Your Handball City Sucks

Walking along Embarcadero in San Francisco, it is the week of the 50th Super Bowl. The buildings canvassed in advertisements for life-ending corporations, Visa, Verizon, BudLight, so on and so forth. The place looked like someone attempted to decorate downtown like one of those caves that particularly insecure men build, but they were color blind and only had plastic tarps to work with.

The people walking the streets all spoke like Sims characters. All I heard was “mumble mumble football business mumble.” I watched as they photographed a fleet of Budweiser trucks turn a corner. They looked up and were giddy about the large trailing banners following small private airplanes. Little did they seem to care about the sun setting over a perfectly still Bay, the light reflecting off of the bridge, a certain work of art.

And the police, oh goddamn so many fucking police. Why on Earth do you need to be carrying an automatic rifle around? That’s a two year old kid, pretty sure he ain’t packing. Officer, what is wrong with you? Why did you come into work today and go, “Yea, walking around in public with a weapon meant for certain warfare sounds like a swell idea. It’s for their own good that I do this, that I be the arbiter of death.”

As I attempted to navigate the maze towards Embarcadero BART I was motioned into a line much like that of an airport, Super Bowl clad TSA look-a-likes and all. The portly woman running one of the security lines motioned me forward in line, behind her a plastic formed doorway with green and red lights. One showing a “thumbs up” and another a “thumbs down”, I can only assume to signify whether or not it had detected metal on my person. She handed me a yellow dog bowl (or bowl in general but it looked like the kind you get at the dollar store for your artificially undersized canine), and asked me to empty the contents of my pockets into it. I complied, walked through the metal detector, and was halted.

“Where are you going?” a man inquired sternly. “Dude, I’m just trying to get home to Oakland.” I replied in my best I-just-sat-in-an-anchor-locker-sweating-for-three-hours. I think the heat-induced pink in my cheeks and the numerous bandages on my fingertips were convincing.

He then attempted to lay claim to my pocket knife, my third iteration of the same and this one my mother gave me. After a bit of pleading the knife was returned. I was allowed to continue down Market street towards the BART station, though not without a few of those warfare-clad officers eyeing me.

I listened to a number of the conversations I walked alongside. A woman discussing with a co-worker how her husband hates crowds but likes people, “I’m with your husband on that one.” She looked incredulous that I would have been eavesdropping on her very boisterous outdoor conversation, some folks think they own the world I guess.

BART was filled with the usual going-home-from-work crowd, and I was safe. Alas, away from those fanatics of the handball. All dressed up in their colors and city names. Their warfare-garments and bad music, their oversized advertisements and undersized frontal lobes, far behind me.

San Francisco, you make terrible life decisions. I’ll come back next month.

Nevermind all of the other actually obviously outrageous terrible atrocities that handball Olympics has caused. This here, these are simply the gnats of the overall grievances.