Hella Foggy

Episode 15: Hella Spooky!

Ghosts! The Bay Area Has Got 'Em! Apparently! It's May. And yet here are Wayne and Greg, elbows-deep in Bay Area ghost lore — which, it turns out, is extensive, varied, and deeply weird. Is this an October episode that got lost? Did it slip through some kind of dimensional rift? The uncanniness is noted. The episode proceeds anyway. The haunted inventory is impressively broad: ghosts in lakes, ghosts in pubs, a ghost cop (constitutionally questionable), ghosts in toy stores, ghosts on the highway, and entire ghost armies of Native Americans. Wayne, heroically, tries to keep the spooky vibes alive. Greg, reliably, is a party-pooper. The ghosts, for their part, remain unimpressed. Other territory covered: sex cults, theoretically haunted Teddy Ruxpins, the Real People vs. That's Incredible! debate no one knew they needed, sports superstitions, witches, rubber chicken sacrifices, dumb ghosts, arguing constitutional issues with a ghost cop, Carol Burnett, a suburban pizza house that was apparently also a brothel, and whispered-about sightings of an earless deer. So very spooky. We hope you enjoy it.

Episode 14: Hella ‘90s

This one circles the ‘90s in San Francisco, when the ground felt loose and everything seemed briefly possible. Wayne and Greg move through the early dot-com years, back when the job market felt strangely overripe, like it might split open on its own. Companies appeared fully funded and half-formed, stocked with free beer and vague intent, then vanished 18 months later, leaving behind dead stock options and stories that don’t quite cohere. There’s talk of the texture of the time. Mouse balls gumming up. Offices that didn’t feel like offices. A kind of corporate nudity, equal parts liberation and farce. The City filling with arrivals, each carrying their own version of what San Francisco might be. Weird art scenes brushing up against startup culture. Burning Man before it calcified into something else. Somewhere in there, a small mystery. Herb Caen. A missing letter. The kind of detail that shouldn’t matter but refuses to disappear. It’s less a history than a pursuit. Half-remembered fragments, chased down alleyways that may or may not still exist. A couple of people trying to get their arms around a moment that was already slipping away while they were living it. If you were there, it might feel familiar. If you weren’t, it might feel like something you almost remember anyway.

Episode 13: Hella Gluttonous

Restaurants, or the long, dimly lit theater of appetite, status, memory, and mild gastrointestinal regret. We settle into the cracked vinyl booths and low-stakes grandeur of old man restaurants, where time slows, portions don’t, and a chilled fork arrives like a small, unnecessary miracle. Is it luxury, or just a habit that refuses to die. Either way, it becomes a kind of thesis. Wayne, sensing an opening, drags in Star Wars with the confidence of a man who knows the bit will land whether it belongs or not.  There’s a prolonged, faintly adversarial inquiry into whether a prime rib house is meaningfully distinct from a steakhouse, or just a specialized dialect of the same language. Greg recounts a self-inflicted Christmas lunch disappointment, a slow-motion collapse that could have been avoided with even minimal foresight. Wayne offers a poignant glimpse into a life without proper toys, featuring one of his many cousins. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Greg gets punched in the head. The story is told with the clarity of someone still slightly surprised it happened. Wayne, undeterred, drifts into a near-religious meditation on the best fried chicken in the city, as if describing a place that may or may not exist anymore. There’s ice cream. There’s a bar in the Lower Haight that feels like it was designed after someone misremembered *Alien* during a fever dream. Tiki bars surface, as they always do, equal parts escapism and residue. No reservations. No conclusions. Just the check, eventually.

Episode 12: Hella Trainspotting

Transit, or the promise that the Bay Area briefly makes to itself before stalling between stations. We descend into Bay Area Rapid Transit, where the trains are real, the delays are spiritual, and the dream of a glass-walled Transbay Tube, equal parts aquarium and civic optimism, never quite materializes. There’s a passing nod to Star Wars—inevitable, given tunnels, empires, and the faint sense that someone, somewhere, miscalculated the scale. We surface onto the unexpectedly worldly F Market & Wharves, a rolling archive of other cities’ past lives, and revisit a historic and slightly surreal interval called the “Muni Meltdown” when San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency more or less stopped functioning, and everyone quietly recalibrated their expectations downward. Friend of the podcast Francesca delivers a critique with edges. A friendly stranger from Reddit suggests the theme of this episode. We consider, briefly, the absence of absurdly short flights between San Francisco International Airport, Oakland International Airport, and San Jose International Airport—a missed opportunity for both convenience and farce. Ferries, as ever, remain the only mode of transport that seems to understand the assignment. Various historical efforts to sabotage or derail BART are noted, then dismissed with the weary recognition that the system hardly needs the help. All routes considered. Few resolved.

Episode 11: Hella Ups & Downs

Episode 11 moves like a coastal loop, all salt air and structural creaks, drifting through Bay Area amusement parks as if they’re unstable memories rather than fixed places. It starts with the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and the Giant Dipper, still clattering along with a kind of stubborn physicality. No metaphor needed. It works, so it persists. Then inland to California's Great America, which feels like it’s been revised into blandness. A theme park that forgot its theme. Greg drops in a memory, a teenage kiss, and suddenly the place has more meaning as a private container than a public attraction. Wayne breaks the mood with a genuinely surprising origin story for the It's-It ice cream sandwich, which lands as exactly the kind of practical indulgence the region would invent. From there, the wreckage. Failed 1970s parks, half-hearted visions, one oddly brushing up against the early orbit of C++ programming language. Big systems, loose intentions. The Wooz comes up as a kind of phantom concept. A good idea that never quite found form. Then Children's Fairyland, still standing by staying small and specific. The question shifts from how to why. And, briefly, a half-serious attempt to seed a rumor involving Charles Manson, just to see how easily a place can be bent by story. By the end, the parks blur. What lasts isn’t the rides. It’s the uneven way meaning sticks, or doesn’t.