![\"Mural](\"http:\/\/transitophile.com\/chango\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Mural-at-19th-and-Mission-Street.jpg\")
<\/a>Walk in the sun on the east side, by Imperial Travel, Lucky Pork Market, Sun Fat Seafood, among odors of sweat, exhaust, empanadas, marijuana; sidestep workers, loungers, drifters, giggling kindergartners leaping sidewalk cracks, a leathery-cheeked Guatemalteco with crisp-molded tejano over brilliantined black widow’s peak, hawking sugary raspados from an ice cream cart.\u00a0 Feel your eardrums pulse with the mad dissonant ostinato of horns, whistles, catcalls, burbling exhausts, conversation snatches (I got HER name tatted here, ‘n’ she tatted MY name<\/em>; I heard those very words on Mission, just last week), smooth-droning trolleys, the newsrack-rattling subterranean roar of a passing BART metro.\u00a0 Many, many San Francisco blocks are wealthier, prettier, safer, cleaner; only Market serves up life as intensely.<\/p>\n Who made it so?<\/p>\n I walked Mission shortly after my return to the Bay Area in 2011, still remember the uncomfortable wonder I felt, the disturbing sense that the whole of what surrounded me was larger than the sum of its parts.\u00a0 Too much larger; who had conspired, say, to paste up this protest poster (with grim, apocalyptic, fist-upthrusting Siqueiros marchers, in last stand yellow and black) next to the meek window display of a beauty supply house, plumping dainty chrome shears and curling irons on crushed red velvet?<\/p>\n Too many elements worked too well together; too many details had been primped, fussed over, tucked in.\u00a0 Any level-eyed rationalist would have attributed the pleasing aesthetics to happy accident, but I was skeptical.\u00a0 The furniture pieces of a perfect set don’t fly on a stage by themselves. I sensed a larger hand at work, a scenographer, a silent mastermind.<\/p>\n Perhaps Mission Street had a god.<\/p>\n Yes!\u00a0 That explained it!\u00a0 This was the fantasy that emerged during my Mission walks in 2011.\u00a0 Mission had a puppeteer, a demigod, foreman to some city acres, uninvolved with others, likely senior to deities that oversaw less demanding turf.\u00a0 (How much imagination would a god really need to run mostly-all-the-same Billionaire’s Row or Sunnydale?)<\/p>\n I contemplated a deified, beneficent Carlos Santana type — a natural, given the Mission’s Latino heritage — but was surprised that my imaginings wouldn’t be steered that way.\u00a0 Too predictable; the afterlife wouldn’t go in for such typecasting; no, the god of the Mission would be other-than-expected, a celestial Oscar Diggs, like a tweedy and apologetic Bennington MFA who offers a too gentle handshake to horrified fans of his ghostwritten Grunts on Guadal<\/em> series at a book signing.<\/p>\n The character and Identi-Kit facial composite of this deity then matured so quickly and effortlessly in my mind’s eye that I took my imaginings half-seriously, admit to taking them half-seriously now.\u00a0 After all, we don’t really know about these things, do we?\u00a0 Didn’t Einstein meditate upon the weakness of human understanding of nature?<\/p>\n Maybe I just think this God-of-the-Mission bit is imaginary.<\/p>\n Maybe he’s a real He.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n The God of Mission Street was a tall, slender, gay caucasian male in his last terrestrial incarnation, neither native son nor recent gentrifier.\u00a0 He aspired seriously to a design career before falling to AIDS in the worst U.S. years of the epidemic.\u00a0 Something Larger (about which I dare not speculate) took simple pity on him in the afterlife, requisitioned a minor divinity’s toolkit, promoted him to a Him.\u00a0 He wore his hair short in his mortal years, cut a preppy-flavored variant of the then-ubiquitous Castro Clone.\u00a0 The online B.A.R. obituaries include his mortal photo and bio, but He won’t reveal details of His past identity or year of death, despite our other confidences.\u00a0 Click through the obits<\/a>, if you wish; your guess is as good as mine.<\/p>\n His taste is excellent.\u00a0 I picture Him in the other-worldly ether with a thoughtful fingertip poised on cheek, brooding over His dominion as an architect might study an N scale model, contemplating enhancement or replication of one scene element, elimination of another.\u00a0 The surly, beer bottle-brandishing drunk in the tank top — an obvious gym rat, dressed to flaunt weight room biceps and delts, eyes watery, lips stuporous under Fu Manchu moustache — would go well near the Mega Trading Company marquee, wouldn’t he?\u00a0 Let’s shoo him over there, encourage him to slouch on a parking meter.\u00a0 How about those polyester-suited Filipino oldsters handing out Bible tracts: too predictable in front of Bonita Footwear, aren’t they?\u00a0 Let’s move them in front of Anna’s Linens (or would that be too jarring?\u00a0 Hmmm.)<\/p>\n I’m afraid He isn’t a particularly nice god.\u00a0 How could He be?\u00a0 Life on Mission is often cruel.\u00a0 I wouldn’t waste breath entreating Him if struck down by a car; He’d only urge me to a curb where my blood and screams might juxtapose well with the newspaper racks.\u00a0 Vibe and aesthetics are His thing; thank Him for Mission’s character, nothing else.\u00a0 He shows no special allegiance to gay culture, and is not all-powerful; if He were, Mission Street would include only a few, specific chain stores.\u00a0 He occasionally asks me for feedback, as I am one of the few mortals aware of His existence, but only about aesthetics.<\/p>\n His era may be ending.\u00a0 I have kept quiet about the luscious vitality of these Mission blocks since 2011, for fear that even my scribbles in this modest blog might attract unproductive attention, but see no point in embargoing the news any longer.\u00a0 The Mission is changing, won’t be what it was.\u00a0 San Francisco is such a tech hub now; industry workers have moved into the district, transformed Valencia Street, are spilling onto Mission, too.\u00a0 The God of the Mission can work an occasional stray Python programmer into His aesthetic mix (plump, blinking, twenty-five, with unsuccessful hipster beard curling over a SourceForge t-shirt, frowning at his Tinder profile on his smartphone next to La Taqueria), but so many of the pearly-toothed Mountain View shuttle bus rider types are wandering onto Mission now.\u00a0 They change the mix of the cultural topsoil, as talented, hard-working and admirable as they might be; they encourage a different and less variegated flora than the Mission of old.\u00a0 The God of the Mission tries to coax them back to Bi-Rite and Dandelion and the Dolores Park hill near the J-Line, where they fit in splendidly, but that’s not in His territory and they won’t all go, and He can’t integrate all that remain.\u00a0 His time is ending.\u00a0 He doesn’t have the same material to work with, will have to move on.<\/p>\n But not today, not in the summer of 2015.\u00a0 Visit soon!\u00a0 Mission Street still feels mostly as it did when I marveled at it in 2011.\u00a0 Pretend that you just got out, or learned that it’s not malignant, or have chosen to risk one more day of life.\u00a0 Walk the brilliant, teeming blocks I’ve named, and try to glimpse the mastermind that made them so exquisite: contemplating His turf from a misty hereafter, brooding over His chess pieces.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" San Francisco’s brightest and most vital blocks may be on Mission Street.\u00a0 I include nearly every blood-throbbing centimeter between 25th and 22nd, then some of the homely and magnificent acres north and south. These blocks are only occasionally and accidentally pretty, and not a safe bet for some tourists.\u00a0 Attractive or not: San Francisco is… <\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>