The Coffee Shop Novel Continues

I sit down at a plastic table under and ancient wooden awning of a nearly century-old market that also doubles as a quasi coffee shop. This table is the coffee shop’s only seating.

I am drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. It is as thin as a Dickens gruel.

A lithe woman with pink hair and wearing yoga pants walks into the coffee shop. More like jaunts than walks. Her left arm is broken and she has a pink cast. Her story intrigues me and I don’t even know what it is.

I waited for my coffee shop to open after a five-mile walk on a deserted beach in a dense fog. The tide was so far out it practically invited me to walk to Asia. I started and then detoured, wandering among the tidepools and exposed rocks. What exciting life abounds there! I may become a sea star man one of these mornings and break up with the limpets. Sea stars devour limpets.

I recall a moment 15 years ago when I saw a kid on a beach detach a sea star from a rock with a stick. His parents watched and egged him on. I let the kind have it, called him a murderer, made him cry. The parents stood their speechless. They’d raised a killer.

A crow is pecking at a street light.

I am eating my yogurt with blackberries I picked on the way back from the beach. I am supplementing this breakfast with a couple of leftover pancakes a poet made me from buckwheat, walnuts and cranberries.

There is bustle in the coffee shop. A carload of jangly tourists invaded and are ordering energy drinks and chips for breakfast.

I met a man recently who divined the secrets of the comings-and-goings of the otters on the local beach. I now possess that secret knowledge and can regulate my life accordingly to watch them. How many Americans can say they have a daily or weekly presence of otters in their lives? I should conduct a research study into that question.

A large woman is walking up wearing a purple bathrobe. I just heard her order a pack of Marlboros for breakfast.

Morning doves mass on the power line. The quail are loose!

I have much to write today, absolutely none of it with any prospect for commercial success. Maybe I won’t write a thing.