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trail of blood
Sunday, May 14 2000
This morning while I was walking Sophie I noticed drops of maroon fluid here and there in random locations on the sidewalk. Whoah, it was blood. I wondered where the trail led. So I followed it down Rochester Avenue to the southwest. The drops were nearly uniform everywhere the trail led, although occasionally I found splatters at waist level on walls. This indicated fairly unambiguously that the creature that had lost this blood was a human who had been injured high on his body, probably on an arm or hand. The drops all had splash marks indicating a distinctive southwestward momentum. Whoever had left his blood was in a hurry, running quickly down Rochester towards Santa Monica Blvd.
As I passed the funky little coffee shop near the intersection of Rochester and Santa Monica, I pointed out the trail to the young man sweeping up in front. He hadn't noticed. Neither, it was obvious, had anyone else.
I followed the trail four or five blocks westward down Santa Monica until I didn't feel like going any further. I wondered what had happened to the bleeder. Was he a corpse in the bushes somewhere? Sophie, meanwhile, had no interest in the blood at all. Its fragance was less interesting than the dog piss she could smell on the base of palm trees.
Later in the day I followed the bloody trail the other direction, towards where the injury had occurred. But the trail stopped abruptly at Bundy. Evidently the bleeder had been injured or dropped off at the corner of Bundy and Rochester, fled rapidly many blocks westward into an uncertain future.
Ever since we moved into our new place, Kim and I have had this funky little table sitting in a sad state of disrepair out on the front porch. It's simple thing with a solid 2 by 12 wooden top and four curvy legs, all in a yellow & green color scheme. The table has been a curse ever since the day it first appeared well over a year ago. It's not exactly the sort of furniture about which a craftsman would ever be proud; its legs are attached to the table top with thin little nails that penetrate to a depth of about a half inch. The legs fall off with about as much ceremony as those of a Daddy Longlegs being harassed by a five year old. Anything ever placed on the table usually destabilized it enough to cause it to crash over in the next wave of domestic excitement.
Today I went to a hardware store and bought four lag bolts to fix our precarious funky little table. Now, after a little buzz-buzz-squeaka-squeaka with a drill and socket wrench, it's a picture of stability and strength. Half-inch-thick lag bolts penetrate each of the legs to a depth of at least three inches and wood glue fills all the joints (none of which even remotely resemble a dove's tail). The table might have trouble making it through airport security, but it'll probably survive the next Los Angeles earthquake about as well as Cher.
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