Well, on my way home today (I call Lighthouse Point in Long Beach home, since that's where I sleep) I stopped at Slauson station and picked a lemon off that lemon tree I saw from the train the other day. I also stopped at Wal-Mart on 5th Street and bought the Bondo epoxy and fiberglass mesh to build my helmet with later. But read on.
For breakfast I ate the lemon and my last piece of bockwurst. I then washed my pants (the pair of black exercise pants I wear under my cargo pants - everything else I already washed in the laundromat yesterday, but didn't feel comfortable being completely naked there) with what was left of the lemon as soap, in the mensroom sink at Lighthouse Point, and went to sleep in the sun, covered with my serape. Awoke several times, but finally about 3PM local time I got up and walked the half-mile or so to the beach, where I made a parabolic-shaped mound of sand with the tool mentioned before, and mixed the resin and hardener. Damn. Not enough. I wasted $11 or so worth of epoxy and fiberglass, and am no closer to having a helmet. This kid walking by, an intelligent-sounding white kid who's here with his parents from Washington State, saw the whole mess. He was asking me lots of questions, and I was explaining how I'd spend thousands on projects that didn't work out. I guess he felt sorry for me, though that wasn't my intention, and he offered me a dollar; I said oh no, I've still got a thousand left, and we went on talking as I was trying to salvage something out of the attempt. Eventually he said goodbye and walked off. 10 minutes later it was nearing twilight, the resin wasn't hardening at all (I guess I didn't mix it with the hardener well enough either), so I picked up the mess, threw it in the trash, and left.
While picking up my stuff, I found a carefully folded dollar underneath the serape. That kid!
While walking to the
Portfolio today, I found a patch of
Carpobrotus Acinaciformis today further down the beach, near a long
staircase up to the main drag. Compare that flower with that of C. Edulis, mentioned previously. So there's
plenty here to eat if I could subsist solely on succulents. But I don't think
I could and still be productive.
There was an interesting story on /. the other day, at The Economist about love and lust, and the chemicals that seem to influence these interactions. Do a google search on "sexual imprinting" to further demystify these processes (I saw the term in the Dune series years ago but never followed up on it to see what it meant until recently). It helps to know, especially when one's love life isn't going so well, that there are some explanations out there besides the usual crap fed to us by religions and jewelry retailers.
last updated 2013-01-10 20:14:31. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com
