2007-10-24 - 1:37 a.m.
Oh, it burns! It burns! The fire! The fire! Aieeee! How it sizzles and scorches, how it bubbles and fizzles! The hills are alive with the sound of flaming howls of agony! Celebrities are leaping from their beach-side patios into the ocean. Tycoons are desperately flapping their oriental carpets against the flames, and urinating into their fireplaces to keep their houses from being razed to the ground.
Actually, the fires are rather a big deal out here, though I am pleased to say that, because I live in glamorous Santa Monica, there has been no particular threat or danger to myself and my little rent controlled apartment. That day will come with the next earthquake.
Otherwise, the fire season does little to me, aside from making my asthma act up a bit and my eyes water. Oh, and my throat aches a bit. Like the rest of the country, I watch the TV news to see these amazing shots of the San Diego area, looking like the city of Dis, ablaze in a Hellish inferno. I do hope that the panda bears at the San Diego Zoo are all right. The pandas and the elephants and the monkeys. They used to have this webcam at the San Diego Zoo where you could watch those creatures go about their afternoons, and I am afraid I became quite addicted to it.
The air is most uncommonly hot: Though most folks in the rest of the country would laugh at me, since temperature extremes in the Santa Monica area range between a frosty 75 and a roasting 80 degrees, one can certainly feel the oppression of the atmosphere, which feels as though it’s like dry lead.
When you walk along the beach, which I have done once this week, you look into the sky and the horizon is a bloody red, punctuated with lines of black and yellow. It looks like a volcano has erupted nearby. Indeed, the light has a very oblique quality: Blocked by the clouds of dust, the sunlight is muted, like it might be at the end of the world. Or, if you remember what the light looks like during a solar eclipse – it’s like that.
But the thing is, this firestorm happens every year around now: This is just the fire season. After the fire season comes the mudslide season. And then, around January, there’s earthquake season. That’s the LA year! And why do people live in this Hell Hole, you ask? “Well, the weather is from God!” is how most put it. Even if it is peppered with fires, floods, and locusts (of the human kind).
Meanwhile, there is another, far more important matter that has absorbed me over the past day or so. It seems that I offended my little stalker the other evening! You know of whom I speak, of course: I’m talking about that young fellow whom I have known for about six years now, since he was a freshman in college up to now, when he is working as a junior IT goofus at some corporation or other.
My stalker is the fellow who calls me every night, just so chit and chat, while I am rather too passive to just say “ugh, leave me alone please, I’m working.” He thinks I share his interests in Anime and comic books and various child-like things, and assumes my silence as he babbles is a consent and approval. Which I suppose in a sort of passive way is true. Oh, he’s a cute enough child I suppose – he’s a kinda dorky 23 year old Mexican American kid, bespectacled, and a slow, deliberate way of speaking that is rather unique and hard to quantify.
Anyway, the other night, I was at home writing up my review of a play that I had just seen and which was due the next morning when the stalker phoned me up and squawked that he was, at this very moment, down at the Roosterfish with his current sugar daddy and would I like to join them? This, to me, sounded like no kind of entertainment at all, and so I begged off, noting that I was in for the evening and wanted to keep writing. He got quite angry, noting that I never want to have any fun, and that it was extremely rare for him to come to this part of town to meet me.
I suppose I would have felt more guilty if he HAD come to meet me, but of course he had not. I was just a side dish on his plate of sugar daddy entertainment. The young lad had been thoroughly sexed up and wined and dined with the sugar daddy and was now making himself available to give me an audience with him (and the other guy) if I do decided. I was but a cameo – and I really just didn’t feel like shlepping all the way into Venice just for that.
I mean, when a person asks a question or makes a request, one has the right to say “no”, right? And so that is what I did. And boy did the little stalker get angry.
Much later on, when he was back in South Gate, he IMmed me to take me to task for my dereliction of him. I did the internet equivalent of a shrug and told him, “Oh well.” And since then, I have not heard hide nor tail of him. He has not IMmed me again, nor has he phoned me to squeak and squawk as he heads to bed.
Strangely enough, I find it rather a relief, if you must know. Is that bad of me? I find myself quite content not to talk to him, and if he continues to be angry that actually makes things rather restful for me. For he is an all right sort, I suppose, but he is hardly someone I feel particularly linked to. I am certainly not his Great Gay Daddy, which it’s clear is how he regards me.
So what I want to ask you now, is this. When he starts calling again, as he will no doubt do, because he is never able to be angry for more than a few days at a time, should I ignore his calls? I can certainly screen my phone and avoid his IMs. After a few weeks, I daresay his calls would cease and desist. And I would have peace and quiet.
I am thinking it would be rather pleasant to cause an end to this whole business, because, as you see, I am no man’s Daddy. I mean – all these dorky children. It’s absurd! And I do feel exhausted by other folks’ ridiculous expectations of me. Truly, I must confess, I wish to be left alone. And that’s just a fact.
