Certain things I check in passing: Art Goldberg and associates protesting the war every Friday afternoon (for years now) at the corner of Sunset and Echo Park Ave. Last Friday it was just Art and another familiar-looking community activist at two corners, with extra peace signs leaning against a low cinderblock wall. Half square. … Then there's the slow, inexorable slow construction of the condo project that people are calling Durbin – the blight at the corner of Delta and Echo Park Ave. …

Season-wise, wild cousins of the geranium are about two inches in Elysian Park; they’ll be four feet by summer. No sign yet of the mustard weed. My friend Steve thinks we may have had our last rain. I hope he’s wrong. … Meanwhile, Magic Gas has neither shut down nor is it offering gasoline for sale. It’s just there, selling coffee, Chevron 10-30, and mints. …

Delilah continues to have a positive message chalked up every morning (yesterday it was "Welcome Mr. President"), though the bakery is said to be hurting. As are the patrons, of course. I have heard second-hand that several Delilah customers have inquired about working at the bakery.

My next-door neighbors, an elderly mother and her elderly daughter, recently moved back to El Salvador with the money they were given as a relocation fee when their home was sold to a young couple who are fixing up the place themselves. They left two younger generations of their family in Echo Park, around the corner from where I live. …

On Thursday I dreamed of a broken child’s easel put out on the street. Then, walking my dog Friday morning, I came across a real broken child’s easel, set out with the trash, just like the one in my dream. I stared at it, then left it, and it’s gone now. … Farther down the street, the trees Albert kept so mercilessly cropped before he died have been allowed by his heirs to grow. … A few streets away, we have a lovely new neighbor who moved to Echo Park from Laurel Canyon, where he had lived for decades. He says Echo Park reminds him of Laurel Canyon twenty years ago. I had only the vaguest myth-driven idea of what that meant. I asked how so, and he said the people in Echo Park are friendly, like the people in Laurel Canyon used to be. I’m not friendly, I was tempted to say. Except that I am. Or I was, last time I checked.