In the olden days waiting for a bus was fraught. One gazed down the street hopefully. The bus either appeared or it didn’t. Meanwhile, one waited. Godot waited too, so this is not without precedent. What Godot didn’t have is an iPhone app. The latter tells me exactly where my bus is, when it will arrive…and roughly how satisfied and fulfilled I will be when it does.

Nothing like data to factor in with other data, and come up with a life course. For example. Imagine that your wheelchair batteries are becoming unpredictable. What isn’t unpredictable these days? Of course, you do want to be able to predict your ability to roll from here to there. And since ‘there’ is your massage guy’s office in a distant part of the Mission District of San Francisco, you particularly want to have sufficient battery power to achieve escape velocity.

That’s why you decide to take the bus, not the subway. A bus gets you closer, doesn’t it? And while you are standing on your San Francisco neighborhood street corner, half marveling at your iPhone app, and by implication marveling at how smart you are to have a smart phone…here comes the bus. You barely glance at it. What’s to see? Well there was one thing that you slightly missed. It was the number of the bus. The one you wanted is the 36 Teresita, which would have taken you where are you wanted to go. This bus, however, is the 35 Eureka, which is now turning up the very steep streets that lead to the summit of Twin Peaks. You are headed the wrong way.

Unfortunately, this obsession with the location of buses and their real-time tracking via GPS…well, it just won’t go away. Because long after you have had your body worked over, you’re headed for the train station. Which involves…you guessed it…another bus. This is the Culture Clash Express, AKA, Muni 12 Folsom. The people boarding it and departing it are confronting age, substance abuse and cultural dislocation. This, combined with San Francisco traffic, delays your progress beyond imagining. No wonder when you finally get to Fourth Street and the bus’ hydraulic lift deposits you like a hard Brexit…you have surprisingly little time to get to your train. Worse, having surprisingly little bladder capacity, that time is even shorter.

Not to worry, because it’s a straight and easy route. You proceed directly down Fourth Street, and there it is, the Caltrain station. But not today. Today the entire street has been bombed. All right, I exaggerate. It has actually been torn up for subway construction. Which, I had thought, was over. Which it was. That is to say, the actual subway rail line is complete. Muni has returned to build the underground stations. Which means that overground is an orange maze of traffic barriers. The latter seem to be a uniquely California device. Light, plastic and orange. They readily shift about to divert cars from here to there. And for anyone on foot, it is easy to see over them and know what lies beyond. For anyone on wheel, it’s another matter.

At the junction of Brannan and Fourth Street I spent several minutes wandering up and down orange plastic canyons. This might have been pleasantly distracting if I didn’t have to pee so badly. It had an Allice in Wonderland quality. I could see a particular restaurant, Marlowe’s, beckoning on the southwest corner. But all turnings took me to the same chain-link fence. Finally, running out of time and bladder capacity, I asked a guy with a hardhat. Simple, he implied,. Turn here, go there, turn here, then here, no, not there. I felt very old, in the end. You don’t want to know about the bladder part.