Play this whilst reading.

8 11 2011 8 54 PM by Reid May

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Bronze as a God

(Listen to audio here)

The slower you are, the lower you are.  You can own a jet.  You can own a car.  You can own a bike.  You can still have your legs and feet.  Maybe, one day, you can own a rocket-ship.

If the day comes when people can teleport, we'll see how many of us still choose to walk.

I always tell myself not to write when I have something I want to write.  The urge is to share it, but the fear is that it wont be good enough to share.  Then I tell myself to go read Henry Miller and learn how it's done.  Then I'll be able to write well enough to share.  But then the moment is gone.

I wanted to write about a the first coffee shop I went to when I moved into the Outer Richmond District in San Francisco.  Now I don't remember much.  But the longer I leave it unwritten, the more soul escapes the experience.

It was small.  It had my favorite breakfast: eggs, hash-browns and toast with a coffee for four dollars and ninety-five cents.  That price seems about fifteen years old in a restaruant.  An  Asian lady ran the counter while, what I can guess, her husband cooked and her son did everything in between.  Every inch of shelves and surfaces were used.  It didn't look dirty, just cluttered.  It looked like they used the cheapest ingredients.  Canned coffee, bulk mustard...

I sat down on a stool at the counter next to a guy.  He immediately got uncomfortable and sort of scooted over as far from me as he could without falling off the stool he was sitting on.  That was okay to me because I felt a bit uncomfortable as well.  It was either I sat next to him or the only other guy in the place at the other end of the counter.  He looked grungy, near his sixties, with greasy long hair slicked back, which must have
once been blonde; now it was grey with only the slightest gold where it shined.

That's all I can say for the coffee shop now.  It seemed more interesting when I was there experiencing it.
I go out looking for inspiration, and it always comes, but usually I am unprepared to docuemnt, reproduce, or express it properly.

Anyway, the old guy left right before I did and I noticed he got into a shabby landscaping truck.

I planned to take my late Grandfather's old thirty-five millimeter camera out and take some pictures around my new neighborhood for the rest of the day.

After hiking about for an hour or so, I came to a place called China Beach on the North-West edge of the city.  There was the old guy from the coffee shop.  He was stripped down to his underwear on the roof of the bath house that sat at the  head of the beach, bronze as a god, basking in the sun.

It wasn't until I left the beach that I noticed his landscaping truck in the parking lot.  Then I thought it was somehow a profound moment.  So I went back and took a picture of him.




I thought he might be what I will be like in thirty years.

Now I should go read Henry Miller.

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