North Beach Examiner

The Japanese labor bureau agreed with his widow's claim, saying that the guy (who was not identified) was under so much stress trying to develop a hybrid Camry that he keeled over, on the job, from ischemic heart disease. Thanks to the ruling this week, she can collect benefits from his work insurance.

See? This is why I live in North Beach, and not Japan. Nobody around here seems to be working at all. It's like the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Oh, sure, I know people work, kind of, but it's different here. It's different even from the Marina District over the hill, let alone Japan where the work ethic is pure insanity. Nobody I know in North Beach is fanatical about work. Something, someday, is going to kill me. It may be gluttony, it may be alcoholism. But it sure as hell won't be work.

Who is the jerk who invented work, anyway?

I'm not saying there aren't people in North Beach who aren't working hard. Shopkeepers certainly break a sweat. Small business people who have no one else to depend upon but that image in the mirror -- they work hard. But I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the suits who, without giving it a thought, work much harder than they should, who prostrate themselves before The Man and waste their lives for his greater glory. They're the ones who glue themselves to their iPhones and Blackberries and even check their office e-mail while they're on vacation, fer crissake.

That's why I get nervous when I see those skyscrapers mushrooming to the south of us and inching ever closer to our little colony of agreeable layabouts. That ghastly disease might be catching.

Back in the '80s and '90s I worked as an editor at the Hearst-owned Examiner. There were a lot of talented people on the staff: reporters, photographers, editors. I suppose that was work, but it didn't really feel like it. It was fun. (It was also union: The shift was seven-and-a-half hours, period.) We'd get the edition in and go down to the corner for a few toots, sometimes after our shift, sometimes during. We'd talk about the noble profession of journalism over a little Johnnie Walker and then resolve to practice it occasionally.

One of the things we asked ourselves in moments of inebriated self-flagellation was this: With all the talent on our staff why was the Ex such a lousy paper? Sure, we were feisty and we could hold our own against the Chronicle, which wasn't saying very much. But compared to The New York Times or Washington Post? Yeah, we were lousy. Why? Some of our guys were as good as some of their guys. Some of our guys eventually went to work for those guys. We had the talent, all right.

So why were we a lousy newspaper? In fact, we wondered, why has San Francisco always had lousy papers?

The usual excuses were burped up: idiotic management, lack of resources. Both true, to some extent. But there was another reason, too, and a lot of us agreed that this was the real one. Simply put: "Who comes to San Francisco to work?"

It's true ... or it was then. In all the ways that San Francisco was unlike other American cities, a healthy aversion to working too hard was one of the best. You came here to live, man. To L-I-V-E. Work was what you did, grudgingly, in order to have enough folding green to pay your rent. Then you went about the business of living, and it was fun.

That's all changing now, of course. The young arrivistes who wash up in North Beach like stinking whale carcasses think nothing of working 45, 55, 65-hour weeks in some dreary little cubicle, in front of a dreary little monitor. Of course, they're no longer people, anyway, they're consumers. And it takes a lot of dough to be a good American consumer these days.

If that's your idea of living, fine. If you want to be deaf when you're 35 from keeping those iPod earbuds in for too long, and dead when you're 45 from overwork, that's your business.

But please do your dying somewhere other than North Beach. We're far too healthy for the likes of you.