San Francisco Tarot

The ebook version of this project doesn't come with the San Francisco Tarot cards themselves as they don't present well in this format. But since most of the project now consists of the writing behind the cards (in the form of ill-tempered essays, comedic rants and biographical-historical detours) I decided to make the writings available separately for the readers who don't have time to go hunting down the paperback version. This booklet contains sixty character-cultural sketches each one-page long, that describe the sixty most common phenomena one must live with in the Bay Area. Each of these character-cultural sketches is located (in the paperback version) behind a page designed to look like an extremely primitive fortune-telling card. (Art was not the main purpose of this project, and so the cards, were they in this version, would look quite crude; so ebook readers aren't missing much anyway.) In the paperback version, each facing page would be like the next card in a deck, and it would predict that you will meet with one of the archetypal people or experiences that must be endured by the residents of the City of San Francisco. (But the title of each character-cultural essay can just as easily serve at the fortune-telling line, so to speak. Now the project, as previously mentioned, is called San Francisco Tarot, but as you'll soon find out, these archetypes are not limited to San Francisco; and if you live anywhere between San Diego and Seattle, you've certainly seen all of these people and things before (presuming that the pattern-recognition software in your brain hasn't already been disabled by peer pressure). Furthermore, in the paperback version, each of the "cards" contains a "Portentous Quote," usually based on things I've heard from the aforementioned personality types. Here they are posted just beneath each "essay" title. And upon reading several of these quotes, you might even say to yourself, "Hey, I know these guys. " But the book has two other purposes, one biographical and the other historical. The biographical purpose was to weave the Bay Area portion of my life-story through yet another lens. The material here will not be new to some people, but the "deck" model provided a new perspective and a new writing format that forced different details and different takes on what would otherwise seem like all-too-familiar problems and personalities. And because the themes chosen sought for a kind of universality, you might find yourself described among these cards; and you might see your old story in a new, albeit unflattering way. And too, you might see the recent history of San Francisco, the period from 1989-2025 in a new light too, perhaps uncovering features of the culture that you had overlooked or screened out. You might even find out about a subculture or two that had not yet seized your attention. Additionally, one could add two sub-purposes to this project, sub-purposes that appear in virtually all of my projects, namely that of presenting barbarically-insensitive comedy and harpy-like, grievance-filled moralizing. I often say that if a person walks away from one of my projects without feeling embarrassed to be alive, then I've not done my job. The few reviewers who ever made a point of doing a deep dive into my work fairly wrote of it that it was something akin to low-grade psychological horror. In spite of all these flaws in my style and in the work, and in spite of my ill-tempered ranting, it is still my hope that the reader would eventually find themselves smiling, smirking, chuckling or sighing at, as one of my friendlier critics said, "the humanity of it all."