PERHAPS CONSIDER SHAVING YOUR BODY?

When I went down Beckett (白話轉街) earlier after lunch there were about half a dozen city services vans plus three or four police vehicles parked there, and a major operation was underway ("homeless outreach") meant to clear the rough sleepers out. They were waiting for the old Chinese lady who is a longtime pavement fixture to pack all of her stuff up. She's actually not homeless, just too eccentric to stay housed. She likes the life on the street and feeding the pigeons. And the birds like her.

Well, when I looked into the alleyway just before eleven at night it was worse than ever. Among the ambulatory wreckage were one entirely naked man and two stumbling and gesticulating half naked men. Plus some indistinguishable shapes that twitched.
So I cannot say that "operation clear Beckett" was a success.
The old woman isn't there, though.

As my friend the bookseller and I headed toward the busstop, we took care to stay out of the way of Sasquatch (another half naked man, excessively body-haired) and a crawling raggy lump. To the best of my judgement, not a single one of the non compos mentes crew tonight were Chinese. I'll go out on a limb here and say that Chinese people are, largely, neither half naked nor excessively hairy. As a rule.

Body hair is more apparent in San Francisco during a heat wave.
It felt exactly like the worst part of the tropics out there.

Imagine smoking in a monsoon climate outside late at night when it has finally cooled down. Yes, parts of your body still hurt like blazes (bad circulation), but you are feeling more human from the legs up (except for the veins in the neck, and that large zone in the left shoulder and scapula (肩胛骨 'kin kaap gwat') which burns most of the time anyway), and perhaps your blackthorn walking stick serves as a warning to the really insane passers-by that "pipe smoking uncle" could get very crusty on them.

Many of the non-Chinese pedestrians in C'town tonight had screws loose. Several. Which tells me that the tourist season is nearly over. And that hot weather brings out the lizards.

The little wheels in their heads have stopped spinning, their hamsters have escaped and chewed throught the electrical wires. The gears are rusty, and there are holes in the grey matter.


We avoided both the beer place and the karaoke joint. Instead we ended up at the third drinking place where it wasn't crowded, noisy, or filled with howling twenty somethings.

Other than evidence of lunacy, it was a fine night.



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