The Taco Traveler

No, not much to say lately, which doesn't mean I'm not doing much or writing much -- it's just that I suppose I'm tightening up with the free & open sharing of everything, and I haven't created anything recently worth sharing publicly. But lots going on.

Anyway, I just noticed that today is National Taco Day, so figured it's as good a time as any for a worthless post.

Cheers, and taco-up!
TT

Nine years ago today, I was sleeping when R called at 6:30 am to tell me to turn on the TV. She was on her way to work, but her base was locked down and the ferries were about to stop running. She came back home and we watched, incredulous, as the towers fell. "No, it didn't," I remember saying when the South Tower collapsed. "Look, it's only the antenna that fell over."

After it was clear what had happened -- after hours of replays and interviews, sadness and tears, we had to get away from it. We watched "The Family Man" on PPV, Grady kicking inside, still one month from coming into this irrevocably changed world.

Here's to all those who died that day. To all the people helpless and unknowing on the first planes or knowing and fighting on the later planes; to the firemen bravely climbing the stairs; to the people trapped, out of options, who chose falling over burning; to those who felt the floor finally drop away: these won't help, but here you go... have some more tears.

I’m still not sure what I did to set you off. I remember a very loud and angry shout: "The fuck’s your problem, fucker!?" and like everyone else, I looked around. Traffic stopped. Trays of food sat suspended above the crowd as waiters looked for you and the source of your anger. We all had to wonder what hideous thing someone had done to upset someone else to that degree. I wondered all this, too, and when I looked over in your direction I hadn’t even considered the possibility that the fucker could be me.

But there you were, poking your head out the window of your taxi cab, cash in one hand reaching over the seat, distractedly paying the driver while sneering my general direction. I glanced at my friend to see if maybe she had somehow been provoking you, but she seemed just as confused as everyone else at the busy sidewalk café that Saturday afternoon.

To be fair, I’ve just moved here to Washington D.C., and I suppose there could be some odd customs I’m not familiar with yet. I thought I'd been doing pretty much everything by the book, but every big city is a little different; my native land, Seattle, they actually ticket for jaywalking.

I was asked, recently, if I’d rather have good things happen to me, or interesting things. I chose interesting, and maybe you’re just another in a long line of people here in DC, working continuously to fulfill that request. Maybe you even work for some secret government agency set up specifically to create excitement for me here in my new home. If that’s the case, it’s an agency with a very large staff dedicated to me, the pampered client, and I’d just like to say you’re all doing a very nice job.

The other night while watching a soccer game in a pub, a drunk guy kept bumping into my friend. Five or six times he bumped and leaned into her while he was talking with a different girl, and finally, after a particularly hard jolt, I had to say something. I was polite in sort of an ass-holey way, I suppose. "Hey," I might have said, standing up from my stool and putting a hand on his shoulder. "Could you please try to get control of your body and stop bumping into my friend? You just spilled her drink... again."

He was a little guy and he fired up immediately, all Napoleon-like. My face reflected my surprise about his quick and aggressive response, I guess, as he dared me to raise my eyebrows at him one more time. I did (though involuntarily, as I laughed) and then I asked if he was serious. "Dude," I said, "I’m pretty sure I just asked you, politely, to stop bumping my friend."

"Yeah. Politely. Fuck off," he said. I just kept smiling at him, like one smiles in wonder at a problem that's barely fathomable -- something they know they'll never quite figure out. It didn't escalate, luckily (though I had my hands in the Secret Service "ready position" until his friends got him under control). His girl called him an ass. One of his friends apologized and put a twenty on the bar in front of us, offering a round of drinks. And a few minutes later the guy came back over to apologize. He offered his hand.

"No big deal," I said. "Don’t worry about it. It was exciting." He apologized three or four more times and bought me a Guinness and my friend her horrible drink: an un-godly mixture of Bailey’s and tequila, which he even had a little sip of to demonstrate his contrition.

Then there was the afternoon in Georgetown when the muscular shirtless black guy, a poor-man’s Tyrese on the street, swerved from the other side of the sidewalk to try to bump shoulders with me as I walked past. I moved my shoulder out of the way like a matador and continued on, unperturbed.

