Monday, August 14, 2000

 

12:05 a.m. Amazing, isn't it? The month of August is already half over -- and it went where? I'll bet the first two weeks of November or January don't fly by like this. One day I'm changing my cover page and the next day the month is nearly gone.

This photo, by the way, shows those palm trees that I was talking about yesterday. They're piled on the side of the boardwalk, waiting to be planted in a relatively shallow hole and then hardly watered at all. And yet they will survive.

Even though they are as transplanted as the rest of us here, they seem to be very hardy and adaptable. I've never actually seen very many dead ones, and these palm trees are absolutely ubiquitous. During the riots, of course, they were even set on fire.

Ah! The riots. There was a sort of riot this evening, with the first arrests of the convention. No one seems to have a handle on the black-masked Anarchists, including the people who are marching right alongside of them. Maybe it's all for fun -- since they either haven't bothered to make posters and slogans and signs, or since the corrupted news media hasn't bothered to film them.

If they wander down to Venice, I will be sure to interview some of them. If I find myself in the middle of downtown in the next couple of days, I will be sure to tap some of them on the shoulder and engage them in conversation. Perhaps I'll even tug on their disguise.

Otherwise, I watch from the TV, just like everyone else. From that vantage point, everything looked serene and under control this evening, during President Clinton's farewell (actually I'm not going yet) speech. Little Chelsea is all growed up. Hillary is seriously slouching during his talk. The world spins on.

I did happen to see one of the brothers that I met on Saturday night, and I'm glad he was telling the truth. There's a lot of money changing hands this weekend, and it's not farfetched for certain morally bankrupt people to consider scamming the more gullible among us.

That would be me, of course. When my daughter told me, a long time ago, they they'd taken the word out of the dictionary -- I believed her. Longer than a beat. Longer than a split second. I also bought an entire set of sub-rate encyclopediae from a door-to-door traveling salesman in 1966.

The set itself was free, actually. That's because only certain very highly qualified and obviously intelligent people were getting a special deal, and I was one of them. I was more than grateful -- honored, actually -- for the chance to buy a yearbook each year, ten years paid in advance, for some sort of convenient monthly fee.

I've always been lucky that way. It's a gift. Must be my shallow roots.