The knock on my door came early, too early to be a delivery. It was one of the college students from next door, obviously distraught, trying to talk to me and holding a phone to her head at the same time.

"I'm so sorry to bother you, I called Animal Control but they said we're not in their jurisdiction, and Miami Shores says they can't come until this afternoon, and I don't want to leave him in our front yard."

Oh no. "Him? A cat?"

"Yeah, he'd been coming around for a few days, but we hadn't been feeding him or anything, but he was really sweet and would get up in your lap, and his leg is messed up, and he's dead and I don't know what to do."

"You found him in your yard?"

"When I got up this morning. He was so young. We called him Cheerio." She wipred her red eyes with the back of her free hand.

I told her I would be there in a minute, and got my shoes and a shovel. This is not how I wanted my day to start.

Cheerio was a young orange and white cat, very clean, with a strong body. Between his affection toward people and his general appearance it was obvious he had been a pet. I hadn't seen him around before, which is surprising, since most of the neighborhood strays end up on my porch eventually.

There was a bloodless gash on his leg and one foot, and his hips and back were hunched in a way the bones shouldn't have allowed. A hit and run, I guess. We get a lot of them on my street; there's no stop sign so people floor it for the two blocks between the four lane roads. Not everything is able to get out of the way.

"I'll take care of Cheerio for you. Thank you for letting me know." I picked him up and put him in a cardboard box, and then carried him into my backyard. A tree there will give him a shady place to rest, and to play with the others.

When I'd put the shovel away and washed up, I sat on the porch steps for a while. Miss Fuzzy sat a few feet away, washing herself and watching me.

"Did you know him, Fuzzy? Cheerio?"

She glanced up, then away. "Why do you give us such silly names? No, he was new."

"I don't think he suffered, for what little that's worth." I watched another car rip down the street. "I wish you didn't have to live outside, Fuzz. I worry about you."

"Do you think I want that? No, here I am free."

"You are full of it, girl. You sit on my porch rail all day. You stare at the door waiting for me to bring you food—"

"I catch my own food. Have you forgotten those tree rats I brought you? And the iguana I gave the kittens?"

I shuddered. "No, I haven't forgotten. But you still whine for food. And when I leave the front door open you come in, too, so don't give me that 'I have my freedom' crap. You'd live inside if you could."

Another car whizzed by, bass thumping.

"His family will miss him, Fuzzy. They'll wonder why he didn't come home, but tell themselves he's just off playing somewhere. In a day or two they'll start to worry more, and maybe go and look for him. But they'll never know for sure what happened, and not knowing is the worst thing of all."

I thought about the tree in the backyard, now ringed with stones.

"One of these days, girl, I'm going to come out here to feed you and you'll be gone, the same way Evil Tom and Colonel Hoppy and Lady Grey just stopped coming around. I'll never know."

"They left when my kittens came. That is the way."

She jumped on the rail and began grooming her tail. "We live and we die, the same as your people. Sometimes we are hungry, sometimes we are not. Sometimes there is pain, sometimes there is not. Sometimes we are alone, sometimes we are not."

She tucked her feet under her chest and put her head down. I knew our conversation was at an end, so I stood to go back in the house.

"Feeder?" She raised her head again. "It's good that you kept the young one's body from the dogs." I stopped with my hand on the door.

"And it's good that you gave my children homes, so they will not need to rest under your tree."

As previously mentioned, I will have to switch my content management system away from Blogger soon. Now there's a specific date: May 1. That's not much time to migrate over ten years of content. Fortunately I only have to jump through a half-dozen hoops to get the content into Wordpress, the new system I've chosen.

So now I'm more involved than I had hoped with the minutia of redesigning and rebuilding Hidden City. Progress has been made — I've imported the first volume already (all 1800+ posts), the basic design is in place — but it's come with an odd (and probably unrelated) side effect. My brain is behaving as though it's in New Zealand.

I go to sleep at a normal time. I set my alarm to get up at a normal time. I haven't changed my caffeine intake at all. My routine — such as it is — hasn't changed for months. But for some reason my brain doesn't really start to function properly until 5-6:00pm, and then it runs constantly until 5-6::00am. I'm sleeping until noon on many days, something I haven't done since high school.

