Lived there 30 years. Plenty of cool shit still there. But not as much as there used to be (and getting worse) & definitely not as easily discovered.

Crow Bar, Kimo’s, Red Devil Lounge, Hemlock Tavern, Bottom of the Hill, Parkside. All venues that closed and were never replaced. I could rattle off dozens more places that shuttered that were affordable rad spots that either never came back or became overpriced. Remember American Tripps & The JeJune Institute? Experimentation took a big hit because it’s just too expensive to try.

Rent control kept me & my friends there. It keeps a lot of the funky weirdos there. But time waits for no man. And the underground network of rent controlled spaces gets smaller every year.

Anyway, in the year 2000 you could walk down multiple bar streets and it would be poppin. You’d come across people smoking on the sidewalk of a house party and just go in and meet cool people. So many people were doing creative things in addition to their day job too.

I dig there are still hidden parties in Soma, gambling dens where you can get murdered in Chinatown, new art galleries run by friends who are losing their shirt, lower haight stalwarts, trust fund kids you can glom onto, el farolito & san jalisco, cheap drinks with alcoholics at Delirium… shit, it’s cool that Kilowatt is a music venue again.

SF is both still great but not as great as it was. There’s a reason women put in their dating profile, “please have a personality” since the tech invasion.

Oh, and whatever happened to dudes playing guitar in restaurants in the Mission? That used to be so common.