They live on Lindero, just above Ocean Boulevard.
They run down the stairs to the beach ex-path, the twelve-foot wide concrete strip,
paralleling the shore.
It is an exercise path that is, basically, as long as the California coastline. From the Lindero staircase to the jetty is approximately four miles.
They run to the jetty then walk to the light post: six days a week.
"What do you do on the seventh day?"
"We go to McDonald's and stuff our face with burgers, fries and chocolate shakes."
Lance and Allen are exceptions.
Pretty much everybody else on the jetty is there for the fish.
They are there with bait & tackle & prayers for the halibut,
Twenty-two inches or longer.
But then there is me.
Like the blog title says: I am the GodFather of Math.
Paul Oliverio is the first person named, out of the three million websites
Googled under the words sans quotation marks, GodFather of Math
My hook, line and sinker is coffee, cigarets, and a good book
but sometimes I stop reading to greet a jetty buddy, homeward bound.
"What did you catch today, Miguel?"
"Nothing but a cold. I'll have my wife serve it up with some rice. There's always tomorrow."
Miguel will be fed arroz con resfriado but I'll have my rice with fillet of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night and sterling is the right–words that is.
They are a conjunction of subject, verb & object with wisdom & whatever.
My personal coach (and Peets CoffeeMate) calls them "bullets."
I just indent the damn things. You can call them Henry and Harriet, if you are so inclined.
Nothing was more conducive to observation than compulsory silence.
"My politeness is a trick of the heart."
That he was not in love with Rosemary, nor she with him, added to rather than diminished his passion for her.
If you spend your life sparing other people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.
He sometimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might grace upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy his personal blood lust.
"It's always a delusion when I see what you don't want me to see."
Nicole is less sick than anyone thinks–she only cherishes her illness as an instrument of power.
There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority.
Live with non-combatant's shell shock.
STOP RIGHT THERE
STOP RIGHT THERE
F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing Tender is the Night in 1931, eighty years before the events of September 11, 2001.
That is the day Reality TV began and ended. That is the only day in history–"9/11"–to be remembered as a fraction.
That is the day citizens of the United States, who were not on the television screen–or burned to death–experienced "non-combatant shell shock."
Did Fitzgerald have to be that prophetic?
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