5 Reasons San Francisco is the Worst Awesome City in America

5 The Filth

San Francisco is fucking disgusting. Don't let anyone try to tell you otherwise. "Oh, but all those hills, man, it's so beautiful!" Right, that's if you can afford to live in that part of the city where Michael Keaton once took over Melanie Griffith's apartment and chased all the Asian people away using gigantic cockroaches.

That's a nice area. Everywhere else? Dirty. People often talk about New York City being dirty, and it is, but it's not even in the same discussion with San Francisco. If there were an official city scent, it would be hobo piss. That's because hobos are everywhere, and piss is what they do for a living. Well, not just piss, obviously. They also drop so much excrement on the escalators in the city's train stations that they're sometimes rendered inoperable from the sheer volume of poo gumming up the works. How bad can it be, you ask? Well, the city had to call in a hazmat team to clean up one recent mess. There was just that much poop. On the escalator. The public escalator.

That's pretty damn gross, how could a person possibly miss that? It's simple, really. Once you've lived with that kind of filth right outside your door, no amount of filth you can travel to really matters anymore. Unless you're visiting one of those still-developing countries where people just straight-up live on piles of refuse, it's a pretty safe bet that you'll be able to look around and say, "Dirty? Sure, but it's no San Francisco."

That's a good feeling. It makes a person feel like they've really seen some shit in their life. Because they have, on the escalators (and pretty much everything else) in San Francisco.

4 The Misguided Community Support

San Francisco loves to protest. I was never able to locate it, but I'm pretty sure there's a storefront somewhere in that city where you can just walk in and rent an ethnically diverse group of people to chant in the streets on your behalf for a few hours. That's really the only explanation I can come up with for San Francisco's "unique" approach to community activism.

Take the recent protest that briefly shut down one of the busiest lines on the city's Muni system at the absolute worst time possible, a Monday morning. The Muni is a trolley system (except when that trolley is a bus). You might remember it from the hobos shitting on it in the previous entry.

Despite its reputation as a mobile public restroom, the Muni gets thousands of San Francisco residents to work each day. So you'd expect that a protest intended to disrupt that, the process of getting people living in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. to the place where they collect their paychecks, would have to be over something pretty damn important, right?

That depends on who you believe. See, the protests were staged on the one-year anniversary of the death of a man named Kenneth Harding. He was killed by police in cold blood because he didn't pay his train fare.

That's the protestor line and, you must admit, it sounds pretty heinous. In no civilized nation is death an acceptable punishment for such a petty crime. You're damn right people should protest, right? Right, except for the part where that's not even a tenth of the actual story.

In addition to being a turnstile jumper, Harding was also on parole for promoting prostitution. Your Facebook friends playfully refer to this as "pimping." The "ho," in this case, was 13 years old. Who still wants to protest for Kenneth? Keep reading if you do.

At the time of his death, Kenneth Harding was also wanted for questioning in relation to the murder of a 19-year-old woman in the Seattle area. Oh, and according to most reports, he was shooting at police. That's why they were shooting at him, you see. In fact, the coroner determined that it was a bullet from Kenneth Harding's own gun that ultimately killed him. And it's not like these are classified details. This is all widely reported.

And somehow, after weighing all of the available details and evidence, it was deemed necessary to hold a massively disruptive protest to speak out against the "unprovoked police attack" on Kenneth Harding. Because in San Francisco, authority is always wrong.

Hey, speaking of that ...

3 The Anarchy

I'm no scholar, but if I had to make a layman's guess as to why San Francisco disrespects authority so regularly, it's probably because there isn't much authority around in the first place. By the time you see a cop in San Francisco, it's been so long since you've seen the last one that you assume they just disbanded the entire police force and decided to try getting everyone stoned to keep the peace instead. If you don't believe that, I have a video to show you ...

That's video of a homeless woman attacking a train (naturally) ...

Attacking the woman who attempted to remove her from the train ...

Being beat by the woman who she attacked for trying to remove her from the train ...

And then just kind of laying beaten under the train for a bit ...

If you watch the video, you'll notice a few things. For one, not a single person is too concerned with if or when the police are coming. Certainly not this young gentleman, who uses the situation as an opportunity to add a little decoration to the train:

But it's not just that there aren't police around. If you listen closely, you don't even hear any sirens. You don't hear anyone attempting to alert the authorities. The guy operating the train gets out exactly one time, and that's to stop the graffiti kid. Never mind the grandma getting wrecked in front his train, just don't wreck the train. San Francisco will certainly protest a police shooting, even if it's justified. But don't you dare expect them to stand in the way of a great viral video.

