A borrowed life philosophy
Posted on | September 18, 2008 |
The common Bay Area fog hung over San Francisco yesterday morning. In it, I rode down against the flow of traffic down Hyde St., and turned onto Jefferson where the “Hotel” branch of the Blazing Saddles. It sits tucked away in FIsherman’s Wharf, the hurried tourist area of the city. There, I met Jeff. Not the owner, who has many positive characteristics, but manages the business with the knotted grip of a rock climber, but the manager Jeff.
At this neurotic company a host of characters–many strung as tight as steel guitar string–bustle through the day in fear of the watchful eye of Jeff. It looms over every inch of all five stores and the paranoia it ferments busyness, even on a slow day when nothing needs to be done. I do not blame Jeff for hanging the cameras over the cash drawers for he has two ex-cons, both busted for the art of counterfeit and fraud, managing both staff and money. Even so, as a result his employees nag each other endlessly. Sitting is prohibited, even if the job at hand warrants it. Holding your coffee, even at eight in the morning, attracts a nervous manager. If the rag in your hand is not busy cleaning a bike that just got cleaned, a coworker reminds you of the camera. “Jeff doesn’t like that,” they say daily. When the shop is dead in the lull of the afternoon, a short conversation with a coworker will be immediately stopped and an inane task assigned to you.
After three weeks of tiresome instruction and pervasive anxiety, it was a refreshingly chill day that I met Jeff the manager. He holds his round face tilted just slightly forward so that he often looks at you from the top corner of his eye-sockets, even though he is a tall man. He speaks like Griswald, Steve Martin’s character in the National Lampoon series, so it is no surprise to hear him say that he is from Chicago and fond of Canada. More so than any other person that I have meet in recent memory, he exudes a sense of self-assuredness.
He seems to understand himself more than the grand majority of men. He is well-read and well-traveled. The fact that he has worked at a bike rental place for 18 months does not seem to bother him in the least. “Regardless of socio-economic status, people get depressed if they do not have a sense that they are progressing,” He tells me. It is just one many bits of wisdom that he offers throughout the day in between making friends with the foreigners and travelers that come in our store to rent bikes.
“Gas prices do down and the dollar rises just before elections, especially when there is a Republican in the White House,” he says as he shuffles in and out of the little store. “It’s a Republican tactic. Just look at the statistics. Even though Hurricane Ike just shut down a lot of the US’ oil refineries in Texas, gas prices went down.”
He pulls bikes in from the street and hangs them neatly inside while holding a conversation on the American Dream. “There is no such thing as the Canadian Dream,” he says with an air of disappointment, even as he praises their socialist economics that provide healthcare and education for everyone. “There are no homeless there, the government writes a check to everyone who is homeless. And, it’s substantial. Almost as high as the minimum wage, which is also quite high.”
Then, he delves into the fascist underhand this system sometimes produces* and relates how the government in the 1970s ordered the military in to break up the separatist protests in Quebec. “They just opened fired on the citizens in the street . . . It used to be that 5 of 6 of Canada’s banks were in Montreal. And, they don’t allow savings and loans, there are only 6 national banks. They just picked up and left to Toronto. Now, all six are in Toronto. It changed the entire industry of the system,” He relates with his long fingers curled up in a distorted circle to demonstrate the whole system relocating.” He carefully shifts back and forth, weighing the good and bad. “So they don’t tolerate homelessness. You get locked up for panhandling. But, they take care of them.”
One is not better they the other for Jeff. They are just different. San Francisco is the best city in North America in his estimation. Toronto is his second favorite. But, he doesn’t like Boulder, CO.
Before I moved here, I talked to a lot of people about San Francisco, even just in passing. Everyone praised the city (minus the cost of living here). “It’s the best city in the world,” a professor told me. “My favorite city,” others said. Some of these now live in Boulder and have good things to say about it too, so I worried that it my friend was right–”It’s just a bigger version of Boulder,” He would tell me.
Boulder may have more trust funders per capita than any place in the US. Jeff told me about his neighbor who’s trust stipulated that he could not be idle for more than 18 consecutive months so he his new business was born in the alley. He and his family were unloading a Uhaul of adult diapers into his residential garage when Jeff told his ex-wife, we have to move, this place is absurd.
Its attractors tout it as a liberal paradise. Others, call it the “People’s Republic of Boulder.” The college has a liberal reputation.
But, it is full of “arm-chair liberals.” The giant 29th street mall smacks of the gross big-box development they supposedly tried to keep out. The plastic shops of mass consumerism do well there. Even Pearl Street, pedestrian downtown and former a hippie hangout, has been gentrified and reeks of the commercialism that Boulder superficially opposes.
We laughed and joked about the “progressive town” that has priced out all diversity and whose city council opposed mass transit plans from Boulder to the surrounding towns for fear of opening it up to immigrants. Its white and the college is white. “I once stood up in a city council meeting where a bunch of people where bitching about the noise on University Hill and said, ‘Isn’t this like moving next to the airport and then complaining about the noise from the takeoffs?’” It didn’t go over well, even though they had chosen to move a block from Fraternity Row.
We swapped stories about the incompetence of the cops in town and their disregard for traffic laws. This included the time Jeff was hit by and seriously injured by a drunk driver. He was in the bike lane when he got hit, and the policeman told him in the hospital as he woke in a drugged, half-conscious state that, “We think it was the drivers fault.” Appropriately, Jeff promptly dismissed the ignoramus.
The problem with Boulder in Jeff’s view is tied to one of his philosophy’s on life. “Extended periods of time without work breeds discontent.” Apply that to Boulder and its populous of highly-educated trust-funders. I am glad that I don’t have to like Boulder to like my new home city.
*Not that the capitalist system has not produced just as many violent and repressive incidents.
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