With less than twenty minutes to go Amanda asked me what my New Year’s resolution might be and I of course had none slated for delivery. Dismissive as I was a debate began throwing words like change around and yes, I know, change is inevitable and possibly even good but that doesn’t mean I have to declare anything. If it’s gonna happen it will and that’s fine and dandy unless it sucks.

It did get me thinking, tho, about where these things come from. When did people decide that the end of a calendar year was the best time to make some statement of intent– I will be a better person in this way for the next year because it’s midnight and I’m drunk. A quick little google run decided that both the Romans and the Babylonians invented the concept of New Year’s Resolutions which just goes to show you that the internet doesn’t know shit. It does, however, know how to sell you shit.

A week or so later I was carrying some heavy equipment up some janky stairs and there was a drunk guy who, it turns out, wasn’t the booker or the bartender. He was very friendly, however misplaced, and asked our sad little parade of amps and drums what our New Year’s Resolutions were. Everyone ignored him except me: “I’m running a little behind– I haven’t made mine yet.” This elicited a couple chuckles from the band and a roaring belly-laugh from the random drunk who seemed to accept this automatic response as an answer worth-while.

It did get me thinking, tho, about what kind of resolutions are being made these days. I tried a technorati search but there were thousands of postings made involving them and no one seemed to actually talk about what they were, only about how they’d given up. Everyone except for people with Christian Mission blogs, that is, who are more than happy to tell you all about how they worked on maintaining their New Year’s Resolution. This was a sadness I could not investigate further. Perhaps bloglines, with their advanced search parameters, would have allowed for better searching but attempting to access any data in between the end of December and the beginning of January resulted in severe server failure. Basically I learned that the internet is a temporal flux where ideas, information and opinion are created, shared and destroyed within the span of a day and the nutritional yield is approximately zero and the waste-product immeasurable.

I’m not opposed to tradition all the time. I enjoy “It’s a Wonderful Life” and think it’s a shame that the movie is so closely associated with Christmas. It’s just a good, emotionally effective fit of nostalgia directed by a true believer in American idealism and potential. Unfortunately you can’t watch it without Macy’s parades and the scent of pine in the house or else your sense of time and place would be so distorted your brain would explode like a 4th of July display and melt into a puddle of over-heated Halloween candy. I’m not even opposed to the declaration of New Year’s Resolutions– it’s just that I mostly associate this tradition with Bloom County’s Binkley screaming them on behalf of beleaguered celebrities over the edge of a dark crevice.

However, if I were in the habit of New Year’s Resolutions it seems popular to promise great productivity in the blogosphere, or rather lament the lack of said productivity. No better example of failed hopes, dreams or idealism than where you’re sitting, I suppose, tho we didn’t really need the make a resolution in order to fail. If I believed in them maybe I would have resolved to push the boundaries of my interest/abilities/desire and propel my web presence into deeper depths but I don’t believe and so there you go. I’d attempt to inspire a response from the passing crowd, something of a trick I picked up from a Guatemalan photoblog I frequent, but somehow I can’t bring myself to pander to anyone. What works and makes sense for some just doesn’t for others. Just have a Happy New Year, you, and I apologize for being late. The drunk guy at the gay bar understood and I hope you can too.

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One unfortunate side-effect of my disengagement from network TV is that I’m woefully unaware of what’s going on. Some of this is alleviated by my periodic scanning of world headlines on the Manchester Guardian’s website and some by my loyal viewer-ship of both Russia Today and Deutsch-Welle but this is only good for a general knowledge of events. My finger is not on the pulse of culture or American attitudes. When I do happen to be snagged by something on the big three (we don’t get Fox) I typically sit bemused rather than hypnotized, and I still find myself offended by a good portion of what’s made available for my viewing pleasure.

If I was dedicated enough I might be able to suss out the hearts and minds of America through alternative channels such as youtube but that window into attention-depraved desperation failed me in a recent attempt to secure an IBM commercial recently dragging its lumber-some, neanderthal fists through the cathode spectrum. There’s an older guy and a younger guy. The younger guy is talking about some online reality where avatars represent people and virtual money flows like water. The older guy asks about real money and the younger guy balks. This virtual reality took a lot of innovation to create he says sulkily. The older guy says, “Innovation is for making money”.

