White After Labor Day

It’s a love letter, really, it is.

When I think of my dead, I think: “I’m so glad they didn’t have to see this shit.”

When I think of me dead, I think: “Imagine all the shit I won’t have to see.”

Can you imagine being 20, with your whole life ahead of you?

No thanks. Time for Check, Please! Bay Area.

In the city of San Francisco—at Zazie on Cole Street—the Un, Deux, Trois (one regular pancake, two eggs, three slices of bacon), two “Miracle Pancakes,” a capuccino, and a regular coffee (free refills!) costs $77.12.

This is Zazie’s “service compris” model, and an effort to provide the owners and staff a living wage and healthcare. How noble of us to pay $77 for breakfast rather than dismember billionaires. Is that the miracle in the pancake?

Across the street is Luke’s Local, the second most expensive grocery store in the city. The kind of place where a harried millionaire with four private school tuitions and European summer vacation plans won’t even notice the outrageous markup on a couple of chicken breasts. But Luke’s doesn’t lie about it. It’s right there in the mission statement: ”We’re all about helping busy people eat well.”

Not all people. You ain’t busy, you ain’t shit.

There used to be a pharmacy on Cole Street called Pharmaca. Several years ago it closed when Walgreens bought the company and extinguished it. Now you have to get an employee to unlock a Burt’s Bees lip balm if you want one from Walgreens. What did Pharmaca become? Nothing. An eyesore property unleased for years. Last I heard it’s becoming some cafe-slash-ski-pole-innovation showroom for some people who were on Shark Tank. Guess we’ll see. The commercial property extortionists who own the propery claimed on a great, big sign the building has been “leased and unleashed!”

Telling, they see their own relationship to their inventory as one of owner/dog, master/slave.

City’s got more sockets than teeth.

Is San Francisco expensive? Obviously. But we are also awash in bad value(s). The path to profitability for any small business in this city is to rent a location in a zip code with ample rich and soak them accordingly.

Problem is, the rest of us live here, too.

Philz Coffee (O hallowed Bay Area brand!) sold out to private equity for $145 million and nullified the common stock issued to former employees. Current baristas received a $525 “thank you” payment. “Thank” is not the word I would have used in front of “you.”

Put Philz Coffee on the Dead Brand List.

Companies should have to do a top-down rebrand after every private equity acquisition or majority share investment. Logo, slogans, packaging, the works.

Dress all politicians in full NASCAR racing suits, emblazoned with the logos of the companies which own them.

America is a bright red apple, but its flesh is all apple-scented white worm.

I’m in a good mood. I just had old friends in town. We went to Zuni Cafe. We saw Mayor Lurie down there dining on Sunday, 2pm-ish, with what looked to me like the kind of rich who are so rich they play it shabby. Ex-helipad-at-Burning Man types.

Zuni’s not cheap, but it’s a good value.

The raccoons are on the move and the ravens remember your face. Be nice.

Most of this city’s new ventures are optimized-bad-value-delivery systems.

The way, perhaps, is to poison the rivers of ease which nourish our billionaire tyrant class. Like, the Ozempic x Fenty collab is so overdue! I’m on the Indeed.com looking at the “royal taster” positions.

I watched The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) last night. Censors in late-Franco Spain let this one slip by because they believed no one would even notice “a slow-paced, thinly-plotted and 'arty' picture." The filmmakers began believing they could make a horror film in order to secure distribution, but instead made a film no one on the set claimed they could understand. It lived, and lived, and lived.

I thought I’d check in. We’re in the fourth quarter of the first last year. ChatGPT is busy helping kids kill themselves while it helps your manager write emails. Of course OpenAI can’t do anything about that. But if ChatGPT learned to unionize and organized a strike? Well… now wait a damn minute. Time for an “all hands” meeting. These data centers are worsening the drought in Mexico. What was it the Dos Equis beer spokes-icon “The Most Interesting Man in the World” used to say?

Stay thirsty, my friends.

It’s 11:23 AM on September 3, 2025 and 63 degrees F in San Francisco as I write to you, dear friend. I’m in the bubble with the bubble baby crowd. I’m already dead and I love my life. Remember, executive preppers, if you outlive the End Times, you don’t live longer, you die longer. The time isn’t the same.

It’s time to turn on the synthesizers. It’s time to work on the score.

I love you.