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This is no travelogue of whimsical wanderlust through a far off land. It’s an obituary. I have walked through the crusted arteries of a sick city. The whole place has turned gray save the graffiti, the FOR LEASE signs, and the tent cities growing like slime mold under and on overpasses. Anybody of productivity or value has already vacated, leaving behind 430,000 useless bums, addicts, stubborn fools, and politicians. There is a big chalk line around the central East Bay, and Oakland, California has been pronounced dead at the scene.

It’s like a boom town gone bust, but boom towns at least provided gold. Oakland has never been more than a place to give up on your way to San Francisco. That shows at the airport, recently renamed San Francisco Bay Oakland International to attract more quitters. The gift shop taunts you with souvenirs from the city you never made it to. Every attraction worth seeing waves a neener-neener from the other side. Anybody with any sense would take a ferry out of Alameda County as fast as possible. That was not an option for my family and I. Fools that we are, this was our destination. I didn’t buy the the toll pass for the rental car, so we were trapped whether we liked it or not.

That rental car was made entirely out of touchscreens and it took me 20 minutes to figure out how to operate the goddamn thing. Good Lord, if this is the future of the automobile, I’m buying all of my cars in Mexico from now on. Good thing Mexico was only a four minute drive from the airport… no, I shouldn’t insult Mexico like that. Much like Ensenada, Oakland’s houses and barrios climb aimlessly into the hills on broken streets. At least Ensenada was populated. I was several blocks into Oakland before I saw any sign of human life. The crusty, sleepwalking fentanyl addicts don’t count. They aren’t human, and they aren’t alive, so for the rest of this piece I’ll refer to them as The Creatures.

I stopped for lunch at the Jack In The Box on Hegenberger Road. The counter was decorated with a thick pane of bulletproof glass, and the kitchen door was secured by three deadbolts. The gal working there seemed cheerful in her security, and passed my sandwich through a sideways tunnel in the plastic. I ate by the window so I could keep an eye on my luxury ride- and one of The Creatures was inside the restaurant behind me! He looked like he’d been sleeping in mud for three days and was fighting a losing battle with his oversized sweatpants. Grunting, panting, groaning in the corner, he may have been masturbating. I don’t know that he wasn’t. He sat down to go a few rounds with his sneakers, and I inhaled my burger and hit the road.

I had about two hours to kill before my family’s plane came in, so I took some time to familiarize myself with California’s infamous streets. I began with a cruise down Hegenberger Road, the half-paved mule trail that leads from the airport. The sidewalks are home to illegally parked cars, windowless (and doorless) vans, and trash. The Creatures meander soullessly through moving traffic at will. Every square inch of this street was painted with some kind of gang insignia or other. Be it curiosity, or masochism, this wasn’t enough for me so I took some sojourns through the Venezuela-esque corridors in my expensive car. I found the local DMV beneath a pile of garbage… hey, at least they got something right.

I would learn after getting home that the Coliseum neighborhood is among the worst in the city. More generally, neighborhoodscout.com ranks Oakland in the zeroeth percentile for violent crime in America. I take these statistics with a lump of salt because sites like this are using generic data to sell you a PDF with more numbers on it, but according to them, your odds of falling prey to criminal violence are 1 in 65. That’s roughly three times the average for California. Oakland ranks #13 for violent crime in the United States, beating out Nashville, New Orleans, and Chicago. The insane rate of 30 homicides per 100,000 people in 2021 puts Oakland in the same festering echelon as Cartegena, Colombia (31), and Tegucigalpa, Honduras (32). I’ll even add Ensenada, Mexico (34) for comparison’s sake.

So it’s no surprise that the Oakland Athletics are leaving at the end of this baseball season, and that sad fact alone brought my family and I to this godforsaken pit. The Oakland Coliseum is the weirdest ballpark in the MLB, designed to house both baseball and football. It’s built like a mausoleum but decorated with friendly green and yellow banners everywhere. Food and seats were fairly priced. The third tier of bleachers, closed to the public, blocks your view of the city for three beautiful hours. It’s too bad that the park was, just like everything else in Oakland, nearly empty.

There are no concessions on the top floor, and the only way up or down is through the elevators. There are two of them, located in the rear through a winding cement corridor. Make sure you go to the second floor- even though the first floor button has a star on it, that takes you to the kitchen. You aren’t welcome there. My sister and I made that mistake and got yelled at by an obnoxious cow of a woman. I’m sure hundreds of people make this mistake daily, and how this hasn’t been corrected over the decades defies my imagination.

Despite the heinous neighborhood and bizarre layout of the Oakland Coliseum, I had a great time at the baseball game. The ballpark was cozy, in an alien spaceship kind of way, and the A’s beat the Mariners 2-1, ending the 9^th inning early with a double play.

By the end of this year, the community created by the ol’ ball game will be extinct. Oakland will be left to it’s own self-cannibalism of gang violence and homelessness. The fine people of Oakland protest this by waving big green flags that say SELL- a call for the Athletics’ owners to sell to someone, anyone, willing to buy the team and keep it in this city. It’s a moot point. The move has already been ratified by the powers-that-be in the MLB, and there isn’t a millionaire on Earth stupid enough to make that kind of investment. It’s an expensive and convoluted thing to move a sports franchise. They’re evacuating, not turning a profit.

