ROBOT SMALL

Best day ever... Me and Ivo went to the beach... it was a perfect beach day... warm and sunny, but not f--king hot as hell... He loves jumping around in the waves, but won't even get near the water unless he is holding not one but two of my hands... We just jump and leap in the water, we built sand castles and crashed them... and then it was time to go, which is when the fun really began... The beach in Venice is SO WIDE that it takes you forever to get there from the paved boardwalk... and it takes you FOREVER to get back too. He walked the whole way, totally tired and raving to himself... "I have sand all over myself... On my fingers... my feet, my shirt, my pants..." This was even funnier because he WAS totally loaded up with sand, to the point where he was walking with all his extremities as far away from each other as possible (think of a starfish)... and still just babbling and raving, "I am curious... I am curious... Look Mama! My shadow! I am walking on it!" Since his feet were walking on his shadow feet, he experimented by touching his hands to his shadow hands, his bum to his shadow bum (funny)... and we were finally back to the boardwalk, where all the people selling incense, and weed, and bad art, and skateboarders, and cool Mexican retro-80s teens were.. The stroller was locked up to a bike rack, right next to this guy playing super-cool Casio tunes for gas money... and as I stripped Ivo naked right in the middle of the melee... He started dancing to the Casio music... People stopped dead in their tracks.. the music and this naked kid dancing, was such an iconic image of something... I don't know what? Freedom? Poverty? Riches? Anarchy? It's a Venice Beach thing.. rich artists passing poor artists passing muscle men passing freeloaders and drunks passing fascist LAPD officers passing political activists and the anti-circumcision guy... It makes no sense, but when you put it all together, it's just Venice, a weird and different thing than anything you would find anywhere. And people stopped to check out the convergence of the gas panhandler musician, and naked Ivo, because how could you not? It was that kind of day.