Hardly ever do I leave the dogs home when I go to work, but yesterday was a day I did.
When I got home, together we all walked down to West Cliff, the narrow, cement path that hangs above the sea and separates you from the water with only a thin rail above the cliff.
Looking across the bay, it became apparent that the I am in global warming, the smog filling the sky lit a wrong kind of orange, from the sun about to drop down, in the same spot as it does every night.
No matter what you do, never going to get it to come back up there.
Quickly I realized, this is the future I see. The air shows poison today like how we'll see it every night when the future starts.
The sea below was rolling and boiling, the tide high on a big surf night and you can feel the spray stinging skin. A sting you can live with, not always so bad to know what a sting feels like.
Lots of people walking, and the path was crowded and everyone together watching and wondering what was wrong with the color of the ocean and the sky, bleached out sort of toxic, like the chemo drained the right colors out and put in the bad ones.
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When we got to the beach, I was surprised that there was still a small patch left bare by the rising tide and we joined the tourists and locals on the steps to make our way down, closer to the thick, hard sea.
Past a girl in a faded, shrunk pink top, with the saddest prison tats scaling her arm I've ever seen. Both her and her black and gray work had a dour look and I brushed her tattoos on the crowded stairs.
A naked old fat guy in shades was sitting behind a rock where the beach makes a turn, twaddling his twiddly bits in the sand but we just marched by and found this little patch where the tide was still staying away.
Everywhere you look, scattered amber turnips I call sticks but are really seaweed bulbs ripped loose by the current.
Diseased, thick air, waves slamming loud, and we still had a few minutes before dark where everyone could run, a dead, fast run, through the mist after sticks. For a second, I looked the cholo guy with a black striped shirt and the knee socks with his boxer puppy, right in the eye, and we smiled at each other, then turned back to make sure the rising tide didn't swallow our dogs.
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In the dim, walking home across the field, a drop line of ground fog hugged the weeds and stumps and obscured a scurrying few out there.
The signs, where decals stuck for a while, and now just show the stick guy walking his stick dog on a stick leash, freshly marked up with black marker tags that I couldn't really read.
We headed out through the bushes, out of sight, and when I felt how hot the air was, for a January night in the north, I realized that this is just how things are now.
Something is different, and we are learning how to do things over again.
Did you ever dream that you were a dog agility super champ except then it switched and you were at some germy, grungy, derelict seaside park in the dark and the carnies were actually drug addled zombies that were shambling after you with hammers and their big teeth? And then as you're trying to escape your way out from under their oily, horrible claws by clambering up a rat infested palm tree, you're all, this is about dog agility like, how?
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