There's a fast way home and a slow way, and most days I take the slow one.
The fast way is the bus. The slow way is on foot and uphill, which is a strange thing to choose on purpose, and I choose it most days anyway.
I pass a house with a lemon tree that hangs over the pavement and drops fruit it has no use for. Someone put out a bowl once, with a note saying take some, and then seems to have given up, because the lemons just fall now and lie there going soft. I take one occasionally. It feels like accepting an offer nobody's making anymore.
Further up there's a dog behind a gate who barks at me with enormous seriousness, the same four barks, every single time, and I've started thinking of him as the Senator. We have an understanding. He objects, on principle, to my passing. I pass.
And in May, which is now, there's a jacaranda halfway up that goes so violently purple it looks like a mistake the tree is making. The blossom comes down and stains the cars parked beneath it, and the owners must hate it, and I think a stained car is a fair price, though it isn't my car.
None of this is efficient. That's the part I'd defend if anyone asked, which they don't. The bus would get me home with my time intact and nothing in my hands and no opinion about the Senator. The walk costs me twenty minutes and gives me a route I now know the way you know a face.
The whole philosophy collapses on the days I'm late. Then I take the bus and stare at my phone and arrive home having seen nothing, and I don't feel I've saved the twenty minutes so much as mislaid them somewhere I can't account for later.