Ricardo

I think Ricardo mistook the phrase “lets do coffee ..”  for  “..lets do it tomorrow.”   He’s accusing the guy of being a flake because he didn’t show. He goes on to tell me that he’s learned to text blindfolded so he can do it while hiding the cell phone in the pocket of his jacket during class. It almost sounds like he’s backpedaling when he says his friends have a real problem ..they can’t stop texting even when they’re talking to him at lunch. What do I make of this ..? I think he wants to impress me with his cleverness but at the same time make sure I don’t get the wrong idea ..he’s not like the other kids his age. It sounds that way because I don’t have a stereotype of other kids his age. I figure it feels to him like he’s talking to one of his parents when he’s talking to me because he’s still in high school and everything. Not sure I can level the playing field.  Too tired to try really. Oh well, doesn't make that much difference.

System tool

New Years Eve and I’m battling a computer virus called ‘system tool’. I finish and it feels like I just defeated alien predators on xbox. I join friends at SoHo to celebrate New Years, and boast about being an expert ‘tool’ remover. They laugh, conjecturing about the different ways I could have been assaulted by a tool ..then ask me to tell them more about this ‘tool’. I tell them it’s a scam-artist that holds your PC ransom until you agree to buy a subscription for some phony anti-virus software. I admit, I bent over and let this bugger in ..but he led me on. He was disguised as a Windows XP update. Same shield and message box telling me there’s a security update available and asking me what I want to do with it. I clicked the ‘x’ in the corner to close the message and deal with it later so I could continue with what I was doing ..when suddenly my Internet session closed and my desktop was replaced with a butt-ugly screen that blocked me from doing anything except taking their bogus offer, which I didn’t ..figuring it wouldn’t end there. I shuddered and told them it made me feel ‘violated’ and ‘unclean’. “Friggin’ unhygienic” is the way Brian put it and everyone moved back a little. I am such a geek. Happy New Year out there to all the nerds and the geeks and the hackers (but only the good ones)..!

Breakfast of champions

I reach for the orange juice while reading the paper .. the ring on my finger catches the lip of a coffee cup and starts a chain reaction that sends coffee splashing over books, papers, notebook PC, clothes and deck. In the wink of an eye, breakfast turns into chaos. I quickly save the notebook ..and laugh. Everything else is dispensable. I hose down one part of the deck, move to another location and resume as though nothing happened ..except I’m more fully in the present than before. Kind of like I’ve been put on alert. Allows me to see how ephemeral events really are. A lapse in conscious, followed by disaster .. gets absorbed much quicker out here than it does on my carpet indoors.

Baths

Last night at the baths some of us were complaining about how much we were paying for our children’s education. It’s somewhere in the vicinity of $10,000 a year, even at the state colleges. One woman told us about a program called the ‘Santa Barbara Fund’ that pays for tuition ..but it turns out you have to be like a 2nd generation Santa Barbara native. Someone else said that even with a 4.0 GPA ..it’s almost impossible to get in these days. I mentioned that a lot of students applying to UC can overcome a low GPA .. even poor SAT scores ..by writing a compelling essay. Something describing some kind of hardship they had to deal with while growing up. That made another guy laugh and say it’s hard to imagine what kind of hardship anyone would have growing up in Santa Barbara. My first thought was to tell him that he’d be surprised, but decided against it and instead I said “Hey, colleges reward creativity ..” which made everyone laugh and start making up stuff:

"Mom and I are living in a station wagon down by the lagoon .."
“I had to take care of my ailing aunt Edna after school ..”
“I immigrated from Peru with 12 brothers and sisters
..mom worked as a housekeeper to put us through school”
“My parents are hippies and don’t believe in traditional schooling
..I ran a food co-op growing up”
“My parents were killed in a fire somewhere on the 14th floor ..”

Around this time I had to say goodnight and leave ..and had to laugh. Nobody noticed ..I could still hear them making up stories while I was walking away.

