Echo

thursday stream

i’d had a strange day today so outside of going to the gym first thing in the morning, i didn’t really get out of the house until the sun was setting. i decided since i didn’t feel like doing work, i would take a walk to my starbuck’s since i haven’t been there at night in ages.

for some reason, i wanted to look nice so it took me a few more minutes to get out of the house. i took my social experiment kit — dl/cc wrapped in a $20 bill, ipod, notebook and pen…and put my keys in the car taking just my car key. as i was leaving, i realized i hadn’t brought my cellphone. i thought about it. i was scared that if something happened — i’m being followed by someone or whatever — i would be screwed if i didn’t have my phone. then i thought, what are the statistical chances that the one time i take a walk and don’t bring my cellphone, is the day something terrible happens? so i go.

the walk is good. the sun is just setting and there’s a nice soothing breeze blowing.

i catch a girl waiting for the bus, lost in her own world and smiling to herself, but when she happens to look up and catch my eye, she immediately hides it with a frown, like she didn’t want me to see whatever thought was making her so happy.

the reason people don’t like to walk in la i think also has to do with the way people drive. it’s a city made for machines out here, and people are pretty reckless. it’s like they don’t expect pedestrians. i’m very careful when i cross the streets.

as i’m walking, i am thinking about vision. i think if you are in a stage where you’re needy for attention, you’ll look for it in the face of everyone you meet. and since not everyone is meant to connect with you, you’re really forcing things and putting yourself on tilt. i think when you relax your ego enough to know that not everyone is going to notice you, but the ones who do might be interesting, you start to look for or see only the people who seem familiar, the people who seem to suddenly click into your wavelength. it’s a really nice way to go about it. it’s like not forcing the universe but letting the universe bring things to you, like objects floating down a river.

so i’m sitting at my table, the table that used to be my other home, my place of constancy.

i remember i used to come here, until i realized that a person should be aware that after being encountered in the same place twice, they shouldn’t return until they can return as a different person who’s had the space to look on the rhythms of people and a place with objectivity.

when i used to come here, i would look at everyone and track their progression, who had changed and who stayed the same. and even though i see them in different people, i recognize them collectively by their energy. but then i found that i was becoming stagnant energy, and i left for a while to find my current.

i think after a person experiences a major life shift, they should return to a place in which they are familiar and observe it for new perspective.

return to where you come from with your new perspective.

hmmm.

kind of like that stage common in legends, religion and mythology, the hero journey as representing the common human cycles and themes, how a person who has reached deeper insight has to come back and experience their old, original world through those new eyes. it makes them or breaks them, since you are forced to ask, which was the dream if anything, and which was reality. do you have the courage and strength to put the two worlds together, to integrate them, to take back the treasure or knowledge you found in another world, and try to incorporate it into the linear reality from where you came? does having both worlds overlap negate one or the other?

i was willing to take the risk to see. it felt kind of like a reunion of sorts, where new light is cast on things you didn’t understand before, but because you’re in a different place now, the world wants to be more honest with you.

so i sat there, feeling positive that i was going to meet someone, but not knowing who it was. i was careful not to make eye contact with anyone (didn’t want to project anything) and i kept my head down, writing stream-of-consciousness, every observation, every thought, every feeling.

there was a little elf-like guy who looked like an antique-model matt mccoy (hand that rocks the cradle) who was hitting on this kid in a phillies t-shirt. antique-model matt saw the kid had a booklet from santa monica college, and was telling him how he used to be on the board there and he was a huge supporter for the school. at first the conversation was purely casual, but then the guy kept talking to him and touching him. i think the kid was getting nervous because he was stuffing food in his face like a chipmunk. i thought a-m matt heard his number called because he went inside, but minutes later, he came back out and gave the kid his phone # on a napkin. call me if you ever have questions or need help in school, he said, and he shook the kid’s hand vigorously. the kid thanked him politely and packed up his stuff and left, while a-m matt stayed at the restaurant for a good two more hours.

there are more gay men in los angeles than people want to admit or realize. i’m good at picking out gay men. gay men are my thing. i think they like me because they think i’m a man in a woman’s body. anyway, for example, my gym is a big time cruising gym. i know this. i don’t know how i know this, i just know this, and i’ve found evidence to back up my inklings. i always ask the basketball boys if they see men picking up men in the sauna or locker room and they always say no, so for a little while, i thought perhaps i was making stuff up. but i swear 60% of the men i see on the floor are gay, conscious or not. then when david was here, i took him to the gym. later as we were leaving, i was asking him how his workout was, and he starts telling me, but then suddenly bursts out, “what the hell is up with this place? this guy followed me around the weight area for a good hour staring at me, and there was this naked guy blowdrying his pubes when we got here, and he was still doing the same thing when i went back in to get my stuff.”

