a stand-up life

It is Friday night, and the world outside my flat is quietly thumping. I think of it as quiet, anyway; you might not. Someone is tirelessly thumping out a bass line at the second-rate nightclub downstairs, and has been for at least an hour. The place has the most horribly banal, generic name: Choices. Isn't that awful? Presumably, people are dancing, but I can't hear them doing it. Out front, someone is thumping their garbage into the dumpster. Even the feral cat who haunts this building (Sophie? Russell? Ramona?) makes a kind of thump when it leaps onto my porch railing.The wind off the bay is robust at this hour, and sometimes it rearranges the patio chairs, and knocks them into the siding. The wind makes the glass panes rattle in their old wooden frames. Sometimes the whole building shudders and shakes.

It comforts me, believe it or not. The way I see it, this building has been standing in this very spot, not far from the water's edge, for more than a hundred years. What I mean is, it is still standing, despite having quivered, shuddered, and swayn on its braces for more than a century. That's encouraging. When the big one hits, we may be able to ride it out--or at least not wind up at the bottom of a heap.