Woke to a gray Sunday morning.  Lingered with coffee and an apple fritter.  The gym was not nearly as interesting.  I would leave town today, drive north.  But for that I would need to enter the garage.  Gloom.

It was still there, the car, with the smashed up fender.  It hadn't gotten any better.  The garage ceilings low, the pillars and posts all about, my heart sank as I unlocked the door.  There is no way to see out of the narrow back window on this piece of shit Taurus, but I now recognized that there was a small video image embedded on the rear view mirror, something just larger than a commemorative stamp. As I backed out ever so slowly, the car began to beep--beep. . . beep. . . beep--then faster.  If only I had known about this before I wrecked the goddamned thing.  I backed from the space without mishap, but I had the fear.  I drove the requisite five miles per hour out of the garage.

City traffic has never bothered me much.  I like the "all gas or all brake" mentality of it.  Not today.  Every moving vehicle, it seemed, was out to destroy some other uninsured part of the piece of shit Taurus.  I drove like an old man.

Up Van Nuys and over the Golden Gate Bridge.  The S.F. Marathon was run that morning.  Perhaps that was why the bridge was filled with thousands of people.  Tour buses clogged the parking lots at either end of the bridge at the scenic overlooks.  I gave up on lingering.

Sausalito is always a mistake.  I had been there when it was just a funky boating town, and even then there was something silly about it, though once I watched a film about the last commercial sailing ship as it went around the Horn in a bookstore there.  The black and white footage was incredible, cameraman in the crows nest, the giant waves reaching almost that high, barefoot men in the rigging furling sails, toes holding onto the ropes like they belonged to monkeys.  Jesus, it looked like a terrible way to be poor.

But in Sausalito, I went into a men's store and saw the thing I wanted, a silk/cashmere unlined jacket by Canali.  I might have considered buying it if I had not crashed the car.  Maybe.  It was $1,400.  But it draped like. . . I can't find the simile. . . and was so thin and fine as to be nothing at all.  The Prodigal Girl has tried to talk me out of this jacket for a year now, but she is wrong.  I should not have seen it, though.  I am tortured.

Hungry, having not eaten anything but the fritter all day, I sat at a table at a restaurant on the main avenue, always a mistake, a Mexican place where I ordered Huevos Rancheros that were not very good. I'd have been better off with the jacket.

Then to Mill Valley.  Why, you might ask?  Nostalgia, I guess.  Mill Valley seems the birth of liberal normal to me, the place where rich democrats live safe, groovy lives of beauty and splendor outside among gardens and gas heaters against the evening chill.   This is the birthplace of the Original Banana Republic and the Original Smith and Hawken stores.  Mill Valley is a place of imagination and of dreams.

Or so it seems.  Nothing bad could happen there.  Kids go to Mt. Tamalpais High School and grow up straight and strong.  I would love to live there for a year in order to write a dark detective novel.

Out of town to Muir Woods and Muir Beach, the winding road filled with Sunday traffic.  In Mill Valley the sun had come out, but along the coast the weather was gray and damp and cold, the wind cutting through my thin shirt and chilling me to my bones.  Standing on a rocky outcropping looking over the Pacific, listening to the fog horns somewhere in the distance, all I could think of was a thick bowl of seafood chowder and a heavy beer.  It was getting late now.  Time to head back into the city.

I didn't bother to change my clothes.  I would go to the wharf and find some soup.  Out on the street at Union Square, trying to find the bus to take me across town, I took out my iPhone and began shooting video.  And just as I did, a woman approached me saying,

"Hello, dear, you're handsome, you know that, listen, I need something to eat, I got called into work today and I don't have any money and I need to eat because I'm diabetic and my blood sugar is falling, could you buy me a hotdog or something?"

I was holding the iPhone camera on her the whole time, but when she asked for food, I quit.  There was a hotdog stand not ten feet away.

"Sure," I said, "let's get a hotdog.  I'll have one with you."

"Oh, god, you are sweet, no one else would even talk to me. . . ."

She was crying.

"C'mon, let's eat."

We were standing at the hotdog cart, the cute cart lady smiling at us.

"What do you want," I asked my friend.

"A hotdog and a diet coke."

"Make it two, but I'll have a regular coke," I said.

She was drying her eyes and eating and telling me some story of her divorce that made no sense.  She was one of the insane or idiotic, I didn't know, brought on by a life of misery and hardship.  But she had asked me for food, not money, and times are hard.  How can you deny anyone food?

The hotdog, however, was playing games with my stomach after a couple bites.  What was I thinking?  I did not eat hotdogs and I had used the condiments in the open metal containers outside the cart.  I I had played this along far enough, so with a certain sweetness, I bid my friend adieu and went about my way depositing the hot dog in the nearest trash bin hoping I had not done any permanent damage.

Down to the water in one of the little trolley buses, around the Embarcadero, a teenage girl sitting in the seat across the aisle from me, unsure and a bit sullen.  Her father, two seats ahead, was facing me with a scowl on his face, aggressive, challenging.  What did I do? I wondered.  It must have been something, for eventually he left his seat and came to stand beside her.

They got off at Pier 39, that hideous Disneyland of schlock--Hard Rock and Bubba Gumps--once a place where you could buy fish from the boats early in the morning.  I was there in 1975 amazed at the pretty Asian women in dresses and careful makeup that early in the morning.  Oh.  I hadn't been around that much then.

I found Cioppino's, a tourist joint, no doubt, but it served a fish stew that was "famous" and I had a hankering for just that.  I sat at the bar and watched the couples and families come in.  And  tonight, none of them seemed that happy.  Distracted kids texting on iPhones.  Father's, too.  Bored mother's drinking wine and looking around the cavernous room, men watching Sports Center on the t.v. above the bar.  Big chunks of sour dough for me and a tomato based stew full of seafood and a big draft Stella. I was happier than they tonight, I thought, though I was still thinking of that jacket back in Sausalito.  Other than that, maybe, I had what I wanted tonight.  I ordered a Sambuca to finish things off.  The barman was too generous with his pour.  There is only so much that syrupy sweetness you can take, but with a sailor's elbow, I tossed it back and banged the glass onto the bar.  Some patrons looked.  Sorry, I thought, it was only a gesture.

Outside, I stood on the street awhile watching the crowd walk by.  The air was damp and cool and the sky hidden by clouds.  It had not been a day you dream of, but it had been what I got, and I could make a dream or two if I wanted some day in the future remembering the way the boats floated in the harbor against the distant islands or the way the fog swirled about my head on the rock above the Pacific.  It was not a dream but there were elements of a dream and I would store them somewhere for when I might need them.  It was cold now, but I was only a bus ride away from sleep.