A long time ago, I learned to listen to nurses.  Nurses are in the shit—they see and deal with just about everything doctors won’t, don’t, or importantly, can’t.  I’m not saying every doctor is useless—I’m just saying that far too many of them are also pressed to the limits and literally depend on nurses to tell them to wash their hands or remember to take clamps out of patients.  I’ve a good friend who is in the final stages of becoming a real-live nurse, and I know how she dishes out the great poop jokes (because literally nothing’s sacred when you’re a nurse), and yet still can remain serious when the occasion calls for it.  She’s representative of everything that you need in a nurse: good sense of humor and brains to back it up.  I hope to hell that in a couple weeks she’ll have a job. Anyhow: expect some more marches on Civic Center this Monday at noon. 
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A long time ago, I learned to listen to nurses.  Nurses are in the shit—they see and deal with just about everything doctors won’t, don’t, or importantly, can’t.  I’m not saying every doctor is useless—I’m just saying that far too many of them are also pressed to the limits and literally depend on nurses to tell them to wash their hands or remember to take clamps out of patients. 

I’ve a good friend who is in the final stages of becoming a real-live nurse, and I know how she dishes out the great poop jokes (because literally nothing’s sacred when you’re a nurse), and yet still can remain serious when the occasion calls for it.  She’s representative of everything that you need in a nurse: good sense of humor and brains to back it up.  I hope to hell that in a couple weeks she’ll have a job.

Anyhow: expect some more marches on Civic Center this Monday at noon. 

Pick out by the street light the names on the pier sheds. “Java,” they say, and “Singapore” and “Hong Kong” and “Pago Pago.” Repeat them and look to the dark west and know that all America is at your back. You’re at the end of the continent, and the water you hear whispering under the wharf has whitened the sands of Tahiti and tossed the ice floes in the Bering Sea. The spices you smell came from Cathay.

So stand there, with the cool night wind on your cheeks, with the sea and the lonely music the sea gulls make. Stand still in the night and listen. You are very close to San Francisco’s heart. Maybe you will hear it beating, or maybe what you hear will only be the restless stirring of the sea; but one is like the other…

This is San Francisco: A Classic Portrait of the City, by Robert O’Brien, 1948. 

I have uncovered a plot: there is something in Hetch Hetchy water that causes considerable use of ellipses.  There is, I am afraid, no known cure…