Got a bit of writing in this afternoon after storming the remains of the farmers’ market. I can’t live without my fresh fruit from the breadbasket or heartland or some such compound word that equals West Coast agriculture. We arrived as tents were being torn down and boxes thrown into the backs of pickups, but I got me some strawberries and we some apricots.

Writing on the balcony is a lovely writerly room. I keep my camera by my side.

One of the visuals of Cali that occasionally causes me pause is the diversity. Ethnically, racially, creed-ily, whatever flavor or color, globalization hits the old doorstop.

Even the goddamn squirrels ain’t just one kind of gray, fuzzy rat. Nope, they got ’em in the trees, in the ground, burrowing through grasses. And, they are colored, they are. Gray, red, brown and black and some ghostly albinos somewhere in some genetic anomaly somewhere, I’m sure. A squirrel Benetton commercial, a rainbow.

This guy would have stood out in my lily-white suburban hometown that featured just common gray.