I'm in San Francisco yesterday letting Chinatown rape my head. I'm in my best friend Chris' car, we're idling in painful traffic deep in Chinatown, and I'm thinking of our high school days, we were friends and talking all the time about ideas and sensations of being alive, saying that it would be great if we could walk around suburban Tampa late at night and make ourselves available to the sounds and the air and the invisible conspiracies that surround us. Hear everything, and suck it all up like hot whisky.
So we were sitting there in the car in Chinatown yesterday and I thought I'd go ahead and do it again. My head is fuzzy and numb the last few years, but I owed it to Chris and to that rare air our friendship inhabits to let the sounds flow across my brain. The woman in the fish store talking in what must have been Chinese. The sound of bustling footsteps lazily scraping the sidewalk around the fruit stand to my right. The water from a faucet plunging into a sink down a drain and into an ocean outside the pier where we saw a guy snagging crabs with nothing but a wad of chicken fat and a lot of time to kill.
