Chunks of a letter to Skot

[garote]

Dear Skot:

I'm writing you more of a formal letter because I don't have constant email access down here, and the feeling of distance that results is more conducive to the formal letter.

Sorry I haven't gotten all those funky journal entries to you - actually, I'm more sorry for myself than sorry for you, crass though that sounds, because the receding tide of memory often carries away the most interesting little thoughts, leaving only the big dumb obvious ones wedged in the sand for documentation.

So now I face the task of tracing my bland narrative across numerous gulfs, each littered only with the daily blubber and dry pylons of perseverance, baked and stinking under stale uninteresting sun.

I think I just got carried away. Really, it's not all that bad. Beach-rot as a metaphor for autobiography is a pretty low-yield approach. At best it only tides one over.

Ooo, my apologies. Here, I'll start again.

So here I am sitting in Cassi's office. Last night we watched a movie called "Evolution", and during it I couldn't help pointing out to her that Julianne Moore, one of the stars in the film, was playing a character a lot like Cassi herself.

The most succinct description I can come up with of these shared traits is, "an endearing intelligent klutz". Yeah I know, the period goes inside the quotation mark, but fuck that shit I'm an engineer. I'm protesting grammar rules that don't follow basic nesting behavior.

I doubt you've seen the film "Evolution", and I'm not sure you would like it. It's quirky and shot full of ass jokes, but to its credit it features a cute scientist wearing a t-shirt with the periodic table of the elements on the back, which serves as the inspiration for a deus-ex-machina plot twist.

Hmmm, that my not actually be a positive in everyone's opinion. Oh well.

So the t-shirt, the woman wearing it, and the role she plays all remind me of Cassi. Just a few minutes ago in this office Cassi spilled some tea on the floor and mopped it up with some tissues, and then went to discard the tissues and accidentally smacked an empty drink cup off her desk. Then she kissed me and went to get some ice-cream from the work fridge, and when she came back she got a drop on the edge of the table and then set her elbow in it. "Oh crap!" she said, and tried to lick her elbow.

"Cutie!", I said, and kissed her.

She has been great fun. She talks to her computer, like it's a small reluctant pet. A tortoise maybe. I described her to Matt Heck via the contents of her apartment shelf. From left to right, we have: A pair of rollerblades, a Stephen King book, a boxed set of the "Evil Dead" series on video, two UNIX manuals, a very large candle, and a hot pair of black vinyl pants.

The UNIX manuals were what convinced Matt. How lucky do you have to get to find a girl who programs in Perl, rollerblades, and owns a pair of hot black vinyl pants? Pretty damn lucky I think.

Cassi's been terrific, but it's been a rocky time in general down in LA because of all the things I need to do, and the vast driving distance between my stopgap resources -- such as a workspace in Cassi's office, a bed in Marina Del Rey, and a net connection in Chatsworth. Downtown LA rests on one side of this triangle, occasionally blocking it with traffic.

Today was one of those occasions, and so I took surface streets next to highway 10 until I'd gone past downtown. Somewhere on my eastward course, before Chinatown but after highway 405, I saw a corpse on the right-hand sidewalk. The old man was bent up in a fetal position but rolled on his back, like a geriatric break-dancer frozen in time. A stout pull of one heel might have spun him around a couple times.

Just part of the terrain. Him and the billboards. Endless billboards hawking the movie of the week. Last month it was "The Mummy Returns" and "A Knight's Tale", tagging the buildings from one end of the valley to the other. You can judge the quality of a neighborhood very easily by considering how recent the billboards are. The really bad parts of town still have billboards - everywhere has billboards - they just don't advertise anything but ripped cardboard and which gang you should probably join.

Pardon the break in this letter, but I'm going to pop across the street to Ride-Aid and get some batteries for my K-RAD S00PER COOL MP3 DISC player. Dude.

...

This marks the first time I've crossed a street and talked on the phone at the same time. I'm glad it's so commonplace around here or I'd feel like a schmuck. I feel like a schmuck just for owning the phone, when I'm in Santa Cruz. Happily, it has a convenient unreliable nature -- when I want privacy I can just shut it off, and callers will assume my phone is merely out of range. It's like XBBS. Someone "hails" you, and if you vanish without responding, they rationalize it as modem noise.

