“The horrible thing,” Rich said, after finishing Charlotte’s Web, “is that I’m never going to be able to kill a spider again.” When I'd learned Rich had somehow managed to get through childhood without meeting the talking spider who saved an innocent pig, I gave him my copy, pulling it out of the huge pile of banned books in our living room. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Charlotte’s Web was banned? Why? Seriously, why? It seems some Kansas folks were offended by the book’s talking animals, insisting they’re “unnatural and blasphemous, as humans are the highest level of God’s creation.” Really? Have the seen the human folly in the headlines lately? Give me pigs and spiders any day. To me, restricting kids’ access to books is like depriving them of oxygen or the right to eat chocolate on Halloween. How is anyone supposed to navigate childhood without lessons from Harry Potter or Goosebumps? Who can make sense of the adult world without To Kill a Mockingbird, the Diary of Anne Frank, and The Great Gatsby (all removed from many high schools; see the banned lists here)? “I am a parent myself,” wrote Khaled Hosseini, author of the much-banned novel The Kite Runner. “I understand the parental impulse to safeguard our children from harm. But banning books like The Kite Runner doesn’t ‘protect’ students at all. It betrays them. It robs them of the chance that we as parents and instructors owe them, the chance to broaden their human community, to let them walk the world in another’s shoes for a while, to foster empathy for others, to be challenged by the experience and perhaps take a small step toward becoming fuller, richer versions of themselves.” I was horrified to discover that in the past three years, 6528 books have been targeted for censorship in the US, according to National Library Association records. Challenges started in public schools and spread to public libraries. Statewide bans have begun. There’s talk of national book bans in 2025. What can we do to protect our freedom to read? That's the subject of discussions taking place this week all over America in libraries, bookstores, and coffee houses, because this is national Banned Books Week. Ask your local librarians and booksellers what they've got planned. I’ve organized events in all the bookstores in San Rafael, the city nearest me, and I'll be participating in the three shown below. If you’re in the SF Bay Area, drop in and say hello; I love meeting readers and catching up with old friends! Find me at these San Rafael events: Thursday 9/26 Rebound Bookstore | Banned Book Reading 6:00 – 7:30 PM | 1611 Fourth Street Saturday 9/28 Friends Books | Banned Book Lottery 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM | 1016 C Street Saturday 9/28 Copperfield's Books | Banned Books Community Read-Aloud 2:00 - 3:00 PM | 1200 Fourth Street Part of my outrage over book banning comes from hanging around City Lights and other activist bookstores I visited as part of my Cheap and Cheerful San Francisco project this summer. Rich and I made 20 trips into the city to investigate reports that it's become a dystopian hellscape mired in a “doom loop” of poverty, drugs, and hopelessness. Don’t believe a word of it. I’ve been talking to San Franciscans, checking out the mood, eating in modest cafes, bistros, and diners, and asking everyone about the doom loop — a subject that always inspires hearty guffaws. “Doom loop? Hell no. This is a great place to live,” I was told over and over. Then they’d point me toward another fabulous eatery, more great bookstores, parks I shouldn't pass up... News flash! The media has been telling a lot of whoppers about San Francisco. “A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.” Versions of this saying are attributed to everyone from Churchill to Mark Twain to Chinese philosophers, and proof of its accuracy can be found in the doom loop narrative. Much of the sneering is politically motivated; the Left Coast is a popular target. And after decades of writing about how cool San Francisco is, many jaded journalists cannot resist the chance to jump on the bandwagon and get snarky at the city’s expense. But the truth is out there, my friends, and fact-checking with reliable sources reveals a very different picture. Crime rates in San Francisco are dropping, reports the SFPD. Year-to-date, larceny theft — including car and retail robbery — is down 40%. Homicides are 39% lower. There are 17% fewer burglaries. People and property are safer. Money is pouring into San Francisco. “In 2023, AI-related startups in the San Francisco Bay Area received an estimated $27.4 billion in investments — 52.6% of the global total — from seed, venture and private equity investors,” Forbes reports. San Francisco has the highest number of AI job postings in the nation, gearing up for what Price Waterhouse Cooper predicts will soon be a $15.7 trillion industry. Of course, we have major problems; what metropolis doesn’t? But struggling to get a disaster-prone city under some semblance of control has always been our default status. Coping with challenges