The buzz is back. My energy is running high and I feel like telling true stories. How about last night? Well, it's was an American evening.
Not all the information in here is really mine to give away, so the other characters will remain anonymous.
Branding
I started off by going down to get my iPod fixed. I'm kind of embarrassed to have one since they've become such status symbols, but they are wonderful feats of engineering and it was a gift from my mother, so I decided to use it. But the battery was bum and it would quit working completely once it was unplugged. I've had it sitting in the living room plugged in as a source of music for my amplifier.
Things were working out fine until my other mp3 player -- the "ultra portable" Nomad MuVo -- crapped out on me. Now there's no music for my bike riding, which cuts into my lifestyle pretty severely and prompted me to go to Apple while the iPod was still under warranty.
Long story short, they just swapped me a new one; awfully nice policy. But it's a trip to go into the Apple store in downtown San Francisco. It's a trip to step that profoundly into Steve Jobs's ego; a clean world of high design and easy comfort. It's a luxury kind of place, but not in the completely meaningless way that I usually think of luxury. There's an agenda at work. Everything is political.
Anyway, sitting there at the genius bar I pondered a bit. I've been daydreaming from time to time about an easier life. What if I just worked at a pizza shop? I could work at Apple's genius bar, that's for sure, but the experience would probably kill me. I wonder whether or not it would be a way to pick up women. Soon enough I've got papers to sign and I'm off. I try on some expensive Bose headphones -- nice, but not the ones I truly lust after -- and I'm out.
Back on the bike, I head to the Citibank in North Beach. It's the only branch in San Francisco that stocks deposit slips in their ATM enclosure. Dunno why that is, but there you have it. I'm overdrawn because I didn't put my roommate's checks in before giving my landlord his. Lucky for me there's overdraft.
Then I'm off to the upper Haight, and I try to figure out a shortcut that's not back the way I came. Turns out to be a long-cut with extra hills. I get up high, sweating, the fog plainly visible moving in the wind at intersections. There's a stretch of very nice buildings, all fancy cars. Just like on Staten Island: altitude usually equates with wealth.
When I finally make it to the Haight, it strikes me as sadly reminiscent of the East Village; a place which was once truly explosively vibrant, but which has now sunk into a commodified kind of tradition. There are fewer franchise stores, but the people are all either too old or young or idly wealthy or brutally poor to be really doing much of importance. It's still a pleasant street with lots of interesting things, but not much seems to actually be happening.
Violence
I make it where I'm going late. We're watching boxing on HBO and the first fight, the welterweights, is already in the 9th round. I settle in with a beer and gauge the vibe in the room. It's a friend of a friend's place, six people there, a few of whom actually follow boxing. I don't, so I don't have the lingo, and my first impression is that most of the people who do are kind of faking it but not letting on. Maybe not, I dunno, but the tone is different from the usual sports-talk.
More beer and the next fight; big Russian vs. smaller Black man with cornrows. Klitchko, the Russian, is the star. Made for marketing, straight out of Rocky IV, but he looses. He's dominant, but wears himself out hitting the other guy without doing any serious damage. Brewster, the smaller man who can take a punch gets inside like a badger, lands a couple heavy hits, Klitchko stumbles, looking like lurch on quaaludes, and that's pretty much it. Luckily for the continued economic viability of boxing, Klitchko has a brother who's even bigger, more of a bruiser. I'm fairly confidant Don King is scheming a vengeance match right now. Should be big bucks.
Intoxication
It's decided that there's no point in going out and spending money while there's still pre-paid bevvy in the fridge. We drink. We get high on weed from Eugene purchased through someone who's training to be a cop.
We watch Dave Chapelle reruns on Comedy Central. This man is a force in culture, and he's funny as fuck. Friday night Matt Stoller purported to me that a sure sign that culture in general was becoming more political was the movement in Comedy, that the Daily Show beats the 24-hour news channels in its time slot. It's a poignant observation.
The state of cable comedy bears this out. At the very beginning there was an old Mad TV episode on, which was lame and unfunny because it probably pre-dates the political awakening. Making jokes out of the idiosyncracies of pop-culture is getting harder and harder. If people don't care, people don't laugh.
Chapelle, on the other hand, is tapping a rich and newly healthy vein. His show is funny and getting funnier as he hits his stride. The preview for the next new episode, in which "President" Chapelle responds to the question, "was it all about the oil?" by leaning over to his boy in confusion, then leaping up, knocking a pitcher of water over and running out of the room, leaves us in stitches (fall-over laughing) each of the three times we see it. We may be wasted, but this is comic genius.
