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pinball in Little Tokyo
Saturday, April 23 2016
location: West Hollywood, California
Not surprisingly, I awoke with something of a hangover. Without having any specific thing to do today, I lay in bed for a time listening to relentless chortling of a Mockingbird. He (though it might've been a she) would typically imitate some fragment of another bird's call twice and then move on to the next one, often one with a few similarities to the one just performed. Not being too familiar with west coast birds, I didn't recognize many of them, though I did recognize the cawing of a crow, which sounded like it was coming from an AM radio. I was surprised that there were no electronic sounds (common ringtones and car alarms, for example) in the playlist. The Mockingbird kept at it all day long, well into the afternoon (when I took a long nap).
When I came out into the kitchen, Da and Ky were up and bustling animatedly geeking out about smartphones, the only indication of our crazy night being an empty bottle of wine and six empty bottles of beer on the kitchen table. Ky was back to his Ayurvedic diet of rice and not much else.
At some point Ky started playing with a new Snapchat plugin that placed an animated cat on top of your head in a live feed from your phone's camera. I'd never seen Snapchat in action before and all I knew about it was that it is a messaging app designed to enable disposable communication between teenagers, allowing them to be teenagers without interference from their nosy parents. When I expressed amazement, Ky came over and showed me all the new things Snapchat could now do to a live feed of my face. These included making me puke virtual rainbows, making up my face like a cheap prostitute, and even swapping my face with Ky's on our respective bodies. The technology was awesome, though I felt like a cranky old man regarding the ends it was being put to. Still, I installed Snapchat on my phone then and there, adopting my elderly voice as I said, "World's oldest Snapchat user is only in it for the fourteen year old girls!"
Da invited me to go with him on an adventure Ky recommended to the Griffith Observatory, but after this week, I needed downtime entirely of my own. I elected to take my computer bag on a hike up to Sunset. Somewhere along the way, I gave Gretchen a call and gave her my revised assessment of the new team I had joined (particularly its several glaring dysfunctions). On the plus side, it looked like I would be doing the kind of work I most prefer. But there are clashing and difficult personalities in the group, and surfing the resulting politics is going to be a challenge. Still, it's also exciting; there's a lot of potential upside in this particular scenario. And the only downside is me being where I was a month ago.
My hike took me to the mall-like cluster of businesses that includes that Trader Joes, the Veggie Grill, a Starbucks, and ten or twelve other businesses around an open-air courtyard. By this point I had an intense need to urinate, but I kept finding that the bathrooms were behind doors requiring codes (in the Trader Joes) or tokens (up on the second floor, where signs had said restrooms could be found). Eventually I had to wrap up the call with Gretchen so I could put my full attention into finding a place to piss. The solution was to just go in the VeggieGrill (where I bought a crabcake sandwich and fries). The scruffy-looking but cloyingly-unctuous guy at the cashier didn't really suit my mood, but this proved to be my best VeggieGrill meal so far.
As I awoke from the nap I'd alluded to earlier, I could hear not only the Mockingbird but also the dins from several parties. There's something about the sound of a distant party that still makes me feel like I'm missing out. When I was in my 20s, I might've found a way to crash one of them, but people tend to notice when a strange 48 year old gentleman is at their keg or trying to find something vegan on their grill. Instead I decided to just sit in bed, drink tea, and write. It was essential to do this in my room, because otherwise I was in danger of being caught up in an endless conversation with Da or Ky when they returned. I made the mistake of resting my tea cup on the bed for a moment, and of course at some point it spilled. The mattresses in the dorm all have plastic liners, so I could strip it down and rinse away the tea stain, but now it was wet. There's was a dryer in the basement, but instead I decided to burn off the moisture with my body heat by just lying on it. Such things are doable in the dry air of Southern California, and by the time I went to bed tonight it was almost completely dry.
[REDACTED]
Ky arrived from whatever he'd been doing and immediately went out to do something else: tennis with another colleague named Al. They returned a couple hours later and proceeded to chow down on Ky's Ayurvedic food, though by this point I'd cooked and eaten a Trader Joe's frozen pizza (it contained honey, accounting for the absence of the word "vegan" on its labeling) and was now cooking a big tray of tempura cauliflower from Trader Joes (it seemed to be vegan from its ingredients, though that was never explicitly stated). Al had no problem with eating some of the cauliflower (it surprisingly good), though it constituted a total violation of Ayurvedic principles. Still, Ky tried a little bit. I liked that he was willing to reach outside the limits of his present worldview if it seemed to benefit the ongoing social dynamics. If he had less of a solid character, I might attribute this to susceptibility to peer pressure. But he knew what he was doing and I've been consistently insistent that I wasn't applying any pressure at all (which is an important consideration when a person interacts with someone half his age).
