Yesterday at the playground:

Father, yelling at small herd of children: "Okay, now does everybody have a gun?"
Hippie granny, to me: "If we were in Berkeley that man would be run out of town."

Yesterday I accidentally took Jackson fishing. We were at the skateboard park at the beach around 4:00 p.m. when he asked if we could walk over to the wharf for ice cream. I spent my last $3 on an enormous scoop of mint chip, which was an excercize in misery because, you know, it drips! On your little hands! And when you're transitioning to a nap-free lifestyle, 4 o'clock in the afternoon is prime time for small but deadly explosions of those tiny terrorists among us who can't reach the water fountain without a boost. We were distracted from our petulance as we moved on down the wharf and I recognized one of the Mexican fishermen: he was the guy who rakes my boss's driveway, the one who has a tendency to look deeply into my eyes whilst resembling a short and impossibly tanned Pete Postlethwaite. So I was all, Hey! And he was all, Hey! Who's this? And I was like, This is Jackson! and Jackson was all, What's in the bucket? So we looked into his bucket, where twenty or thirty three-inch-long fish were swimming around, and Joe (his name is Joe) took a small net and pulled up three or four fish and told us, This is a sardine, this is a blah, and this is a blah. Then he said to Jackson, You want to catch a fish? Oh my god. Yes, YES, I WANT TO CATCH A FISH said the look all over Jackson face, so full to bursting was he with the desire to drop a line in the black water and pull up a shark, so inflated with anticipation was he that all he could do was nod. So I sat down and Jackson sat in my lap and Joe cast out a line and handed us a pole and told us what to do: Reel it in (pause); now jerk it (pause), now reel some more (pause); nope, no good, let's cast it again. I want to catch a shark, said Jackson. I caught a bat ray once, said Joe, there's a picture of it over in the bait shack; 125 pounds, pretty good for a 61-year-old man. Nice, I said. Bat ray? said Jackson. (I stopped myself from telling him it was Mr. Ray in a Batman costume.) They made me throw him back, said Joe.

Inevitably, after four or seven minutes of reeling and jerking, Jackson got bored. So we did not catch a fish. We thanked Joe, who promised to bring us a shark tail next time he caught one, and we politely refused, because the thought of a shark tail decomposing in our refridgerator makes us sick.

And then we got take-out sushi (do you tip for take-out? I gave them 10%) and went home.