Eric's Big Day Out

Eric likes to do two things in the world.  First, he likes to work hard all day long and into the night.  And second, he likes to get up at 2 A.M. to fix his bugs because he didn’t give himself time to rest and think during the day, or on weekends, or vacations.  The boy is driven.

Back in the mid-90’s Tektronix had sent me to England for a project.  I didn't much care for it.  Most people were snooty, contemptuous, and decidedly unfriendly.  And lazy, did I mention lazy?  At 5 o’clock sharp you’d be run over if you dawdled in the front doorway.  At 5:05 I’d have to lift my feet as the cleaning lady would vacuum under my desk.

One day I overheard a conference call with two guys sitting behind me, Collin and Mike.  Eric was on the other end of the line talking about a project he was leading that was behind schedule.

“We’re going to have to come in on Saturday and finish this off”, he said.

Collin and Mike looked at each other, they hadn’t heard clearly, “That’s Saturday”, they replied.

“Right”, Eric countered, and continued talking.

“But that’s Saturday”, it was obvious Eric hadn’t heard them.

I was enjoying their torture immensely.  They weren’t angry that Eric was asking them to work on Saturday, it was simply not in their concept of reality.

Eric didn’t win that battle as there never was any battle.  It’s like he showed up to the battle armored and astride his war horse, and was greeted with an empty field.  

Anyway, a few months later Eric came over for some meetings. Business travel really isn’t very romantic, you beat your body up, get your sleep all screwed up, and then spend a tiresome week in a gray windowless room discussing business processes.  You rarely get to see anything of a country unless you try.  And Eric always needed to work.

Gary, Eric’s boss, called me up and told me that Eric had been to England multiple times and had never seen anything because he valued work so highly.  He knew I’d been going around on weekends looking at stuff as I sent back a series of my ‘Adventures in England’ e-mails to people back home.  Gary told me my assignment was to kidnap Eric and ensure he saw London.  Gary knew Eric wouldn’t go willingly so I was to steal his plane ticket and not give it back to him until he’d seen some things.  Gary knew Eric wouldn’t do it if he was simply ordered to.

I of course was thrilled with this assignment and quickly conspired with Haley, the secretary, to have her come in and request Eric’s ticket to ensure everything was in order.  Then I created an agenda and it was delivered along with a ransom letter to Eric informing him that he needed to see London and get pictures as proof or his ticket home to his loving wife Tracy would not be returned.  This was the agenda:

1) Feed the pigeons at Trafalgar Square (you can’t do that anymore)

2) See 10 Downing Street

3) Find out from a Beefeater at the Tower of London what the moat was used for (His response: The crapper)

4) Eat Lunch at the ‘Hung, Drawn, and Quartered’ pub across from The Tower

5) Get his picture taken with a Queen’s Guardsman

6) See Big Ben

7) See Westminster Abbey

8) See Piccadilly Circus

He had a set of questions to answer and photographs to take to prove he had completed his mission.

Eric whined like a little girl.

“I don’t have time for this!”

“I’ve got work to do!”

“C’monnnn you guys, I’m serious!”

But he was assured his ticket home was in jeapardy.  Reluctantly he went.  This week while cleaning my desk I found these pictures from Eric’s Big Day Out.  I got $10 that says he never went back.  Enjoy.

"You did this didn't you?"

"Oh, I'm screwed"

Trafalgar Square

10 Downing Street, back before they put up steel gates

Tower of London

I'll need a pint of Guinness to get me through this

Harassing the Queen's Guard

Big Ben 

(No that's not his middle finger)

Westminster Abbey

Piccadilly Circus

Agenda fulfilled, Isaac returns Eric's ticket

I can go home now

There's no graceful way to get to the lion

Kirby really was a Vacuum Cleaner

I originally wrote this 25 years ago and am reposting on request.

---

Today's story is about Eric, his wife, Tracy, and their beagle named Kirby.  Under normal circumstances a happy little family.  However, when it is 2 A.M. and the beagle wants to imitate Snoopy howling at the moon like when Linus is out in the pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin, Eric, Tracy, and the neighbors are a little less happy.

