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conversation with an ice machine
Saturday, November 18 2000
I'm not here; this isn't happening.
I can identify with that. But then again, how about with that new song by PJ Harvey called "This Mess We're In" - featuring Thom Yorke from Radiohead? The very first time I heard it I was thoroughly blown away. I'm a little more jaded now. But anyway, go check it out on Napster if nowhere else (it's nowhere to be found on the music site I work for).
I spent another day working at Bathtubgirl Productions, mostly related to the perfection of Flash animations I built earlier. It won't be long before I'm actually pretty good at this stuff. Bathtubgirl and I actually managed to get along very well together. One thing that kept us from ending on a bad note was that I smoked a little pot near the end there. I can't really work effectively when I'm stoned, but it also hard for me to be an asshole.
Sophie the Miniature Schnauzer is always really happy to see me whenever I come over. She usually throws a little party involving her rolling around on her back making ahgh! ahgh! noises while shaking her "friend" (a small stuffed Holstein Cow) back and forth.
In the evening I walked a few blocks northeast into Brentwood to attend a small party honoring the erstwhile DBA Laurie as she enters her last week of employment at my workplace. The party was being hosted by Karen, a girl from the editorial staff who is often seen riding around on her electric-powered wheelchair, usually in the company of her canine assistant, a golden retriever named Merlin. When I showed up there were only a handful of people: Laurie, Karen, a sort of nerdy looking dude and two British chicks. They were drinking a number of absolutely repulsive looking pastel-colored girlie drinks out of styrofoam cups and acting silly from the pot they'd been smoking, something I could tell they didn't do too often judging from how they tittered about it.
I fixed myself a glass of vodkatea and did what I could to be charming and interesting. It wasn't all that hard, since by this point I was the only conscious guy in the room.
Eventually Julian and Linda showed up, and that's when I really came out of my shell. In my own gregarious drunken way I was going on and on about all sorts of things, taking some tiny scrap of a notion, exaggerating it outlandishly and presenting it as authoritative fact. For example at one point I made the outrageous claim that I get all my news in the form of musical parodies off Napster. Another time I found myself growing cranky and frustrated in the face of Laurie's astounding cultural naïvité. Though she grew up in decidedly cosmopolitan Santa Monica, she's far more ignorant of cultural trends than I was even as a teenager isolated in deepest Redneckistan. So, in response to some pussyfooting she was making about someone's gayness, I decided to claim that I was gay. That always goes over big when you're the only unattached guy in a room full of couples and boyfriendless chicks. Then there was that conversation I had with the refrigerator ice machine, reluctantly dropping ice cubes one by one into my drink (which had long before been contaminated with some sort of repulsively sweet liquor). I talked to it as though it was some sort of powerful and dangerous mechanistic monster, and as I did so I also simulated its responses using my most mechanically authoritative voice.
Machine, I would like to have some ice now!
Okay, I give you ice.
More ice, machine, more ice!
Okay, I give you one more cube!
At the end of the night, Laurie drove me home, right to my door.
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