PROFOUND DISTRUST OF NAKED PEOPLE

It surprises me how much nudity I saw yesterday. Not in my apartment. Where there was virtually none. That's the sad part. The nudity and near-nudity was out on the public street. Which, as a descendant of severely disapproving Protestants, I naturally instinctively abhor. It's shocking. The man wearing boxer shorts placidly sunning himself a few doors down from the apartment building. The individual scratching naked flabby areas a block up. The kidney rolls on an only partially clothed passer-by. A person changing his clothes at the laundromat. The nearly naked fellow screaming at his motor car on Pacific Avenue late in the evening. The black woman who is almost always showing off too much on Grant Avenue.

The shorts-wearing dude down near Polk after midnight.

Folks, the weather is not suitable for that. A cold wind, and chilly fog. What are y'all thinking? Don't you realize that warmly dressed little children are going to wonder what the devil is wrong with you?

In Summer in this city you should be dressed. Considering that most of you are unappealing, you should be very well covered up. May I suggest a set of heavy sackcloth robes, baggy and all-encompassing, like the people on Arakis in the Dune series?

And for craps sakes, hide those nasty tattoos!

That is why when I leave for lunch or tea during the day I head down to Chinatown. When it's light out, and there are people on the street there, you will hardly ever see nudity. Folks are normal there.

Well, except for tourists who heard that this is California.

There seem to be a lot of them this year.



I wonder how the folks who run one of my favourite eateries are doing on their vacation. They went back to the home town on vacation for a month, somewhere in Southern China, where there are probably almost no naked people running about at all despite the temperature being thirty to forty degrees warmer than here. Not even the American tourists and Europeans who are stumbling around looking lost and baffled.

There's no McDonalds here! Whatever shall we do, whatever shall we do?

Don't know, Bubba, perhaps have a bucket of lychee ice cream after your pork-fried rice?
A nice cool boba tea with jelly squiggles added? Perhaps buy a colourful folding fan as a souvenir for the folks back home, use it to cool yourself, and tell everybody later that you hacked your way through a tropical jungle with it, beating off the mosquitoes and leeches, and you would have been dead without it? This fan has a history, Peggy Sue, a history!

Don't leave the hotel. It's airconditioned.

Look, if you're convinced that you desperately need to cool down in weather that keeps the normals fully dressed -- fog, wind, and nearly arctic at night -- you may have a screw loose. The ONLY place where people need to be naked in San Francisco during Summer is in the shower and my bedroom, and if any of you try that I'll beat you off with a stick. I didn't invite you, and I'm deeply suspicious of you lot. Most of you are not my type, and mentally unbalanced anyway.


And as for the Europeans, if they want to ponce around in Bermuda shorts, Culottes, or Daisy Dukes, they should go to Majorca. We have no beer. Go away.



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