The Chit Chat Cafe just got ten feet closer to the Pacific ocean. It’s the coffee shop a few blocks from the apartment buildings about to tumble down the crumbling cliff you see up there. A sleepy coast town called Pacifica getting hammered by stormy seas and heavy rains.
Nothing like a bit of danger and potential human suffering to bring in gawkers who need a latte as they stand gripping emergency cyclone fencing at the safety zone perimeter. Count me in.
as you leave LAX on the freeway so scared of the graffitted ghettos it stands up on cement stilts and from that height you see the black shadows of downtown peering through smog.
The green fields in the drawing are rooftops of apartment complexes and the local church of god.
I got called in to haul garbage from a bar in North Beach getting remodeled. It’s great being in basements of old buildings in this city. My old pal Matt Conway got me in the door and he showed me around.
“We’re under Columbus street right here!” he said as we stood in a little brick walled room with a just us and a refrigerator in it. It seemed like a perfect opium den for 1885.
I hauled out garbage and was scheduled to come back for that same broken refrigerator the next day. Upon arrival, the news came down. “We got broken into last night. They stole all the tools on the job.”
What a bummer. The dirty thieves who kicked in the back door also knocked a 15 gallon drum of used fry grease down the stairs. What a mess. I volunteered to go get kitty litter to clean it up.
I strolled up the block and was quickly sucked into Chinatown. Signs were no good to me, I just looked in shop windows. Whole pig carcasses, jade necklaces, pork buns and dim sum. Where does one buy kitty litter in Chinatown?
“Do you sell kitty litter?” I asked a woman at variety store.
“Kit-tee lee-yer? No. I doan unstan.”
I try a few people on the street. A young guy with pierced ears smoking on a corner.
“Ohh, maybe that way,” he says, pointing back down the alley I just came from.
A woman selling tourist t-shirts tells me to ask the man in the stall next to her selling cell phones.
“What kind of kitty? Hello Kitty?”
I am desperate now. “You know when you have a cat?”
“OK” he says.
“You have a box with sand in it? A box?”
“Ok” he says again.
“And the cat goes to the bathroom? In sand? Special sand?”
It wasn’t ok. I kept walking. Suddenly large English letters jumped out at me. WALGREENS it said, in that special cursive script. A gold mine. Aisle 4b, Johnny Cat. 3.89 a bag. I bought two.
Later, at Mr. Bings, a bar across from where we sopped up oil and boarded up the back door, I asked the Chinese man behind the bar how to say kitty litter in Cantonese. He didn’t know what I was saying either. So I took out a pen and drew this diagram.
“Mow Sa. Cat sand,” he told me. “It’s been a long time since I wrote the words.”
Didn’t know any of these were left in SF. Found it at Mr Bings in Chinatown.
I got an email from a guy who rolled up on my blog from this site. Then I got a phone call from what sounded like a 13 year old girl. She wanted to know how I got my robot pregnant. She was giggling. I told her it was a miracle of science. It’s funny how this internet connects people.
Geekologie found me through this site: autocomplete me Someone submitted “myrob” and it filled in myrobotispregnant. but it doesn’t do that for me. Does it work for anyone out there?
photo by Chiraag
Welcome to the 21 Club. Located in the scenic trash heap known as The Tenderloin, where everyone has a friend who’s been robbed, this small bar welcomes whores, drug dealers and bikers of every race and creed.
Andrew sits by a crazy man who passed out after telling me, “The wrong people are breeding!”
I countered with, “You have no idea what the future needs, my friend. Perhaps they are just what we need to survive.”
He replied, “You can’t have dumb people and smart bombs!”
thanks for this one too, Chiraag
No one asked this guy why he had a bra on his head. But he let me lick it.
Met some neighbors, they had me over for dinner. The kids were asleep and the toys were all lined up neatly along one wall. They got talking about the youngest, a poop rolled out of the diaper and he tried eating it. You know I’ve found some laid back neighbors.
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