You ever wonder what the guy across the street thinks? I don't. If you have to think about it for too long, you're probably my neighbor. So decadent he drank himself to death at 36. He test ran his liver to shit. Give a guy like that a medal. He was honest about his adventure. He could've locked eyes with a real life bigshot or seen a ghost once. Someone probably loved him. Staying with someone long enough, your eyes peel back from all the things you see. At first it's just a beach, then it's ten states deep. Pretty soon, driving around taking care of menial tasks, like pumping gas or tidying up your hotel room before you check out are all you are any good at. The money is scarce and time isn't. Longer to be old then young. In the end, everyone knows that work is just there. We are all stuck in the same maze. Still burning my guts with hot coffee though. I'm thinking too hard. Rain and back pain. Switching my position on the chair and desperately trying to stretch my crooked, cursed back in a jerking, lurching postured motion that reflects an overly tired passenger. Back and forth in this dance with the clouds, from the east coast again, then another tiresome jaunt back west. In this scattered, decaying vessel known as 737. It's not the easiest way to keep your passions realized. You really can't appreciate how much west coast weather matters to an east coaster unless you are one and you've made the pilgrimage. We are all intransigent cocoons. Immigrants get a bum wrap, literally. Remember compassion? Me either? Neither do I. She was brought up mostly by an angry drunk man who quit drinking by the time the girl was in her early 20's. She's reflecting on the near 40 years of bad times had with her Senior. Her father played with emotions like how dog owners are a master to their canines. Evidently the years in which her Dad did drink, she played her emotions docile like an obediant pet. The girl you see is of Vaudvillian decent. Beautiful and cunning, and always paid her bills on time. The Sun glistens to form a pastey yet opaque eggshell color that swarms the coastline from the view of the Pier. It's early, probably 6:30 AM if she had to guess. The white-yellowish top layer is a short term morning side up thought. During her routine morning walk to get her coffee at the Pier, the old women who regularly worked the register realized that when she paid that she hadn't spent any of the change she had painstakingly counted out yesterday to her as she handed her the 47 dollars and 75 cents change. In her broken muttered statement one hears a bad accent of a bad stereotype. 20, 40, 41, 42 and so on. There is sadness in front of us all in the mirror that we face everyday like a blank canvas but its actually a telling tale. Lately a cloud hung over the girl. The peculiar stance she had been taking on things revealed her persistent thoughts of dread. As far as she could determine, it was there to change her mind on things. To guide her path. A riddle containing imagery of when you dont have a token to ride the bus, so you get off, and then your lost, and you have to walk a while. Then you see that code or sign that lends a helping hand and leads you to realize you shouldn't have left home to begin with? Now you look at what you've dealt with. This shadowy figure is a memory in the Gypsy that haunts her in her deepest sleep. She stalks him from her bedpost. The most common man could immediately understand her happiness and sadness. Along her walk back from the coffee spot she wanders through the Library Park taking pictures and cautiously editing them to erase any unwanted imagery from the still frame with a thunderous cropping. She sends them anxiously to her Mother. She wants to kill time so she heads back to the Pier with vigourous steps to the Thrift Shop. The Thrift Shop is located 4 doors down from the Coffee spot. Its nestled in a rather ugly manner between a recently condemned Pizza Shop. Hastely supervised by a slithery, young man and owned by a Tourist loatheing couple, who only felt the need to visit occassionally when the State was coming in. And a surprisingly busy Arcade that seems to have been directly plucked by some hideous Godzilla like paw and petrified, then sutured to the Piers old wooden planks. The two storefronts between the ravaged Arcade and Coffee Shop are a popular baitshop and pole rental spot. The girl's Mother never responds to her texts. That night in her sleep a myriad of macabre imagery relentlessly beckons her. Called upon like a hunted scar hears a whip's crack. When she awakens, a traced paper w/ no lines on it yet sits on the table next to her bed. The thought of moving on with her life past the position she was in now terrified her. She couldn't understand what got people up in the morning. For the most part, she couldn't understand what got her Father up all those mornings. Shit, she couldn't understand what got her up in the morning. Her day creeks by in slow motion. Every night she came to the same point to write. Every night to think. To get away from all the non-sense that kept her in a little box. She romantisized her plight as a jack of no trade, accomplishing only what she considered goals. Her thoughts echoed in her skull like winds dancing in and out of a hollowed out seashell. Tattered and inanimate. Moods shift as gears though, and she thinks of her hypocritical Father who drank every night but preached order. This seems now to be septic and chemical in its sterile, lilly white sheen of an appearance. The love rate was way out of order. The girl is a testament to the fact that you don't put a bandage on the boundaries of cancer. Years of toiling. She takes and crops more photos, still no reply from her Mother. It's getting late, probably 6:30 PM if she had to guess. The beach was her favorite because she believes places hold feeling. Another hour passes, maybe more. She is realizing that living in the past is a dead scene.