How Not To Be Seen

I got sick last Friday and stayed home from work. I don’t know if I was authentically infected with something, or just suffering from extremely bad allergies, general exhaustion, and a profound lack of will power. But there was no rousing me from bed all that day.

That night, I stayed up late working on a “steam punk” costume for Alli, for a wedding she would attend Saturday morning.

The awful truth is, I don’t absolutely love these super-cute themed social activities. It sometimes seems like a lot of childless folks treating their existential ennui with tossed-off arts-n-crafts.

Worse, they often strike me as somewhat self-congratulatory. Like, “Look how clever and creative we are! Take another picture. Facebook will love this!” Like, folks proudly taking the path less traveled by walking continuously one foot to the left of the more traveled path. Like, everyone making boat-rocking gestures while staying as stone-still as possible. “But it looks like I’m rocking the boat, doesn’t it? It looks like it? From a distance? From the pictures on Facebook?”

On the other hand, I do absolutely love to make things, and I needed to treat my existential ennui with some arts-n-crafts, so I made the costume. I’m happy with how it came out, and now I can post it on the Facebook and hope I get congratulated on how creative and different I am.

Gosh, I do have fun. Don’t I? I have the most fun!

Then, Saturday, I slept late to continue recovering, I did chores, and I watched a Monty Python documentary to raise my creative spirits.

Sucks ’cause, instead of raising my spirits, it reminded me how far from my goals I presently am. It put me squarely back into my grade-school mindset, reminded me of what I wanted when I started out. And now, it seems, I haven’t only compromised on where I’ve landed, I’ve compromised on what I permit myself to dream, on what I permit myself to chase.

Why am I not pulling together big projects anymore? Why am I not assembling teams? Why am I not arguing against lowered expectations?  Why can’t I think of a way to beat this creeping normality? Why am I surrendering to normal life?

So, then, all fired up with those thoughts, I spent Sunday with Barb, doing nothing. Went to a nice lunch, shopped a little, lay around the house, went to the grocery store. Monday, I got up extra early and had the oil changed in my car. I watched some Good Day LA, which is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I went to work early, to remedy all the panic created by my Friday absence. And all week long, I was overwhelmed with too much responsibility at work, covering for my absent bosses.

You know, normal life.

Traffic On Your Parade

In LA, we have no weather. It’s sunny and warm almost all of the time. For the most part, the weather is predictable and reliable. It’s so agreeable, I’ve mostly forgotten that weather is a thing that happens.

And thus, having been denied that outlet to deliver its reminders, here, it is instead through the traffic that the Universe makes its indifferent and chaotic nature known.

The weather is almost always nice, so the Universe orchestrates the traffic to shout: “I’m still capricious and cruel, folks – and don’t you forget about it!”

What a lousy drive. How much longer can I tolerate a life that it this bare-faced random, this coldly arbitrary? A person deserves the illusion of meaning and sense! If the traffic can’t even bother to put on a show of making sense, well, then … I’ll do something, I tell you.

I will do one hell of a something.

Spoons and Monsters

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Hey, Coffee Shops

Yeah, coffee shops, I’m talking to you. Particularly coffee shops in the vicinity of Century City. It’s swell that so many of you are open at 7AM. It’s fantastic that you have nice furniture with comfortable workspaces and free wifi.

But this is Los Angeles. If you put a sign in your tiny parking lot that says parking is limited to, say, 20 minutes, or hell, even 45 minutes, then I can’t spend my morning there, working and buying your coffee and snacks, now can I? And thus, I end up at Norm’s. Where the spoon is a different length every day.

You’d think they’d have bought the spoons in bulk.

What’s Up With the Finger?

Yesterday evening, when I arrived home, the power was out in my building . I walked Bacon and checked out the neighborhood. I took some pictures of LADWP cones and broken electrical pipes, but there were no trucks or crew-persons to photograph.

When I returned to building, many of the neighbors were out in the hall, because they were desperately bored, having already been deprived of their television and internet for an eternity lasting upwards of forty minutes.

The halls were very dark. It’s a bit of a walk in my building, from the entrance to my door. And on my floor, there lives a gigantic mammal. She appears to be part Dalmatian, part Great Dane, part Prehistoric Hippopotamus. She is energetic and nosy and, as best I can tell, entirely unspoiled by human discipline. This is probably the hippo in her.

She is also spotted, which is the Dalmation, and has floppy jowls and big pointy ears, which is Great Dane. I believe her name is Bella. Barb said she thought it might be Stella. In any case, her head comes up to my shoulders, her ears come up to my chinny-chin-chin, and yesterday, she heard Bacon and me, in the dark – and she motherfucking chased us down.

