One more for the Vault.

Taking into account some preordained need to write with a beverage, I can’t say I know what I am doing typing on my cute Mac or penning within a leather journal on such a consistent basis from brew pubs with a free wireless connection. I wish everywhere here was filled with huts and strangers drinking tropical dandies with umbrellies and conversation taking itself out for a walk among locals and new faces, if everything around me had an air of wellness with a breeze and time on your hands, then I think you may understand why I do it, but this is San Francisco, the same place which dulled my senses for a good few years, a place where there still is no biergarten nor chestnut trees above and gravel underfoot, where folks tend to speak much louder than necessary. Yet for now I feel like I’m in a little Shangri La. Magnolia is a brewpub on Haight Street that subtly memorializes in fresco and watercolor a culture that is giving way to what I can only see as a cleaner version of dirty hippiedom. In short, things are more intentionally odd than randomly strange here. But I’m not a hippie so what do I know. I’ve also typed and written at the Beach Chalet, a metrosexual/surfer brewery joint with fantastic garlic fries and deep-fried calamari and the sunset-on-the-ocean each evening, or at the Java Joint coffee house that looks like a beach bungalow set under a five story apartment building across from the ocean. And once I went to Gordon Biersch’s brewery on the Bay Embarcadero but the people there were far too proud of their business-talk and I didn’t get the point of the expensive beer. I am making the rounds of breweries and am actually getting work done all at the same time. How not like me is that?

I’m also realizing how quickly customers feel the need to get up and out of a restaurant here in San Francisco < California < perhaps the entire USA. What I notice: the VISA card is thrown down or the wallet is reached for, on average, when at least half of the group is finished eating; this of course makes the eating-stragglers feel they need to wolf their remaining food or leave it, and in around five minutes of the wallet’s appearance they are up and leaving. And this is totally OK; the average meal for four lasts about 30 minutes, and the average meal for 2 people about the same. In and out – WHAT??? Do we have someplace to go? I have nursed two beers for 2 hours here and I feel like I own my seat, perhaps can call this my Norm-spot (from TV’s Cheers). The waitstaff are partially to blame, but customers can just as easily display a total lack of hurry as much as they play along and feel rushed by an urgency of service. Why do Europeans tend to take time out for eating? So very few people there come and go so quickly as USA-ans. Are Americans so much busier, or do they feel some guilt at spending their time allowing someone else to cook for and serve them, or do restaurants just generally turn US people off, to the point where they just can’t wait to get back to their cats, their satellite TV, their families, onto something else... I mean, single people leave just as quickly as married people, unless I have the whole wedding-ring-finger thing wrong, which I don’t. Do certain people just plan about 5 things to do each night, in order to feel like they are keeping their promises to a busy lifestyle? Can you just simply commit to sitting and hanging out, or is everything so UNplanned that we can never plan to stay long enough to hang with people we are eating with?

The sun is setting once again in a brewpub on the water’s edge, only this one has a view of the sunset against the sky, water, hills and houses to the east, so the real magic is behind me. Here’s to harmony.

I will try to add some audio to these links... Aural hints of my senses.