Los Angeles is a good place to have MLA, and even though it was fairly cool and cloudy, I did sneak off to Venice for a few hours and a quick, cold dip in the misnamed Pacific on Sunday morning. What a strange name for the largest and most powerful fluid body on the planet. Though yesterday morning, as I ran south on the bike path & watched the surfers, I could see why the ocean can be calming. I took this picture from Venice pier , as I watched a surfer catch one of the slow curling waves that evenly shouldered in from a vast still sea. 
After I was warm enough to make a ritual immersion — the wetsuited surfers didn’t even glance at me — I decamped to the Sidewalk Cafe, my favorite breakfast joint from my time living in Venice in 1991-2. I lived in a basement apartment on Westminster Ave, with old beat-up windows that let sand blow into my sink. I still remember coming up from underground after the MLK Day earthquake of 1994, when the whole neighborhood, from the New Zealand rugby players living in the closet across the hall to my skateboarding hippie landlady, ended up wandering down to the Sidewalk after the shaking stopped. There was no electricity, but the gas stoves worked, & pretty soon chorizo and eggs were flowing.
Here’s the view looking out from the Cafe —
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