We're Racing Now

I get off work at midnight usually and bike down the empty boardwalk with the black sea to the west of me.  I can't see it, but if I hold my head to the side when ride so the wind's not rushing past my ears  i can hear it sometimes, if the water's really moving.  If each wave is taking sand away with it, I hear the crashing, muffled through the night air.

It's brisk, nice for a ride home.  Really it's always nice for a ride home, save for the rains, but it almost never rains in Venice.  Even this, an El Niño year, has been only a handful of days, maybe two.  Besides that, I'd been at another job recently, and I was in my car mostly.  It was one of those jobs that you take on a leap with an uncertain step and like an albatross slowly circle back to the one that you love.

Now I'm back and it feels like magic.  It's hyper-nostalgia of all the things I remembered; the people, the weirdos, the workspace.  The life on Windward at night, it's a Friday.  I usually just ride by, sometimes slowly to see the people in their line at Townhouse, see if I recognize a soul.  I rarely do nowadays.  I'm getting old, I guess.  The kids smoking cigarettes in the street look like high-schoolers, and honestly the last thing I want to do after work is queue up at a desperate sweaty bar entrance.  I used to love that place. Oh, well.  I used to love a lot of things.

At the intersection of Windward and Pacific, I swing over to the side by the curb to look into The Bank for an old friend.  She still works there, I think, but apparently not tonight.  The light's red.  People and cars are swirling around me, and through the din and unfocused clutter, I man rides up next to me on a road bike, like poof! - out a nowhere and he stops next to me and says, "Hey, that's a nice lookin' ride you got there! Schwinn World Sport, an oldie!"

There's a snap and I come to out of the dreary daze of solitude to respond with a pause and, "Yeah, thanks man! I wish I would a taken better care of it. It was in mint condition when I got it two years ago."

"Well it still looks good to me, man. Good find." We sit there on our bicycles, and we talk.  The light turns green and then red again, and then the young bucks and anxious ladies cross diagonally to the far corners and across, then green again, then red again.  He's a delight.  An older gentleman, white hair, but strangely he's young in the eyes and speaks quick with spirit.  In fact, he looks like Sir Richard Branson in that split second whenever I happen to blink at him.  He tells me about his bikes on the boat he lives on in the Marina, and about collecting and projects that fall by the wayside.  Something resonates.  I can relate.  I tell him about my surfboards, but not about my writing.  Then red, then green again.

"That's my light," I say.  "I just got off work, I'm heading home."

"All right. It was really good talking to you."

"Likewise brother." I shake his hand with a smile.

We both start cranking, slowly at first in low gears.  We both cross Pacific neck-and-neck, ahead of the pedestrians, and I laugh a little to myself.  Goodbyes are always a delight when you both leave in the same direction.  Jokingly I yell, "Oh, we're racing now!"

He smiles a wide Richard Branson smile.  "It's been a couple years since I raced, I'm up for it. To Abbot Kinney then?"

I look at him, "You're on." So I push down hard on the pedals, even stand in the saddle for a few strokes to catch a quick rhythm.  We fly around the circle, past Hama, and when I look back, he's right there at my eight o'clock on the same beat.  I can't help but start laughing.

I'm in the right place again.

GTA

There used to be an octopus beck here, but it's gone, replaced by dull taupe wall.  I guess they say the color's soothing.  I think it looks dull, like hospital walls.  Looks like they carved it off with a surgical knife, the octopus, clean scrape so that if you didn't know, you'd never know it was there.  Call it a sign of the times.  It speaks in thirty year leases.  BEWARE.

It wasn't some ordinary octopus either.  In this alcove used to live a spotted octopus with a fox head among the stars like the shadows on the ground in this alcove.  You know this word, alcoves?

Life's always roundabout like that, Travis will tell you.  He should know I hope.  Maybe...  He's got a sharp eye.  He remembers the Omelette Parlor and Wildflower and Joe's now too, and if he doesn't, I do.

[For WEST, what if she ends up with the therapist...]

That's what you call a plot twist.  Remember, just because it's one season doesn't mean everything can't change.  Convictions roll in and out like the moon tides.  That's important.  Things are certain until they're not.  That needs to be conveyed from one point to the next.  Some things creep along and other things just crash into it, but nothing is set in stone, nothing, not a job, not a person, not an outlook on life.  The magic's there throughout, but it's always changing, and everything definitely means something.

Or it doesn't.
C'est l'ouest.

*language plays a part*

Old Habits

I'm having one of those nights again.  The restless waiting kind, waiting for sleep to come find me and the million thoughts in my head.  When I used to sleep alone with a notebook next to my bed, I'd simply turn over, fumble for a pencil with some lead still in it, and stop waiting.

It's a big word--like "enigmatic"--that only feels proper in describing the sensation, like I could just keep writing and writing and writing until the lead's run out and the sun's come up and the heavy rains are just stains on the walk.  But I won't.  It won't drag on for nearly that long.  Not even close.  

No, not too many words more now.  The pressure's been released just like that.  Life's familiar again.  I have a notebook again.  This is the first writing by hand this year.  The last one's run out of pages months ago and for a while there I lost myself.  I'd forgotten the smell of the pages, the sound of the scribble in the silence.

Like a lullaby.

C R A Z Y

It's not crazy to think, "What if I had a million dollars... What would I do..."

That's not crazy.  Everybody thinks that at one point or another.  It's called dreaming.  Everybody dreams.

What's crazy is to think, "I'm going to die. What should I do in the meantime..."

Say it out loud and people look at you, concerned, like something's wrong.