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November 4, 2012
The Teeth-Grinding Soliloquy
10/3/12
The last two days have been insufferably hot. Those rare days where even San Francisco is too hot for a couple of days. This is the highlite of the summer. It's summer's Magnum Opus.
And now, the temperature drops again and I'm sitting on market street watching the leaves fall from the trees. E tu, brute?
The city ruins everything it touches.
I see a woman sitting on a bench along market street and I sit down beside her. I get hot walking in, no matter what the temperature is.
I sit down beside her to cool down.
She's got a lot of luggage. More than she should have. And I'm studying her closely, trying to figure out if she's homeless or not. She's talking like she's on a speaker phone, and waving a cell phone around.
But I'm not sure she's sane. I strongly suspect that this is a soliloqy, not a conversation. A mad diatribe.
She's wearing light blue knock-off Uggs. Black pants. Grey shirt. Light blue baseball cap. Cheap white plastic shades. Has a cheap silver ring on her fourth finger.
She's talking and going on and on and never stops for the other person in the conversation to get a word in edgewise. But there are people who talk like this. Who just go on and on without ever stopping to gauge the interested of the listener. Maybe she has a bluetooth earpiece and is getting some feedback that I'm missing.
Or maybe she's as crazy as a bat.
I study the boots. They're starting to fray at the toe. Her hair is up in a ponytail.
I think about myself, as I'm sitting here trying to figure out if she's a freshly minted homeless soul. Some part of me wants to discover that she's started on the descent into homelessness. I don't know why this is. Schadenfruede? I can't be sure.
She turns and spits in my direction. She's definitely homeless. I don't know how I could have thought otherwise.
And now, I think about her. Like, I tend to think, wrongly or otherwise, that I have control of my environment. Maybe I'm delusional, but as I see the world around me, I imagine that I could imact it. Change it. Have an effect on it. I could open a store right there, or change the bus routes by petitioning the city.
But here's this person, ranting insanely, sitting on a park bench It's hard to imagine how she sees the world, but it must be markedly different that how I see it.
Yesterday, I watched a homeless man push a stolen generator down the sidewalks of Market Street. Shirtless, back covered in tattoos, missing half of his teeth, he pushed the enormous stolen Husky generator down the sidewalk, sloshing gas along the sidewalks as he went.
"You got you a generator, huh bud?" I ask.
He stops briefly.
"Yeah, but I gotta take it down here..." and his voice trailed off as he started again on his journey to nowhere.
I wondered where a homeless person would go with a stolen generator, and I followed him for about a block before I lost interest.
Posted by Rob Kiser on November 4, 2012 at 8:17 PM
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