(no subject)

Summer means mermaids. I did attend the mermaid parade but there will not be the usual half a loaf of flickr since my camera died a few days ago. Well it hasn't quite died, it gives out a sad little whine and shuts itself off, which I take to mean that it's lost the will to live. Because of thisI didn't worry about fighting my way to a good spot at the parade or catching all of it or paying attention very much, I drank tequila & ginger out of a seagrams bottle and surfed around the crowd and felt a little sick. Coney Island is over-stimulation, it's garish, skeevy, hot and, as the mermaids started to shuffle home and the more usual crowd took over, a bit dangerous. A woman said to her date, on the way out, "This place is a... hell hole." The pause there is what got me, because you could tell she had had a good time and was laughing about it, but there was something maniacal to the place, in the excess, in the mass of bodies. Hell is a crowd of people having fun.

The next day was calmer and I watched some of the air race and made my way to the chinatown bus and back west.

The train, on Sundays, stops four stops short, which I forget every time. So it was a three hour walk. A bright half moon, what I took to be Venus roughly marking my direction.

I made a concentrated effort to think of nothing.

Two highlights. Seeing the hills open up into the great valley, immediately, like dropping the backdrop of a play from forest to open sky with one pull of a drop cord. Then, fireflies, so many fireflies that whole blocks were lit up like christmas trees, looking over a bridge down to train tracks and all of it blinking off and on so randomly with fireflies, yellow/green light when up close but white when further away. The galaxies of that, with trees as space. One firefly landed on my hand and stayed there for four or five miles.

Summer means fireflies, means rabbits. The heat, the abundance, the bugs. Sweat & showers. It's been a sunful few days.