Local buzz

Got a buzz with smokers at the high school stadium this evening – after completing my workout. Two teenagers big enough to be football players ..but probably weren’t. I could tell by their friendliness and total lack of defensiveness that they weren’t gang bangers. They laughed when they saw how long I would hold the smoke in. You don’t have to do that anymore. I have smoked with gang members before .. often enough that they recognize and trust me. They call me the hippie pot smoker ..and go “Hey, tell us some more of that weird-ass, trippy shit.” I figure if they’re going to get high ..they might as well know something about it. I am afraid that one day I'll run into a group of paranoid gang bangers ..which I have, come to think of it. It’s a forested area and I sometimes don’t see them until I run into them. As much as I might think it’s disarming to stop and share a smoke. They might think it wasn’t such a good idea to give that old guy a buzz. After I leave, they may go “..hey, wasn’t that the narc who took out Emilio ..?” ..and decide it might be safer if they took me out. I guess that makes me sound kinda’ paranoid too.

Gold coast

Beautiful autumn day. Sunlight passes horizontally through the eucalyptus trees and turns to gold ..I’m fully in love with this time of year. Out on the deck, the air is perfectly still ..there’s no breeze coming from any direction. Makes me think about the waves I’m missing on the beach. I pop a couple tabs of ginseng ..hop into the alfa ..turn up Blind Faith and pull way too far into traffic lanes on Anapamu Street. Real swift. I pop it into reverse and swing my head around when I realize the cars have stopped to let me through. I proceed ..giving them a courtesy wave .. then head around the Milpas bend. I pass by the marquis for the County Bowl ..and remind myself to keep an eye on the road. I pass by Trader Joe’s ..giving the right of way to cars already in the circle ..and shoot out on highway 101 ..listening to Steve Winwood singing ‘Sea of Joy’. I exit almost immediately on Olive Mill ..downshift to 15 mph on Channel Drive and check out the tide and the surf and the sun shining on the water. Perfect glassy conditions with crisp, waist-high waves peeling off Hammonds. I pull over ..grab my Churchills’ ..knowing that the fins of choice now days are Vipers ..feeling a slightly stupid sense of brand loyalty. I spend five minutes on the sand doing breathing exercises and sizing up the situation. I take a running start .. dive into an oncoming wave and surface on the backside feeling free ..like the wave washed over my brain and removed all constraints .. putting me in perfect condition for whatever happens next.

Prānayāma

I’m attending Prānayāma practice tonight. Prāna means ‘breath’ or ‘life force’ and āyāma means ‘abode’. So it’s the practice of restoring the place where your life force resides. I admit, it does oxygenate the system. I can feel a warm tingling sensation in my hands and feet ..and the feeling that all’s well spreading through my brain ..making me all smiles. Afterward, I hang around talking to the session leader Jeff ..a friend who I haven’t seen for a long time. He tells me that Brian moved back to Pennsylvania but Dave can still be seen walking around town. Jeff is busy preparing for a workshop on Ayurvedic healing this weekend. One of tonight’s participants is an elderly woman who receives Ayurvedic treatment. She’s planning a 50-day excursion through India this fall. I think that’s remarkable. Now Jeff is telling me about an ancient language he read about in the Upanishads where the sound carries the meaning by itself, without the need for an intermediate concept. He goes “ ..consider the expression ‘shhh’ in English. It conveys a soothing sensation all by itself.” Makes me think about the sound the ocean makes as it rolls over the sand on the beach ..and about all the times I’ve sat there listening to it ..then I think about how it sounds like a simple breath ..then I realize that breathing is not really simple, only thinking makes it so ..it’s really a complex process that’s been around since the beginning ..then I remind myself not to overthink it ..now I’m wondering how much I missed while Jeff was talking and I was listening to myself think.

LaLonnie

LaLonnie likes to call me a snake oil salesman. He tells me that psychology is nothing more than a pseudo-science. I agree with him, a lot of claims don’t have much merit ..but then, I like to point out that there are many that do. He just looks at me with disdain and dismisses me as a ‘flat-lander’. I can only guess what that means. This time I took it as my cue to duck out ..I had no interest in sticking around to watch his slide show at Dennis’. Dennis invited me over earlier going: “hey man, you gotta’ come see this.”

