I slept until the sun came out and felt as if my head was going to explode. The independence coincided with a feeling that my day was at its best. I needed such a holiday to sleep.
The coffee house was packed with customers and mostly regulars I see each time. I wrote for several hours, watching as she would feed banana pieces to her dog. When I was done, I walked back home and did the do before I went to write some more. It was a total like a day of work.
My mother texted me and asked if I could visit her and Dad to eat some steak and lobster at their house to celebrate. I drove there at a half past five o’clock, and they were watching Wimbledon as they were cooking steaks outside. The grill was hot in triple-digit heat. We ate when it was close to time for me to leave. The steak was flavorful, delicious, but the lobster wasn’t soft but hard. I’ll say I’ve never eaten lobster when it’s cooked that way. I dipped the tail in butter sauce, and it was huge. It would’ve been okay if it was tender, but it wasn’t quite the case. I don’t eat lobster every day, so it was disappointing. Anyway, we ate my favorite ice cream afterward as a dessert. The peanut butter chunks with chocolate tasted awesome at a time when heat was such a factor.
When I drove back home, I saw the fireworks explode at eight o’clock at night. It was a time I will remember as the years go on. Today is just a normal day in which I have to work. They should’ve given us another holiday. Oh well. Perhaps someday they will.
Do people even use smartphones for their intended purposes, or are these things just toys that we play with to call other people at rare times? We text another person, whether it’s a friend, a relative, or a family friend, rather than call them and listen to their voices. I, who is guilty of the same epidemic, prefer to text people. This newest form of communication I prefer over having to call someone and hear them babble for minutes, potentially even hours, or worse, to hear myself babble. I remember the days before cell phones and never thought we would reach this point. Those were times when I would have to be home for a friend or a parent to get a hold of me.
Otherwise, I would need to use a payphone, which was always a bummer. They were dirty, sometimes with gum on the receiver and always with graffiti etched on the phones themselves and on the windows at a phone booth. You used to have to wait for someone else before you got to use it. Payphones ain’t around no more. When was the last time I saw one on the sidewalk? Way over ten years ago? There was something romantic about payphones. A lover in a thunderstorm missed his lover so much that he would call her with one, soaking wet, and plead to have her back.
“Please, I have nowhere to stay tonight.”
You don’t feel that same type of romance with a smartphone. Aside from it being broken, it’s too convenient. If you’re in a quarrel with your mate, all you have to do is pick up that thing that has mesmerized you for several hours in a day, and not even dial the number that you’ve remembered for so long. All you have to do is press the name of the person you’ve saved in your list of contacts. How is that passionate? The smartphone holds no passion. You would’ve known the phone number by heart if you cared enough about the person. I can barely remember my mom’s number without looking it up on my smartphone, which if I lost it, say if I dropped it in the sewer, which I’ve almost done on several occasions, there would be no payphone nearby to save me. I would be screwed, without even knowing what numbers to call let alone having a quarter.
The smartphone is a computer we can fit in our pockets. You can argue that a phone call is a last resort when using one. It holds almost infinite possibilities.
A typical text I send would be, “Are you there?”
Their reply would be, “Yup.”
That would be the end of the conversation. It saves so much time and energy over a windy phone call.
I still say bring back payphones because we might need them in the case of a disaster, such as a dying smartphone, which is one of our worst worries. We fall into panic mode when it happens and look for the nearest smartphone store to rescue us. When we get there, there’s a line that nearly goes outside the door, and we have to set an appointment for a few days later. Who can wait that long? Those are agonizing days.
I remember I spent a whole afternoon at an Apple store. The geek at the mall set my appointment using his iPad for about 1:30 p.m., but I never got to see him until about two hours later, so I had to hang out and wait in there until he was available. Something was wrong with the hardware. They had to replace it with a new smartphone, and it took another two hours for it to load all of my apps. It was a nightmare of a day. I wish a disaster such as that only on my worst enemies.
Technology blows my mind. We live in the age of gadgets. A male fantasy to become James Bond has surfaced a little because of it. The smartphone is a piece of gadgetry, and so are all the small components in a car these days.
You can now hook your smartphone up to the car and have them communicate with each other. Again, where’s the romance? There’s nothing romantic about a Tesla compared to a classic Mustang. Yes, the Tesla has a digital dashboard and the ability for Apple Carplay, but externally it looks like an egg on wheels, and internally it comforts you at the sake of visual aesthetics. Who can argue against the leather interior of a classic automobile or even the steering wheel compared to today’s cars? I’m falling off course, or am I? You can argue that today’s vehicle is just a larger smartphone. I connect my phone to the car and call someone just by pressing a button on the steering wheel. Who needs a drive-in theater when I can just watch a movie on the dashboard with my lover when the phone is integrated? Things just ain’t the same.
