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is your name Gus?
Thursday, June 10 1999
This morning Kim announced that I had until August 1st to move out of our apartment. She was furious and hurt by, well... that doesn't really matter. I told her I'd give her a few days to think about it and if she still felt this way, I'd start looking for a new pad. This was perhaps the most extreme breakup talk Kim has ever made, though in our marathon fight last night, I'd said things at least as harsh as that.
As expected, sometime during the day Kim sent me an email telling me she'd been a little carried away this morning. The end result of all of this was that are relationship was fully back in effect, as much as it ever is. These dramatics are so familiar by this point that I've come to regard them much the way I do furious thunderstorms: when they're actually happening they're sublime and beautiful in a way, and when they're finally over the world is all fresh and restored.
Aaron, the "class clown" marketing dude who claims he was fired from my workplace for making fun of his boss, was to be moving to New York City tomorrow. He has both a job and a girlfriend lined up already. Kevin the DBA and other colleagues arranged for us to all get together tonight at Gordon Biersch in Mission Valley to drink a few brews and see him off properly. I called Kim and had her plan on meeting us there. I told her to bring her "bat and balls," code language for her cigarette-styled one-hitter pot smoking device.
I rode to Gordon Biersch with Kevin. He was so angry about some "ugly woman" snagging a parking spot he felt was his that he commenced to working up a big loogie to spit on her car. But by the time we'd walked from the distant lot where Kevin had been forced to park, we'd forgotten which car was hers.
It was the usual Gordon Biersch scene. Kevin and Al were there, Sherms showed up eventually, and Antonella (another fired former-marketing person) was her usual friendly wallflower self. There was the usual lonely-guy banter about painfully-gorgeous "slutitas," but mixed in with that, we talked a little about a temp in accounting named Mark. Mark is middle-aged gay guy with a disproportionately enormous gut. In gay culture, where physical beauty is even more important than it is in heterosexual culture, he's not exactly considered a prime catch. So, like most of my male colleagues, Mark is extremely sexually frustrated. Unlike most of my male colleagues, though, he has an interest in others amongst my male colleagues. Kevin, who is from a deeply-religious Christian family in the deep south and has fairly conservative notions of acceptable lifestyles, told a story of an interaction he'd had with Mark just today. Mark had seen Kevin's motorcycle and been rather impressed, saying, "Hey, some time I'd like to get a ride on that thing!" Kevin's response was, "Well, to be quite honest, unless you're 110 pounds and have tits, I'm afraid I can't help you." Considering for a moment, Kevin figured perhaps that he'd been too cruel and added, "Actually, I don't have proper insurance and I can't afford to take the risk." Mark wasn't hurt; he came back with a story, "Me and a friend once rode all the way up to San Francisco along the Pacific Coast Highway, and it was so beautiful it reminded me of the first time I came." This unsolicited imagery was perhaps the low point of Kevin's entire day.
Kim showed up, and she and I treated each other as though our relationship hadn't just this morning weathered it's most extreme crisis yet. She had the faux-cigarette paraphernalia, so I (and some others) partook of the marijuana. For the most part, we did so completely casually, as though we were smoking a regular cigarette. The ventilation was such that no one could smell anything. Someone pointed out that this must be what hanging out in a bar in Amsterdam is like.
Suddenly a smiling clean-cut guy walked up to our table and asked if my name was Gus. I said it was. He enthusiastically introduced himself as Frank, a reader of my online journal. "You are one twisted individual," he proclaimed as he shook my hand. He said he'd discovered my journal while cruising through the bookmarks at an internet café in La Jolla (I've never been to this particular internet café by the way). He'd come here alone to Mission Valley because he'd heard from somewhere (not my journal) that this particular Gordon Biersch was a fun place to hang out. But as a non-drinker, he didn't have any intention to drink. This didn't prevent him from buying my whole table a round of beers. (Writing in my journal doesn't pay any money, but it does occasionally bear a few fruits.) As can be expected of people who, like Kim once did to me, introduce themselves to total strangers, Frank was a very social and outgoing kind of guy. My colleagues were all dazed and impressed, something Kim sensed more than me. I've kept my "second-tier web celebrity" mostly secret in my workplace, so this was completely unexpected for them.
Under the influence of pot and beer, I made a sudden startling realization. We humans have the capacity to watch things without actually looking at them. I'm sure I've known this all along, but today it gelled into the framework of evolutionary anthropology, the paradigm with which I regard humanity. Here's an illustrative case of what I'm discussing. It's easy to tell a girl is thinking about you if she looks directly at you. Unless she wants to send that signal, she'll be more discrete than that. She'll hang back, watching you with her peripheral vision to see if you're looking at her. She'll use this information to gauge your interest. And you'll do the same with her. What I'm talking about here is the place where social skills meets basic physiology. Good peripheral vision gives someone better social information, the kind that isn't poisoned by the observed's awareness of the observer. I'd be willing to bet that creatures with advanced social systems have better peripheral vision than creatures with less complex social systems. Of course, peripheral vision also helps in other departments, especially defense from predators, so any study based on the aforementioned hypothesis would have to take other survival pressures into account.
On the drunken drive home, I had my bike hanging out the trunk of Kim's Volvo sedan. Suddenly she became aware of a "shhhh-shhhhh-shhhh" sound from the back. She assumed it was the sound of a badly leaking tire, so she pulled into a gas station. When we went around back we found that my bike's back end had slipped down to the ground and its rear fender (a recent anti-splash addition) had been dragging. Other than being filed completely flat for the length of a banana, it was fine. Later, very close to home, the bike fell completely out of the car into the street. At the time I found myself blaming Kim for her tight hair-pin U-turns.
After tonight's ordeal, my transportation was a little scruffier than it used to be but it still seemed to work just fine. By the way, this entry was sponsored by The Huffy™ Multi-National Bicycle Concern. I sure hope they check their referral logs.
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