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lunch in Venice
Friday, August 11 2000
For lunch, I went with one of my co-workers, a German expatriate dude named K___, to Venice Beach where he lives. On the drive over, we were talking about my recent breakup with Kim. I haven't told many people, but the topic just sort of came up yesterday when I was talking about my DSL troubles. Anyway, K___ was completely sympathetic about it, saying he never makes it more than two and a half years with his girlfriends. He says he's been going out with his current girlfriend for, well, two and a half years. We stopped at his pleasant Venice Beach home on the way and he even gave me a beer.
K___ went on to tell me his whole America story, how he started out earning three dollars an hour working for an illegal immigrant Mexican installing air conditioning ducts and breathing millions of tiny flecks of spun glass insulation. But he only had that job for a day; soon he was working at a comic book store and married to an American woman (thereby putting his immigration troubles behind him). One thing led to another and eventually he had a job where using Adobe Illustrator to put dialogue bubbles and text on top of comic book graphics. This gradually led to more managerial sort of work. While his marriage didn't last, K___'s experience in America did. Now he's a project manager for my company, helping co-ordinate the release of massive new web products such as my message boards. He still does some comic book bubble graphic work on the side, and he showed me a few examples. I hadn't even known that job existed.
We did lunch at a little greasy spoon attached to a very elegant women's clothing store. "I love this place," said K___, "The women here are just so gorgeous!" I can stand K___'s particular brand of female appreciation; it resonates more with my own. It's far more sophisticated and innocent than its analogue as I knew it among my colleagues in San Diego.
There wasn't much to do at home except watch teevee and surf the web (Kim finally relented and let me use her DSL account which is otherwise not being used). I'm keeping myself on an extremely tight budget until I find a renter. This means that I cannot go out and get drunk and invite chicks back to my house or any of those other things that freshly-single guys like to do with their Friday nights. Those hoping for an immediate resumption of the old crazy Gus lifestyle will have to wait at least a week.
And while I sort of had the idea that I would be happy with a life that involved nothing but sleeping and doing internet stuff, it's quickly proving unsatisfying, something that was never apparent when I stood a chance of being interrupted by Kim any moment. It turns out that there's only so many times you can visit the usual virtual haunts, fuck shit up in the usual virtual public places, and tweak the virtual structures that constitute your virtual presence.
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