Penny Wiseacre

Ask not for whom the chicken clucks; she clucks for thee

If you are going to read books about how awesome urban farming is (Spring Warren's The Quarter Acre Farm) or how wonderful it is to live off what you raise (Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Mineral), then I think you should skip the next sixteen "How I, an urbane lady who loves Sephora, came to grow my own food/teach inner-city children what kohlrabi was/find intense life lessons in agriculture while keeping all my upper-middle-class cultural capital and privilege so I could sell a memoir" recommendations Amazon will give you, and skip straight to Josh Kilmer-Purcell's The Bucolic Plague.

Here is the book in a nutshell: Josh and his husband Brent buy a farm in upstate New York. Then they spend their lives doing one of three things:

1. Working grinding, high-paying jobs in Manhattan so as to afford the farm and its attendant mansion.

2. Taking trains between Manhattan and Albany.

3. Working 18-hour days at the farm. On their weekends. Before doing #2 in order to do #1.

It all sounds hellish and pretty much is, until in the final chapters of the book, personal growth is had, the reader is reminded how handy it is to have friends in high places in the New York media world, and the boys keep the farm.

(You may or may not also recall that later, the guys finally get to release Kilmer-Purcell from his 1-2-3 grind by dint of going on the Amazing Race and using the stealth strategy, "We only need to come in first once." The prize money paid off the mortgage on 1802 Beekman and now they're empire-building. If I give in to the temptation to buy some of their goat-milk caramel, I'll do a full taste test.)

San Francisco didn't change. I did.

In the winter of 1996-1997, I was at a party in San Francisco's Inner Richmond neighborhood, and I ended up talking to Paulina Borsook, a brilliant writer who was getting a lot of heat over the piece she published in Mother Jones, "Cyberselfish," which postulated that the dot-commies who had flooded the area were a bunch of libertarian jerks. This quote stuck with me at the time:

I routinely attend parties peopled by digerati in their 20s and early 30s who, in addition to their desirable arrogance of youth, have a frightening invulnerability (their skills in demand, the likelihood of cashing out high).

Mostly because at the time, I was attending the same parties with the same type of people.