ACTUAL SIDE-BY-SIDE PHOTO

From behind us, an earthquake, a rain of slobber, and then, mouth open, she pounced on Bacon. I don’t think she meant us any harm, but all the same, she hit a lot of us with her teeth. And when I say she was on top of Bacon, I mean completely. Bacon fit nicely in the space between her front and back legs.

As the animal jumped and swatted around, I could hear her female owner shouting “Bellaaaa! Belllaaaa!” over and over again. This did not have any notable effect on Bella. Perhaps because her name is Stella?

There was a tangle of leash and arms and dog faces as I tried to keep marching, in the total dark, all the while attempting to extricate Bacon from under this creature worthy of its own constellation. It was impossible to tell whether a sincere fight was about to erupt. My hand really stung, and it was slobbery.

Eventually, I got Bacon out from under Bella, and held him in my arms as I marched on. Stella trotted along at my side, her head at my shoulder, looking down on Bacon in my arms.

When I reached my door, there was a strange woman and a bald man, also strange, standing outside my door with paperwork. They said, “Do you live here?” And I said, “Yes,” and then I darted inside and shut the door. I left the giant out there with them. They could fend for themselves.

The power was out, so I couldn’t examine my injury very well. I tried to hold it near a tea-candle, but the candle blew out. And soon enough, the strange people were knocking on the door behind me. Which meant, Bacon started running around to alert me to this fact. Bacon believes I am deaf.

The knockers were not screaming for help, but I couldn’t be sure they weren’t in league with the monster, so I put Bacon in Alli’s room and opened the door.

It turns out, the strange pair wanted me to sign a petition to prevent the raising of the maintenance fee at the condo. This struck me as strange – refusing to pay 10% extra to maintain the building while, at that very moment, the power was out in what appeared to be only our building alone.

I explained that I only rented. She explained that I could sign anyway. So I went out and I signed it in the green light of the EXIT sign.

The story ends a few minutes later, with Barb and me lighting candles and digging out the flashlights. At last, I could examine my hand, which, it turns out, had a bright blood blister, just in front of the nail, on the tip of the pinky finger. It stung and it smarted, and it still does.

Also, on the same hand, the pinky finger was the only one left. All the rest were bloody stumps.

A few hours later the power came back on.

Inscrutable Déjà Vu Traffic

Left 7:13 AM | Arrived 7:38 AM

This morning the 405 flew, and I arrived about the same time I always do.

I can’t explain either part of that statement.

The ease of travel may have been due to a six-car pile-up, just north of my entrance, that choked back the usual overflow passing through the Galleria corridor. It may have been due to increasing amounts of spring break being observed by colleges in the area. It may have been because Passover begins tonight at sundown, according to my calendar, but not according to my Jewish friends.

I’m not sure.

As to how I arrived at the same time, despite traffic being non-existent? I can’t even begin to guess. Like advanced branches of quantum theory, Los Angeles traffic will never make intuitive sense to the human mind. Our species simply wasn’t evolved to interact with systems this foreign and complex. Even with mathematics and metaphors, we can barely bridge the gap. We can’t predict it. We can’t explain why it happened. And apparently, we can’t even know how bad it is when we’re inside it. Unless you can think in 12 or more dimensions, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

Déjà Vu

On the fast but slow drive to Norm’s, I thought about whether déjà vu was anything more than a misfire in the brain, a misfire triggering the sensation of familiarity, or maybe the sensation we associate with the replay of a memory.

I tried to remember how many occasions there have been when I experienced déjà vu so strongly that I actually predicted the remainder of the “déjà moment” before it played out.

It seems to me, there were maybe four, five, maybe half-a-dozen incidents where I’m pretty confident I predicted things accurately and aloud.

The problem is, I can’t reliably say that I couldn’t have predicted those same things based purely on context alone, from simple common sense, or from a pretty solid grasp of where the conversation was going. Plus, how strict was I with myself on those occasions? How accurately do I remember my accuracy? And were these moments just dreams?

They may have been dreams, everybody.

Could the sensation of déjà vu be triggered by direct electrical stimulation? Or magnets outside the temple, like in the experiments where they tamper with a person’s morality with little more than a strong magnet and a cleverly constructed puzzle? Could someone have a disorder that gave them the sensation frequently? Would they think themselves an oracle? A psychic? A Groundhog Day victim?

