The Tenderloin in San Francisco has many myths as to how it got the name. Most revolve around the cops either getting hazard pay, or accepting bribes, so they could afford a better piece of meat, or better yet were actually paid with meat. Another is a reference to the loins of the prostitutes frequenting the streets.  They probably all have an element of truth.

We stayed in a hotel that accepted pets. Pet acceptance seems strange in a city hotel, especially when you walk in with a real live dog and all the guests and manager look at you wondering why you weren’t in on the joke. “Yeah, yeah, we take pets. Sure.”

On this particularly fine evening during the brunt of the heat spell that put the usually cool San Francisco into the mid 90s, the tall, dark-haired manager of some foreign decent was training a new guy. The new guy had a “C” scar framing his right eye, and admitted over the course of our checking in that he’d spent four years in the military, and yet this computer thing was really not agreeing with him.

From his somewhat dingbat demeanor, the question arose in my mind whether the lad had been shot.

He’d started our checkin on one computer, then got sidetracked and started again on a second computer, but the machine kept bipping at him at the final moment of glory because we were already halfway into the system. Every time it blipped he would do a two-step shuffle, like one of those AI “extras” in video games from just a few years ago. They look human, but you weren’t supposed to interact with them, because their programming was as advanced as the tree next to them.

When the moment came to pay, my dad offered cash.

Woh.

From the reaction to “cash,” we may as well have offered them a shot in the neck with a lethal drug. Military boy began walking a predestinated AI track to a filing cabinet and back to the computer as he held the money, looking for 48 cents in change. It took him 10 minutes.

For the final doozy, I popped the question of whether we could bring our bikes into the room. Apparently this was the equivalent of holding up a dead skunk and asking for a trashcan. “Bike” triggered their Atari-era 8-bit Pong-level algorithm, and they put their respective feet together, stood at attention, and cocked their heads back about four degrees off vertical. Their eyes were wide and their mouths were slightly open.

“Bikes …” they said in unison.

At one in the morning I took a shower, and the water was tepid, at best. For $130, which I realize is pretty damn affordable on a Friday night in the city, even if it is the Tenderloin, you’d expect some hot water.

Prior to this, I took my pup for a walk, which a white boy isn’t really supposed to do during the witching hour in the city of vice. The tranny hookers on the corner were 6’5” and wore miniskirts up to their esophagus. Their square-jawed butt-chins would probably slot really well between your thighs.

The 20-dollar a night city lot we had to park in is another story entirely, complete with mothers with children sleeping in their cars in some distant corner of the five-story lot. The lot abutted another hotel, and the fifth level of the lot had a door that entered the hotel—to the third floor.

The Tenderloin, baby, where you can get steak and eggs til 2 a.m. for $7.99. Strangely enough, I didn’t see one cop the whole time I was there.

Salon.com had an excellent story about goats and chickens with human DNA.

Progress.

A company based in New England called GTC Biotherapeutics has been manipulating the genes of New Zealand pygmy goats in order to derive antithrombin straight from the milk. The protein prevents blood clots and helps against heart attacks and strokes.

Basically, a goat embryo is artificially fertilized, then lab techs find the goat’s genome that codes for a sugar in the milk and put a human gene in which codes for a naturally occurring protein. Tom Newberry, GTC’s vice president of corporate communications, explains it thus:

“The mammary gland is nature’s way of making proteins that are nutritious for offspring,” Newberry says. “All we’re doing is placing extra DNA coding in this natural pathway.”

So you see? Milk, it does a body good.

The process has a 10 percent success rate, meaning over the last few decades there have been hundreds of modified goat babies that didn’t come out looking like goats. It’s like that room of clones that Ripley walks into in Alien: Resurrection. An otherwise schlocky addition to a then stale franchise, the underlying story was pure science fiction gold. The hero Ripley on screen is the result of splicing the DNA of alien and human, resulting in the perfect hybrid: a human-looking semi-indestructible killing machine with acid for blood that can command legions of freakish, drooling labia monsters.

In the case of the goat babies that actually look like goats and produce milk that is chemically processed to remove the desired proteins, Newberry claims it’s safe as pie. There’s a control sequence placed in the gene so it’s only triggered during lactation. Besides, it’s a single gene, not a whole chromosome. Confusing the two, according to Newberry, is like saying:

“I moved my brother-in-law into his new apartment with a pickup truck. Now I’m going to move all of New York City with that same truck.”

Yes. Just remember people; clone milk is as comforting as milk from your own mother’s teat, and as rewarding as helping out your brother-in-law in a pinch. It’s all about family.

In creating these chimeras, the potential for unexpected side effects like retroviral or pathogenic agents that up to this point in the normal course of evolution haven’t even been imagined opens a whole world of possibilities for the Big Pharm’s. They could invoke diseases that may have lain dormant until the death of the world.