The jars on my desk with their segregated coinage populations notwithstanding, I lost my thirst for wealth some years back, now attempting to make my way through life by requiring as little as possible instead of acquiring as much as possible. I’ve not been very successful in my personal endeavors but I try to make do and I do alright. There’s a world of people better at this than me, just as there’s a world of people who don’t just skulk around the corners with their eyes on restaurant dumpsters but with their eyes on an inner vision. The good old DIY ethic may have been subverted and sold back to the internet generation like every other identifiable cultural identity but true-blue individuals continue to thrive, continue to make things happen on their own terms, surviving through willpower and a sense of community that banks and loans and IBM can never understand because it’s not economically quantifiable.

But as I said, every attempt is made to take the concepts of “the underground” and spin them into a product for the cutting edge, left of center liberal who’s registered Green. The most obvious and contemporary example is what’s happening to the organic foods movement as Walmart, Safeway, Costco and their factory farm suppliers have found a profitable niche waiting in the parking lot. They attempt to dilute the legal terms of what qualifies as organic and they skirt the edges of the concept to maximize production with no regard for the grey areas which were never originally an issue when the scale was smaller and more localized. Sustainable? Crop rotation? Transportation? No, they’re busy trying to find a way to have certain pesticides pass the FDA’s rules and fussing over which multi-billion dollar marketing team has the best idea to sell this new rage.

Another marginalized institution of the past has begun to percolate into the popular consciousness as of late– non-profits are booming. However it seems the days of food drives and volunteering at the soup kitchen aren’t sexy in the modern era and now we have tech-driven companies luring the cash for whomever is deigned impoverished and worthy. In particular there has been a movement in the world of finance to incorporate more “socially responsible” investment plans into the capitalist world. I’m on the fence about the purity of this since I a)have this slush fund of death in my name I never did anything with and b)think the only way to invest money in something is to hand it to someone and hope they make a movie instead of buy cocaine.

An old co-worker of mine, after some conversations in the past, told me to check out one of the hot new school feel-good responsibly companies, a local non-profit known as kiva.org. It was exciting and worrisome at the same time, to think of a San Francisco couple founding a charity of sorts contrary to common sense and self-interest. Basically kiva.org began in 2005 after Jessica Flannery traveled to Africa, a place steadily becoming the world-wide destination for wayward, middle-class, college educated 20-somethings set to replace Latin America as soon as Hugo Chavez begins machine-gunning dissidents and broadcasting puppet-shows on his own TV station. Her husband, a programmer at TiVo, listened to her stories of beautiful people struggling to remain their inherent dignity under crushing poverty and together they pooled their pennies and designed a method of allowing other wayward, college-educated 20-somethings to help these beautiful but impoverished people HELP THEMSELVES.

Oprah loves em’, TV loves em’, you probably love em’ too. Kiva, Swahili for “agreement” or “unity” according to their FAQ page (gag, gag), basically works like this. In the third world there are poor people, most of whom could probably get a good solid job at McDonald’s but they’re lazy and would rather watch TV all day and have lots of babies. Despite looking uncool, however, there are people scattered throughout the land who really want to get off the couch and make something of their lives. They try to start their own businesses but, being poor, they have no start-up capital. Some have managed to scrounge and save enough to buy a yak with which they can exploit for milk to sell at inflated prices in the market but most are either unable to take that first step or are unable to get more yaks because the money lending is generally handled by sharks who charge exorbitant interest rates and have the tendency to react poorly to late repayments. What ever shall they do?

Fortunately the third world is dominated by people of a darker-hue and white people, particularly those with good-breeding and a cultured education, love that shit. It’s exotic. You’d love to bring one home for the den but your friends might think it’s tacky. Anyways, the white people want to see these hard-working yak milkers succeed by the sweat of their brow and whatever innovation they can afford from IBM. However, international financing is a little difficult because white people don’t really wanna spend any more time in the third world than is necessary to drink a lot of cheap booze, hook-up with other whites hanging out there and defile ancient cultural artifacts with their banal chatter and snapshot interest. But white people love the internet because it’s really leveling the playing field for the people of the world AND you don’t really have to actually interact with the third world. It’s also a great way to send money!

