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the fine chicks of La Jolla
Sunday, May 23 1999
I wanted to spend the whole day fucking around with my LINUX computer equipment. I didn't want to do anything that Kim could think of; I didn't even want her to go as far as proposing activities, though she did anyway. There were movies to be watched, deserts to be revisited, big greasy breakfasts to be leisurely devoured, you name it. "Aren't you in a masters program?" I asked her at one point, and she responded with something to the effect of, "Oh, you're right."
We scarfed down some bagels in front of the Zen Bakery up on Voltaire Street. The weather was cool and grey, noticeably less appealing than it had been on, say, New Years Day, 1999. Of late here in San Diego, I've been feeling like I'm being deprived of a genuine spring time. Sophie was being extra bitchy for some reason, squealing and barking aggressively at other dogs for no justified reason. It was kind of embarrassing.
The LINUX gods were not smiling on me this afternoon. I had unresolvable "dependency issues" concerning the "jpeglib" of Red Hat 5.1 and could not install the greatly-anticipated KDE desktop (which, I've been told, wraps the workings of LINUX beneath an elegant Macintosh-like user-interface). I first heard about it from Dave, one of the database developer boys at work.
We had the teevee on C-SPAN for much of the afternoon. There was something sickeningly addictive about the congressional hearings on "Youth Violence." About the only solution some of those idiots could come up with was the posting of the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Could they really believe those commandments would have stopped the likes of Dylan Klebald and Eric Harris? Thank God our money still says "In God We Trust." Can you imagine all the high school shootings we'd be dealing with if the atheists had succeeded in getting that removed?
Kim and I went for a walk down to Newport in the late afternoon. On the way we came upon her understated, underachieving friend Lawrence, and he joined us for the rest of our walk down to Newport. Kim, you see, is constantly on the lookout for social opportunities for her many single male friends. Since one of the members of our courtyard community was having a graduation party this afternoon and we'd been led to believe it would be inescapably big, Kim had suggested to Lawrence that he come visit us today. Alas, the party never expanded to the point where it would have been stressless to crash.
Down on Newport, Sophie was continuing her bitchy anti-social behaviour she'd exhibited earlier today. Kim and I did some CD shopping, hoping most of all to get the Cyclefly debut CD, but no one had it, and no one seemed to have much interest in ordering it either. Music store personnel in Ocean Beach aren't anything like the hip, eager-to-please, on-top-of-the-scene types I'm familiar with from places such as Charlottesville and Oberlin. In those places, music store people socialize with the people who run the alternative music show venues and the non-profit radio stations. It's all one big incestuous group, and if you frequent those circles you quickly come to know all the people involved. Such people want to hear about bands with whom they're unfamiliar. I was trying to explain all this to Lawrence and he thought I was saying that Southern California types are shallow, but that's not what I was saying (though it might be true).
The CD I bought was Fugazi's Steady Diet of Nothing. It's not their best, though it does have a great example of a double entendre, possibly (thus ironically) non-intentional. In the song "Latin Roots":
"It's time to meet your makers"
sounds a lot like
"It's time to meet Jamaica."
(in that Led Zeppelin "D'yer Maker" sort of way)
Which could be some sort of reference, I suppose, to punk's debt to Jamaican ska, though I can't really detect any evidence of Jamaican (or, for that matter, Latin) influence in the music of Fugazi.
We walked a short way out onto the pier, where a hippie couple was playing a marginal duet on saxophone and guitar. The waves and the water looked like it might have contained chunks of ice floating in it; the fierce wind definitely carried more than its season-burden of chill. But there were plenty of surfers out catching waves, dressed neck-to-ankle in insulated skin suits.
On the walk home, I led Kim and Lawrence to the "ink fruit bushes" near the Appletree supermarket, and we all spent some time adding to the accumulating sidewalk graffiti. Having given up on biting social satire, I made a few hasty line drawings of beheadings, which are about as easy for me to dash off as pictures of roosters.
Back at our apartment, Lawrence caught a bus back home from the bus stop adjacent to our bedroom. Meanwhile Kim and I made arrangements to go hang out with my colleague, Eric the 21 year old database developer guy who lives in La Jolla.
Eric lives in a mid-scale apartment complex up there by the wedding-cake Mormon temple (the big tacky white structure visible from I-5). Eric had given us detailed instructions on how to find his place, but we were frustrated by the completely non-intuitive layout of his complex. The numbering scheme of the buildings and the apartments was something close to random, and unless you knew exactly where you were going, the odds of not stumbling into a dead-end were very low. I'm always happy to have another reason to despise modern housing "solutions," so the infuriating addressing scheme was satisfying in its own dumb-headed way.
