STEP CAREFULLY

There's something about morning smells, when your nose is fresh from a good night's sleep, that wakes up the spirit and starts the day right. Provided, of course, that if you live in San Francisco you take control of the first fragrances, because otherwise you're likely to smell something ghastly.

See, there are folks who relieve themselves, or walk their dogs. And in the downtown there's a sewer system that dates from the middle ages, which we imported from the slums of Marseilles, because it was "authentic" .....

Coffee and tobacco. It smells like victory.

I am a sensitive man. You may not think so, as you jog past in your yoga pants and sports bra, while I pensively puff my fine cheroot (a Dutch mini cigarillo), in my obviously not recently washed bathrobe and comfy slippers, infecting the crisp winter air with the smell of tropic fermentives, but I am.

You just stepped in poodle do.


The bum who lives in the bus stop was peeing against the tree moments ago, so there's moisture to wipe it off your Nikes. I am all heart.
And my internal voice is very helpful.


It's far too early for healthful exercise, and I do not have a dog. But if I did, I would pick up after it, and put little folded paper warning signs over the spot, saying "let it dry a bit, so that what remains can blow away", while carefully avoiding the sleeping bums.


Coffee. Tobacco. Nineteenth century Dutch poetry.
My mind is a welter of random synapses.
It's how I wake up.



Across the street in the driveway of the fast people, someone had decanted the contents of the coloured bins; recyclables, compost, garbage. From the door to the curb, and down to the next building. Even from this distance it's obvious that they like pizza. The street person who had been inspecting the mess gloomily -- he lives in this neighborhood, and this reflects badly on his kind -- came over and mentioned that he needed a smoke this morning.
I gave him my cigarillo. Didn't have another one on me.
I had smoked only an inch of it.

As I went back in I realized that the advantage of my little cigarillo holder is that my lips hadn't touched what I gave away. So it was clean.



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