So kiva has these partners referred to as microfinance institutions. These MFIs exist throughout the third world, tho how they got the money to become anything like an institution is not readily discussed. Perhaps they were really good at milking yaks? Anyways, these MFIs provide small loans to impoverished people so that they can go do what they do to stop being impoverished. The loan officers meet with potential applicants and if their business plan is sound they approve them of the loan. Meanwhile on the malaria-free side of the world kiva receives colorful and exotic snapshots of these applicants and compiles an informal but personable dossier on who they are and what they wanna do. These profiles are put up on the website and shiny happy people can use the power of the internet to make a small donation to the exotic native (officially referred to as “entrepreneurs”) they choose. If that’s not enough the exotic natives even correspond with their “Kiva lenders” and update them on the progress of the yak milking or whatever. Back in poverty the MFI loan officers come knocking once a week to collect a percentage of the loan back. When the loan is paid off the “donor” is free to reinvest their money in another colorful native with a different business plan or withdraw their initial investment. Or, as rarely occurs, they lose their ten bucks.

The loans are repaid with interest which covers the cost of loan officers and, I guess, a portion goes to maintaining kiva itself. While a lot of leg-work is being done by interns or shiny happy people off to the hinterlands to get wasted and fuck Germans, there are still sixteen employees and an office in a very expensive city to consider. It’s no longer that romantic bedroom operation of, uh, a couple years ago. Then again, looking over the titled employees (no indication of what kiva -specific name they have) they might just live off dividends. Former google, Paypal, MIX, Barclays people and not working the mail-room mind you. There’s probably some corporate underwriting and, surprise, Paypal even waives the transaction fees for kiva donations.

In a nutshell… And despite the inherent offensiveness of .com hangover-styled new-wave monied liberals on the loose I think it’s a good company who’s really trying to make a difference in a way they were uniquely capable of doing. I obviously wanted to unearth the dirt, Cayman accounts or tobacco investments or mink stoles at the Wammies, but they just seem like normal people who you might run into at Whole Foods if you were so clueless as to buy that over-priced and mass-produced green-washed dreck. My real problem is vague and uneducated– the emphasis on creating a “My First Capitalism” relationship. Welfare is the nasty word that keeps floating around– it’s not a hand-out! I’m not sure that welfare is such a bad thing in its own right– American poverty is its own beast (to paraphrase PJ O’Rourke it’s the only place you can be poor and own a color TV) so comparisons to central Africa seem a little irresponsible. I mean, places where milking yaks is a good job makes you wonder who the fuck is buying the yak milk, where is the wealth trickling down from? God knows, but there’s probably some machine guns involved, and we don’t wanna know. So there’s yak milk flowing and cute little native things being made to sell to tourists and people can feel good about pulling themselves up by the boot-straps and contributing to their community. Building wells and schools is no longer sexy; earn it people. It’ll be the land of yak milk and honey until desertification strips the pastures, the military junta rapes and pillages and everyone dies of AIDS while drowning in the floods brought upon by global warming.

Kiva.org didn’t invent microfinance; Muhammad Yunus is credited by most as the father of the concept. Back in the 70’s in Bangladesh (not the land of yak milk and honey by any means) he was just a middle-class guy teaching economics in a university when, on a field trip to have his students poke poor villagers with sticks, his heart opened up and he made a small personal loan to someone to better their lives through innovation and hard-work. The habit continued for many years until, in 1983, he founded the Grameen Bank, the first MFI. People thought he was crazy but now MFIs have opened throughout the world and the repayment rate averages at 95% across the board. Not only the initial concept of small, direct loans has trickled down but also the idea of loaning predominantly to women (who tend to stay sober and watch the kids) and often to groups of women (group pressure to keep the money on the straight and narrow) have become industry standard. The interest rates on loans are high to cover the amount of work which goes into the small loans but the size of the repayments are still small enough to keep people from being overwhelmed and the repayment cycles are short, presumably for reasons that make sense but I’m not remembering what those are right now. While I’m sure he’s done alright for himself Yunus does seem to genuinely care about people and the Nobel hippies thought so as well.