Somewhere, someone is laughing because I can’t think of a word to write outside of the fact that I’m writing about not knowing what to write. Does that make any sense? I thought not. But let’s go.
Writer’s block is real. Some people claim it isn’t. It’s fine if they can give it another name. How about constipation? Does that make it sound better? I didn’t come up with writer’s block, so I’m fine with whatever someone calls it. It’s real. I think the muse is real, too. Some writers deny it. They say hard work and determination are what produce words and paragraphs and pages and chapters and whole works. I say that’s part of it. A writer has to sit his ass in the chair and stay there until the work is done for sure, but there are outside influences that can determine the writer’s success.
I’m staring out the window, watching a barista take a break from work. It isn’t distracting in the least, but he intrigues me enough to stop and watch him. He’s sitting on a park bench on the sidewalk in front of a Sunglass Hut, reading from his smartphone and vaping next to a star of Harry Lee Coffman, M.D., on the Walk of Fame in Palm Springs. He’s drinking iced tea out of a plastic cup. He has walked back in. Now I go back to writing. My Adderall can only help so much.
When I was younger, I used to run into a man at the coffee shop whom I was convinced was the devil. He was short, skinny, had a bald head, and wore all black with black sunglasses in which I couldn’t see his eyes. His appearance didn’t make him the devil, although his pale complexion and skinhead jacket did make him look sinister. It was his behavior. I tried to get work done there, but he would walk up to my table and start talking. I forget whether I wore headphones in those days. I was only in my twenties when dude entered the frame of my life.
“There he is,” he would say.
When I looked up, I saw him approaching me with a grin, and I thought, “Oh shit. Here we go. He’ll waste my time for about twenty minutes. There goes my muse.”
What fascinates me is how no one bothers someone who’s reading, and nine times out of ten, no one will bother someone who’s writing. Except this guy. Yep, the muse is real, and it’s delicate. He would elucidate to me random facts such as the difference between yellow mucus and clear mucus, as mucus was forming on his lips. And I would just stare at the mucus in morbid fascination.
He was a cokehead who would bump lines in the bathroom. I never had clear evidence, except he would come out sniffling after a long time while other people waited for their turns.
He also claimed that he was the ex-drummer for a famous 1980s hair band. I recognized the hair band but couldn’t think of one of their songs. For some reason, I believed him.
Anyway, he was the devil to my muse. My muse would crumble and die when he was near. He sent telepathic messages to me that I was doing something unimportant or at least not as important as what he wanted to say to me.
I never found out whatever happened to him. He’s probably at some other coffee shop in the universe, chatting it up with someone by himself who’s trying to focus on something, telling him about his days as the ex-drummer and how much coke he did. The man was a vampire. He was writer’s block personified. I never found out his name, but who needs a name to identify him when he served only one purpose, which was to kill someone else’s muse?
I went to bed at nine o’clock last night, woke up at one o’clock this morning for no reason, and couldn’t go back to sleep. It was time to give up, crawl out of bed, and take a walk outside. The temperature was easily over eighty degrees, but the heat wasn’t what bothered me because it was cool in my apartment. What made me lose sleep were thoughts I couldn’t control–thoughts about the past and future, regrets over what I did and what I never did.
I was never a good sleeper. Some people sleep just fine, from the minute they go to bed to the second their alarm goes off. I can’t relate to those people. They usually snore, keeping everyone else awake.
My college roommate used to snore, and it drove me insane. Sometimes I thought about that scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when the patient smothered the Jack Nicholson character with a pillow. Now I would never do that, but man, there were thoughts.
When I have insomnia, I want the rest of the world to have it so I won’t feel alone. It’s so quiet outside that I believe everyone is sleeping except for me, which is untrue. A lot of people lose sleep. I read that one out of three adults suffers from it, and it can lead to obesity and diabetes, not to mention anxiety and depressive disorders.