And the panhandler I confronted about his tiresome shtick: "Can you spare some change so I can buy some water?" As a pan-handling line, I’m sure it’s worked well for him this hot Washington summer, but he wasn’t impressed by my suggestion that maybe he should lower his standards and go with tap water until he gets back on his feet. And my reward for what I thought was a pretty witty quip? Instead of tipping me or offering to buy me a drink so he could be entertained with more hilarity, he stood up from his park bench and yelled mean things at me as I continued down the sidewalk.

So, anyway, despite all my interesting experiences, lately, I hope you can understand my surprise (my raised eyebrows again accidentally forcing my Zoolander-esque "for serious?" face) when you exited the taxi and walked directly for me, your brown skirt and fall-colored blouse rippling in the warm, pre-thunderstorm breeze, your curly, tangled hair partially obscuring your scowl as you cursed some more, walking purposefully towards my table, evoking a middle-school art teacher who’d forgotten all her peaceful messages from the sixties but none of the agitation.

"What the fucking hell is your problem?!" you demanded, again, as you got closer.

"Are you talking to me?" I asked. I still wasn’t sure. Your glasses were reflective.

You swerved away from my table and towards the restaurant door. "Yes, I’m fucking talking to you, fucking asshole!"

"Ma'am, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about."

You mumbled some more words and went into the restaurant. As the door shut behind you, I imagined how cool it would be if I were famous enough to get punked. I looked around for Ashton, just in case.

You exited the restaurant just a minute later (after causing more trouble inside, we learned later from the waiter), and you sneered at me again as you walked by my table: "Well, I suppose you picked the right city." If it was a game to see how badly you could confuse me, you won it right there.

You jaywalked across the street and into the Whole Foods, and like the rest of the patrons at the café, my friend and I were left with something interesting to talk about and rehash. We attempted, in vain, to figure out exactly what I did. The best we could come up with -- my friend's suggestions -- was: "obviously something very, very bad."

So, believe it or not, I’d like to avoid offending you in the future. To that end, I’ve made a list of possible offenses, and I hope you can help me out and select (or prioritize, if more than one) the things I may have done that day to make you so upset:

a) Sitting at a sidewalk café on a warm, breezy late afternoon with a girl who was much too pretty, while drinking a beer and eating a blackened steak Caesar salad that was way too tasty.

b) Something else very, very bad.

c) Other.

... and that's all I can come up with.

I’ll be looking forward to your reply.

Everyplace in Washington, D.C. is “city.” There’s no downtown or slum that I’ve seen. It’s just miles and miles of eight to thirteen-story buildings (and the thirteenth is usually called a “Penthouse” even though it’s usually just another floor). And everywhere the sidewalks are wide and clean and there are bars and pubs and restaurants and panhandlers because no one block seems much better than another for any of that. The topography has something to do with this being a swamp, originally, so they can’t go deep enough to build real skyscrapers – or so I was told by a blind date quite a while ago, on my first visit to the place.

I walked again, today, as I do almost every day – seeking out a place to settle, investigating neighborhoods or specific apartments found on Craigslist or Hotpads or via a friend’s forwards from her work’s bulletin board system. Today, I walked from Penn Quarter nearly to Georgetown, to the West End, where I looked at one place and made many phone calls without success. I spent most of the day in one coffee shop or another. After browsing Craigslist some more and working on my side project for a few hours at a Starbucks, I walked to Dupont Circle. There was a happy-hour feeling around the entire place that I think I could get used to. Once I was there, I found I couldn’t leave. I tried to leave as I wasn’t quite sure I was ready for happy hour, but then as I got farther from the epicenter of Dupont and the streets grew less exciting I had to turn around. I was drawn back to the circle.

I do a lot of that here – turning around in the middle of a block and doing other things I’d usually feel self-conscious about but doing them now, anyway, just because. I read in a bar. I write in a bar. I stop in the middle of my run on the lawn near the reflecting pool or I climb the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in a t-shirt that’s so thin and wet with sweat it’s transparent. This is a city that’s (usually) exceptionally un-disturbed by anything anyone does. I think I just feel this way because of all the tourists. Whenever you can pretend you’re a tourist or a businessman in the city on travel, you can get away with things like reading in a bar. Or so it seems to me; someone observing me may have a completely different perspective. But one thing is clear – I’ve never found it easier to talk to strangers as I do now, here in D.C.. Very few nights have gone by where I didn’t end up talking to someone interesting or even exchanging cards (my cards being self-printed from a Sam’s Club business card kit where the paper felt heavy on first inspection but now I’m almost too embarrassed to hand them out).

