patience

Realization during a day of bike-riding: the last time I tried to do this, before the Year of the Cat, I was in a hurry. Today, enjoying vacation-time, stretching endlessly across the day, noting that things take as long as they need to, and the time adjusting the helmet strap, the time carefully shutting the lock around the chain, is time necessary to complete one step in preparation for another. And it's time worthwhile in itself, no need to push forward what comes next because it will come, so instead breathe with closed mouth, feel sunlight and the familiar safe pressure of helmet against neck as each step takes its inevitable course. Later, looking at my phone-turned-clock, seeing that the anticipation and preparation takes far longer than the trip itself.

westside au natural

Did you know that early in the morning in June if you drive east on Jefferson Bl. through the Ballona Wetlands, visibility is less than ten feet and the ground is enshrouded in white?

At dawn, 5:30am, the moon is full and brilliant, the sky velvety like midnight blue in a Crayola box, only growing paler. The swaying plants either side of the road are nearly invisible and you have to trust against all evidence that the road keeps going and so you roll, five miles an hour, every so often dim headlights to the left offering the possibility that somebody is sharing your private white cloak -

At the end of the block outlines of gaudy new condo developments materialize, the square glass Electronic Arts building becomes a possibility, and over to the left, where the wetlands have been permitted to continue briefly, you can see that like dry ice the blanket hovers only above the plants, four or five feet of dense mist, ghosting off at the end where Lincoln Boulevard rudely interrupts.

And you keep going and you think that now, now you finally know what June gloom is, and why didn't anybody tell you? Were they hoarding it all for themselves?

true

Seen in Kenneth Hahn State Park public restroom.

speaking of which

Just now I heard a loud pop, the kind that could be a car backfiring (what does that even mean?) or something large falling over.

I wondered if I should feel scared, if the people in the neigborhood just north of mine - well-kept houses, manicured lawns, known for being gang territory - felt scared.

Two or three minutes later I heard sirens, then a brief silence then more sirens.

Probably it was a great luxury of mine that I could sit and wonder whether to be scared.

Probably somebody is being rushed to an emergency room right now and somebody else is in tears.

Probably.

As I write that, I feel nothing.

It's dark and the city plods on.