Welcome to the Cacomixl blog.
So I'm out by the pool. Started my day with my usual run. A gentle uphill along the road, with hazy desert mountains in front of me, at this time of year the sun stays low. The road is wide with a palm-filled median, meandering between walled country club communities. Of course it's much too wide for the ridiculously low traffic: the occasional jag, BMW, and Mercedes I see. It's also wide enough to have a golf cart lane and a bike lane. Not today because it's Sunday, but usually I see decrepit little pickup trucks too -- the gardeners, the pool boys, the cleaning services. The air is thick with desert scents and I love this run. I head West parallel to the mountains, past the pool at Ironwood where Jeff and I were skateboarding, got hot, and decided to jump the wall and take a dip, and got busted by the golf security guy. I remember being sneaky quiet, slipping gently into the pool, and then totally forgetting ourselves in our usual adolescent nonsense. I can imagine the guard coming across this scene and trying not to laugh, these two 15-year-olds oblivious to reality and obviously not a threat, and giving us the ultimatum. "We can do this the hard way or the easy way. You give me your names and numbers, I'll call your parents and tell them what's happened, or you can come with me to the office and we'll talk some more." And Jeff giving his usual begrudging answer, "I'm Brian Williams"...
Over to highway 74, the road through the mountains to San Diego. I head East, the Coachella valley in front of me. It's a rare day when you can see the other side, either because of smog rolled in from LA, or desert dust hanging in the air, or like today, the rarest case, because of moist haze. It's easy and fast through this section, winding through the landscaped path with frequent sprinklers, but today I don't need them. Then back along Haystack, the long flat grind past the roadside mailboxes with their flags, along back to Portola, and then a short rise past the Living Desert Reserve and into the complex.
And into the pool.
My life is good.
Saturday, December 9.
Thoughts during my flight to Palm Springs, specifically during my 3-hour layover in Denver.
The woman who heard selectively, in the Mexican restaurant. I ask her, are there beans in a veggie burrito? She yells to the cook, Veggie burrito! I tell her, no, I just want to know about the beans. Oh, she says, Yes, there are beans. I'm sitting eating later, and I hear a man ordering, asking her How long will it take for a beef quesadilla? So she yells to the cook, Beef quesadilla! He seems flummoxed and doesn't repeat his question.I buy a Sol because I'm thinking of my parents in Mexico, and Sol's made in Guadalajara.
The couple sitting intimately, early fifties, his knee up near her body, him playing idly with her wedding ring, then stopping. Self-consciously because they weren't married? Or have they just not been married long? If neither, well good for them.
There was something else.
Ah, the whiskey thing. The legal notice posted in the restaurant said "NOTICE: THIS ESTABLISHMENT SHALL NOT SERVE WHISKEY, BEER, OR WINE TO ANYONE UNDER THE AGE OF 21". Made me think about the frontier days of Colorado, and how there are still those crazy laws on the books like not shooting a shotgun down main street on a Sunday, and this was from the same era. I mean, whiskey? Who the hell serves whiskey? This is a food court in an airport, not a saloon.
And I wonder if the designer who used Wide Latin for the signs was thinking Latin=Latino=a good choice for a Mexican restaurant. Kind of like setting the word "Fajita" in Fajita...
