THE SOFT WET EMBRACE

At three o'clock in the morning on the final day of a work-week it is likely that a rational person will realize that for the last couple of days they have not been entirely sane. Fortunately most of the people I associate with are cool with that. Eric, for instance, was batshit crazy at the same time that Marie was high on life in America (Friday night), which is also when the drunken gentlemen from The House of Pee (not the correct name of that establishment) were screaming and tweaking, Yanni was non-compos mentis (five day bachelor party), Roger was dealing with an exploding pipe near the dish washing machine, and two English-speaking foreigners were discovering that San Francisco has a far wider spectrum of genderish sizes and shapes than they were familiar with in Sweden. Please don't ask about that last item; I didn't want to know that, could have live the rest of my life without ever hearing the details, and was only interested in smoking my pipe outside, freezing my buns off in the purple rain fog.

At my age, buns in the fog are a concept.

And yes, I am NOT old. Dammit.

Statler, Waldorf.


My Friday, only your Tuesday. Tomorrow I may have Baked Portuguese Chicken Rice (焗葡國雞飯). Which will send my cholesterol through the roof, and give me the energy to go up twenty storeys of bamboo scaffolding in a typhoon for another ten hours. Mmm, good. Heart attack on a plate.


I just spent twenty minutes in the kitchen finishing my pipe. Closed door, wide open window, apartment mate who hates tobacco. And a lessening of arterial elasticity, which under the wrong circumstances leads to near-paralysis, profound belly-aching, whining in a cringy fashion, and, if further from the apartment than tonight, a taxi.

I stumble around, kvetching.

The fog up at Larkin and Clay swirls beautifully, silvery billows, glowing and soft-bright. Down at Polk Street, a black gentleman whom I've known for two decades clutches an un-opened wine bottle (good lord, is that Rosé? No one drinks that bocht, it's what you bring to hippie / swinger parties!), and the pot-holed pavement looks "adventurous" in the white metallic haze.
Two shots of Loch Cheapbasterd Scotch. The pipe is now on the table near my chair. I had brought a second pipe, but I had such a good time talking to rational people and a long-haired small dog sitting on the bar that I drank less, and was not outside enough to need it.




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