COPING MECHANISMS FOR THE MODERN AGE

This blogger committed laundry today. Yes, I had let it slide a little, seeing as I am not in a committed relationship -- or even a short term hot and nasty relationship -- and work around cigar smokers and convicted white collar criminals. So who actually cares? For four days each week I can be a little funky.

Actually, scratch the convicted white collar criminals; I don't think they've ever even been tried yet. Although one of them must know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, seeing as Marinites are all-knowing, all-seeing, and altogether the most damned enlightened people on the planet.
Even if they eat tofu and wheatgrass.
Or do yoga.

Very few of them actually have IT dude physiques, so you don't have to picture bloated rolls of clammy white flab squishing on a yoga mat right now. At eighty plus degrees, Iyengar style. Sweat, babies.
They barely creak either, even if they are antiques.
I am an archaeologist; I work with fossils.

Some of which are moist.


What I do want you to picture is an elderly black guy with a little excess weight wearing a saucy little Catholic schoolgirl skirt.
A nice mostly red plaid, short and pleated.
Underneath a tie-dyed tee-shirt.
Perfect laundry clothing.

Naturally I spent most of the time at the laundromat with my eyes closed. In that outfit, he may have been criminally insane -- lord only knows where he dumped the lifeless body of the twenty year old pay-gay street urchin from whom he stole it -- but the manager was there, along with three young ladies doing their own laundry, an elderly Chinese gentleman, and the ghosts of every judgemental prude who ever was and ever will be.
Sick psycho Sinai. Moses must avert his gaze.
There's sh*t burning all around us.
Shiny ebony-hued calfs.
Not golden.


There are good reasons why I normally do my laundry earlier in the day. For one thing, less people at the laundromat, for another, they're mostly Chinese grannies, and very sane.

The non-Chinese in this city are effing weird.

Like the doddering masses of Marin.

Just a lot different.



Anyhow, I meditated for nearly an hour an a half while there, and I now have sparklingly clean threads. Yes sir, Atboth is styling! Either I'll strike up a conversation with someone tomorrow -- seeing as I will smell fresh as a daisy, what with not spending the entire day surrounded by the dark side and their stogies -- or get my hair done, have some rice porridge and a yautiu, and smoke a few pipefulls in the afternoon while listening in on conversations no one expects a white dude to understand.

There are no black men scantily garbed in pleated plaid in Chinatown.
Pleated plaid is present, but worn appropriately.
By people of the right age.
And height.

It is very nice to find normal people in San Francisco.

Exceedingly rare, in most neighborhoods.

Chinatown is full of them.

Of all years.



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