INDIAN HILL

                 I can remember getting into the Jeep and maybe driving down around West Covina, past the Home Depot and the bowling alley, back up to the 210, maybe getting off at Foothill and driving east thinking of stopping at Kohls.   I drive over to Montclair Plaza and go into Barnes and Noble.   When I’m coming in the front doorway, there’s an alcove there with discount books.   A black woman is looking at some volumes, wearing a black t-shirt with the words ‘Man Up’.   It’s a Nike shirt.   I say ‘Nice t-shirt’ to her and she smiles.   I go in and head to the magazine section looking for a truck magazine, something with modern, new trucks, but all they have is the mags that tout the huge diesels and crawlers, the monsters.   I look for the automotive book section, but it’s been moved.   Fiction, that’s where I go.   I pick up a copy of ‘Tale Of Two Cities’ by Charles Dickens, after reading about an author who’d mentioned the classic characterizations of Dickens.   The woman

       I sleep very well and it is dark gray this morning.  Cold, wet, damp, it rains last night and the morning has layers of slate-colored clouds rolling low across the southern sky and the black birds are unsure---to fly and hunt or stay close to home and hunker in the trees and wait out the weather.  I want to get outside and stand in a field.  Feel the crisp cool air before it turns too hot in the summer, gather the last breaths of winter up and pack them tight in an overcoat, button up, feel the freeze until my toes are tight and drawn up against a thick wool sock inside a boot that sheds water and moisture, standing there breath freezing and flowing out through cold nose and damp mouth.  There aren’t enough of these mornings.    Cold and breathy, wet and grey, dark holding out the light until late in the day, these wet days are the rare glimpse of the weather patterns that are forever lost to Southern California.  Bare limbed tree branches etched against a wandering charcoal ba

One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out. That was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed. — opening paragraph of Ask the Dust by John Fante

She was beautiful . . .I was doomed.   He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being. L'âge de raison ( The Age Of Reason ) (1945)