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walking a big loop in San Francisco
Monday, December 18 2017
location: Room 1112, Kimpton Sir Francis Drake Hotel, San Francisco, California
I wanted coffee this morning, but there was (strangely) no Keurig robot in our room. So I was forced to go downstairs to take advantage of the hotel's breakfast. I went downstairs and found no evidence of coffee happening. So I asked the concierge, and he somewhat patronizingly told me that was because it ended at 9:00am (it was now 9:20am). Gretchen had been told it went until 10:00am, but evidently that's only on the weekends, and it was now Manic Monday. But then the concierge added that "because I look like a nice guy" he would give me two complimentary coupons for a free continental breakfast in "the Scala," wherever that was. So I went off in search of the Scala. I kept ending up in this small dining room where this one Asian sat by herself. The first time I showed up, I said that it looked like the wrong place. But then when I returned and said that this must be the place, she got all huffy and asked if I needed help (like I was someone sent to harvest her organs or abduct her for ransom). A member of the hotel staff quickly stepped in and directed me to "the Scala," and then provided unhelpful direction. I eventually found it; it was off a corridor that made an immediate right inside the front doors. In the Scala, I took a seat, thinking it was some breakfast place like they have at a Marriot. But I was mistaken, and the maître d' quickly told me I had to wait to be seated. It was a stupid sit-down dining situation, and now I was feeling like a peasant tromping manure in a baron's parlour. It's for reasons like this that I generally outsource all my interactions with restaurant and hotel staff to Gretchen. I don't know the protocols, and everything I do feels like a fuckup. Eventually I was led to a seat, where I said that all I really wanted was coffee because there was "nothing here I can eat." Eventually I got a little carafe of the brown stuff and even a glass or orange juice. I opened up my laptop and proceeded to hack my way through some programming challenge that had been in my mind. It felt good to be publicly tinkering with code in a breakfast place with such pretentions. I looked less like an uncouth rube than a scruffy long-in-the-tooth brogrammer equipped with an apparently Soviet-era laptop.
Back upstairs, I told Gretchen of my experience in the Scala and apologized for not finding the tea she'd wanted. It was no big deal; it was time for our big day in San Francisco before the flight back to the East Coast. We checked most of our stuff at the hotel and then headed off on foot towards North Beach. There was no diagonal street in that direction, so we were forced to alternate between northward streets and those that went west. The northward streets became absurdly steep in that only-in-San-Francisco kind of way, though the completion of every such block felt like an achievement. Interestingly, there weren't very many homeless people in evidence in the highlands.
Our first destination today was Vegan Picnic, a small vegan sandwich shop specializing in upscale fastfood lunch sandwiches. Gretchen was her usual bubbly self at the counter, saying we were making a pilgrimage to come here. The woman running the place was super nice in a way that made you want to cancel your plans and spend the whole day there. I ordered the Old School Fish Filet, and was not disappointed (even if the sandwich did disintegrate in my hands). And the macaroni salad that came with it was the sort of thing that I would buy a bucket of if it were available in that size. There was a tub-sized portion (about a pound?), and we got that for the airplane. The music in Vegan Picnic was strictly early-to-mid-80s (at least while we were there). The hipster to my right wanted to know who the artist was when Heart's "What About Love?" came on. I said that it was Heart or either of Ann or Nancy Wilson in their solo careers. He hummed along to the melody seemingly non-ironically. Maybe the cheesiest part of the Heart discography is poised for a revival.
Our walking continued from there, though now we headed northeastward, eventually arriving at Columbus Avenue. While most of San Francisco's streets are laid out in a grid that ignores the underlying topology, Columbus Avenue traces a diagonal at the bottom of a valley. Since we were on a pilgrimage, it made sense to visit one of the holy sites of American literature: City Lights Books, an essential publisher of beat poetry and (to this day) everything that Amazon is not. Gretchen talked shop with the cashier up front while I wandered to the back, sitting down next to a bookcase (they're all on wheels, allowing the space to be flexibly utilized) and thumbing through Atlas Obscura, a sort of popcorn of coffee table reading.
Next we went into Caffe Trieste, the San Francisco coffee shop of that name. Gretchen had 25 year old memories of the place from back when she lived in Silicon Valley and occasionally hung out with various high school friends here. They made a fairly acrid cappuccino, which we drank crammed in between two strangers. I had my laptop with me, so I could plink away on it. But the internet was misbehaving (either Caffe Trieste's WiFi or the internet itself), and I wasn't able to do all that much. I went up to the front to just get a simple cup of coffee. But I must've been mumbling because the guy added milk (the kind from a cow) into it. When I corrected the order, he dumped it out and poured a cup of just coffee, and I felt more of that awkward feeling I'd had this morning trying to get coffee at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. It only got worse when I tried to slide into my spot along the wall and the hem of my jacket caught the top of the drink the young woman to my right had been drinking, and it toppled over, smashed, and sprayed her beautiful burlap bag with a big brown splotch. She was really nice about it, and Caffe Trieste cheerfully made her another cup of whatever she'd been drinking (it had been topped with whipped cream). But, yeah, not really what I wanted to be doing today.
I felt cold, crowded ,and cursed in Caffe Trieste, so I suggested we hit the streets again. I thought it might also be nice to drink alcohol instead of caffeine. So soon we were in another Caffe, Caffe Greco. It was less crowded, I could plug my laptop into an outlet, and I could have a glass of red wine. With me happily doing my thing, Gretchen walked over to Chinatown and got herself a twenty minute massage. It was the deep-tissue kind involving elbows, and afterwards she wondered if perhaps she'd been bruised. Meanwhile, at Caffee Greco, an older hipster (he looked to be in his 60s), pretty much turned his tiny little dog loose on the long bench seat I shared with him, and that dog kept coming over for spasmodic visits while I continued hacking away at my worky-work code.
