Harshing My Mellow

Every doctor is an island. There is perhaps a lagoon of ego, and an archipelago of like-minded medical school graduates, but the idea that any two of them are the same is anti-snowflake.

I've yet to identify what it takes to be one--there's not a type that can be constructed. There are people who I believe can be easily tracked through primary and secondary education as likely candidates: played football but not well enough; cheered, but not into it enough; hot, but not willing to be hot enough; smart, but thought about money enough; ego, but not risk-averse enough; fatuous, but not quite smarmy enough.

I met yet another in my long line of new acquaintances in the field. This doctor, young, and with a questionable suit but interesting shoes, sized me up as uninteresting within seconds--but frankly, he's just an overseer on my medical plantation where I am the only drone. So, there may not be enough service here to interest him. As a surgeon, he's to oversee where my healing from my Indianapolis work is at, and that I don't go completely awry or fall too much apart, while dosed and bombarded these next two months. His job is as simple as a pinstripe, which he should never wear.

I rather enjoyed his breeziness, except that he called me "man" and I held my breath waiting for "dude." I know it was in there and had we spent another 45 seconds together, it would have sprung forth. For those who know me, "dude" will never describe me--"man" possibly could, depending upon its connotation. If one is connoting a look of belonging to the ruling class, the bruderbund of rich white men who in cabal are running the world, then no--I'm decidedly too down-at-heel, and the BB don't get tongue cancer, ever.

If one is saying "man" as the juggler in the orange pants meant it, it's still not possible. His "man" was a hippie chick who claimed to be swaying on too much acid. According to him: "man, San Francisco's motto should be an open mouth..."  Such truth out of such innocence on such a sunny day...still, I'm not that man.

One to whom the exclamation "man, did you see that" could be directed would be the sort of man I am:  bystander, observer, male. Today, a guy in pants that pulled up enough to display my leg would describe tha man, a test shirt that I took from Scott's closet to see if it made me look less sunken in upon myself (didn't), Saucony's that look far racier than I'll be for many moons forward. Yes, that kind of man.

Thinking of the juggler and his hippie chick does remind me that Scott and I met at Whole Foods for his lunch (and my combo of coconut water and Nutren) after he went swimming at USF, and before we went to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park this past Sunday. I spent an hour or so walkiing and window shopping on a beautiful Sunday on Haight Street. It was too early for dope smoke and just time for brunch scent. Fabulous.

Haight, for anyone born outside of this place, evokes nothing quite so much as the mid-Sixties, and the street is definitely living off that notoriety--picking the bones clean of the Boomers who drive Audis with Grateful Dead bears, and the tourists who bring their kids, inexplicably, to check out weed tsotchkes, posters and t-shirts, the Europeans who will just go anywhere, and the great masses of Asian tourists who will grimly document it all on some of the most incredible cameras I've ever seen.

Too, there are the young believers who are still around--free love, hairy-legged, flowing skirts and pants with inexplicable button flys and wooden toogle loop holders, that may be linen or just may be polyester made to look like linen--too hard to tell because--damn--a washing machine is obviously not in evidence. Always involving some sort of dog in their lives, and laying stretched out in the grass just across Stanyan, just inside the park, as if a zone had been declared where smelling like hell and looking like part of it is as welcome as a bar of soap and an unfettered smile.

To these, I am a "man." An establishmentairian, a systemic cog. And they are quite correct.

I'd like to tell them that the system is hooked into me far more than I'm hooked into it, but who knows where one starts and the other begins. These days, without the system, I'd have a month of two of sass in me and start to fade pretty rapidly. And I know myself well enough to know I'd never spend those months wondering if that dark ring around my ankle was dirt or a holdover from the chains the man laid on me. I'd just scrub that crap off ASAP.

Well, so the doctor met the man today...probably not the last one in his day, either. In fact, I rather liked this guy for all his semi-dismissiveness...let's hope the dude who came after me was far more gnarly to treat.