Is S.F. really fine just the way it is?

Construction cranes join the Transamerica Pyramid and 555 California Street (R) jutting through the fog at sunrise in San Francisco on October 20, 2013. San Francisco is seeing a boom in new housing and commercial construction alter the skyline.. UPI/Terry Schmitt less Construction cranes join the Transamerica Pyramid and 555 California Street (R) jutting through the fog at sunrise in San Francisco on October 20, 2013. San Francisco is seeing a boom in new housing and ... more Photo: Terry Schmitt Photo: Terry Schmitt Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Is S.F. really fine just the way it is? 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

The Muni streetcar came screeching around the corner the other morning, and it was covered in advertising, like a shrink-wrapped sandwich, only bigger. The message in letters 3 feet high: The Next Big Thing Is Here.

The next big thing is here? I'm against it.

I'm against a wall on the waterfront, I'm against a new Warriors arena, I'm against Google buses, I'm against anything new at the Presidio, I'm against taxicabs with pink mustaches. I'm a real San Franciscan. If it's new, I don't like it.

San Franciscans are an odd lot. We love all the attention and we hate it. We love to be the darlings of high tech, but we hate the techies. We like the idea of the cable cars, but we never ride them. They are for tourists, and we, of course, are San Franciscans. Tourists come to see where we are lucky enough to live.

We love all the legends and myths that swirl around the city like the fog: Emperor Norton, and Caruso singing the night before the 1906 earthquake; the Beat Generation and the Summer of Love. And don't forget the giant rainbow flag that flies above Castro and Market streets.

Television was invented in San Francisco, and so was the martini. Who's the most famous native San Franciscan of them all? Steve Jobs, that's who. Didn't he invent the Internet?

We even have our high-tech myths. It's true, isn't it, that the idea for Twitter came to a couple of geniuses in a brainstorming session at the foot of the children's slide at the playground in South Park? And that spot, trivia fans, is just around the corner from Jack London's birthplace. No fooling.

It's true. We are a city of geniuses, or at the very least, the geniuses live and work just down the street. Just the other day, the New Yorker magazine compared San Francisco favorably to New York. World class. That's us.

No wonder we don't want to change. San Francisco is perfect just as it is. Well, perhaps it was perfect on the last week of October, when the whole city basked in golden autumn days.

So let's not let anybody else in and spoil the fun, and for God's sake let's not change anything. Just say no to everything. That way we will stop time, like the mythical valley of Shangri-La in the novel "Lost Horizon," a place where everything was just right and nobody ever changed.

You could argue that Shangri-La is a fair description of our fair city in the late fall of 2013, a city where the old and the new blend together in perfect harmony. We don't need anything. Well, perhaps a little rain.

It is a little scary. The city has become smug. San Franciscans, who were already famous for their self-congratulations, have begun to believe their own hype.

San Francisco property is hot because the city is so cool. The city is beautiful and the people are all smart. We are like the wicked stepmother in the fairy tale. "Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who is the fairest one of all?"

We are, of course. It's become a disease. We have fallen in love with ourselves.

We forget we are a smallish city on the far west coast of North America. We have a weak city and county government with balkanized politics coupled with a civil service bureaucracy that rivals the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The big tech boom is driving the middle class out of the city; it's unaffordable. Our colorful Chinatown, much beloved by tourists, is really an overcrowded slum. We have a horrible homeless problem that no one seems to be able to solve. So we look past the beggars and walk past the druggies sleeping in the streets. It's not the cool, gray city of love out there.

A friend of mine went to New York last week, hailed a cab. New York cabbies can spot a visitor a mile away. "So," the cabdriver said, "where are you from?"

"San Francisco," my friend said.

"San Francisco?" the cabbie said. "Well, that's a cute little city."

My friend spent a couple of days in New York, looked around. The cabdriver, he said, was right.