borderline boardwalk walk

i was walking around steveston earlier cause there are lots of people and people make me think stuff and thinking stuff makes me have shit to write that isn't boring. except that maybe it is boring. i dunno. i don't really see all things clearly. what i find interesting could be a total yawn to most people. i dunno. the world is often confusing to me.

with that said, or rather, spewed like a symptom of tourettes, i'll tell you what i saw when i was walking around steveston.

there's this long wooden boardwalk (redundant? shhhhhhtttttttup) that goes along the bank of the river from my folks house to the beach in steveston. it has all these heritage sites along the way, all the original buildings from the first japanese settlers to the area. the gardens some of them started and centuries of junk and debris lodged in the mud of the banks. there's always a thousand people walking, riding bikes, rollerblading up and down it. they go out there to this very public place, in their spandex with their fanny packs and their visors and sunglasses and water bottles strapped to their backs and they power walk. there's so much fist pumping going on out there with the occasional grunt gasp and sip that one can almost see a porn movie plot taking shape. but anyways.

i love going past the hill. the one hill in richmond. it's summit, being as richmond is already below sea level, is probably at about 2ft. there is always some group of women, with a line-up of strollers at the foot of this gargantuan peak. babies sleeping, crying and pointing at mom, laughing cause she's such a fucking idiot cause her and all her matching friends in new balance cross trainers are walking up the hill and then walking down, in a giant oval, single file. there's always about a dozen of them, up and down and up and down. some of them like to switch it up a little and do more of a squat-walk descent, which i suppose strengthens those soccer mom thighs and makes them look semi-malformed at the same time. funny thing is, this mommy militia keeps getting fatter and fatter, cause they probably go home and bury the hurt of such a static, unchallenging life in whipped cream and ho-hos, soak the pain in red wine and beer and martinis when the girls are over so as not to tarnish their reps as fashionable young mommies. and then they're all out there again the next morning. line up the babies, matching shirts, shoes and visors, fist pump fucking galore and up and down and up and down, OFF DAMN FAT, OFF! it's hilarious and even human beings in such unnecessary pain are beautiful to me and i love to see them struggle and struggle with something so trivial in a way. it irritates me too and i want to run over there and just say, look, stop eating the junk food, perhaps try running and stop drinking every night, but women are cruel to other women and they'd probably lynch me and throw me down the massive little hill, where i would lie in a ball and pout a little.

there was a bit of a strange moment when i was near some gardens. in them was a man doing tai chi which is pretty normal for around here, and as i approached him these two women fist-pump-power-walked by me speaking spanish, and i'm surrounded by steveston's japanese heritage. it's crazy cool when shit like that happens. it makes me feel like i'm traveling, like a tourist. and it happens a lot cause white folk in these parts are a minority. shit the elementary school my brother went to was french immersion and called école élémentaire tomekichi homma. and that's just down the street. it's sad though, the reason i love richmond is all too often the reason most caucasians leave. oddly, in this city, that makes the property value rise - all the crackas leavin' town.

so i sat up at the top of the stairway to nowhere at the middle mark of the boardwalk and sipped ginger ale and chewed juicy fruit and watched a woman on a bench below sit there in a striped shirt and scowl. i smiled at everyone walking by because i love how just turning the corners of your mouth up a little will make people mirror you. and i sat there and thought about mike and how much i miss mike and how incredibly fucking lucky i am to just know mike and i started to beam and i couldn't stop and everyone who looked at me started beaming and it was a pretty fuckin' smiley place earlier today there on the boardwalk near the stairway to nowhere, it was odd. except that woman on the bench scowling. i couldn't get her to look at me, so i couldn't get her to smile. it started to get really irritating and i thought about getting really mad, but then i decided instead to just start laughing really loud, and i kept doing it and doing it and laughing and laughing and you know what? she finally cracked a smile and i saw her upper body jiggle a little so i knew she'd let out at least a slight giggle. i dunno why, but i was the happiness pusher.

i started walking home and i was making a mental list of all the things i'd thought about so i could write them in this blog post and i was saying out loud, "tai chi, spanish women, mommies on the hill, striped shirt" over and over with my fingers out for counting purposes, and my shoes were hurting my feet so i was limping a little and my dad comes around the corner walking kramer and looks at me like i'd just suffered some brain trauma and was now slightly retarded. so i stopped my list-making and limping and looked at him and said i was getting blisters from my shoes, said hi to kramer and busted ass home so i could write all this shit down.

i love how i treat the most mundane crap like a breaking newsworthy story. don't you just love me? yeah.

Labels: mike

posted by Courtney at 4:26 p.m.

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