Goats and pigs and chickens, oh my. Old McDonald’s Pharm will never be the same.

In the very near future, when transgenic animals will be as common as Hamburger Helper, museums will be erected in much the same vein that Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Auschwitz have memorial museums to showcase the follies of man’s past. Like natural history museums have recreations of Indian villages, these gene history rooms will showcase mutated goats and violently wrong human offspring, and standing to the side will be a smiling, gentrified gray-haired man in a lab smock, nodding approvingly.

We’ll also have the option during prenatal care to have our fetuses injected with a medley of proven, family-friendly genes from the likes of a Great White Shark, a cat, and a bullfrog. By then we’ll have polluted the skies so bad we’ll need the enhanced eyesight, ability to breath through our skin, and the genetic necessity to move. Sleep will be an option provided by the pharmagenoceuticals in the form of cherry flavored Slothquill, a milk derivative extracted from the tweaked mammary glands of the Amazonian Sloth.

If you’d prefer your child never sleep, we also have snake genes, which produce children with lidless eyes.

Elementary-school staring contests will never end.

Sleep well.

There is an establishment in Montecito where high-heeled denizens gladly pay a premium for things you can get elsewhere for much less.

At times in the past the sandwiches, coffees, danishes and various other deli items might have been worth the price, but as is the trend with most businesses these days, the place is operated by our friends south of the border. While these fine people can make a delicious sandwich, they are way less than adept at crafting specialty coffee drinks.

So too, it seems, are Brazo boys. (Brazilian, for the unitiated.)

I walked in and behind the counter were two Brazo’s fresh off the plane. It was obvious that either a gay or Cougar manager had barely contained their drool as these two young slabs of flesh were hired. I knew instantly the two had no idea what they were doing. Right then I should have turned around and walked out before anything weird happened, but hey, I’m a writer, and I do things for the story.

This was going to be interesting.

The two walked back to the coffee/juice bar, where the mondo professional juicer sat, complete with its clear, 4-inch tube that schlopps all the pulp into a catch bucket …

… on a side note, why is the refuse tube clear? Admittedly, I experience a wide-eyed, perverse satisfaction when the vegetables have been properly tortured by the jet engine and their juiceless remains are flung down the chute; but why do we need to see that? If it weren’t see-through would we assume that bone marrow and liver particles were being assimilated into our precious beverage?

Anyway, I asked for a base of carrot juice, and the kid began hammering whole carrots down the grindhole: complete with little green nubbies and wizened points. “Dude,” I said over the din, “could you clean those up a little?”

There was a trickle of juice, indicating the machine hadn’t been cleaned in about three days and therefore the backed-up pulp was absorbing all the juice. After six carrots there was less than half an inch of juice. I pointed out the beets, which are good for some zing, but you definitely don’t want to get comfy in a nice chair and guzzle down pure beet juice. This kid put in three beets before I could stop him.

This was getting tedious.

I requested orange juice, knowing from previous visits that a big bucket of fresh-squeezed OJ was kept in the fridge behind them. One of them ran to the front of the store and quickly came back with a whole orange—peel and all.

    “Uh-oh.”

I watched, bewildered, as the kid actually tried to put the whole orange into the machine, but it was a round peg in a square hole kind of thing. He cut the orange in half and without hesitation slammed both halves into the machine, and the “juice” came glarching out the spout into my cup of … broth.

    “Um, look man, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you don’t use the whole orange.”
    “Oh. Okay. Yeah—we don’t normally work in this section.”
    “I seriously couldn’t be any more aware of that fact.”

A girl from one of the nearby boutiques walked in and asked for a Chai Latte. Both boys froze in much the same way they had when I’d asked them for a juice.

    “You’re really going to enjoy that,” I said to her over the dying din of the juice machine. “These boys are professionals.”

The orange retriever started shuffling boxes around as if in preparation for a latte. I could tell by the look on her face she had immediately deduced that letting the two Wonder Twins fulfill her order might be a drastic mistake. I left the store with my “juice,” making damn sure no money left my pockets, and before I walked five feet the girl came out, empty handed and shaking her head with a look of befuddlement.

As I said, this store is echelon, where people with money go to gladly spend more for less, yet these two bozos were literally running the store, and neither had any idea what they were doing.

More for less, indeed.

Harvey Molotch is the father of my good buddy Noah Molotch. Both are extremely smart little fellows, and as father and son interact together like skinnier versions of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Alone, though, they both possess that uncanny social magnetism that demands you listen to what they have to say.

Molotch, Jr. is in the process of reinventing how humans prepare for draught by studying nature’s natural reservoirs: snow. Molotch Sr. is in New York, at least in a New Yorker article from March 3, 2008, talking about urinating in public.

I cheat a little on the phrasing, because Harvey Molotch is teaching a class about integrating men and women’s bathrooms, specifically public restrooms.

