The Mythology of Cities

There are some levels on which I really, truly miss living in a big city.

It's not that Mountain View is bad, by any stretch of the imagination. My friends are here, I'm close to mass transit, I can walk to the grocery store and any of numerous wonderful restaurants, and the city really is just a train ride away, albeit about an hour's train ride. The problem is not that I cannot get to the city; the problem is that I am not in the city, and so I am lacking the vitality that the city brings to me.

I don't know what it is about cities. They're crowded, they're dirty, they're often polluted. And yet somehow, I think they're beautiful. Other writers have spoken about cities having lives and personalities of their own, and I used to think that was just an interesting take until I lived in San Francisco for five years.

San Francisco, as a city, was truly alive. At all hours of all days there was something happening. There were entire cultures and subcultures inside the city, strange shows and weird stores and ingenious little pockets of the human drive to invent and circumvent that kept me from ever being anything but surprised. The part of San Francisco where I actually lived was hilly and a bit desolate, its shops too small for me and its options too limited, but the rest of the city grabbed hold of me and never let go. Riding Muni to work was almost a religious experience for me; something happened on my way from West Portal to Powell that left me chilled and invigorated, and my greatest regret in working where I did was that I spent my entire day underground and in the blocks just off Union Square, where I couldn't see life happening. When I lost my job at the bookstore, I went surfing through interview after interview, and one of the selling points was always my ability to look down on the street: my ability to see the city.

A lot of stories talk about magic and civilization being somehow incompatible; the war between magic and technology is well-trodden, some might say eroded, ground, and the idea that logic and advancement hedge out the power of magic is certainly not fresh and new. Yet somehow, I feel like cities have a magic of their own, and when I write I have to speak to that: to the weird patterns in our buildings and behaviors, to the strange things I imagine happening in the dumps and shadows. Like any huge structure, there are things happening in a city's cracks, events too microscopic for the larger entity to keep track of or even notice. If San Francisco can host Ambrose Bierce, Bondage A Go Go, the Hip-Hop Chess Federation, the Living Dead Girls, the Grateful Dead, and the bartenders at Zeitgeist all inside seven square miles, why can't there be something even stranger lurking in the cracks? The city is alive even when humans aren't there to see it, and it's all too easy for a secret to get lost...

I love Mountain View, and I love Palo Alto and San Francisco and I love being somewhere that I am able to go to all these places. But as much as I felt hollow some days in my apartment in San Francisco, I feel stripped of something elemental when I walk by the shops on Castro Street. One of my first nights I was here, I walked down to Castro and El Camino as part of a bid for exercise, and I felt odd, off, somehow disrupted. I realized, as I stopped and wondered, that when I looked up and left, I could see the sky.

I'm here for now, and it's where I belong. But the city is calling; and I'm sure that when money, time, and fate all intersect, the city is where I'll live.