While wandering through the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park this holiday weekend, I came upon a guy orating eloquently into the air. There was no sign or hat for donations; he just continued with his detailed monologue, as some people stopped to listen and others just passed by. He was dressed in clothes befitting the formal, archaic tone of his speech. After using my phone to look up some of the key words and phrases he was using, I discovered he was reciting (and enacting) the entirety of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” from memory.
While working in a coffee shop on Valencia this morning, a woman walked by on the sidewalk carrying a giant, laminated photo of a grinning mouth in front of her. It seems her only purpose for it was to walk along, show people this comically-large grinning face, grin herself, and illicit grins in return.
The Tale of the Couch
Recently, I bought a bunch of furniture at the thrift store and debated with my roommates about how best to get it up the hill and into the house. We decided to hire movers off of Craigslist. After a few calls with rather dubious sounding prospects (one guy insisted that I help him spell Valencia correctly over and over again for almost ten minutes before I hung up) I landed on a responsible-sounding Irish guy who could meet me with a truck in an hour.
Irish shows up with a nice truck and a buddy, Southern British. Both guys are skinny as rails and Southern British is sporting skater clothes with a plaid short-brim fedora perched on his head. In essence, not what you’d think of when you think movers. However, they got the furniture loaded up at the store within 15 minutes and we trundled up the hill to the house.
They got the first two pieces of furniture in with few problems but a large amount of entertaining cursing in accents. The last piece was the couch, which I was realizing with a gathering dread was a lot larger, now that it was removed from the cavernous warehouse thrift store. The guys tried literally every possible way to get it into the house: directly up the stairs, into the backyard to lift up onto the back porch, through a neighbors house and over the back fence. 40 minutes of shoving this thing in every possible direction and nothing was working.
I was slowly resigning myself to having to unload this too-large couch when they declared, “Alright, we’re going over the roof.”
Before I knew what was happening, they pulled the truck up to the front of my house and somehow hoisted the couch up onto its roof. From there, they lifted it onto my roof. This was a challenge in itself, due to a facade roof on the front side of the house that they had to get the couch up and over. To accomplish this, Southern British held the couch while Irish dove through my bedroom window, ran to the back of the house, and monkeyed his way onto the roof from the back. Then he held the couch from above while Southern British did the same. They walked it across the roof, lowered it down on the back porch, and easily walked it into the living room from there. This whole process took about five minutes. I am also pleased to report that Southern British’s fedora did not become dislodged at any point during this entire process. That’s how you know these guys are pros.
If you’re looking for movers in the SF area, these are your dudes. http://www.yelp.com/biz/claddagh-moving-san-francisco-2 Also, tip them.
This morning, I was down on Guerrero waiting for my carpool, and I was watching all of the other commuters walk, bike, drive, and bus their way in or out of town. While I sat there, a fellow commuter walked past me, wearing a three-piece business suit with Reef flip-flops.
Last night I went to the launch party of a startup started by my cousin (http://www.2600hz.com/). The party was thrown at a SOMA gallery heavily into pop and indie art. Throughout the party, I found myself brushing arms with both hipsters and techies, while looking at sharpie drawings of rooster-headed naked chicks in giant paint-cans with my 60-year-old mother and aunt.
Last fall, I was at one of the more popular S&M clubs in the city when I ran into a guy I hadn’t seen since college. It turns out we have ended up in similar lines of science-related work. We stood there in the club discussing work and contracting job opportunities, all while I was wearing a minidress with no underwear, and he was in latex pants and a chainmail vest.
- Friend: Dude, where did you get that churro?
- Me: Back there, there's a guy selling them out of a fishtank.
One of the coolest people I met on my last housing search was a lesbian bullrider who rides semi-professionally in a NorCal LGBT rodeo league.
Last night I got serenaded by three random mariachi dudes who were wandering through the Safeway parking lot singing and playing guitars at 9pm.
A friend of mine saw a photo for sale at Philz Coffee. The photo happened to be of a mural that a friend of hers painted here in town. The mural was apparently originally painted by her friend for free. This photo of the mural was being sold for $180.
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