Life In The Big City

When I moved to Oakland from Boulder, Colorado, I was confused when I was told that periodically we would need to go into "The City." What I came to understand was that the Podunk little burg of some four hundred thousand souls was across the bridge from a City: San Francisco. With double the population and boasting their very own Rainforest Cafe, I surrendered to this odd distinction after a few years. That doesn't mean that I have become totally acclimated to this hierarchy. Just about anytime I hop on a highway to travel across town, it tweaks a nerve somewhere in my college-town-born-and-bred brain. And yes, it only gets worse as I attempt to navigate the maze of on and off ramps across the bay in San Francisco. I am even more grateful for the GPS in my car when we make the jump to Hyperspace and land in Los Angeles.
But it's not just navigating that confounds me. City living has its own rhythms, not the least of which are defined by the number of helicopters in the air: news, traffic, police, rescue. The politics of our little-non-quite-a-city-by-the-bay seem to carry an air of intrigue that was missing from the local elections of my youth. There always seems to be just a little more at stake. Which brings me to the really big city, New York.
I don't think I could live there. This probably has something to do with the way that their baseball team seems to have made a practice out of looting the Oakland roster, waiting patiently for stars to rise and then plucking them out of the relative obscurity of an A's uniform and popping them into Yankee pinstripes. The lure of the Big City. Of course that means that they have to deal with the expectations of a team that has won more championships than God, and all its attendant clubhouse drama. Can anyone explain to me what Alex Rodriguez does for a living?
Then there's the politics of New York City outside the Yankees' locker room. There's a guy named Weiner who was, until last week, a serious contender for mayor of the City That Never Sleeps. Now he has been brushed quickly off the pages of People Magazine as the comeback story of the year to being an object lesson for anyone who thought it was "cool" to tweet your junk. Of course, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, as witnessed by the current mayor, Michael Bloomberg who runs the city as if it were a world power. Mayor Mike issues opinions and fatwas against Big Gulps like he was the czar, not some elected official.
Back here in Oakland, we watch as our elected officials wring their collective hands in anticipation of some new wave of rioting or collective outburst. And we hope that those big city fellers will keep their hands off our baseball team.