One woman is a little less angelic when it comes to microfinance, even tho she traveled on her 1st world credit cards to investigate this Grameen Bank for a couple of months. Tracey Pettengill Turner graduated from Stanford business school where she learned about the small loan practice but was disappointed that only large companies were able to invest globally leaving penny-ante stock market gamblers like herself out in the cold. She wanted a piece of the action and thought that having her own online MFI, one that paid out dividends, was her doorway to emasculating the financial world, or whatever her sick motivations might be. This is all best summed up with this snippet stolen from MicroPlace’s own history page:

Upon her return, Tracey discovered that the capital markets in the United States were beginning to view microfinance as an attractive investment opportunity. However, only major financial players like institutional and high net worth investors could invest. An everyday investor like Tracey had no way to participate. That insight led to the vision of MicroPlace: a company that enables everyday people to make investments in microfinance.

When eBay executives heard about MicroPlace, they were excited by the synergies between eBay’s mission to provide economic opportunity and MicroPlace’s vision to empower the world’s working poor. They saw MicroPlace as an ideal opportunity to put eBay’s assets to work in a way that could be truly world-changing. Powered by eBay’s expertise in connecting people, creating marketplaces and processing online transactions, MicroPlace could deliver on its vision to significantly impact global poverty.

Yes, you just read “synergies”, but the differences between kiva.org and MicroPlace don’t end there. Kiva may as well be a granola retailer, or maybe a manufacturer of lotions for people allergic the everything except butterfly wings and puppy kisses. MicroPlace looks like every company that has spawned in the internet age that’s predominantly a non-internet concept. Kiva unites the world through pictures and essays while MicroPlace has a bunch of pictures of people probably found using google-images. There are no direct investments– the money is given to a stateside investor which then deals with MFIs of its choosing around the world. You get their assurances that they’re investing soundly in yak milking and love, not oil. What is reassuring about MicroPlace is that there’s little patronizing– this isn’t about making the world a better place as much as it is making an investment you don’t feel guilty about because it’s supposed to be the right thing to do and you don’t even have to watch it happen. Kiva.org has designs on someday being able to offer investment with payouts but, for their sake, I hope they never get SEC clearance to do this– I’ll take my mildly aggravating, clueless, middle-class metrosexuals donating, not profiting, thank-you.

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Everything is just the same. We’re all part of society. Think we’ve got what we want. Think we’ve got variety. We like to watch television, listen to the radio. We like to read the Sunday paper. We believe what we’re shown.

There are those who disagree. They don’t like what they see. Different faces, different cases. Fighting all the apathy.

I call it revolution.

It’s not the usual jaunty number I find myself singing as I step out of the shower but somehow I seemed to be channeling what was going on hundreds of miles away. My old friend Lance Hahn died today.

I knew him before I ever knew him, y’know? When I was just getting started with music one of the first 7″ I bought was by an old band called Cringer, who had broken up before I was even aware of anything other than my sister’s tapes and MTV. The memory is pretty clear– Zen Flesh Zen Bones used at Neurotic Records for about two bucks. It wasn’t their best but the name was all over thanks lists from my favorite bands of the time, Green Day and The Mr T Experience and Crimpshrine, so I picked up the far superior Perversion is Their Destiny for a similar cost from Epicenter Zone and I had the bug. A collection of sharp, impassioned, literate (enough) but immediate and raw political and personal songs. The lines were blurry– it wasn’t exactly hardcore but it wasn’t too poppy. The lyrics were directly political and yet distinctly personal. The character of the band bled through the wax and the cover, dripped in your hands. These were people you could find yourself talking to on the street, at a show or at a party. There was no detachment from life, no separation brought on by the stage. These were people.

If I had your pen I’d write this song again, and let someone else write the next lyric. Every single day we have something to say, or at least have some appearance. I can’t be right all the time. I plagiarized the next line. I can’t say that I feel shame. If everyone did the same there’d be nothing left to blame.

It’s hard to believe– in anything– til everyone– does everything.