Lacking a day job it doesn't affect me all that much, but it is still both troubling and inconvenient. By the time I'm fully functional it's almost time for stores to close. It's harder to make phone calls and run errands. I feel as tough I'm operating a quarter-turn to the right of reality. What has caused this change?

There's little point in worrying about it, though. I'll just take what steps I can to correct it, and wait for my body to sort itself out. In the interim, I have thousands more posts to import, update, and tag before I can formally launch Hidden City, Volume Four.

Let's be clear at the outset: I am not a food writer. I am not the person you want to ask to eloquently describe the nuanced subtleties of fine cuisine. However, whenever possible I eat for pleasure as well as sustenance, and have accumulated a small list of cheap to moderately priced, unpretentious local haunts I frequent as often as circumstances will allow, and over the next couple of days I'll share them with you. Let me make us hungry.

First we'll travel a bit out of my normal area, to the relative wilderness of Davie. There, in a strip mall a stone's throw from the local IKEA, you will find the finest Cajun restaurant outside of New Orleans: Creolina's Dixie Takeout. Fried green tomatoes, firecracker shrimp, gumbo, shrimp and grits, crawfish etouffee, jambalaya, oh my my. It's the kind of tiny, unpretentious place that surprises you with the quality of its food. The chef takes his work very seriously, too, to the opint of refusing to offer ersatz po'boys because "You can't get the right bread here." If you go, be sure to say hello to City Link Hall of Fame "Best Waitress" Rosie.

Moving to the more familiar territory (for me) of North Miami, here are several treats. If you want fish, then Captain Jim's Seafood is a place you'll want to visit. It's another tiny place in a strip mall with Formica tables and fluorescent lights, but for incredibly fresh fish prepared simply and unpretentiously it's the best. The combination is your best deal: your choice of grouper, snapper, or dolphin, plus shrimp and/or cracked conch, prepared grilled, fried, or blackened, for about ten bucks. There's a decent beer selection, too, or so my beer-drinking friends tell me. And if you are a cook yourself, you can buy the same fresh seafood off the ice, prepped as you like it. The portions are generous, the service is prompt and friendly, and the taste is great. It isn't a candlelit table by the water, but it isn't trying to be all that, either.

Behind a Walgreen's on 163rd Street you'll find Heelsha, my favorite Indian restaurant. There's a strong Bangladeshi influence in the dishes, so look the menu over carefully, but my personal favorites are the spinach and cheese naan, a soft, flavorful fresh bread which is practically a meal itself; the malagathooni soup, rich and flavorful without being overwhelming; and the marchi style chicken biryani, the meat slow-cooked in aromatic basmati rice with plenty of chili and ginger. However, there are two small caveats with my recommendation. First, the service tends to be very slow, as each dish is clearly prepared from scratch; plan accordingly (i.e., have a few Kingfishers) and you'll be fine. Second, and most important: they can be a little erratic on the spices. I like spicy food, but I would never, ever order anything more than medium. On my first visit I ordered "hot" and had a religious experience. However, don't let this scare you away from an outstanding meal.

Bagels and Company is on Biscayne Boulevard, sharing a parking lot with a gun shop. This has lead to it getting the unfortunate nickname of "Buns and Ammo" among my friends. Nonetheless, it's an excellent old fashioned deli of the variety slowly becoming extinct in South Florida. You'll find excellent examples of the expected selections: bagels, knishes, lox, ruggalach, pastrami, corned beef, matzo ball soup, and so on. For me, though, nothing beats a breakfast of their amazing banana walnut pancakes. The light and fluffy batter holds together thick slices of sweet, fresh bananas, and the walnuts add a great crunch and counterpart to the soft sweetness. Slather a triple stack &#nbsp; three plate-sized cakes — with melting butter and drizzle on a little maple syrup... my doctor might not approve but my taste buds certainly do.

• Creolina's Dixie Takeout, 13150 W. SR 84, Davie, 954-524-2003
• Captain Jim's Seafood, 12950 West Dixie Highway, North Miami, 305-892-2812
• Heelsha, 1550 NE 164th St, North Miami Beach, 305-919-8393
• Bagels & Co., 11064 Biscayne Boulevard North Miami, 305-892-2435

Some species are simply natural enemies. The mongoose and the viper, for example, or the football player and the band geek. There doesn't have to be sense to it, it's simply the way the world works.

