There is a bohemian international highway whose rest stops are separated by long distances and legions of philistines. All along the way writers will wave to you and cry, “Say hello to San Francisco when you get there!”

They know that you are going home. It is their home, too, one of their homes, and more like home than the place where they currently reside. It is certainly possible to live in a place where diversity means two or three kinds of orthodoxy.

We have all lived in such places for as long as we could tolerate them. But how we itch to escape them and return home to a place like San Francisco.

Eric Maisel, “A Writer’s San Francisco” (via mia2sfo)