And so Cringer became and has persisted over the years as one of my favorite bands. Not because they never released a bad record or wrote a bad song but because the spirit of their existence and the heart and soul of their songs came to exist within me. More than probably any other band Cringer single-handedly is responsible for my drawing lines between my personal existence and the political implications of my life on the world around me. Lance wrote love songs that sounded like political treatises and political songs that were a conversation between two lovers unconscious in their struggle for control. Kit and fucking kaboodle…

When I started working at Epicenter we came to know one another and it was a little incongruous, the man and the records that had taken part in the shaping of the younger me. I never told him just what exactly his songs had meant to me and continued to mean– frankly it was embarrassing and he was a little more dorky then I had expected. Not that I was star-struck, possibly because from the connection of me and that band there had been that underlying understanding that we were on equal terms. Maybe it’s because he was so dorky. It just kinda happened, us knowing one another as people. I would sit behind the counter drinking a 40oz and smoking, spitting on the ground and irritating customers (both of them) by playing country records and he would walk in in his AK Press sweatshirt and maybe some fried tortellini from Mr. Pizza Man. It seemed like neither of us had anywhere else to go so we sat there, sometimes for hours, sometimes with others. We started staying well past closing, Lance and Kate and I most often, watching movies and talking massive amounts of shit. Non-stop shit talking. A never-ending torrent of shit was talked.

I’m watching for signals, they turn every night. It’s making me restless but nothing ignites. Oh, you know that I wanted this to be so much more, but I know we both know I should head for the door.

After a couple years Epicenter became financially and, honestly, culturally un-viable. I was pretending to live in Minneapolis while the collective dissolved itself, but at the same time Lance was seeing doctors and learning that he had a congestive-heart issue that was crushing his lungs against his rib cage. While I crawled the streets along the Mississippi at three in the morning he was getting blood work twice a week and working desperately to save his life. By the time I returned to help lay Epicenter down he was out of the worst but now had a permanent condition which would require constant monitoring and medication. You would never have known by talking with him unless you knew. Because he was so full of life and something like a potentially fatal disease was not going to keep him from hanging out and talking shit all night.

Epicenter was what brought us into orbit and when it was gone things changed dramatically. Kate’s house wasn’t as conducive to hanging out and now Lance and Liberty had started going out so we didn’t see too much of either of them. Eventually Libby decided to go back to school for linguistics and got into a program at the University of Texas in Austin. Lance continued to play in his post-Cringer band, J-Church, and continued to run his record label, Honeybear Records, through two house-fires which not only left them homeless but also destroyed his entire collection of records and priceless artifacts of his personal and punk rock history. We didn’t keep in touch, never having been the closest of friends and no longer having the common bonds we once shared. The last time we spoke was several years ago when J Church was on tour and played Bottom of the Hill. I skipped the show, not yet having attempted to listen to the band (a common feature of knowing Lance shared by everyone seems to be not being able to like whatever band he’s in when you know him– oh shit, except once I saw them play when I loaned them my PA to do an in-store at Howling Bull but I was busy kicking the amp trying to squeeze volume for the mics out of it so I didn’t really notice much except Lance had the guitar slung around his ankles and was bending chords by kneeing the neck), but we hung out afterwards before the van moved on for Portland. I was working a dead end job at a dying video store, the same as when he moved away. “I’m doing the same thing” he said. “Neither of us has changed since I moved” Well, I’m living at home tho, that’s shit. “Fuck, I’d live with your parents if I could. Your parents are cool.”

Okay, once he did spend the night at my parents’ house but they were out of town at the time.

Some months ago I heard through the grapevine that he had begun to experience kidney failure and had been placed on dialysis. There was talk of a waiting list for a transplant. It was bad news but something made me shrug it off, just as I shrugged off countless benefit shows and eventually a benefit compilation CD. I mean, this is Lance we’re talking about. He’ll be fine. He’ll be up and running in no time. J Church will go back on tour (maybe this time he can play Japan and wouldn’t it be funny to actually roadie this one now that I have money and he’s not having to go to the hospital every day) and he’ll release more records on Honeybear, write another newsletter and another historical essay on a long forgotten Peace-Punk band for MRR. He’ll be back and talking shit somewhere in the wee hours eating fried tortellini or telling a story from some Polish tour way back when.

