Further Adventures in the Emerald City

I keep exploring the city, looking into its nooks and crannies, tearing it up like an english muffin - searching for truth at the end of a fernet bottle. Observing, interacting and growing. Thumping on my chest and growling at the bay like a convoluted King Kong. I bartend at a place called Shanghai 1930, where people either think I'm either half chinese or Ben Affleck or both. Chinese chicks tell me pick up lines, gay guys offer to help me network and the staff - my friends help me to feel at home. I like working in bars because I like the people. Charismatic Pea-cocks displaying our feathers for ones and fives...

Time finds us traveling by geographic nationality, flying on mimosa stained lips, doing the dip at shabu shabu in Japan Town, crunching and vibing at Ethiopian cafes' on haight, soaking in the sun at Lime in the castro, the party that never ends. Networking, growing spreading tentacles like insane octopuses hell bent on cliched youthful ambition. Entering the dark days, wondering where my moneys gone?

Then two Sundays ago it was if the world up and ended. Bay to Breakers, The devil, Christian brotherhood and kegs being pushed along in shopping carts.

Bay to Breakers, an annual race, a 12k through the city - from the bay to breakers, from sober and well intentioned to sticky and heaving. It starts at 7 am where upon 60,000 people get costumed or get naked and get totally and completely obliterated. Like a million salmon swimming upstream into a distillery, fighting against the current of old people with exposed dangly bits and hungry bears with leather hats.

We were a blur of glowing atoms swirling in a vortex of cops on cycles, tequila runs and far to many red headed sluts. It was a hot, hot sunny one and we we're unprepared and over intoxicated, the sunburn that followed served as a reminder and not as a warning sign- fifteen minutes into it and we had howled into that wet hot american morning...camo covered banshees of death screaming for blood in the form of triple distilled mexican delights. Inebriated evil doers enunciating every syllable of "show me your tits".

Under aged, undressed women undulated down divisidasadro towards dimensions of diluted discotheque street teams hell bent on arranging an arousal from either the city or the street, everyone in between taken hostage by the ruckus and commotion that was left sputtering out in their path.

This is in the street, streamers, couches, tikki bars, alt rock bands, EMT's casually practicing on beer bong stunts gone horribly, horribly awry. There's to, to many things to register, a keg in a shopping cart, my legs in the air, Tequila filled super soaker, tony punched chase. Somewhere along the way I fall off of a moving truck, how I got on is a mystery, the gash on my leg and the thorns in my hand clues...

Wailing hot sun, black outs for hours, bruised and bloodied, sore but smiling -surviving the Apocalypse one shot at a time.