VAMPIRE NIGHT

In one of the x-files episodes, agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully come into conflict with a nerdy teenage vampire pizza delivery boy in a Texas trailer park. Which describes night on Polk Street pretty accurately. But fortunately pizza isn't all that is available. There are also bacon-wrapped hotdogs possibly made of turkey-flavoured gluten or human body parts, delicious with mustard, mayo, ketchup, and pickled peppers.
Plus artistic West-Coast sushi, and doughnuts.
It's everything for a balanced diet.

Polk Street after dark is no place for a civilized woman.

The dominant theme seems to be getting drunk quickly, and playing in traffic once that has been accomplished.

Unfortunately, I do not know what IS the place for a civilized woman. After nightfall in San Francisco. Obviously NOT either of the environs where I am likely to be found at that time: in my bed with a book, or in a smoking environment with a pipe. My bed clearly doesn't count, because there is no room for her with all the stuffed animals, books half-finished, dictionaries, miscellaneous papers, tobacco tins, clean laundry, and me.
It's comfortable, but it's also a fortress of solitude.
There isn't enough space there.
None in years.

[Monkey, froad, fat degenerate weasel, a chicken, several assorted crazies of the six inch tall or less pursuasion, and a raccoon who thinks he's German. Damned nazi rodent.]


The civilized woman ain't gonna happen anytime soon, in any case.

Not unless some sweet thing for totally inexplicable reasons decides that she needs to commune with an evil stuffed amphibian and a monkey.

At that point I would have to bail out to another possible place, namely the great frigid outdoors of Nob Hill. Because there is just no room at present for two normal human individuals in my bed.

Especially not with the insane flippery green dude there.

[He's responsible for ninety percent of the mess, I swear. Him and the monkey. They're beasts.]


I could stroll down to Polk Street, but it's noisy and rather densely unclean. Zombies and pizza delivery boys.

Bat country, more or less.

Or, if I catch a bus, I might end up at the cigar bar down in the Financial District, just below Kearny Street.  Which is no place for a civilized woman either, unless she's accompanied by her husband Mark.

That's ONE civilized woman. An unusual specimen.
Statistically there have to be more.
Unless they've fled.


Not infrequently I end up at the cigar bar on a Saturday night. Despite there being NO civilized woman on my bed, discretely taking up space while arguing with an obsessive monkey and an unstable amphibian.

On Saturday night, the Occidental on Pine is the perfect sanctuary.
It's a place to smoke, and I like the one civilized woman there.
Along with the limited subset of other civilized people.
She and Mark leave when it gets too crowded.
Before the insane masses can rampage.

Often though, I end up roaming the streets between Polk and Chinatown of an evening, vampire-like. Though not because the occupants of my bed pushed me out and told me to go smoke elsewhere.. The cigar bar is mostly a Saturday thing, not so much weekdays. Despite or because there often being an uncivilized mob of both genders there.
Plus rutting, fetishisms, and whiskey.
Bars tend to be rather noisy.
I am a quiet type.


If I ever end up regularly enjoying the company of a civilized woman of my own, I shall take her there with me. I'm sure she'd like to meet the other civilized woman and her husband, Mark.

They'd shield her from the wankers and unsavoury business types.
As well as all the free-range lawyers, geeks, and jocks.
Just like I'd protect her from the amphibian.
Who is evil, yet so huggably soft.
A fuzzy green psycho.




This world needs more civilized women. Otherwise we will be overrun by crazed green flippery guys and bacon-dog snarfing zombies.
It's a matter of survival.
I am a vampire.




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