There had to be a way to combat the insomnia. I watched YouTube videos while I was up until three o’clock before I tried to go back to sleep. My brain just wouldn’t shut off. Then my alarm sounded at five o’clock in the morning, when I usually get up. I hate the song that plays on my iPhone. The piano is too haunting, like a ghost is going to crawl out from under the bed. It vaguely sounds like the theme to The Exorcist. I turn it off right away and jump out of bed. Sometimes my hand, with a mind of its own, hits the snooze accidentally so the song repeats. But all of the other songs are just as bad. I can’t win with the alarm because it sucks to be awakened by anything, such as a chainsaw outside of my window when someone is chopping up a tree, or a bunch of cackling crows that make me want to throw a coffee can at them and watch them fly away.
Now I’m at the coffee shop, half dead, and I have to work today. It’s going to be another long week. I just hope that tonight I can sleep the whole night through.
I’m sitting in the corner of the coffee shop observing everyone. There are one, two, three, four, five other customers sitting at their tables. Every one one of them is absorbed in their smartphones. We have come to this point. I used to predict how the future would look and got some of it right. One of those things was something like Youtube. I believed every person would have his/her/their own channel. For the most part, it ended up being correct. Except I don’t have a channel and I doubt I ever will.
Another prediction was that the cars would be rounder than before. They were too boxy in the eighties and nineties. The manufacturers decided, “Hey, it’s the future. Let’s make everything round.” Lo and behold, I saw them on the streets, these older models, round and futuristic. Some of them came out ugly, others improved.
Anyway, it’s a growing concern to me how everyone is stuck to their phones. I’m guilty as well except for now. The phone will distract me from emptiness later today. I’ll keep checking for new emails without a clue of what I’m looking for.
How will this Monday unfold? There’s a lot of anxiety about going back to work. I don’t know what emails I’ll have to deal with or how much work is in front of me.
My birthday was yesterday. Mom and Dad showed up to my door in the middle of the afternoon after a long drive back in town, anxious to see how my air conditioner was working. It impressed them how cold it was in my apartment.
After a few hours of chatting, we went to a restaurant called Lulu’s for dinner. The heat was one-hundred-and-eleven degrees. It was a slow, painful walk there, as if we were walking in mud, hot mud. Lulu’s was cool inside. The manager sat us in the middle of the dining area. Mom asked if the patio was comfortable enough to sit in. I thought she’d gone insane. We whined at the fact that they served Pepsi, not Coke. I ordered a Pepsi anyway, even if it’s far too inferior.
Our waiter didn’t have much of a personality. My father commented on that when she wasn’t around. She was more of a Flo from Flo’s diner, the type of waiter who would carry a pencil on her ear to take down our orders on a small pad.
Dad ordered the strawberry salad with shrimp. Not only did I wonder what the hell a strawberry salad would be, but who would eat shrimp with strawberries?
I ordered the swiss and mushroom burger, medium rare, while my mother ordered the chicken sandwich. The burger was charbroiled, which I don’t prefer, with romaine as its lettuce when it’s usually iceberg. It took up over thirty percent of the burger. I deleafed most of the lettuce to where there was only one slice. The cheeseburger wasn’t as much as a job as it was before.
My mother became fascinated by the tables because some of them had hooks on the underside of them, not all of them. Ours didn’t. She could’ve hung her purse on the hook. I could’ve hung my hat there since I wasn’t wearing it indoors.
We left Lulu’s and came back to my apartment for carrot cake and red velvet cake to celebrate my birthday. I ate only a few bites because I had eaten too much. They left after eating the cake to drive home and unpack. I still had to go grocery shopping to my chagrin.
Now it’s Monday. I’ll face the music at work. At least Thursday will be July Fourth. Only a four-day work week is ahead of me.
My birthday is today. It doesn’t carry the same weight as it used to. I kept forgetting that today was the day, and as I get older, I find that birthdays lose their importance over time. I don’t know what to do to celebrate since I live alone in this small town. I think the trip to Avila Beach was enough. I don’t need any more of it.
I have to go back to work tomorrow. It’s a four-day week because of July Fourth on Thursday, so I’ll only have to work Monday through Wednesday and Friday. It’s always a half-day on Fridays. And then I’ll go to the dentist on the following Monday, so that would be two weeks in a row of a four-day week.
I think I’ll spend my last day on vacation doing nothing special. I’m not happy that it’s my birthday, but I’m not that sad either, just sort of numb.
The regular people on social media will wish me a happy birthday, people whom I don’t even know, whom I’ve never even met. It’s weird like that. Every year, this one man sends me a happy birthday GIF with a synthetic voice that sings the happy birthday song. In a way it’s haunting. It makes me not want to know the person. There are people I was once close to who don’t wish me a happy birthday, and it stings. In response I don’t wish them one either. I don’t know what I ever did to those friends, but that’s the way it is. But like I said, birthdays aren’t as important as they used to be.