This may be the right place to point out that my only friend here (a pretty girl, as it happens), has acknowledged that the ratio of single women to single men in DC is about (feels about) 3-1. I don’t think I’d dispute that, though the married politicians seem to skew the ratio more to 3-2 (plus, they screw up the rent availability by getting their girlfriends nice apartments in the city). But I may be generalizing, a bit.

So anyway… there was free yoga happening on the lawn in the center of Dupont Circle. There were legs and heads and bare feet flying into the air and downward-facing dogs, with an inner circle and an outer circle of spectators and others just enjoying the evening on a bench. There were hundreds of people all coalescing in the circle; those not doing yoga or watching yoga seemed to be considering which restaurant or bar they’d like start with.

I stopped at a restaurant that had sidewalk seating and I thought I’d like to sit there and people-watch, but as I got closer I realized I didn’t want to consume a big patio table all by myself, so instead I sat inside at a smaller table and read. I’m re-reading If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler…, by Italo Calvino. Incredible book and the voice and his words just make me want to write and keep writing regardless of how I sound and just to trust that something decent may come of these words, whether they’re read or not.

Microsoft Word underlines the previous word “read” and suggests that maybe I meant to say “ready.” Ready or not?” No, Word. Read. Read as in the past tense of read. Our language is hard.

While walking back to my temporary Penn Quarter apartment from Dupont Circle, I detoured father down than usual, and took myself to Lexington Square – the large park just north of the White House. I was blown away by the awesomeness of the place at night. Sure, there were still crazy guys talking to themselves about how many times they’ve been in the hospital and probably some characters who’re better avoided, but there were also women jogging and skinny businessmen walking alone, talking on their phones as if this weren’t a big-city park at night.

In the two weeks I’ve been here I haven’t yet been scared. This isn’t a scary city. Or maybe it’s that I’m not a scared person, anymore. I suppose it’s a little of both. I’ve had conflicts here – several conflicts, in fact: with other bar patrons and vagrants and panhandlers and punks on the street, but I’ve never felt that there was a situation I couldn’t handle – and I haven’t yet been pushed to any sort of real confrontation. I wrote something about that a couple days ago – about the aggressive panhandling and a crazy woman yelling at me as I sat at a sidewalk café with a friend, but I’ve sent it into McSweeney’s for possible publication in a section that’s not all that prestigious anyway, so maybe I’ll publish it here soon (if they don’t publish it soon). But anyway, it’s not the sort of city that makes you run away from anything or sneak paranoid glances behind you.

I get closer to Penn Quarter and still, at ten o’clock at night there are pretty girls walking all alone, and I realize I’m not the only one who’s fearless. Behind me is the sound of flip-flops on concrete and I dismiss them as a threat and continue on without even turning around. Only at the light do I notice the flip-flops carry a pretty girl in a black dress who’s heading somewhere purposefully as she doesn’t stop at the light at all – she does the big-city jaywalking of a local. I usually jaywalk, too, but I’m distracted by an email that’s come into my iPhone with a ding. I stop for a second or two to read the title and instantly delete. I look ahead and evaluate the light, still twenty-six seconds before I can walk legally. With no cars in sight, I stride forward and continue on against the light, the girl in the black dress and flip flops leading the way to my next cocktail.

I just posted this on reddit in reply to a thread about interesting Vegas hooker stories, and realized I'd forgotten to mention it here. It's not a beautiful story. Do with it what you will...

__________

A few weeks ago I'd just finished winning a small poker tourney at the Venetian and had a pocket full of $100 bills. A hooker followed me into my elevator at Harrah's (yes, dump, but I just slept there and went elsewhere to gamble). She(?) strolled into the elevator then just stood there, smoking her cigarette. She didn't hit a floor button. She got off at my floor. As I put my key in the door I heard from behind me: "What do you think would happen if I came into your room with you?"

My thoughts came pretty rapid-fire: You'd charge me a bunch of money for sex, then when I went to pay you, you'd see my wad of cash and you'd hit me over the head with a lamp and the maid would find me naked and poor in a pool of blood in a few hours. Then they'd charge me an extra cleaning fee because it's a non-smoking room.

