22 July 2002

Tired and cranky today.

One morning in Costa Rica earlier this year I woke up on a couch in a small wooden house by the side of the ocean. The place belonged to the bartender who worked at the restaurant where I was drinking the night before; I’d been too deep into drink to make it back to my hotel in the next town, and so I crashed at his place instead. He was an American, previously a marketing executive who ran his firm’s Seattle, San Francisco and LA offices. Some time ago he’d burned out, gotten fired and fled to the Caribbean coast to write “the worst American novel” and tend bar.

As I lay there on the couch blinking into the little shafts of sunlight that came through the window in the spaces between the shutters, I heard him washing dishes in the next room and singing,

and then he started to laugh and said to himself, “Holy shit! I do live in a shotgun shack!”

The Fiat is out of the shop again; Alex picked it up late last week. The kind people at European Motosports replaced the main brake cylinder, the fan switch and several cooling system valves. It’s nice to have it back.