LAST NIGHT CRASHED on Binko and Pollack's couch, south of Market, and started out the morning this morning at the SoMa coffeehouse on Howard. Great coffee and a good mix of people talking on cell phones and people talking to themselves.

I wasn't doing either. I was reading and thinking. And then Binko and then Pollack staggered in on their way to work, the bums. It was almost 8:30, and I'd been working since 8:15. They sat down with their to-go cups, Binko trying to pry his eyes open, and Pollack leafing through a newspaper. I tried to engage them in a theological discussion.

Binko blinked.

Pollack leafed.

Then they went to work and I finished my book. The book was a book about Jesus, loaned to me by my trucker friend Earl Butter because he knows how sacrilegious I like to be. Love to be.

Oh, but you're a spiritual person, everybody assumes. No. Fuck no. I may not be quite as sacspiritual as I am sacrilegious, but I don't want to have anything to do with either, thanks.

Anyway, so this book is The Gospel According to Jesus, by Stephen Mitchell, the great translator and all-around Zen dude. Not surprisingly, he presents our Lord and Savior as, basically, an all-around Zen dude, misused and malconstrued by his biker-buddy disciples, by Mark, Matt, Luke, and John, by Paul, by John-Paul, by Father Venglaric, Reverend Ike, Uncle Ray, and anyone else who believes in Him with a capital H. Which I guess would include Joseph Spence.

Really, it's an interesting book, except that anytime anyone uses the word master, or teacher, or enlightenment, or righteousness, or even path, in any context, Eastern or Western, my juju detector alarm goes Woo Woo Woo and I go, "Bullshit!"

That's how unspiritual I am. But don't get me wrong. By completely rejecting all things godly, including all this kung fu shit (i.e., universal life force energy, the force, etc.), I can already feel myself becoming God, in the Lord Existerly sense of a simple sort of state of am-ness – or yamness, according to the prophet Popeye.

Follow?

Of course not, because it doesn't make any sense. Same way as I sometimes feel I am becoming more masculine by becoming a woman. Doesn't make sense, and that's exactly what I love about it. When I get it down finally, probably, I don't know, some time this summer maybe, I'm going to be the most spirited, most badass thing since whole wheat bread. And then I'm going to just go around in dresses and a halo and beat the crap out of everybody.

Hold on a second while I go get another refill.... I'm at Brainwash now. I was driving to the P.O., thinking about forgiveness, and there it was – Brainwash, the famous laundromat-café – with a parking spot right in front. So I thought: let's see. I had a load of dirty laundry in the back. Let's see about forgiveness, I thought.

You probably don't remember this, but 15 years ago or so, before I was the Cheap Eats guy, my old band played at Brainwash once, in return for which we were fed a little something, maybe a little something to drink, and they did 10 pounds of laundry for each of us, destroying almost all of it. Shit shrunk. Shirts changed colors. Socks were missing. I vaguely remember burn holes in a blanket. Then when we showed the manager, they offered, by way of apology, to ruin 10 more pounds of laundry apiece.

And they were not forgiven by me. I never went back. Until now, 15 years later, driving by with dirty laundry, there was this parking spot. And the Holy Spirit entered into me and said, "Take it." Plus I was thinking: pancakes.

The pancakes, and French toast, and some other things on the breakfast menu, are $3.99 before 11 – $4.99 with sausage or bacon – by way of an early-bird special. That's pretty good and they're pretty good. But I don't know about forgiveness, because they don't give you enough butter, or syrup, and you have to keep going back and back and back to ask, and now they kind of hate me.

Still, here I am, pancaked and sausaged and way overcaffeinated, writing this and waiting for my clothes and the rest of the known universe to stop spinning.

Brainwash. 1122 Folsom (at Langton), S.F. (415) 861-3663. Mon.-Thurs., 7 a.m.-11 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 7 a.m.-midnight; Sun., 8 a.m.-11 p.m. Takeout available. Beer and Wine. American Express, Discover, MasterCard, Visa. Wheelchair accessible.

Email Dan Leone

Dan Leone is the author of Eat This, San Francisco (Sasquatch Books), a collection of Cheap Eats restaurant reviews, and The Meaning of Lunch (Mammoth Books).