“was he still naked?” i asked.

“YES! He must have been doing that for over an hour!” he said, and even though i was laughing inside, i noted he was pretty seriously alarmed.

it’s just the night people, i told him. they can be weird.

but i’m sure. this is a cruising gym. and people who don’t notice either don’t want to admit it, or are going out of their way to be oblivious of it.

there was a guy in his 50’s reading a vintage paperback and i’m pretty sure he’s english. he just has a look to him, and he’s not using his straw–he’s taking the cover off his soda and sipping it like tea. i figured that book had to be some lit classic like something by dickens. or a science fiction novel. he looked like the type. when his number was called and he went inside to get his food, i bolted up, made like i was going to the trash can behind his table to throw away a napkin, and checked out the cover of his book. here’s what he was reading. ha! i was right.

this really cute little black girl at the next table keeps staring at me. she’s with her father who’s reading some kind of ledger. work-related. she’s battling this fly, cringing from it and slapping it away from her. she accidentally drops her fork. without looking up, her father take his plastic fork and puts it on her plate.

i see an asian guy staring at me while his girlfriend is oblivious. he keeps looking over, not hiding it, not backing down. i don’t want to generalize but a lot of asian guys are about posession. very specific male-female dynamics and a very saturnine ide
a of their gender role. i think that’s why most asian guys stay away from me, and i don’t get involved in them. there’s a conflict of egos and perspective.

i’m freewriting everything i see and feel, and thinking if you put yourself in the right place and right time and let the universe act as a river, the universe brings people together in a way in which we are the fleeting moments that make up time, and what we think is time is actually the real, active constant. as much as we would like to believe, we are not the constant.

and as i think, i’m about to run into someone who i need to talk to, i look up, and there’s eytan walking up.

eytan–let’s go back.

we met in a bar. i don’t know–6, 7, 8 years ago. neither of us can remember. but i remember that night because it was a miserable night. i hadn’t been in la for very long, and the only people i really knew were friends of friends who i didn’t really have anything in common with but i hung out with out of lack of alternative. i’d been invited to this girl’s birthday party at the bar, but being unenthused, i showed up an hour late. i tried calling her to find out where they were in the bar, and the call went to voicemail. as i’m convinced that i’ve come too late and had missed the party, i see two beefy security guards hauling the birthday girl out. i was to find out later that she and her boyfriend had one of their reknowned volatile fights and she’d thrown a glass at him, shattering it on the dance floor. so they were walked out and i figured, crap, i’m at this freakin’ bar and don’t know anyone.

i figure i would get a drink and see who else showed up, and that’s when i met eytan. hit it off immediately, though i was a little wary of how smooth he was to talk to.

a week later we went to a comedy show (my suggestion) and closed down the starbuck’s afterwards, talking. he told me that he made money squatting on domains and then creating porn sites. i couldn’t tell if he was kidding but either way, this guy was too smooth for my liking, though we did have great chemistry. so we parted with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. he invited me to a party at his house, and i couldn’t get anyone to go except these three guys i worked with. so i show up at his party with three guys. he was a big flirt, flirting with everyone at the party so i figured, okay, then i wasn’t being a douche for bringing three guys to this guy’s party. a few weeks later, he showed up at my birthday party with two girls. according to one of my friends, he snuck off and was making out with both of them. yeah, i was a little irritated, because i wondered if he was getting back at me. we would half-heartedly email about meeting for coffee, but nothing ever turned out. i didn’t trust this guy and he seemed like the kind of guy you hang out with despite not trusting so it wasn’t a very high priority for me to find time to meet up.

then throughout the years, we would keep running into each other. at the post office. at the gym, twice. while dropping off screener tapes at a film festival (we were both in the lineup and in the same program), while sitting in traffic…it was the most random but constant thing.

when i saw him at the gym, he was with an older asian lady i assumed to be his girlfriend. i really didn’t care.

