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car crash weather
Friday, February 2 2001
The day was beautiful because it was both sunny and warm. A great day, as it turned out, for bad luck, sabotage and mischief.
I was minding my own business in my cubicle at 9am this morning, not yet willing or able to read my email, when suddenly the telephone rang and it was the CTO with yet another crisis. The site was down and had been down all night (an entire business day in the UK). After some pesky emails I uncovered the cause: some idiot over in operations had simply turned the machine off. It felt like sabotage. And threats to the UK effort continued throughout the day.
James (the UK logistics guy) and I went over to the other building to nursemaid (as always must be done) the new development site into existance. We arrived in the spacious Network Operations Center (NOC) and found our usual "point of contact" entertaining a striking young blond bizdev woman at his workstation. Okay, with out arrival, it was clearly time to get serious, and he eventually lost her and bent to the task of satisfying our demands. Of course, in the version of this story we later told the CTO, upon our arrival there were six gorgeous blonds crawling all over the operations guys.
When we got back to our building, we looked high and low for the CTO and the two remaining UK developers, but they were nowhere to be found. Their absence was sort of creepy given the psychology of the context: the beautiful day, the fact that it was Friday, the fact that we'd just had to go sit down next to the operations guys in order to get them to accomplish anything. When we eventually ran across the UK developers, they were out in front smoking cigarettes. They proceeded to tell us their harrowing tale. Both of them stay in a house near the corner of 11th and Montana in Santa Monica, and on their way to work this morning they were involved in an auto accident. There they were, innocently crossing Montana on 11th under a green light when, out of nowhere, a Geo Metro flying through the red light at 40 miles per hour slammed into them. The errant Geo was completely crushed and its airbags deployed, though its driver survived uninjured. The UK boys escaped with no visible injuries, though their car (an average-sized American model) was seriously damaged. Its airbags did not deploy. While Neil suffered some whiplash-like symptoms, Simon's trauma was more psychological. All of these things accounted for their arriving late for work. I was one of the first Americans to talk to them, so I was sure to tell them about all the money they could expect to recoup from the Geo driver's insurance company. People from the UK generally need to be reminded of their legal options whenever they are injured here on litigious Yankee soil.
Mental calm and something approximating relief from a persistant hangover (a legacy of all the beer drank last night) didn't come until a solo noontime luncheon back at my house. On the way home I made a detour to Ralph's on a special errand to buy Swiss cheese, my long-time favorite sandwich component. I love the flavor of Swiss cheese, especially on the slightly-discolored surface of the holes. I also like the rubbery grain of the cheese that you get when you tear a slice in two. The flavor along those shredded edges seems particularly delicious, but this could be a purely psychological artifact of the visualization.
In the evening John and I went to our local Café. On the way we went on something of a detour to pick up some hazelnut creamer at Smart and Final. John bought one of those large boxes that can be unfolded to form its own dispenser, and he discretely placed it on the Café's counter as a humble anonymous donation. Later he decided this particular brand of creamer sucked, but he didn't want to retrieve his donation because doing so would have had the appearance of theft. Meanwhile some guy was playing music for some chick on his headphones-equipped Powerbook and making all sorts of nauseating observations such as "this is such an intoxicating riff!" I didn't overhear this conversation but John did, and he seemed revolted as he talked about it later on the walk back home. According to John, clearly this guy really only wanted to see the chick's tits, but he had to beat around the bush about it by making lame observations about probably lame music instead.
Nothing interesting happened tonight. I've discovered that Los Angeles doesn't really care about Friday. Chun came over to visit John bearing a small excessively-designed clear glass bottle of extremely expensive liquor. I heard them giggling and acting goofy in the downstairs living room and decided to just stay in my room.
I go through periods of my life when I find various forms of torture and execution erotic. Then, after a time (you'll be relieved to know), I gradually grow weary of my torture/execution fantasies and steer entirely back towards those with more conventional heterosexual themes.
Recently I found myself getting really turned on by Saudi Arabian beheading fantasies (it didn't seem to matter much whether I thought about men or women being beheaded; both were equally erotic).
One night in particular, a few weeks ago, beheading fantasies were the only thing that did anything for me at all. The next day I learned that three different women had been beheaded that night in Saudi Arabia. This kind of creeped me out and I resisted such fantasies for a time. Then, a week or so ago, pimples started forming in a line around the back of my neck, like a vicious taunt. The other day a pimple emerged along that same line, a couple inches to the right of my Adam's Apple, visible from the front.
Perhaps I should go back to public spanking humiliation fantasies. I was into those for a month or so in the late Fall of 1994, but reflecting on them now does nothing for me at all.
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