La Mancha

I’d misread the movie listings, so I found myself at the theater hours before the first showing of Lost in La Mancha. So I was in the University District with no movie to see. At the University Bookstore, I lost and then found again a collection of vintage photobooth pictures. I walked up The Ave, or what’s left of it. The street is a trench now, filled with yellow bulldozers and heavy construction machinery, and there’s an empty store front on every block. I was a little sniffly and my eyes were feeling slightly irritated and I experimented with a few deep breaths, trying to work out whether or not allergy season has started up. I had tea at a coffee shop, where a clean-cut student sat silently at an out of the way table, laying her head down on a pile of text books, an alarm clock on the table beside her. A grad student type wearing an outdated sports jacket played pinball, putting a new quarter in the machine every few minutes. When I was thinking of getting up to go, the Built to Spill album, There’s Nothing Wrong with Love started playing – (first stopping a few seconds into the first song, like someone was skipping to another CD, then playing again from the begining) – so I stayed through the end of the record. Eventually I ended up seeing The Quiet American, which was pretty interesting – upsetting and messed up. Michael Caine looks a lot like Graham Greene – which was a nice touch.