THE JUICES, THE JUICES

At night it gets fifteen degrees colder or more than during the day. And the fog is back. So it's more peaceful, and things disappear in the middle distance. Consequently leaving the house at the crack of dawn has one moving through an alien landscape, nearly silent, with the occasional vehicle or howling crazy person punctuating the vibrant stillness.

That first cup of coffee and that first pipe in the morning.
There's nothing like it, son, it tastes like napalm.
One day, this stinking war will be over.

I should make better coffee.

When I still lived near Grant Avenue I would head to the Caffe Trieste at this hour. The local poets and artistic types were not even awake yet, one could read the Anarchist Scheduler while smoking one's Regie Turque ovals in peace, occasionally swearing in a foreign language over what the French and Greeks were doing.

[I've always thought of Turkish leaf ciggies and Italian coffee beverages as setting the standard. Serious Europaische political publications, not so much.]


In the evening I'd read The Chronicle, The Examiner, and the 金山時報 at 平園咖啡店 while dawdling over pie and coffee (with multiple refills), before heading out into the newly foggy streets again. The local poets and artistic types avoided Chinatown, though by that time they were having gay orgies all over North Beach, reciting their jejune scribblings to rapturous acolytes and pontificating giddily, the pests.


There are no local poets and artistic types about at this hour. Unless they're sleeping in doorways down on Polk Street.

But there are people pooing their dogs.
That, too, is creative.



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