Clean Cut

Yesterday, I started my job.  It's not that I avoided the option of working, because it's instilled in me to always be productive doing something, but it's that I had to be patient and wait for what was in store.  I work, now, at The Sunset Restaurant in North Malibu.  It's the closest thing to a perfect job I could have ever imagined.  I drive my car for 15 miles going to work right on the PCH.  Every day I drive in I smell the salt water from the ocean.  It's absolutely magnificent.  

Saturday morning, after another circuitous night only filled with sleep depravation, I woke up around 6 am.  Of course I had set seven different alarms the night before in fear of my iPhone not changing for Daylight Savings Time, but that was irrelevant at this point.  I tossed and turned for another fifteen minutes and after realizing my eyes wouldn't close again I decided to go to the Pier and watch the sunrise.

I put on the one pair of jeans I like, which now have a gaping hole in an area that shouldn't be publicly displayed, tied my chucks, plugged my headphones into my phone, and lugged my bike down the stairs to make the short 2 mile bike ride.  Having recently made a new playlist I was deafened by Rare Earth's "It's Time to Celebrate" while passing Colorado and 20th.  The air was crisp around me, fresh.  I knew it'd be a good day.  

I flew down the bridge that connected to the pier and the sounds of the wood thudded over my tires.  No one was really awake yet.  There was a homeless man sleeping under a tree off of Ocean, and small mexican man fishing off to the side, and a skate boarder (random, I know, but he was probably doing the same thing I was).  I was almost to the end of the pier and stopped to turn around to see the faint glow coming up over my city.  

Constantly distracted and ADD derived, I only stared for about 5 minutes.  In those five minutes I decided I was alive and awake and wanted to continue my bike ride down to Venice.  I got on the bike, turned up Carolina Liar's "Show Me What I'm Looking For," and realized how much I loved what I was doing.  I sped down the boardwalk and the vendors were setting up their kiosks for a long Sunday of hopeful sells.  I went through a group of guys and girls kicking a soccer ball around, galavanting at such an early hour, and on occasion, may the scene have allowed it, I plowed through herds of pigeons to watch them scatter relentlessly away.  I went home, refreshed and ready.

The most surreal moment of my day was when I had just gotten to work.  I was helping my co-worker Kelly set up the restaurant.  We were listening to music, listening to Kim's debauchery of her previous night out, and then we heard helicopters.  It was odd to have those gnats swarming at such an early, desolate hour.  We looked at the front window, well, one of the front windows since the entire restaurant is basically made of them, and saw what the commotion was.  Just off the shore to our right a huge spew of water leapt into the air and fins began surfacing all around it.  Then to the right, almost instantaneously, it was deja vu.  The sprinklers of water came up every few minutes - they were grey whales.  Turns out, the helicopters were flying just above them, closer to sure, to try and scare them back out into the ocean so they wouldn't become beached.  Ha, I didn't realize that term was applicable in reality.  The dolphins were amazing though, watching them come up every ten or fifteen seconds.  It was definitely something I had never seen before.

This was my break, my cut from what I used to do in LA.  I used to be the partier, neglecting my responsibilities as a student and sometimes as a person.  Not that I didn't before, but now I have such great influences in my life.  I have friends that work and realize the importance of their being is told by how they live.  In nine weeks of school, I have gone every day but two at seven am for class - something I haven't done since high school.  I'm working a thirty to forty hour work week in a drama free environment.  Could I ask God to bless me anymore?  Never.