sunshine and gulls
It’s skies are crawling with gulls. They sit on every streetlight ā along Fremont and up the city’s spine, Broadway (now also called Obama Way). For Seaside, tucked nicely between Fort Ord and Monterey, it’s a fitting new name.
I kissed a girl for the first time at Martin Luther King Middle School, saw my first dead body, and played with my babysitter’s perky boobs under Seaside’s watchful gaze. Wallets were stretched thin in that community when I was a kid. For many families, that’s still the case. The city is infected with gentrification, but it’s growth is slow, which is good for the families struggling for enough food to make lunches and dinners each week. Forget about lunch.
The odors of Vietnamese food spreads to the corner of Fremont and Obama Way. The sugary smells of donuts from Red’s has the next few blocks covered. And the sun shines over Seaside more than it does over any other city in the Monterey Peninsula.
I’d like to think there’s a reason for that.
Patrick Whitehurst 
The imagery makes me miss the central coast, maybe not the dead body or the perky boobs parts so much as the gulls and the culture parts.
I suppose that’s fair, since I am aching to visit Oregon again, particularly Powell’s!
I recently committed the most heinous crime. We spent two nights and a full day in Portland and did not visit Powell’s. I did, however, purchase a most fabulous book on the native Mason bees at a highly interesting pollinator store.
Pollinator stores are where it’s at. Though there’s a good pizza joint across from Powell’s, and you missed your chance to bump into Chuck Palahnuik there. But the Mason bees wouldn’t care about such things…
I don’t know about that. Those cute little bees surprise me. I recently saw them devour every page of The Antichrist, the German version Der Antichrist!
They are so much hipper than I give them credit for. But do they beat box?
I know, right?
No, but they buzz box. š
And sing like Sting?
Niiiice.