A few days earlier, Beth had made an oblique reference that she knew where Cathy had ended up. I mentally filed that away, but didn’t bring it up again. Most of the time I have the context “Cathy who?” She doesn’t come up in the day to day. But there are ordinary objects, places, phrases and people which are actually disguised keys that unlock a hidden time period. In this group of friends, the Cathy-shaped gap must be quite prominent for them. I never really thought about it until now. She essentially fell off the face of the planet for seven years. For all of us. [read more... ]

The ocean is one of those places where I don’t need to use English. I stop trying to find the right words and just communicate.

Due to lack of foresight and sun block, my nose was horribly sunburned for over a week.

This guy on the right is Scott. He graciously allowed my friends and I to invade his boat at Marina del Rey. Scott makes movies. It would behoove you to get to know him while he is still an indie filmmaker. See what is up at Sirena Studios.

As you can tell from the pictures, it is impossible for us not to document our activities to the rest of the world via Twitter and digital photos.

That was a good time. Chilling on a boat, drinking beer, talking movies and games.

I’m driving the BMW to Trader Joe’s. Beth is next to me. I notice that the experience of the car is transformed by who is handling it, much that of a gun or violin. Here the vehicle is purely utilitarian, getting us to where we need to go. I don’t care what it looks like or what it is and I only think about it in terms of how the BMW is not like my own car.

We’re talking about relationships and online dating. I haven’t given Beth the backstory of the avatar, so the things I say apparently horrify her on some level. I haven’t encountered many people who are comfortable with the rhetoric of the quirkyalone. Listening to myself, I know it sounds like I have excluded the entire world save one person.

I’m pushing the shopping cart at Trader Joe’s and reality has gone wobbly for me. I start to lose focus on where I am and suddenly I am in several different stores at once. Beth is asking me something about the grocery list, which has suddenly become indecipherable, the scrawled prescription from a mad chef. I answer noncommittally as the aisles telescope and emotions tumble down the shelves.

We manage to collect the ingredients for guacamole and hummus, dips which Beth insists must never be purchased, always made by hand. Later she would demonstrate her Shaolin avacado cutting style. She has resolved to eat an avacado a day while in California. I also found the frozen chocolate dipped bananas I had been craving.

The ride back is just like the ride there, only in reverse. Which is to say, completely unfamiliar.

Whenever I’m with Dave, an unusual interactive social space is created. Like a theater, there is a stage area where the main scenes occur with our friends. Then there is a back stage area where we discuss the events of the stage and make plans for other scenes.

Dave’s various living spaces have always been conducive to this dynamic. In Seattle, there was the loft sandwiched between the dot com ghost offices, next door to a rave. Then there was the strange ship-like house, complete with portholes. Dave’s LA pad was a bohemian villa constructed of hand-made bricks. Imagine a U-shaped complex where each room connected to two other rooms as well as the outdoor patio. Before we all arrived, this place was inhabited by Dave’s housemates, a reclusive English photographer and a gorgeous interior decorator, who I nearly fell in love with.

I love my friends and, in general, I get along well with most people. I know how to interact with another person one on one. But when you add a few more people, suddenly you don’t have a single entity, but this crowd. And a crowd is shifty and has uncertain energies. What is a crowd thinking? What does it want? I certainly don’t know. I listen to crowds in the same way I do waves or waterfalls: I can hear a faint music or people murmuring some distance away, but it is lost in the rush of something much bigger than I.

So sometimes I would need to hide backstage and reflect and compose myself. I typically interact with humans for a few hours at a time on any given day. Now I was faced with spending several uninterrupted days with eleven other people. I was grateful for doors and the guest house/garage/home theater, anyplace I could go to refresh my reality management system.

Because it was already dealing with quite a bit.

Los Angeles is a lot cooler than Austin. The temperature, I mean.

Dave picks me up in his blue BMW convertible and we rocket away. It has always been pretty terrifying to ride in the car with Dave, but a confluence of factors create the perfect storm of a Jerry Bruckheimer-style driving experience: The LA freeway is about eight lanes full of reckless assholes, the sun is shining, the top is down, and this car can’t go less than 60 miles an hour.

Throughout my stay in LA, the BMW became a metaphor which created chapter breaks in my story. But mostly it was an agent of fear, something which I eventually had to at least coexist with as it could never truly be overcome.

Thirty seconds away from the airport and we are nearly creamed as the molecules of the BMW attempt to share the same space as an oncoming car. Something white. Everything is moving so fast. We zig zag around cars, evoking moves from the video games of our youth. Someone yells at us from out her window.

“Welcome to Los Angeles,” says Dave, shifting gears.

My foot instinctively pushes the brake pedal, but, of course, there isn’t one.

Passengers never get brake pedals.

Here beginneth the lesson.