BOYSCOUTING AND URBAN LIVING

They're working on the street again. Sounds like heavy machinery. Somewhere there is a jackhammer. The newly laid concrete along the near edge has had a few days to cure.
If I lived at the front of the building I would be bothered.

Because two buildings are also being worked on, there are now three porta-potties on the street. A mommy, a daddy, and a little baby Jesus potty. Now imagine Goldilocks having to make a choice. After eating and napping.
One of them is "just right".
Confused bears.


"This one. This is totes the one! OMG!"


She has a little self-satisfied smirk. Like a spoiled blonde yuppette would have after trying on everything at the store. The latest fashion in porta-potty garb, designer, costs more than your weekly pay cheque. Onward to the luxury potties of Union Square!

It might be worth it to purchase monthly memberships to the gym around the corner for the jackhammer boys. Cleaner, more comfortable, flushy flushy, and better lighting. Lighting is very important at such times, there are few things so depressing as a badly lit loo.
And you can't see the spiders when you're in there.
Uncomfortable angry spiders.

About seven years ago when they were working on Van Ness (a project that consumed a generation), one of the local crazies or street people got accidentally locked in a porta-potty at the beginning of a three-day weekend. I sure hope someone with a cell-phone called the authorities to rescue him. I didn't have a cell-phone at the time, and it was dark and cold.
Being pooped from a long day, I forgot about it by the time I got home.

I often think about panicked frantic Goldilocks locked alone in a crapper on Van Ness.
If you're going to sneak into a porta-potty when it's dark, maybe bring along a crowbar or an axe. Or at the very least, a flashlight and a walkman or cell-phone.
Plus water and maybe a bag of snacks.
Be prepared.

During one of the Union Street Festivals (yearly events with drunks, food stands, and artists worried that a drunk would knock over their shelves of pottery) I stood in line for one of the porta-potties. Not exactly traumatic, but in hindsight not a memory I'll cherish. I can't even remember which lovely ceramics I bought that day, OR whether I had patronized the fried snack concessions. But I remember the porta-potty. So my sympathy is decidedly with working types forced to use those things.

Who might worry, on a slope in San Francisco, whether it's going to start sliding downhill and they'll end up smashed into a local restaurant amidst horrible wreckage and overturned wine bottles with their pants around their ankles.

And spiders.



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