Sex
At some point a roommate comes home. She reminds me of a girl I knew in New York who was attractive, but always seemed a bit like damaged goods. I'm too out of it to even introduce myself -- not physically incapable, but socially without means and no one is helping -- but I watch her a little bit. Scheming begins.
I also notice that there are a ton of advertisements out there for impotence drugs. Natural Male Enhancement at every commercial break. I wonder, and not for the first time, if advertising about impotence increases the incidence of not being able to get it up.
We head out to a bar to shoot pool. My friend and I hang back for pizza at Escape from New York. The woman serving the slices is cute. I try my charm, get a smile. I love to work for a smile. My friend and I talk a little like men. He tells me he's pretty bummed out, and I tell him I'm worried about him. Not that he can't handle it -- life, school, whatever -- but that I'm sad that he's so sad. We talk like men because soon we will be mingling in public and we understand that this will involve the pursuit of separate agendas.
We rejoin the group and shoot pool. The woman I'm watching is a player, and it's enjoyable to observe. At first the bar gives me the Fear, but then I realize it's just a friendly bro-bra sort of joint, and I relax into the comedy of it all. The light above the pool table is shaded by a replica of a Miller-Lite NASCAR, and the height of things works out so that if I'm looking across the table I see a person's body with the head of a car. Looking at women like this is just too funny.
I'm still not making introductions. I'm still socially clip-winged and a little out of it, so I do the logical thing and keep on drinking. It's clear that I should meet this woman and learn her name, but I'm flummoxed and slow, hardly interactive, so I elect to hang around and get drunker in the hopes that something will happen.
A couple hours and a couple whiskies later, my friend is ready to go, so I'm gonna go walk with him. I catch the woman's name on the way out, apologize for not introducing myself sooner, say maybe I'll grab my bike and come on back. We hit the pizza shop again and the girl there remembers us and I still love working for a smile. I walk my friend somewhere...
[scene missing: I'm informed after the fact that I was adament that my friend go back to the apartment where our original hostess is because this is what will be best. While I remember the precourser to this thought popping up during the boxing-watching, I do not recall strongly recommending any course of action, though it turns out I was at least partly correct.]
I lock my bike up outside the bar now. Head back in, like I promised. She's surprised and I think happy to see me. We shoot a game and I loose. I assume we're flirting and it's going ok. We wander out and the moment of truth arrives. I'm not sure if I want anything more than to head home, but the vibe is there and figuring that there's no harm in it I let the magnetic thing do its work and we kiss out front of the bar instead of walking in opposite directions.
More kissing, then walking to her house. Making out out front is good. Exchanging info. I go to give her a card and she then invites me in so she can reciprocate. The card, that is. It seems odd because it seemed clear that I wouldn't be going into her house, but then we do and there's a little more kissing on her bed and hands under shirts and then I really do have to go. Her idea, but I'm not about to push. First of all, pushing is juvinile. Second of all, it's for the best -- I'm tired and drunk and all I would have been up for was a spoon -- but at the same time the genetic urges feel slighted.
I feel a little guilty as I walk out and back to my bicycle, wondering if I'll call this girl (I'll probably email her; that's about my tempo at this point) and thinking forward in time to a visit from another woman I'm pretty excited about. There are no obligations -- obviously -- but I feel that twinge of cheating guilt. Don't quite know what to make of it. I was pretty honest on the OkCupid personality test, and they pegged me a playboy. They're right, but I'm not sure if I've the courage to embrace this or the will to change.
Aftermath
The ride home is a blur. Drinking and biking... oh man. Some good friends of mine just had a real bad car crash in portland. Everyone was injured, but not badly. Alcohol was a factor. This morning I woke up with a dry mouth, a headache, two broken spokes and a flat front tire. The details are lost to history. Next paycheck I will buy a helmet.
We do punk rock breakfast. It's wonderful, even sunny for a moment. It is a community and I am at ease. The lip-to-lip massage does a lot to charge my batteries. My little internal gyroscope/dynamo seems to be running strong, and so I'm loud and laughing and flailing about. Molly and I talk to Portland people to get the scoop, and Zack and Neil continue expanding their minds. There are pretty people and good food and coffee and talk of projects and creation and my night before seems like a strange episode. A safari into another time.
But the buzz is back so I'm not dwelling on it. It was fun, and it was true. And everything is fuel, powering an engine that builds better tomorrows. People are coming and going to churches in the mission, wearing their best clothes and checking each others cars out. People are smiling in the sun, and in spite of Everything, I am smiling with them.