Everyone is Inscrutable

Last night, while jogging the dog, I wondered whether I’ve spent so much of my life focused on developing skills to better predict people, to better decode personalities, to better decipher characters, to better speculate about what people are thinking or feeling – because, as a child, I found my father so inscrutable? Was his frequent silence and unpredictability (at least to young me) the cause of this life-defining habit?

And what does it mean that, while I can remember him telling stories (usually to other people, stories that I only overheard), while I can remember stories about things like an ambulance accident he was in, or the body they carried out of a building once – while I can remember these stories – I can remember him saying very little else that was sincerely personal? What does it say that those stories were the times I understood him most vividly, when I was young? And now I spend my life on stories.

I was thinking about this, and Big Fish, and why Stirling likes it and Aram doesn’t, and whether I will be inscrutable with my children, and whether I am inscrutable, even when I don’t wish to be, right now.

Sometimes, I like to be inscrutable. It denies people an easy handle, frustrates attempts to pass cheap judgments or assign rigid stereotypes. Yet, I firmly believe, if you take an accounting of my actions, you really do know what’s going on in my mind, even if you’re foolishly plumbing for more.

Everyone we know exists as a character we’ve constructed in our minds. If we are wise, we build that character based on the person’s actions, their habits, what they do frequently; not on what they claim about themselves, and certainly not what is claimed about them; not on what we’d like to believe, or what we fear to believe; only on what they consistently do. We have to work out the puzzle of a person over time, careful never to blindly confirm our biases, ready always to take on a whole new understanding and recast the role entirely, if the story demands it.

I think, we must be careful how we think about characters; if we are shallowly judgmental with them, we will be the same with real people in our lives, because the brain little minds the difference.

Also, I like the word inscrutable.

I love that 30 Rock used it in a dis of Tracy Jordan’s vanity plate.

“She called my vanity license plate inscrutable!”

Excesses and Shortages

I am back at Grounded Cafe.

It is 10:15 AM, and I just dropped my dog Bacon off at a new groomer, not too far from my apartment. It’s called Mr. & Mrs. Dog. The woman there seemed very nice, but her accent was a rare form that I absolutely could not place or penetrate.

I followed her almost entirely by making guesses about the meanings of her gestures and by constructing my replies such that they could have sprung entirely from personal inspiration, not strict response. When she said “vaccinations?” I asked her to repeat it three times, the third time by softly saying, “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” because “vaccinations” started with an “O,” and only had three syllables. “Ossendens” is the best transcription I can make.

I’m not making fun; I’m simply describing how hopeless I felt.

In any case, Bacon won’t notice, and she seemed optimistic despite my warning: he won’t let me clip his nails or trim his hair at all. He gets crazy nasty. To this, she said the one thing I understood, “Dey eye much personality.”

I’m going to start using that as a euphemism for human pains-in-the-ass. “He has an abundance of personality.” In fact, “She has a dire excess of personality.” If nothing else, it makes me feel better about having a mild shortage of personality.

A tall, skinny young man with long blond hair, glasses, and brand-new too-tight black-denim trousers, says into his phone, while waiting in line: “I’m still high after last night. I can’t help it. There’s nothing to debate.”

Meanwhile, a man in a tweed jacket with a fedora hat marches, leaning forward, down the opposite side of Ventura Blvd. He carries a yellow envelope and jabs the air just slighty with it, never really raising his arm. He’s saying something to himself, perhaps rehearsing the talking-to he’ll give the recipient of that envelope. I wonder without substance whether he’s heading to the bank.

And now I’m the only one here, aside from the employees. It’s awkwardly quiet.

“It’s slow today because it’s Spring Break, I think. A lot of kids don’t have classes,” He says to She. Then they speak too quietly for me to hear. They have Spanish accents.

Perhaps I should’ve sat outside. There are new, richly coral-colored, almost red, umbrellas. Small in circumference, like the tables, but casting sufficient shade. And it’s a beautiful day. 71 F degrees, yellow-touched white sunshine, 15% humidity and a barely present northerly breeze.

It’s a Los Angeles day out there, and I’m sitting in a Northampton coffee house, with a dire shortage of personality.

Silver Morning

Left 7:09 | Arrived 7:39

It’s overcast and silver-lit outside. It’s the first time that the sun hasn’t been rising, blazing in my window as I drove in, peering over my shoulder as I sit here. I rather like it. It brings a timeless quality to the morning.

It could be anytime on a cloudy day.

A slick-haired Hispanic businessman, wearing a goatee, a pink shirt, and a neck brace, just asked me if I was sitting here yesterday.