I remember my twenty-first birthday. My cousins drove me to Las Vegas to get me drunk. I was of the legal drinking age. That was a big deal. I don’t remember anything about the trip. I was still in college at the time. It’s too bad that there are no memories.
I ate a whole bag of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies in bed last night for a celebration. That’s about as festive as it gets for me. I’ll treat myself to a burrito tonight from my favorite Mexican restaurant. Other than that, I dread tomorrow and this whole week in fact. It’s going to be over a hundred degrees again in the desert, and I’ll have to walk in this crap to get some exercise.
I really should join the gym. But I won’t have the motivation to go every day. I don’t know. I stopped going to the gym when I was living in Culver City because I was sick of the elliptical machine. All I did was paddle my feet for a half hour and sweat. I wasn’t going anywhere. I have to be going somewhere if I’m going to exercise. Otherwise it gets monotonous. Maybe I’ll go there to lift weights. People get addicted to that sort of stuff. I never did. I always looked at it as a rough hour to get through before I was done. Then I could go home and rest. Some people love the high that it brings. They’re talking about the lightheadedness from working out too hard. I look at it as the feeling before one is about to pass out, which is never good for me.
Anyway, rent is due tomorrow, and I have to finish editing my book this week before the next stage of development. Enough about my birthday.
It saddens me to see this vacation come to a close. I’ll be back at work this Monday, and I dread that day when it comes. Until then, I guess I’ll just sit here and enjoy the two days I have left. Isn’t that what everyone thinks when they’ve been away from their jobs? It must depend on how much someone enjoys doing what they’re doing.
I drove back to Palm Springs on Thursday, and I must admit I miss the beach, even though I was never at the beach. I’m not a beach person, although I can lie on my back in the sand on any sunny day. What kind of person am I? I’m not a forest person, nor a desert person. Maybe I’m a lake person. I could sit at the lake and stare at the blue water for hours if it’s, in fact, blue water. Sometimes it’s brown water, which doesn’t much appeal to me. But who does it appeal to?
I checked out of my room in Goleta on Thursday and sat in the coffee shop for several hours before I hit the laundromat to wash my pants and socks. While they were in the washer, I went back to the coffee shop and waited.
When I came back, I saw my wet clothes on the counter and a woman standing near them. She didn’t speak English, but she gestured towards my clothes and asked if they were mine. She’d removed my clothes from the washer. It pissed me off. What kind of rude person does that?
I said, “Thanks,” and I don’t know why I said “Thanks.” She didn’t deserve it. She deserved her clothes to be thrown out of the laundromat.
I grabbed my clothes and hastily threw them in the dryer. I lost one of my socks in the process, always losing socks. What is it about socks where I always lose them? They just get away from me. I constantly need to buy new ones. That lady had put me in a bad mood.
While the clothes were in the dryer, I went back to my room and packed my belongings. I checked out with the concierge, and he asked if I enjoyed my stay. I couldn’t say that I did. It was a funky shower with a detachable showerhead that hung against the wall. The only way for me to wash myself was to hold the showerhead while I applied the soap. And I find it to be a challenge to wash my hair with one hand. So I had to attach the showerhead back onto the thing that holds it so I could rub the shampoo on my head.
But I didn’t complain to the concierge. I didn’t have time.
“Do you need gas?” he asked.
“Not immediately,” I said.
“Well, if you do, there’s a Valero across the street. We have cheaper prices than Santa Barbara. I highly recommend you use that one.”
I wanted to repeat to him that I didn’t need gas. Did he not get the message? I handed him my keycards. They’d charged me fifteen dollars just to park in their precious parking lot. I at least could park right in front of my room. It was a small room with about a seventy-inch flatscreen TV on a wooden drawer. The only way to find the mini fridge was to open the drawer, and it was inside there. I’d stashed my iced espresso and a couple of cookies in it.
And then, I hit the road from Goleta back to Palm Springs. It was a four-hour drive. The traffic slowed down in many parts during the trip, mostly on the 60 freeway heading towards Indio. I didn’t know what the holdup was or if there was anything to hold up for, but there was nowhere to be. I could afford to waste a whole day on the road.
I got home after 6 p.m., unpacked, and decided to take a walk. The street fair on Palm Canyon Road had already begun. They do it every Thursday in Palm Springs. I walked past the vendors, having never bought a thing from them, but I would like to try the food someday.
