I have arrived

The new place is small yet sweet. The new town is sleepy and suburban and renegade in its own way. Every morning I get coffee and internet at a little place right in front of my new apartment. And every morning the koffee klutch can be heard debating the merits of an Inconvenient Truth, the lack of night life on the island, or other heady topics such as is grey hair on a woman sexy. This philosophy club, from what I can make out, is composed of the mayor, an elderly gentleman with glasses who smiles often but offers little in the way of discussion and who seems best known for his diplomacy; Jesus—and here I prefer the Spanish pronunciation—who, while looking not unlike a fan at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert, appears to be the cockiest of the bunch and the ringleader, the kid, an under-thirty-year-old black guy who holds forth often in direct opposition to Jesus and complains frequently about the town, the hottie, a, well, hot Latino with a coupla kids who may or may not own the cafe and who smiled at me this morning, and one or two strays either tagging along or inciting the club with some preposterous theory about intelligent design.

There is much to discover here as there is much to unpack and much to get used to. The only thing that fits into my bedroom is my mattress. I appear to be the only one in the building who does not have a pet of some sort. And I live across from a very active ball park, the kind with the stadium lighting that doesn't seem to turn off until about ten. There is a nearby pub that specializes in Kiwi pies—and I don't mean the kind with fruit—but closes at the questionable (for a local pub) hour of nine.

Did I mention it's an island? Sounds exotic right? Remote? Well, not really. The island is, in fact, man-made, created at the turn of the century by dredging a channel to allow ships to pass and thus creating a port industry where none before existed. Besides boasting the oldest municipal electrical system in operation in California, 10% of its residents report German ancestry, and 10% report Irish. Other uninteresting facts include: a total of 4 fatal motor vehicle accidents between 2001 and 2003, a local gay index of 209 (the national average is 100), and, that at one time, it was known for it's famous—somewhat—Neptune Beach, the Coney Island of the West, whose largest roller coaster was named the Whopie.