wet

Very wet!  Not that I'm sorry to see the rain - but it's not just wet, it's cold.  And it was a long day.  Two search discussions and voting, one in each of my departments; long meetings.  And rain.

This isn't actually the photo I thought I'd be posting.  I was splashing from class to meeting, and saw a slightly chilling sight: two campus cops, with a large, menacing, growling dog who was being trained to attack - luckily the object of the attack seemed to be a large wedge of cardboard, but you wouldn't want those teeth anywhere near you.  Very shortly afterwards I saw in Annenberg Media that an unhoused man with a history of sexual battery had been arrested on campus.  I'm suspecting the two things are linked.  But here's my question: given that we are paying security services for a secured perimeter that's a total pain to work within (having to check back in with a USC card when we've walked fifty feet to mail a letter, for example), why are there arrestable people on campus in the first place?  Anyway, they were probably trying to keep dry.

In any case - as I tend to do if I see armed police anywhere near students, doing anything unusual, I got out my cell phone as a kind of reflex action - thought I'd taken a pic, but no.  Maybe Elon Musk got inside my phone.

 

contemplating the future

Maybe I should stop on my way to or from USC and ask for a reading: I find (as, I'm sure, do half the country) that I wake up at 3 a.m. (assuming that I've been able to sleep, in the first place), thinking - what next, what next, what next?  This regime's incessant battering of seemingly everything I value in this country is exhausting, infuriating, and doubtless it's meant to make us feel like that, so that we shut ourselves down so as not to engage any more.  Well, no.

 

stairwell

Another day; another job candidate visit; another trip to the bathroom at Manuela so that I could take a photo of the tastefully decaying warehouse architecture ... This evening's discovery was the date ice cream ... 

 

the shadows of an afternoon walk

Unintentionally, I seem to have captured the shadows of a pregnant lamppost.  Plus some bougainvillea, and its accompanying leaves; all projected onto a weirdly colored pale lime green wall.  

Jolted just now by a 3.9 earthquake, which did everything it was meant to do (loud boom; sound as if a train was rushing into the house; windows rattling alarmingly). Gramsci fled; I dived under the dining room table; Moth carried on eating, and Alice "wasn't sure what that was."  I guess Grammy and I come across as the novices, here ...

 

Jackson Market

A new discovery!  Jackson Market, in Culver City (or, to be more exact, Park East), which is like a funky neighborhood deli in - oh, I don't know, somewhere mid-sized and quirky, like Columbus Ohio (friends in Columbus will tell me it's nothing like it, I'm sure - I plucked that out of the air, but it reminds me of the US 25 years ago, being busy but small scale and completely unpretentious), with a little yard in which to eat at the back.  "Eat" - I'm still on the not-chewing-very-much routine, but the tub of guacamole was delicious.

And this was with my oldest friend, whom I've known for ... a bit under 68 years.  Photo courtesy of the people sitting next to us - I don't know why I've slumped so ... it both seems a long time since we were, say, galloping down the beach at Deauville on retired racehorses, and on the other hand, not a minute ago.