I was a high school senior when I first encountered Lech. He was a good-looking blond Polish kid on the varsity team, but not terribly well-liked outside his sports-based circle. He was also one of the worst offenders when it came to picking on the weaker specimens of student, such as bookish band geeks. Not a lunch period went by that he didn't physically or verbally abuse a few kids, to the hilarity of his friends.

One fine fall afternoon he stopped me in the hall. "Hey, you're ugly, faggot. Why don't you just go die somewhere?"

Under normal circumstances I would have just seethed a bit and walked by, but I had just heard the "you're like a brother to me" speech from yet another drill team girl, and I was not in a very passive frame of mind. An inspiration came to me.

"Look, asshole, I'm tired of this. You want to fight with me? Let's fight."

He was already ten feet away when my words worked into his brain. He turned to me with a puzzled expression. "Did you just call me out? You want to die, faggot?"

"No, I want you to shut the hell up. But it's okay if you're scared."

His jaw worked while his mind desperately tried to process this impossible data. His friends started to egg him on. "What's the matter, afraid the geek's going to hurt your pretty face? Fight him now, moron! C'mon!"

"No, not now. Three o'clock. Outside the cafeteria.

There was a small crowd, and the less physical among them — my friends — tried to drag me away. I shook them off. "Well?"

"Yeah, okay, three o'clock. You're dead, faggot."

The next few hours were a blur, as was the fight itself. A circle of students formed, we squared off, and I dove at him. We hit the concrete immediately and started wrestling. It seemed to go on forever, but was probably only a minute or two. We rolled around, my arms and legs wrapped around him, crushing him with a fury born of years of frustration. I got his face on the ground and promptly rolled against his head, scraping his pretty face against the concrete. He howled in rage, and would probably have killed me if the teachers hadn't arrived.

We were dragged before the principal — sweaty, bloody, and bruised. To the amusement of the student aides outside, he didn't even bother closing the door before laying into Lech.

"You fool! What's wrong with you? You know I have to suspend you for this! What's your coach going to say when you're off the team for starting another fight? Christ, are you an idiot?"

Lech started to stammer out something when I spoke up.

"Uh, sir?" I kept my voice quiet and meek. "It isn't Lech's fault. I started it."

"What?!"

"I picked the fight with him. He was just being an— a jerk, as usual. But I told him I wanted to fight. It's all my fault."

By now I was getting used to Lech's bovine expression of incomprehension.

The principal turned to Lech. "Is this true? You let this— He started it?"

"Well, yeah, but—"

"You're both idiots. You." He pointed at me, shaking his head. "I don't know what your problem is, but you just saved this fool's spot on the team. And you!" A look of pure disgust clouded the principal's face as he turned to Lech. "You owe this boy your future. Stay the hell away from him and his friends, do you understand me? Stay away from him. Now both of you get out."

On the way home from school two of his friends jumped me and beat the hell out of me, but I didn't care. My body was beaten, but Lech's reputation was destroyed.

At some point in the next few weeks Google will be shutting down the ancient implementation of Blogger I use to update Hidden City. At that time posting will stop until I can scrape together the money and mental acuity to move everything to a non-Blogger site. Given the sporadic nature of my updates you might not notice, so I thought I'd give you a heads-up.

Speaking of those sporadic updates, there are ways to get the news from Hidden City other than visiting the site itself (although I do appreciate the effort). There is a full-story RSS feed, if you know what that is. There's also a low-volume Twitter account, and a Facebook "fan" page, too. Twitter primarily lets you know when the site updates, but the Facebook page occasionally has other stuff. There was once an e-mailing service, but it went under and I haven't found a new one yet.

There's also Hidden City Curiosities, for some good old-fashioned link-dumping. I throw in various photos, videos, cartoons, quotes, bits of music, and whatever other items of interest my web wanderings uncover. Very little of it is original, but you may find it interesting, anyway.

In other news, I'll be putting a new Links page together soon. If you read Hidden City and would like to be included in the section, here's the form to use. If you are already linking to me I'll do my best to include you, but an unfortunate side effect of reading through a feed is that the extra material (like link lists) never appears. To be safe you might want to remind me.

Of course, if you'd rather not be associated with Hidden City, let me know that, too. I won't take it too personally.