Every day it's the same goddamned question: what the fuck do I have for lunch? I work in downtown San Francisco, on the edges of Chinatown and North Beach, probably in the best place in the world to have lunch during the workday.
And I can never decide on what to eat. I could go to the little deli across from the fire station, but who can trust a Russian Pirogi made by Asians? Screw that. There's a crepe place about sixty feet away, but a little pancake filled with suspect goat cheese isn't really going to fill me up. Plus, the guy who starts there at 11 am is an idiot; he's got two crepe makers and can't ever have two crepes going at the same time, so it takes me twenty fucking minutes to get a goddamned crepe that won't fill me up and drips grease all over my crotch, so I come back looking like I spent my lunch at the Hustler Club.
And yes, their buffet sucks. Never again.
So I could go a little farther south to Specialty's, but I'm convinced that they piss in their bread. And there was a midget in their window the other day; what the hell kind of clientele are they hoping to attract with that?
I could get a burrito from the place in the alley, but their carnitas comes from, at best, horses. At worst, dogs. There's another burrito joint that has good burritos, but they're only about the size of my penis, and I don't want to pay the eight fucking dollars; it'd probably cost me less for the yoga lessons I'd need to be flexible enough to suck myself off.
There's the San Francisco Soup Company, where I could wait in line for twenty minutes for decent soup, but be forced to listen to endless yuppie conversation about BlackBerrys and home renovation porn, all while having the guy behind the counter tell the same stupid Soup Nazi "no soup for you" line on every fucking person who comes through. How have his co-workers not strung him up by his testicles using razor wire?
I could head over to Chinatown, but sooner or later all of the rice plates there boil down to "a bunch of random shit on a plate with a brown sugary sauce and rice." I'm sick of that. I could get Vietnamese food, but that's suspect--Chinese restaurants serving Vietnamese food is like vegan bakeries doing barbecue, or it should be. The two cuisies are unrelated--don't try to pull the fucking wool over my eyes.
Then there's North Beach, which is exactly like Italy in that it's full of overly beautiful people who seem to have nothing better to do than sit outside Greco all day with tiny cups of soup and tight clothing and cigarettes in holders, looking at people like me as if we working stiffs would make really good spittoons.
My last hope is Jackson Square, but after wandering around that morass of advertising agency bimbettes and dirtbag cameramen and the occasional wannabe celebrity from KPIX ("I was the guy who thought up Bay Area Backroads? Congratulations--go hang out with Justin Guarani and all of the cast of the fourth season of the Real World. You're not even good enough for the fucking Surreal Life).
So I went to fucking Quizno's. It's a big evil national chain that probably has a back room filled with nine-year-old Burmese slaves baking the bread and using their break time to beat the shit out of even smaller children. But they toast the bread, which makes up for the tomatoes tasting like they've come from a spore vat.