at the film festival, he told me to find him before the screening and when i showed up, he was doing his producer thing and surrounded by girls, and i was with my actor and my boyfriend. i think he didn’t know i was dating someone, because there was tension between my boyfriend and the situation – my boyfriend felt eytan was vibing me, and i didn’t seperate from my group to talk alone so it was really like, what are we supposed to really do here.

when i saw him in traffic a year later, we laughed like, of course it’s you. he said he’s never run into one person as many times and as randomly as he does with me. it’s what we do, running into each other. we did a quick 30 second catchup and parted saying we would run into each other again.

i invited him to my birthday party and he responded saying he couldn’t wait to run into me randomly at my party. i knew he wouldn’t show though and indeed, he wrote me an apology email to say he hadn’t been feeling well.

and then when we saw each other today, it was like…again, of course. “of course it’s you,” he said. “there’s something about you and me that this keeps happening.” we hug and i’m laughing. i tell him i was just writing about how i had come here because i was going to run into someone, and just before i looked up, i had an image of him in his car the last time i saw him, and when i looked up, he was there. he didn’t believe me, and i told him, i’ll tell you some crazy stories.

i told him about my life since i quit my job in february, about going to germany, to amsterdam. about following life and how people are brought together for a reason. he tells me he was raised orthodox jewish and he always had this doctrine in front of him, telling him how the world was and how to be, and that he didn’t believe in fate. i told him it’s not fate, sometimes it’s just life. it’s like how science has shown that intention can affect particles, that maybe the decisions we make are the ones we were supposed to make, just because those were the precise decisions we made. time’s not linear, eytan. we talk and i learn that he resists faith, he resists ideas. a part of me is surprised because i dont’ know why we’re on this topic and how it started, but he tells me that he believes something is up, and if i write down a date right now of when we’re going to run into each other again, and i show him that date and it’s right, then he’ll believe.

so you need hard evidence to please your logical side, i ask him.

he thinks about it. i guess so. i need stone cold proof before i can let go and say okay, i believe.

you’re asking for a miracle, i say. but the problem is, if you need a miracle to believe, the problem is even if a miracle occurs, you won’t have the faith to realize what just happened.

i’ll have faith when i see it, he says.

okay, i say. obviously the universe keeps bringing us together for a reason. maybe i’m still not ready yet, so i just need to expand my vocabulary of analogies and ideas so the next time we meet, i can bring you more signs. all of this evidence is circumstantial, but i’m going to show you a pattern when all these things are put together. i may not be able to give you a precise piece of evidence of magic, but i’m going to build you a mountain of evidence that adds up. and if you’re willing to see it, you’ll see it.

he asks me if i think he’s the person that i came here for, waiting to run into.

it looks like it, i say. i had a strong feeling i would run into someone if i came here, but i had no idea who until you showed up.

he asks me what happened after berlin with the guy in amsterdam. i might be moving out there for a couple of months to write, i say.

so you guys are still connected, he asks.

yes, i say. i neglect to say that today, i finally sucked it up and booked my ticket to amsterdam.

he mentions that since february, he’s settled down more. he tells me that he’s moved out of a house that he began deeming the groundhog’s day house, because every party was the same party.

so you’ve reached the ‘been there done that’ phase, i say.

yeah, it took me long enough.

i’m looking at him and wondering where he’s coming from, if he’s trying to tell me that he’s changed. i kind of have a feeling he doesn’t know where he’s going with this, with any of this but then again, neither do i. we’ve been dancing around each other so long that it’s defined the relationship, and outside of that it’s still not good timing despite for whatever reason, having been brought together again.

he refers back to something i had said, how some people will keep dating the wrong people for t
hem, but it’s the same kind of wrong. and despite advice from their friends and family, they’ll keep doing it until they hit rock bottom a point where they realize they can’t do this anymore, they refuse to do this anymore, so they sit out and examine why these partners, and what they really want out of life and a relationship. he says that it’s funny that i say that because he’s realized that he’s always dating the wrong girls…but it’s the same kind of wrong girl.

i think people instinctively know when a person’s not available, i say. the question is, why does a person chase what’s unavailable or not good for them. maybe they don’t want to have to be confronted with something real.

i do like chasing what’s unavailable, he says. there’s something exciting about it.

maybe you have to find a girl who’s available, but hard to get at, i say.

he repeats what i say like it’s a riddle, then says he has to go because he’s late meeting up with some friends.

until next time, i say.

julia, it’s always so good to run into you, he says.

as he walks away, i write down the date of a next time in my notebook.