Eric was working on an assignment for his web development class, a version of Pac Man written entirely in JavaScript and Dynamic HTML. I was pretty impressed until he admitted that he'd pirated most of the code. That's the thing about college assignments in the internet age; one can often find pre-made solutions if one really knows how to work a search engine. By the way, back when I took computer classes at Oberlin in the mid-80s, I was always far too lazy to do any original programming for my assignments. Fortunately for me, all the Unix accounts on the VAX 750 were visible to everyone else by default, and I could easily copy the work of my classmates, changing indents and variable names until "my" work looked unique. Yes, and I used to sign honour pledges without the slightest hint of guilt.
We hung out at Eric's place just long enough to meet his housemate, a computer science major like himself. She's unexpectedly attractive and socially evolved for someone in her field of study. (Eric is always talking about the sexual tension he experiences living with her. There's lots of talking but nothing is ever consummated.)
I'm fairly used to "downtown" Ocean Beach, so I always find La Jolla incredibly clean every time I go there. At night it looks even cleaner than it does during the day. It sparkles and glints. Hell, it even smells good. Instead of the urine, seaweed, beer, cigarette and body odour of Ocean Beach, there's the rich fragrance of semi-tropical flowers.
We dined at Sushi on the Rocks, one of at least two premier sushi eateries in La Jolla. Kim, who once worked as a sushi waitress, knows her sushi and can speak the language. I never order anything when I'm in a sushi restaurant. I leave that all up to Kim.
Eric is unusually outgoing with the girlies. Though he's fairly sweet about it, his unprovoked forwardness and obvious sexual motivations make his overtures sort of embarrassing, especially for a shy guy like me (incidentally, I've often been embarrassed by the innocent outgoingness of my own mother as well). In the sushi bar, at the table directly next to us, sat a nubile college sophomore chick and her kid sister. It was actually Kim who struck up conversation with her, but Eric kept it going with utterly pointless references to what she was eating.
Then there was our waitress, another cute girl with whom to strike up conversation. Today was, she said, her first day as a sushi waitress, and she was a little confused and flustered, but we were understanding. Eric was more than understanding; he felt the need to compliment the fake reddish colour of her hair and, well, not the size of breasts, but he would talk loudly about his breast-size ideal without any concern about whether she could overhear or not. With me, I'm strictly business when I'm dealing with strangers unless either I'm very drunk or they're very friendly. Later, at a fancy old-school watering hole called "the Whaling Bar," Eric explained his outgoingness this way, "There's very few girls who find me attractive immediately, but if I can strike up a conversation with them, then I can usually keep them interested." This was his way of saying he's a bright guy and it works to his advantage romantically (though he's not an unattractive guy). But he seemed to be denying something important about sexual attraction.
It's mostly a non-verbal thing.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer in the power of intellect, reason and logic. But when it comes to matters of the heart, words are of secondary importance. On more than one occasion I've found myself engaged in strongly sexual activities with people with whom I've never exchanged a single word. Perhaps those romantic adventures don't lead to strong long-term relationships, but there is nothing inherently wrong with them either. I'm enough of a romantic (and I mean this in the sense of "awed by the sublimeness of nature") that I find myself avoiding the contamination of romance with excessive language. For example, I'd just rather not have to ask "May I kiss you?" or "Can I put my fingers in your pussy?" For some reason I'd rather trust my romantic communication to non-language forms, in the same way that I try to avoid using my hands to aid in the placement of my penis prior to intercourse. Unless I'm doing things the way innocent animals do, I feel like I'm cheating.
I thought I wasn't going to enjoy The Whaling Bar when we first went in. We were practically the only ones there, and I usually work under the delusion that a bar needs to be hopping to be any fun. But in this case, a hopping bar would have been a distraction. Eric would have been too busy saying "What's up?" to the fine chicks of La Jolla to have a conversation with us. But the Whaling Bar had an elegance about it, from the big folk art Sperm-Whaling-Scene mural and the quiet jazzy background music right down to the older, butler-like bartender. The house specialty there is "the Whaler," a thick milkshake-like girlie drink. As we left, Kim told the bartender, "I have two dates tonight."
I have one additional Eric-related piece of gossip to tell. It seems that at Gordon Biersch on Friday, most of the male colleagues I'd been with managed to get some kind of action from the few loose women there. Allegedly they (Al, Kevin and Eric at least) were all getting to swap saliva with the blond girl, the one whom I asked, "So, what's it like being blond in the 90s?" Eric didn't just kiss that girl, he also got to kiss the cute brunette girl. It seems that when the brunette slipped off and vanished, she was actually meeting up with her "blind date" for the night. But that date was evidently a failure and she returned to the bar after Kim and I had gone home. That's when Eric descended on her and, as he said, he got to "French kiss" her. "French kiss." What a horrible phrase! And I'd thought that expression was used exclusively by 6th graders.
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