I seem to be allergic to this state. Some of my skin has gone rubbery and hot, like an octopus tossed onto a bed of asphalt. For this, I am taking any number of pills each day. I smell like chemicals and lizards are licking the inside of my skull.

It may be full of beauty here and the lovers walking together and the tourists with their cameras strapped would be proof that it's true but it's not my kind of beauty and I am left starving for something else. I am too tired to look for more and too full to receive it anyway and the people in front of me are telling me things I don't want to know.

The woman who sits in the ferry seat next to the slot for wheelchair access. She is making an ugly bet that no-one will need the space and she won't have to house her clutter of bags around her ankles. With her naked skin she would like you to think she is gorgeous naturally but I know each one of her eyelashes is fake and the spill of hair down her back is fake too.

This woman is wobbling across the trolley tracks risking her neck with virtiginously high heels. From behind that danger is eclipsed by the fountain of her hair, a stiff spread of radiated halo. I can smell it from 5 feet behind her. She has downgraded to the the $.99/can spray, economic downturn forcing her into Aqua Net territory.

In line at the 7-11 I watch the street worker nodding out standing up at the front of the cash register line. It's an amazing feat, baffling the Sikh guys behind the counter. I'm baffled too. I examine her careful get-up, the matching pink plastic sandals, belt, purse, her arms and legs bared by clothing way too stingy for an overcast day. I can't find the track marks, she has been doing this long enough to get clever but not long enough to get sloppy. It's a fine and awesome balance.

It hasn't rained here in months. There is a summers worth of urination layered along the side of the building, rich, vile and potent. At the corner someone has vomited orange and chunky onto the crumbling edge of the faded movie palace. A few doorsteps down a streeter is listing slowly to the ground. He got the pick of the used men's clothes from his shelter this morning, a good pair of suit pants, a good pair of dress shoes. He has no socks and is talking into a cellphone which may or may not be a geniusly elaborate pantomime. I am waiting at the corner for the light to turn when an ambulance comes screaming the wrong way down Market Street. The subject of that attention is standing in front of my building, supported by two policemen and I am relieved that there is no blood, no yelling, and by the time I get a large half-caf coffee with skim milk from the open air stand, he has been bundled away. DIstance from parking garage to office: one block.