"I'm getting the (stuffing) scared out of me"

I passed a pair of beautiful Fisher speakers yesterday. They were large and solid, the kind you saw in stores before the idea of the home theater was giving 18-45 year old American males wet dreams about the carpeted room at Best Buy. I stopped to look at them quietly sitting at the bottom of my block while I was walking home late last night. Despite the fact that pretty good shit, occasionally great shit, is often left on the sidewalks of San Francisco, these surprised me. For a moment, I toyed with the idea of hauling them up for deep storage in the apartment. But our horde is already on the verge of ridiculous--and includes plundered speakers-- so I decided against it.

Today I was walking from the opposite direction, up the east face of Nob Hill, when a man stopped me in the middle of the street. I couldn't tell if he was a typical neighborhood guy or more of a transient. He asked me if I had seen the speakers. I told him that I had but they had been gone by this morning. He was very visibly dissapointed and stood there for a while, as if in shock.

I grabbed something from my car, which was parked a little ways down. When I came back the man was still standing there looking sad. I felt I should say something. "That's the kind of shit that if you want it, you gotta jump on it right away, " I said.