Our story begins with Tracy and Kirby in the back yard playing around.  The dog is very interested in the sparkling rock hanging on a thin gold chain around Tracy's neck.  This was a diamond Eric had given Tracy as a present just before they were married.  It represented Eric's last few dollars, and thus his true love for her, when he was still in his self-described "Ga-ga" stage of the relationship.

Like a true male he wasn't thinking about what he was doing.  If he had, he would have said to himself, "Self, once you are married, you will never have any money again, it all goes to your wife's wishes, be it a new couch, bedroom set, house, or *choke* baby shoes, you will be in debt the rest of your life.  You should spend this money on something of immense practical value that you will never be able to afford again, like a radio controlled model of the Titanic that you can crash into a floating block of ice, watch it sink, then you raise it and do it again.  Remember the ad in Playboy (also something you will never see again) last week?". But no, our hero spent it on his fiancée.

So back in the backyard, Kirby makes a flying leap at Tracy and catches the chain in his paw, breaking it.  Tracy is quite upset that this gift from the man she loves is broken.  She takes it inside and puts it on the desk for Eric to see.  This way she can point it out to Eric, and show how upset breaking his token of affection makes her.  Eric is supposed to heroically get the chain fixed and then present it to her, once again winning her heart and undying love.

Fortunately for our story, it didn't happen this way.

For those of you who don't know Eric, he can be quite a focused individual.  I've seen him sitting in front  of his computer with his head down, brows furrowed, looking like he's going to butt heads with the screen, while people threw stuff at him, or placed ornaments in his traditional Austrian hat he wears during implementations, just to see if they can distract him.  They always fail.  The only time I've been able to get his attention was when I hit him in the side of the head with a snowball.  (It was an accident...really).

Well somehow the importance of this item escaped Eric (he's been married a couple of years now, and has begun to settle in for the long haul).  Nobody is sure how it happened, but all fingers point to Eric absentmindedly knocking it off of the desk onto the floor.  I think he was looking at an interesting computer program and spread it out on the desk, after all, desk space to a programmer is far more valuable than a piece of crushed carbon.

At this point the diamond disappears.  They know it was on the desk, and now it's not.  A genuine horror engulfs them as they realize that their own living vacuum cleaner, Kirby, must have swallowed it whole.  At this point they are faced with a number of options:



A) Call the insurance company, and let them deal with it.

B) Cut the dog open and retrieve said diamond, or

C) You guessed it, wait and see what turns up.



Eric was partial to A, I suggested B (they hadn't even thought of this one), but this being Tracy's diamond and favorite dog, she opted for C.

Eric comes home the next day to find Tracy absolutely ecstatic.  She's found her diamond.  Whereupon she presents to him a baggie of doggie doo that she had retrieved from the back yard.  She had gone out back and searched through all of Kirby's, ummm, leftovers, and found her precious necklace.  Eric can just make out the glitter of gold in the bag through the tears of laughter.

Now, mind you, it is still not too late for Eric to call the insurance company, he can make a claim, get a new diamond, and then later tell the insurance company he found the necklace and give them the baggie to deal with.  Tracy will have none of that for her token of love.  She soaks the necklace in soapy water, and then in jewelry cleaner.  It now looks like new (but presumably is still broken), and no one will ever be the wiser.

But you all know dear readers.  So the next time you are at a party, and see a young lady walking toward you with a diamond on a thin gold chain, be kind and don't act like Dracula when he first meets the heroine and cringes at the sight of the cross around her neck.  All that glitters is not just gold.



----

Postscript: I told this story to my cousin Beth who said she used to work in a dentist office and sometimes people’s gold crowns would come lose in their sleep and they would swallow them.  The dentist would say, “You know, if you retrieve the crown, we can clean it up, put it back, and you won’t have to pay for a new one”.

Which begs the question, what would you do?

The Legend of Jussie Smollett, Jr.

“Fucking dog!  Get out of the street you idiot!” 

It’s dark and there’s traffic coming.  Who’s going to see a small dog?

I can’t watch and hide my eyes as a white minivan comes through.

Vroom!

“Yip!”

I see the dog go down, I didn’t hide my eyes enough.

“Fuck!  Fuckity, fuckity, fuck, fuck, fuck!”

