This volume covers January to March 2007
Selection from the text:
March 3 – Early Morning
When you first started coming here to write, passing beneath the forest green awning, the place was called Café Le Gamin. A few years ago it became Le Grainne Café, named eponymously for the new owner, a woman born in Cork. Grainne is the Gaelic form of Isolde, but practically no one who isn’t Irish has a clue that it’s supposed to be pronounced Gronya. Some people deal with the conundrum by calling the place Granny while others go euphemistic: the watering hole, the living room, the campfire, Le G., the G. spot…
This a.m., as you park your bike outside the café, you look up and watch a third jet complete a triple cross of white mystery-trails across a wide swath of skydome. Far higher, wisps of what appear as genuine cirrus slowly migrate east toward where strange rhomboid clouds hang over the building tops. What to do but shake your head and breathe whatever’s in the air.
Near the back tire of your bike, some rank barf deposited on the sidewalk ran partly into the gutter before it congealed in proximity to numerous bits of flattened restaurant debris. If you had a choice between the two, you’d infinitely prefer to navigate around piles of dogshit and conventional refuse than deal with whatever stuff it is that parties unknown are pumping into the atmosphere. But you don’t have a choice.
Ah, Table 4 remains unoccupied, though it’s ten or so minutes after eight. Alan and Mark are talking amicably across Table 5. Under the awning you go, to catch an hour of R&R – at least in your mind – among friends inside the Green Zone.
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