The next day, I met Donna Kuhn. Donna is another Unlikely Stories contributor, who lives in Santa Cruz, and whose visual art will soon be on display here at KungFu. A true multimedia artist, Donna has any number of favorite mediums. Most of her poems are cut-ups. She and her husband Rick regularly make short films, which often (but not always) draw heavily on Donna's talent for performance and dance art. She does oil pastels and collages, and frequently transfers her images to dolls, masks, or most marketably, clothing. She's had a number of successful shows around the country.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to interview her, because we didn't have that kind of time. My trip through the Bay Area was a little hurried, and I couldn't bus out to Santa Cruz to go to her house. Donna has a serious case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and this limits her mobility in a number of ways. There are a lot of days in which she can't drive, and there are a lot of places she can't go, because she can't stand to be around many pollutants. She also can't go very long without eating, and she can only eat weird shit. When she came to Pacifica to meet me, she was supposed to bring a cooler with several green balls that she could eat. I have no idea what green balls are made of, but the fact that she forgot hers cut our time further. Plus, people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome have poor night vision, and she wanted to get home before nightfall.

We met at a Denny's. I want you to understand, I didn't ride a bus across the continent just so I could hang out in a Denny's, but we needed a meeting place, and the Denny's sign is highly visible along Highway 1, which Donna took from Santa Cruz to Pacifica. She arrived at the Denny's, declared that she had forgotten her green balls, and needed to eat. She ordered a couple of eggs, and while she ate them, the waitress, who noticed her Star of David, began telling us about her synagogue and home life and a bunch of other shit I tried to forget about. My friend Joja once tried to convince me that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was written with a very Jewish perspective. When I replied that there's nothing remotely Jewish about the show, she said that in California, being Jewish means that you don't go to church and your parents never did. But the Denny's waitress seemed a lot more Jewish than that.

Donna herself was smartly-dressed in a long purple dress and jet-black hair. And the aforementioned Star of David, of course. She too is a tall woman, with strong, almost authoritative features. Her face is given to solemnity, and tends to look more natural when serious than when smiling.

There was a beach near the Denny's, so we walked to it, not because either of us like the beach, but because I was near the Pacific Ocean for the first time in my life, and was going to get some pictures, by God. So we walked along the beach, and Donna, knowing that I don't like the beach or water, made fun of me for insisting. We eventually grew tired of walking, and sat down to admire the beach, the various people on the beach, and the giant Taco Bell that stood directly on the beach like an Old Testament warning about avarice. We shot the shit for a while, until I realized my hands were dirty, and attempted to wash them in the ocean. This went very poorly. I walked up to the water, and it receded. I walked up to it again, and it receded some more. I did it again, and it kept receding, until it suddenly washed up over my shins. I washed my hands, removed my shoes and socks, and walked back to where Donna was.

"What's wrong with you?" she asked.

"Nothing."

"Why did you get in the water?"

"I didn't!"

"You did, I saw you."

"It came to me," I said, wringing out my socks. "I'm done with the beach."

It was about time for her to go, so I returned to Michael's, where it was almost time for first Sader.