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Ocean Beach 4th of July
Sunday, July 4 1999
For the first time in a long time, I had dreams that I remembered. In one of the dreams, I was with a male friend, a sort of Matthew Hart/Ed Nelson character, and we were stopping by his rich parents' place to pick up some items (I don't know exactly what). His father, an old man who gradually changed into Richard Nixon, didn't like me for some reason. While I was there, the old codger was doing all kinds of nasty things to indicate his displeasure with me, such as spraying room deodourizer in my presence. Finally I was so fed up with this mistreatment that I grabbed a piece of chicken from a plentiful dinner spread, jumped up on a rail and devoured it like a primitive beast, mocking the old man and berating him for crimes he committed while in the White House. Then I fled on foot into the rural outdoors. The old man was so angry that he took off after me in some sort of motorized vehicle. But the others who had witnessed the argument as it had developed were sympathetic to my plight, and rendezvoused with me at a hiding place somewhere in amongst crops in a field.
Later I was at a bar and some annoying guy kept bothering either me or Kim, so I hauled off and hit him square in the face, knocking him completely out. Someone remarked that they didn't know I could fight, and, still in a state of shock over my achievement, I responded that I didn't know I could either. No one, not even the bartender, thought I was acting out of line because the annoying guy "had it coming."
Still later, I was riding my bike down Wertland Street in Charlottesville, Virginia with a contingent that included Karin the annoyingly over-involved member support girl from work. Suddenly I noticed that I had rolled over some glass and it was stuck to my tires. The shards came in all kinds of colours, like a stained glass window. As I picked it off, a little air leak materialized and the Karin said, "Look, a cloud of steam!"
As my dreams go, this particular series seemed to indicate a great deal of self-confidence. Instead of my punches being weak and ineffectual (as they've always been in the past), they have an unexpected power. And everyone agrees with every position I take except those who are obviously evil. The only thing to fear in the entire series was a tire puncture. I suspect, by the way, that the Richard Nixon figure was actually symbolic of the VP of Systems Architecture from work.
The day started off good enough. Kim and I walked Sophie on the beach before 9:00AM (when dogs can no longer be on the beach). It was low tide and plenty of seaweed clumps were strewn about like beached Jolly Green mermaids.
We stopped at the Zen Bakery for bagels. The couple with the old sick sheep dog was there, but their sheepdog was no more. He'd been replaced by similar-looking long haired black dog. It turned out that the old sheepdog had died since we'd last seen him, the victim of a Rotweiler attack. It had been just another cruel tragedy culminating a life of misadventure and hardship. The young black dog replacing him had, in his own brief life, also suffered greatly. The couple had adopted him from a dog pound and judging from his neuroses, he was once beaten by a man wearing a baseball cap. I've often encountered people who seemed to be magnets for tragedy and hardship and I'd say this couple seems to be just such a magnet. You can tell the moment you see the woeful expressions on their faces. Furthermore, it takes almost no provocation to get them talking about their latest bad luck.
There was also an old drunk who showed up and began chatting with Kim. He pointedly told me several times that I shouldn't delay any further in marrying her. Then a plump Mexican woman with extremely long, beautiful hair walked by and he attempted to pick her up in broken Spanish. She was courteous and lingered a moment while his bloodshot eyes swam in pools of translucent moisture.
Back at the house, Kim gave me a massage, encountering all sorts of problematic knots in my shoulders. From there, well, we made up for some of the sexual malaise that plagues most couples whose members include those working in new media sweatshops.
Everything was going good until we a conversation we had while coming back from the store. I was talking about all the guys who came over last night, saying that that was all well and good, but that I wished that not all of my friends were male. Suddenly concerned, Kim wanted me to elaborate on this point. So I said that she, with her restrictive policies, had basically made it impossible for me to befriend women.
To make a long story short, Kim went ballistic. She abandoned me with all the groceries, which I had to carry by myself. Then, some time later, while arguing the matter further with me in my study area, she threw a tantrum, part of which involved throwing my laptop hard against the floor. I was horrified. That laptop is one of the few things I have in California from before I met Kim, and to her, spoiled rich girl to whom hippie ideas of material inconsequence come easily, it was just a means of expression. To me, though, this was the last straw. If I'd had a car, I would have packed it and driven away. And being the way I am, I would have never returned. But Kim wouldn't allow me this sort of retreat. She threw a secondary weepy fit and absolutely wouldn't leave me alone until I gradually relented from my promises that I would be moving out.
The laptop is still functional, but its case has all kinds of new cracks in it. It's more fragile and less portable. Perhaps Kim succeeded if her mission was to further ground my wanderlust; that computer was the one I'd take if I ever headed out on the road. A year ago, it was the single heaviest thing in my backpack on the day I met Kim.
The various neighbors in our complex were having a big Fourth of July party today, but after this fight I was in no mood to party. I half-heartedly drank some beers and piña coladas, but that only had the effect of making me sleepy. Whenever I went outside the sun seemed uncomfortably hot and bright. Kim was embarrassed by my antisocial behaviour and kept ordering me back outside, but eventually I won some sort of freedom and actually took a nap.
In the late afternoon, Kim, Steph and I walked all the way down to where Cable Street falls into the Ocean, at Pescadero down on the Sunset Cliffs. A party was happening featuring a several bands and lots of people we didn't know. Since it was high tide, the tiny beach where the bands had originally planned to set up was inundated, so they were on a little terrace built into the cliff. There wasn't a whole lot of space for an audience, but we did our best. We stayed and watched a little of the "Tittie Bar Mitzvah Band" and then headed back. As I was climbing over a rail trying to escape, I managed to get my cheap flip flops tangled in some girl's extremely long, beautiful shiny clean black hair.
Kim and I eventually made enough peace to take a nap together, and the nap lasted until sundown, at which point we headed to the beach to watch the fireworks display. The entire population of America seemed to be streaming down every westward sidewalk towards the Pacific, past endless keg parties and giggling teens with firecrackers. Ad hoc fireworks displays were going off everywhere, many of them featuring powerful pyrotechnics smuggled in from Mexico.
Kim and I found a patch of sand amongst the deep throng on the beach. We'd been in a post-nap haze and had forgotten everything: towel, marijuana and alcohol. We had to take the whole thing in completely sober. Sophie didn't really start cowering until the big, official fireworks were launched off the Ocean Beach pier. Nearby, some especially fucked-up individuals began to launch some powerful smuggled fireworks at an angle so dangerously low that even the mellow hippies in the flight path felt moved complain. All the while one of the beachside apartments was blaring Grateful Dead, which, during the actual display, happily changed to Neil Young's "Keep on Rockin' in the Free World." Off in the distance up the coast we could also see fireworks going off in Pacific Beach and La Jolla.
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