Sometimes you always feel alone

Late Summer, 2008: Everything I owned in a Toyota Corolla and drove across country to California with my girlfriend at the time, partly because I owed her $1000, but we wouldn’t break up until Thanksgiving so that it wouldn’t be weird. What I learned: things are not always what you think they are. I rented a room from a woman who I think had had a brain injury, and one time she pulled out her breast to show me the scar from her surgery… and she liked to use the phrase “subby boy” in a joking way in the context of cajoling me to do chores, which was confusing, having never heard that term, and having never considered combining housework and kink. And it was really cold at Ruth’s house in Fall and Winter (in California!), kinda like the supervisor of my UCLA research fellowship was a cold empty prick… and realizing later, as I visited his BIG FANCY HOUSE in the hills, that he was divorced from a former student, who was writing a book about narcissists (hello!)… and I heard that one time, he tried to kiss one of his female graduate students (who was really beautiful, I met her later) at a work party– and some Korean women really are unbelievably beautiful, but I guess that’s true of all types of women — but she sort of publicly rebuked him, I wasn’t there. Or like when I emailed my supervisor’s supervisor about a year later and said, “hey do you have anything I could do for work, because I have a family situation?” — which was true, but not very sophisticated, and he didn’t call me back, probably having heard it aaaaaalll before. But people are always more than one thing: genius, idiot, heart-breaker, creep, that’s like when Harrison Ford fought with Ridley Scott while making Bladerunner, but for my money, that’s a great movie. Maybe you gotta break a few eggs to make a beautiful omelet, or a beautiful family… and that’s another thing: in the Midwest, where I was raised, you ask for a “Denver” omelet if you like ham and green peppers, but in Los Angeles, you have to ask for a “Western” omelet to get the SAME THING! Dude, now I have to know some geography to order breakfast? I mean, come on, breakfast should be the easy part. But — should it be? Maybe not on La Cienega Boulevard, or Hollywood, or Santa Monica, on the Pier, which stinks out at the end, where people fish. And something else I learned: the thing about mental illness is, sometimes you always feel alone.