Prometheus Beneath the Bridge

I have been thinking about the proposed nationwide ban of gas stoves and what it means for the American spirit. My fear is this: you may take away a man's rights, his heroes, but take away his hearth and it will become clear the tree of liberty needs watering. I am something of a revolutionary, though, looking for excuses.

Despite gas's aesthetic and practical advantages — themselves leftovers from woodstoves — electric is ascendant and I can see a future where fire is an illegal domain, like tobacco in some nations and the gasoline engine in California thirty years from now (the modern republic seems to recoil from the glow of combustion). It is a strange world we can see even now: I was walking in the rain to a pub the other night and happened to pass under a train overpass. The sidewalk was filled with thick, gray smoke — a homeless man had just started a fire with damp cardboard. Entering the clouds, I found the creator standing before small, humble flames, holding a ring of sausage that he was about to roast. I felt a strange envy that no well-meaning federal agency would ever deprive him of this freedom. In fact, we have always been very good about leaving the homeless alone. 

I imagine a future in which many years have passed, and the last old home with a gas stove has been demolished, and a child is walking with her parents, having only known the warmth of an induction element. Suddenly, a hobo on the street strikes an ancient match against some dry old bark and his face is illuminated with a glow. The child is aghast: for all she knows, this man has stolen this strange tongue of energy from the very algorithms themselves. It is inseparable from magic for her. She will tell the story of what she saw at her school in the metaverse the next day, in between field trips to the stars, of the man with the flames; and so modern Prometheus will be born.

Until then, I aim to find a gas stove and call it my own. We are privileged with one now at the apartment, but it is the landlord's and I fear we are one tax credit away from it being replaced.  My hope was to buy an old home, anyway, although I inadvertently saw the last new gas stove installed in San Francisco a few months ago. It was a journey, not much less strange than the one under the bridge.

How I ended up in the lobby of the Yerba Buena Island residences involves a bit of deception. As a rule, I do not lie for a story;  if someone else lies for me, however, I am willing to see how it will go. In the startup world, you occasionally have a valid reason to spam a large audience with advertisements, and I had done this a few times in 2021 with all innocence. This incurred the wrath of one individual who proceeded to take my throwaway email and sign me up for a variety of spam. Some of them were lewd, some of them benign; one of them was the Yerba Buena Island residences.

For some time, the company's marketeers believed the  firm to be far more successful than it was and sent me advertisements for seven-figure condos, which I enjoyed. Then, one day, they invited me to an open house. This was a mistake, but it was not mine, and so I found myself in the hushed, airy foyer of one of the finished structures, nibbling a muffin and talking to a member of Wells Fargo about the exclusive interest rates available to that day's purchasers — 3.5% APR (this was before Jerome Powell grew drunk with power). As for the cost of some of the middling spaces, the builders would receive, with humble thanks, something like three million dollars. 

Tours were given one-by-one, so as to not allow visitors to overpower the demonstrator and steal some of the tasteful décor. I waited my turn with the impatience you might expect of someone earning $20,000 an hour via stocks, and this gave me time to review in the brochure the residences' features: among them a well-equipped kitchen with Swedish induction stovetops. 

Finally, I was led down a long, cruise ship–like corridor and was deposited at another door, the display apartment. And I must be fair to the Yerba Buena Island residences: they would make very good cruise ship cabins. The whole ensemble is that satisfactory grayscale which assures resale, compact without being snug. The apartment was tastefully decorated with deconstructed art, and the appliances hidden behind cabinets, giving the kitchen that blank and wooden expression that is this era's response to those outlandishly furnished kitchens of the nineties. 

The whole apartment exuded wealth I did not possess and I felt embarrassed as I gazed out the Juliette balcony (an architectural term for balconies you cannot use). I wanted a reasonable excuse to say I was uninterested, for otherwise this was the sort of place you bought on-the-spot.  "Can we request changes to anything about the apartment before we move in?" I asked. "Carpeting, painting, appliances, the like?"

"No, these have been professionally done," the agent replied. "We prefer that you maintain the overall aesthetic even as you decorate per your tastes."

I noticed that the one appliance visible in the kitchen, the stove, was not as advertised. It was a gas range, and very fine one at that — but not electric. I felt I could seize upon this in wealthy indignation as a reason I would not consider the place, wanting the prized Swede stovetop instead. Since we could not change anything…

"Oh, we're not supposed to advertise that, but we got this gas range in just before the ban," she invoked. 

"What ban?"

"The San Francisco board of supervisors banned them. Any new buildings can't have gas ranges, but this one was installed right before they said so."

We looked somberly at the gas range, perhaps the last in San Francisco, and mourned it. The distant foghorns lamented. I felt compelled to buy this apartment now, if only to turn it into a museum of less tyrannical times. 

But perhaps no museum is necessary. If the "poor will always be with you," then perhaps in our charity we will still have the opportunity in years to come to see a human's face lit up with the warmth which has signaled health, and safety, and home, for centuries. We may perhaps reliably find it in that apartment on Yerba Buena Island; but we will always find it beneath the overpasses and bridges.