BRAINS ON FIRE

There's always a crowd at some places around dinner time. Which in this case was actually a very late lunch. Dumplings and hot sauce, hot milk tea. A generous tip because they didn't even attempt to seat me at a small table and I like the people who work there. Bright, young, efficient. In addition to dumplings they also do electric hued dishes that visiting New Yorkers and Midwesterners would like, but three of the nearby tables were Mandarin-speaking, and had ordered real food, so I couldn't identify any steaming plates with reds and greens.
Not that I wanted to. Probably sweet and sour this, gung pao that.
Plus the general. Always the general.

A long dawdle with my pipe and some fine tobacco afterwards in the darkness beyond the edge of the square, far from the crazy man screaming and the card players clustered in the light. From a distance I could tell that they were smoking. Smoking! That's illegal in San Francisco city parks. Was I the only incorrigible obeying the law?

Unlike them, I hesitate to risk a fine. I would be far less believable if I tried glib-talking my way out of trouble. 冇意思，我唔識講英文，唔知你講乜嘢，阿sir。"I'm sorry, I don't speak English, I don't know what you're saying, officer" ('mou yi si, ngo m sik gong ying man, ngo m ji nei gong mat ye, ah-sir'). Your honour, the accused swore at us in some goofy European gobbledygook when we cited him for smoking. So we gave him a citation for that, too.

And we're convinced that he sik gong ying man very well.

Yesterday it had been the vocalizing man on Waverly, this evening howling outrage from the street person collective near the pedestrian walkway. This city, in some areas, just cannot be quiet. For peace you need to walk up hill two or three blocks. And there are always people who see the pipe and think you have a spare cigarette, after all, you're not smoking it.

And actually, I did have a pack on me; a lovely luxury product that cost one third of the price of regulars. 五葉神香煙。 Support your local circumlegal businesses.

Didn't we make that point once in Boston Harbour?
And what would whiskey be without it?
Tradition!


That, in essence, is what we will be celebrating two days hence. Despite turkeys being actually very much like puppies, feathered puppies, capable of love and affection, and the severely discounted merchandise at the big box representing corporate greed and shoddy production standards because none of those people fighting each other for the very last electronic nostril twiddler have any self-control or standards.

If you used the fingers of your opposite hands to jank the hairs, which gives you a better angle, you wouldn't need the fancy device. Just like the depression boy, when we did it entirely by hand. And during the war! Self-reliance!

I watched the rats in the bushes struggle over a spent fast-food wrapper. I imagine the victor happily sounding like captain Jack Sparrow boasting "I've got a greasy paper, I've got a greasy paper" before losing it to some other rat.
Little swaggering rodents.


We need to return to simpler times, when America's consumer whores fought each other over jars of dirt and greasy papers. Not nostril twiddlers. Values, man, a return to values!


Like many pipe smokers, I contemplate the deeper things.
We're nature's intellectuals, tell you what.



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