our 76th weekly open mike

Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.

4/18/2026

Anything goes

itsdougholland.com 
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Tonight I took another walking tour of my neighborhood — San Francisco’s lovely north Mission area. God, I love it here. This will be my home turf for as long as I can afford a rez hotel, the rest of my life if I’m lucky.

If you haven’t been here, dear reader, you’re invited to accompany me on the walk, not literally, but literarily…

Let’s begin right outside the door of the Hotel McMillan, at a loud corner of Mission Street. Next door, a few stories under my room, is the Wang Fat Fish Market, and you wouldn’t mistake the scent for anything else. When the weather and wind are just wrong, I can smell the fish in my room.

At the corner is the Section 8 Cafe, where drunks and derelicts enjoy a reasonably-priced breakfast when they don’t need the money for booze. I’ve eaten at the Section 8, and give it a thumbs-up, mostly for the prices, but the food is OK too. The modern-bum ambiance is provided by the customers.

On the other three corners, there’s a mom & pop grocery, a mom & pop hardware store, and a mom & pop plastic crap store, like an indy Kmart. The moms & pops are as diverse as the area — one couple’s black, one’s Hispanic, and one’s Asian.

My walk took me four blocks north, south, east, and west of the hotel, and I counted half a dozen full-service Mexican restaurants, and another half-dozen fast-food taquerias (burrito dives). There’s almost an equal number of Chinese restaurants and noodle stops, and you’ll also find four Thai restaurants, four Salvadorean, four pizzerias, three sushi bars, three Indian restaurants, two Vietnamese, two American-style diners, two Peruvian restaurants, two Arabian, two barbecue joints, two old-fashioned luncheonettes, a Cajun restaurant, a Cuban, a Guatemalan, a Filipino, a Mediterranean, an Irish, an Italian, a Spanish, a Korean, a vegan, and a French restaurant, and a British bar & grill, and a bizarre military-themed restaurant where the staff wears combat fatigues and the meals are served on aluminum trays. There’s also a Greek deli, an Italian deli, a Mexican deli, two more delis of no particular ethnicity, a Philly cheesesteak place, a Turkish coffee shop, and a burger joint cleverly called Burger Joint.

What’s amazing is that I could afford to eat at most of these places, long as I don’t make a habit of it. From the menus in the windows, there are dozens of places where you can eat a meal for six bucks or less. If my meager income allows it, I hope to try all of these eateries before I die, though of course, the Sincere Cafe is nearby too, and always beckons.

There are nine ordinary groceries plus five bodegas, an Indian grocery, two Chinese groceries, and two healthy/hippie stores.

There are eight thrift stores, and five used bookstores, offering trashy paperbacks for 50¢ and trashy hardbacks for a dollar (actual literature is priced slightly higher).

I counted nineteen liquor stores, sixteen bars, ten coin-operated laundromats, eight check-cashing places, four copy shops, three pawnbrokers, two funeral parlors, and a college.

There’s a wide array of drug stores, acupuncturists, chiropractors, and small doctors’ offices (the offices are small, not necessarily the doctors).

There a composting shop, a pool hall, a zine store that sells Pathetic Life (and pays the author!), and a typewriter repair shop that says they’re experts on the brand I’m banging this on.

There’s a tiny public park, and it’s not overrun with bums and hypodermics, and there are two post offices, and of course the Good Vibrations sex toy store. There’s a police station on Valencia, so there are four doughnut shops.

And of course, there are other businesses I’ll never have any need for — banks, butchers, auto body shops, barbers and beauty salons, jewelers, clothiers, manicurists, churches, etc. A few stores are boarded up, but really, surprisingly few.

From the hotel it’s two blocks to BART, and there are several buses headed downtown, two crosstown, and one to Palo Alto. By train or bus, I can quick and easy get to six different theaters that show old movies, and two more, the Roxie and the A.T.A., are so close I can easily walk.

Here’s a tragedy, though. The Tower Cinema, which used to show second-run double features with Spanish subtitles, is now a church. The marquee says JESUCRISTO ES EL SENOR, which I clumsily translate as “Jesus is the man,” but my Spanish sucks so correct me if I’m wrong. Certainly, they’re wrong.

There are three more dead movie houses on my stretch of Mission Street. One is shuttered, one is an import shop, and one is a damned parking lot — they gutted the building, and now people lock and leave their cars where the seats used to be, under the intricately-carved walls of what one once a swanky auditorium. It’s an abomination, and I crossed to the other side of the street to keep my distance.

There’s not as much graffiti around the area as you might expect, and a few of the buildings have beautiful murals painted on them, which even the vandals seem to respect. During my long walk, I was panhandled 22 times, offered drugs four times, but saw only one obvious hooker and two certain psychos.

