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balls of blue
Monday, September 4 2000
In the afternoon my former girlfriend Kim came over to my place to pick me up so I could help her buy the components necessary to build a new desktop computer. The former Dr. Susan Block handyman Robert, who rents out Kim's garage as a studio/machine shop, also occasionally functions as Kim's "driver," and she was traveling with him in his red pickup truck, en route from Encino to Venice. When I finally emerged from my house with an armload of assorted computer components, the sun was bright and warm and Robert was blaring "Sweet Child of Mine" from his truck's stereo system. It was a real LA moment. As usual, Sophie was delighted to see me and vice versa.
Despite our earlier promises to never return to Fry's Electronics, Kim and I figured there was no other place to go to pick from such a wide variety of cheap computer parts. So we drove south down the 405 and went to Fry's Manhattan Beach outlet. It's in a considerably more shopworn building than the one in San Diego.
I suppose I could have predicted that the worst possible place to spend a Labor Day afternoon is Fry's Electronics, especially if you're buying an entire computer piece by piece. Just getting from one part of the store to another was a hassle, what with all the warm geeky bodies in the way. Then there was the gauntlet of lines that we had to wait in. Here we were aided to some extent by the fact that there were two of us, since it was possible for us to wait in two lines simultaneously. Overcoming some of Kim's æsthetic issues in the name of frugality was another formidable challenge, but luckily the chief skirmish involved the difference between a $10 and a $20 keyboard. After we'd completed our shopping, I was actually left with a feeling of dissatisfaction about the prices I was able to find. Fry's isn't really that cheap when you're forced to buy specific things that they're not advertising and selling at a loss.
Back at Kim's apartment, I set to work at the task of putting the various computer pieces together into a usable desktop machine. To a certain degree such work is easy, but it involves some skill and it isn't without its annoying reversals. It's definitely the sort of work one doesn't do for free without at least a certain amount of token appreciation. Instead, however, Kim and I were fighting just like the good old days. This was the result of my demand that Kim knock a hundred dollars off of my multi-thousand-dollar debt in exchange for the motherboard and processor I was contributing to the effort. But evidently Kim had been working under the impression that I was giving her those things, and she was reluctant to compensate me for them. She characterized my demand as "cheesy." I might agree with this assessment were it not for the paucity of material things she left for me when she moved out. My thinking is that if she wants anything else of mine she's going to have to pay me for them.
Aside from the fighting, though, there was considerable sexual tension between us. We've been apart for a long time and the sex we remembered from the old days had never been bad. One thing led to another and before long Kim was telling me that no, we couldn't be doing that here. What would she tell Robert if he walked in? Last he'd seen of Kim an hour before, we'd just been fighting and she was in tears. That we could go from warfare to the old doodle-doo within such a brief passage of time was, well, embarrassing.
So I was left with the worst case of blue balls I've ever had in my entire life. Girls think we boys just use blue balls as leverage to get sympathy sex, but I cannot stress strongly enough how real the phenomenon is. Tonight I was in such pain I would have begged to be taken to the emergency room had I not known what was going on. I wanted morphine.
[REDACTED]
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