Weeks go by then, out of the blue, I get a call from the psychiatric unit of Long Beach Memorial. LaLonnie is asking for me. They tell me he’s sedated (1,200 mg of Thorazine) and I can come visit him now. I’m shocked. I had no idea. I look back for signs but I really don't know him well. I tell the nurse I had no idea ..and that I’m not his therapist. She says that’s OK, he’s already seen a therapist ..he’s asking for a friend. I tell her I think he’s asking for someone else, and I’m about to give her Dennis’ number, when she says no, he specifically asked for me. I call Dennis anyway, saying: “hey man, you gotta’ come see this.”

LaLonnie is sitting in his room, definitely sedated. I go “Hey LaLonnie, what brings you here?” His speech is measured but slurred. He tells me a police car brought him here. “OK, what were you doing when the police car brought you here?” “The first time?” he asks. “Yeah, the first time.” “S-s-standing in front of my house, givin’ way books.” “You mean the police came because you were giving away books?” “Nooo, of course not ..that wouldn’t make sense, would it?” “OK, why did the police come?” He thinks about it for a minute and says: “Oh, the neighbors called ’em cuz’ of a disturrbance.” It turns out, he was shouting at anyone who took a book, as well as anyone who didn’t take a book ..either way ..they were idiots. “So, what did the police do?” “They told me to s-stop sh-sh-shouting and go back inside the house.” “OK, what were you doing the next time the police arrived ?” “Throwin’ money out in the s-s-streeet.” “I see, was it your money?” (No, it was his aunt’s money, he’s in charge of her estate). “What did they do this time?” “they told me I better get back inside the house and s-s-stop throwin’ money in’ the streeet, and ..hey, I already explain’d alla’dissh to m-my attoorney, why’m’ I talking about it again? N-n-not to talk ’bout this with anybody.” “OK, so ..tell me what you were doing the next time the police arrived?” “Pulling f-f-furniture out on the lawn.” This time his neighbors stopped by to ask if he was having a yard sale. He told them no, it was perfectly good furniture .. he was taking it out of the house to protect it. Protect it from what, they asked. “A fire” he said. What fire, they asked. “The fire I’m going to light to burn the house down.” I'm like ..WTF LaLonnie (!?) He goes: “Oh m-m-man, I told ’em I was gonna’ build it back up again, only this time with b-b-better mat’rials, like t-t-titanium and p-pre-stressed concreete ..that way it will last hundr’ds of thous’nds of years, instead of just two or three d-d-decades.

He’s tired and it turns out the real reason he called was to get someone to fetch his address book. Dennis and I go. The house (which also belongs to his aunt) looks normal from the outside ..but it looks like squalor on the inside. There are piles of dishes, caked with hardened food, everywhere. Dennis goes looking for the address book while I poke around. The other rooms look about the same. Back at the hospital, Dennis asks about things at home. LaLonnie explains he’s working on it. He joined a dating service to help him find a girl who, as he put it “..will feel so honored to sleep with me that she’ll have the place cleaned up in no time.” “That’s pretty slick” says Dennis “I don’t believe a woman's ever felt that honored by me before ..how do you do it?” “First I d-dazzle ’em with brilliance, then I crussh ’em with a chunk of s-silence.” As we’re leaving, I say to Dennis: “I think it's ironic, the poor guy has just been hit by an awfully big chunk of pseudo-science .”

