The corner of 21st and Alabama

A front-row seat to contemporary San Francisco culture.

For over a year and a half, I shared a tiny apartment with roommates on the corner of 21st and Alabama Street, in the heart of The Mission. It wasn’t until I moved out that I realized how living at this location — where so many families struggle to remain in homes that were passed down to them as they compete over rent and mortgages with trendy coffee shops full of tech bros, art collectives that work year-round in preparation for Burning Man, and high-end restaurants and bars catering to six-figure-earning twenty-somethings — offered me a front-row seat to contemporary San Francisco culture.

I sound bitter and cynical, perhaps, but my laments are the same as everyone else’s. We in the city are, after all, painfully self-aware.

The following are recordings of what I overheard right outside my window:

“I feel like we as a culture have moved away from mischief.”

“It smells like harvest!”

A girl sobbing uncontrollably into her phone, “You’re being the selfish one!”

“Have you ever been to Norway? Oh my god…”

“You know how Facebook really believes they keep the world connected? The employees really drink the kool-aid…”

Two children are racing and they stop in front of my window to fight. “Kung fooooooooo!” The parents follow and tell them not to touch each other.

“There’s a thin line between, like, hip, fancy coffee, and…”

“To better our lives.”

“We’re just, like, more…chill.”

“If you had to gamble, would you put money on that cat? I mean, horse? Dog, whatever. Yeah, neither would I.”

“That way we can work collaboratively in a room.”

Walking briskly, staring down at his phone, a man huffs, “Who is this clown?”

“You think as a human that I’m not, like, not going to want that person to die…”

A child cries. A woman answers: “The monster’s going to come get you! The monster loves bad babies!”

“Anything that’s in the movie Hostel: no. Anything that’s in the movie Saw: no.”

“Et c’est qui? Tu le connaissais pas, en fait?… T’es jaloux, c’est tout!”

“It’s Friday, bitches.”

“Choisir une poussette, aussi…”

“I’m open and willing and want to learn more! You know, I want to learn to code…”

“Jesus, gives me chills…” Laughter.

“I do a ten-minute mile!”

“…he has to pretend to be gay.”

A small child stands outside my window and rings his bicycle bell. His grandmother follows him and quietly admonishes him in a language that sounds like Korean.

“…a sophisticated kid in the class.”

“It might be chilly over there. I mean, it’s kind of chilly right here.”

A runner, panting.

“We’ll see how life goes.”

Maniacal laughing.

Three adults. “Zoom! Zoom! Zoom!” Then one adult stops and asks, “You got lasers on your bike?”

While sitting directly next to the open window, a delivery man walks by with a large package and says, “Can I just throw it in here?”

“If you don’t like it, you spit it out and compost it.”

“Where it’s all about…like…how you treat people!”

“Because he had some money to spend…”

“Just stop doing what you’re doing! It’s annoying! Just…don’t!”

English accent. “Yes, please. So let’s look at that…”

“There’s a girl in our house who works in a pie shop.”

“…a million sessions a month…”

A baby laughs over and over again. A woman, in a baby voice, repeats “Whoa! Whoa! You’re so silly, you’re so silly!”

Two small children. “It’s a maaaaa! It’s a maaaaaaa!” Parents catch up to them, speaking Spanish.

A women speaking in a language that is not English, punctuating her last sentence with the word “Thanksgiving.”

“He’s always been a father figure to us…”

“…bigger than the fucking internet…”

“I’ll kick you in your fucking face if you come here.”

An adult speaking to a child in a teacher-like voice. “And look! This car is blocking our way!”

“Come on, Abby!” Two minutes later. “Abby, you’re driving me nuts. Come here!”

“…with onion, garlic, and a smoked tartar sauce.”

“Is that a name? Maximillio?”

“My grandma spoke German and Polish because they were from…Russia?”

“People will talk at work. They’ll ask me tomorrow. And yeah, I told her to bring a hat…”

“She talks like a Valley girl? She sounds like that? But she’s, um, very smart.”

A man speaking to a woman. “Well, just hustle.”

A child cries out. A woman: “Are you okay?” The child, softly: “Yes, yes, yes.”

“I think the market size is tremendous!”

A man, singing.

One woman says, “I need to replace this stove that’s super fucking old.” Another woman replies, “Oh yeaaaaah.”

“You should not be here burning the midnight oil! I’m like, if anyone should be there, it should be James! Just change your perspective!”

“It’s a lot of fun, except the not-getting-paid part.”

“Just go to our Instagram and tell us what you like.”

An infant crying hysterically, a woman speaking calmly in unknown language.

A woman giggles, then: “I see you!”

Two men jog by. One says to the other, “How is it not organic, bro?”

