We were all doomed, really, doomed without knowing it. We were like a species of an animal that was so comfortable in our habitat that we didn’t quite realize we would soon be hunted to extinc- tion. We drank at the 500 Club when it was an actual dive bar and not just marketed as a dive bar, blind to the tech companies moving in, not truly hearing their utopian promises and fanfare, not realizing that all the money flowing through them like a gushing river would also flow into snatching up Bay Area real estate and juicing San Francisco rents. We dined on heaping platters of Mexican food in the kaleidoscopic festival of bright holiday lights at La Rondalla. We went to poetry readings at the Elephant Café, where street poets like Julia Vinograd read during the weekly open mic and a gruff bartender with the thickest walrus mustache on the planet served the cheapest red wine on the planet. We bought precious books by precious experimental authors at Small Press Traffic, a bookstore that only sold literature published by small presses (imagine that). We bought ravioli and salami at Lucca, an Italian grocer that had been there since the turn of the century, thumbed through magazines on UFOs at Naked Eye while picking out bootleg videos to watch, and then we’d go hear Angela Davis speak at Modern Times Bookstore, which not only carried tracts on Central American politics, but also books in Spanish

The ineffable numen of a place can somehow define our essence.