señor taco’s travels

Last week I was at my new dentist’s office for my first visit. As I sat down
in the waiting room my ears perk up to the music being piped in. It was none
other than title="lyrics @ azlyrics.com">Roots Radicals by href="http://www.rancidrancid.com/" title="Rancid Web Site">Rancid. I had
to stifle my laughing because it was just such an odd song to hear at a
family dental practice. I mean, people like their punk rawk, but it was just
kind of surreal.

During the course of my visit people obviously couldn’t make up their minds
because it would change to country then top 40 then soft rock then 80’s hits
then pop. The peak of the musical journey was Simon and Garfunkel performing
on the TV on some morning program while my teeth were being cleaned.

Despite all the musical choices that was by far the best dental hygiene visit
I’ve ever had. If anyone needs a dentist in the Bay Area (probably easier for
East Bay residents) then don’t hesitate to let href="http://www.hmdds.com/contact.html" title="Herrero | Martenson">Dr.
Martenson know that I sent you. If you should desire more opinions just
come by the Whitney House and ask since most of us use Dr. Martenson.

The first Tuesday of every month I attend a meeting of the href="http://sfobug.org/">SFOBUG. This month’s meeting was a speaker from
Sendmail, Inc. talking to us about a new
anti-spam/verified sending domain system called DomainKeys. The talk went
well, our questions were answered, and we had good conversation.

I left before the majority of the people because I needed to get back to the
East Bay and I was taking the BART. On
the way out of the Metreon (our meeting place) I saw a woman walking out near
me. She, however stopped to look at a movie poster so I continued on. As
I was walking down 4th street towards the BART station I noticed the
same woman was walking almost even with me. She looked cold because it was
chilly out and she had no jacket on. Only a grey short sleeve t-shirt and
tan pants. Once we walked through the approach to the BART station she had
to go buy a ticket and I went on down to the platform.

Eventually she shows up on the platform. At this point I’m not sure if she’s
following me or not, I mean, it is BART and many people use it on a daily
basis. So, I am hanging out waiting for a train and I notice she’s walking up
and down one side of the platform. Twice she walked right by me and looked at
me. The second time she acted like she was going to say something but didn’t.
Then she walked down the platform. At that point I figured I would say
something to her, but a train headed to Daly City pulled up and she got on
so I didn’t get a chance to (at least that’s where I think she went, I lost
track of her for a second).

At this point one could say that it was maybe a person on their way home,
nothing special. Well, I would go along with that, except when I talked to
a friend that was at the meeting he passed on some interesting information.
He said there was a group of women sitting directly behind me at the Metreon.
He’s a bit more paranoid than I am so he took more notice of that group (they
also weren’t directly behind him) and he said there was one woman that was
listening in on our conversations. He said she even seemed to laugh at some
of our jokes. Now, this in and of itself wouldn’t be so bad, except that
when he got around to describing her he exactly described the woman I had seen.
That actually freaked me out a bit. Was she stalking me
(not likely I’d venture) or did she just want to talk to me. Well, whatever
it was I may never know, but it sure did produce some excitement in me
this morning.

Imagine if you will a man riding the BART to work this morning. He’s reading
a book like usual. From his right he hears the sound of cards being shuffled
over and over: frip, schump, friiiiiip. He looks over and
there is a lady shuffling tarot cards over and over. She shuffles the deck
about ten times in a row, very loudly he thinks, and then lays the cards out.
When she’s done “reading” the cards she goes back to the shuffling routine.
The man thinks to himself as he’s trying to read “Golly that’s annoying!”

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.

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.

Walking from the BART stop to the office the other morning I saw a quite
peculiar sight. A man was riding a 50’s era bicycle down the street against
traffic (the wrong way that is). Only his right hand was on the handle bar and
in his left hand was clutched a portable radio/tape machine. As he rode along
he would listen to a bit of music, then hit the fast-forward or rewind button
to move the position of the tape. It was audibly odd. Sort of a
la la la…screeeeeet…woo woo woo la…screeeeeet screeeeeet…la la
hey sound. The people were singing to him, but that’s not what he wanted
to hear. The whole time he was doing this he never looked up, I hope he made
it wherever he was going okay.

The move went off without a hitch this weekend. The cats are adjusted to the
new place. All is good.

More later.

Well, around six months ago I decided to href="http://danimal.org/SenorTaco/2003/06/02#WB-zero-day"
title="Wild Brain Zero Day">take a job in California. The most major
reason I had for making the move was I was sick of living in New York and
messing with snow and ice. Sometime last winter there was around two feet of
snow for me to shovel off of my walk. Then, because I had to park on the
street there was almost double that around my car thanks to the plows.
Granted, I was not alone in this, but I realized that was the last straw and I
had to move someplace where it didn’t snow.

Cut to now and I am living in the San Francisco area. It’s gotten cold some
(into the 40s last night, and even 30s in some areas). It’s rained a good bit
the last few weeks, but there has been no snow. Then I read that there were
between one and two feet of snow in the Northeast. Eeep! I’m so glad I’m not
there. I hope my friends are doing well, but I know I never want to live in
that again. I’ll take brutally hot summers to avoid that. (of course, I say
that now, but really, I’d do it to avoid shoveling snow and bad snow drivers).

This morning, while driving to work I noticed that it was a bit foggy out.
Little did I know that while crossing the Bay Bridge I would only be able to
see three or four car lengths (not cars spaced in front of me, but about 60
feet or so) in front of me. It was very tripy. I liked it, but once in a
while is plenty.

Yesterday was a different story. The weather was misty with the sun just
poking through clouds behind me and in front of me was a rainbow. I snapped
a picture of it, I’ll post it soon.

It’s all been nutty stuff. At least with the rain and cold there isn’t snow or ice.