In San Francisco, people are tired of sharing. They say, “Our generation is post-sharing,” and “Don’t you realize that our epoch is just now burgeoning from the shadow of the last?” When you respond with a blank face – a face that is blank because you are tired and this is way too much bullshit to listen to before coffee – they interpret your lack of expression as skepticism. “No, but you don’t understand,” people say. “We’ve done butter-noodles-at-the-commune-dinner.  We’ve stuffed ourselves on orange-slop-at-the-Krishna-lunch. We want something new! We want micro-green-and-endive-bisque-with-a-glass-of-rosé. Can’t you understand?” Then, despite the fact that you only planned to speak with people in San Francisco while waiting for your latte, they say, “We want to explain. Oh! It must have seemed so selfish just saying it like that. Flippant! We-people-in-San-Francisco are not flippant. We are well considered! We want to tell you about growing up so you can understand us.”
    You wish you could remember people in San Francisco’s names. These three people, three men that talk and sound so much like one another that you can’t tell them apart, are following you now on the sidewalk of Valencia St. and you have no choice – at least you don’t have enough energy to make a choice – about listening to them. You must have interviewed them. Yes, it was the trend piece for the Chronicle. Or was it for the profile job for the 7x7? You cannot remember who exactly these people are except that you called them “The New Generation of San Francisco” or some other hyperbolic cliché about being “cutting edge” and “turning the tide.”
   If you tried, yes, you could tell them apart maybe by the slight variations in their angular haircuts or by identifying who is wearing which pastel colored shirt, but that would involve trying or caring, neither of which interests you this morning. You have a hangover and they might as well be the same person, anyway. They’re all wearing Ray Bans and they won’t take them off. They were wearing them right there in the coffee shop and, if you remember correctly, they wore them in the photo shoot for the newspaper (or was it the magazine?) and now you can’t help but wonder if they wear them in bed, too. Still, their incessant chatter is drowning out your own thoughts.
    “We didn’t even use our real names then,” they’re saying. “We called ourselves Spazz or Barn Yard or Garbage Can because it was like, well, we can’t even remember why we went by those names, but it felt really important at the time to choose our own names and we did.  We just did it. When we had to fill out forms, we even changed our signatures and, well, who are we kidding? We didn’t really even sign anything back then.  It was crazy like that.”