One Year In

San Francisco – overgrown with nasturtiums and dizzy-headed startup starz – San Francisco doesn't feel like home yet. Sun-bleached and fog-soaked, filthy and freewheeling, blooming, grinding, singing lullalabies to lesbians, San Francisco strains and slumbers. She is a wild, untamed seductress. She reaches out with her forest of kelp fronds, with her dark hair, with her bacon-wrapped hotdogs at 2am. She's pulling me under, but she's not home yet.

I don't know why, but I won't let her draw me in, churn me out. San Francisco wants to remake me as she does every man, woman and child washed up on her hillsides. She wants to turn me into an individual, one of her Totally Originals. She wants me to be free – and be destroyed in the freeing.

I don't want your freedom, San Francisco. Not your infinite possibility. I want to be like the men in the catalogues. Like the guys on the cover of Men's Health, the guys in the Bud Light ads. Keep your indie galleries and vintage sweaters, your bawdy Victorians, your wine for godsake, and your Lagunitas IPA. I want to spend the afternoon at the mall.

Keep your street artists and poetry readings, your jellyfish floating in kelp forests at the Academy. Keep your homeless and your pot brownies and your food trucks.

"You're already free!" beckons her siren's call. "Already untethered." Free of New York's fashion. Free of DC's intellect. Free from Chicago's work ethic. From Detroit's ideal of manhood. From LA's ideal of womanhood. "Make man anew. Rebirth yourself. My streets are your canvas, my sweeping fog your first breath. In my salty sea flows your lifeblood. It stirs my sensitive kelp fronds, pours steaming from my coffee spigots, ages in my winebottles, drenches my alleys in urine."

"Don't copy a life. Invent one. Show us something new under the California sun."