This being San Francisco, there was even a protest. A dozen Hispanic women marched past me on Mission, and later they came the other way down Valencia, carrying bilingual placards, Spanish on one side, English on the other. Most of the ladies were in their 20s or 30s, many were pushing strollers, and one of their signs said, “Moms for Kids.” Their other signs said things like, “Stay in school — it’s important,” and, “Don’t give up.”

Hell, I dropped out and gave up twenty years ago, but the message wasn’t meant for me, obviously.

So there’s my new neighborhood. By comparison, if I’d walked a similar distance in Berkeley, there’d be a liquor store, an old folks’ home, and a Walgreens, and a whole lot of boring houses full of boring people. Give me the Mission, any day, every day.

And then, the smell of fish told me I was home. I smiled and waved at the doomed crabs swimming in the window of Wang Fat’s, turned a key and climbed four flights of stairs, took off my clothes and typed all about it.

Pathetic Life
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itsdougholland.com
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I dreamed I was a policeman.

Now, you gotta know that I don’t like, trust, or admire cops, so this was not a dream I would’ve chosen. I’d’ve chosen bikini babes in Bermuda, but instead William Shatner was my commanding officer. He was TJ Hooker, so I’m hoping I was only an actor in the dream, playing a cop.

Lots of us blueshirts had surrounded a patch of bushes, where we were somehow certain a suspect was hiding. A suspect suspected of what? Nobody asked. Probably smoking reefer.

Capt Shatner had his gun drawn and shouted at the bushes to “Come out with your hands up,” and then he saw that my gun was holstered. I wasn’t pointing it into the shadowy shrubbery where we couldn’t see anyone anyway.

I didn’t want to draw my gun, cock and aim it at plants and weeds, because I was afraid that I’d accidentally shoot the first thing that moved — maybe a stray dog or a squirrel, maybe the suspect’s ankle if he was really in the bushes.

Shatner gave me a good talking-to, but I was the fat rookie cop and he was very benevolent about it, smiling and putting his hand on my shoulder. His other hand was holding a gun, though, so it really wasn’t the heartwarming moment he was going for. Shatner never was a very good actor.

♦ ♦ ♦  

Woke up wet with sweat, ashamed of the dream. Cripes, where did that come from? I’ve had some twisted nightmares, but never, even in little-kid fantasies, never ever did I dream of being a cop.

Always, I have only feared the police, and while I’ll grant the hypothetical possibility of a good cop (in the same sense that monkeys might sly outta my ass or my dead grandmother might be baking sugar cookies in a black hole in space), even a so-called good cop enforces stupid laws. That’s the job, along with beating people and taking bribes.

The dream was so distasteful, I had to type it just to get it out of my head. Now I gotta take a shower and wash it farther away.

Give me horrid nightmares that I’m back in high school. Give me body mutilation, or dreams that I’ve gone to Telegraph Ave without remembering to get dressed. Give me ghastly monsters destroying the city. Almost any dream would be better than dreaming I’m one of the ghastly monsters with a badge. 

♦ ♦ ♦  

Ran an errand to the post office and maildrop, and as I was waiting for the bus back a passing car honked. You hear honkers all the time, and usually they’re honking for nothing, so my finger was launched before I recognized Lori waving at me from behind the wheel of a passing Pontiac.

I smiled and waved back, but she didn’t stop and I’m glad. What would I say to her? She’s not a friend of mine, and I’m not even sure her husband Jacque is a friend of mine.

Maybe I could’ve asked, “Have you had that baby yet?” because she was sure pregnant last time I saw her. But the answer would’ve been obvious soon as she got out of the car, and after that, what have I got to say to her? To anyone, really…

♦ ♦ ♦

Back at the hotel, Mr Patel snagged me as I walked into the building, and he had to say what he had to say three times before I could get around the accent. Which must be very frustrating for him, all day every day with everyone in the hotel.

He wanted to spray my room for roaches. OK by me, so he hollered for his teenage son, who followed me up the stairs, up and up so many stairs, and then slipped a sci-fi facemask over his head. I opened the door to my mess, and the kid walked in and sprayed the floorboards and around the sink with the stinkiest insecticide ever. It ought to kill the roaches; it about knocked me out.

I’d seen a notice posted on the board near the office, saying they’d be spraying for roaches in everyone’s rooms, so I asked Junior Patel why they hadn’t just used the passkey to go in and spray?The boy’s all-American, and answered with no hint of an accent, “Dad almost never uses the passkey. If you were behind on the rent or didn’t answer knocks for days and days, maybe, but not just to spray or bring up mail or something.”

Cripes, I’m renting from a landlord who respects my privacy. Never heard of such a thing. So why is there no latch on the communal bathroom door?

Pathetic Life
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