I Love San Francisco

Today, I love San Francisco and I love living here. Lately people I meet, freely tell me how much they hate it or that they will "NEVER, IN A MILLION YEARS, EVEN FOR A MILLION DOLLARS, EVER COME TO SAN FRANCISCO" when I mention I live in here. Albeit it seems like I am meeting more people from places I would NEVER, IN A MILLION YEARS, EVEN FOR A MILLION DOLLARS, EVER go to myself, but being confronted with that kind of bias, rocks me a little bit and forces me to look at who is saying this and why.

Last year a couple of months after I sold my second store, I sublet my apartment and went to Vegas. My plan was to stay for three months in the vacation condo (nobody lives in) my family has. I ended up staying in Las Vegas for eight months. I mostly played poker with men ranging in age between 22 and 70 years old who were visiting or had moved to Vegas just to play poker. Sometimes I would be at a table with the same guys for more than five hours, so chit chat was inevitable. Mostly, the banter was stuff like, "Where are you from? What do you do for a living?" That kind of thing all very calm and mundane. However, if and when I mentioned that I was from San Francisco, all Hell broke loose.

Mostly, the reactions were things like, "My wife wants to go there, but I refuse!" or "I'm not gay." Which at first was rather amusing, but eight months of this day in and day out, coming from different people, became a little macabre and quite a bit funnier. Here's a perfect example of that delightful combo of hilarity and perversion.

During the presidential campaign last year, playing a low stakes no-limit game at The Palms, I noticed that the guy to my left kept calling the Asian dealer Kim, when her name tag clearly read some thing else. So, I turned to him and said, "Her name isn't Kim." So, the 45 year old man with a front tooth missing, wearing a T-shirt two sizes too small that had a picture of President Obama dressed like Mr. T (with the Mohawk, gold chains, and earrings) looking ragged like a homeless guy with an outstretched hand saying, "Got Change?" asks me, "What the hell is wrong with you?" But, before I could answer another guy at the table chimes in with, "She's from San Francisco."

I want to hear your stories about meeting people from places (other than here) who find it necessary to tell you how they feel about San Francisco...good or bad...or the types of people you have confronted who throw around the word, "liberal" like it is a weapon.

I could not find the actual T-shirt online, but I found this...you get the picture!