Learning about the world mainly through books, as I have, leaves me stuck with a geography of time along with space. Traveling becomes difficult. Kelly and I went to Monterey, California. We visited Cannery Row, but it wasn't Cannery Row, not the place Steinbeck told me about. This was no bustling, stinking, raucous port of fishy industry. This was mostly a series of shops and restaurants and a really cool aquarium.

So now my Cannery Row became everyone else's Cannery Row.

My Los Angeles suffered a similar fate. It is not Philip Marlowe's Los Angeles, where if they look like a lowlife they probably are, and if they look high class then they're probably worse. I walked those streets at night and I didn't get hit with a tire iron, not even once.

What's this world coming to.