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The sermon for Jun. 11, 2003 is: looking up 4:01 p.m. For a time I was too poor even to take the bus. Kristin, being an artist and also having free access to all things coolio working at Kinkos, forged a bus pass for me; and that worked just swell for a long time, until the bus company started getting wise and began issuing passes using colours found only in Neptunian rainbows and HP Lovecraft. So finally, after getting from place to place by being handed off like a football or atomic secret from hand to hand in my infancy, and then being carted around by my mother in her carriage until I was 49, I finally had to learn how to walk. I had become pedestrian. Santa Cruz, the place where my car had broken down and where I subsequently lived forever and ever, is a beautiful place to wander on foot. Kristin and I would walk the streets together, moving so majestically and purposefully through the night and the world that we felt like that the planet Earth revolved solely because we rolled it so beneath our feet. Larsen and I would walk sometimes through the fog that mysteriously welled up from Monterey Bay at exactly 4:19 pm every day, and look for the most perfect set of swings in the world (we found them, finally, on the corner of Ocean and Dream). Yong and I would walk through the markets and secondhand bookstores, putting everything not actually being sat upon in our pockets; and then run out into traffic, triggering alarms that nobody paid attention too, screaming "RUN, RUN!" And mostly I would walk by myself, listening to Portishead or Tracey Thorne or Morissey on my Discman, counting how many steps it took to get back to my apartment, peering at the amber-lit windows I passed each night to see if I could glimpse something more of the human drama that boiled behind that proscenium; I walked by myself, making sure I didn't step on any cracks and causing my mother back pain, making sure I didn't take more than two steps in each square of sidewalk, and thought about, oh, Dylan Thomas, and Nick Drake, and whoever it was that had just broken my heart. I thought about my poor broken heart a lot. Wow, that was more than I meant to write. All I wanted to inter herein was another one of those "ooooooh" moments that I have souveniered in my memory: a memory of walking. Back when motion was so easy, back when everything was dancing, back when I had places to go, people to see.
 
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