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The Bicycle Shop (a restaurant)
Thursday, April 6 2000
The stuff I'm doing at work is getting a little more interesting with each passing day. I'm experienced enough now in the professional world not to expect to be doing anything useful immediately, but I find myself getting up to speed rapidly nonetheless. My first assignment is complicated puzzle that, in solving, is teaching me all about how the website is constructed. I'm examining a part of the site that didn't manage to scale over time with the increase in users. My task now is to figure out how it works, build a development system and test my ideas, and then to replace the code with something that actually works. Interestingly, the old stuff is based on the NT FileSystemObject, my favorite NT object of all. The reason the code didn't scale was because it didn't heed the 50,000 items per folder limit of Windows NT. Whoops!
In the evening, one of the founders of Neo-Tantra, Raymond, an intensely soft-spoken long-haired gentleman from Ojai (we've stayed at his place) used Corynna's healing room for a tantric session with another man, probably a happily heterosexual one at that. It just goes to show that tantra does not necessarily involve physical contact or especially sexual themes. Indeed, the sort of tantric work Raymond does is almost entirely psychological.
While that was happening, Kim and I went off to do bank business in the ultra-hip Ocean Park neighborhood of southwestern Santa Monica, the neighborhood near the Wild Flour pizza place where Kim had originally wanted to live. Not finding a Bank of America, we ended up in the vicinity of our new townhouse, just east of the northeastern corner of Santa Monica. There's a place on the north side of Wilshire called The Bicycle Shop, and I'd just assumed it was, well, a bicycle shop. But Kim knew better. It turns out that it's a restaurant, a dimly-lit place with white table cloths and a relaxed, dignified, sort of East Coast atmosphere. The decorations consist of old bicycles and various disconnected pieces thereof. We drank margaritas with top-shelf Cuervo Gold tequila, pleased to find a cool bar within stumbling distance of our new home.
Starting this evening with a pasta & mushroom dinner Kim had prepared, my intestines had been in a state of raging pain. Just as we'd walked into the Bicycle Bar, however, the pain subsided and I was fine for the rest of the night. At midnight as I lay sleeping, however, I awoke to find I was in the act of vomiting. I caught myself and swallowed hard, but vomiting was the least of my problems; my guts were in terrible pain once again. I went into the bathroom and forced myself to vomit again, but that did nothing for the pain.
[REDACTED]
Frighteningly, the pain seemed to be localized right under my ribs. Perhaps it was my liver finally starting to complain about all the alcohol I drink! I was convinced that I'd be in pain for the rest of my life (or at least the next 24 hours), that I would have a miserable day at work. But when I woke up the next morning, I wasn't in pain at all. It had been some sort of brief night condition, probably the result of the cheap Chinese food I'd had for lunch from a restaurant on the somewhat low-rent Santa Monica Blvd.
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