|
|
|
illuminated by selfish intents
Saturday, November 20 1999
With Kim and I, nothing ends one of our fights quicker than a little bumpty-bump, in this case upon the old futon left in the computer room by Steph and EJ (who are now living in a garage up in Pacific Beach).
In the early afternoon, Kim and I were hanging out in the courtyard with Lisa the neighbor girl and Scotty, the bright little boy she nannies. Kim had her yoga instructional guide with her and we were both trying poses with varying degrees of success.
Little Scotty was extremely pumped-up with the boundless energy of five year old boy, a resource it seemed desirable at the time to burn off. Somehow I got him playing a game requiring him to run around the courtyard's central aisle of bushes ten times in order to make me "blast" (explode), after which Kim would, as Scotty put it, "need a new Gus." I thought Scotty with his stubby little five year old legs would never make it ten times around those bushes, but he did it. Then, completely without any suggestion on my part, he played the same game all over again. All I had to do was "blast," a relatively low-budget special effect requiring me to throw plucked grass up into the air.
Lisa, Scotty, Kim, Sophie and I all went down to Newport Avenue for a time, mostly on an unsuccessful hunt for Dead Can Dance CDs. There we ran across my colleague Al (erstwhile heart throb of Lisa). He was with Christina, an attractive young woman who works with Al as one of the relatively new community guides on the website our company builds and operates.
In the afternoon, our "redneck surfer" neighbor Jason was pacing around, Budweiser in hand. He was waiting for the arrival of his mother from Los Angeles. Suddenly we heard a commotion up the street and there she was, reprimanding some children for cruelty to a dog they'd tied to a plastic kiddie pool a few houses down Cape May Avenue.
Soon enough we were all in our living room smoking pot and chit chatting. Jason and the newest courtyard resident, Ann Marie, soon showed up and then proceeded to hang out for a time. Ann Marie had never been in our place before and was extremely impressed with the paintings, which (if I do say so myself) looked extra good with Dead Can Dance blaring from the bedroom on our apartment's only tape deck. Kim was winking at me, indicating Jason's obvious interest in Ann Marie, who is single. When Ann Marie needed to smoke a cigarette, it was the perfect opportunity for him to make his move, and he scampered after her out the door. I suddenly realized how the novel 90s concept of the outdoor cigarette break had added a whole new class of strategies to the would-be Romeo's toolkit.
I was painting my nails with colours from Kim's luxurious fingernail polish collection and Jason's mother was impressed, telling Kim I was a rare find, that most men would be too hung up on proving their manhoods to do such a effeminate thing. I gradually realized from the things that Jason's mother was saying that her connection with Kim was related to her desire that Jason find an agreeable, intelligent mate. She saw Kim as a lost cause because of me, which (oddly enough) seemed to make her feel closer to me than she otherwise would. As for Ann Marie, well, she was clearly the best love interest Jason had demonstrated in a long time. As I explained to Kim later, it's always most useful and revealing to ponder the most selfish interests behind people's behaviour. Jason's mother is maternal to everyone; the most selfish explanation is that she's searching for a suitable mother for her grandchildren.
Jason's mother is big into the Wicca movement, so she and Kim naturally find a lot to talk about. Listening to the contrived, inaccurate history and bogus science of a practicing witch can be a little hard to take, but I stomached it as best I could, even contributing some of my own knowledge to the mix. When, for example, Jason's mother spoke uncertainly about why the Chinese and Gregorian calendars might be even more out of whack than they're actually represented, I mentioned how, in the 1500s, Pope Gregory summarily lopped eleven days out of Western History to cancel out a shift in the seasons that had accumulated over the past 1500 years since Julius Cæsar.
Dogs rejoin masters after the agricultural age and industrial age finally pass. If only it was that simple!
The agenda for the night was a fancy dinner in La Jolla. Due to recent events, I felt the need to spend my way towards greater domestic tranquility. Besides, I'm loaded these days. Mind you, I would have been happy to eat at Hodad's burger joint down on Newport, B-health inspection rating or otherwise, but Kim didn't want another meal of "belly bomber food."
The original plan called for sushi or Thai food, of course, but we settled on another place in La Jolla called Galoka, a new restaurant which claimed to be both a jazz scene and fine art gallery in addition to being an all-natural vegetarian Indian restaurant. Being a new restaurant, it didn't have much of a following established yet, so it was the perfect place to go during prime dining hours in La Jolla.
Not only was the food excellent, but the pacing was perfect too. Excellent food can easily be rendered unenjoyable by overly-pushy delivery from the kitchen (as we discovered at a seafood place in Old Town). Here, though, every course just made us that much more eager for the next. The house Cabernet Sauvignon was a little on the chalky side, but once it had a chance to breathe it was perfectly acceptable.
Kim was wearing a necklace I'd originally fashioned as part of my Halloween costume. It features a little plastic doll suspended on two insulated telephone signal wires that go around the neck in a big loop. It's the sort of necklace Deya would wear, though it probably wouldn't be "fine" enough for Jessika; she would want the plastic guy to be on some sort of chain, though a chain would be æsthetically inappropriate for this particular action figure.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?991120 feedback
previous | next |
