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don't bother me; I'm eating
Sunday, June 17 2001
My housemate John saying, "Let's go do something," is usually how these beautiful Sundays get going. Without that sort of motivation, I'd normally just stay inside all day making magic materialize on my computer.
We rode leisurely to Santa Monica beach on our bicycles, stopping for a yardsale on the way. "I never ride this slowly," John observed, "It's kind of nice."
We parked our bikes, walked most of the length of the Promenade and then went down to the Santa Monica pier and out onto the beach. The sand was thickly crowded with sunbathers, nearly all of them Hispanic. The cold brownish water stank like rotting shellfish but this was no deterrent to bathers. A short walk from the pier, the beach population rapidly thinned out, with the few remaining being increasingly (glaringly!) white as well as physically fit. But as we approached another parking lot further up the beach, the population density began to increase once more. John saw some little Mexican boys playing near a massive clump of seaweed and he dared one of them to "put that on your brother."
Returning inland across a wide swath of dry beach sand, we encountered a very low density of sunbathers, all of them white. These were the analogues of the hardy anti-social settlers who homesteaded Kansas and Arizona.
Directly between the busy Pacific Coast Highway and the sandy void of the beach is a thin line of expensive homes. Actually, they were supposed to be expensive, but many of them looked as if they were either unfinished or deserted. A few were even tagged with graffiti.
We passed over the Pacific Coast Highway on a walkway and climbed steps to the top of the cliff, and were once more on the Santa Monica plateau. Returning to the Promenade, we got some slices of pizza. My blood sugar was at a critically low level, and if you're familiar with Carl's Jr. advertisements that say, "Don't bother me, I'm eating," that's how I was feeling. There was this homeless Hispanic veteran in a wheelchair nearby. Evidently he had no legs. When he started asking us if we might possibly give him money, I lost my shit. "Hey, I'm eating! Don't bother me! Haven't you seen the Carl's Jr. ads? 'Don't bother me, I'm eating!'" The homeless guy was evidently surprised by my reaction, and started getting huffy and defending himself. I could tell John was appalled and embarrassed by my reaction, and he sort of buried his face in his hands. This may be surprising, but I don't think John had ever seen me be angry before. But I had a point to make here. Bothering people while they're eating is, in my opinion, beyond the pale. Interestingly, I think my reaction had something of a genetic component; I've heard tales about my maternal uncle, maternal grandfather and father all making similar spectacles.
Like John, a woman at a nearby table was also appalled at my harsh words to a homeless amputee. She started rebuking me, "Sir, sir...!" I turned to her and said, "The fucker started bothering me while I'm eating!" At this point the homeless amputee got angry and shouted, "Don't you swear at a woman!" and then he lapsed into a string of epithets in Spanish. "Fuck you!" I shouted to the legless man, "I'll kick your ass, I don't care about your fucking wheelchair!" Enraged, the legless veteran hauled himself up on a rail and made like he was going to actually come over and get me somehow. Things were getting out of hand, so I just turned to my pizza and let the chaos I'd initiated tire itself out. By now John was red with embarrassment and the woman who had defended the legless veteran was serving him handfuls of change as he bubbled with hungry satisfaction. As we walked away from the scene of the debacle, John asked me, "Now what exactly was your point in bitching out that legless guy?" "There was no point; I was just angry," I said.
On the ride back home, we picked up two shock absorbers at a Pep Boys. The Punch Buggy Rust has been handling like a haywagon ever since I inherited it and I'd diagnosed this as a problem with the shocks.
John is much more excited by auto repair than I am, and he was there with me in the basement the whole time as I replaced the front shocks on my Bug. While I was cranking off the 17mm nuts on the left side, he was applying WD-40 to the nuts on the right side. Installing shock absorbers on a Bug is an incredibly easy operation. The things are simply bolted on; there's no need for jacking things up, compressing springs or removing wheels.
To test my new suspension, I took John for a ride to the DK Donuts on Santa Monica Blvd. What a difference two shock absorbers make! It's an entirely different car now. I feel like I could drive it to the Moon and back.
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