I throw up my arms in frustration.  I’m standing on the side of a major thoroughfare with cars rushing by at 50 miles an hour.  I walk away, I don’t want to look, nothing more I can do.  Well it’s not yelping, I’m the one who scared it into the street, I should at least check how bad it is and take it over to the vet to be put down if it’s still alive.

It was only two minutes earlier that I saw this small tan dog by itself as I drove into my complex after dark.  In the streetlight I can see she’s looking at me as I drive in.  I didn’t see any owners.  I saw a van parked about 100 yards up the street.  That’s unusual, there’s no parking on this road, maybe they’re the owners and were walking her, or maybe they just dumped her off.  I quickly park and get out to see what’s going on.

I walk out the gate and as I approach the dog I notice the van is gone and nobody’s around.  The dog is a Chihuahua.  I don’t like Chihuahuas, they’re nervous and bitey, so I’m nervous too.  I’m talking to her, trying to get her to come over to me but when I’m about four feet away, she starts barking at me and bolts into the street.

That’s when the white minivan comes by.

But when I turn around I’m surprised to see she’s still alive.  That won’t last long, there’s more traffic headed this way and she’s wandering around in the road, why doesn’t she cross the road to the median and get out of the way?  Stupid dog.  One thing I’m not going to do is wander out into traffic in the dark to save you.  I wave my hands from the side of the road, but I worry people will swerve away from me and hit her, so I stop.

She’s now in the left lane, some cars are dodging around her, but one doesn’t see her.

“Yip!”

Down she goes again.

Well that finished her off, I think.  But she’s up and stumbling around.  Finally a car stops in the left hand lane and the traffic stops too.  I go out into the street and try to force her on to the median.  She’s scared and barking at me whenever I get close.  The last thing I need is to get bit by a stray dog.

I notice she’s walking in circles, just like that cat did that got hit by a car a few years ago.  The cat was blinded by the hit and walking in circles to get its bearings.  I took the cat to the vet to be put down.  Now I gotta do that for this dog too?  I can see in the headlights that one eye is damaged.  Must have been the minivan.  This dog is not long for this world.

The guy gets out of his car and comes over to help.  All the traffic is still stopped, but impatient, as we try and corral this dog.  We’re like the Keystone Cops out there, chasing, and shooing.  Finally we get her up on the island and after about five minutes of high adrenaline excitement she’s worn down enough that the other guy can pick her up.

I instruct him to bring her over to my complex and get her out of the traffic.  He’s left his family in the car and other cars rush up from behind before cutting over to the right lane to avoid it.  He puts the dog down and I tell him to go get his car out of the way before his family is killed and he takes off.  He was very nice.

“Now what?”  I wonder, now that the immediate drama is over.

I obviously didn’t see any owners out there or they would have been having a heart attack and screaming.  I take a closer look.  Amazingly, she doesn’t look injured, but the dog is not just blind from the minivan, she’s missing both eyes!  WTF?  What are you doing out here girl?

She has a dog sweater that says ‘The world needs more naps’.  I can’t figure it out.  Is she a stray?  Did someone drop her off intentionally?  Where is she from?  Do the owners even know she’s gone?  Is she chipped?  Doubtful, who would chip a blind dog?

I call my friends who are involved with large animal rescue in Morgan Hill and they tell me to call the county animal control.  When I check on my phone, nothing is open until Monday and it’s late Friday night.  I’m going to have to keep this dog all weekend.  I’m actually a bit worried that if this dog isn’t chipped they’ll put her down, it’s hard to get a blind dog adopted.

I name the dog Jussie Smollett, Jr. because she’s caused quite a needless ruckus.  Plus, she can’t tell white people from black people either, can she?

I figure the best thing I can do is just to take her back to my place where I can examine her in the light.  Esmerelda, my feral cat, is none too pleased with this interloper.  She doesn’t seem to notice the dog in my arms and comes inside with me.  This should be interesting.

Jussie Smollet, Jr.

Esmerelda meets Jusse

I put Jussie down and Esmerelda starts mewling.  This attracts Jussie’s attention and she starts sniffing toward her.  Esmerelda’s small, but Jusse is smaller, she’s not giving ground.  Finally her nose touches Esmerelda’s and she cuffs her. 