But he went in for dialysis on Friday and collapsed. He slipped into a coma and on Sunday, October 21st, he slipped out of this world. I came home to two messages on my machine telling me and I spent some time on the phone talking about it and other things. Two people who I haven’t been very good about keeping up with but two people who are friends in the truest sense of the word and who deserve a little more effort on my part. And Lance did too, of course, even if it wouldn’t have mattered to him. Once again I have someone who I had stored away in the memory file assuming that we’d meet again and, when the time came, I could just reach back and grab that information, open the folder and begin where we left off. Not so, he’s gone. And despite the distance and the time in between the last time we spoke and now I will miss him.

Trapped in the back of my mind, is the thought too little too late. So when I try to define, I tend to over-complicate. When I’m told, again and again, ‘that’s just the way things go’. It leaves a bitter taste with me, because I think that we should know.

But at this time, I would have guessed
that we could rise above the rest.
But at this time, I guess I know
there are things we still can’t show.

Trapped in the back of our minds is a single ideology. Yet we bicker and we battle about what it means to be free. We never seem to have the courage to live the life we choose. So we lost what we should have won, because our numbers are diffused.

But at this time, I would have guessed
that we could rise above the rest.
But at this time, I guess I know
there are things we still can’t show.

Trapped in the back of my mind, trapped in the back of our minds. Trapped in the back of my mind, trapped in the back of our minds.

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Ever try to do the right thing? Terrible idea because the forces of fate are loathe to permit such acts of responsibility society puts forth as ideal standards. Time and time again the inclinations of would-be do-gooders result in failure, ridicule and winking, “should’ve known better” glances as the viral tales of defeat spread from amused bystanders to friends, family and co-workers.

My own life has been a steady trickle of avoiding situations which require a choice of right or wrong because the fear of retribution and the desire to act in accordance to values promulgated by church and state conspire with handshakes and bank transfers to tear me asunder. I hate the metro stops along the Embarcadero for the simple fact that they have fare boxes at either entry and standing on the platform suggests that the social contract has been signed– you have paid the entry fee and are waiting with evidence of this transaction for your civil chariot.

It may surprise you that I’m at all hesitant to pay for the bus. Okay, it doesn’t surprise the people who think of me as a pauper among misers nor the people who know of my coin jars but it might seem contrary to those who know my opinions on civic infrastructure and transportation: cities should not require the use of a car for the citizens to get to and from home and work and all points between. San Francisco has a far-reaching bus and trolly system which provides ample coverage but has never been able to manage this service in a timely, clean or safe manner. If the bus driver isn’t taking out a stop shelter or if the train isn’t dragging old Chinese women underneath then there’s a lunatic who has spent the past week marinating in their own shit yelling at their invisible friend or some kid with a gun in their backpack in the wrong part of town. All this after you waited for half an hour in the rain and get skipped by the first two busses which are packed closely followed by the third which is only going half the route.

So when you walk up to one of the Proof of Payment (POP) stops you’re subject to trying to ignore the fare cop who’s standing in your personal space shouting in a desperate attempt to raise their voice above your headphones– wearing dark sunglasses helps. But the cops are no where to be seen when you’re standing at the entry eyeing the fare boxes and so the casual observers will see only you paying for no damned reason and thinking you’re the fool for doing so. The only reason is fear of being caught but I always lost in the battle of fears and I always paced nervously around the stop near suffocation. For some reason I never had any problem smoking the whole time which is also liable for a ticket even after a maintenance worker warned me.

The odds are on your side, of course. How many fare cops can there be out there at any given time? There’s seven metro lines with any number of cars on the rails going two different directions. The underground stations are probably where most of the searches take place because tourists are easier to intimidate and not even the fare cops actually wanna ride MUNI. Hell, it’s not that long ago no one even gave a shit about the fare collection. Little kids would stare down bus drivers after running on the back door, bums would wave spent kleenex for fast passes and station attendants, if there was one, were usually too busy talking to someone to notice anyone hopping the stile. Shit, they didn’t even seem to notice anyone opening the wheelchair gate and its piercing alarm. But then they built these new stations out by State and the mall which was a joke. Except to Jay, the only person who was ever busted for fare evasion resulting in the second time he had to go to juvenile court. (more…)

