The intolerable heat drove us from the hearth tonight in search of sustenance. Our stated destination was a fantastic and extraordinarily inexpensive Ethiopian restaurant nearby called Lucy, after the famed fossils of Olduvai Gorge.
I pause here to celebrate my just-concluded assassination of a mosquito.
When we arrived we were saddened to see the place shuttered. We walked around the corner and had an unremarkable meal of tacos and a burrito before strolling home. We stopped by the nearby market and picked up a couple of paletas to eat while headed home.
We crossed the nearby deadly arterial and watched three small kids play in a dusty chainlink lot next to a shack labeled “Blessed Event Counseling Center,” which pissed me off. A few houses later Viv found a “for sale” flyer box in front of an awful-looking full-lot crime against architecture.
I wasn’t really paying attention, because the house was so ugly, when Viv told me I had to see what they wanted for the place. Obediently, I came over to look at the hand-reduced asking price.
$600,000.
Free of volition, I yelped “WHAT!”
From behind a nearby bush, an amused voice said, “That’s for interested negotiators only.”
Viv and I burst into laughter and had a brief conversation with the fellow reclining in his lovely, gardened and detailed front yard in which we both expressed hope that the absurd asking price would pan out.
We turned home and on entering the nearest precincts were struck dumb by the mighty colors spilling across the sky for the next hour. As we entered the house we let our neighbor Tony know that now was probably a good time to gaze slackjawed at the sky.
The walk from our house to the nearest commercial center is not that long, and on a good day it holds a mix of good and bad, with the good predominating. But the bad is so bad, and so clearly the effect of structural forces within our economy and society that it defies reason to expect that an individual citizen can resist and remedy them. Therefore, we, and our neighbors, prefer to drive.