I was born on New Jersey’s very last family dairy farm. My dad had a theory about cows in wind tunnels. I got into Rutgers, but I decided to take a year off to stretch my horizons. All my friends tried to tell me San Francisco was over. Yuppie fucked. Go to Austin or Portland instead. But I had a feeling about San Francisco. Maybe it was those big, eager dog heads with the chef hats. San Franciscans preserve those diner-top statues, and any time you carry one of them down the street, a parade just forms behind you. They close the street. Does Portland have dog heads? Hells no. I don’t know what I expected when I got to the Sucka Free. A coolness test? An initiation? I was all braced for whatever. Unstoppable. Eighteen years, I’d played nice. I’d germinated in Hot Topic and boat shoes, and everybody called me a good kid. I didn’t want to do drugs, listen to shitty music, or have unsafe sex, like the rebels at Dearly High, but I rebelled on the inside. I saved up my fuck-you-world until it could do some good.