I told him “Close. I was right up there. But yeah.”

He nodded silently and stepped away.

I ordered only fruit and coffee. As usual, the fruit is cantaloupe and some sort of greenish-yellowish melon. I cut them into little pieces.

This will cost me about $4 or $5, but I will tip at least $3. I want to establish the point that the staff gets the same, no matter what I order.

Angles of the Sun

Left 7:06 AM | Arrived 7:37 AM

The angle of the sun is changing. Earlier everyday, the sun blazes through the windows of Norm’s, laying itself across the whole restaurant. If I sit with my back to it, I can block its glare from my screen with my body, but it is orange-gold and blinding.

Today I will have two eggs, over easy, with sourdough toast and a side of fruit rather than hashbrowns. Let’s see how that makes me feel. Then again, I really prefer scrambled to over easy. . . EOE or ES.

I’m wondering if the immense increase in morning coffee consumption is adding to the inflamed taste buds in my mouth, or to the sore growing on the inside of my cheak.

Meanwhile, allergy season has amped up to 9 or 10 our of 12 on the daily pollen reports, and the inside of my nose is dry and bloody, stinging and burning. Pressing the tip of my nose can squeeze a tear my eye, like a tear dispenser. Daily running and walking is making my legs, knees, and upper-ass ache. I’m tired. I would imagine I was getting sick, but I’m pretty sure it’s simple revolt against this three months of habit changes.

And yet, change is the only thing that keeps me sharp and sane.

Man, I told the waiter I needed a moment, and it’s been many moments now. I’m not complaining; I’m amazed how hungry it’s making me feel. I’m starting to fantasize about what I’ll get, rather than reluctantly decide. Scrambled I think. Scrambled.

Here’s an amazing conversation that I just overheard (boiled down to its essense):

“All these TV stations. Too many. It’s just like the races, you know.”

“Yeah . . .”

“There are too many now! It’s over-kill. They ain’t special no more. There used to be 8 run a-day, now it’s over-kill, it’s over-kill.”

“It used to be simple. That’s what you’re trying to say. It used to be simple.”

“Too much like a job, trying to pick horses, now.”

“Too much like a job.”

Long pause.

“You think people still watch them game shows?”

Frustrated With This Wonderful Computer

Left 7:06 AM | Arrived 7:42 AM

I was stupid and lazy last night and neglected to plug in my Asus Linux netbook, and so I’m on this vastly over-sized Apple laptop, which reduces my focus and – still, after almost a year of using it almost daily – feels like I’m typing with my thumbs tied to my wrist.

Let’s be honest here, folks, Apple spaces their keyboard keys too far apart, and their text navigation hot-keys are insufficient for intense writing and revision. There’s no question that their keyboards look good. The question is, why don’t they type good? Why must I suffer?

My roommate has a new Apple laptop, and the keys are spaced so far apart that I can’t rest my fingers comfortably on all the home-keys at once – and I have relatively longish fingers.

I have similar feelings about the operating system itself. I find it clumsy in many complicated multitasking situations, particular with any software that utilizes multiple windows. In particular, it is vastly over-reliant on the mouse. And please, don’t smugly tell me to learn the hot-keys – I have, I know them, and I find them to be lacking.

On the other hand, I have experienced remarkable stability from the system. But, I don’t know if it’s been worth the straight-jacket I’m resigned to wear while visiting their ecosystem. Every time I want to perform a small task outside the software package assigned to me, I am inevitably frustrated. Everything of quality in the Apple software universe is profit-based and over-priced. Then, when you download it, you learn that it’s also feature-crippled; they’ve sacrificed customization and fine-grain functionality for simplicity and big, unwieldy visual-metaphor-oriented mouse interfaces. When I want to get something done, I want a drop-down full of fine-grain options, thank you, not a cute “tray” where I “drag” “clippings” and “turn” “knobs,” or some similar too-cute physical-world metaphor.

And don’t get me started on how sick I am of having the same window decorations after all this time. Let me customize the thing without having to pay out the nose or rely on hacking, please! Let me change the computer’s appearance in substantial ways; I have to look at it every day, for hours at a time. I can’t stand the shiny bubbles any any longer!

But, I am grateful that it works. I am grateful that it cost me nothing. I am grateful for new battery, which I bought at discount, which lasts almost three hours. And I am grateful that this frustration is one of my frustrations, rather than disease, war, and death. I am grateful to hate, hate, hate those shiny bubbles.