But instead I just said "Uh... no thanks" and shut the door in her face.

She's massaging my scalp. She was cute when I walked in, and now, with a warm towel over my eyes, another with a light menthol scent covering my chin, her strong fingers rubbing my hair, mussing, tangling and then pulling those tangles smooth as she brings my hair to a point of concentration at the back of my neck where the water drips into the bowl, her wrists abrading on my two-day beard, she is more beautiful than ever.

She pulls off the eye-towel and leans me up in my chair, and I come groggily back to reality. "Wow. You should have a deal with InSpa," I say. "Like crack, you know... the first little bit is included with your haircut but walk on down to our partner for a full hour of bliss." She smiles, says something awkward about there being an InSpa right down the street (which is why I mentioned it in the first place), and I'm brought back to an idea I've wondered about for a while now -- whether my conversation/flirting creates an awkwardness more often for good reasons or for bad.

It's a little of both, to be sure -- I just wish I were better able to tell when I should shut up and when they want me to continue. There are women I talk to who seem to be attracted, and the awkwardness there is a shyness, maybe something they're unable or unprepared to deal with for whatever reason, or maybe their shyness is their way of dealing with it (works for me), yet they apparently enjoy the things I say or the way I look at them. Then there are the women who are clearly thinking "As if!" and the awkwardness comes from their inability to tell me off because they're in a position where they're supposed to be nice, which makes conversing with waitresses and hair stylists tricky.

I'm a smiler, an observer, a conversationalist and a flirt. I love making a day brighter with a smile, and a beautiful smile returned can make my whole week. But I hate those occasional times when I seem to make a girl uncomfortable with my flirting eyes or some other sort of apparently unwanted sentiment. I'm not a big fan of boundaries, but not a day goes by that I don't wish someone would invent a pair of super-infrared (or super-something) glasses, like the spray that reveals a laser beam alarm tripline, that would help me figure out where the invisible boundaries lie before I cross them. I'd pay thousands for those glasses.

My two weeks here in Vegas have been an up & down affair, with a big win, a smaller win, and several poker losses. The smaller win was one that just ended a few minutes ago, and I sit here on my hotel room bed feeling an odd sort of malaise over the cards that almost were, and the huge win that could have been, but won't be.

I originally came to Vegas for the World Series of Poker, but quickly tired of the huge buyins and minimal chance of success given the ridiculous number of players (and many really really good players) entered in those events. One of my dealers in a $1000 event there told me about the less expensive, more fun events at The Venetian, and I gave one a try about ten days ago. Since then, I've played probably seven or eight events with either $350, $560 entry fees, or the $120 nightly "Second Chance" tourney. About six nights ago I ended up essentially winning a Second Chance tourney when we did a "chip chop" when I was the biggest stack. A chip chop divides the remaining purse money by percentage according to the amount of chips held. So my stack earned me more money than the others.

But yesterday's tourney (which finished for me a bit ago) was special in that there was the potential for a $60,000 first prize. After fourteen hours of poker yesterday, I found myself with an average-sized chip stack at the resumption of play today -- right in the middle of the pack with 34 people still standing out of 450+ who all paid $560 to enter the tournament, a Deep Stack Extravaganza at The Venetian.

I played well all day long, with no major errors I can think of offhand and one very nice call when I held a pair of fours and a big stack tried to push me around when he held pocket twos. He bet big on the river with a board of 5-8-K-K-J, and I considered everything carefully for a couple minutes and eventually called with my pocket fours. "Two pair," he said, no doubt expecting me to muck. I nodded, waiting patiently for him to flip over his hand, and feeling ecstatic with my call when I showed the table my fours, earning a round of "Wow"s and "Nice call"s for a huge pot that kept me going late into the night. Those fours were about the best hand I'd seen for two hours, as I was almost card dead for most of the night. I finally picked up some hands and knocked a couple players out to chip up, then doubled up a couple short stacks when I held mediocre hands (A-6 offsuit, J-8 suited) in an effort to knock them out, too. But I survived to the money. Then I prospered until the end of the night when we bagged up the chips for storage until the next day.

