the Sammy Hagar edition

Nine FACTS, One LIE
Issue #26

1. This morning I was cruising along Park Presidio Avenue, which, unsurprisingly, cuts through Golden Gate Park on the way to the infamously spectacular bridge that I now have the pleasure of crossing almost daily. I often giggle at how lovely it is, the luck and gratitude I feel just soaking in the Florentine light and beach-side cliffs and endless vistas.

2. Park Presidio is three lanes and heavily trafficked, one of the major north/south arteries in the city, so you could set a metronome and switch lanes without signaling every third beat and still not arrive at the toll plaza any quicker. There’s simply no benefit, except as an expression of masturbatory chaos tumbled like dice into the karmic universe, to drive aggressively.

3. Which is generally a nice thing, in an automotive sense, this inability to hustle or force the action. The commute is smooth. I have the window down, pleasingly polyrhythmic music accompanying the sound of tires on asphalt. It’s a chance to embrace (culturally appropriate) your inner Zen and consider a few lines of poetry without the unnecessary distractions of modern technology or the need to whinge about all the things life fails to provide.

4. And yet (you saw this coming like an anvil falling onto the head of a desert coyote) on this particular commute I was being heavily crowded by a black Audi. It roared up from behind, veered, ran a light, cut me off before the next, hemmed and hawed between a succession of cars and trucks and an Amazon van driven by what appeared to be Washington Post owner Mr. Jeff Bezos participating in an Employer’s Work Day event.

5. Yeah, you get this every once in a while in The City: some character hopped up on crank or estrogen or stock options or gaping emotional difficulties or a just-collapsed relationship, and it’s the sort of behavior one has to not only expect but be resigned to in a cosmopolitan area full of lunatics (in a mostly good way).

6. Therefore, it didn’t cause my atrial pressure to rise a single diastolic.

7. Until I noticed homeboy’s personalized plates.

8. What, I wondered, is SHEEXTRA trying to say? Is Dude a pimp letting you know it’s $500 an hour, but if you want kissing the full grand? Is it snippy parlance intimating sexy male fabulousness? Is it Melania, reminding the world about the unquantifiable limits of her prenup? A young woman asserting pride in having substantial back? Extra obvious? Extra tedious? Extra additionally supplementary? Could it be a veteran of the film industry who has posed in a million backgrounds on the sets of the films of Claire Danes?

9. Is SheExtra someone deeply, seriously, almost dangerously into olive oil and its imperceptibly virgin specifications?

10. I’m always wrong about modern slang, as my daughter has made a career of pointing out, but my understanding is that “extra” is not something one aspires to.

11. I have a curious nature, often to distraction, and as we crossed the bridge, SheExtra mashed the pedal and took off in the diamond lane.

12. Now, as I may have mentioned previously, I drive a very powerful and highly-tuned performance automobile of vaguely Teutonic associations.

13. SheExtra had it up over a hundred roaring past Sausalito, and by the time I found a clear lane, I was hovering around 118 just to make up ground, while also weighing the court-ordered penalty differential when clocked by radar above or below the arrestable Maginot Line of 120 mph.

14. Fourteen exists solely in order to affirm that I did indeed make up enough lost ground to take the pictures below.

15. In a moment of relative sanity, I decided it was unwise to snap a candid of the driver at speed, but I did get a good look.

16. Dude was possibly of Levantine extraction, had likely shaved an hour earlier and already had stubble, wore a black V-neck shirt that looked so luxuriously comfortable I’m guessing it was made of strands of woven fetal alpaca, and rocked cheap mirrored aviators.
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17. So, he could easily have passed as Carlos The Jackal if it had been 1974, which I suppose is Extra if viewed in a certain light.

18. Nothing really said “She” about the driver, except if he was 2025 Richard Gere doing the American Gigolo thing in Lauren Hutton’s Audi.

19. To be fair, he did have an undeniably Extra look on his face as I was forced to cut back across him to make my exit, and then power-slide down the ramp and up to the light in a clicking, steaming, screeching, somewhat sideways fashion.

20. I gave a guy sitting on a backpack at the intersection a five spot for doggedly continuing to revere the Grateful Dead.

21. I love California.