Coed bathrooms to my knowledge have only happened in science fiction like Battlestar Galactica and movies like Starship Troopers. (Both military-based.) In real life, the prudish underbelly of our society would get rather squeamish if men and women were encouraged to evacuate their bowels in the same room. For instance, in men’s bathrooms, the urinals are sometimes blocked by your own personal divider, or in some older bathrooms, the wall is lined with a bunch of urinals and no dividers at all.

When I have a divider, I suddenly feel as if it’s absolutely necessary, and feel violated when it’s not quite enough shield. But what is it really? The divider creates some weird “private” zone, and they’re even more unsettling when they’ve been placed wrong, like the project ran out of money. One such bathroom in a movie theater has a divider every two urinals, thus when crowded creating some odd partnership with the man pissing next to you. In the smaller bathrooms the urinal is sometimes right next to the sink, without a divider, and when that other dude turns on the water and starts washing your hands—his hands, sorry—it gets a might bit personal.

Plus, there are a lot of weirdos. In science fiction coed bathrooms work wonderfully well visually, especially when the various actors must interact together in such an intimate setting. But when Trenchcoat Pete discovers that red-headed Molly is using that new coed bathroom down the street, what’s to stop him from getting all freaky on her and upsetting the pleasant vibe of unity?

Also, women’s bathrooms are usually immaculate places of rest, while men’s are disturbingly unkempt representations of their own inability to aim their penis. The clean factor alone would cause some major problems.

All in all, just talking about “the most euphemized of subjects” while sitting in a room full of budding intellectuals would be an awesome experience. Years ago on a camping trip, my fellow camper’s girlfriend cited a study about the uses of toilet paper. It seems that men fold and women wad. The foundations are there, we just need to remove our societal chastity belts and hearken back to the days of the Greeks and the Romans.

Here’s to pissing with you.

According to the New York Times, it seems that every one-cent increase in gasoline prices translates into Americans paying $1.42 billion more a year for gas.

Two-thirds of that goes to foreign producers.

And now that the cheapest gas, at least in my neck of the woods, is eagerly licking the $4.50 range and climbing, I’ve switched to counting the gallons, rather than the money. Back when gas was sub-four dollars, you could pretend you were “filling” your tank by getting fifteen or twenty dollars; but now I get up to five gallons, and damn if the money total hasn’t gone up a dollar every week for the same amount of gas.

The BBC recently reported one station in Exeter charging £9 a gallon, or £1.99 a litre, because of a fuel strike. At the current conversion rate, that’s $13.50 a gallon.

In the meantime, my brother is still bugging me to chug on up to San Francisco, so I can give him my old Gary Fisher Hoo Koo E Koo. I would do this because I’m a nice brother, and my knee’s been injured for the last two years and thus couldn’t ride a bike.

I’m back, however, and suddenly giving my bike away is leaving a very unpleasant taste in my mouth.

So, to counter my pending empty bike syndrome, I’ve taken to “shopping” for a new bike, preferably a dual-shock XC trail bike, as they’re called in the business. These new bikes are nothing less than works of art, and some border on alien technology. The catalogs, specifically for Kona, Trek, Gary Fisher, Specialized and Santa Cruz, are like bike porn.

Seriously, even the bikes you don’t want, like the shockless commuter street bikes designed for women, look tantalizing and utterly desirable.

I guess my point is that in times of drastic gas prices, (and let’s face it, even if the price per gallon goes down, four dollars is the new cheap) we look for alternatives. This brings to mind the obvious shortsighted money-grubbing tactics of the American automakers, who were all collectively shocked and dismayed that their Hummers, Ford F150s and other gigantic ilk are suddenly not their bread and butter. Cars like Honda Civics and other gas sipping sedans are popular.

Well, duh.

All I can ask is: are car makers, especially red-blooded, make-it-bigger-until-you-need-the-whole-godamn-parking-lot-bigger so shortsighted that they don’t have a contingency plan in place in case their galactic fleet loses selling points?

Consider the hybrid Chevy Tahoe, for instance. Not a bad idea, and with—get ready for it—20 miles to the gallon (phoo! can you handle the economy?), you think they’d be hyping the crud out of that gas sipping behemoth. But no, according to the few articles I read, it’s almost like they’re embarrassed to be upsetting the tried and true Americans who gain a certain sense of pride out of driving a vehicle that thrives on gargling massive quantities of gasoline.

So, here I am facing the conundrum of guzzling more than $300 in gas so I can give my brother my old bike. Money that could go into my new bike fund. But I suppose giving him my bike so he doesn’t have to ride the bus and experience people projectile-coughing blood or getting hit in the face with rubber bands shot from errant youths is a service toward piece of mind.

Piece of mind knowing that in about a year I’m going to have one sweet ass new bike.