hones our strength and creativity. As Orson Welles said in The Third Man: “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” San Francisco isn’t a cuckoo clock kind of town. During its turbulent history, it’s given the world Levi’s, TV, 911 dispatch, no-fault divorce, Beatniks, The Summer of Love, gay marriage, fortune cookies, Airbnb, Uber, Twitter, Instagram, Yelp, Eggo waffles, martinis, iPhones, and driverless taxis, to name but a few. Above all, San Francisco is tremendous fun. Whether you’re as outrageous as Janis Joplin, just want a quiet place to read the books you love, or have a hankering for dive bars and dim sum, this city has it all. Where to start? Here are our suggestions. Best Food Foghorn Taproom The Grove Marcella’s Lasagneria Delicious Dim Sum Best Bars Tempest Bar & Box Kitchen Vesuvio Café Twin Peaks Tavern Best Bookstores City Lights Fabulosa Best Tour Tenderloin Tour Best Museum Beat Museum Best Transportation Waymo driverless taxis I was touched by the kindness we received wherever we went (except the Tonga Room, of course, and the area patrolled by the Waymo Vigilante). And I am deeply impressed with the way the city continues to champion personal freedom. You can be yourself here. And that is a gift beyond price. “San Francisco is a mad city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people,” remarked author Rudyard Kipling. “San Francisco has only one drawback – ’tis hard to leave.” But leave it I must. Next week Rich and I head back to Seville and our Spanish life. It’s not easy saying goodbye (cue Tony Bennett’s I Left My Heart in San Francisco), but we are moving on to fresh loony adventures in Europe. Stay tuned for updates! ON THE ROAD AGAIN NEXT WEEK I will have to skip next week's post to accommodate my travel schedule, but after that I'll have all new stuff to write about. This is the last post in my series OUT TO LUNCH IN CHEAP & CHEERFUL SAN FRANCISCO Thanks for joining us on the journey! BROWSE PREVIOUS POSTS HERE DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POSTS? If you ever miss a post announcement, please check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. WANT MORE? You can find my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it. You have to love a city that commemorates the removal of a hated eyesore with poetic words celebrating our collective joy. Walking out of the San Francisco Ferry Building this week, I discovered a sidewalk plaque commemorating the destruction — begun by the 1989 earthquake, finished by the mayor — of the hideous 1958 Embarcadero “freeway to nowhere.” “The freeway that brooded over the Embarcadero with all the grace of a double decked prison wall is finally gone,” SF Chronicle columnist Carl Nolte wrote gleefully. “In its place is a sweep of air, fog, October sunlight, piers, ships, and the silver Bay Bridge, which is 55 years old and still looks modern.” I was snapping a photo of the plaque when I noticed a man nearby grabbing a yellow traffic cone and making off with it. Wait a moment, I knew this guy — it was the bike-riding Waymo Vigilante who had attacked our Waymo driverless taxi in June, calling me “a disgrace to the human race” for riding in it. What was he up to now? He strode across the plaza to a Waymo standing at the curb and placed the cone on its nose, angled like a unicorn’s horn. Unsure how to cope with this surprising development, the vehicle radioed headquarters and hunkered down to await further instructions. The Waymo Vigilante took a few victory laps around the plaza, admiring his handiwork, clearly thrilled that he’d won a battle in the war between humans and robots. It was a short-lived victory. In minutes, a worker arrived and removed the cone. The Waymo drove on, the Vigilante pedaled away glowing with self-righteousness, and the streetcar Rich and I had been waiting for came and whisked us off to the day’s activities: an afternoon in the city’s dive bars. If you’re not familiar with the term, a “dive bar” is a well-worn, unpretentious local place that can be anything from a comfy, no-frills neighborhood pub to a seriously squalid gin joint. The name was born in the Prohibition era, when you had to dive down steps to cellars selling bootleg hooch. Today’s dive bars offer cheap drinks, funky décor, colorful characters, and often an easygoing camaraderie that creates a pleasant sense of community among random strangers. I get a kick out of dive bars and have spent years dilligently researching them all over the world on behalf of my readers. (You're welcome.) Very, very few have edible food, but I’d heard of one notable exception in San Francisco: Tempest Bar and Box Kitchen. In the 1960s it was the writers’ hangout Page One “just a short stumble away” from the city’s main newsrooms. Through the years and various owners, the bar has quenched the thirst of reporters, printers, delivery drivers, bike messengers, and “general weirdos.” After the current owners took over Tempest in 2010, a regular customer who was also a notable chef proposed adding modestly priced gourmet eats. Box Kitchen was soon dishing out such