doit, doit now!

As usual Patty and I were roughhousing on Friday night and somehow we started shoving our iPhones into each other’s mouths. I bit down on his phone (very lightly) and felt glass fragments spray into my mouth. I shattered the screen and dented the aluminum on the back. SMRT.

So my friend Andy Hill and I went to Minako Organic Sushi for dinner the other night. Minako is my favorite restaurant in the world. It’s run by my friends Judy/Minako and her mother, Yoko. Judy, who used to work in the music industry (she will kill me for writing that), runs the floor and Yoko runs the kitchen. I call it the Japanese Laundry. It takes a long time to eat there and the food is exquisite. It’s also on Mission between 17th and 18th, which is essentially crackwhore central, and the street is thick with crazy drug addicts.

As we are wont to do, we closed the restaurant. Yoko came out and poured us some sake and started telling us the most absurd and funny story. She said that a (male) Yakuza came in to the restaurant a while back wearing pink pants and talking on a Hello Kitty cell phone. She said he was very quiet and normal and friendly.

But then he started telling her that he was smuggling cocaine and heroin stuffed inside of a condom stuffed inside of a condom stuffed inside of a condom, apparently because then dogs can’t smell them. She also mentioned he was putting them inside sushi fish or something like that (in which case I imagine the dogs really can’t smell them). But then she said he went outside and a bum panhandled him and he karate-chopped the bum! And she actually said “Hi-ya!” in her adorable Japanese accent. I just about lost it. Granted, I had had a lot of sake at this point, but the mental image of a pink-panted Yakuza karate-chopping a panhandling bum was just a little much for me at the moment.

Plus I have had this picture of the Japanese man with the pink bear gun sitting around on my hard drive for a long time and this was a perfect opportunity to use it.

Speaking of good things in my life, there is now a herd of goats on the hillside of Corona Heights Park near my home. There has been a huge problem with homeless encampments there and they need to clear the brush out so they can build switchback trails to allow the cops to get to the encampments. It’s sort of funny to see 300+ goats a block above Castro Street, and no one knows they are there.

Sadly, this breakup threw me into severe acute depression, and it’s just now I am feeling a little like myself again.

I had lunch on Monday with Carol Lin, a former CNN and ABC anchor who has the distinction of being the first reporter to break the story of 9/11. (She is also friends with my friend Jason Bellini… Very small world. In one of email exchanges she said “Oh I love Jason! He picked me up in Kosovo and drove me to Macedonia.” How often do you get emails like that?). Her husband passed away from cancer at a young age and now her mother has it. When she found out her husband had cancer she decided that she was going to stop working and become his caregiver. Since his unfortunate passing she has decided that she wants to be a force for change in the world of cancer (and chronic disease in general). She’s a very motivated and passionate individual.

We were meeting over the possibility of me helping her out with a new venture she is trying to create. We got along great. After the technical and business discussions finished we began to get a little personal. At one point she started getting visibly and softly upset and said that in the midst of all of her sadness she one day realized that she just had to wake up every morning and choose happiness. She said it was work but that she had to choose it every morning.
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