Duane

Duane had some tumors removed from his head. They also took out part of his ability to contain his impulses. This caused him to launch pre-emptive strikes at the first sign of perceived (or misperceived) threat ..as well as anything that violated his standards of appearance. If the strap on the back of my cap was showing, he’d abruptly stop what he was saying, mid-sentence, and demand that I cut it off saying it was distracting and made me look silly. He would then get up and start searching the room for a pair of scissors. At Trader Joes, heaven help the unsuspecting shopper blocking his way. He would ram them with his cart. When behavior therapy helped bring his physical outbursts under control ..he learned to gently pull the offending shopper aside and scold them for being rude and inconsiderate ..letting them know that they’d been making his life miserable, not only that afternoon, but their whole insignificant life, which was so far beneath his, they didn’t even rate being this close to him. He stopped coming to the support group and I lost track of him ..until he wound up in jail. Highway patrol pulled him over for speeding and running red lights. They found him rambling incoherently. When I heard this, it surprised me because his verbal outbursts had always been pretty articulate. Anyway, they told me he’d been cooperative, showing them his license and registration and everything, but just not making any sense, so they brought him in as a precaution. He blood-alcohol level barely registered so they put in a call to me (my card was in his wallet) and Atascadero (state mental hospital). He could not tell them what month or what year it was. Nor could he say where he was, or why he was there. He was, however, ranting about his civil liberties and the rights of an Englishman. When I got there, I shouted at him to tell me the name of that thing in the corner ..and pointed to the chrome toilet. I got the name of some car parts and surgical instruments. So much for trying to get him ‘grounded’. The cops just shook their head like, see ..we told you so.

I tried one more thing ..I wrote down a list of words and asked him to pick out the ones that best described his predicament. He correctly pointed to ‘jail’, ‘police’ and ‘traffic stop’ He even found the word ‘john’ somewhere down the list without me asking, and looked at me like .. ‘see, you asshole’. He wasn’t crazy, he knew exactly where he was and why. Somewhere he had acquired an ‘aphasia’, or a problem finding words or the names of things. I sort of suspected that because it’s related to impulse-control. Word searches also require the ability to constrain choices. Mess with that action and word choices become creative and sometimes barely relevant. That’s when expressions like ‘civil liberties violation’ pop-up in place of ‘traffic stop’. It gave the impression he was talking around the subject. Anyway, it also kept him out of a mental institution and got him into the hospital much faster. Last time I saw him he was speaking well ..but still telling me how silly I looked.

Light show

I woke up in the middle of the night to the tune of Windows XP starting up on my laptop. I thought I heard other noises as well, but couldn’t be sure. I slithered downstairs with a bat, but there was no one there ..my laptop was lit-up however (had been in sleep-mode). I mentioned it to my neighbor this morning expecting to get a laugh. Instead, I got an appeal to install lights and motion sensors along the creek. She said it was probably something on my deck that triggered it, and while I was thinking coyotes, possibly deer ..she was thinking people. She says there’s no substantial barrier between us and the street, and the creek bed invites who-knows-who. She goes on to say that the homeless population is definitely on the rise ..and wonders if I’d been in town recently. Her husband runs into them every now and then looking for a place to crash. She tells me we need motion detectors and lights to fend them off. I tell her I think that’s a good idea, and even act approvingly, but I’m thinking what a light show that would be. I may have run into one or two people in the past, looking for a back entrance to a concert at the bowl ..but mostly it’s members of the wildlife community I see.

Jorge

Jorge is having a beer on the steps of the high school stadium around sunset. He offers me one, but I tell him no thanks ..I haven’t finished my laps yet. He tells me that he just got through working-out in the weight room. He’s a former gang-banger who is re-directing his life to focus on his health and family. He’s got a kid who he wants to be there for. Seems to be working ..he’s 29 but looks like he’s 18. He tells me he had an uncle who died of cirrhosis. I tell him not to worry ..a couple of beers after work aren’t going to set him back health-wise, especially considering he’s got the resolve to wait until he’s finished with his work-out. He asks what the liver does. I tell him the liver is like the body’s ‘detox’ center. That’s its job. If it didn’t do its job ..his beer buzz that would last a lifetime. He laughs. He tells be about his high school days spent drinking and smoking weed. I tell him about my high school days spent taking hallucinogens and smoking weed. He says he’s done that too ..but now he’s worried about the long-term effects. I tell him not to worry, I think the mind is resilient ..it’ll recover from whatever damage’s been done. I mean, look at me ..no wait, bad idea. I tell him that the nervous system does something similar as the liver ..it cleanses itself in order to regain balance for the next round of punches. If it didn’t, we’d all be hallucinating still. He laughs ..but looks even more concerned. He says he often gets flashbacks and can’t tell if they’re real or not. I suddenly feel insensitive because I did not see this coming ..and maybe wasn’t taking him seriously enough. I backtrack and tell him that memory has it’s own filtration system ..past episodes that don’t fit-in today, will weaken and either get revised or cycled-out tomorrow. I also tell him I’ll take that beer he was offering.

