Picking up trash in San Francisco

                    a novel by h. brown

Having a stack of medical files sitting on one corner of my table saying I’ve got early dementia according to  a couple of UCSF studies is a reminder that I’d best get cracking on setting up my twenty buck a month AI agent on Open Source and make it into my personally designed Caretaker who can handle the things I’ve applied to get an IHSS helper to do in the meantime.

Hi, I’m h. brown and my dog, Skippy and I pick up trash but only on the days that he needs to pee or take a shit.

I’m going to write this in my current style which I’m describing as stream-of-consciousness idiomatic sailor talk.

Punctuation and profanity are always on the table options for me.

Like I quote myself :

“So, I put in yet another 311 request (they’re the only ones who listen and give you some kind of concrete response) for the City to route a morning street sweeper for the entire block in front of Fred’s Liquor because 5 or 10 of those  speed demon big scooters with the milk crate sized box on back that have no licenses and …

I just made a comment on Mission Local’s chat space that anything with a motor on it should have a license easy to photograph with bike lane Flock Cameras that then send automatic tickets to the bastards and they complain about skate boarders and the Dolores Park Hill Bomb  …

where was I when I interrupted myself  (get used to that)

Oh, yeah  …

Skippy and adjusted our Volunteer (not for long, Skippy needs expensive meds)  …  we’d dropped the circumference of he Armory from our route when the City hired  a half dozen guys with some trucks to do the job badly that we were doing so well.

Soooo, we’d been doing in front of and sometimes the Brosnan side of the Friends School that used to be the old Levis factory and as far on Valencia to Fred’s Liquor catty corner to Zeitgeist and the delivery guys leave beer bottles often broken and use the gutter for a urinal which is nice for the tenants and shop owners of that block to wake up to …

So, I requested a regular morning sweep of that block cause it took me and my dog 4 hours sometimes to do it by hand but I like to be thorough for two reasons and the first is that Roscoe Robinson taught me many years ago that you should make your job into a workout and I may look like a fool out there weeping up broken glass in between streams of morning traffic but doing deep strokes close to the ground with a hand broom is very very good exercise and when you start the day with 40 minutes of strenuous calisthenics and walk 4 miles after the morning work  …  you get in pretty good shape for an 82 year-old and I’ve even had DPW grunts come up and compliment me on my “work ethic” tho lots of the mid-level inspectors and brass hate my ass cause I’m always asking for things  …

So, come 5:20 am one day and I hear the trash sweeper and look out and see it cruising North on Valencia and figure he’s headed up to clear away the mess in front of the acupuncturists and  chiropractor and Sushi Place  …

wanna guess ?

Yeah, guy goes up and sits under the highway bridge there with his nose buried in his phone for a half hour and then roars back South on Valencia at a high rate of speed for such a vehicle and the brushes turning but never touching the road.

Hey, I spent a few of my ealy employment era jobs working for city departments from St. Louis to Upstate New York to South Carolina and I’ve always turned a blind eye to scams cause everyone was doing it.

Nowadays, while I still complain, I now mostly concentrate on keeping everything I can see out my window fastidious from the crosswalks and bike lanes at 14th and Valencia on East to the exterior of the Armory.

There I go repeating myself.  

Lemme cap this now and see if I’m worth waiting to get to the point  …

My old man and my mom taught me to honest and hardworking and to respect Jimmy Hoffa and Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter Lipmann.

I bring everything I have to work.

I don’t just pick up trash.

I study textures of droppings and have gone through a variety of ways to soak up vomit and diarrhea level runs from animal and man alike.

Plain old dirt in an old long potato chip can works best with 2 small plaster blades.

You sprinkle the dirt on the mess which makes it easier to look and and mix the dirt with it like scrambled eggs and they lift it bit by bit directly up and over the top of the Trash Cart (park it as close to the mess as possible).

I always remember what Roscoe used to say about making your job into a workout when I see that there is a bunch of broken glass of something that requires lots of stoops that I do 60 squats every morning to loosen up and that it is good exercise opportunity.

So, I dug into my cognitive reserve and came up with an overall way to get the streets and sidewalks in San Francisco clean.

1.  A Million Dollar San Francisco Trash Lottery

Idea is that, as the Mayor told me when I told him (after he was elected) that it was a way to get more volunteers  …

“h. I have thousands !!!”  (front of Manny’s)

I’d run the idea past him before he announced he was running for Mayor.

Laid the sample Lottery tickets out with Morse code on some and Phonetic Alphabet and Boy Scout emergency tips …

“You have to make these things into collector’s items suitable for framing.”

He liked the idea and I went on with how it would work into his campaign  …

“People are gonna hit you for being rich so toss it right back at em.

Call it ‘Lurie’s Lottery’ and have a million dollar tax free First Prize and a ten grand second prize tax free.

BUT  …

You give 100 Second Place prizes when you have the drawing on the front .of City Hall on July 4th and for the rest of the campaign you’ll have reporters tracking the Million dollar winner and have the hundred who got ten g’s singing your praises.”

I preached that anyone who volunteers for an hour should get one a ticket even f they are only 9 years old and that Manny told me that he’d had over a thousand volunteers in one 3 months stretch of Sunday mornings.

I’ve since refined the idea to open the Lottery to the General Public around the World.

If someone in Germany complains that SF is dirty just ask them if they’ve bought a Lottery ticket to clean it up.

Half of the money from the Public Lottery goes to sweeten the Million Dollary  Picker Pot  …

Yeah,  …  

Picker Pot 1 million from Lurie and share of international public arm of biz ?

Public Pot  ??  

Hell, maybe some of these billionaires can buy a few million each just to keep things going.

So, that was what I pushed in front of the Public Works Commission yesterday was it and also I pushed my plan to convert my prototype Trash Cart  …

Trying to get City to fund a die for the body of my cart and punch out a few.

Think they’ll get back to me ??

How do I get Skippy a pass to go with me to see the Public Works Commission?

go Niners  !!

h.