By now it was coming up on dinner time, so Gretchen looked for vegan options on our walking route to the Embarcadero, and we eventually decided on a Chinese place called Lucky Creations Vegetarian Restaurant. Its selling point for us was that they made a "mock sea slug." Who knew anyone ate real sea slugs? After a walk that took us near a famous fortune cookie factory, we found the restaurant. It was small and a bit grimy, and going to the bathroom meant taking a zig-zagging path through the kitchen. But the food was really good, at least to my tastes. I think I ordered the sauteed mushroom and bean curd rolls. The rolls seemed to be made of some sort of deep-fried filo dough and melted in the mouth. And mushrooms tasted somewhat of chlorine, but in good way. For her part, though, Gretchen didn't care for the food at all. What didn't have too much seaweed in it was too greasy. We ended up taking nearly all of her mixed vegetables (and several wontons) to go.
I'd added a little kratom to the tea served to us at Lucky Creations, and it put me in a good mood for our next destination: the Ferry Building Marketplace down in the Embarcadero (which seemed familiar, more from playing endless games of Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas than having been here in 2004). Unfortunately, many of the shops were closing when we arrived, and there wasn't anything for Gretchen to eat. For her, we'd squandered yet another mealportunity!
Surprisingly, after walking more than five miles, we were now fairly close to the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, where we would grab our stuff before catching the BART to the airport. Tonight I noticed that the guy in a red 16th Century costume out in front of the hotel was white, not black, and he was also decidedly smaller than the weekend guy had been. I had some alcohol to reorganize in my backpack, and while I was doing this, Gretchen struck up a conversation with a British couple on the couch nearby. She wanted to know what they thought of Brexit. Interestingly, he was against leaving the EU and she was for it. They both seemed pretty disgusted with our current president here in the United States, which was unsurprising given that they hold passports and can speak in coherent sentences.
The BART ride out to the airport was long and uneventful. By now we'd completely mastered the whole procedure of buying an access card and catching a train.
The security checkpoint was running slowly this evening at the San Francisco Airport, and of course the Homeland Security folks running the operation clearly didn't give a fuck. We'd come plenty early, so it wasn't a problem for us. But some of those people around us might've been more desperate. It seemed that a big reason for the slowdown was a person in a motorized scooter who needed to be cleared. He or she didn't seem to move at all, keeping his or her head flopped over completely to one side while somehow manipulating the controls of the scooter.
For whatever reason, our flight back home was via Virgin America/Alaska Airlines. I don't know if their policies are different from those of other airlines, but there were an unusual number of dogs (some of them barely small enough to fit under a seat) on this flight.
The airplane itself was shiny and new on the inside, with crisp clear screens that were nice and responsive to finger touches. The seats themselves were bright white and looked like they'd been made from the repurposed suits of Star Wars storm troopers. None of the seats on our plane went back very far, but mine went back none at all due to a defect, and it made me feel a bit trapped where I was in the middle seat, between Gretchen (on the aisle) and some unknown dudebro (at the window). Neither he nor I needed to get up even once on the four and a half hour flight back to Newark. Being a red-eye, I hoped to sleep at some point. But I first I watched an entire movie on the provided screen. It was Snatched, the mad cap adventure starring Amy Schumer/Goldie Hawn. It was a bad movie but perfectly good for airplane watching. What made it stand out from nearly all other movies was the fact that the heroines were generally able to rescue themselves from dangerous men, though they tended to do so either by reflex or accidentally. I'd been drinking booze for much the movie and managed to nod off for perhaps ten minutes at some point. Meanwhile, the dudebro to my right kept falling asleep with his head up, which would then droop, which would wake him up with a start. The constant upward-jerking of his head was not a pleasant thing to be seated next to, but it could've been worse.
Gretchen did all the driving back to Hurley from Newark as the sun gradually illuminated the overcast skies from the southeast. There was a hint of drizzle and temperatures were in the low 40s, though they'd been well down in the teens during our absence. So you can imagine our alarm when we arrive home and found the front door to the house wide open. Our trollish housesitter hadn't quite left, though she was frantically packing her shit (her car, we happened to notice, looked like that of a hoarder). After shutting the front door, I noticed the door to the east deck was also open. "Why are the doors open?" I demanded. "Oh, I wanted some fresh air," the trollish housesitter replied. "We don't want that!" I exclaimed, and then Gretchen reminded her that fuel oil is expensive. Even if she's lived her whole life in New York City apartments where "someone else" pays for the heat, she should know that you don't just let heat escape in a private dwelling. I later noticed that she'd had the kitchen thermostat all the way up to 70, probably because of how cold it gets when you open all the fucking doors! We'd been calling the trollish housesitter "Tardilocks" even before this example of mind-boggling stupidity. She'd fully earned the name now. Who knew that you actually have to tell housesitters to keep the doors shut in the winter time. But by now I'd turned to another matter. A leak had developed in one of the bean bags, and the living room carpet was covered with little globes of styrofoam. I managed to find a tiny dime-sized hole in the bag and put all the balls I'd found back in, but I as in no shape to do anything else. We'd been up for 19 hour more-or-less straight. Still, it was hard to get to sleep with all the anger I was feeling at our housesitter's wastefulness. How can people so stupid survive in this world?
Gretchen photographed me paging through Atlas Obscura at City Lights Books.
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