I think today should be spent studying. There was a rumor I’d go over to JZ’s but I’m not doing so well on the practice exams yet. I carefully took notes on every lecture. They still seem to ramble all over when I re-read them. A+ is a listening course, not a doing course. It is 8:30 and I woke up dreaming of a diet soda. Never mess with nature, so that is what I had for breakfast. There is also an urge to go to the beach really early and get some video time in. Maybe, for it is just before 8:00 in the morning. I will do that. Just to see who else is crazy enough to be out there this time of morning.
Speaking of dreams, those five police really did a number on The Hippie. Remember, they stomped him while he was face down on the pavement. He still has nightmares of zooming backwards a hundred miles an hour in a car he cannot control. These five cops all swore under oath that The Hippie had tried to ‘assault’ them with his car. I am curious. How do five cops trying to arrest one man all get in front of a car? Do they lock elbows and form a human barricade? Or do they line up one by one perpendicular to the bumper? If The Hippie was that dangerous, it seems they would have surrounded him, thus making The Hippie the owner of a miraculous car that could move sideways.[Author’s note: the next passage turned out to be quite visionary. Almost all the downtown businesses of today were sold, taken over or closed down due to high costs imposed by City Hall. It is still the same downtown, but now run by strangers and prices have doubled.]
Y’day when I walked through downtown Hollywood, it was clear that a lot of restaurants and specialty stores were closing down or moving. I didn’t have my camera. My guess is close to 16 recently vacant stores in the main three-block business area between Young Circle and Dixie Highway. You know, the area with restaurant chairs blocking the sidewalks, merciless electronic parking meters, $3 cups of coffee-like liquid, predatory parking enforcement and places that “start you off” with something to drink. The places that won’t let you stand under their awning when it rains, charge you $2.55 to print one e-mail page and whose meal specials don’t include at least a cup of coffee and charge for refills.
The same area that hires people to spy on you [for parking on their lot while you zip over to the post office] and has macho police types staring at you just for walking through their shopping center that has closed circuit TVs trained on you continuously. In the center of it all is an ugly pile of dirt that was there when I first saw this area five years ago, now dubbed Mt. Hollywood. All of them don’t seem to be doing that well. I may be turning ruthless, you know, because as I sit here counting out the several dollars in change I will need just to go for a walk on the beach this Sunday morning, I am having trouble feeling sorry for those people.
Now, I am back from the beach and $5.00 poorer. I had to fall for one of the oldest scams in the book. This would not have happened if I’d remembered that in Florida, always take the exact change with you. I brought along just $2.75 for parking. I found a place with a breakfast special and infinite coffee. The waiter never carries any money and the cashier is in on the scam. They know you likely have to pay for parking nearby, so after ten minutes of waiting for my change, I had to leave or risk having my car towed. I really had to hoof it and got there just as the meter maid was rounding the corner. My $1.95 breakfast special zinged me the full five bucks.
This double gets me because I don’t buy that nonsense of the waiter working through college any more. Waitering is bottom rung and not an alternative to a real job. The restaurants that went broke in Hollywood in many cases had a permanent help wanted sign in the window. Maybe they should consider paying the staff a decent livable wage and have them stick around. This whole tipping thing is silly, for Americans otherwise are too bright to pay for anything twice. Unless you can go in the kitchen and get your own food, you kind of expect a waiter kind of thing.
Attitude is also part of it. Maybe once in history, some waiter in an upscale country club in New York really did have an $1,800 week once. That, lady, does not mean you are going to get that in some waterfront beanery in Florida, so lose the attitude. Another thing, two dollars for the whole evening is plenty tip from a regular. Not all of us are on vacation, and nobody likes the server who expects a two-dollar tip every round or ignores you. If you got bills to pay, get a real job. Then the café owner might actually have to do some of the dirty work himself. That is one thing that politicians and café owners have in common: they don’t do well at any other kind of work, especially the kind where you have to build up your equity slowly over a period of years.
Let’s talk waitresses. Like any male, I would tend to tip a young single babe more than others, it is the way they built the world, you see. The problem is Florida’s concept of babe. Listen to me, some 32 year-old woman with rumpled thighs does not cut it, man. She’s shacked up with the friggin’ doorman, for Christ’s sake. What do you expect from me? A housewife in 1960s style hot pants is not the real thing any more. Cellulite should be covered up, it is not everybody’s favorite sight on the beach.
These restaurants also have a bad habit of blasting Latin music over their sidewalks on weekends. Latin music sounds better without being amplified, not necessarily a compliment, and in any case, Miami is over thirty miles away from here. I took many other photos, just because they looked good. Maybe I am developing a photographer’s eye. But I doubt it. One of the pictures looks like an isolated dune with a lonely seagull. It is carefully posed and I am standing on a railing so the dune nearly matches the horizon. There are some sunrise photos because it was a very brilliant morning. Other shots include a palm-framed beach scene and some local plant that produces a huge berry, much like a crab apple. If these pictures are visible here, enjoy, for I never took that many photos when I had to pay for development back in the previous century.
The $30 per hour job seems too good to be true. I’ll let one of the other guys in class find out what the catch is all about. Fifteen an hour seems more realistic when learning a trade that I intend to strike out on my own the minute I master even a part. I may ask Charles or Emily at 561-213-5827 about their offer. They supply the leads sound good to me. The other guys in the class can take the bait. Floridians assume if you are smart, it all happened around this time last year. They cannot accept that some of us were always smart and learned a long time ago that there are some things you just do not do for money. (Then again, no woman ever offered me money for sex which would definitely put a different angle on things for me. But she would still have to be damn good-looking.) I even got you a photo of that Hollywood sign offering condos for $39,000, but not before somebody doctored it to read $69 or $99,000. Don’t rush out and try to find anything at that price. Notice the morning scene with the beach umbrella.
