TADIOTO

Tell you the truth, I am addicted to sleep. It’s just that I am addicted to other things too. Like what’s on the internet, news from friends.  And sometimes at 3 am, I wait for San Francisco to wake up and send me emails and tidbits.  And for a moment or two, the years of foggy, hilly living come back to me.  And I go on Google and search for what I knew. For images that remain familiar, yet far away.

That looks a little like the crosswalk of Mariposa and Bryant, where KQED is.  And this somehow reminds me of my last neighborhood in the Fillmore…

I know it’s more like Columbus Avenue, at Vallejo, where you get a great view of the TransAmerica building.  But hey, I’m all the way over here in Ha Noi, and it’s close enough.  Or I can go to this:

and think of the days I used to walk from my flat on Russian Hill down through the alleys in Chinatown, and wasted time drinking bad wine at Mario’s, before North Beach became a weekend playground for tourists from Fremont, or San Diego, or Stockholm.

To really tell you the truth, as if you didn’t know, I’ve been addicted to sleeplessness since 1922. I’ve been always afraid to go to sleep for fear of missing something.  Here in Ha Noi, they say you can hire anyone to do anything. I don’t need anyone killed as I have seen enough dead people in my life.  (One is enough, really, although I’ve seen more. That’s what happens when you grow up in a war.)

So I hired these two guys to sleep for me. But they keep sleeping on the job, so I fired them. Now I have to go get some sleep myself.  What a concept.