unlikely fare as mac and cheese egg rolls ($10) and potato skins with pork belly and quail eggs ($15). Along with our short Modelo draft beers ($4), Rich and I ordered corn and clam chowder ($8) and elote riblets ($8), which turned out to be Mexican street corn slathered with miso butter, chives, and a Japanese spice-and-seaweed blend called togarashi. Not your average bar snacks! A woman at a nearby table jumped up to hug a burly guy with his hair in turquoise cornrows, and they did a little impromptu dance. I called out something encouraging, and we exchanged grins. Soon I was over admiring her friend’s baby, which led to the kind of meandering, friendly chat that’s a hallmark of dive bar culture. The food was spectacular and almost surreal, being served in the kind of place where ordinarily you’d be lucky to get a bag of peanuts. Sipping my chowder and studying the specials, I vowed never to try The Mind Eraser (vodka, Kahlua, and soda water, $11)(unless I already have and don't remember it). I wondered idly if the Italian digestif, Fernet ($8), was anything like its Spanish counterpart, orujo. “Let’s find out,” said Rich. The first sip seared the inside of my mouth like liquid fire. If I’d been capable of vocalizing, I’d have howled. “It grows on you,” gasped Rich. Incredibly, it did, and we finished every drop. Our next destination was the legendary Vesuvio Café, where the Beat Generation gathered before City Lights opened across the alley. Eccentric artist Henri Lenoir launched it in 1948, filling it with art and drenching it with atmosphere. “Stepping inside feels like walking into the bowels of a pirate ship adorned with decades of history and loving kitsch,” wrote SFGate editor Andrew Chamings. “The bohemians filled this place with surrealism, a sense of humor, whimsy and lightness, and I love them for it.” He declared it “the best bar in America.” Young Jack Kerouac found it so seductive he blew off a once-in-a-lifetime chance to meet world-famous author Henry Miller, who’d written to say he liked the younger writer’s work and could they meet up? En route to their rendezvous in Big Sur 150 miles south along the coast, Jack dropped into Vesuvio Café … and never made it out of San Francisco. When I got to Vesuvio I found the atmosphere convivial and noisy. My nearest neighbor at the bar was a man with a paperback book and a shot of scotch at his elbow. “Get much reading done in here?” I asked. “Sometimes,” he said. “If I really want to concentrate, I go upstairs to my favorite table on the balcony.” Ice broken and his cred as a local established, we were soon exchanging names (his was Josh) and tidbits about our personal and professional lives. When I mentioned the dive bar pub crawl, he insisted I walk across the street to check out Specs’. “Specs’ is the best dive bar in the city,” Josh said. “Specs’ is not a dive bar,” said Shafagh. And he should know; he’s the bartender there. Properly known as Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum Café, and eccentric even by San Francisco standards, this former speakeasy and historic lesbian bar was transformed into a left-wing, blue-collar union bar by Vesuvio-waiter-turned-construction-worker Richard “Specs” Simmons. The inside isn’t as downscale as your typical dive bar, but the dim lighting, quirky décor, and atmosphere of casual chumminess fit the profile. Rich and I were soon chatting away with everyone. Shafagh showed me postcards sent by customers journeying in distant lands and gave me a copy of the card the bar uses to support women fending off unwanted advances. I don’t know what time Rich and I stumbled outside into the afternoon sunlight and began weaving our way toward the Ferry Terminal. Along the way we continued the debate about whether Specs’ was a dive bar. “It all comes down to price,” I said. “How much did we pay for those drinks?” I’d seen Rich hand over a credit card and wave away a receipt. There was a long pause. “I have absolutely no idea.” “I rest my case,” I said. And then we were boarding the ferry, where we slept all the way home. WHERE ARE THESE CLASSIC SF DIVE BARS? South of Market Tempest Bar and Box Kitchen, 431 Natoma Street North Beach Vesuvio Café, 255 Columbus Avenue Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum Café, 12 William Saroyan Place And There Are Countless More Google "dive bars in SF" and have fun exploring the city's oddball drinking establishments. I'M ON THE ROAD - NO POSTS FOR TWO WEEKS We're going to a wedding plus lots of side trips to visit family and friends. I'll post again as soon as I'm back. This post is part of my ongoing series OUT TO LUNCH IN CHEAP & CHEERFUL SAN FRANCISCO My goal is to discover some of San Francisco's most colorful neighborhoods so I can check out what's really going on in this zany town. Are we in a doom loop? Already on the rebound? Still fabulous? And where should we eat afterwards? These and other questions will be explored in upcoming posts. BROWSE PREVIOUS POSTS HERE DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. 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