Sammy

Sammy was sixteen before he could decipher the meaning of words in a textbook. He says they looked like they were written in a foreign alphabet or something. He tells me about the whippings he received unless he stayed in his room and studied after school. He remembers hours spent staring at the pages of a book until they went white on him ..then he’d stare at the walls until images would appear from them. He considered a career in graphic design. Since then he has had to hustle to finish high school and the University. His field was anthropology instead of graphic arts because it was familiar to him from watching the National Geographic channel. I ask him if he can recognize most of the words he sees now. Only if they have a familiar pattern or shape to them, he says. Hopefully they’re keywords, he adds. I’m thinking about all the hurdles he’s had to jump to get through school. I also suspect he’s not suffering from a problem with his eyesight. “Where are you from originally ..?” I ask “Palm Springs” he says “Where are your parents from ..?” “Korea” “Can you read in Korean ..?” “No, never tried ..my parents didn’t want anything interfering with my education here” “What language was spoken in the home while you were growing up ..?” “Korean” That’s it, I tell him ..he probably would have learned to read in Korean just fine. He asks me how I know that. I tell him because he jumped from a verbal environment of spoken-Korean to an education of written-English. It happens all the time with kids from Spanish-speaking households around here. During infancy, our system gets tuned to receive the sounds our parents make, in his case ..Korean. The first step in learning to read is parsing the words you see, into the sounds that your system was tuned for. Since Spanish and Korean have fewer sounds than English ..parsing breaks down. On the other hand, reading by sight, or ‘pattern recognition’, is not a natural way to learn to read and takes a lot longer.

Psychotic episode no. 133

I walk home from State Street sometime after midnight, counting the blocks as I go. I unlock the door, climb the stairs and slowly walk down the hall. The hallway turns into an underground tunnel where menacing-looking apparitions reach out to grab me from between the bars of their cells. I walk as close to the middle of the hall as I can. Events of the evening dissolve ..the crowd at Sohos dissolves.. my bedroom door looms up and I push it open with my shoulder. Books have always been a source of refuge for me, so I pick one off the shelf and fall into bed. I turn the page, the room dissolves ..and the letters rise up like pillars. Somewhere a voice whispers “if it’s refuge you’re after ..you’re in the wrong place ..there’s nowhere to hide ..people will only make up what they can’t see anyhow.” Now the letters are forming words ..and the words, like thoughts, are circling my head ..mockingly ..pronouncing judgment .. like a booming voice, from a higher authority, coming down from the sky.

Buzzed

I walk to state street and get buzzed sipping iced coffee at ‘the bean’, while watching tourists stream in and out of starbucks across the street. Ryan shows me a clip of women skim boarding on youtube ..his daughter is competing this summer ..I tell him I’d like to go see that. Now I’m watching an intense game of ‘go’ next to us .. “takes cojones” he says. I go what, playing ‘go’ ..? No, competitive skim boarding .. she’s cracked her head twice already. I go “No shit ..why don’t you make her wear a helmet or something ..?” when I remember she’s grown up now ..and I’ve never seen anybody wearing a helmet skim boarding. We duck into the ‘fiesta’ to see the movie ‘runaways’ ..but 30 seconds into it we realize we’re watching ‘repo men’. ‘Runaways’ ‘repo men’ ..it’s a common mistake, I tell him. We switch to door number two. ‘Runaways’ isn’t bad, kinda’ historical ..shows me how little I know about Joan Jett. About three-quarters of the way through, I’m thinking I’d like to see more musical performance than personal drama ..but I guess I was expecting something like ‘prey for rock and roll’, which is actually in my collection of concert DVDs, along with Tom Petty and Flyleaf. Afterward, Ryan asks if I want to go see ‘English Beat’ at Soho’s tomorrow ..takes me longer than usual to find them in my mental collection of 80’s music ..which is pretty slim and makes me think how pathetic I am ..that and how old I am.