The young black guy outside the Ride Aid hit me up for some change. I held up a finger for pause, finished my phone conversation, and then dropped about 45 cents into his hand. In the store I bought two cokes and handed him one on the way out, wishing him luck. He would have preferred more money, but hey, fuck it. My generosity is perverse.

...

I seem to have missed my train of thought. Pardon while I catch another one.

...

You know, this whole move to LA would have a very different, more desperate and lonely, feel to it if Cassi wasn't involved. I'm no stranger to a long relationship, yet just now it comes to my attention how very different the daily existence of an artsy person can be made by the favor of a fine girl. I'd probably be pretty damn depressed right now if I was facing this move alone.

...

We've just arranged to see Atlantis and Tomb Raider after some Mongolian barbecue. This sparked a discussion about the Tomb Raider video game series, and video games in general. Cassi's mother was strict with gaming. She wouldn't let her play her Game-Boy on car trips unless she read something first. Her opinion of video games was simple: "They rot your brain." Cassi's response was: "But they give you hand-eye coordination!" Not a strong enough appeal to change her mother's mind.

Actually, I think her mom was right in a way - early video games like tetris probably do not fertilize your brain compared to a good book, and they contain no direct social experience. Yet, for the more visually-oriented and action-craving youth, video games hold their own bounty. They challenge the mind to fill in gaps of interaction and sensation.

Gaps of sensation... I mean, the disparity between computer games and reality. Reality fills the senses to the limit, but even the very best computer games of our age are still flat projections and digital noise. No computer game has yet involved texture, weight, heat or cold, taste, or smell, with a few feeble exceptions such as force-feedback joysticks and the cloth map in an Ultima game. The imagination must fill out these sensations in the pursuit of a more complete experience, and meeting this challenge inspires creativity and clarity of thought.

Gaps of interaction are the human interest behind the scenes. Why does Mario want to rescue the princess? Did that close call with the pit of lava frighten him? We are more inspired to know, because we are the ones directing Mario through the game for the princess, and we are the ones who nearly spilled him into the lava, with our frantic squeezing of the joypad. Why does Chun-Li want to beat up Ryu? Did the people waving money in the scrolling backdrop bet against her, or for her? How did she get such big thighs?

Mmmm. Thighs.

Of course, these phenomena are also at work in reading, role-playing games, and to a lesser degree, cinema. In my opinion cinema has become the least inspiring of the lot, though perhaps my opinion is biased because I am using mainstream, big-studio cinema as a yardstick against novels and games, which are mostly small-group endeavors of craft and abstraction. Perhaps a better comparison would be with independent film.

Anyway, I suspect that a lot of this argument is moot, from a parenting perspective. You know when I got the most work out of my imagination? Walking home from school. The pace of my feet would put a rhythm in my head, and I would imagine music to accompany it, and visuals to accompany the music.

No fancy coaching, no frantic tours of art galleries, no piano lessons, no carefully wrought home atmosphere of Mozart and macaroni noodles. I found inspiration in blank walls: The paint was the surface of an endless cliff, with adventurers scaling it and encountering alien life. I found inspiration in bare carpet: Each thread was a bizarre tree in a mysterious rainforest, a twisted ecology involving serpents of hair, boulders of lint, and the fossilized scraps of prehistoric bug-people.

The hiss of the water-softener mounted on the wall outside my room scared me some nights, because I was certain that a dragon was stalking me.

Luck of the draw, or something like that.

...

Well it's been ... let me see ... five days since I've added to this letter. I spent Father's Day with my pop and Tony's pop, at a house in Chatsworth, which is on the north edge of the big LA basin. I caught a nasty intestinal bacteria from Tony while I was there, and floated through Monday and Tuesday on a burning, angry gut. Cassi stayed home from work to watch over me, then on Tuesday night she did some barfing of her own. Wednesday we both decided to get out of the apartment. We played pool and watched a couple videos. I bought some music, and a pair of rollerblades. That evening I went blading for the first time, up the Muscle Beach bike path and back. Pretty darned fun.