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Making my way to Keith’s Monday evening I came across a red light on Fell. Directly across from my corner was a young woman holding the hand of, presumably, her child. After traffic cleared I began to cross and noted that they did not follow suit, the light still red for us and her with a kid. Suddenly I was back on another corner some night in the past– 16th and Dolores and I’m hot, sweating, on the way to a show and most likely suffering from a weak nerves cocktail… I’m sharing space with a man and two children and the light clears– I’m out in the street like a shot. “Is it really worth three seconds?” is rhetorically asked, indignant with just a light flavour of aggression. Three seconds being, of course, the amount remaining on the crossing indicator for 16th. I didn’t bother turning around– what, I’m gonna pick a fight with some guy and two kids over that?

It’s the children that he’s concerned about, or more specifically their penchant for picking up bad habits quicker than a cold. I even managed to feel guilty for showcasing such errant behaviour under this obnoxious rebuke… Hadn’t made it more than halfway across Fell by the time the vision cleared and I looked up at the woman. She wasn’t sternly insisting to her child that she never do as I’d just done, nor was she preparing to pepper the air with admonishment. There was no eye contact whatsoever and I swear that the woman’s head could not have been craned any farther from me had it been broken.

Some days before I had been making my way down to Safeway which didn’t seem like such a bright idea because my body was threatening to either send fluids suddenly flooding out from my bladder or surging up through my throat. My pace was brisk and I was pretty intent on trying to control my breathing to calm various functions down while simultaneously attempting to achieve the world time record for shopping excursions. Half a block ahead I observed a gawky man shuffling slowly, pausing, looking around, shuffling forward and I began a subtle arc so as to clear his odd meandering with enough space to avoid any collision and to avoid startling him by suddenly being right behind him. Fortunately for me this landed my foot right on top of a $20 folded in half laying on the sidewalk and, using the mystical art of plucking pennies from the street without anyone noticing what a scumbag I am, scooped it up without pause.

Between the moment my eyes caught the twenty as my foot covered it to the moment I had completed my recovery I had evaluated the half block’s time I’d watched the man wander slowly down the street. By the time he had reached the point where I was passing him we were both parallel to the money and I concluded that this served as evidence enough of his innocence of littering. It honestly didn’t even occur to me that the money might be his until I had already walked on, crossed a street and was halfway across another. God knows how long he’d been shuffling up and down the street looking around, stopping, looking, shuffling. He didn’t look too disheveled or insane for money, but how do I ask someone if they dropped this money laying on the ground? Hey, is this your $20?

Still, before I reached Safeway I was sent back in time, further than my trip to 16th and Dolores. Years back and I’m walking down Arkansas Street one night smoking a cigarette, walking the little circles I walked. Just in deeper dark of the trees holding the streetlights back I came across a pile of personal effects– it looked like someone had emptied a wallet or purse on the sidewalk and left it. Business cards, credit cards, and a shit ton of money– not a $20 but a stack of them. This seemed very exciting to me, but I kept looking through the cards until I found the ID. The address was, of course, right next to where I was crouched digging through the riches.

I could see what must have happened– some guy barely gets out of a cab after a night of life and loses everything in between the curb and his gate. Maybe his excesses deserve retribution but I’m not playing God tonight– I gather all of the shit and reach through the bars of the gate so I can drop it all in the newspaper mailbox. It’s three in the morning and I’m not gonna ring any doorbells.

The problem being, of course, why would anyone look for their lost wallet contents and money in the newspaper mailbox which is probably never used? So when I’m walking to work the next day I make a point to pass the house again and this time I ring the doorbell. I don’t want to be doing this, I don’t want to talk to anyone and I don’t want to look like some junkie expecting rewards. A woman answers, probably not much older then I am, and the fact that I have no business ringing the doorbell is clear on her face. But I explain why I’m there and she pulls everything out of the hiding place as I start to leave. “Wow, good karma!” she says through the bars. Before I can stop myself I reply,”yeah, but that’s for after you’re dead.” and continue on my way, but now I’m biting my tongue. It was the worst thing I could have said because now it sounds like I’m bitter for not being offered a reward. That still bugs me when I find myself thinking about it.

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