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Excerpt from mail sent in 1998:
My manager gave me a ride home early Wednesday evening, and I was done with dinner with the sun still out. I went wandering up the stairways on the hillside behind the main cluster of UCSF buildings again, this time bringing a camera.
There were various outdoor areas that were marked No Smoking, because they were near air intake vents for medical buildings. It made we wonder about where the outflow vents are, and what sorts of interesting microbes might be contained therein. Perhaps they needed to pump the air through some kind of big filters, I thought. I thought this as I wandered through huge banks of fans connected to large, mysterious blocky bins, tangled with pipes and hoses. Sometimes I held my breath in these areas.
Outside the School of Nursing, there is a statue, a bufanesque bust of a young woman in a nunnish outfit, presumably some ancient expert of nursing. I noticed that there was something strange about the statue's breasts--it was as if its nipples had been sheared off. I mean, this wasn't a statue of a nekkid lady. It's not just that the breasts were smooth. I mean that they were truncated domes, a flat plane where nipples would have been--actually, the flattened area was bigger than that, beyond the areolae. "Nursing" is a word with a few meanings, and it occurred to me that this lady wasn't going to be capable of one or two of those meanings. Perhaps the school's administrators had mutilated the statue to make it clear what kind of nursing they were teaching. There were places where it looked like pieces had broken off the statue over the years. All in all, it seemed like this statue had had a rough time of it.
There was a walkway that extended from a hillside to a balcony. The balcony was forlorn and dusty, containing a dilapidated bench and a door that managed to look bashful. I approached the door, read its sign: The Urology Department. I was petty enough to smirk. I walked around to the side of the documents, saw the mysterious pipes that emerged from its windows, which extended to some large device which took up most of a courtyard. The pipes were labelled "Chilled Water" and "Chilled Water Return". I tried not to think about the Chilled Water Return pipes. I tried to stop smirking. I really did.
I live in a strange neighborhood.