Down at the Municipal Pier, harassing crustaceans again

I hit the pier for the first time in a long spell this afternoon. My weapon: frozen chicken livers, which I set in the bait-cage of my hoop net, and hurled into the briny depths.

By my standards, the action was fast. Exhibit A, to the left, shows an 11-crab haul, one of several big catches. Obviously, the ocean floor was crawling. Unfortunately, as you can also see in Exhibit A, it was crawling with dinky crabs. So in the end, I chose to be a magnanimous god and spared 'em all.

When I tossed the leftover chicken entrails into the water, the gulls went wild, squawking and brawling with each other like stock brokers swept up in a trading frenzy.

It was cloudy and cool, so there weren't many people on the waterfront. A young, spaced-out dude who called himself "Aspen" imposed his company upon me for about 20 minutes. He claimed that he'd been abducted by angels and shown the earth from some sort of glass spacecraft/mansion. A great triumph of architecture, he insisted. He also talked about some famous lover he'd had in Europe. I couldn't quite follow that story. Eventually, to rid myself of these monologues, I took out my cell phone and called Bob Mosedale. I jabbered for a while, and Aspen drifted down the pier. Soon, he was engaging a baffled, young Australian couple and I was left to contemplate the undeniable usefulness of the mobile phone.