3-31-99W 3:32 PM
With Getoff Walters at Diedrich's Coffee of Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.  This is the first I've written today.  I went to Bandera after Q's yesterday.  Lauren wasn't working.  I called Shirelle.  She came out to meet me.  We split an apple pork dinner and drove back to her place.  She was stressing because her roommate's vacuum cleaner vanished, and she accused Shirelle of stealing it.  Kristina wasn't there when we got there, but there was a message on the machine apologizing.  We watched the beginning of "Dog Day Afternoon."  Turned it off before we fell asleep.  This morning we went to Bob's Big Boy for breakfast.  I read the newspaper and started watching "Red River" with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift.  That's when Getoff called.  We went out to a deli he knows in Agoura Hills and got sandwiches and a bottle of chianti and drove the canyon through the Santa Monica Mountains along Kanan Dume Road.  We came upon the sea as if in a dream, the colors and lighting so remarkable and yet unremarkable.  We parked at Zuma and hiked up the cliffs to the rocky point there and drank our wine a sheer hundred feet above the roiling sea.  The wind steadily whipping, we hunkered against a boulder and talked about our dreams and regrets.  Whatever.  We hiked back down to the car and here we are now, a Malibu strip mall.  My vacation seems nearly over.  What next?  Maybe we'll stop at Patrick's Roadhouse.  Maybe we'll go to Mamagay's tonight.  I want to finish watching "Red River."  I've got to lower my standards and further Jim.  Summary summary summary.  What about the details?  What about the lawyer, the stockbroker, and the human resources manager at Bandera?  [pencil sketch of a man's profile]  "Teaching is such a noble profession," the stockbroker said, and may actually have believed it, but still and all, she had chosen to make millions instead, which trumps nobility, I think.