Weekend At Last

Work, class, appointments and deadlines, soaring gas prices and the plummeting value of the dollar. All of the stress that lie has to offer. The week is over now. People everywhere are winding down so they can gear up for another week of the same. In the last of the failing light I took my bike and headed for the aqueduct bridge on Gotte Hill. It was an evening of Spring's perfection. It's evenings like this which cry out in inspiration to poets and mere mortals alike.
It was late in the twilight hour. The stars were out and the sky was colored from a dark aqua in the west through lavender to midnight blue in the east. I followed the path along the water on my bike. It's course wound around the foothills halfway between the stars and the valley floor. The horizon was a straight line running infinitely off ahead of me, and giving way to the city below. I rode through still pockets of air, some warm and some cool. Each one carrying with it its own unique smells. There was the musky smell of moss and moisture which rises off of bodies of water and carries with it the scent of life and renewal. A second later my face was filled with the breath of the evening, a breeze fell off and away from the curving valleys to the south, and I was surrounded by the aroma of a million flowers, jasmine and primrose, each variation bringing to the surface vivid memories of unseen blossoms, hikes and hills long forgotten. Accompanying the smells were the sounds of crickets and frogs, the world transitioning between light and dark. Mixed with the natural were the sounds of distant neighborhoods. A family laughing, a car door closing, a dog barking. Slowly the streetlights came on in the world below and the weekend was underway.

Tales from the Bedridden

So today has been an interesting day. Not that everyday isn't interesting, but I just feel like writing about today. I've had the flu now for the past three days. I've been doing a lot of sleeping and watching movies and youtube. There isn't much else to do when you have a fever of 103 and you can barely stand. Yesterday was grad-fair, and I had to go to that to get my cap and gown for graduation. Going out when you're very sick comes highly unrecommended. My only alternative was to make the 100mile drive to Bakersfield and buy one from the school bookstore there at a later date. With the price of gas as high as it is I opted to attend the grad-fair. I learned that driving with a high fever is probably not all that different than driving drunk. I also learned that when you stand in line for an hour on the verge of passing out only to find that they don't have any gowns for people over 6', you'll find out that you could have just ordered the dern thing online anyway. But I'm digressing, I'd only intended to talk about today. So today I had a term paper due for my Ethnic Literature class. The assignment was about as vague as the purpose statement for the class. I think when delving into controversial realms too deeply, you become immersed in a quagmire of PC lingo that makes it nearly impossible to communicate intelligibly. If a language is a set of sounds that have mutually agreed meaning, making the terms you use to define something as far from being a representation of what you're actually defining as possible, has the potential to cause quite a bit of confusion. And here I was worried that my paper would be unintelligible because I'm running a fever.

I also ruined a pair of shoes today, which is rather amazing considering I've barely stepped outside. My amazing urban pipelines, the preppiest shoes I own, which I got for $10.99 at Kolhs are pretty much kaput. I blame the outrageous price of rent in Southern California, or possibly the fact that I'm feverish (you can blame everything on that one). So due to the high price of rent in California I'm forced to live in a little run down pink hotel room. Yes, it's very gay. It's also only slightly larger than your standard walk-in closet. What little space I do have is taken up by books, my bed, my bike, and my clothes (living in a closet does have its perks). I have no room for furniture. This makes it difficult to eat meals. I resort to eating most of my meals while sitting on my bed. Needless to say I've become very ingenuitive. I discovered a long time ago that shoes make great cup holders. You can put a 20oz soda in a shoe, and it will sit there through a veritable earthquake. This discovery is something I've been very proud of for the past couple of years. Well, today when I got back from dropping off my paper, with a package subway lunch, I kicked off my flipflops, dropped my lunch on the bed, plugged in "Whitesquall" on DVD (great movie by the way) and set up my cup holder shoe and enjoyed my lunch and my movie. Two hours later, in the midst of the storm which the movie is named for, I noticed half an inch of liquid sloshing back and forth in the bottom of my shoe. There was a hole in the cup, dad gum it! I tried to wash the shoe out, but I don't have much hope that it can be salvaged. I can only imagine what it's going to be like walking around in sticky shoes. On the bright side, I learned that canvas shoes don't leak.