The thoughtful Californians, apparently, are all concentrated on Ocean Beach on Friday nights.

Last night some of the delightful Project SEED folks got together for a Beltane bonfire and I managed to drag my decrepit old body down there to see what I could learn.

I had brought a bottle of wine covertly in my backpack, which I would realize a couple of hours later had been consumed by myself alone (as Bill Morissey said, "You can hit free-fall until last call / when you're travelling by cab"—or by bus in my case), yet with negligible effects of drunkenness.

The first person I met was a dress-down scrub with a scraggly baseball cap, a hoodie sweatshirt, and a weedy beard, who asked what sort of wine I had. I told him it was the garden variety $7 issue, and he took a look at the label. In the darkness, he asked, "Is that Kendall-Jackson?" I had a look myself. "No, it's Turning Leaf."

"Oh," he said, shaking his head. "K-J used to have a grape leaf on its label. Then Turning Leaf made a new label, and what did they put on it? A folded grape leaf. I mean how obvious can you get? To put a grape leaf on a wine bottle."

"Do you want some?" I asked him.

"Nah, thanks," he said with some disdain.

What's the point of being a dress-down scrub if you're going to be a wine snob at the same time?