I Feel It In My Stomach

San Francisco is uncharacteristically wet.  The highways are characteristically jammed.  It’s rush hour, first day after a holiday weekend. I’ve got an Uber driver, Dexter, who took a crazy back way that I’d never have put up with calmly in a metered cab, but for this trip, the fare is set and he’s following some traffic app, which probably saved us both twenty minutes or more.  Still, we’re crawling into the city.

It’s pouring outside.  The trees are blowing back and forth enduring gusts of wind as we crawl along south of Market.  I can’t remember many days like this in SF, where it otherwise so regularly toggled back and forth between foggy and sunny.  I just managed to finish rereading Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” on the plane ride down from Bend Oregon.  I’d bought it to share with my older one.  It’s exhausting.  I feel it in my stomach. I’m glad Zooey was able to make Franny smile in the end. 

Sixth and Howard, plodding along towards Market.  All my standard hotels were three times the normal rate.  What’s so important about Tuesday, January 20^th?  I’ve got some other no-name joint off Union Square that will almost certainly not check me in at this hour of the morning.  This area still has a half a dozen adult film stores, I’m noticing now.  I guess there is still a market for people who can’t figure out how to get on line when they need to.    

I need to get on line and plough through work that has built up slowly over this past week.  There are dozens of follow-ups that will gnaw at me till they’re done.  I’m listening to Hank Mobley’s “Peckin’ Time” so I don’t have to listen to Dexter’s insipid talk radio show.  We’ll be arriving soon so I should get ready to confront the wet.  The Tenderloin looks like a soggy mess.  Sometimes I miss this city.  And sometimes I don’t.  Some other time I’ll tell you about Bend Oregon, which left a nice, fresh cedar residue in my bituminous Beijing nostrils.