I have noticed a real lack of jackhammers out here. There is hardly any street construction going on, and very little noise, not counting the space-man futuristic sounds of the electric buses and trollies going by, which drag poles along suspended cables that kind of snap and crack and make echoing experimental music nosies as the wires zing behind them.

There is also, on certain streets, the noise of the undergroud cables that pull the cable cars, which are inside metal sheathes but make a very distinctive noise whipping around and working through pulleys. It sort of sounds like many skateboards coming down a hill, only muffled and using metal wheels instead of urethane.

But there is almost none of the sounds of concrete saws, grinding and pneumatic chisels that I have come to accept as part of urban life.

There is, I should hasten to add, plenty of garbage truck noise, which by perverse coincidence, crescendos right outside my window at 6:30 am, a coincidence only because that is about what time the trucks came outside back in New York. Or maybe I am naiive and suffering from persecution anxiety. Maybe all garbage collection happens at that hour, on every street of every city.

Speaking of feeling put upon, I have also noticed racial relations are different here. For one thing, the mix of races if very different, despite the mix of black , white, asian and hispanic which is similar to New York, the tension is different. Here, the hispanic population is largely mexican, and almost all male, the asians are either Chinese, who have been here for generations, or Hmong, who just got here from Cambodia. And the relationship to black people is very different. I noticed that both the security guard at work, who ignores me when I say hello to him each morning but goes out of his way to charm any black woman arriving, as well as the shuttle bus driver, who similarly seemed to be grouchy with white passengers and overly helpful with black women passengers, even going so far as to help them off with a hand on their arm, the divide is different. I'm not quite able to put my finger on it, but I think it has to do with more class hostility, and it seems to be rooted in a Gil Scott Heron era anger against social inequality.

While the word yuppies, as in "Die yuppie scum" has fallen out of use about 15 years ago in New York, Yuppie as an epithet is alive and well here.

The legions of beggars who I pass on the street, many anglo and looking like American Taliban John Walker Lind, are much more hostile and agressive. Perhaps, as I already conceded once earlier, I am naive and full of persecutory delusions, but getting swarmed on every time I walk down the street starts to feel like perhaps the choices in dress I make result in being automatically resented, almost to the point of violence. And by choice of dress, I am fairly incognito, wearing, for instance, anonymous, non-fashion choice khaki pants and a sweater. But the graffiti, if one is to go by the writing on the wall, is unsettling, as it says things like, "I'd rather be killing capitalists" reflecting both blood thirst and class hatred that seems straight out of the Paris ramparts of 1789.