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riverside alleycat Friday, December 4 1998
The morning bicycle commute is a little like watching the same old interesting but increasingly familiar videotape. The same people are almost always at the same places along the route:
- the elderly Vanagon-driving ornithologist observing the brown and white pelicans, coots, ducks, etc. in the lower San Diego River salt marshes
- the big black jogger dude
- the tomboyish commuter girl on a mountain bike going west while I head east
- The two jogging middle-aged Hispanic women
- The attractive sharp-dressed woman waiting at the lower Mission Valley bus stop
- The guy walking his jet-black Rotweiler without a leash
- The overweight intense-gazing woman waiting at the Fashion Valley bus stop with her arm in a cast
This morning Kim was ill with an especially painful period, so I was a little delayed. The tomboyish girl had come as far as the ornithologist, who hadn't moved beyond his usual haunts. All the people waiting for their buses had been picked up except for the overweight woman with her intense-gazing eyes and bandaged arm.
At lunch I got a couple burgers at the Jack in the Box and went down to the edge of the river to eat them. A found a cat completely asleep on one of the rocks, basking in the bright sun shining down through the cool autumnal air. When I called out to the cat, he woke up and scuttled off immediately. But then, as I was eating, I noticed he was watching me from not too far away. He was a plump old cat with eroded ears and thick spotted white fur. I left him a little piece of my beef patty, though he looks to be doing well in this swollen land of plenty.
It's fight time again here in Ocean Beach. The girlfriend understands my need for intense concentration when I'm writing, but then she baits and tests me anyway, and then expects to resolve the fight (with what will surely require a long conversation) immediately afterwards. I don't care what I need to do but I'll do it to get the time and space to write; it means more to me than anything else in the world.
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