(NB: this draft was found in the Phone transition. Don’t know why it never posted but I’ll try now.)
9 Aug 2017
It’s quiet out here. The BART lets you out at Montgomery in a vague aroma of smoke and diesel that suggests London as you walk upstairs in the fog past the Palace Hotel. Popping into the office of American Giant – where they have a showroom, not a retail shop as such, but able to try sizes and evaluate colors and plan your fall order – feels like a bit of something else. Then back on the Muni, the N Judah, where it’s not far from Market Street to the beach, a beach that’s fogged in solid and 57 degrees on an August Wednesday.
There’s coffee and cinnamon toast at Java Beach, and a couple blocks away, Pittsburgh’s Pub has been open since 8 AM dispensing adult libations in a manner recalling Cookie’s Caboose in Punxsutawney. It’s a marvel that a little slice of western Pennsylvania exists in the corner of a motel three blocks from the Pacific. And it may be a day game in the summer sun for the Giants, but the fans piling into the train are bundled for autumn here on the edge of the Western world.
In the Inner Sunset, at the Fireside Bar (whose fireplace is tragically unlit despite 58 degrees weather at 1 PM), the bartender sees the Vanderbilt hat and immediately asks about Damian Jones. It’s hard to explain but there’s just something about the light rail trundling down the street outside that heightens the sense you’ve landed somewhere else – a phenomenon equally pronounced at Trial’s in San Jose…