VERY MUCH LIKE KANSAS

Grey and colder than yesterday. But we have a new street; they finally finished working outside. Beautiful aesthetically pleasing black asfalt, with an elegant white stipe down the center. Truly a joy to behold. While outside with a pipe I calmly appreciated the sheer dashingness of it all. Kudos, kudos.

Two new things: sometimes gingko trees smell like vomit, and the cow killer ant has a ferociously painful sting. The cow killer ant is actually a parasitic vespid (dasymutilla occidentalis), strikingly hued, that doesn't occur in California. I have never seen one.
San Francisco is not their native habitat.

Both of these tidbits were brought to me by social media.
See, it's not just doomscrolling or snark.

At some point I will do an illustration of the cow killer ant for the bug folder.


In other news, my apartment mate, who was rage-filled and despondent over the complete clown show at Kentucky Fried Chicken the other day -- it 's been recently remodelled and is now inefficently laid-out, only two employees on duty, one of them demented and possibly an ex-con, the other crazed and entirely out of it -- finally did get herself some fried bird. Life is good, again. Savage joy. Greasy salty crunchy. A woman needs her fried chicken or things will go very wrong in this world. Dang. You all dodged a bullet big time.

It's a female thing. In the past she'd get those insane fried chicken cravings in the week before the menses, but that's not part of the programme anymore, so I doubt that a biological imperative was actually what drove that. Probably just a woman's food-spurred insanity.
We men don't have that. Ever. We're considerably more normal.

Speaking of food, today I'll very probably go get myself some cheung fan down on Stockton Street. Sometimes a man needs his cheung fan. Soft rice sheet noodle folded over pork and cilantro, to which if I add chili oil, Sriracha, and peanut sauce, it makes the irritation of the world and all those tourists lumbering around just disappear. Magic. Heaven. To die for.
People who don't love cheung fan might be defective. Seriously.
Cheung fan are what life is all about.

During work days over in Marin, I do not have access to cheung fan. Which proves that it's culturally and culinarily worse than Siberia. A steaming putrid slice of horrid Midwestern values undeservedly plonked into civilization. Consumerite strip mall territory.
I cannot understand what is wrong with them. They might be heretics.
Damned hot tub sodden pot-smoking degenerates.


No cheung fan! The horror, the horror.



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