Here’s one from downtown, the Yeti Restaurant. I sometimes get their chicken biryani, it’s quite nice. It’s on the E Street Plaza. It was my birthday week, and perhaps to fight off the thoughts of getting older, I needed to furiously draw in my sketchbook. So I drew this, but I didn’t eat biryani for lunch. I might have had it for dinner, I can’t remember now.

On my birthday, I went just eats of this spot to where the plaza (‘plaza’, haha; it’s a parking lot) meets F Street, so I looked over to Blaze Pizza. My family like Blaze, and sure it is nice, but it’s a bit thin for me. That’s where Tower Records used to be when I first moved here, then it was Dimple Records, then I stopped buying CDs and records and now music is just, oh whenever, look for it, stream it. Explaining to young people now that a record was not something you bought to be retro, music was actually something you had to look for. That One Way sign looks like it is pointing backwards, but we all know that life is a One Way street and there’s only forwards. So, I had to accept that another year had passed and my age counter clicked again, no point fighting it.

And seventeen and a half years after I got here I am still in Davis, drawing the same buildings downtown, the original intention being to fill my sketchbook with the place I was living at the time, and to show those at home what it looked like. Many places have changed in that time. This place on the corner of 3rd and D has not changed much, even that big sign has been there for so many years, and I sketched it a fair few times. I drew it on the day after my birthday, officially know as “isn’t your birthday around now? Happy birthday for whenever it was” day. Time keeps rolling by.