Today, after we resumed, I made a couple of moves early, picking up some blinds and antes when I raised in late position, and I also made two mistakes, giving up some chips when my suited A-2 hit only a deuce and I was raised by someone who, I believe, clearly had better cards after the flop. I also gave up a lot of chips to a chip leader when I tried to steal his raise from the small blind when I called with mediocre connecting cards (7-6 off-suit, I think) and the flop brought a king, which he check-raised me on.

But the reason for this post -- the bummer feeling of opportunity snatched away -- was when I raised with 1/5 of my stack and was re-raised all-in by the big blind. I called with KQ offsuit because we'd sparred a couple times before and I thought I might be ahead and he might do that with any king or maybe even a suited queen, since his stack wasn't much larger than mine. I was crushed when he turned over his AK. Then I was elated when the flop came K-Q-6 and I had two pair to his pair of kings. The turn brought a jack, which gave him a straight draw. At that point, there were seven cards in the deck that could make his hand. Any ten would give him a straight, and an ace would give him a higher two pair. He got an ace, and I was out of the tournament with only a modest win: barely three times more than I paid to enter.

Poker -- particularly Texas Hold'em -- is a roller-coaster game, and one that sees way too much obnoxious celebrating or whiny bitching about other players' poor play or lucky breaks, but my psyche is very well-suited for poker. My resting heart rate is 50 beats per minute. I can be as stoic, silent and calm as many of the best players you see on TV who care much less about the money than I do. And when I lose, I can shrug it off as well as anyone, remembering the many times that river has helped and brought me quiet elation while crushing someone else's tournament dreams. But this time, at the close of a long two weeks in Vegas, as close as I've ever been to a very large payday with a very well-played tournament, the unveiling of that last card, the river ace, just stung -- still stings -- in a way that's kind of hard to describe.

"Nice hand," I said to the guy. "Good game." I stood up from the table and wandered numbly up to the podium to claim my 24th place winnings, looking back just once to see my chips being pushed to the AK guy, hearing him say something about how he has enough chips to really do some damage now, and although he was best when the money went in, it's difficult after that great flop to not start planning, already, what I'd do with my newfound aggression when those chips were shipped over. I was already considering the chore of stacking those 240k chips and how I'd be amongst the chip leaders. I started wondering what the tournament LCD monitor's scrolling payouts said about the final table's minimum prize. I held my breath and waited for one more card. And then the brutal river took my tournament away.

TT

It always happens like this… I win a bunch of money playing poker, then I lose that same bunch of money playing poker at a level I’m not comfortable with, then I re-commit to my writing and my projects because, as it turns out, in the end I’m just barely a profitable poker player.

After two wasted WSOP entries and a nice comeback with a tournament win at the Venetian, I’m back down 2k again today after a suck-out gave some Italian guy a flush to my AK. I read him right, and knew I was ahead with just AK after the flop, but he called $900 on a draw and beat me on the river. Oh well… it’s a call I want that will usually win money.

So here I am having a bottle of wine and a cheese plate for one at a very cool café on The Grand Canal in The Venetian in Vegas. Still in a very good mood despite the day’s lost dollars, and ready to go home (wherever that is), soon, to my boys.

I really ought to have gone to Europe instead of pseudo-Euro Vegas. It occurs to me that it would have been cheaper. Still, I’m barely out any real money as this is still poker winnings from another poker tournament win from a few weeks ago.

I could do an “I Saw You” eposide/essay/vignette here. There are so many people out and about, like myself, having dinner or just drinks at 10:45 on a Monday night in the false vanilla sky of a manufactured indoor Venice. There’s a pharmaceutical supplies conference in town (or maybe just limited to the Venetian – I’m not sure) and last night I ran into a crazy group of women leaving the restroom and making noise, blocking the walkway. Once I’d passed them I realized I must have had a scowl on my face, because one of them, the cute one, apologized for her group and said “Give us a sign to let us know it’s okay?”

I turned around and failed at flirting by just giving a thumbs-up.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, as I slowed to let them catch up to me while on my way to the poker room. “We’re just a bunch of boring professionals who don’t get out very much.”

“No problem at all,” I said. “What are you in town for? Bachelorette party?”

“No,” she laughed. “It’s a pharmaceutical sales convention.”

At that point I got lost, realizing she was indeed very pretty, and of course every pharmaceutical sales woman in the world is beautiful. After all, they need those doctors to be totally psyched to see them when they walk in with their samples.

