The Brunch Table

OK, so the exit I usually take at the BART stop on 24th and Mission has no escalator, just a lot of stairs. There are other exits, and I suppose any one of them could have an escalator, but by the time I stop to consider that, force of habit has already carried me far enough along to commit to the one that definitely doesn’t. This morning, I passed two people passing out flyers–a thin, unsmiling middle-aged man, stationary, with an unthin smiling young woman pacing around him. People who strayed into her orbit got a flyer placed in their hands; the few who actually looked down at it grimaced as they started up the stairs. I skirted the edge of flyer-passing range, close enough to hear the repeated words “against the war.”

I guess at this point I should mention that, on the train, the driver had asked us to stay on the lookout for a missing 290-pound autistic man. That might possibly be connected to what follows.

So I’m halfway to street level when I hear a bass bellow–”No!”–echoing up the subway exit as if it were the inside of a musical instrument. Because our long staircase is unautomated, nothing keeps carrying us forward when we all stop and turn as one to track the source of this bearish threatening noise. “No!” the roar sounds again, bigger and closer now, and a hulking red-faced man puffs into view at the bottom of the stairwell. He’s got glasses, he’s balding, he seems about equally tall and wide. He’s dressed in a white and gray gym outfit, t-shirt and shorts, too light for a cold morning. And now he’s got about a twenty-person audience.

“Don’t you know what you’re doing?” he barks at the two flyer-passers. He’s huge, and furious, but he doesn’t quite seem to present a clear threat to the pair–his voice has an autistic’s flat, unmodulated quality. Despite the arm-waving and shouting, he scrupulously refuses to close the last six feet between them. Everyone is silent. He looks up at us for the first time, and with a grand sweep of his arm delivers his next line:

“Abortion is murder!”

Now, every traveller who’s gotten this far is aware that the flyer-passers are anti-war protestors. So a wave of sheer cognitive dissonance sweeps through us, front to back, like one of those expanding fiery doughnut-shaped explosions that were so popular in late-’90s movies. The flyer woman sizes up the situation poorly, and shoots back a bit too quickly:

“War is murder too!”

But her enormous debate opponent is ready for that one. “Well, abortion is about cutting the heads off of the little babies!” he booms in reply.

“Nobody’s cutting anybody’s head off, all right?” says the flyer man slowly, moving from his spot for the first time and stepping between them. The big guy slumps his shoulders in defeat, and on that signal our communal sense of show’s-over sends us back to our stair-climbing. With his theater falling apart around him, our star rallies and gives us his very best effort.

“I hate abortion!” he screeches, his voice rising alarmingly to the register of a frightened child. “I hate the women…and the babies…and…”

He’s got us.

“…and…”

We all stop.

“…and the cunts!”

And with that he runs back into the station. I’ve read that autistics find it very difficult to tell a lie, especially about their own thoughts or feelings. Maybe today I met the world’s most honest anti-abortioneer.

Since my “day” began over 24 hours ago in Normandy, I’m about to crash. So I’ll make this quick: you can see my first pass at a photo album for the trip here.

As gasoline prices keep rising, have we left behind the more frivolous problems and are we now at the point where people’s incentives have changed noticeably? USA Today reports that pump-and-run fuel thefts are rising:

“Our drive-offs are up probably 100%” this year, says Jeff Miller of Norfolk, Va., president of a company that operates 88 gas stations and convenience stores selling gas. “We’re on track to lose about a quarter of a million dollars” in 2005.

Gas retailers lost $234 million to theft in 2004, more than double the amount in 2003, the National Association of Convenience Stores reports. The annual loss averaged $2,141 per store.

As usual, it’s worthwhile going to the source. The NACS PR Kit which appears to be the source of USA Today’s figures prudently includes the following footnote on the trend:

For 2003, gas theft was reported to be $112 million. While theft certainly increased in 2004, the difference in theft over the two years is also attributable to a more accurate measurement of the problem.

Incidentally, I wonder why USA Today reports the NACS’s $2,141 per store figure, but gives a $234 million total as compared to the NACS’s $237 million estimate? In any case, theft does appear to be going up to some extent, and the increase in gas value is at least a logical culprit. (It’d be nicer to have some longer-term historical data to draw conclusions against, though.)

Meanwhile, evidence about whether fuel prices are affecting car-buying decisions is less conclusive. CNN Money quotes several sources which claim that while there appears to be a drop in recent large SUV sales figures, it may have more to do with buyers shifting to other types of vehicles within the “sport” segment. If there is a trend, we’re probably still to close to the cusp of it to see it clearly.

An online discussion on the topic of David Mitchell’s prodigious Cloud Atlas led me to this post about post-hurricane Florida, in which we get a preview of what southern states might be like in future energy shortage conditions:

An underground economy quickly developed with ice as the pinnacular commodity. “People are fighting over ice!” she yelled into the phone. “I mean fist fights — right in the parking lots!”

“What are they doing with the ice?” I asked.

“It’s hot!” she cried.

“But the power’s out, so it will just melt in a few hours — right? Seems like ice would be a luxury item compared to food and just regular old water.”

“You don’t understand: WE NEED THAT ICE!” She cried. “Some of Germaine’s friends brought us ice from Naples in the back of their car” — such a trans-state delivery, I should point out, requires a three hour drive — “and when they got to our parking lot, people were clamoring to buy the ice from them before they got it up the stairs. This morning, David went to the store and there were police guarding the ice. They have to keep the hordes away. They’re scalping it in some places — for twenty bucks a pound!”

The extent to which order was deteriorating was surprising:

“Yeah — there was a truck coming down to Palm Beach with those army meals and some water, and it was hijacked. Taken before it got here.” Thus had Frances created modern-day brigandry right in the middle of suburban Florida.

Still, the post ends on a positive note, with the sort of heartwarming tale of neighborly generosity that we heard so much after the recent New York outage.