There were a group of bike riders rolling toward the river. Bright spandex tops and bottoms gripped their urgency, beads sweating off of them with too much care. I wondered what they were seeing as the Oklahoma sun burnt up the roadways at eight in the morning.
There was a wedding in my future, and by nightfall I’d have all but forgotten their stern exhaustion. By night, I was stuffing Maryland crab cakes into my mouth, flown in by a good woman.
I stood out amongst two gigantic magnolias, next to an old dilapidated private tennis court and wondered what a future would hold for those trees. Eventually we pave it all. Eventually we torture our bounty. Eventually we sink beneath the confluence. But that night, I smoked a cigar, and wore a bonnet and worried about my increasing waistline.
Back in LA, I saw the same stern exhaustion as those Oklahoma bicyclists on the face of a homeless guy digging through a recycling bin. I remembered a magazine I’d picked up in the airport in Oklahoma, it’s title taken from a Woody Guthrie song.
