Market Street

Driving it.

It reflects the deep psychological chaos of this city, a schism along one side like an active stroke, trembling towards the bay, as if trying to escape by land, to the water, or underground. 

It has the mind of amphetamine addiction. The street is its urban planning equivalent. 

It's what is must be like to be involved in an earthquake, followed by a lengthy fire in a hall of mirrors. A few minutes on it and you, also like Mistah Kurtz, will demand that the brutes be exterminated, leveled without recourse.

I could help:

The street would function more efficiently, I think, if all of the road signs and rules were just removed. It is the universal confusion heading off in all directions which seem to cause most of the problems. The combination of perplexity and fear combine dangerously. If they just made it a free-for-all then a natural order would emerge that would trump the barely regulated disarray that occurs now. 

If anybody in San Francisco is ever an asshole to you - and you can rely on that happening very regularly - then remember that they are just disclosing the chaos of their environment. They probably just drove down Market, or interacted with somebody that did. Perhaps they ended up on it accidentally and couldn't find a way off, at least not a way that was remotely close to the initial direction they came, or where they had hoped to arrive. 

It spins people away in reflex angles. Even an occasional perpendicular would be welcome. A sensible one-way square orbit back to where you came.

The many streets approaching and departing are all hopelessly one-way. They each point in slightly different directions, none at 90 degree angles. None make any sense. They all lead somewhere useless. It's like driving along written Cantonese. 

If they made each street one-way, pointing in the same direction, then at least it would be over for everybody as quickly as possible.

But no, it just hemorrhages cars into the directionless unknown, like a bad drug. Everybody is a tourist; expertise is confounded, useless against it.

Now, I must only learn to love it.

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