If I were John Dos Passos, today's story would sound like this, only better.

Up early with plenty of time to kill, but I killed it a little too well and ran out of the house without time to enter the numbers I needed into my phone, just wrote them down in my notebook along with the addresses of the places I was going. Literally ran from the parking lot around the train platform as the gates came down, to the ticket machine and scooping the change out of the bin as the train doors closed, dropped some but no time to pick it up, on to the train just-barely, sit down and see that my backpack fell completely open due to the unscheduled athleticism, and map and notebook are gone (MFU2). What to do now? Well if I get where I'm supposed to be on time, I shouldn't need the phone anyway, just relax, not like there's any way to go back now anyway.

Lady on the train has three small kids that run up and down at will climbing on the seats, probably not bothering anybody much, but the lady, although she is never once moved to stand up from her chair, shouts a constant stream of orders and threats about what the kids are (come back here and sit down) and are not (anything else) to do. Kids are obviously accustomed to the director's commentary and pay not the slightest bit of attention. As is usual the badly behaved kids are nothing to their badly behaved parents.

Get to San Francisco caltrain station eventually, get on Muni train, plow right into ... baseball game has just ended (MFU3). Wait 30 minutes for train to be packed elbow-to-elbow full of beery baseball people holding the Tourism Board map upside down asking for directions to Embarcadero (take any train, you couldn't not go there if you wanted to), overhear somebody say "let's get off, I want to get on a Judah train"--wait, this line has only Judah trains on it from here, doesn't it? Two seconds to make a decision, decide to follow that guy (Dirk Gently navigation isn't only for driving), but adjacent beery baseball people assure me that we are going Down Town (true, you couldn't not go there if you wanted to) and too late..off we go.

Down Market Street, the disembodied voice clearly announces this train as an N, N, so fine, this goes where I want to go, until past Van Ness..wait, what is this West Portal place? I don't remember this but I guess I wasn't paying attention, I was with Alice last time I went here, this neighbourhood doesn't look familiar, why for God's sake are there not Muni maps inside the Muni train? They are in every bus shelter. Eventually I get off in who knows where and hey presto, I am in Ocean View, which can only mean that my train was an M train in baseball camouflage (MFU4). Can't walk to the park from here (could have if I had gotten off 20 minutes ago, I really should have brought a map), so walk around aimlessly instead, back to the street and back on the Muni back to Van Ness to get on the N, N train for real this time. I'm now half an hour late but can't call (really should have brought the phone number, too). But hey it's ok, when I do get there I explain: "Sorry, I take the Muni." So no problem.

Finally get to the record store which has a name, but will never need it, because it is clearly the record store without equal. It is full of the San Francisco public of course, so it's the kind of record store where you feel self conscious about everything you pick up, because if the person next to you doesn't roll his eyes and tell you how much better Brand X was while they were selling home-burned CDs at Club Y (which was before John Q got in a fight with Producer P), then the clerk is going to do it when you try to pay. But I risk it anyway because I want so much stuff I have to get a basket: Phish, Psapp, The Apples in Stereo, The Apples in Stereo, Stereolab, Belle and Belle and Sebastian and Sebastian, They Might Be Giants.

Hey that was fun, let's go to supper, if only I knew where to go (really should have written that down). Haight Street not too exciting, ride back to Market and Powell because there's a nice Italian restaurant here somewhere I know, but nowhere we go turns out to be somewhere, so we end up at...the Cheesecake Factory, standard failure mode every time we used to go to Pasadena and not make a decision, and apparently serving the same function here in The City. Yes ok, food fans shall scoff, but whatever, it wasn't my idea and am I really going to argue for going Somewhere Adventurous? I'm the least likely to like Somewhere Adventurous of anybody I know.

All right well my big day is done and I am back at the Powell Street station with plenty of time to get to the Caltrain, it's barely 9:20. And here comes an N, N train, after only 2 minutes of waiting for once! Funny, it's on the wrong track I think, but my idea of directions is not to be relied upon after dark, and I would have ignored it, but she says No! hurry, it's the Caltrain-train, see it says right there! Which it clearly does. In the ELECTRONIC. AUTOMATIC. PROGRAMMABLE SIGN. -N-. JUDAH. DESTINATION: CALTRAIN DEPOT. So I jump on, ok bye see you space cowboy, I'm on the actual train with 30 minutes to go, we're moving, nothing could possibly go wrong this time, next stop, Civic Center.

Yes, Civic Center, as in, we are going in the opposite direction of DESTINATION: CALTRAIN DEPOT (MFU5). And so long, there goes the N, N train in the opposite direction, so I get out, and go back, but it makes no difference now, there won't be another inbound N, N train for 25 minutes which means ... I miss the caltrain.

Muni 3, mikey 0.

Midnight train to Mountain View is noisy, noisy. Four females wearing stiletto shoes and alluring attire get on at the Stanford stop. One is platinum blond, one is brunette, one has red hair, and the fourth is Asian. This seems rather improbable since I don't see an admissions-brochure photographer anywhere, so I speculate that they are four strippers returning from (or going out to) an engagement. This seems even more likely a few minutes later when one of them (Asian Spice) stands up and drops her pants to illustrate some kind of point about her thong (or possibly her tattoo, I didn't catch the conversation precisely) to her companions. The train is near-full yet nobody else appears to notice.

Curiouser and curiouser.

11 Jun 2006 00:47 PT - persistent link - trackback - 5 comments