And though she was clearly flirting or interested to some degree, I forgot to flirt back as flashes of a previous infatuation that may have been love (but was probably just lust) burst through my brain and over-rode the smile and wittily flirtatious space I reserve nowadays mostly for waitresses and women at the poker table.

I drifted back in time to 2000, where I met another pharmaceutical sales rep at a downtown Seattle bar. I was wearing my leather jacket even though it was about a hundred degrees in the bar. Lights flashing, music blaring and people so crowded together that the sweat and beer and liquor blended together on the sticky floor and actually smelled pretty good.

I saw M_ standing there, just next to the dance floor, and I’d had just enough to drink to be able to walk up to her, pull out my wallet and say “Hey. Look at my awesome nephew!” I flashed my picture folio like a badge. A badge that said: “Look at what my sister made. I have within me the ability to make things just as beautiful, and don’t you ever forget it.”

She admired my one-year-old nephew and we talked for a few minutes, and she showed me photos of her gorgeous family, too. She wanted to dance so we danced and sweated together on the dance floor. It was so crowded that dancing wasn’t really feasible so pretty soon we were just there, pushed together by the crowd, hopping to the beat and feeling everything and the moment required that we kiss. We made out on the dance floor amongst the masses in the thumping beats.

We closed the bar and because at the time I thought myself a very good drunk driver and her friend was in bad shape, I drove them to my car, which was parked at my friend’s office a few miles away. She asked me to come home with her. “Just more kissing,” she said. “I want lots more kissing because that’s really fun with you but you have to be good.” She said this while holding up a finger as if to warn me in a pre-scolding way. She was recently divorced – still waiting for the final papers, actually – and just needed to kiss, be touched and appreciated. She needed to feel, again, how awesome it was to hold or be held all night.

I considered the coolness of being so close to something so beautiful for a while longer, and agreed to her terms. After driving us all to my Jeep I then led them to her house because she was new to town and said, basically, "If you get me to XXXth street, then I can find it from there." I nearly missed her turn-off, but responded to her urgent bright-light-flashing and turn signal from behind me that said, “Hey – don’t forget to exit here.” It felt good knowing she was anxious, too, to spend more time with me. Where so often you expect to be ditched in that scenario, as she re-considers and thinks better of the whole thing, turning off suddenly and running away, she instead was concerned about me going the wrong way.

We kissed all night and I held her while she slept (I’m not sure I ever really slept), and when the light came through her window and ignited her smile, creating a shadow in her deep left dimple, she turned a bit and said to me, a little embarrassed and shy, “Hey there.” And me, the big spoon, one arm under her neck stretched out underneath the pillow and the other laying on her slim waist, cupping a breast outside her t-shirt: “Hey.”

I fell for her almost immediately, and was there to be the soft landing she needed to recover from her divorce and just to be a friend – someone to cuddle and eventually to make love with. “Timing is everything,” we always said, often in frustration as things slipped backward and she needed more space or I happened to call at just the right time to offer a Neil Diamond show after she’d had a difficult phone call with her soon-to-be ex. We went to Teatro ZinZanni, once – a Seattle cabaret / entertainment that includes the audience in the show, and they put us right up front where the little French bus-girl fell in love with me and gave M_ dirty looks. The performer stuck out her tongue at M_ as she and jumped into my arms to claim me, and we laughed along with everyone and that night we were a couple.

After the show she said rather urgently that I’d better find somewhere to park or there was going to be trouble, and we found the darkest spot we could as close the theater as we could, and we made love (or something like making love, considering I had a rather cramped Jeep) there in the shadow of the Space Needle at what used to be a Tower Records store, because something had to be done with that sort of awesomeness – with the night and happiness, emotions and an excitement that that could not wait for a long drive home.

So interesting and amazing the little things we do – whether based on timing or pure choice or chance – that determine a lifetime or multiple lifetimes. The children we made and the worlds we changed by the things we did. Here in Vegas I basically forgot how to flirt as I escaped into my memories and told the pharmaceutical sales girl to have a great night as I walked away to the poker room. Maybe she was destined to be something more in my life than the spark of a memory, but I’ll never know. The girl from Zazu, M_, circa 2000, not quite ready or divorce-recovered until she was finally ready and divorce-recovered and I’d already moved on, telling her not to come over during her last, tearful two-A.M. call when she’d finally changed her mind and wanted me for more than just her recovery, her bounce – her friend already driving her to my house. “No,” I said, painfully, already essentially committed to the woman who would eventually become my wife and the mother of my two beautiful boys. “I’m sorry,” I said to her that night. “It’s too late.”

