Alley Oop

Every once in a while, I'm seized by the urge to go for a walk. Lest you draw the wrong conclusion from that fact, I will say that it has nothing whatsoever to do with my health. Any such benefit is purely ancillary. The real motivation comes from my fairly strong spirit of exploration. I'm a curious guy, and sometimes I just like walking around, looking around. It's not necessary for there to be any practical discoveries, but they do sometimes happen. One did in fact happen on one of my earliest excursions in my present neighborhood.

I now live in a building just off the main road in this area. It is lined with more or less bustling shops and restaurants. Customers access them from that main road. Proprietors do so by way of the alley behind them. I love that alley. It's an excellent short cut in certain situations provided I am alert enough to avoid the occasional car and truck traffic which sometimes clogs it up. Even if it weren't a handy way of getting places, I would play it up as one solely so that I would have something to be in the know about. who doesn't love being an insider about something?

I like strolling up and down it, amusing myself with the less-seen views of those shops. From the front they warmly invite me to take advantage of their high quality merchandise and low prices. From the rear, they brusquely warn me not to park there or else court the risk of being towed. Those signs are just as large and numerous as the others. I guess it's not not really either funny ha-ha or funny strange, but somehow it makes me smile.

I also dearly love any kind of tranquility and solitude, and while this alley might not be that in a smaller town, in a city like LA you take what you can get. Relative to the main street, this alley is like a private Tahitian beach. It's even picturesque in its own way to me, particularly when I'm there in the middle of the night after commerce dies down. As I related in reference to another street, there's this lovely mist that hangs in the air at a certain hour during the fall and winter. Stay out of that alley, though. I'm enjoying it, and you'll just wreck it.