LOFANS OR CHINESE?

White people by and large should not do karaoke unless they are sober, discreet, and actual musicians. Because otherwise they are loud, drunk, and obnoxious. As was the case last night at our final stop. The Chinese patrons were clearing out, they couldn't stand it any longer. They can tolerate a lot -- music videos of Lau Tak Wah and his crazy shiznit filmed at that giant venue on the tip of Kowloon -- but screaming young white people is asking more than a sane person can or should bear.

College graduates from all over the United States come here so their mothers don't hear them do karaoke. That should tell them something, but they're remarkably dense.

Our profound sympathies are for the owner.
A very patient woman, and a saint.

We've been going there since before they had a karaoke machine, when the "entertainment" consisted of an alcoholic Chinese American hippy and the occasional drunken tantrum by the previous management team; a day and age when patrons weren't sh*tfaced, but "happy".
Meaning of course that they were in fact totally sh*tfaced, but diplomacy insisted that one pretend that everyone present still had all their faculties and marbles, nothing remarkable going on at all, merely nice churchgoing types gathered together.

Honest. Would we lie? Why are you so suspicious?

We're just choir boys!

Sine they've reopened there is much less slamming of dice cups.
And much more tasteless screaming white yuppiness.
We are tolerant men. Saintly.
Choir boys!

When I left my apartment for the weekly meet-up with the bookseller I grabbed the wrong smoking equipment. Not the "pipe for watching rats in Spofford Alley", as I usually do, but a pipe that looked similar. I wasn't aware of the error till I got to Chinatown.
It proved to be a stellar smoke.

Grant Avenue looks somewhat forlorn these days. For at least two decades it has been a mere addendum, rather than the main street. The locals shop and eat on Stockton, and other than banks many of the businesses on Grant cater to tourists.
A few butcher shops and clothing stores, a place where I buy another alarm clock every four or five years, and several souvenir shops whose owners wish to retire. There's a bakery. Some loose leaf tea places. A grocery store. Also icecream, boba, snacks.
Plus quite a number of empty store fronts.

It's rather beautiful at night, when there are no tourists wandering about.
It's quieter, and the lighting is pretty. It's more old San Francisco then.


I do not drink, and my friend the bookseller is a man of restraint.
So we headed our separate ways afterwards still fully functional.
Which cannot be said for anyone who sung karaoke at the bar.



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