Dr Gregg

“ADHD is built-in ..it’s part of our nomadic heritage ..otherwise our ancestors would have been eaten hundreds of thousands of years ago. Try wringing-out that kind of adaptation from kids by the second or third grade.”

..or so says Dr Gregg, speaking to me from his estate in Ann Arbor, where he’s surrounded by books from the 16th - 17th century, depicting life in Indian communities before the arrival of the conquistadors. He’s a one-man research institute. He’s writing a book on stress ..or ‘cortico-tropin releasing factor’, which he says gets triggered by the ‘reptilian’ part of the brain in response to sensory signals that haven’t reached the recognition-centers yet. Transmission to this area is more channel-direct, he tells me ..and it releases stress-hormones in response to anything unfamiliar, which means pretty much everything that hasn’t reached the recognition-centers yet. I called because I was reading about a group of neuroscientists at Emory University who have discovered pretty much the same thing he’s been lecturing about for decades ..that is, we’re not the brightest species on the planet. At best we come in a distant third. He goes on to tell me that whales have much greater potential for intelligence ..their brains are real well-suited for processing their underwater environment. And they have language. Their bio-sonar system allows them to communicate with whales in any ocean on the planet. Their language is complex, comes in different dialects, and they pass it on from one generation to the next. He cites linguists who have reported changes recently. Whales off the coast of California are chatting in deeper voices, which carry farther. Apparently local supplies of salmon are running low so they’re contacting suppliers off the coast of Japan. Whenever I get off the phone with Dr Gregg, I detect a mid-range humming sound running through my own brain.

Wednesday morning

The telephone rings, waking me from catatonic deep-sleep. There’s no way I can reach the phone before it goes to machine “Bill, it’s Amanda ..can you come over .. they want to run a sewer line through ..” but I’m already up and don’t catch the rest of the message. I’m putting on overalls and wondering who the hell wants to start excavating, thinking the canyon’s gotten way too crowded ..you can’t even put an extra bathroom without crossing over someone else’s property ...shit, I’ll wake up Dr Jones, he’ll know what to do. I remind myself to wait until I hear the whole story before going defensive, but I think the dominoes are starting to fall. I’ll blame it on Don ..he still refuses to give Aaron easement rights. Son of a bitch. I’ve never gotten an urgent message from Amanda before. I tap-out my usual drum-solo on her door. She answers, whispering because the baby’s asleep. I tell her I got the message and ask who the culprits are ..(?) She tells me she didn’t call ..(!?) I stand there uncomprehending. She laughs and says I must’ve been dreaming, and asks if I actually checked my messages. I refuse to answer on grounds it may give her reason to call the county ..and walk away feeling shook. I’m afraid my dreams are becoming way too literal.

Hermosita

I board the surf-liner headed south ..hop in my sister’s lexus ..zip through the streets of Irvine to Woodbridge .. where there are no corner-malls ..only town centers and village squares, which I believe were planned by the same group of students who did the Hobbit-land dormitories at UCI. We have wine and dinner ..then watch women’s half-pipe and men’s figure skating.

The next morning we go out for bagels and coffee ..and watch school kids walk past the shop and wave. We wave back and a tune comes to mind “.. where the children go to summer camp/and then to the university/where they’re put in little boxes/and they come out all the same.” Wicked of me.

We take the 405 to the 91 to Pier Street to Hermosa Beach ..a funky little town with lotsa’ clubs and great places to eat and hang-out. We cruise the strand before the show and I talk incessantly about boring shit.

We’re standing in line talking with some girls from 7th and Redondo ..then we’re seated in a small dinner theater, two tables away from the stage .. listening to a pianist, who was conceived during an affair, and consequently raised by his mother and father/step-father, who remain married. I know this because he wrote a song about it called ‘greatest mistake’ ..which turns out to mean ‘best mistake’.

