Bet You Never Had Pho Like This

First of all, I just want to apologize for completely sucking lately with posts. In my own defense, I have about a dozen half-finished entries in my que waiting to be finished - an argument that cannot be proven with evidence as that would break my process as an arteest. Yes, stop laughing, an inability to complete anything and procrastination contribute almost entirely to my status as an unemployed writer. That and dumb ass George Bush. But let's not get political. ANYWAY, hello. I've missed you. I would say I promise to write posts everyday and be a good little blogger, but a promise is only comfort to a fool (a wise man once told me that) and I'm kinda flaky (my own mother told me that).

Since writer's block is thwarting any attempt for me to finish any of the posts I so eagerly started and then so haphazardly abandoned, I give you this: A lunchtime observation....

And people say Oakland is scary. Yesterday, a couple friends and I were in San Francisco and decided to go get pho at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant. As we were in Union Square, the closest authentic restaurant was in the Tenderloin. Now if you're not familiar with San Francisco, the Tenderloin is not where you would take your grandma site-seeing. Hell, it's not even where you would take your half-cousin Thor site-seeing. Not unless Grandma or Thor has a penchant for men who wear blankets on their heads and argue with an invisible leprechaun about who gets to pee on the wall outside of Slippery Hand Massage. I think it's called the Tenderloin because a long time ago, it used to be the where all the meat factories were located. Now it's just sort of an African safari with junkies and angry prostitutes instead of zebras and gazelles. But good pho is good pho and we're all martial artists so into the Tenderloin we went. Fah-la-la-la-la!

Everything was actually pretty uneventful until the end of our meal when some live performers came out to entertain. And by that I mean, the crackheads in the building across the street started leaning out their windows and screaming down to the people in the street below. First, a lovely young toothless woman in a button-down did a jazzy little spread-eagle number sans pants OR underwear while balancing precariously on her sill about four stories up. She would lean back and cackle, kicking her legs up in the air and then swing them separately in circles, intermittently pausing to screech obscenities down to anyone who was watching, looking like one of the drunken pirates on the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. Then her boyfriend (or pimp or inbred brother) came and yanked her back into the room, slamming the window shut.

There was a slight intermission in which we had time to pick our jaws back up from the floor and exchange wide-eyed looks over our nearly empty bowls of soup before the next entertainer appeared. This performer was wearing underwear, but only underwear and they were the kind of pink that you only get from accidentally washing your whites with a red sock and looked like they might have been from Goodwill or picked out of a gutter. She did a little routine of thrashing with the blinds as if they were attacking her and then leaning, almost to the point of falling, out the window to yell and spit at the Asian man pushing the shopping cart on the corner.

And that was lunch. You would think that any sane human beings would rush to pay their bill and get back to an area of the city with a little less needles and vomit on the sidewalk. No. Instead we sat for awhile longer, waiting to see if there would be an Act III. When it seemed all the lunatics from the building across the street had settled in for a long, nap of God-knows-what induced unconsciousness, we wandered outside to continue our adventure. Think Crocodile Hunter goes urban. Anyway we got in another hour or so of thrills and near-brushes with scabies until we were approached and asked if we were holding. When we said no, our hopeful, unrelenting consumer offered his own services in exchange for, well, it wasn't cupcakes.

And that was curtains for me.