At some point, roughly between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, the geophysical higher-ups decided to cancel summer in San Francisco. Of course, there is no record of official announcements or subsequent complaints. The Ohlone people were just getting established themselves. The existing sabertooths, woolly mammoths and giant sloths were, of course, inarticulate. That’s the problem with a voiceless mammal population. Policy gets made without public input.
Anyway, this climactic situation continues. It is the stuff of jokes. It is supposedly the source of Mark Twain’s famous (and merely attributed) quote about the coldest winter being a summer in San Francisco, etc. Thing is, this particular year seems unusually bad. Take this morning.
Jane was up and bustling about in preparation for her volunteer stint at her daughter’s suburban church. And there was no avoiding the outside. It was just there, windows being what they are. It was outside where our dog wanted to go to have her morning whatever. It was where I went to stand, play my BBC Ukrainecast and experience the morning air.
And there was a problem with that morning air. It was cold, say about 53°, and I had soon had enough of it. In fact, gentle reader, I have had enough of it to last a meteorological lifetime. And I didn’t mention the part about the morning’s fine mist driven by a fierce cold wind. Never mind.
Out for breakfast. What else to do while the wife is away?
Another disappointment, although it’s never disappointing to be out and about in Glen Park, San Francisco. I don’t care what you say. Our neighborhood is cool. Except that today it is beyond cool, well into cold, and I am at my wit’s end. I joke about the weather with a waitress. I joke with people in Canyon Market. I joke knowing the joke is on us. And no one is laughing.
What else? Well, I am getting over a day of writing about, thinking about it and generally delving into disability matters. Disability does matter, by the way. I’m just not sure how. The Sun Magazine has a fine piece this month by a young woman with muscular atrophy of the spinal cord. No, the cord isn’t atrophying, and I misstated the name, but it’s a variation on ALS. And that, by the way is just technical background. She gives a wonderful account of a human’s relationship to a wheelchair. I get it. The chair becomes an extension of the body. Subtle differences matter. It’s a fine piece.
Where was I? Well, I was floundering about and thinking aloud in the best extroverted fashion. No, literally. Because I use voice recognition to write this thing. And I speak all my thoughts. As though there is someone there to hear them. Which there isn’t. There is only my computer screen and the intervening bits and bytes. And my conclusion is not so much a matter of consciousness, but more of practicality. When one is disabled and the experience is actually worsening, what is there to do but go all in? That is to say, be disabled, think about it, write about it and, when one has that rare opportunity, try to make the experience better.
So it was over breakfast, a rather maddening breakfast, but never mind…that I remembered my invitation from someone at the Mayor’s Office to get involved with matters urban and disability-related. And which matters? Well, those pertaining to Uber, Lyft and the future autonomous ride services. And when I say autonomous, do remember that this is San Francisco. The “future” is about 90 minutes from now.
This is the one strange thing about our town. On the one hand, San Francisco has reverted to the 1930s. Though instead of having people selling apples on the street…we have people stealing Apples, i.e., iPhones, from each other…while either trying not to be homeless or trying to find a cappuccino in the abandoned, dystopian high-rise center of town that was once called the financial district. It should have been dubbed the high-tech district, but it didn’t last long enough to be called anything but brief. Never mind. I digress.
Anyway, with everything going backward, it seems, how maddening to have to dodge robotic cars. I don’t know what else to call them. Waymo and Cruise are the two companies already vying to run driverless taxi services in San Francisco. And on the way to getting fully licensed (they are in partial operation already), well there are some issues. What to do with wheelchairs in driverless taxis? Strangely, there are some answers. The US Department of Transportation has funded a couple of research projects. And early results are actually rather positive. There are ways of doing this. There are ways of doing anything, if people want to, I always say. The other things I always say are not worth noting.
OK, so I am interested in this. And what really “interests” me is the prospect of being able to hitch a ride, quickly, safely, where I want to, when I want to. So, I have decided to get involved. And this is the time. Watch this space. Stay tuned.