Linguist, lexicographer, radio host, public speaker

Tourists

I thought, for just a second, that you were talking about Union Square in New York, say, a hundred years ago when it still had cable cars and they would come ripping around Deadman’s Curve where Broadway and 14th Street rails used to do an insane jog and jerk. Used to kill, like, a dozen people and a couple of horses a year. Some kind of timewarp on your part, I thought, maybe the result of some Beowulf-LCD-wearable computer IPO-funded research whose press release I missed one day when I had to work late and then came home and went to bed with the shortwave radio tuned to white noise to block out the Puerto Rican couple upstairs listening to infomericals on Univision until 3 a.m. when they both leave for shitty jobs downtown. But I see now that you were talking about San Francisco today and everything’s all right.

author avatar
Grant Barrett