...

I remember a while back you told me of a confrontation building between you and Torrey because sex had tapered off and you were going crazy. I'm very interested to know how the two of you resolved that conflict, because I feel a similar one brewing where I am now.

It's funny, I spent two years with a woman who wasn't really attracted to me, somehow at ease with this fact, and in the final year I was not attracted to her either. Somehow I was content enough to masturbate for that year, and now, six months after the breakup I'm with this fine new girl. From the way she talks, sex is her favorite pastime, and from the way she cuddles me and the things she says, she is most definitely attracted to me ... yet we have not had sex in a month.

I am bouncing back and forth in my head between two attitudes. One is that I should immediately confront her about this and ask her if she really means what she says about sex being her big pursuit. I should tell her that, after two years of a stiff arm and a begging bowl, I am really not prepared to enter into another relationship with an attractive woman who does not have sex, and that after spending so long with a woman who was not attracted to me but wanted me as a boyfriend anyway, my gut suspicion is that the same thing is happening again.

When my "ex" and I were spending nights in her dorm room at UCSC, we would hear her housemate Scott through the wall almost every single night. He had a girlfriend named Kalan, a sweet optimistic girl who was supernaturally horny. When he left for his final year of study, in England, he said goodbye to Kalan. She took it pretty hard, I think he was her first real boyfriend. Up until the day he got on the plane, they would rattle Scott's doorframe with the regularity of their horniness. Scott had a large inflatable mattress that they used instead of the tiny apartment-issue bed, and the crazy rubber squeaking noise it made with each thrust would pierce through the walls. They could get up quite a frantic pace, and most nights it sounded like a couple of dolphins playing dodgeball.

Once, after I'd broken up with my "ex", I was walking on the beach remembering this when a sudden landmine of fury enveloped my head. What the hell was Scott thinking, leaving a girl like that for a fucking study-abroad program? I jumped up and down on the sand, shook my fists, and yelled every swearword I knew. Was he insane? Shit, if I had been in any condition to date when he left, Kalan's name would have been right at the top of my list. Of course, she would need an appropriate grieving period or whatnot, but I have learned thoroughly that the turnover rate for relationships in college can be lightning-fast. Sound predatory? You bet. You can't help that; we're all mad here.

But at least I would be having sex -- if the issue is which woman I'm dating, that is. Perhaps it's not. This is the other attitude I've been bouncing off of.

...

Pardon me, Tony needs to go on a walk to calm his nerves. He's been trying to work all day in a house with a screaming child. The child is his, which makes things worse.

...

This other attitude is that I am a self-defeating sex-crazed maniac. Now, I understand that there's nothing wrong with being sex-crazed if you've got the right partner and relationship; that's not the issue. It's that I suspect part of my personality is working against such a relationship.

Perhaps the way I act is not very sexy. Perhaps my tolerant, accepting, and almost selflessly supportive behavior turns me into a father figure, or an unappealing martyr, or a nebbish with no backbone. Maybe since I'm always ready for sex, I devalue my attentions. Maybe my touching and hugging and petting just puts women off of sex, or makes them lose desire or need for it. Good lord, listen to what I'm saying! Am I actually pondering the thought of acting more like a typical apeshit male in order to be more appealing to women? These are questions plaguing me, and they ring suspiciously hollow. I've seen their outlines radiating off of all the boys walking downtown on the weekends, sitting in the cafeterias, driving their lowered cars. How can I adapt myself ... how can I set the trap ... how can I prolong what has been, every time, a brief phase in a relationship that always propels itself elsewhere?

Wrong, all wrong, I scream: Relationships are for people to be intimate in, patient in, caring in, accepting in. Not for making demands, for bribery, for extortion. Never act the opposite of your feelings to get what you want, it all decays to sour grapes! Argument! Fear! Poodles!

Same struggle, from the dawn of man on up. Terribly egotistical of me to assume I could avoid it. Men have such lowly jobs: Fuck somebody and keep shit working. Why is logic always reductionist?

...

Well, this is a lot of writing, and even though it doesn't have an actual ending, I'm gonna send it your way. Tell all the various personas warring in your subconscious that I said hi!