After the game

There was a day game yesterday at AT&T Park so, when I took my lunch break around 3:15, King Street was mobbed to a surreal degree. To that mob, everything must have seemed just right: leaving the game, big crowd. I wonder if it occurred to any of them that there are some people on King Street with non-Giants-related business?

On the block with my building is an alcove, a concave scoop removed from its building, a smoking area. Sometimes, in spite of the shallowness of the scoop and the lack of cover, it attracts the homeless. Yesterday, as I passed by on my way to get tacos, shouldering through the baseball crowd, a woman sat there in the alcove, legs crossed, and cut off all her hair with a steak knife, the tufts strewn before her, fluttering softly away on the breeze.

When she was finished, she bowed her mangy bald head toward a new task, the circular arrangement of a small pile of what looked like animal droppings on the concrete in front of her. It wasn't the shit of a large mammal, if it was shit at all; it was smaller, white-flecked pieces, like bird shit. Maybe it was from geese.

I looked at this scene for only a few seconds because, you know, it's not polite to stare. Then, for the next hour or so, it remained burned into my retinas, an omen of the apocalypse.