Echo

8/26 Recap

I had an hour and a half to kill after work before my acupuncture appointment so I let my bro watch the South Park movie while I read. About 20 minutes in, I had to turn it off when Brian came home and my brother goodnaturedly said to him, “Suck. My. Dick.”

I am wasting my life at this job. I don’t mind what I do when I have stuff to do, but the problem is that I’m either going at 110 mph or .002. Without projects, I can finish a week’s worth of bullcrap admin work in a matter of hours. And then I just sit there. There doesn’t even seem to be enough internet to surf anymore. I’d rather work part-time so at least I don’t feel like I waste so much of my precious life trying not to nod off, but they are insistent on having me there full-time. Just in case. And I’m the only one they’re strict with about coming in on time and leaving on time. Even though everyone else comes in late and leaves early. I like this company and I like the people but if I don’t get my ass going and get writing and get over this thing about my refusal to market myself, I’m going to go nuts under these damn fluorescent lights.

This post is from Sunday, 8/15/04; I finally finished transcribing from my notepad.

When the Universe Echoes in Your Head Does Venice Beach

Every once in a while, I allow myself some slack in my creative endeavors and get to do one of my favorite activities. I hit a crowded place on a Sunday and fill up a whole tiny notepad (like the ones detectives carry in movies) with observations, thoughts and the usual stream of conscious erraticism that spasms through my brain.

Today, I hit Venice Beach. I walked the entire stretch, scrawling in my notebook until it was filled. Here is a narrative of my afternoon, probably intolerably confusing, recorded and represented by the contents of my notepad.
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I like the warmth of black people. The assumed intimacy, for better or for worse.

there’s some guy in front of the Titanic store (they sell Cowboy hats and somewhat European looking men’s clothes). He’s doing a male tribal dance of sauve masculinity set to drum n’ bass music (aka the male stripper dance), flexing his pecs and holding “sexy” poses. I want to laugh but I’m afraid because he seems really serious about this. I’m curious how this guy can go home after hours of doing this and take himself seriously. He ends every dance by flashing a business card next to a matching large poster of an ad. I think I get it. This is the male interpretive tribal dance of advertising? Fuck, man. Is this what our civilization is coming to?

(why does everything end in, ‘wanna go home and fuck,’ with you?)

He saw her watching. Taking everything in.

-Where’re you from?
-Minnesota, she said.
-Oh. I have a friend in Minnesota.
-I’m not actually from Minnesota.

It’s a different community out her in Venice. There’s a lot of soul. I like it. Here, you can be invisible. No strict rules of behavior. Total immunity to be yourself. For me, it is to observe. To absorb. To appreciate.

(Craig’s List is an internet hippy community)

This blinged out black kid wearing nearly all powder blue head to foot walks by with this tall, beautiful girl in tiny daisy dukes. Three black guys pass by, going in the other direction. As they pass, neither party makes eye contact–despite being highly aware of each other, they refuse to admit the other’s presence. When the kid with the girl is a few yards behind, the three guys immediately talk with bravado and in detail about the nasty things they’d do to that girl, like this was their egos’ needed ritual to show disrespect towards the Alpha male and to reconfirm their masculinity.

I find indecipherable handwriting to be intriguing. It is like a code that only a select few can interpret.

I’m looking at Matthew Perry and a pretty dark-haired girl. His body, though lean, is long and gangly, like a boy’s body still stuck in that awkward high school phase. What stands out about him is the obvious care he takes with his skin, but his hair is mildly thinning.

It always freaks me out what kinds of things people carry in their purses. So I go out of my way not to look.

I’m watching a band. The guy with the maracas doesn’t even look human. With his long shaggy white hair and beard and floppy green hat framing a rubbery red face, he looks like a muppet.

Go out anywhere where there are people and you will see vibrant, beautiful, ALIVE people. How can this not make you absolutely fall in love with this world?

this dancing couple glows with happiness. I can’t stop watching.

People from the midwest have a more narrow focus to their psychic scope, a hardness to them. They are more aware of the need to be aware of physical survival due to the cold climate, and it’s prevalent in the way they carry themselves. People from the west coast don’t really have to worry about physical survival because everything is so easy. You can probably find examples of these disparate temperaments in animals living in warm and cold climates as well.

The toothless psychic. She freaks me out a little. I mean, she’s toothless. What is it about people who are toothless that makes a person so uneasy?

