to remember that summer, the "prodigal summer," that we all have the first time we return home from college, from whatever it is that draws us away. it is from a parking lot on the bike ride home from my first "real" job - one that i got on my own, etc. the job was at a cheap baja-california style restaurant called "taco del mar." it was basically a burrito stand with franchise funding, which meant cutesy colors and surfer kitsch. the job turned into my life. 40 hours a week didn't sound so bad, but i soon realized that, while i only worked 8 hours shifts, i spent two hours preparing for them and the rest of the night digesting the day at work and resting for the next one. i also had a catering gig on most weekends.
i started smoking really at this place - it was the only out for breaks, and i welcomed the mental anesthetic in the workplace - i was amused that summer at the ability to smoke a cloud over your head that prevented all the internal monitoring from reaching the surface. plus it was the culture of the shop, and as i would soon see, the food & beverage industry in all its faces. i was intrigued by this scenario and felt i could identify with it: people who got up, went to work, went home, and repeated the process. in capsules of 5 minutes in between, we put nicotine in our bodies, a fine line between entertainment and coping that most drugs seldom straddle. something about the macabre of this idea of spoke truth to me: people trapped in mediocrity, admitting defeat in a sense and surrendering to the routine. perhaps it was foreshadowing.
the point of this picture is that this was my view, as i would ride home after work on a bike borrowed from my girlfriend's mother. i would stop here and eat my free burrito and smoke a couple cigarettes, looking up at the tall buildings. i would ignore phone calls and other responsibilities until i had completed this little ritual, sometimes varying the place but never the practice itself. i decided to take a picture to remember.
but the grotesqueness of the f&b industry hasn't marked my life quite yet, although the possibility looms. this summer was very free, perhaps one of the freest i've ever had, with the exception of jen leaving. we lived in the moment a lot of the time, and i'm thankful we did. i had adventures off of work, and basked in the comradeship i had returned to and the exciting just-back-from college stories. hence the bonfire picture in the earlier entries.
i wonder if the unavoidable trend is to look back on your youth and view yourself as confused, moreso-then-than-now. naïve is one thing, of course, but confused is another, and they are not synonymous, not necessarily so.
now that i am out of school for the summer, i will jump back into this. the summer i mentioned in this entry has a little bit left to mention: namely cuba and jazz music.
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