Sarah Bettens, who we came to see, has been sitting at the table next to us for I don’t know how long. On stage she plays: ‘can’t get out’ ‘..not an addict’ ‘..shine’ ..and somewhere along the line she goes into ‘damage done’ by Neil Young ..and for a moment I’m transported. After the show, I see a chance to chat with her ..and take it. She’s attentive and responsive ..making me feel like there’s nowhere else she’d rather be ..and I can’t help but think, what a great musician ..and lovely person she is.

Toon town

Lately it seems like I’m living in a cartoon. I used to get this way on occasion, usually after sharing a spliff with my neighbor, but now it’s more like everyday ..spliff or no spliff. I watch Señor Jim walking home. He looks like a two-story dinosaur. He lives in a tudor-style house that looks like its made out of gingerbread. He just finished chatting with Dr Jones who, as the name implies .. looks like Indiana Jones. I’ve even started greeting him that way, imitating the low booming voice of his adversary Dr. Belloq in the movie. Fortunately he gets a kick out of it. Dr Jones is a vigilante. He patrols the neighborhood on a bicycle .. or sometimes on a stakeout with night-vision goggles and automatic weapon. He’s trying to keep Orange County developers below the LA County line. Unfortunately he sometimes blows the head off an innocent neighbor adding a deck. Today, however, it’s infiltrators from within that have got him on-edge. This could be anyone from high school students to dirt-bike riders. Apparently some guy named Sperling is bank rolling the operation. Dr Jones is not short on conspiracy theories.

I continue on a path leading to the County Bowl. ..stopping along the way to chat with Marleña through the window of a house that looks like something out of hobbit-land. She tells me Sugarland tickets go on sale tomorrow .. people are already camping out around the Bowl. David and Julianne appear out of nowhere ..dressed in saffron threads and ugg boots. Looking like a swami and goddess. I put my hands together in gassho. They say they walked down the steps of the Bowl ..but now they are looking for a trail to climb back up. The terrain looks kind of steep and overgrown to me ..so I offer to drive them back. Not a problem, David says ..and I hear Julianne go “here it is” ..and they vanish. I turn to ask Marleña if she saw anything remarkable about that ..but she’s disappeared too.

NYC

Usually when someone tells me what they expect to see in a place they’ve never been before ..I think it says more about the place where they’re coming from. Like, what else do they have to go by. But, more often it's like, what a stupid generalization I go by. Joey is a screenwriter from NYC who I met last night at the baths. When I asked what surprised him most about California, Hollywood in particular, he said he expected sharper teeth. Not sure what he meant, I asked him to tell me more. He goes “I expected sharper teeth because Hollywood always seemed like such a far-away fairytale place ..sitting inside of a fort ..surrounded by a moat ..guarded by sharks.” I laughed my ass off. What an illustrative mind ..! Not much about NYC there, expect, perhaps, the part about the sharks. But then again, that’s another stupid overgeneralization of mine ..it comes from watching too many TV shows..

Charlie

An unexpected turn of events occured at the poker game this evening. Charlie stood up and slammed down his cards, one by one, shouting (in beat to the rhythm of the slamming cards) “This ..is ..not ..the ..hand ..I ..was ..dealt ..Goddamn bunch of thieves!!!” This shocked the shit out of us. Brian went looking for his bat, while I go: “OK Charles, tell me whose hand you think it is ?” He bellows “The cards I had went up to 0.732 ..these are only around like 0.53” I had no idea what he was talking about. I looked at his cards ..queen of hearts ..seven of spades ..two of diamonds ..they did look random, which is kind of like a 50/50 proposition. I thought about the winning hand he had a while back ..a full house. “Charles, you’re thinking about a hand you already played.” He goes “No fucking way, Jose ..” spraying food everywhere “..not even the same ballpark ..but let me tell you something ..I am foursquare against these goddamn revisions and .. hey, what the hell’s inside my mouth (mouff) .?” “Doritos” I tell him, hoping feedback might help him feel a little more grounded. It was a little too late. We took the mountain roads back to my place, with the top down, freezing cold ..but hoping it would put psychological distance between home and the scene back at Bri’s. I even offered to give him my share of the winnings. He had no idea what I was talking about. I thought it best to leave it that way.
 

continued here~>[ link ]