Psychics? I believe in the ability to see. But I don’t believe in the business of telling everybody. It kind of really pisses me off actually. They’re messing with a lot of people’s hopes and life paths when they claim to be able to see everything about everybody. It doesn’t work that way. Psychic ability is a focused connection. You can only see certain things for certain people, and you can only interpret as far as your own personal perspective. Psychic communication is a private, intimate affair.
(For the Rules of Psychic Intuition, see 3rd Post from Jan. 26th, 2004)

a 6’5 fat guy wearing an Iverson jersey just doesn’t look right.

Watch couples walk. Sometimes the guy is pulling the pace to a quicker speed, walking in front of the girl, and sometimes they are shoulder to shoulder at both slow, ambling and quick, focused strides. Says a lot about the balance in the relationship. Some guys naturally do it. Just try not to allow him to walk in front. You know what? Open a door for one of those guys who insists on setting the pace a little too fast and walking ahead of a woman. It really fucks him up because he’s used to and depends on a role of dominance.

I bet if I sit here long enough, I’ll see someone I know. I ALWAYS run into people. It’s what God blesses me with — reconnections.

My parents really don’t want me around black guys. But you don’t understand. The first person I ever loved, ever felt connected to as a baby was black. And my consciousness at the time wasn’t developed enough for me to have retained anything more than a fuzzy, swimming notion of that person.

My mom never understood why I love flea markets so much. It’s not that I was looking for items to purchase and bring home. It was more that I wanted to look at other people’s things, to find clues to put together someone’s life story and to figure out how these people experienced life.

I am alive. I can feel the warm wind blowing against my cheek and my skin breathing in the goodness of it and I know it’s a blessing to be alive.

People shouldn’t keep pets just as accessories. It’s not nice.

That’s the 7-Up guy.

Some people just look crazy. I don’t mean the obvious ones. The average ones. That look like every other person. Except there’s something very unpredictable in their eyes.

Ah, this African American woman working as a psychic. You’re the only one of them here who actually looks spiritual.

The Robot Man. Big, black, ripped. He looks like he was delicately sculpted from a block of dark chocolate.

What happens to all the people you meet in life? I know my #1 question to God when I meet him will be…what ended up happening with every single person I ever met? I want to know where life took them. Every one of them. Even the ones I had only fleeting interaction with.

I get a kick out of seeing really tall and lean people. It reminds me of the awe I felt towards trees when I was little.

I think I know why I’m fascinated with Ben Wallace’s body. I feel like if I were a giant who could grab him by the waist and wave him around, he’d be like one of those crazy-sculpted He-Man action figures.

Black guys have the nicest butts, hands down. And I’m not even a butt girl.

This couple is having sex on the beach. Why do I always catch people having sex?

Fucking for love
Or fucking for money
Or fucking for fuck’s sake
It’s all s
till fucking.

Excuse me. Why do you look so sad?

I was dying to ask him. I watched him walk by and I realized I could either run after him, or never see him again, and thus, never find out why this man looked like he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

There are the boys who figure things out faster–that a guy should go out with the fat girls because it’s the fat girls who can be pressured into putting out. And then they end up being fathers at 15.

I’m searching for the stranger with the eyes that I will recognize.

I told myself there is fun left to be had; the sun had not yet set .

When the sun sets and the throngs leave, and it’s just you nestled between the sky and the sand with the ocean lulling you to sleep, it’s like paradise here.

I Finally Died in My Sleep

In my dream last night, I was at a trade show with my dad in a big hotel. I worked for a government agency and I got word that there was a bomb in the building. It was in the daycare room and there were mothers and children all around. We didn’t want to alarm them so we didn’t evacuate the room. I find the bomb, which is this thing that is the shape, size and color of an egg with the shell made of a styrofoam-like substance. As I was opening it, glimpsing a black plastic-like interior, I remember thinking, I have to be careful because if I’m not, all these people will die. Then I felt my body jolt, like the wind was punched out of my body from the inside. I was still holding the egg thing and was really disoriented. There was a man in a dark suit standing to my right, and we made eye contact. He leaned towards me, his head close, and said, you opened the bomb and it blew up, killing yourself and everyone in this building. But we spliced your life and are giving you another chance, gesturing with his head towards the egg thing. Apparently, I had died and come back to life, but as far as my memory went, time was still continuous and I had no idea that in the space between what I felt was just a matter of seconds, I had been blown up and experienced death. When I woke up, I was still trying to wrap my mind around having died, having had such a HUGE EVENT happen without any conscious experience or memory of it.

Love, Friends and Parenthood

Have you ever noticed that, when a friend of yours is in a bad relationship, you can almost see her life fire burning so much dimmer? It’s like in science class when you put a jar over a flame to restrict the oxygen and the flame turns into this sad little blue nub.

I know they say that raising kids can be the most rewarding experience a person could have. But they tend to not mention, it’s also the most heartbreaking.