And now it’s Saturday. I’ll do much of the same thing. It’s routine for me at this point. I write and edit for several hours in the morning, go for a two-hour walk, maybe swim, come back, write and edit some more before I come home, take a shower, make dinner, and go to sleep. I can’t sit still, can’t watch TV. It depresses me too much.
Last night, I watched a movie that was eerily similar to the book I’m putting out next year. It wasn’t exactly like my book. I’d conceived the idea during COVID, four years ago, before this movie was probably even thought about. I won’t get into the movie and what it was, but I will say how strange the collective unconscious is if this has anything to do with it. It’s like our brains are connected, or every idea has been taken. I can write anything, and rest assured, somebody has already done it.
I’m sitting in the coffee shop and hearing a man talking to himself. There’s nothing to see her. Just keep moving.
Anyway, I’ll take this time to thank the writers who’ve come before me.
I remember going to a company party on July Fourth when I was in my twenties—close to twenty years ago. Everyone except my friend and I sat at the pool or the jacuzzi on a hot day. We perused the bookshelf inside the house in Lawndale, a trashy little town a little south of Los Angeles.
My friend plucked a book from the shelf called Hot Water Music by Charles Bukowski.
“You got to read this guy,” he said. “It’s so easy to read.”
I’d read some of Bukowski in college. A roommate had kept a book of poems on the toilet in our dorm, and I remember turning it to a page where Bukowski described a trip to Bakersfield, where I lived through high school and some of college.
My friend flipped it to a page for a short story for me to read. It was about a random couple that would have sex in the apartment elevator at random times. The story lasted maybe ten pages if that, but it was largely entertaining.
I became addicted to Bukowski after that story. It was cinematic the way it was written.
Bukowski had a knack for introducing other writers. I learned about Celine, Hamsun, Hemingway, Fante, and those were just the novelists. And I tried to read all of their books but couldn’t quite make it.
Celine was too esoteric for my liking, so I never finished a book of his.
Hamsun’s Hunger is considered to be a classic among certain readers. I read it the whole way through, waiting for a payoff that wouldn’t come, but I still respected the writing.
Hemingway was Hemingway: direct, humorless, way too serious.
Fante was Bukowski without the obscenities. I think I read all of his books except for a few. Ask the Dust was really good. I even saw the movie, which starred the Irish actor Colin Farrell. He wouldn’t have been my first choice. The main character was Italian.
Anyway, those are some of my favorite writers. I don’t celebrate a genre. I could read Thurber one day and Vonnegut the next. Some days, I’m in the mood for a good detective novel, although The Big Sleep was too slangy for me with too many weird metaphors.
My favorite Bukowski book is Ham on Rye. It’s about his childhood. In the documentary Born This Way, Charles described it as a horror story. I could see where he would say that. His childhood, if he’d portrayed it accurately, did sound horrific.
I wouldn’t put Post Office far behind Ham on Rye if it’s my second favorite book of his. Factotum might be. They made a film out of that as well, starring Matt Dillon as the Bukowski character. Again, he wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it was close enough, I guess.
I haven’t read Bukowski in many years. I’ve exhausted his books and want to discover someone else with a voice I really love, but I have yet to find that person.
But I do love what Jane Bowles had written. Two Serious Ladies is a book I would recommend to everyone. I just looked her up online. It was her only novel. She’d written mostly short stories and a play. So she’s someone I would want to explore further once I’m done with my reading list, which is arduous. Most of the writing, these so-called classics, has been painful to get through. I don’t recommend anything besides Bowles thus far.
I returned to Goleta last night after two nights in Avila Beach and can say that I’m happy to be away from that mean town. The weather is hotter here. I’m staying at the same hotel where I stayed on the first night.
It’s an awkward hotel room, especially the shower. The showerhead is one of those detachable ones that hangs in the middle of the stall. And it faces the wall. I can’t just stand there and let the hot water hit me. I have to hold the showerhead in one hand and wash myself with the other hand. It’s just as dysfunctional as the shower when I stayed on the first night, which was missing a door, but it’s something that I’ll remember in years to come.
