Currently Listening To: YouMeAtSix - Hold Me Down
Hey everyone! Hope yr week is going well! My job hunt is coming along...slowly, but surely. Had a job interview earlier this week for a retail job down the road in Solana Beach. I am hoping to hear back from the manager there by Friday, crossing my fingers. I would also like to update you on my new writing job...I have begun to post for a website called Examiner.com. I am writing for them about local non-corporate owned coffee shops in my area. So far I have posted two articles and you can find those here: http://www.examiner.com/coffeeshop-in-san-diego/a-latte-more
Do me a favor and subscribe to my page...it will help get me more money for my articles (thanks dad!!!)
Anyway, for the real reason I am here...I was trying to think of something to write about and I figured NDNU has been taking too much heat so I will share a true story about a trip into San Francisco and a classic example of being in the wrong place a the right time...
Last fall, Sept. 2009, I was visiting the bay area. After a long (mostly frustrating) day of traveling from Napa to San Francisco, which is a whole other story, a friend of mine invited me to hang out with her for the afternoon. Alenna was out at some park near the Mission and I had some time to kill before my flight back to La, so I hopped on the BART and got off at 16th and Mission to meet up with her. When I finally found her, amongst the dirty homeless Mission people, we picked up a six pack of Anchor Steam (SF's finest brew) and headed off up the street to enjoy some music in the park and catch up. The park was a total scene: people everywhere dancing around, playing soccer, throwing frisbees, smoking pot, eating "magic" mushrooms, drinking beer, being weird...you know a typical Sunday in the park. After a couple hours of schmoozing and people watching we decided that it was time to go.
Walking back towards the BART i realized that I really had not had anything decent to eat and it was going to be some time before I was home in LA so I figured I had time for a quick bite so we walked back down to 16th and Mission and made a right, looking for something quick to eat. We stumbled upon a Chinese restaurant/doughnut shop/hangout and looked over the menu. After realizing that there was no English on the menu I decided to just look through the display and just eyeball something tasty. I chose a dish that I believed to be some type of yummy, Chinese noodles. I ordered the food from a little asian woman who didn't speak English so I just pointed to the dish I wanted and she began packing a little take out box with the food. to my delight my meal plus a Pepsi cost only $2! What a deal right!!?!?
Alenna and I sat down at a table at the front of the establishment, seated across from each other, my back to a big glass front window and to my direct left the front entrance. i opened up the small box of food and began to dig in. I took a big bite of the noddles and came to realize that i did not order any fancy Asian dish, but a fairly simply made spaghetti, like they probably boiled the noddles and took a can of Prego and called it what ever the hell they wanted to call it. I just laughed to myself and shared this hilarity with Alenna who was also taken aback at how strange the place was, but wait....that's not even the good part...
So as I am trying to enjoy the mediocre meal, I notice some interesting looking people at the front of the store, one tall gentleman with a scraggly beard and a walking stick and a super skinny black woman, most likely a local crack head. If you have ever traveled to San Fran you know that it is not really a big deal seeing weird people or stuff happen, but today was different. All of the sudden there was a lot of commotion and two cars sped up and bumped into the curb. Plain clothes police officers were standing outside the vehicles, weapons drawn, closing in on the guy with the walking stick, yelling, "Put your fucking hands up!" "Drop the cane, what is this bullshit?" "We have been watching you, we know you don't need that shit!" Other people near the scene scatter, mostly crack heads not wanting to deal with the law. They get this guy down on the ground and begin to search him very fast. Mind you, I am still sitting in the restaurant as all of this is going down not five feet away from me. They are asking the guy where his "stuff" is and they don't find anything on him immediately, but they cuff him anyway and take him away in one of the unmarked vehicles. This all went down in a matter of 2 minutes!
After the cops were gone, I noticed a couple of crack heads outside the Chinese restaurant, again about 5 feet away, hunched over, scouring the ground for the precious drugs, the dealer may or may not have dropped before he got nabbed. It was quite a sit to see these people look on the sidewalk for nothing, bent over taping their finger on the floor and then putting that finger to their mouths trying to get high off of anything. What was even more strange was that no one in the restaurant seemed to care what was going on outside, just another "normal" day in the Mission. Alenna and I looked at each other and didn't really know what to say, but we laughed uncomfortably, finished our small meal and then made our way back to the BART station because it was my time to leave.
I will never forget that day...I truly love San Francisco because it is a city with so much to offer, strange food, stranger people, and always good laughs!
Thanks for reading today...i love a miss you all (you know who you are)
humbly yours,
maddog
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