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.