Or is it supposed to happen more ethereally than that, without human intervention?

For that matter, how does anyone have any way of knowing how their heads up penny was flipped? Maybe it was fate. Or maybe it was a would-be Good Samaritan passing not five minutes before you. Which is, I guess, a form of fate.

Maybe it doesn’t matter whether the penny is flipped organically or otherwise. Maybe it just matters that its heads up when you find it. Or maybe, all those heads up pennies you picked up that turned out to kind of be duds…maybe those pennies were flipped by people passing ahead of you.

Thoughts?

The nice thing about getting on the number 5 at 8:23am and travelling by way of Speedway and Guadalupe to the downtown hub at 11th and Congress is that I get off at said hub, walk one and half blocks due south and turn sharply–right–into the greatest coffee shop of all time: Little City.

Once at the counter, I tend to order a Migas taco and a single shot Americano. If its a particularly rough morning, that can be a double shot Americano. Maybe two tacos. [Another opportunity for assertion: When in doubt about the roast/age/brew of the coffee, always get an Americano instead. It's a fairly sure bet.]

Then I chat idly with the bike messengers, getting one last dose of anarchism before I walk two and a half blocks to my office to sell stuff to people, which is also fine and helps pass the time until the afternoon. If its a good afternoon, I might return to Little City for a roast turkey sandwich and a cold beer.

Then its back to the bus. And back home.

This was baffling.

Because if you know anything about bus riding [and if you don't, I'm here to tell you all about it] one of its perks is absolute regularity. It imbues your life with structure that I, for one, seem incapable of creating on my own. For example, if I’m in charge of driving myself to work I may leave anywhere from 8:45 to 9:52, depending. But if I take the #5 downtown, with Joe, then I leave my house every morning at 8:16, get on the bus at 8:23, walk to Little City for a single-shot Americano and a Migas breakfast taco, and arrive to work consistently before 9 am. Which is considered good form in most circles.

On top of that, of course, there are the other amazing benefits of life on the bus; time to read, inexpense, people-watching, the occasional Bus Friend and, of course, the living, breathing demographics of the city you live in. In much the same way that bike riding takes the topography of your city from a concept to an experience, riding the bus brings the people you live around–every day–to life. I for one would take this against the isolationism of a car any day. [Not to mention it's 7 dollars just to park downtown for one day, and 10 dollars for unlimited bus rides for a month.]

But back to the main point. The people you live around. Seeing them. Occasionally talking to them. Occasionally pointedly ignoring them. Making friends with them. Asking questions about them. Such as, “HOW is she already on the bus?”

Answer: Cap metro black magic.

And not only, my friends, does she live there, but this cousin of mine - who’s just my age, but whom I haven’t seen in five years or more - just so happens to be the coolest fish in the entire Pacific Ocean.

My flight on Sunday got pushed back to Monday, which turned out to be the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to me. Sierra descended from the heavens (or at least, Pacific Beach) and brought me to breakfast and bloody marys, followed by an unrivaled day at the beach. [May I say, as an aside, that a dunk in the Pacific Ocean is about all it takes to get you back up on your feet after a long night of wedding debauchery.]

So, here’s to Sierra, long-lost, recently-found, incredible cousin of mine. If you see her, give her a hug.

Harlow, as it turns out, doesn’t have quite enough hard consonants for the number of times in a day one has to say the dog’s name, and the number of tones of voice one must employ.

As we speak, I’m sitting at Dolce Vita, halfheartedly working on a Sunday midday, wondering if that little black dog is hot. She might be; she’s crawled into her portable water bowl and is taking her nap there. Perhaps its time to bring her back to the airconditioning.

And what are dogs (you can ask my mother - she’ll confirm) if not perfect excuses for air conditioning?

Happy Sunday, everybody.

Nobody’s quite sure what she is [maybe terrier? lab? pit?], or how big she’ll get [25 pounds? 45?] or whether she is, as we speak, chewing up my cedar chest. Probably. There’s a lot to learn about little Harlow, but at least now she has a name.

You might be thinking: Wait. Didn’t Nicole Ritchie just name her daughter Harlow a few months ago? And you’re right. She did. But after a couple of days and a million trial names, I’ve realized: It’s pretty much impossible to find a good pet name that some celebrity hasn’t already used on their human child. [Moon Unit. Shiloh. Scout. Tallulah. Etc.]

And now you’re probably wondering: Where’s a picture? Well, the strangest things happen to my machines. For example, today I went to get the thingy that brings the picture from the camera to the computer, and lo and behold a seed [a seed?!] had become lodged inside the area where I would have put my memory card. And now the wire thingys are all discombobulated. Things are pretty much hopeless–all because of a seed.

I can only hope that when my machines were drunk, in college, before they met me, they used to say things like, “Dude. I don’t want to be all old and boring. When I go I want it to be interesting, you know?” And their friends were all, like, “Totally.”