YOU LOOK LOST

Among the habitués of Portsmouth Square in Chinatown are a number of non-Chinese individuals. Unlike the Cantonese-speakers around them, who are usually engaged in chess, or card games for nickel stakes, the non-Chinese seem best at being only tenuously connected to reality.
It's a very San Francisco thing.

But precisely like clostridium difficile, which is kept in check by all the other bacteria in the gut, these space cadets are becalmed by the sheer number of elderly people who would look askance at too much weirdness.

The idiot young Filippino getting in touch with his nun-chucky side was given a very wide birth, though many observed him with avid interest.

My, he's getting quite good at not clobbering himself with those things!

He was there for several weeks, months ago.
I haven't seen him in quite a while.
Maybe he's medicated now.

Irrespective of where I enjoy my tea, I will often end up on the edge of the park, where smoking is still legal, enjoying a pipe-full. Except for the people who know me, I remain invisible in Chinatown. Especially near the motherlode of loony tunes which is Portsmouth Square.
Rule number one: never catch the white man's eyes.
Rule number two: do not get too close.
Remember, they all look alike.
And act equally nuts.


It's a survival strategy. You never know what one of those crazy buggers is gonna do.

One of us crazy buggers.

Whiteness!

Even though I am clean, calm, neatly dressed, and casually fading into the background, I am still white, and hence tainted by my melanin-deprived similarity to the clear and obvious o-paths. It also doesn't help that all the tourists -- who are possibly not insane, what with being financially able to swarm far away from their own assigned places in the universe -- act incomprehensibly odd, and dress like either labourers or hippies. You know and I know that there's something about travelling that brings out the slob in many people, but they sure don't look like the folks a civilized person would want to take home to meet the family.


I too find it very hard to distinguish between Europeans and whackjobs.
As well as Midwesterners, Canadians, and Suburbanites.


To quote my ex, they talk funny, smell bad, and eat too much.

Our small universe is the centre of the world.

Because it's freezing here.

Don't touch!



Whenever I see people studying a map, I go over and ask if they need any help. That map more than anything else advertises that they aren't dangerous crazy people, and usually they merely need directions to somewhere close to here. Everything in the area bounded by Van Ness Avenue, Market Street, North Point, and the Embarcadero, is near everywhere else, though there might be a hill in the way.
We've all been a stranger in a strange land.
Some of us are just a little less so.


They won't leave till they get to where they're going.




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