señor taco’s travels

A man, dressed in a suit. The suit, made of a light salmon/pinkish silk with
Japanese Maple, bonsai, dragons and some sort of logo stitched into it’s pattern.
A black shirt and silver-grey snake skin loafers rounded out the outfit. He
was one fly mutha on a mission. You can’t make this stuff up.

On the way home on Thursday there was a guy that got onto the BART at the 16th
& Mission station with me. He had a sleeping bag/bedroll and a backpack.
The first thing he did was set his bags in the four-seat (two sets of two seats
facing each other) I was in and start asking around for money. Spare change
is what he started with. While his bags were sitting across from me he started
to walk down the car asking people, realized his bags were unprotected, and
came running back to see if I would watch them. I said I wouldn’t and then
pushed the issue by asking if I was getting off soon. To that he only got
silence, which he must have thought I was going to watch his crap, because he
went down the car asking for money.

Then our next stop comes up and he sits next to me leaving his two items on the
two seats across from us. As people come in and are standing he starts saying
“I’ll give you my seat for a dollar.” No one is taking him up on it and he’s
hogging three seats at this point. Does he stop there? Oh no. He says, and
this is the kicker, “You can have this seat for a dollar. There ain’t no
negotiating because I’m not your prisoner. I’m not your prisoner. Well, not
yet.” The people behind us apparently have had enough and leave to goto the
next car. He quickly pounces on the open two seater by stuffing his bags and
himself back there.

One would think it would end there, but no. He starts hitting the car again,
fresh victims from the downtown SF stops of course. As he walks be he starts
asking people if he’s already asked them for money. My favorite reply was a
quite burly fellow with “Whatever it is you’re asking I don’t have it and I
don’t want any.” He said it with his eyes closed and his head tipped down,
chin to chest. As soon as he’s done with hitting up the car again he goes
into his sob stories. He’s trying to get to the house of a friend that
just passed away because the neighbors will help him. He needs money for the
bus so he can get there (unless of course he gets a FREE bus transfer at his
destination station in the East Bay). His girlfriend is in the hospital so
he wants to go see her. He’s broke and needs some help. It went on for a bit.

At some point this pan-handler starts rattling off his home page URL. I’m not
going to bother publishing it here because he doesn’t need any more hits.
Sometimes the length people will go to to get money for nothing. As readers
can guess I didn’t give him anything. I have a hard time stomaching
pan-handlers where there are jobs available, they just don’t want to do them
(and for the record, were I down on my luck I would do everything I could to
make ends meet, even getting taking a shitty job for little pay. Yes, there
are times when that’s not enough, but every little bit helps). I also don’t
like the way SF pays homeless people, but I’ll stay out of that one until
I live there and I’ll just keep bringing my lunch every day so as little of my
tax dollars go toward that as possible.

This last week, starting with last Friday, has been my worst week for
Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI) pain in quite a long time. Starting with last
Friday I have been getting the oh so lovely burning and stabbing pain in my
forearms and wrists. Over the weekend I was reaching into a shopping bag and
pain shot up my arm just by grabbing an item inside. All week it’s been
little bits of pain here and there. Doing the dishes, grabbing things, just
sitting around.

To counter it I reduced the amount of time between my href="http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/xwrits/" title="Software: Xwrits">forced
breaks, I started stretching more and even using a href="http://www.wristwand.com/" title="Tool: WristWand">WristWand that
one of my coworkers has (note to self, you really need to make one of those
for yourself). I guess I can only be preventative once again now, because
once you start feeling the pain it’s a little too late.

I of course attribute the buildup in RSI stress to two things:

1. doing more typing at work for my project (that can’t be helped, but I can
   be careful);
2. having the title="A Desk of Distractions">Worst. href="http://danimal.org/SenorTaco/2003/09/30#desk-situation2" title="The size
   of the desk">Desk. href="http://danimal.org/SenorTaco/2003/10/10#desk-situation3" title="Two
   Inches Means A Lot">Evar! And I mean that in all honesty. This is the
   worst desk I’ve ever had to sit at for an extended period of time.

Hopefully I will be able to correct it, but only time and vigilance will tell.
As a point of reference I took two forced breaks in the typing of this short
entry.

Okay, I like zombies. You like zombies. I mean just look at the resurgence of
zombies in popular culture of late: 28 Days Later, Dawn of the
Dead remake, Prince, etc. So, I like serialized work. There are comics
(oh, oh, another zombie tie-in with The Walking Dead monthly comic from
Image Comics) and
animated series. Just the
other day I stumbled on a serialized novel:
Monster Island. It’s zombies and
New York City. So far it’s up to chapter 7 and it’s a good read. Start
at chapter one
and go nuts. Check back often for new chapters.

So, I get out of the BART station this morning, turn right, head for the cross
walk and then I hear the whining sound of a little gas powered scooter. Only
this time it’s not a scooter, it’s a 1/4 scale motorcycle. There was a guy
riding it. His knees were sticking way out to the side and his head was only
about as high off the ground as the bottom of the window on your average car.
So, dude has zoomed up the right side of all the vehicles stopped at the red
light and then the light turns green and he zooms off down the street. The
sight makes me wish I had a cyborg eye with a camera in it so I could share it
with all of you.

The other thing I saw was a few blocks down, two boys waiting for the bus
threw down their bags and started swinging at each other. There was an adult
there in his late 20s to early 30s. He was sort of encouraging the boys along.
at one point they got tangled up in a grapple and the guy split them apart and
said “One of you is gonna have ta whoop tha other!” and let them go back at it.
At this point they had moved to just a bit to an empty parking lot and one boy
was just bouncing around and away from the other with his fists up while the
second boy was moving his right fist in a circular motion like he was winding
up for a good punch. All the while the adult was repeating alternately to each
boy, “Whoop his ass!” That was all I saw as I then turned the corner and left
the excitement behind.

Ah Mission District, you never fail to amaze me.