But still, how does this indicate that police are in short supply in San Francisco? Well, you'll notice that there's a lot of talk about the "Air Yeezy 2 Campout" in the video and in the description of the video. That's because this was all happening right in front of a massive event put on by Nike to promote their new Air Yeezy 2 line, a shoe designed for Kanye West, because rappers are athletes, too.

And that event was taking place a stone's throw from the busiest mall in the city. Which is on quite possibly the busiest street in the city. On a Saturday afternoon. And not a single person involved in the ruckus seems to be concerned that, maybe, at an area packed with that many people, there might be a few cops around. Because there aren't.

I'm not a criminal, but living in San Francisco made me feel like I could get away with it if I ever decided to make a career change. As far as safety nets go, you could certainly do a lot worse than knowing you always have petty crime to fall back on in a pinch.

Also, it's probably the lack of law enforcement that clears the way for ...

2 The Public Dongs

That's right. Dongs. In public. Just, like, out and flopping around. Do you know how many times, prior to living in San Francisco, I had seen a man walking around completely naked in public? Zero. Do you know how many times I saw that happen when I lived in San Francisco? At least four, that I can remember. I lived there for three months. That's more than one public dong per month, on average. I don't know what the national statistics are like, but that's gotta be way above the usual per capita for that kind of thing.

Now, you're probably wondering what it is about seeing dongs in public that I will miss. Do I just like dicks? No, you're thinking of someone else.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. Liking dicks, I mean. There are plenty of things wrong with Marion Gladstone, and that picture is at least ten of them. But it's certainly not his sexuality that I hold against him (or my body, no matter how many times he asks). What I personally enjoy about a public dong is the massive amount of attention that it draws. Say, for example, you're walking down the street, eating a slice of pizza, when a giant dollop of sauce falls on your shirt. Oh no! You've got a huge stain on your shirt! Whatever will you do?

In San Francisco, the answer is simple. Just look around until you spot this ...

... and then walk 15-20 feet to the left or right of it for the remainder of your trip. Don't doubt for one second that, if you're in San Francisco, someone in your general vicinity is stark naked. Just find them and stand nearby. Nobody will even know you're alive. A dong in public is like an invisibility cloak for anyone in the area who happens to be wearing pants, and it's a power you're able to access more regularly and effectively in San Francisco than anywhere else.

I'm fairly certain that all of this penis talk has Gladstone thinking about one thing right now, and that's eating. So, let's talk about food.

1 The Access to Horrifying Food

Everybody knows that the food in San Francisco is incredible. Or maybe you don't, but you kind of do now, because I just told you. The food in San Francisco is incredible. There are restaurants everywhere, in every price range, and most of them are wonderful. But it's not the good food that I'll miss in San Francisco. What I'll really miss is the awful food. Can I give you an example? Surely I can, have a look at this.

That's one of those "burgers on a glazed doughnut" nightmares that I've read so much about. But prior to moving to San Francisco, the only place I'd ever heard of them existing were at minor league baseball stadiums and such. I found this one at a restaurant in San Francisco called Straw. It was a five-minute walk from my apartment. How does it taste? Terrible. Just so bad, you guys. When you bite into it, you're expecting that, somehow, all of these disparate flavors are going to come together to make something tasty. Like how stuffing and cranberries somehow taste delicious together or how KFC uses flour and stray pets shipped in from Third World countries to make delicious fried chicken. That doesn't happen, though. It's just beef, doughnut, cheese and bacon fighting for attention in your mouth. Eat a bacon cheeseburger, but first, drown it in syrup. That's what a doughnut burger tastes like.

But you know what? At least I can say I've tried it. If I didn't live in San Francisco for three months, I'm not sure I ever would have had the courage or ability to eat a doughnut burger. They don't just sell those things everywhere. But they sell everything in San Francisco. If you see Anthony Bourdain eating pork ankle tacos at a filthy food cart in Bolivia, there's a pretty good chance that disgusting food cart is actually a franchise with several locations in the Mission District of San Francisco. You don't have to wonder what pork belly doughnuts taste like, because you can just walk to a restaurant that sells them (delicious, by the way).

See, good food is everywhere. To find the stuff that people claim is good but actually tastes like pickled death, you're usually going to have to do some searching and, likely, a lot of traveling. Not if you live in San Francisco, though. Be it doughnuts made from pigs or a bunch of those naked men that Marion Gladstone likes so much, you can definitely find it in San Francisco.

Adam hosts a podcast called Unpopular Opinion that you should check out right here. You should also be his friend on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

Check out more from Adam in 4 Bootleg Items Purchased on the Streets of NYC: A Review and 6 Absurd Situations That Only Happen In Food Commercials.