|
|
|
Saturday Without the Girlfriend
Saturday, April 10 1999
In the morning I decided I wanted to install LINUX on my spare computer. To do so easily, I decided I'd need an additional CD-ROM drive. So I flipped through the latest Computor Edge (San Diego's free weekly computer magazine) looking for some good prices and then set out in Kim's Volvo. I ended up at the wrong end of the very long street along which the store I sought could be found. Much of greater San Diego amounts to mesas and canyons covered with urban sprawl, and the roads in these places, or, more particularly, between these places can get very confusing. I did experience some stunning views of Mission Bay as I came down off the wrong end of the hill above Mission Valley.
I bought a 45X CD ROM drive. I didn't even know CD ROM drives had become so fast. I bought a 24X CD ROM drive about a year and a half ago and it cost me 60% more money. While I was on my shopping spree, I picked up a new 125 MHz motherboard and 350 MHz AMD processor as well. I actually do need a slightly faster computational engine to do some real time processing of the signal from my electric guitar. This field seems to be a bit in its infancy, but there's an emerging supply of realtime digital audio tools (some of them freeware) that can turn any fast PC into a wish-list collection of guitar effects.
- I should have known Matt Rogers would send me an email begging for my old Pentium motherboard at this point. -
I didn't want to go out tonight. I wanted to stay home and play with my computers or work on something refreshing like art. But I had an errand to run down at Al's place, and since it was time for sunset, we went to Sunset Cliffs to watch it happen. At the end of its shimmering westward highway of orange across the rolling blue-grey water, the glowing disk of the sun dutifully slipped behind the distant clouds and then dropped beneath the waves. That was the only thing in the world just then that was making any sense. Indeed, the only thing that Al said which made any sense was about this phenomenon. His ramblings about work-related things left me frustrated with his failure to understand what exactly maintaining a website actually entails.
As soon as that errand was finished, Kevin called and was planning some sort of evening drinking excursion. I was agreeable on the condition that it be as low key as possible. I didn't want to get terribly fucked up. Indeed, I would have liked to just stay home, but Kevin had been at work until five in the morning doing the bidding of Brandi the marketing dynamo, and I should have been honoured that he wanted to spend his few precious hours outside of the workplace with me.
Al bowed out early, so it was just Kevin and me who headed down to Tony's on Newport Street. We ran across Giacomo and a number of his friends at the pool table, and they were all pretty friendly and talkative, from what I remember, though the British fake blond girl expressed unexpected concern at my level of intoxication; she'd only ever seen me as a shy sober boy.
I found myself chatting with a slender brunette girl who I found sort of attractive. Her male companion looked to be a fifty year old marine, all buff and muscular with a grey head of hair buzzed into the shape of a box. When the brunette girl spoke she had a kind of trailer trash cadence to her voice. Still, she was kind of fun, as was one of her girlfriends, a plumpish mulletized lesbian broad who looked like the body double of an Indigo Girl. Trying to seem worldly, I confessed to bisexual tendencies and an absentee girlfriend. The brunette took this as an indication that I was having an affair with Kevin, and I asked her if she really thought Kevin was my type. She had to agree he probably wasn't.
Kevin wasn't really being my type at all. He was bored by the folks I was hanging out with in the back and preferred to spend his time oogling what he termed "the slutitas" near the bar. Whenever he did hang out with me, he was more like a fifth wheel than a drinking buddy; he definitely wasn't improving my ability to socialize. By now, though, my social failings were too numerous to itemize. Kevin and I kept ordering each other white russians and jacks and coke, and before long we were absolutely shrouded in drinkers' fog. He wanted to leave, so I handed him my keys.
After stumbling home, I couldn't find my keys of course, so I pried open the bathroom window and wiggled through. On the first attempt I didn't quite make it and I cracked the back of my head hard on the window frame.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?990410 feedback
previous | next |
