Blue Angel's
Originally published in newsgroup gen.opinions 1992, one of many stories from my Taxi Diaries indexed as "Muskat Muses."
As if this world weren't weird enough:
It's 100 degrees on my deck and 120 in my office, very un-San Francisco
weather, and the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels are diving San Francisco in
preparation for the gala, once-a-year and one-of-a-kind event known in
these parts as "Fleet Week." Thousands of civilians will line the Marina Green
and celebrate masculinity, excuse me, I meant militarism, by barbecuing
meat and tofu while Sailors and Marines celebrate liberty in bars, whorehouses and
dungeons from The Castro to North Beach.
I've got a great view of the practice runs wishing I had several thousand
remote activated balloons strategically placed around the City. But who
wants to get up the danders of those green environmentalists behind the
likelihood of suffocating some animals that will never end up on a grill on
the Marina Green anyway? Well, maybe it could be a meat eaters action!
Contradictions soar as six death planes do beautiful geometric dances
between 8,000 and 1,500 feet. I never see an air show without remembering
the French pilot and his Mirage that never made it up from an earth bound
nose dive and ended up spread all over the air field outside Paris.
It is easy to forget that in other places, planes like these carry weapons of
massive destruction. Children, the unaware and the right wing see what they
want to see. I guess we all do yet a sightless person shivers when told the
sound is five or six Blue Angels turning out of a several hundred mile an
hour 360 degree swoop. The sixth plane trails as a reminder of Dead Angels
(not to be confused with Dead Heads or Hell's Angels) - yet we all can be
reminded of the awesome death these machines inflict - smart or dumb, one
way or the other, they deal death.
Even if they can manage to pull off five planes in tight formation and vapor
trails blazing, a pattern several thousand feet high of one half a heart. It
doesn't take ESP to deduce it was the right ventricle.
I wonder how many kids will enlist on the Marina Green this weekend?