“This kids is. OTHER. WORLDLY.”

“You’re taking data from my body for medical-research purposes.”

“I have a couple of things I can do to get around our costs on THAT.”

“I don’t know, all we did was smoke a dutch!”

“Uh, well, roughly, I think it’s Renaissance-age….”

“There are micro-cells in there that eat the fiber….”

“You can but you don’t know what it’s going to take out of you. The road you need to take in order to do that is not the road you really want to take.”

A man, intoxicated, speaking in language unknown. Then, after maniacal laughing, “Oh, Mr. Donald Trump, you’re the best.”

“Oh, only about 40 million.”

A child to a man. “When I was a baby, I got my whole body covered in it. I didn’t fell.”

“Come on! You gonna pee on everything?”

A man and woman stand and have a long conversation about a dog outside my window. They coo and sigh as they lean down and pet the dog. “Sometimes, when she hits a wall when I play with her, she has a moment where she stops…the trauma takes a long time to recover from. But, come on, relax…” This conversation lasted a very long time, and the ways in which to help an animal recover from stress was discussed in depth.

“I think, like, even if Uma Thurman called me…”

“Male, female, whatever”

Singing: “Sidewalk! Sidewalk! Walk, walk. Walk, walk.”

“Is it French Japanese?”

“Or, we can go on a hike, like a normal date.”

“Dude. I feel like my whole life has changed since the last time I’ve seen you.”

Two men laughing: “There are enough of those circus performers with income!”

“I don’t want to end up like this. In a neighborhood like this.” Moments later, two boys skateboard by, speaking Spanish.

“That’s why we say that teachers can’t have sex with students!”

“Spaceships or whatever…it just wasn’t sexy enough for a lot of people.”

“You’ve got about ten suitcases you need to unpack.”

“I’m going to make the assumption that people aren’t living in tents with shit all over it.”

And she was like, You’re a handyman, you’re a handyman. And I was like, that’s your fantasy?”

“The sun, bro, the sun!”

A child speaks. “He said he’s going to Australia for a hundred months.”

“In San Francisco, it’s harder to go more than 5%”

“When somebody gets run over by a car, it really puts things into perspective.” She began laughing. “Every day is a gift!”

A homeless woman begins screaming at two other homeless men across the street. “We women created men!”

“You were totally like a five year old kid last night.”

“That’s the best part of the story! He couldn’t make it to the concert so he pissed on the floor!”

“Right now, I just don’t feel like hiking seven and a half miles.”

A man speaks on his cellphone. His voice begins to break. “This isn’t me, like, gas-lighting you.”

Two girls walk past, their high heels clicking against the pavement. “I’m like, I want food that I’ve had before.”

“This is my price, this is my whatever, this is my whatever.”

“I don’t think you can have sex for a whole week.”

“Down, Mommy, down, down.”

“That and developers. Making developers love us.”

“No one.” “No one?” “No one.”

First man: “Irish/Italian, and it was rough.” Second man: “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah…” First man, again: “This was probably rough, too. What was this?”

A woman: “We’re going to put that lollipop away.” A small girl’s voice, after a long pause. “Why?”

“You ain’t running shit around here. Zip your mouth and shut the fuck up.”

A man: “I tried FOUR times last night.” A girl lets out a single laugh.

“Wait, sorry, you’re like in a tornado right now.”

“Go hike the mountains in Chile.”

“I don’t know. That shit goes up and down. And it’s like, wait a couple of weeks before we sell it.”

A man talking to a little boy: “Jump up and down on his neck.”

“Senior communities where it’s 55 and older. And I’m like, 55, that’s not too far off…”

“Looks like a bitch, smells like a bitch, must be a bitch.”

“I don’t think a conventional-type mattress works on those kinds of…”

“And you’re going to lose your insurance.”

“Totally thought it said ‘banh meme.”

A man, singing light-heartedly: “Do you know who the fuck I am?”

Man to a child: “Yeah! There are lots of markings! I think they’ve marked which parts of the sidewalk need to be repaired.”

A girl on the phone saying, “Yeah, it’s ok, yeah, I know…” A woman’s voice on the other end of the phone, yelling, screaming, crying: “Every FUCKING DAY! I can’t stand living in this FUCKING HOUSE!”

“Shame on us for not doing something…(inaudible)…our children will be looking at us, saying, ‘Where were you?’”

A man to his young daughter, “All other guys are bad. No, they are.”

“Unless you’re the president. Then you can do whatever you want.”

“I understand, mommy, but every time you talk into the GPS, the GPS doesn’t understand you.”

“I get paid 135 an hour.”

Two men walk past discussing chai, how it is often too sweet, and how the version they serve at the office comes unsweetened.