“Yip!”, Jusse backs off.

“Nice try girl, but you can’t scratch her eyes out, it’s already been done”, I laugh.

Jussie’s not scared of the cat though and continues to sniff around.  I let Esmerelda out but she just sits on the porch mewling.  She never does that, she’s just jealous.  Tough luck cat.

Jussie seems quite at home in my place.  She’s not freaked out by anything.  She kind of follows me around, but she doesn’t walk into a single wall or piece of furniture.  How does she do that?  Is she detecting slight air currents?  She follows me everywhere and when I sit down she tries to jump up.  So I put her in my lap whenever I’m sitting.

I get a closer look at her eyes and realize the eyeballs have been removed and the skin professionally sewed shut around the sockets to prevent infection.  She looks in good shape, so I figure the owners must have wanted her if they went through all this expense and gave her a sweater.  She probably wandered over from the apartments nearby.

I figure I’ll give a once through those apartments this evening and worry about a better plan tomorrow.  The apartments are mostly empty.  I ask one guy about the owners and he refers me to where some people have some dogs, but I don’t see anyone and head back home.

I give Jusse some cat food and she scarfs it down.  But how will I get her water?  How is she going to smell water?  I put out a bowl of water and force her nose into it a bit.  She backs off.  But later on she seems to find the water.  How does she do that, does she detect humidity?

I want to go to bed so I figure she needs a walk before bedtime.  How do you walk a blind dog?  I don’t have a leash or collar either.  So I take her down to the grassy area, let her lose, and luckily she does her business.

Esmerelda is watching closely, she comes over and rubs up against one side of me while Jussie’s on the other.  So jealous; she refuses to come inside for the night.

For bedtime I put Jusse up on my bed, she gets under the covers and doesn’t move until morning. 

“Your owners are probably searching for you girl, but I’m exhausted, good night”.

I gotta say, I quickly came to like this amazing dog.  She’s not half as much trouble as I expected.  You’d barely notice she was blind.  She’s always looking right at you, ears perked. I took her for a walk in the morning and she followed me along the sidewalk no problem, she’s just slow as she’s always worried about running into something.  She didn’t bark, she didn’t snap, she wasn’t too demanding of affection but she did always want to be around me.  If I had nothing else to do in life, I’d adopt this dog.

By now I’ve formulated a plan, a blind Chihuahua must be a recognizable animal.  One of the vets nearby must know her, maybe they removed the eyes.  They can probably check for a chip too.  I figure I’ll print out a bunch of flyers and post them around those apartments.  I get about thirty made and I grab Jussie and we head out.

I figure since she’s blind she couldn’t have wandered far.  She must be from the neighboring apartment complex, because I’ve never seen her in our complex.  I see the maintenance guy at the far corner and I stop him by the dumpster.  He doesn’t recognize the dog.  That’s a bad sign, the maintenance guys know everything.

I ask him where I can put up posters, but he says it’s against policy.

Fucking policy.  Always ask for forgiveness, not permission.

A lady stops by and I can tell they’re talking about the dog in Spanish.  She tells me she has a Chihuahua and asks if she can take care of Jussie.  

Are you kidding?  You’re offering to take this blind dog off of my hands?  Of course!  Plus, it will be easier to find the owner if you walk the dog outside a couple of times a day in the complex.  She loves dogs and is quite happy to take Jussie.

She tells me there’s a couple who have two Chihuahuas at the end of the complex.  We go over to her apartment so I can get her address and information so I can contact her if somebody calls about my poster when we see this guy walking towards us with a Chihuahua.

“Please let this be the two Chihuahua guy missing one”, I pray.  After all, what are the odds?

He spies us and makes his way over, sure enough it turns out he is missing a blind Chihuahua!  He explains his wife has been worried sick and they were searching for the dog until 2 A.M.  It turns out that it is chipped and the dog had glaucoma and had it’s eyes removed a few months ago.  His wife loves that dog.

His wife is ecstatic to see the dog and they tell the stories of all their searching up and down the street until 2 A.M.  She says the dog has gotten more adventurous lately and went left instead of right as she normally does when out.  I point out she’s got a slightly injured leg from one of the cars, but it doesn’t look like anything’s broken.  We talk a while and thank each other and go on with our lives.

