Day With Chelsea

The world is a cruel, jobless wench and no amount of denial or resume submitting will ever change the fact the your unemployable. It's not even a factor of resume building when not even an unpaid internship will pay you attention. Hello! I'll work for peanuts, live in a dog shed, run on a treadmill hooked to a generator so the coffee maker has power!
What drove this point home, my own rejection letters not being enough, was the fact that my friend Chelsea, who I had the pleasure of spending a sunny San Francisco day with, has been slaving away at her unpaid internship for 10 hours a week, looking for paid work, even at clothing stores, submitting thousands of resumes, and getting nowhere but in to debt. What's sad is that by most accounts she is much more qualified than me, and her resume and cover letters are practically Shakespeare.
Aside from commiserating, Chelsea and I had a lovely day wandering the city. We saw Fisherman's tourist trap, a famous place to waste time and money watching smelly seals defecate on the docks while eating a $6 hotdog you spent an hour in line waiting for. They also have a crab statue and guys who dress in silver and pretend to be robots for money.
On our way there we stumbled across a 400 year old Fransican church and a Hell's Anglel's funeral procession, in the same block. For 10 minutes windows shook from the cacaphony of thousands of motorcycles. Apparently their leader had just been murdered. The sight was really amazing though.
One of the less touristy things Chelsea and I did was lose her cell phone. The way it happened was we were sitting in a park, in a sea of characters, just people watching in the grass. The kinds of people you find in a San Francisco public park are the kinds of people you find at late night showings of The Crow. Baggy black shorts, muscle tees, boots or skate shoes, shitty fake dreadlocks, pubescent looking facial hair, camouflage, and white socks. They all passed around forties and blunts and talked to themselves, like everybody else does in San Francisco.
By touring from one side of the park to the other we got a sense of the hierarchy in park-bum community. When you enter the park you see the newbies: people with large military hiking packs who cuss about where they're going to camp out or get food. Past them you have the lowland scum who hang around the lake in the wooded area. These people are generally older burn-out types and wannabe burn-out groupies, smoking ditch weed and giving us dirty looks. After them we took a seat in the grass near what I call the Bums of the Plains. These people were in their twenties, able bodied, who just liked to sit around in the grass. They also seemed to act as go-betweens for the lowlanders and the aristocracy of park bums: the hill people. Even to outsiders like Chelsea and I it was obvious that the people who hung out on the hill overlooking the park were the cool kids, the ones everybody else looked up to and secretly despised, but openly sucked up to. There were more girls on the hill than anywhere else in the park, per capita, skinny ones too, wearing Doc Martens. The hill people wore makeup and trenchcoats, all black, and appeared to have real homes somewhere, possibly further back in the park, but none of them were carrying huge backpacks or tents like the newbies or lowlanders. The point where we lost Chelsea's phone was in the presense of The Dark King, a true leader of park bums. He came down from the hill and his people, everybody in the park in fact, stopped what they were doing to watch him descend. He had long blond hair, dyed green in some places. His clothes were tatters stitched underneathe leather armor. Chains dangled from his loins and conected his tight leather pants to his chestplate. His boots were steel-toed and strapped, not laced, onto his feet and calves. His cape, tattered and scraping the ground, cast a shadow that made him appear to literally spread darkness across an otherwise cheery and sunlit field. In one hand he carried a hammer, from his chain belt hung a curved Arabian looking knife. And his skin, pock-marked and white, possibly from makeup, and clinging to his hollow cheeks and high cheekbones, made him look undead. He passed right by us, and as Chelsea brought her knees towards her chest her cell phone slipped out of her pocket and into the grass. The Dark King stopped near one of the plains people who offered him his 40oz. They talked for a minute -The Dark King looking very intense, doing most of the talking- then parted, The Dark King returning to the hill and the minion walking off towards the lowlands. I imagined a war was brewing, perhaps the newbies had taxes to pay and The Dark King was issuing his final warning. We waited for a half hour, the minion eventually returned with a new 40oz but didn't talk to The Dark King. We decided to check out the botanical garden.
I will credit the bums of the park with one thing, they are honest, or at least indifferent to the possesions of others. After walking a half hour or so, all the way through the botanical center and a hysterical elderly man yelling at a park bench and throwing his clothes into the street, we realized Chelsea's phone was missing. I called it several times and we walked the mile or so back to where we were sitting and found it in the grass. Despite being in hearing range, the nearby bums left the phone where it was.
It is perfectly acceptable, in fact excpected, that citizens of San Francisco take a little time out of every day to go crazy. I saw a man in a suit (no tie of course) walk into a grassy area and just flop down laughing, like he was in a Prilosec commercial. Another guy stood in horse stance and pointed at things in front of him over and over, really fast. I saw a guy in a thong and a girl dressed like a clown doing normal things without seeming to notice her own getup. You see wierd stuff all the time in SF, and that was one of my favorite parts of my trip there.
Towards the end of the day Chelsea and I took and insane bus ride up the near vertical streets of uptown San Fran to Coitus Tower, a big building named after a famous socialite and giver. The bus was so big on the narrow streets that it had to perform 3 point turns to get around certain corners. But the deft driver did it effortlessly, missing cars by inches. It cost $5 to get to the top of the tower, and from there we could see all the way to Berkley. I made a commemoritive penny with a machine and dropped a quarter from the window. Then we called it a day. Chelsea took the train back to Berkley and I took it the other way, to my sister's house.
In the subsequent month Chelsea moved back to Iowa City and went to grad school. My search continues.