But anyway, I kept eating yesterday. My parents and I ate lunch at a restaurant inside a hotel in Los Olivos, which is a small town off the 101 mostly for wine tasting, but they still have places to eat. All three of us ate flatbreads. Our waiter was a big man with mutton chops. He suggested the specials. Waiters always speak fast when they tell us what the specials are. I can never catch on to what they’re saying. But I did hear the word “artichoke.” My father did, too, so we ordered the artichoke as an appetizer. It was a plate full of small artichoke hearts with some sort of white cheese sprinkled on top of it, with a yellow sauce that I can only describe as tangy–if that’s the right word, but it’s hard to tell.
We then ordered our flatbreads. My mother ordered the Margherita flatbread, which needs no explanation. We all know what a Margherita pizza is: salt, olive oil, mozzarella, tomato sauce. My father ordered the mushroom truffle flatbread. And I ordered something with garlic, mushrooms, pine nuts, tomato sauce, and ricotta cheese. There was no hint of garlic, even though it said garlic on the menu. It didn’t taste as good as their flatbreads, but they still gave me what they couldn’t finish, so I ate it later in the hotel room in Goleta. The flatbreads tasted better cold than they did hot. I wasn’t expecting that.
After lunch, we drove to Chumash and gambled at the Chumash Casino. It’s a fair casino, unlike the casinos in Coachella Valley, where the machines hardly ever hit. At this one, I broke even after playing a machine with the devil involved in it. When the devil shows up in the middle slot, a bunch of free games shows up, and the devil unlocks more money, including bonuses such as the mini bonus, the minor bonus, the major bonus, and the maxi bonus. The major bonus would’ve won me a hundred dollars, while the maxi bonus would’ve won me over a thousand dollars. But that never showed up. I went there with a hundred dollars to gamble with and left with the same amount. It was as if I never even played the slots.
And then I said goodbye to my parents. They’re staying for the rest of the week in Avila (God help them), and I’m driving back to the heat in Palm Springs this afternoon. It was a trip that was frustrating at times, but I got through it.
Day three is the last day. The circus is leaving town. The one-man circus.
I’ve had enough of this beach. The people are unfriendly. Yesterday, a barista at a coffee shop in San Luis Obispo castigated me for taking up too much space at a table. I apologized and said I would clean it up, but the lady kept giving me the stink eye, so I moved outside where the b***h couldn’t see me. That was in the morning.
In the afternoon, I rented the tennis ball machine at the tennis club where my parents were staying. We were actually staying at the inn, not the hotel, next to the tennis club. I waited until one o’clock to use it.
A short guy who managed the ball machine came up to me and said, “The machine is for club members only, not hotel guests, but I’ll let it slide this time.”
Oh, gee, thanks. What a swell person you are.
At least he helped me set up the machine. It fed the balls well, but I was too afraid to hit them onto the other court, where someone else was playing. So I wasn’t swinging perfectly and, therefore, wasn’t hitting them with accuracy. A few balls flew out, while most of them skipped into the net. I used to play high school and collegiate tennis, but I’ve since lost my strokes. They’re hard to get back after I haven’t played in a while. It was annoying to deal with. Not only that, but the machine that picked up the balls was broken, so I had to pick them up myself, which consumed a lot of time and energy. I used my watch to count the calories I was burning, and picking up the balls counted for a lot of that.
The lady in the court next to me was using another ball machine, but her ball picker-upper was working just fine. She kindly said, “You can use it when I’m done.”
A nice gesture of hers, but she didn’t finish until I finished. I’d rented the court for an hour, and she’d been hitting with the ball machine longer than I had, maybe two hours. It was too late.
So I chalked that up as a negative experience. I never want to do it again.
My parents took me to dinner at a restaurant that overlooked Pismo Beach. It was one of their favorite places. The menu didn’t grab me. I wanted something like a crab sandwich, but nothing like it was on the menu. It was all entrees. There we were, gazing out at the surfers surfing the little waves that Pismo had to offer, and none of us ordered seafood. My father ordered the lettuce chicken wraps, and my mother ordered the filet mignon. I ordered the half chicken with gnocchi, green beans, and mushrooms. We might as well have eaten at the Cheesecake Factory, but I didn’t complain.
I don’t even really like chicken. I’m still wondering why I ordered it. I wanted cookies to make up for dinner. All I’ve been doing this vacation is eating in between dealing with a******s with ball machines and baristas with dirty looks.
I think today will be a better day. We’ll eat lunch somewhere and go to a casino on the Chumash reservation, where my father once won eleven thousand dollars. I’ll stay another night in Goleta and sit in my favorite coffee shop tomorrow morning before I head back to Palm Springs. I hope the same lady won’t be working there who gave me a cheese Danish that she’d never warmed up.
