CELEBRATE YOUR FAVOURITE DEAD PRESIDENTS!

It's a holiday which some people cannot enjoy. As part of the whole Washington's birthday - Lincoln's birthday compression, which per the Uniform Monday Holiday Act in 1971 switched both commemorations to the third Monday in February, schools and banks are closed, low-level law-office workers and many Federal and state bureaucrats as well as city employees and transit agency drudges get the day off.

Capitalism's regular footsoldiers, however, are hard at work. So are some of the establishments where they will get sustenance throughout the day.

I am off per regular schedule. I do not 'prosyletize' for pipes and cigars on this day, and shall not head to Marin. If anyone wants to come over to the side of sweetness and light today, they're doing it on their own.
I am not the midwife.
Not today.

My apartment mate is also off, because she works in a city agency.


MINOR CELEBRATORY PROBLEM

My apartment mate is a charming intelligent person. With Asperger's, and somewhat anti-social. As well as a resolute non-smoking fiend, who objects vociferously to the pungent stench of burning tobacco leaves. Which means that today I cannot wait till she has left the building, won't sneck her door firmly and open all the windows, fill a briar with fragrant leaf, then light up and pretend I'm Hemmingway or Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Or Einstein, Camus, Bertrand Russell, Edwin Hubble, or any of the other pipe-smokers of brilliance.
Or even Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, or Josef Stalin.
There will be no indoor smoking today.
Curses, foiled again.

Instead, the television is on (Real Housewives of Atlanta), she's just given me a concise explanation of the French Arch in architecture while plonking at her computer, and I'm planning to escape.

Heading over to Chinatown early seems like a good idea. Something yummy to eat, a caffeinated beverage, then hiding out in the alleyways. Stockton Street is too crowded so close to Chinese New Year, and Grant Avenue has flocks of monstrous pudgy Americans from the interior of the country, gawking.

Hang Ah, Spofford, Ross, Becker, Wentworth, Faa Yuen Gok, Commercial.

Joyce, Stone, Trenton, Cordelia.

Volleyball courts, mahjong parlours, Christian classrooms, more mahjong parlours, a place where you may order a chipao or cheongsam, and a slow descent into the backend of the Financial District.

Noisy kids, utter quiet, tree-shade behind Ping Yuen, and a view of the crowds at Stockton and Pacific.

Probably going to spend a fair amount of time In Hang Ah Alley, near the mahjong parlours facing the tennis court. Or at the Sacramento Street end of Waverly by the First Baptist Church. It is relatively empty at both of those locations, as the pudge-monsters from elsewhere do not walk that far uphill.
No one should object to a middle-aged man with faux-intellectualism but a very real fondness for good pipe tobacco, in quiet reverie.

Perhaps a cup of milk-tea after four o'clock, and a snackipoo at a bakery. Then more of the same till long past twilight.


I'll have a notepad. There's always something to jot down.
Or look up when I return home.


Happy Dead Presidents Day.




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