What are they?

None, I’m afraid.

“Just walking back from town,” I explained.

My straightforward answer proved unsatisfactory. The officer told me I was rambling through a neighborhood full of drunks, heroin addicts, and burglars, and thus my very presence was suspicious. It was clear he couldn’t fathom why anyone would walk except to go to or from their automobile unless they were up to no good.

I couldn’t provide any identification, so the policeman took down my name and date of birth. After that, he said he was letting me continue my walk since I appeared to be sober and clean. (He didn’t add that I was Caucasian.)

After he drove away, I started laughing. I never saw the comedic elements in Ray Bradbury’s fifty-year old novel Fahrenheit 451 until tonight.

At the same time, the people who play more or less traditional jazz are at loggerheads with the musicians who play newer works. The latter group complain, with increasing boldness, that the traditionalists are just refrying the same old tired beans, playing the same predictable riffs they’ve heard a zillion times before. The keepers of the true jazz flame shoot back that the new pieces are pretentious, shallow, gimmicky, flimsy failures.

I’m enjoying the little spats; they more or less neatly encapsulate most of the learned aesthetic debates I’ve heard in the last few decades.

“You know how theatre people describe themselves as being ‘between plays’ when they can’t find a project?” I asked.

“And so?” Celeste replied.

“Well, I’m between words.”

In other cities, galleries present a balanced diet of just about every kind of bad art. I could probably make a lot of money if I opened a Santa Fe gallery specializing in, say, bad surrealism or bad impressionism. I could probably make a lot of money doing a lot of unpleasant things. But I don’t need the money and, more importantly, I’m getting out of this monocultural wasteland tomorrow.

After too many weeks in the Santa Fe desert, I’m back in San Francisco, or Frisco, or Sco. I used to call San Francisco “Frisco” because it bothered so many people. But that was before I discovered tht most of the pseudo-natives here find “Sco” many times more annoying than even the reviled “Frisco.”

Of course, the problem with a three-character name is that someone has probably used it before. And someone has. “Sco” is the name of a mediocre software company; it’s also the international airport code for Aktau, or Aktau, in Kazakstan, or Kazakhstan.

Nevertheless, I’m sticking with Sco. The name confuses most people and perturbs the rest; how can I go wrong?

“You should have seen the lead lady,” Clyde enthused. “Damn, she was gorgeous. And when she stood on one toe and raised the other long leg way up in the air behind her like a wolfhound at a fire hydrant, that was worth the whole ticket price right there.”

It’s always a pleasure to see someone in aesthetic rapture, even when the message received was unrelated to the message sent.