read closely - Monday July 17 2000    

I rode my bike down to the Pico Blvd. KFC to buy disembodied deep fried chicken limbs. There was a little Hispanic boy, he couldn't have been more than ten, in line in front of me. He had one of those shiny new aluminum scooters that are suddenly so popular among the kids of Santa Monica. It seemed like such an enviably compact form of transportation in comparison to the bulky full-knobby monstrosity of my $70 used mountain bike.