Two of the 16th-and-Mission locals – the big guy and the bent-over guy with the child’s shopping trolley – are engaged in some kind of mercantile activity. The big guy pours a handful of silver into the bent-over guy’s outstretched hand. The money spills onto the tarmac, catching the light and ringing like tiny cash registers.

“Dang,” says bent-over guy, “there’s a hole in my hand.”

It turned out Richard Stallman and Osama bin Laden were actually the same person. I was assigned to improve his public image. When I suggested trimming the beard, he became enraged.

Later, I was trying to search for “daylight saving New Zealand” on Google, but the text box kept changing “daylight saving” to “Intel” and “New Zealand” to “Helen Keller”.

*

In other news, my brother, he is funny.

We are brooding over coffee and bagels at Atlas.

R (deprecating the choice of music): Nothing like waking up to rockabilly. Hey,
can you have pomp rockabilly?

J: Prog rockabilly?

R: Add a banjo player to Yes.

J: Tubular Organs.

R: Tales of Topographic Farmboys.

J: Pink Floyd’s The Ditch.

Big (rousing himself from morning torpor): Dark Side of the Barn.

They ponder.

Big: The Alan Parsnip Project.