Travel Log - 10/04/2011 - Jazz jam session, Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, CA

Upper Haight street is one of the bohemian arteries of San Francisco. It's busy through the night, and Haight is never lacking for interesting people willing to go above and beyond the normal levels of weird anti-social behavior expected from bohemians and vagrants.

I took the Muni N line to Stanyan and Cole, cutting straight to the Haight Street entrance to Golden Gate Park. I wanted to visit the panhandle, and make my way to Ashbury by way of the panhandle.

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By the time I had walked along the panhandle and come to Ashbury street, it was too early for the band. I walked west down Haight Street, and found Club Citrus Noodle House. Delicious-looking Thai noodles were being prepared and served en masse, so I sat down and ordered a bowl of beef noodles.

The giant, steaming bowl set in front of me was large enough to fit a volume of liquid equal to about 10 days of bowel movements. I gulped. The noodles were served with the usual varnishings: basil, sprouts, and a lemon (limes work better), chili sauce, unidentifiable sweet sauce.

By the time I had finished, all the shops on Upper Haight had closed, until the only things open were bars, with a handful of coffee shops or head shops open too. The street was mostly quiet, except for small portals of activities dotting the street and people milling about. In one coffee shop an angry Middle Eastern man, probably the owner, was yelling something about hippies to two hippies getting coffee, with the smell of burning and a wave of heat emanating from the open door. Uncomfortable on many levels. The tattoo crowd is out getting more skin decorated, and the bar crowd is milling about inside drunkenly, spilling into patio areas where the crowds belch great clouds of noise pollution.

And through it all, there are the dog walkers. Rain or shine, 5 AM or 5 PM, and any times in between... dog walkers.

3 in the morning? Dog walkers who procrastinated.

11 AM? Dog walkers who came home for lunch.

7 PM? Dog walkers who do things correctly and on-time the way they are supposed to, and probably also make their beds in the morning.

Not that it's a bad thing. It's an illustrative statistics example: given the per capita and gross dog populations in San Francisco, human and dog population densities, the mean radii of all dog walks, and a few other minor details, one may compute the probability that one has of seeing a certain number of dogs being walked. Oh look, there's one now -