The Coliseum Neighborhood Zoo left a bad taste in our mouths. Every city has bad areas, so we set out to find any part of the city that could instill some hope in our tourist souls. Surely we could rescue our vacation by exploring a bit. No dice. Even a three hour hike into the redwood forest isn’t enough to deter gangsters from leaving their marks.

Street parking downtown was ample and free, with a friendly warning on the meter that your car windows are in grave danger. We had dinner at a tasty seafood spot by the marina and took a walk through Jack London Square. You can see fossil evidence that this was once a hip and happening shopping center, with a beautiful seaside hotel, statues, fountains, and a view of San Francisco. Today, it’s a Potemkin mall. Between every storefront too stubborn to close were four empty ones. We saw more FOR LEASE signs than people. Across the train tracks from are empty brick buildings, each with a weedy yard protected by barbed wire. To hell with leasing, these heaps are all for sale. The only functioning business on Embarcadero West is the mile-long liquor store, an indispensable retailer in a city like this.

We took a quick drive down Broadway street, the heart of downtown, and things still didn’t improve. More graffiti. More Creatures. The entire space beneath the freeway overpass was filled, filled the way insulating foam fills a wall, with a tent shantytown. Two police cars were parked next to it, completely uninterested.

The killing blow to my low opinion was the state of the architecture. Downtown Oakland boasts beautiful buildings, like the Spanish colonial City Hall and the New Yorkish 1409 Broadway. Most amazing was the Cathedral Building, the first Gothic style skyscraper built west of the Mississippi, completed in 1914. Viewed from the front, it stands as a beacon of hope that this city could someday echo its former glory. Viewed from the back, your hope sublimates again and leaves the body as a fart. Some jackass smeared shit all over the facade, with city approval, and called it a mural. It supposedly represents the founding of the United Nations. It’s so ugly that I was sure it was graffiti, which would match that Eye of Sauron thing at the top. I took this picture last week, but Google Maps street view confirms that the tag has been up there for over a year. Let this building be the city’s headstone, and SHOTZ! its eternal epitaph.

The Creatures were giving us dirty looks for filming their habitat, so we hightailed it back to the hotel. We took turns crying in the shower, and I asked the family: “would you rather live here, or in Ensenada?” The answer was unanimous- Ensenada. “At least the shops are open down there,” we agreed.

“It reminds me of the favelas in Brazil,” commented Dad, who lived in Rio de Janeiro during the early 1990s. Favelas, the endless slums of hand-made houses stacked like Legos, stealing power and water from the main grid, fall just short of being the perfect comparison. In the Bay Area, Oakland is the run-down ghetto where few dare tread. It’s where the poor wallow in badly built structures, where the shops are shuttered, where gangs proudly display their tags on skyscrapers, where stray bullets whiz around like horseflies, and where nobody’s personal property is safe. It’s where you take the wrong bridge and can feel the air change. It’s the part of town where the locals tell tourists “I wouldn’t go there, if I were you.”

To call Oakland a favela is not to compare its crime to the Mad-Max-of-the-Jungle criminal mayhem of Brazil. We’re a far cry from that. I don’t know if we’ll ever get quite that bad in America, I have a hunch that Brazilians are just a violent breed. However, one thing you’ll never see in a favela is an empty storefront. Favela dwellers have nothing in the way of material wealth, which is why they depend on the community that shops, cafes and restaurants provide. What our American favelas lack in rampant murder, they make up for with a desert of culture.

It isn’t the banks and venture capital firms boarding their doors because they can’t make rent; it’s restaurants, bars, coffee shops, stores, and other places where people go interact with their neighbors. DoorDash kills these places financially by eating into already thin profit margins, and spiritually by reducing a community to a commodity. Why go out and talk to people when you can push a button, pay an extra ten bucks, and a cup of coffee will show up at your door? Americans are so allergic to looking at each other that we’ll pay extra to avoid human interaction. We’re apathetic to our crumbling neighborhoods because we’re all safe in our tenements eating delivered food and binge-watching televised tripe.

I like to think that it will get worse and worse until community is all we have, that the people who live in dead cities like Oakland will come together to make the best out of a bad situation… like hell! Americans are so self-centered that we’d sooner hang ourselves in our closets. Fear not, I am a man of solutions, I have some thoughts on how to resurrect Oakland before it comes to that.

First: the city shall commission a Fentanyl Ferry full of free drugs and load up as many of The Creatures as will fit, which will float out into the bay and explode. We do this every Saturday until it is no longer necessary. Second: everyone caught with DoorDash, UberEats or similar installed on their phone gets tied to the Jack London Oak for fifteen lashes per offense. Third: the Cathedral Building will be repainted, with a new mural depicting a giant middle finger to the United Nations. Lastly: the entire police force will be fired and we start from scratch. Any cops who actually give a shit can go through training again, corrupt and lazy officers won’t bother. There will be a brief period of chaos, but nobody will notice the difference, and then Oakland will have the best police force in California. I won’t be running for office (or visiting ever again), but I invite any of you to steal this plan for your own mayoral campaigns.