Thu, 19 May 2005

11.24.00
All set I was for to spend the day writing, which I obviously haven’t done in a while. All was quiet on the homefront, my eyes had stopped hurting, and the slow slide into a drizzly overcast holiday was keeping me from out-of-doors distractions. I did have to snag some refreshing beverage, as what’s a writing binge without refreshing beverage, so i headed up to walgreen’s, got refreshing beverage and some motor oil, and noticed this girl out of the corner of my eye while putting the oil in my car. She had long black hair with purple streaks pulled up on both sides in low-slung (which is to say not perpendicular-jutting) pigtails, a ratty-looking leather jacket with some weird hand-drawn pattern i couldn’t focus on in white paint-pen on the back and sleeves, an equally ratty sweater, tights, and combat boots, and as she turned to watch a car pass I saw she had a sign: TRAVELLING BROKE HUNGRY PLEASE HELP. I walked across the parking lot to get a better look, then she saw me, and feeling conspicuous and full of thanksgiving cheer I walked up and said hi and gave her ten bucks, to which she replied “You know this is ten bucks” and I said “Yeah, take it, I think New World is open.” Behind her (I hadn’t even noticed) was another girl, dressed roughly the same, and she got up from sitting against the Walgreen’s wall and the two of them pondered their options. After pondering what might be open on Thanksgiving, I said “I bet Flightpath is open, I can give you a ride, it’s just right up this way,” and we drove the ten-odd blocks to Flightpath, during which time I found out the first girl was named Sarah, the other girl was named Karen, and all sorts of horrible ideas went spilling around my head.

In the nine months I’ve been in Austin I’ve never been to Flightpath, which is weird as it’s just up the street from where I live. As such, I had no idea if it was open or not, though I suspect in hindsight the nearness of my home to our destination wasn’t an accident. Flightpath was open, though practically empty, and we sat for maybe three hours drinking bottomless cups of coffee and eating pretty ho-hum pastries. Karen and Sarah were on their way to Oklahoma City, where they knew some people (that’s how Sarah said it, “we know some people there”, which sounded iffy at best, but I’m probably just reading things into things), having come up from San Antonio yesterday with a couple Palo Alto kids coming home for Thanksgiving. Endless chitchat about Austin, about music, about writing (Sarah had been keeping a journal/sketchbook ever since she left home, which I tried to talk her into letting me read, but no dice). Karen asked what I was doing for Thanksgiving, and I told them I was kinda ducking out on a party so I could hang out by myself and write, and I flinched because it sounded really stupid the way I said it and plus it sounded like I wanted to not hang out with them, and I tried to think of a way to cover, and Sarah laughed and rolled her eyes a little, and for the first time all day I was all smitten with some girl again.

You probably already know this, but if you took the average of everyone I’ve ever dated you’d see a blurry image of someone prone to serious caffeine abuse, with long dark altered (henna/dye) hair, well endowed (she’d probably say too endowed) in the breasts and hips, who smokes but is trying in a vague sort of way to quit, who talks to excess at first but then settles into a comfortable if slightly manic peace, who is attracted to goofball bookish shy guys (obviously) and believes in things she’d never admit to outside of hushed post-midnight telephone calls from somewhere very far away. Which is to say Sarah was so ridiculously suited to my notions of crushdom that I was certain something really weird and wrong was going on and I just wasn’t noticing it, I being out of range of a faith in the inherently benign nature of fate. Karen was no slouch in that department, but I wasn’t gonna push it. I was dewlling on this at length while I ran back to the house to make sure I hadn’t left anything particularly disgusting on the floor and to (get *this*) turn to irc quick-like for a confirmation of my rightness in my pursuits. As anybody who remembers 1995’s “girl with bells on her shoes” incident can attest, irc can be a genuinely helpful oracle, bringing up angles one may have missed in the rush of giddy strategizing. The moral question, or “Is it proper to proposition someone you just gave money to, somebody who’s just looking for a way out of town?”, was raised and rightly squashed by the irc greek chorus, who did raise a second point to consider, which, to quote cheap trick, “you never know what you’ll catch”. this of course being always the case, but with vaguely homeless faux-punk girls it’s been suggested to err on the side of judgment. All of which I considered and reconsidered and then threw entirely out the window as I practially skipped back up to Flightpath, where the table where we were sitting was being bussed, as Sarah and Karen had left, and I walked around pretending I wasn’t looking for them until it started to rain again and I walked home.
(12:05.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #