Smoking Section

styrofoam boxes in the street

The Red Cross hot meal truck is a wonderful thing. He still comes around the neighborhoods blaring on his horn and loudspeaker, “Red Cross! Red Cross! We have chicken, corn, and rolls. Red Cross! Red Cross!” Each day he has a different menu he shouts to the people waiting on their porches for a meal they don’t have to pay for, fix, or clean up. Those meals are a nutritious hot dinner for little Suzy and Jimmy and their lazy parents. Paul and I were talking about how the Red Cross could improve their trucks and get rid of the excess food each day. Instead of the horn blaring and the driver spouting off the menu for the day, have the music from the ice cream truck playing, and people will run out of the house to get dinner. The kids could come home and have a meal for everyone plus a couple of rice crispy treats. Maybe they would have some ice cream. If not, they should. Ice cream is good. What kind of people are you to deprive these children of their ice cream? Yeah, so maybe the ice cream theme is a bad idea. People might get mad if they want some ice cream or zooms and they get franks and beans with a side of pears. Sure, the rice crispy treats are good, but they’re not ice cream. The trucks could use a different song, something catchy. Get Sean Combs (I can’t call him any name that sounds like something a puppy does on a floor) to do it. He could do a special making the band and the contestants’ task, after getting breast milk from a Cambodian immigrant, would be composing the song to play on the Red Cross trucks.

You knew it was a bad idea when you saw her in the parking lot.

So now they have hundreds of designers, architects, urban developers and planners to come in and give their opinion of what the new Coast will look like. They have good ideas about it, but the thing that caught me off guard was something they (the developers or whoever) said. It was something along the lines of it is going to be a nice place to live, but we have to make sure the poor people can live here, too. Talk about fine dining, casinos, attractions, new commerce, and it is all coming from an upper middle class white guy. I don’t see too many minorities on the Boards. As nice as The Coast sounds like it will be, they are forgetting the majority of the people here.

We are ready for change. We are ready to rebuild. Careful, while you are in one of your many meetings about what to do with The Coast, we might go out there and just do it. It’ll be done when you get out.

I have mixed feelings about it. I want The Coast to be everything it can be, but we want it to be like it was, and it will never be that way again. We were comfortable with its inconsistency.

I will admit that the talk of public transportation along The Coast, and Long Beach being more pedestrian friendly gets me a little excited. (In a giddy, hopeful way.)

I saw the first train since the storm today. I heard one a couple of weeks ago, but seeing it made it more real. Everyone in the drug store looked outside and stopped to watch it go by, like they had never seen a train before.

Shannon and I were out this afternoon and got behind a Dodge truck. In the bed of this Dodge truck was a stack of three or four mattresses. The mattresses were bungied together, but I am not sure if they were attached to the truck in anyway. On top of the mattresses was a woman on her stomach holding the mattresses down. She was half on the mattresses and half holding on to the truck. This is why I don't want to drive.

clean up

When the wind blows I get visions of what it was probably like during the storm, and it scares the shit out of me. I think of the wind tearing the trees up, hitting the house, the wave that came in...and i wasn't even here. I have been able to get out and around with better ease than before. It is becoming the standing operating procedure. I have south of the tracks completely blocked out of my navigation memory. I try to remember the back roads that I took as a teenager with my first car and go the best way I can. Add at least twenty minutes to your time.
One the up side of my being out of a job and not having much to do sometimes. I have a first draft. It took me long enough, but I have a first draft and I am proud of it. I feel like a weight has been lifted off of me. That story and character were in my head for the better part of three years. So it is out of my head and ready to be cleaned up.