I wake up in paradise, a view of the ocean and palm trees from my room. The sky and the scenery speak of summer, but the air is chilly. It was a cold night.
In the lobby getting coffee, I see a television screen with a news report about twenty murdered children.
This is a place that brings out the opposites, or contrasts perhaps that are never opposites, not just the good and bad, but every kind of juxtaposition.
Steep mountains rise right next to the sea. Wide flowing freeways exit onto to tangled impossible-to-navigate downtown streets. Along the row of luxury beach hotels, homeless men shuffle the sidewalk with shopping carts and dirty bedrolls. Fancy restaurants line State Street in downtown, but one has to drive ten miles to find a Walgreens.
I spend the entire day holed up my room working, finally finishing a project that had taken me three weeks when I thought it would take three days. I can see my New York-based coworkers are on Skype all day, but I don't from anyone. It's a day of silence there.
For dinner I fantasize about a big thick steak meal, at one of the fancy restaurants on State Street. Like almost every time, I slum it and go to I-Hop for steak and eggs. The I-Hop is large and sprawling, and for once at an I-Hop, I am not shunted into one of the tiny one-person tables. Inside around me is mostly a Mexican clientele and Mexican staff.
As I cut into my dinner with my knife, a homeless woman approaches my table and asks me, "Did they ask you if you had to pay for your meal in advance?" She asks this at several tables. "It's illegal!" she says over and over to staff.
I feel like J.P. Morgan, brushing her off. Had she asked to share my meal, I would have given it to her. But she didn't ask that. Instead she is yelling something about the "District Attorney" and refusing to leave.
On the way home in the rain I get caught up in a DUI checkpoint. A young female Santa Barbara cop asks for my driver's license and if I have had any alcohol. I am rude to her. "No," is all I say, with an attitude of "kiss my ass" and she waves me through.
I watch several old movies on TCM, but halfway through The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg, which I've seen before, I realize I don't to see the sad ending again. I normally relish silent movies, but this time I leave at the midpoint, when the lovers are happy, and walk out into the darkness of the night, carrying postcards for my nieces, looking for a mailbox in which to drop them.
I walk past the Fess Parker, where there is a large party celebrating around the outdoor patio fires. In solitude I walk out to the end of the long pier, past the sea food restaurants, which are mostly closed for the night, including the Moby Dick, a New England reference on the California coast.
The Christmas decorations on the pier are beautiful on the rooftops of the wooden buildings of the pier. A Christmas tree stands tall above the distant dark outline of the mountains along the coast. Out on the pitch dark ocean, the oil drilling platforms are it up like sailing ships at a festival.
Past midnight I come back to my room. The silent movie is over and TCM is showing vampire movies. I watch one, about a girl terrorized by a female vampire of a vampire cult, while reading articles about dental health on my laptop.
I can't read any news sites today. Tomorrow maybe things will begin to smooth out.
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