Friday, November 27, 2009

Black Friday






People are said to get up at first light on the Friday after Thanksgiving in order to start their Christmas shopping. Perhaps they do, but I didn't see any likely-looking shoppers in the drizzly half-light of the Mission this morning. Most likely the legendary shopping was happening downtown, but in my own neighborhood the majority of people I observed outside at dawn were homeless sleepers, bundled under as many layers as they could find.


A small bit of the Mission Dolores graveyard can be seen above (from the Chula Alley side) through the chain link fencing topped with triple strands of barbed wire.


The last photo was taken through the window of a BART train stopped at the MacArthur Station in Oakland at the end of the day – with the sun on the way down and the halfhearted rain still coming and going. The vague & smudgy view is toward San Francisco in the west, where I was returning after coffee with a friend in Berkeley.