The Drunken Dog Race

This is one of the things I love about living in the presidio. On my way to or from home I sometimes see this bird standing stoically in a small field. It just stands there, huge and peaceful. It's a great blue heron.

I'm not a big music purchaser (read, I "borrow" a lot of music) but there's no place quite like Amoeba, with the masses and masses of albums, trendy music-oriented hipsters browsing away a weekend afternoon, and Fillmore posters lining the walls.



I went with a bunch of people from my work (a great group) to bowl. As if you needed another reason to go bowling at the best alley in the City, Presidio Bowl, their beer comes in glass bottles the shape of bowling pins.



To explain this series of photos may require that you be drinking yourself to understand just exactly what the fuck is going on. I myself was drunken and winded and still couldn't quite make heads or tails of it for the nutty hour that it lasted. The Urban Iditarod is a race through SF where each person is on a team based on a shopping cart and ropes attached to the shopping cart. Basically, you are the "dogs" and the shopping cart is the "sled" which is full of "beer" and "other alcohol". Each team seemed to be themed, mostly in a doggy fashion. There were the "dogtors", the "fire dogs", the "red rockets" (also fondly known as the dog's lipstick), the "salty dog" pirates, and us, the "brown hornets" otherwise known, according to our drunken teammate, Rich, as the "Bee-yotches". Much smaller and less official than Bay to Breakers, and slightly illegal, much of the race is based on running like mad and stopping in alleys.

This photo is of the start of the race:



This one is of the first stop on the race (there were 4). Everyone sprinted like fucking crazy at the start of the race, with their shopping carts, uphill. Then you stop all of a sudden like a crazed school of drunken fish and drink in an alley for 10 minutes. Then at some invisible word everyone sprints off again, to the next stop.



After the first stop we took off through the entrance to Chinatown, uphill as you can see. Everyone is screaming around you, and half the people are screaming "I didn't know we'd actually run!!!!" (well, that was just a few of us, actually).



By the time we made it close to the water (and the end of the race), it was near chaos. I think the crowd grew as the race went on.



The race that was supposed to take 4 hours only took 1. At the end everyone stood around, sweaty, in disheveled costumes, drinking more and more, so I took off.

Later that night I went for my friend Katie's birthday to Ti Couz in the Mission. It's a crepe restaurant, and it was pretty damn good. The cocktails were great, too. After, we went to the Elbo Room for an upstairs 50's soul party, which was not your average Saturday night fare. It was fun to dance to.