“Timing,” she said, finally. “It's always has been about timing.”

I write while I run. And I’m literally thinking that, while I run: “I write while I run.”

I don’t construct complete sentences (usually), but there are thoughts that drift in and out – some worthy of keeping and some that should be let go. I haven’t written much lately, though, because I’ve been too busy building a Content Management System and a web site for a client. It’s been draining. I forgot how draining a flat-rate project can be when it gets down to the end and the details never quite reach a point of completion. We’re there now, the back and forth of “well what about this?” and significant pieces of functionality that, upon deployment, we find still need to be built to make the thing complete.

It was just a run to the jetty. I figured it would be about a mile and a half each way. I put on my new shoes to break them in on the beach, because they’re lighter, faster, less-supportive shoes and I’m not sure my stride is worthy of them but I really wanted them because they’re orange and I had a credit at zappos anyway.

All down the beach I zig-zag back and forth between the soft sand higher up and the harder wet sand when it's not too steep to be comfortable. It's early for the beach, as I've just returned from dropping the boys off at school, so there are only the ultra-committed vacationers who want to suck out every minute of beach time they can.

As I approach the jetty, there’s a woman. She’s standing on the jetty taking a picture or something. I feel something in my toe and worry that my new shoes are going to give me a blister my first time out, so I stop and sit on a jetty rock to check on my toes. She climbs down off the jetty. Gorgeous, and not a tourist taking a photo but a jogger taking a rest. She steps off the jetty twenty feet away, stretches her arms and smiles at me. She takes a deep breath and strides off.

And there's me: checking my toes for blisters.

When I started today’s run, I was planning on running along the beach to the jetty, then from the jetty through the state park back to my condo. I just didn’t feel like quite so much soft sand today. So I put my sock and shoe back on and start towards the barbeque cabanas that will lead me to the parking lot that will take me to the road back through the park. And my brain says to me: “What if she’s waiting for you? What if she “gets tired” and stops at one of the hundreds of resort chaise lounges along the beach for a few minutes rest, and maybe looks down the beach to see if you’ve turned around yet and if you’re coming?”

I go through the first cabana, turn left in the parking lot, then turn left again through a second cabana and hit the trail back to the beach.

As I reach the beach again, an appropriate song comes on my iPod. It’s Yeves Laroc and the song is an electronic / house-beat called “Nomadic Knights”:

Up near the parking lot the sand here in Panama City Beach is so deep and soft you can lose your shoes. You sink six inches with each stride. This makes for a horrendously difficult workout, but while “Nomadic Knights” plays I think of Lawrence of Arabia. I’m striding through the desert sand on this quest to see if maybe, just maybe, this girl is waiting.

I write the last sentence of an essay: “And I ran off after her, chasing in her the ideal I was not sure I wanted to attain.”

It’s been three years this month that my ex and I filed for divorce. I then spent two years fixing myself while sailing down the Pacific coast into Mexico, and another year fixing my body – coming out of the malaise, the carelessness and complacency of a relationship where physical fitness becomes less important than sleep and work and re-bonding every weekend over steaks and wine and warm chocolate cake.

Three years later and I'm back in shape. I haven’t bench-pressed more since grad school during the workout commitment just after a different relationship ended. Today, after some water and a banana, I will start on sport bottle #1 of today’s gallon of green tea. Yes, I consider that I may appear vain if I share these things. Yes, I consider how I look if I post a status to all my friends saying I got a honk while running. Ultimately, I think people who live their lives alone (for the most part) must compliment themselves because it’s too important to feel good about themselves and the things they do well. People don’t give each other nearly enough compliments. I resolve to tell my friends how great they are when they are great.

