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dreary homecoming
Sunday, August 8 1999
In the morning, Kim, Renee and I walked Sophie down to Newport Avenue, over to the beach, and then up to a coffee shop Kim and I had discovered the other day. To Kim's refined coffee-shop-radar, the place seemed like a remarkably urban establishment, which to her was definitely a good thing. "At least they should serve good coffee," she said. But in the end we weren't impressed. It was the sort of place that languishes for want of an owner's attention. The employees were all in a bad mood and couldn't even enforce the ridiculous 50 cent refill policy at the do-it-yourself cup-filling station. A coffee shop owned by a person who doesn't care one way or the other about coffee is a souless contender in the competitive coffee shop market. It's like a message board abandoned by its creator (as my bosses would surely have me do in the interest of my moving on to other urgent programming tasks). A basic rule of craftsmanship goes as follows: the presence or absence of enthusiasm and love is always evident in the product and cannot possibly be faked, especially by an organization with monetary constraints.
In the late afternoon when Kim went to work, I had her drop me off at the Old Town trolley station, where I caught a ride to work.
The original plan was just to hang out for a half hour or so and retrieve my bike, but I ended up staying and working like some sort of sucker for the Man. On the way in, I'd found a box of publications outside the union headquarters on the first floor of the office building. At the top of the first page of the publication was an article crowing about how Governor Grey Davis had signed legislation restoring the eight hour day. I considered clipping the article out and posting it in a strategic place somewhere in the sweatshop, but I jokingly handed it to John the editor instead, and we both had an ironic chuckle about it.
When I returned home, I found Kim in a terrible funk about what I'd last written in my journal. She was embarrassed and depressed to read that the only escape I could imagine from our relationship was suicide. (As harsh as that might sound, it was really the way I felt during the time described.) Kim told me (with as much conviction as I've ever heard) that our relationship must finally be over. I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. For some reason I didn't know what to feel so I found myself feeling something pretty close to nothing at all. She, on the other hand, was extremely upset, lapsing from eerie silence into reclusive bouts of tearful emotion. This eventually had an effect on me and I could feel tears coming to my eyes. But everything about me and my emotions is so confused right now (by insane work expectations, if nothing else) that I can't really say what was going on in my head at the time.
From left: me, Renee and Kim posing in the mirrored
front window of the Ocean Beach Music Trader outlet on Newport Avenue.
Sophie is somewhere on the other end of the leash I'm holding.
From left: Renee and Kim in front of the most urban coffee shop of Ocean Beach.
A perpetual state of "closed yardsale" in a fenced, dusty Ocean Beach yard.
These tarp-covered piles of items are guarded by a kindly-looking
German Shepherd guard dog.
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