Mallory's Camera

I've been mesmerized by the resurfacing of that old shipwreck on Ocean Beach. The tides have been so amazingly low these past few days – I suppose that's why it poked up again after thirty years.

The story I'm telling myself about it has to do with a group of people who would have been born in 1962 and who therefore were kids the first time the shipwreck surfaced, doing various wacky and wild kid things. But this second time round they're adults, all tottering on the brink of intensely dissatisfied middle age. Weather factors into it somehow –it's been glorious beyond glorious, Garden of Eden glorious, the kind of glorious that happens maybe once or twice in a decade so you figure there have to be psychic bridges between your memory of each rendition of weatherly perfection, cross-over spots that allows you to go back and forth in time. Figure also the clipper ship itself originally carried Spooky Science Stuff from some mad inventor's laboratory on the Adriatic coast. Blah blah blah. Connect the dots.

Also yesterday a baby otter got stuck in a tide pool. I didn't actually see the baby otter this time but I saw the Otter Rescue truck parked in a red zone outside the Little Store when I opened at ten o'clock. Also a hoard of people gathered on the beach, kept at distance by yellow caution tape.

I had seen the baby otter and its mother earlier this week, swimming close up to shore on high tide – too close to shore maybe, because just as this week's low tides have been very, very low, this week's high tides have been very, very high. The mother otter all but bashed the baby's skull into the sea wall several times, accidentally of course, but still. You could tell she was a very bad otter mother, the otter equivalent of a neglectful teenage mother. If you squinted hard enough, you could actually see the cigarette poking out of the side of her mouth.

Fun otter fact: did you know romp is the collective noun used to describe a group of otters?

Anyway, two hours later the crowds were all gone and I haven't seen any otter obituaries in the abysmal local newspaper so I assume a Happy Ending was had by all.

I continue to be in this absolutely indescribable mood which (of course) I will attempt to describe anyway by noting I feel very… porous. It's exactly like being stoned on acid only without the hallucinations. Everything I see has about a hundred onion-skinned layers of symbolism, memory, innuendo and race memory floating in the atmosphere around it. For example: I could write a five hundred page novel about the keyboard on which I type this and it would be the year's runaway bestseller. Type of mania? Who knows? Anyway, I'm doing my best to ignore it. Punishingly long bike rides seem to help – so far this week I've done 48 miles.