I walked through the lobby of my building into the small cafe to buy a drink for lunch, and as soon as I entered I was stopped in my tracks, held firm by the music on the speaker in the wall, because it was there, amid the Sun Chips and the peanuts and generally overpriced sodas, that the rockin' chords of Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69" came thundering down to me in all their lite-rock glory. Suddenly, I looked into the eyes of the woman in front of me in line and sang "Those were the best days of our lives." She began to dance, not that erotically but still pretty hot, while the man working behind the cash register went into the bridge: "...we were young and restless / we needed to unwind / we knew nothing would last forever...," his rich baritone carrying out into the lobby, where I saw upon my exit from the cafe two security guards and a UPS man engaged in some kind of spontaneous background dancing. One of them did a suprisingly moving air guitar face.

The perspective changed to third-person, as I saw myself move through a series of slow-mo shots, as in a trailer for some Bruckheimerian opus about a young schlub with a grammar hangup (boxoffice disaster, but I think the international sales would put it back in the black). If anyone wanted to write that trailer, by the way, that'd be cool.

As I waltzed out onto the street, the whole of Wilshire Blvd. caught up in some kind of brotherhood-of-man lovefest brought on by the gravelly tenor of Canada's favorite son, I realized: California's a magical place.