Men on Bad Mood Day

Yesterday, in my regular comings and goings, I came across a few men who stick in my memory:

1. A block from work in the morning, after I turned the corner of Montgomery and Pine, in San Francisco's financial district, I found myself walking behind a man. I think he had dirty blond hair, was middle-aged, white. As we both kept walking, I got closer and closer to him. This meant he was going slower. He wore the clothes of someone who worked in the neighborhood, gray slacks, black leather shoes, some sort of sports coat. But as I came closer still, I noticed colorless stains on his pants and then he leaned towards and then against the building we were walking next to. And as I passed him, I turned to look at his face, eyes almost closed, mouth open, tongue sticking slightly out. He fell against the building then, but somehow kept his legs moving forward and so did manage a few steps before I turned away and walked into the building where my office is.

2. On a happily empty train going to school midday, I was seated facing the profile of a man seated across the train's width from me. In his hands he held paper sack which seemed to contain a can, though he never drank from it, but instead kept it between his legs, holding it tightly. Every once in a while he would lean over and spit an unbelievably huge amount of clear liquid onto the ground in front of him. Over the course of the ride, he managed a small pool of his own spit-up at his feet.

3. Coming back from school that night, I noticed a man waiting with all of us home bound sfsu students on the outdoor train platform. He stuck out because he had with him two large clear plastic bags, each filled with many smaller bags, those bags filled with trash: empty bottles with a few drops of liquid inside, folded and smoothed piles of paper, and other things. He gracefully weaved his way up the platform, and as I passed him I noticed a stick-like thing in his hand. A cane? The train took forever to come, and so when it did, there was a sizable crowd gathered and we all crammed our way through the two tiny doors, everyone eager for the perfect seat. I took one in the middle of a five-seat row and opened my book to read. A few seconds later, the man with the bags came and sat down next to me. As he was carefully arranging all his things and turning to sit, I had the impulse to get up and move away, but something kept me there. He sat, and his sleeve brushed my arm and I think he apologized. He kept to himself, crossing his legs carefully as not to disturb his bags, under which, I noticed then, he had laid two pieces of cardboard, to keep the ground from getting dirty where he set them down. Then I turned just a few more degrees to see the stick he held and noticed it had a handle on end and pinchers on the other. There were no unpleasant odors and he was by far one of the best stranger seat companions I've had on the muni since I moved to San Francisco just over a year ago.

Yesterday, I was in a bad mood, all day coming and going as I regularly do, but with thoughts swirling, mouth down turned, little gray storm cloud just two feet above my head.