A friend recently told me she and her husband of a few years were separating and filing for divorce, and one of his status posts yesterday was from a gym. Taking care of ourselves is just what we do when separation happens. It was a shock to me, this beautiful couple and their outdoorsiness together -- and what I’d always assumed was their shared passion for motorcycles and off-roading in their trucks. But I knew her better than I knew him, and never really thought she was meant for the suburbs and commuting and then the sand dunes on the weekends.

Who really knows who we’re meant for, or if we’re really meant to be with anyone forever. I’m growing more cynical, and the woman running ahead is not waiting. In fact, she’s farther away – a better runner than me or just on a different schedule. I slog at a pace of 13:00/mile through the heavy sand, leaning forward as the sand gets heavier. I think of a friend who just achieved a million miles in the air, a friend much like Clooney and Ryan Bingham (since Clooney is Ryan Bingham and Ryan Bingham is Clooney): handsome, single, 40s, hip, friendly. There should be a club for us, with Clooney as our figurehead. We are men at peace with ourselves and the world, handsome and experienced, in no hurry for anything but to enjoy being with someone, occasionally, until something amazing happens and we stand there at her door on a cold Chicago night and realize she’s not who we thought she was. We nod our head. We shrug, relieved, we suppose, that it didn’t take too long, this time.

But then there is the twinge of something else. This feeling that makes nature happen. This idea that if the timing were right and the woman were right and there was adequate money to do that and still live this life adventurously… there’s just maybe that bit of hope for just one more – I mean… I make such beautiful babies and Charlie Chaplin had kids at sixty (or something like that – so said Billy Crystal in “When Harry Met Sally”).

At nearly four miles and back in front of my condo the lady jogger is nowhere to be seen. The watch/heart-rate monitor/GPS reads 3.8 miles and I think “That’s close enough. I’m still sore from Wednesday’s run.” I slow to a walk, stretch, and something fires in my brain. I determine that I will not quit before four miles, and to punish myself for even considering it I run in only the heaviest sand. I loop around a trash barrel and check the GPS: “3.89” – a little further and I can turn around. “3.91” and I turn around the second barrel and run back. I’m Herschel Walker working out in the off-season, my shoes sinking nine, ten inches each stride and my knees almost to my chest until I find a track from the Beach Patrol ‘s pickup and it gets easier. “Get out of the tire tread, you pussy!” I think. “Would Hershel Walker run in a fucking tire tread?” I breathe deeply each stride, grunting and “pshaw”-ing rather than the in/nose-in/nose-in/nose-exhale/mouth of my normal pace.

I reach my stairs at 4.01 miles. My shirt – an Ex Officio undershirt meant for the tropics, paper thin when dry, is now soaked through and looks like toilet paper clinging to my chest. I breathe, hands clasped behind my head, I take out my headphones. I walk up the stairs, kicking the sand off my shoes. I ride the elevator up to the eighth floor. I open my door and walk down the hallway to the balcony where I sit and sip my water, the families assembling below, the jet-ski and beach chair rental company preparing for their day. The Gulf of Mexico stretching off forever, and my mind beginning to come back to this world.

I have no idea if I'm spectacularly disorganized or spectacularly ambitious. It's probably both. On the ambition side, there are the two primary web sites at varying levels of completion, the two or three nonfiction books partially outlined and mostly thought through, the foundering novel and its even less considered screenplay both nearly abandoned due to higher priorities. And then there are the things I want to read. These are the things outside of paying work, parenting, exercise and social life.

I've detailed (as much as I care to) the writings before, but the readings are interesting: I've just set down Proust's Swann's Way (volume 1 of In Search of Lost Time which is better known as Remembrance of Things Past). In my backpack sits another book I'd planned on enjoying today at the coffee shop mid-way through a bike ride (the bike ride having been abandoned due to continuing cold and wind): Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

So I was sitting here on my sofa this morning reading in the quiet -- just the dryer working and muffled voices of snowbirds four floors down on the cold, windy beach, and somewhere in the first chapter of Swann's Way I had a thought I wanted to write down. Maybe Proust spawned an essay topic or the first few ideas in a longer piece. So what I did is I meta-bookmarked Swann's Way, holding my page open with the weight of a bookmarked book entitled Meditation Made Easy.

You see... I'd bought a couple of books on meditation thinking I'd use mediation to get myself more organized and structure my time so I'd be able to actually get one or two of these projects finished. And if you consider bookmarking to be an organizational quality, then they've helped out a lot.

TT