August Kleinzahler

I went down to the corner bar last night with a few of my neighbourhood friends. We get together every few weeks down there. It’s a bit young, noisy and yup for my taste – I prefer the old man slob bar across the street – but it’s become our custom to meet there and catch up.

Whither the sea lions? That’s what’s on the minds of many here in San Francisco these days, no less than the vanished Nigerian head of state has puzzled citizens in that corner of the world. They disappeared a couple of months ago from their gathering place on the now abandoned boat docks at the foot of Pier 39 on Fisherman’s Wharf, after the Disney parks the third most visited tourist attraction in the United States. Disgusting and malodorous as they were, lolling about and barking, plastering the docks with guano, occasionally slipping into the Bay for sustenance, these creatures were, apparently, the big draw on the pier, an open-air, rectangular hell of T-shirt, junk food and gee-gaw shops. There is absolutely not one single reason to visit Pier 39 unless you are a conspicuously unimaginative family with small children and a camera from Terre Haute, Indiana on holiday.

I called Poluszny, my friend the retired cabdriver. He knows many things. ‘Paolo,’ I said, ‘where did the sea lions go to?’

Now that Tiger Woods is making ready to pull the sock off the head of his driver once more, and with our concern and warm wishes going out to Sandra Bullock in her moment of heartbreak, who among us can ignore the devastating toll sexual addiction takes, not merely on the celebrities we love and admire, but on the broader society, a society reluctant to even acknowledge this serious mental health issue and the countless lives it affects, inevitably in the most damaging of ways.

There is agitation abroad in the land to put a likeness of Ronald Reagan on the face of the $50 bill, supplanting that of Ulysses S. Grant, Civil War hero and two-term president of the United States. Grant was a mixed bag; presidents almost always are. Consider Andrew Jackson, the face on the $20 bill, and nowadays a most familiar face since the advent of cash machines. Next time you’re in Oklahoma, why don’t you ask a Cherokee, probably an older one, not attached to an iPod, about Andrew Jackson.

There are too many people on the planet, and that is why we are out there drilling at 5000 feet in the Gulf of Mexico. There are too many people, and it is not at all an acceptable thing to say so. The Left doesn’t like it, neither does the Right, in so far as those quaint terms are relevant in this context. And the Catholic Church really, really doesn’t like it. There are too many of them, to be sure, spitting betel juice and flipping tortillas all the live long day; but there are also too many of us, fussing with our handheld whatevers as we jostle one another amid the stalls of Camden Town or pour off the N-Judah streetcar at day’s end, down the block from me here in San Francisco, where a great deal of tortilla flipping goes on and, doubtless, the more than occasional instance of betel juice expectoration.