A sight the other week:

Like around 10pm or 11pm or so I'm walking back to my back alley cottage from the downtown area a few blocks away, and I see a major busline coming down a side street, and I think to myself, "That's odd," and then I wonder if it always turned there, but I just hadn't noticed.

Then, I get up to the main east-west drag, and there's an ambulance down in front of an apartment building, and I can see down past that onto the parallel street, and there's a bus going down that in the other direction, and I realize that there must be some kind of sudden re-route going on.

And, I see a (mid-20s) (fat) (white) girl at a bus stop just beyond where the ambulance is, and she's looking at her phone, and so I call across the street to her to let her know that there seems to be some kind of a re-route going on, and as she's like, "Oh, that's why the bus should have been here by now!", I see a small van with the local transportation agency logo on it putter by, probably to check out what was happening and if they needed to set up signs or something.

A shattering watermelon.

The other week I finally busted open the small watermelon that I'd gotten at the local farmer's market, after I'd finished up the other one that had been in my fridge.

With my watermelons, I always cut off the upper top like a lid so that I can scoop out chunks from inside the middle, and then finally I saw around the edges and remove the rinds and gnaw them down once that middle part is gone.

Only, when I went to do that with this watermelon, as soon as I stuck the knife in, it was like something was tight and released, and a crack shot down the side, and as I sawed off the lid on top, the crack widened even more, like the watermelon was tightly bound up but could finally let it all out now and could breathe.

There was a little bit of juice puddling under it on the counter, but otherwise the watermelon was good, so I stuck it on a plate and stuck it in my fridge like I always do.

I've checked a few times to make sure that there's not so much juice on the plate that it spills off into the refrigerator, but that hasn't happened yet, and I don't think it will.

My lower back is hurting again.

On my recent trip to the city that I used to live in, I think schlepping around all those weighty bags with produce and beer weakened it, and then when I went to the beach, at one point I slung my backpack off my shoulder to set it down as I still continued walking and that somehow made something go wrong, which I felt slightly, and then more when I gently dove into the water, since as I arched up out of it I could feel this odd unanchored slow-moving spasm in my lower back, as the water supported my weight, but my muscle was shifting in a way that it wasn't accustomed to.

So, I did a few paddles, but then I went back to shore right away, and ever since then it's hurt, though daily stretching has helped it to heal, some.

I wonder if I permanently f*cked up my lower back during my stint working at the resthome - I threw it out once, there - and now I wonder if for the rest of my life this will occasionally happen.

It really makes you wonder how humans have survived this long, with a really shittily-designed lower back muscle; if you threw that shit out back on the veldt, man, you'd really be a goner.

A neighborhood exchange.

A few weeks ago I was walking back home along my one street, and a(n older) (Asian-American) woman who keeps a nice garden and who I've said hello to before was out on her front lawn watering everything.

"Thank you so much for your garden!", I was like. "It's so beautiful, every time that I walk by here."

"Yes," she was like, "But it's a lot of work."

"For me, it's perfect," I was like. "You do all of the work, and I enjoy it."

And, she laughed, and then was like, "I want one like that."

More avocado seed happenings.

So, the other week I went and put an avocado seed out on the one plastic patio table that's out on the small brick patio right outside my back alley cottage, and then a day or two later I went to go put out another one.

And, the first one was still there, but it had like gnaw marks on top of it.

A few days after that, I went to go put out a third avocado seed out there, and the second one was gone, but the one with gnaw marks on it was still there.

So, I had to wonder to myself, was something wrong with that particular seed, where it tasted nasty to the squirrels?

I'm not sure I'll ever be able to know.

Why I carry pepper spray and an alarm around even here where I live now:

A few weeks ago I was coming back from my evening walk in the lake park near me that I do a lot, and as I was going by this main street, I see this (late 30s-ish) (very dark) (very agitated) (black) guy walking rapidly up the street and then doubling back like fifteen feet, and then turning around and heading up the street again in the way that he had been going, and then a car passes by him and he like lunges out at it like he's going to smack its side or its hood or something, then he goes back to the sidewalk and charges up the sidewalk up the main drag and out of sight while I watch, as I had been considering heading the other direction, if he started to come my way.

Linguistic change in our lifetime.

I was reading Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" the other week, and at one point he says "edibles" to mean food in general.

Except, for us now, that word only means like marijuana gummies and shit like that.

It's totally like how the word "deer" used to mean different kind of animals, but now it only means "deer," and how like in German "das Gift" used to mean "present" or "gift" like in English, only now it means "poison" ("the thing given," in an ominous sense).

It's funny to take a step back and see how quickly such a very specific semantic narrowing occurred, and from such a general word, and without us even realizing it.

When you read about stuff like that in linguistics textbooks, you're always like, "Okay, so I can understand how that happened, but that was then, and this is now," only it isn't.