I’ll miss you Jussie, you are a great dog, I take back a third of what I’ve ever said about Chihuahuas.  By the way I never did get your real name, you’ll always be Jussie to me. 

And Jussie, you are one fucking, fucking, fucking, lucky dog.

The Uber Ride from Hell

I took an Uber from the Metro Station to my dad's house in the middle of nowhere Maryland. The first thing I noticed was the SUV was lurching forward every two seconds like the driver was hitting the gas and then pulling back, but she wasn't. The car is just a piece of shit.

We're going along and my driver was guided to take a left turn at a road that was closed. We can't turn, so she tries to pull back into traffic. It's dusk, the road is wet from a previous rainstorm, and while the cars are coming on in the other two lanes I notice one of them doesn't have his lights on. She doesn't see him and starts to pull out.

"STOP!" I yell, "You can't see him!"

She stops and then makes the wise decision to wait until all the cars have passed.

The Uber navigation app she's using instructs her to make a U-turn.

"Ma'am, it's just going to take you back to the closed road", I say.

"We'll that's what it's telling me to do", she responds. Great, my driver is a believer in the infallibility of technology. The app doesn't know the road is closed and will forever instruct her to take it.

Sure enough we get back to the closed road and the brilliant, all knowing app, wants us to go down it.

"What do I do?" she asks me.

You're the skilled Uber driver, you tell me.

I instruct her to go down to the next road and take a right and I take out SIRI. She got me through Estonia, she can get me through anything.

We're able to route around the closure and we're back on track driving through the back roads of Maryland.

I notice she's got her high beams on, but I've already been enough of a back seat driver so I remain silent. Somebody flashes their lights, and she flicks them off.

All the lights turn off.

She plays with them flicking them on and off and asks out loud, "Why don't the lights work?"

"I think you have to have the high beams on for your lights to work. You should check that."

She's got on a Christian radio station on full blast and is singing along to songs to Jesus. Please lady, I know you want to see Jesus, but I don't. Can you pay attention? You seem to think lanes are simply suggestions and Jesus will save you from your own mistakes.

We get on a main road and after a few miles the police block it off and send us left. Why? Probably flooding, Maryland has received tremendous amounts of rain this month. Again she won't listen to me and keeps obeying the Uber app instructing her to turn around and try and bust her way through the roadblock. She keeps attempting to go down side streets to bypass it. She seems to think if she just can just get six feet beyond the roadblock there will be clear sailing. I'm thinking if she succeeds we could be running into a newly formed river. The police don't block main roads for no reason.

After she spends ten minutes listening to her app instruct her on how to circle back to the roadblock, I get her to go a different way but I'm still arguing with her to stop listening to her app.

"Ma'am? Can you turn down the radio so we can communicate?"

"What?!"

Exactly.

We finally get back to the main road, and twice she follows a car in front of her into a left hand turn lane.

"Go straight!" I shout from the back.

"Don't worry sir, you've got the best driver on the road tonight", she declares proudly.

“Then we’re all doomed”, I mumble.

I no sooner get that out then the heavens open up. Sheets and sheets of water pummel the car in one of those East Coast thunderstorms of biblical proportions. She pushes her head over the steering wheel, peering through the gloom, trying to see the road.

"Ma'am”, I say as calmly and clearly as possible, fully aware that the information that I must convey to her, and it is vital she must comprehend, holds both our lives in the balance, "You need to turn on the windshield wipers".

And can you turn up the radio? I need to sing a song to Jesus.

The Tories

“Hey Idril! Let’s be the Tories!”, my friend Luchessi shouted from across the classroom. I don’t even remember his first name, in the eighth grade we just called each other by our last name.

“Sure”, I responded, always up for a good losing political battle, which would follow me most of my life as I strove for change in a world filled with no desire to do anything that involved more work than picking up the TV remote.

