When I got to the bluffs the other morning, I could tell immediately that something was not right.
The day had begun like any other. I had crossed the wide expanse of Asilomar Boulevard towards the bluff, prepared to take on whatever the day might throw at me.
(Because, let's be honest, you never know what you're going to encounter. Admirers, construction trucks, dead squirrels, little children, dogs wearing muzzles who attack you and knock you over so that you're humiliatingly rolling through the dirt to get away from their cruel jaws and unkempt visages while visions of your demise roll past your eyes and you think, I may never get to lick my family again, and you think, oh god another bath looms because I've gotten dirty through no fault of my own, and you think, maybe I should reinvent myself as an attack dog....) But I digress.
In this case, it was something about the air, or maybe something in the stillness of the bluff, that put me on the alert and told me, "Lambie, be careful!"
So I investigated.
I stopped in my tracks when I realized that the Anna Walker Steere bench had been defaced.
Nosing around, I noticed a clue.
It was a cigarette butt.
Only a few days earlier, I had noticed this very brand of cigarette thrown behind some bushes.
Were the smoker and the defacer one and the same?
Was I assertive enough to do the right thing and ask the hard, probing questions?
Sometimes it feels like I'm carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders.
I'm just one poodle mix trying to stand up to evil.