Coffee Shops

It’s Sunday. It’s almost 1 PM, and I’m out at Grounded Cafe, a coffee shop and internet cafe on Ventura Blvd. I found it with the Yelp application on my cell-a-ma-phone, and I decided to give it a try. There is another place with free wifi and pay coffee recommended by the program: it’s called Crave. I drove past it. It looks very busy and bohemian, and there wasn’t any street parking within five blocks. So, maybe next weekend. Maybe never.

I am trying to reduce the cost of these writing expeditions by making them coffee-only, or snack-only, instead of full-meal. Perhaps I could do that at Norm’s, but it feels wrong. It feels like I’m taking up a profitable booth. This is likely ridiculous, since the booths are rarely even close to filled. But coffee shops are places where you are supposed to do this sort of work.

I guess this is who I’ve become. My binary opposite. Someone who writes in public.

Necessity makes for strange bedfellows, even when we’re sleeping alone.

The coffee-shop man just offered me the wifi password, which was very nice. That means, at least in my weird psychology, that he doesn’t mind me using my own computer, rather than renting his by the hour.

I also really like my high seat and high desk, over by the window. Crave may have a hard time competing with that. Oh, and the coffee is good; intensely sweet mocha.

Sprinkled throughout this post are some pictures from my visit. Can you guess who the celebrity is, in the painting? I can’t! But I know it’s a celebrity! They said so!

Yesterday, writing-wise, I made an unusual sprint forward. Unexpected, and so out-of-the-subconscious, I honestly can’t remember much of what I came up with. Good thing it’s all written down.

There I was, doing my usual tinkering around the edges, when my mind turned around, made a dash – straight for the wall – and rather than smashing into it, it ran up it. Right up it, and then right off, leaping from rooftop to rooftop.

I don’t know what that was all about, or how long that stuff had been brewing, waiting to come crashing, boiling-over. but there it was, and those are the moments I’ve been missing.

Clearly, they only happen when I’m running at that wall every stinking day.

Similarly, I was cooking dinner last night, and I’d just finished warming the cassarole dish to put the chicken in, as per the recipe. I took the dish out of the oven, and turned toward the counter-top. I could put it down on the countertop, you see, because it wasn’t all that hot.

 

I touched the dish to the countertop surface, and I remember a small hiss, and then an instantaneous crack, and then, the dish completely exploded. Shards of glass flew in every direction. all with surprising force, and several of those directions were precisely where I was standing.

The glass was cool enough for a countertop, but counters and people are made of considerably different materials. A short length of glass landed on the back of my hand, and I have a red shadow-image of it burned there now. I was fortunate that none of the glass found my face and eyes to be a welcoming destination.

There were invisible, tiny shavings and slivers of glass everywhere.

Luckily, no one was hurt. Alli didn’t really bother to look up from her Facebook game. Barb remained completely asleep. And I was able to finish the meal by working around the mess. The food came out pretty well.

However, the suddenness of that explosion, and the power of it, really stays with me. It came to mind when I was reflecting on the sensation that I had yesterday, when story started creating itself, starting sorting points out, and all I had to do was hold on with my oven mitt. A hiss, a crack, and an explosion.

Now I’m going to go read it over.

Who wants to start a betting pool regarding how disappointed I’ll be?

Weekend Writing Experiment

I am at the Lamplighter on Van Nuys blvd, about two or three miles from my house. It is Saturday, and it  is 11AM. That’s about two hours before I usually get up on weekends, and 2 hours after my alarm clock started going off.

In any case, I am here, and my laptop is open. I have one hour before I need to pick up Barb at the airport. Then, I suspect I will be taking her to her place to take care of the cats, and then taking her to various dealerships to look at used cars, since hers was destroyed in an accident about two weeks ago.

I’m not feeling nearly as motivated at this hour of the day. Perhaps I’m just feeling less mentally sharp. Perhaps it’s because the text messages and emails and conversations with my people, my mother, my roommate, my girlfriend, have already begun, and my mind is unable to focus on fiction and storytelling. Once again, I have this nagging emotional tug telling me that people are needing my attention.

Perhaps, on the weekends, this would work better at night. I should check out the closing hours on my way out.

The waitress just said, “That trips me out. I’m tripping,” regarding someone’s new haircut.

The biggest problem with this writing method is becoming clear: it may be too expensive. The bill is $8.97. With tip, that will be $12 or $13. It’s a good motivator, sure: I’ve come all this way, subjected myself to feeling unwelcome, and spent the money – I had better write.

But is it sustainable at this price?

Also, I’m going to get fat.