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conservative fancy party
Saturday, December 5 1998
Early this morning, one centimeter iceballs fell improbably from the tall billowing clouds and lingered in great numbers on the cool grass. While walking Sophie with Kim, I picked up a few up tossed them at my girlfriend. One managed to work its way inside her clothes and cause her discomfort. That's about as close to a snowball fight as one can get in San Diego.
Taking a number in the return line in the massive Point Loma Target superstore, I yanked out an extra number and handed it gleefully to a stranger several tickets later.
At the place where I bought the CD-Writer, I dropped my purchase off to have it "tested." I have to say, it's an especially harrowing experience to be defensively patronized about my presumed lack of computer expertise by a shop owner who can barely speak English.
While Kim was at work tonight, her neuromuscular colleague Heather had arranged to take me up to a formal party in Delmar. The hope was that I could meet other computer professionals and increase my connections in the San Diego area. I was in it mostly for the adventure potential, of course.
I put on a tie and white shirt, covering all the defects, rips and stains with a dark blue zippered jacket. Then I smoked some pot and surfed the web for awhile. Eventually I went outside and waited for Heather (as she'd requested). Before long she pulled up in a big old 1977 BMW.
Heather is at least two decades older than me and, as a part of the whole California "somatics subculture," doesn't have a lot in common with me. But she's also a socialite who likes to surround herself with energetic, intelligent young men, so there was enough chemistry for good conversation, even if we mostly just discussed the San Diego weather.
The party was very, um, adult, and I don't mean that in a good way. The place was a cozy (and probably overpriced) condo and everyone there was (or appeared to be) older than me. They were successful businesspeople and professionals, dressed elegantly, engaged in bland little conversations on couches. There was wine, beer and finger food but absolutely no music, drugs or cigarettes.
Heather and I were taken immediately on a tour of the condo, where, of course, we were expected to make approving grunts and groans, oohs and aahs at the lavish bedroom, the kiddie-pool-sized bathtub, and the secondary television area outfitted with retro-futuristic furniture. Heather was far better at making the appropriately approving noises than was I.
Mostly all I cared about was getting to the alcohol and having some sort of conversation with anyone so as not to have the humiliating experienced of the classic party reject. Once the first goal, the alcohol, was achieved, I walked up to the most attractive woman in the room, who looked about as bored as me. Walking up to a bored person at a party and introducing yourself is the best gift you can possibly give that person; she is immediately in your dept. We immediately fell into conversation about nothing in particular, and soon her various girlfriends had joined us. Then her husband, a tall, skinny, extremely energetic man, came over and told us all a hilarious tale of being ripped off by a hooker and abandoned in the desert near Las Vegas. This led me to tell a number of my stories, including the saga of my hitchhiking in Quebec.
When asked about my relationship to the others at the party, I said that I'd come with Heather, who, I explained, was a Neuromuscular Therapist. When they asked to explain what Neuromuscular Therapy was all about, I said that it seemed like an intense and vaguely sadistic form of massage. This gave me the perfect springboard to launch into the biography of Sara Poiron, thereby fulfilling my goal of subverting the conservative, overly-polite party ambience.
Heather and I didn't stay at the party long; she admits to being sort of a light weight. For the entire drive home, I was treated to a nonstop barrage of catty comments. While there was plenty deserving criticism at that party, Heather chose instead to make snide remarks about one of the few interesting people there, the guy who'd told the Las Vegas story.
Back at home, alone with the marijuana, I packed a bowl and smoked a fairly large amount of it. Then I set out on a walk with Sophie the Miniature Schnauzer. Instead of dictating our route, I decided to let her take control. I was only there to keep her from running in front of a car or wandering too far into someone's yard. She seemed to appreciate my lax, non-totalitarian attitude and rewarded me by responding with unusual deference to my infrequent corrections. We passed the black Labrador who lives on the east side between Cape May and Brighton, and the tension between the two dogs was unusually palpable. The Labrador did her utmost to make Sophie as uncomfortable as possible without actually provoking a fight. For example, she made a big point of being friendly to me, making Sophie snappy with jealousy. From my perspective, the dogs' interaction closely resembled a conversation between two women on Melrose Place.
Further down the street, a generic older white woman (with requisite permed white hair) was just about to walk her precious ugly little fluffy dog. Sophie saw the pooch and immediately wanted to interact with it, as it did with her. But the woman was holding back, allowing Sophie and me to pass so her dog couldn't come into contact with mine. Every now and then you meet people like this, people who have no consideration for the healthy social feeding of their animals. Oh well, I was content to keep walking, but Sophie wasn't. As soon as the woman had her dog out on the street, Sophie began to pull me backwards. "Oh, okay!" I agreed. But the the nasty old woman began to freak out upon my approach. She evidently had some sort of compulsive phobia about her precious doggy establishing non-human relationships. I was freaked out by the two dogs' reactions to being rudely and unnecessarily ripped apart. Their whimpering haunted me and left me feeling nasty inside. I wanted that awful woman to be hit by a steam roller. I was still wearing a coat & tie, by the way.
Back home my brain was swimming with concepts. I could picture the price of gasoline as a three dimensional map with the elevations being price: relatively low in Pacific Beach and ridiculously high in Mission Valley.
I looked into the mirror and I realized for the first time the extent to which my face isn't symmetrical. My right cheekbone looked freakishly high in relation to my left cheekbone. And my mouth seemed to be pulled rightward, twisting my face. I could feel it dragging my whole face with it.
In my coat and tie, I suddenly realized that I looked just like a businessman. Businessmen, of course, are deserving of considerably more stress and woe then these good economic times present them. So I did a little performance before the mirror, with just me as the audience, making the distraut faces of a tortured capitalist pig and feeling delighted.
On the web, I visited the Savoy site to see the journals that had recently won the Whitman Award. Oh dear, the place was all so proper and unthreatening. I wanted to drop a stink bomb on that page just to liven it up a bit. In my stoned state, I could see the calculations that had been made in the selections. The give, the take, the consideration of what winners would do the most for the prestige of the award-granting body. It all seemed so sordid somehow.
A random thing: In answer to a question from a rock reporter, when Robert Pollard (of Guided by Voices) replied that all he had to do for Converse (as part of a paid promotional campaign) was wear free sneakers that he used to have to buy anyway. I realized tonight that when Pollard said these words, he was fulfilling his contract far fuller in one public sentence than anything he was admitting to.
Another random thing: There's a terrible advertising ditty on all the San Diego rock stations of late. It's performed in the style of a late-80s big hair stadium-rock ditty, and it goes:
"We're with you every step, every day, Boot World, Boot World, Boot World!" It's as bad as a Lenny Kravitz lyric, for Christ's sake!
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