FITS FOR MAN AND BEAST

There was only one brain between the three of them, and the white guy was out of luck; the two Chinese fellows weren't sharing it. When we walked by earlier we thought that the stoner (we knew him) was monopolizing it, as by their behaviour outside the karaoke bar one could tell which person was the most sane and and "rational". We've seen him a number of times before, and while he is quite good-natured, as pot freaks often are, sane and rational were terms that theretofore we would never have associated with him.
But by comparison, that bar sometimes gets lowered.


Both my friend and I are much in favour of riotous stupid behaviour at a safe distance. We encourage it, as long as we will have turned the corner and are out of witnessing distance when things go south. The planet is filled, and there are far too many nimnoos.

Especially in San Francisco.


By the time my friend got off work and joined me for our weekly very staid (used to be far less so) pubcrawl, I was having second thoughts about what I had eaten earlier.
Should have omitted the peanuts.

Small meat chunks, mustard stalks, a handful of roasted peanuts, garlic, plus fish sauce and chilipaste. There was a small fragment of peanut cunningly enfolded in vegetable fibre stuck between two molars on the right hand side, pressing into the gum. Should have chewed with more attention to the details instead of reading The Road To Khartoum - A Life Of General Charles Gordon, by Charles Chenevix Trench, while dinner-eating earlier.

[The problem with food stuck between molars is that it's too far inside to easily pry it out with one's fingers.]

The road to the karaoke bar and the burger paradise beyond that is a bleak and lonely road, gringo, and it is cold in the dessert at night. The pavement is like a block of ice.
Particularly up in the mountains.

The past four days have been marked by rain. Frigid, threatening, sometimes downpouring. And while I myself have been layering like you wouldn't believe (mmm, pockets of stale air, toasty!), people who are young and well-insulated have ponced past wearing shorts.
Which is exhibitionistic and disturbing when the air is forty degrees Fahrenheit.

Earlier, while waiting for the bus, a Cantonese mommy and her two little daughters had trotted by on their way home. I marvelled at the courage and fortitude of the tykes, braving the elements while dressed like normal, instead of packed in layers of fleece and puffy clothes or moaning about the horrible cold. Cute, adorable even, and inhumanly cheerful. Does Count Dracula feel the cold? The wolfman probably doesn't, neither do werewolves. Faeries wear diaphenous crap, and probably freeze to death.

There was almost nobody on the street where the bus let me off, there were no animals in Spoffor Alley, and only an occasional passerby hurrying along. No drunken fratboys, no young Caucasian rowdies. Grant, too, was mostly empty.


While at the karaoke bar we were onlookers at craziness. Low temperatures make alcohol hit the brain harder. There was evidence of that.


One good thing about this cold spell is that the elderly white haired mentally impaired person who wanders around my neigborhood and Chinatown at night mumbling to himself and being lost was not about. I worry about people like him. He obviously needs help. And what with him being a Cantonese speaker when he actually enunciates anything at all, city health services are not finely tuned to his type.

I hope he was somewhere warm.



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