César Chavez Library: Thursday the 19th of August

The guy to the left of me does philately in his ECKO Other Ground print shirt. The guy to the right blasts death metal into his headphones while he draws careful line drawings on sheet-after-sheet of copy paper. The guy to my immediate right is quiet and square-looking; he reads and writes and occasionally types. The guy down at the end of the row has recently rolled out of a boxcar and wears acid-washed denim blackened with grime and a Karl Marx style beard. I believe mice live in it. There's a lady who is here often. She sits perched on the edge of a chair and does not read. She just watches everyone and appears perturbed by the hard rock music. Her ears lay back like an irritated cat's. Soon she leaves. I spent much of the morning with my son at pre-school. Now I won't see him until the evening. I'm on vacation, so I just come here to kill time. I find the environs and the people watching to be pleasant. Later on I will have some Thai iced tea and a chicken-and-rice bowl at the nearby Quickly snack bar and watch the Simpsons on their TV. Tomorrow is the last day of my vacation and I will return to my normal schedule. The goat in me is happy (Capricorn)-- I frolic in my goals and ambitions. I love tasks and plans and passion and motivation. This is my native element, and only in the soil of realism and daily duties does my imagination take root-- not in the airy vagaries of vacation time. Yay, work!