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the way boys do things
Sunday, September 3 2000
I've been talking a lot about earthquakes lately. It's a combination of homeowner anxiety and a punk rock armageddon fantasy. Last night California actually had an earthquake that caused injuries, but it was on the other end of the state. Since I've never felt a real earthquake since moving here, I feel vaguely like I've been missing out on the true California experience. I've been startled by movements and momentarily thought that they might be slight tremors, but they're always something else, like the rebound of the desk after I hit it with my knee.
Housemate John and his friend Fernando (from Sherman Oaks) are always together these days. They like to do the same things: jogging, lifting weights, eating fish tacos at Rubios, that sort of thing. Today they invited me on a fish taco run. As Fernando put it, "Two ninety-nine cent fish tacos and you're like ..." (At this point he shook his head once, smiled, and pushed his hand out from his body, palm to the floor, swooping it slightly upward, as if to say "you're good for the day.") I couldn't argue with that, so I said sure, let's go.
The Rubios Baja Grill in question is about a block to the east of Bundy on Wilshire, in a little cluster of yuppie-friendly architecture decked out in watered-down and fluoridated colors. We were in sort of a hurry, so Fernando drove.
I suppose it had something to do with the fact that we were finally outside the distorting influence of female friends and relatives, because our conversation kept returning to the subject of women, something we've never really talked about before. For example, when we passed an attractive large-breasted short woman on Amherst, John said, "That's what I call a 'short stack.'" Then, as we were getting out of Fernando's plushly-upholstered Camry in a Wilshire parking garage, John made the following observation, "There sure are a lot of beautiful women in this town. It's nothing like Burlington [Vermont]."
It seems like I've heard guys say this same statement about lots of different towns, from Charlottesville to San Diego. I think that there's some sort of built-in amnesia system that allows boys to stay interested in girls. After we've been in a town and and been dazzled by lots of hot chicks on the hoof, we move somewhere else and the memory immediately fades. Suddenly we find ourselves being impressed by all the hot chicks of our new home town. I could see such an amnesia system playing an important role in male sexuality. Without it, our intellects might allow us to become bored with sex. Sex is, after all, the same thing, over and over, on every level of its fractalization. (I have to admit that though some of my sexual fantasies have no more angles left to explore, they still fascinate me.)
While John was in Gateway Country doing something on the Web for free ("Why pay to do it at Kinkos?"), Fernando and I were in Rubios ordering lunch. Unfortunately though, today was the day we learned that the 99 cent fish taco was a thing of the past. Rubios has apparently decided to break with other fast food franchises such as Jack in the Box and Carl's Jr who have 99 cent value meals. The Rubios fish taco is now a $2 item. This was terrible news to Fernando (and, though he hadn't heard it yet, John). They'd built their diet around the Rubios 99 cent fish taco. Just the other day John was talking about how he couldn't imagine a day when he'd get tired of it. But what could we do? We sucked it up and bought the tacos anyway, even at their grossly inflated price. But this would be the last time.
As we were waiting for our tacos to be prepared, Fernando and I joked around about the differences between men and women when it comes to restaurant food. Men, it seems, love to find ways to get by on nothing. Our food doesn't have to be fancy, and we don't need any fucking atmosphere. Just give us our food and let us eat it and get on with our lives. Women, though, at least when they're interacting with men, are all caught up in how much money their man is willing to lavish upon them. The same food one gets in a Rubios value meal, when served by a fancy restaurant and sold for ten times as much, is all that's necessary to get a girl's juices flowing.
This is all a gross oversimplification, or course. There are plenty of girls who aren't impressed by a wallet full of plastic and presidents. But I've been with Kim for the past two years, so my view of gender issues is distorted by the experience. Evidently Fernando's experience has been similar. We're excited to discover that we share the same joy in figuring out how to get by as cheaply as possible. It sure makes planning an evening easy: whatever we're doing, it's not going to cost too much.
Back at the house we sat around the faux wood Ikea coffee table eating our tacos and drinking beers. We lifted our bottles and toasted Rubios; it was to be our last patronage of that particular inflationary franchise.
On Fernando's insistence, we had an NFL football game on the television. Fernando was all into it, clapping his hands and cheering loudly whenever Oakland did something detrimental to San Diego. Not having liked San Diego much myself when I lived there, my sympathies (such as they were) were also with Oakland. Fernando explained his Oakland fan status this way. "It's a blue collar town, and those guys had to work to get to where they are now. They play their offense almost like defense. I love those guys!"
I'm not much into science fiction, but on John's insistence I've been groping my way through one of Isaac Asimov's early novels, I, Robot (copyright 1950). I'm finding the writing dry, unengaging and almost unreadable, but I'm pulled along anyway by my fascination with the way minds in the 1950s envisioned the future, the times I'm living in right now. There was, for example, absolutely no expectation of a phenomenon like Moore's Law, which postulates that for a given price and volume, computational power will double every two years. Early in I, Robot, you see, we're introduced to the first "talking robot," circa 1998. It's a huge immobile device full of coils and relays taking up "25 square yards." Asimov never predicted semiconductors. Not only that, but in I, Robot he predicts the development machine intelligence before the development of machine speech. In fact, though, the exact opposite has happened. Even in the 1990s, computers could speak very clearly and could even enunciate in a relatively non-robotic manner, but as of yet no one has figured out a way to get a machine to actually comprehend text in any manner that seems even remotely human.
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