i got to my bar at 6:45 pm and started setting up.  the manager put on her ipod and set it to her bar playlist, and the first song to play was "california, here we come.  right back where we started from."
the manager does not know that i'm leaving, so i had to bite back a smile as she and the first regular sang along.  i knew that to sing along was to break the spell of the happy coincidence.
[i'm getting to the point where i can't be sure something is necessarily a sign...what i used to call signs i now call happy coincidences.  whether or not they're being sent from someplace else, i recognize them and give my appreciation.  i figure it's the all-around best thing to do.]

after working the bar till 4 am then being hit with a relatively large number of regulars at around 3:45 am and knowing i'd stay there until the last one got the inclination to leave, i and my manager and they got out a set of coloring books and a 64-box of crayons.  this is what they do now on mondays - get drunk and color! - but we decided we could extend this ritual into late late tuesday nights.  i colored a cab.  it looked very tired already.  i drew red veins in its droopy headlight eyes, dirt on the bumper, a smashed butterfly on the windshield.  i wanted to make sure it was a new york cab.
this will never happen in la, i said to myself for definitely not the first time since deciding to leave.  we lock the doors around 4 am and we leave when we leave.  there is no "everybody get the fuck out" at 1:50 am.  absurd.  preposterous!  where would that happen?  certainly not in new york.  we colored and laughed and took shots and continued to sing along.  my heart was warm.

after all was said and done, and money was counted and things were put away and surfaces were wiped down, i shared an as-of-late-very-rare cigarette with the manager as we decompressed and waited for her cab to come.  (the cab did, in fact, look a lot like the picture.)  then i hopped on my bike and pedaled towards home, with my messenger bag slung over my shoulder and the cig dangling from my lips.  i said to myself, not for the first time, this will never happen in la.  yes, there are bikers, but the chick nonchalantly going home on her '80s schwinn complete with bag and cigarette, sans care, at 4:30 am...where in la would i fit in?  here the handful of cars gave me room, as they were used to someone like me. 
things are accepted here - many different spectacles. people here have seen far stranger than me, and they even begrudgingly accepted that, at the time.  i'm an afterthought, if a thought at all.  i'm another biker going to or from work at the usual ridiculous hour in the morning.

i went down the main road for a while, then turned off at a side road and took another way to my apartment.  since even astoria is for the most part on a numbered grid, i have many ways to get home, and sometimes i want to go a different way knowing that i can still wind up at my front door.
biking down these streets, i was struck by the quiet.  only the soft, soothing tick, tick of my schwinn when i paused mid-cycle on the pedals; when i pushed forward, nothing.  i was reminded of being in a canoe gliding on a series of small, silent creeks, with the only sound of my oars when i thrust them under the surface and pulled them through and out. 
this was a suburb.  everyone was asleep.  i began to think of, then hum a christmas song.  i like these sorts of traditional, very familiar church songs out of context:

it really was idyllic.  and the hopes and fears belonged to the dreamers...and, of course, me.

things are starting to manifest, become physical.  for once i made a good amount of money at this bar i love so, and then tomorrow i've got another training day at the third job, and then the next day i've got a spare shift at the second job, and then that brings us to friday where i'm back at the first job.
this will (hopefully [and fearfully]) be the next three months of my life.

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