San Francisco Nouns

Smells: Eucalyptus. Lemon trees. Fog. The ocean.

Colors: Ground and trees a thousand shades of green, dotted with light orange California poppies. The Marin Headlands blue in the distance. Chinatown: red, gold, verdigris.

People: Grimy runaways sitting at the mouths of alleys with their grimy dogs. A white man with indigo Maori-style tattoos covering the right half of his face. In a boutique, a prosperous lady with meticulously sculptured hair caressing $300 shoes. In a single concert crowd at a club south of Market: 4'8" Japanese grandmas (one of the bands was Japanese), 6'8" German journalists, and virtually every demographic in between, except for midwestern housewives, big-haired Texans, and uniformed members of the clergy.