Our eighth grade history teacher, Mr. Lorraine, was one of those teachers you remember and appreciate your whole life, he could bring the entire class to life. At one point we conducted our own government with House, Senate, and President, and everybody was involved and had a role. If memory serves Silva was the President and I was the Vice-President, I don’t even remember the laws we passed, I think it had to do with how to arrange the schoolroom, but his vetoes got everybody pissed off at him and they attempted to impeach him. The impeachment failed to get 2/3rds majority, and just like Al Gore, I didn’t get to be President.

This was earlier, near the beginning of the year, when you always studied The American Revolution. We moved a lot so I got to go to seven different schools in four different States in those first eight years, and wouldn’t even get to finish Mr. Lorraine’s class before we moved again. No, I didn’t get thrown out of schools, there was never time, my dad simply changed jobs and we changed States at the drop of a hat.

Every school I went to never even got to the Civil War when they studied history. We would usually dwell for half a year on the Revolution, I suspect looking back, because the teachers didn’t know much else and it was easy. I distinctly remember one teacher remarking that men had one less rib than women because God took Adam’s rib out to make Eve. I kid you not.

Mr. Lorraine decided to split up the class into three equal groups, Patriots, Tories, and Mugwumps, or fence sitters who couldn’t decide. Which is really what America was in 1776, oh, and I guess nothing’s changed in 237 years, the useless, spineless, undecided, Mugwumps, still get to determine the future of America.

Mr. Lorraine asked for volunteers to lead the Patriots and Tories; everybody wanted to be the Patriots so Luchessi and I filled in the vacuum on the Tory side. He gave us talking points for both the Patriots and the Tories. After seven years of American Patriotic indoctrination, nobody had ever told me there was another side to the story, Britain’s side. There in front of me in black and white was the proof that the Patriots could never win. Britain had just defeated the great nations of France and Austria, we controlled the seas, we could control any city we wanted, we offered protection from foreign powers, we offered protected trade and prosperity, the list seemed endless. The Patriots were just a bunch of crybabies about some necessary taxes to keep the French out of North America.

I walked up to Mr. Lorraine and only in half-jest asked, “How did we win?”

He just smiled. He wanted me to figure it out, what a great teacher.

So Luchessi and I prepared ourselves and we had two separate class debates, with students allowed to ask questions, to determine a winner. At the end Luchessi and I convinced over half the American citizens in the class that their best bet was staying with England and to vote for us. We were pretty chuffed at our victory, it really wasn’t that hard, we had the facts on our side, all our Patriot opponents had were slogans and cheering. Our class was pretty smart, I determined. Plus the girls liked Luchessi.

Much to my pleasure the Patriot and Tory leaders were then sent on a field trip to a second grade class at a nearby elementary school. Who doesn’t like field trips? All of the second graders were sitting in a big room watching a movie about the American Revolution and how brave and wonderful the Patriots were.

After the film we got to present our case to all of the second graders. The way this worked is we would make our pitch, take a vote, then come back in a week and present our cases again and take a final vote.

We got our butts whooped. If I remember, out of about one hundred kids, we got eleven votes. I was actually surprised and pleased we got that many, the odds were greatly against us in that virulently Patriotic environment. But there were eleven plucky second graders who refused to go along with the masses.

Then Mr. Lorraine did something that stunned me and I remember to this day; he crooked his finger at each of the kids who voted Tory and invited them into a side room with us. There he pulled out an entire bag of candy, presented it to them, and said, “I am a representative of the King, and King George rewards his loyal subjects”.

Outright bribery, what brilliance.

At the time I was not thrilled with this, we should earn a victory fairly I said. The Patriot leaders were just open mouthed and making futile objections, Mr. Lorraine was not to be moved. The kids went nuts and split up all the candy and wouldn’t you know it, went out and TOLD EVERYBODY what a vote for the Tories meant.

The next week we came back and gave a shortened version of our presentation. This time we won fairly easily, about sixty votes. The second grade teachers were much amused at the little traitors in their midst.

I learned a lesson in the art of politics, bribery works.

And the second graders learned a lesson too, there was no more candy forthcoming. Once a politician has your vote, you’re fucked.

The Mission District

“I grew up in the Mission District!”