Unless he's going to bed or work, Ky always has some big activity planned that he wants everyone to be involved in. Today that activity was to drive into Little Tokyo and watch one of our colleagues play pinball at EightyTwo, a club/arcade combo equipped a bar, bouncers, and lots and lots of pinball machines and video games. Thinking the outing would be something other than what it turned out to be, I said sure, I'll go. Al would be coming to.
Upon hearing about tonight's pinball adventure, I briefly (and inaccurately) recited some lyrics to the Who classic "Pinball Wizard," but neither Ky nor Al had ever heard of it. "Oh man, it's a classic song from a classic band," I explained. I went on to mention the rock opera Tommy and how important the Who had been in the 1960s. But I might as well have been talking about an obscure British artist from the 1860s. That part of what I'd thought was eternal pop culture hadn't made it to the 20 and 30 somethings with whom I happened to find myself.
On the way to the pinball place, we had to pick up Da from somewhere on the road to or from Griffith Observatory. Somewhere along the drive there, Ky pointed out another VeggieGrill franchise (which I jokingly referred to as "VeggieGirl"). Ky asked me at some point if I'd ever spent so much time doing things with co-workers before, and I said no. I think Ky had accidentally attributed a few activities to me that he'd only done with Da, but in any case I'd been participating in many more after-work activities than I normally have a stomach for. I said that doing so was much more tolerable with The Organization given the similarity of my worldview to those of the other employees.
As we entered the increasingly rugged terrain near the observatory, the night landscape darkened considerably, probably due to regulations limiting light pollution that would ruin the view for telescopes. As we passed the Greek Theatre, we got stuck in traffic so slow-moving that Ky phoned Da to tell him to start walking towards us, something he was a little reluctant to do for fear of being mugged (evidently that's a real concern in his native Atlanta).
[REDACTED]
After we'd picked up Da, Ky drove us to a small independent health food store, where everyone bought sandwiches and such. I had no appetite at all and was amazed to Ky and Al eat their second dinner of the evening (it was only Da's first). I suppose that's how it is for young vegans.
Ky parked us on the outskirts of skidrow and we walked to EightyTwo. Though I was probably the oldest person they'd seen that club, the bouncers checked my ID liked the checked everyone else's. The place was mobbed, with popular games having lines of people waiting to use them. There was also a lot of beer drinking, though none of the companions I'd come with ordered any[REDACTED].
Somehow I'd expected to see our colleague playing an isolated pinball game in front of a crowd of spectators, but he was just another person at the club. At least he had a beer. (I'd talked with him about beer yesterday, and he'd also shown me how to use The Organization's coffee machine.) He was great pinball player, and he was also generous with us, allowing us to play rounds at his favorite machines (he liked more recent pinball games with dot matrix displays that would give you a fresh new ball if it "drained" prematurely. No matter how bad we were (and initially I was really terrible) he monologued a constant play-by-play using what I took to be pinball jargon in a highly professional manner. Being sober as I stood around mostly watching others play pinball on a Saturday night, it wasn't really my thing. But it was teambuilding experience and I did my best to be a team player. Somehow at the end of a multi-person round on the Game of Thrones pinball game, I won the extra round, and for some reason I played extremely well during that final game I'd won. I liked that my improvement was so steep and rapid; it gave the impression that I learn quickly.
Aside from the lameness of spending time in a darkened club sober with a bunch of rutting 20-somethings, the only real downside of the evening was the many impolitic things coming out of Da's mouth. He's a talker, that's true, but he doesn't have a good sense of when and how he should talk trash about others. Being so new in The Organization, he really should've thought better than to talk trash about a certain new colleague to Al, whom he'd only just met. Despite the negative things Da was saying (and I understood his need to vent), Al kept acting in his responses like all was well and that everything was going to work out. That's the difference in political skill between someone working as a project coordinator and someone working as a lead developer.
I asked Ky at some point in the drive why he is on an Ayurvedic diet, and he explained that it was to help him deal with stress and emotional issues that had suddenly become too hard to manage. He seemed to think the diet was working, though from my perspective it seemed like the benefit could've all been coming from the placebo effect. In any case, Ky spends his days watching farmed animals suffering horribly in clandestinely-shot video, so it's hard for me to imagine him not being stressed and emotionally fragile as a matter of course.
Back at the intern dorm, and despite the fact that it was now midnight, suddenly Ky got a second wind and invited Da and me to join him on a foray to a ramen place for what would be his third dinner of the evening (is ramen really Ayurvedic?). I begged off and went into my room to drink alone, but Da (who barely has a need for sleep anyway) was up for it.
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