I gave at the office...

It’s the season as much as anything, I suspect – the long nights, the short days. Even when it’s light out, the sky’s uneasy, streaked in high white stratus through which the sun doesn’t shine so much as glower. And the effect on my light-sensitive brain chemistry is as if my eyes are processing the world through a blue-white filter. If I remember to miss anything when I’m dead, it will be color.

Anyway, I continue in my pissy mood. Part of it is financial panic. Two beautiful twenty-somethings bounced into the store yesterday morning, a guy and a girl decked out in full Bubba Gump regalia. Waitrons or something. "This is such a totally cool store," said the guy. He was unbelievably handsome in that very clean-cut, Mormon tabernacle way.

We chattered away about hot sauce, New Orleans.

Then he cocked his adorable dark head to one side and asked, "So. Do you have a sustainability strategy?"

"Aha!" I said. "You’re a business major."

He laughed. "Guilty."

"Yes," I said. "I did a very elaborate business plan before I launched the store. Break even at the end of Year 1, profitability by the end of Year 2. We are entering the belt-tightening phase, of course. January, February, March. The slow months."

"My sister decorates her kitchen all in chili peppers," said the girl. "I’m going to come back with a big gift basket and load up on stuff."

As Ben predicted, the vagaries of the calendar this month – two four-day holiday weekends – were such that we managed to recoup the losses of the first part of the month in the last ten days. When you have bored children sitting around at home, you drag them to the aquarium and when you drag bored children to the aquarium, you shop on Cannery Row. Still. I worry that this is the stupidest, most self-destructive endeavor I have ever launched in a long career of mostly stupid, self-destructive endeavors. We will continue to lose moderate amounts of money until May (according to my business plan) when the weather in the Central Valley turns hot again and hoards of Modesto-ites, Fresno dwellers and Bakersfielders descend upon the coast to seek the cool seaside breezes. Then we will harvest money. Money will grow upon plants, measuring between 20 and 30 inches high, with ovate green leaves, white corollas and red fruit.

Part of the pissy mood, though, is angst.

Sorry – there’s no other word for it.

Jeanna called me last night. She was about to leave for a meditation workshop. "You should do one of these, Patty. It would be good for you."

"No doubt," I said. "But it would be even better for me to win Lotto."

She laughed but I could hear the reproach. "When I met Amah, Patty, I cried. That’s what happens when you meet your teacher. It’s a recognition so deep that your ego dissolves in an instant."

Jeanna practices her own bizarre, homegrown hybrid of Hindu/Buddhist spiritual practices. If they burn incense and chant, Jeanna’s there. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I almost cry practically every morning when I see the homeless guy with the long gray beard and the succession of bizarre vintage paperbacks sticking out of his tattered back pocket. Yesterday it was a life of Hitler. The day before that, Atlas Shrugged. In the summer months, the guy pitches his sleeping bag under the rotting wharf that supports the Fish Hopper restaurant. But where can he sleep in the winter?