My mother would brag about this every now and then, both seeking street cred and scolding our spoiled ways.  It was true too, she was the only child of a single mother, and in those days there was no welfare, not that my grandmother would have ever accepted it; they lived on what her mother brought home, long before the days when women could get a decent job.  It wasn’t a fun neighborhood even then, it was a place you only lived if you were poor, and they were quite poor.  Of course when she would complain about where she grew up, my dad, who was born in the Bronx and grew up in New York City, would tell her, “I wish I grew up in as good a neighborhood as you!”

Back then The Mission District was white poor.  Then it became black poor.  Then it became Hispanic poor.  The people changed, not the neighborhood.  But with this current influx of techies the poor are being driven out and the neighborhood is rapidly transforming.

I visited a friend of mine in the Mission District the other day.  No, she’s not one of the new techies who have decided it is a cool edgy neighborhood to live in, she’s lived there for years in a private/public housing project where the city helped her buy her condo.  The irony is that these techies are driving up the prices in the neighborhood and her condo now puts her in the top 20% richest people in the world even though she has very little income. 

My friend’s daughter went to study down in The Mission what she called ‘Integrated Studies’ about what makes a community.  She bemoaned how the neighborhood is losing its Hispanic character.  Is a neighborhood entitled to maintain a certain ethnic character?  Didn’t Jimmy Carter get in trouble for suggesting that?  Is one character better than another?  One wouldn’t claim that a white neighborhood should maintain its white character, but it’s perfectly acceptable to claim that a Hispanic neighborhood should be able to maintain its Hispanic character.  And it’s not like there’s a shortage of Hispanic neighborhoods in California, the state is not only not majority white, it’s not even plurality white, it is plurality Hispanic.  How odd for the dominant ethnic group to claim it has some sort of right to a neighborhood.  How un-American actually.

I remember the 60’s and 70’s when the media complained that the (white) middle class was leaving the cities.  Now the middle class is returning and the media is complaining again.

Where will the poor go?

Gasp!  The green and leafy suburbs?  Oh no!  A fate worse than death!

Protestors picket and sometimes attack the busses sent up to San Francisco to pick up the techie employees.  This takes thousands of cars off the road every day, easing the commute and congestion for everyone else.  It is paid for by the companies themselves, not even by tax dollars.  The busses are a symbol of change the community organizers don’t like.  Hmm, liberals who don’t want change, doesn’t that make them conservatives?  So hard to tell the difference these days.

But it’s not just a techie white influx, it’s Chinese and Indian as well.  I am particularly tickled when I see lily white, supposedly liberal, labor leaders protesting the busses carrying all of those Asian techies.  Dudes, you look kind of racist.

Most of these Asian kids spent their lives studying their asses off under the harsh tutelage of their parents in countries where you are up against a billion people scrambling to survive, so you had better get a fucking skill or you will spend the rest of your life stitching clothes together for fat Americans to wear while they try and work off the kilos at the gym from those supersized American meals they eat in front of their supersized flat screen TVs.  The hard work finally pays off and they get a job in a country that is so rich that the native born kids actually get degrees for studying how poor people live.  Imagine their surprise when they learn this, they spent all their lives studying how not to be a poor person.  Then to top it off, along come these entrenched labor and neighborhood leaders protesting their ‘wealth’ and how they’re changing the city.

It reminds me of the old videos of Dan White, the conservative former policeman and city Supervisor who assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, talking to the press and complaining of ‘outsiders changing the city’.  I’ve literally heard and seen those exact words numerous times from outraged San Francisco liberals.  Back then it meant gays and minorities, today it means, well, Techie gays and minorities.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

After the visit with my friend I walked back to BART and I could tell that The Mission has changed in just the last couple of years.  More trendy taquerias rather than run down authentic taquerias.  More trendy noodle bars rather than authentic ramshackle noodle bars.  And really, to be truthful, much more clean, well-lighted, and safe looking as well.

However as I passed a massage parlor I got a true shock.  Yes, yes, I know, there’s lots of massage parlors down there.  They get closed down and open with new management a few weeks later.  But this was not one of these, it was a LEGITIMATE massage parlor.  The front door is left open and you can see inside and observe the tables with an emphasis on foot massages.  Chinese men in black pajamas, not Asian sex slaves in lingerie, vigorously buffed the clientele. 

What is becoming of The Mission District?

Oh, mom, you’d hardly recognize the place.