Sometimes in a taxi, if you squint your eyes just right, you can see traces of what used to be…

Like smoking next to my cab with this homeless guy outside the Hilton in Union Square when a group of tourists fresh off a tour bus offer us their Buca di Beppo leftovers…

Or giving a skanky hooker a free ride from Mason to Polk as she propositions me the whole way and then, after I repeatedly reject her offers for “sexy time,” bums my second to last cigarette and insists I drop her off right on the corner so the other girls can see her get out of a cab…

Or waiting for the green light at Market and 5th next to a burning trashcan, pretty as you please, like that’s just what trashcans on Market do…

Or cab-standing in front of the Gold Club at 2am, only to get a businessman burning the midnight oil who walked down from New Montgomery because he knew he could always catch a cab that late in front of a strip club…

Or hanging out at a taxi driver cocktail party in yard, which is a cross between a hobo campfire and a bunch of pirates getting drunk after a night of pillaging and plundering…

Or driving to Tiburon as the fog rolls through the Golden Gate and you can’t even see the bridge, but still confident that somehow you will make it to the Marin Headlands safe and sound…

And especially, coming back to the city on the 280 after an airport run, taking the 6th Street exit and seeing San Francisco spread out across the sky, not like a patient etherized, but a stately pleasure-dome… an ascetic’s Xanadu.