On what turned out to be a record-breaking scorcher in the San Francisco Bay Area, my New Trusty Rommate and I loaded over 4 pages of Ikea catalog shelving solutions into the back of an oversized Ryder truck. Several HATTEN side tables, OPPLI TV units, and KUSK storage combinations filled the 15 foot yellow behemoth we'd managed to park on the sidewalk, inconveniently obstructing leagues of sun-starved, gray-socked, environmentally-minded dog-walkers who made sure to grumble their disapproval as they passed by.

"Are you moving in or out?"

"Out," I said, squinting into the sun, my forehead drowning in wrinkles.

"Where to?"

"I'm bringing him to LA," I explained, pointing at the huddled wreckage of arms and shoulders heaving boxes into the truck, "Where we have weather like this everyday."

Trying hard not to bark and bite my pants leg, "Good riddance."

I expected such a response, and so shrugged and returned to the IVAR untreated pine bookshelves waiting their turn on the sidewalk. San Francisco and I have never seen eye-to-eye, you see. We don't like each other, and have known to go out of each other's way to piss the other one off.

I like to wear "shorts" in July, to "park" my car closer to a destination than "somwhere in Oakland", to wear "color" in public.

I like my pretense up and in your face, like the women in Beverly Hills who wear Prada stilletos while they browse produce and network production deals on their cell phones. Not like the sea of inbred Ivy-Leaguers swarming the craggy hills of SF in Pursuit of The Good, snacking and preaching organically-grown bananas while tossing the peels out the windows of imported SUV's.

Give me LA and its masses of freeway-infested shopping parks, its armies of inorganically-grown centerfolds. At least it's warm here.