Travels: Investment Banker Walks Into A Coffee Shop [Day XV]

Wherein you all meet in a tavern.

[NB. This post is long because it is a reasonably exact transcript of a conversation I had with a man in a coffee shop this evening.  I had my laptop out, ready to write a post, and the only other person in the shop - a man who looks to be in his late fifties, salt and pepper hair, very fancy suit - is chatting to the barista about his radio choices.  Pandora - the Bob Dylan station.

They get going on Woodstock and he says something about Arlo Guthrie and the closing of the New York State Thruway.  I can't help mentioning the live recording of Coming Into Los Angeles, where he refers to the attended masses as 'a lotta freaks'.  Since I already have my laptop out, when he starts telling me his life story, I just type along.  It was a very strange thirty minutes.  I have no idea if this man's willingness to sit there in front of a total stranger as she typed away and nodded politely indicated a deep narcissism or if was just lonely, or what.  I don't even know if he knew I was writing down what he was saying, just that I was typing and I was looking at him, not the keyboard.


I have left the typing mistakes in for posterity.]


/begin transcript

My father is a flag-waving, you know, you would never accuse him of doing anything that was, um, un patriotic and the day before the draft came up he took me aside and he said.

This is a politician's war and I'm not going to have you die for some goddamned politician.  If your number comes up I have a car arranged and I will put you in it and take you across the border - there are people there waiting for you who will take you somewhere even I don't know where until the war is over.  And I said, really Dad?  And he said Really.

This man is wearing a silk shirt and a powder blue tie.

It wasn't so much freedom as the feeling that everyone there had that their life was going to be closed off and people felt they had no control over their lives.  They were trying to create a new society to escape from these -0 The people we've produced that have gone into politics that we've produced I can't believe.  They're a mess.

      This place has glass teapots.

What happened in that time too is that there were a llot of people in that time that were looking for answers is - a lot of those people went straight to drugs.  I did LSD three times and every time it was like -- I'm opeining the door to = -- another place.  And then the third time I tried LSD a being appeared in front of the door and said "you can't keep oepning and closing the door, you have to come into the room"  and when I finished with that trip, I finally said, I have to move into this next dimension of awareness, but I'm not going to seek it through LSD.  So then I had a spiritual epiphany and I lived with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in his ashram for three, four years.  That got deeper because I started to have experiences and spent time there.

      So, if you don't mind my asking - how did you come to be an investment.

Through chinese medication like everyone else.

      I'm not familiar with that trope, no.

I have a doctorate in Chinese Medicine.  I was working in Chinese medicine for three years, then I burnt out.  I was in my twenties at the time, and I met a fellow named Bill Bane, who is Bane Vanderbilt, Oppehauss family - probably the wealthiest people in the world at least in this country.  But through those connections I had met Bill Bane (Bane Capital) Mitt Romney, and he said Hey if you want to change careers you've got the right attitude and ability to do 90% of what we do and since you've learned Chinese medicine you can learn what we do in an afternoon.

Well, it took more than an afternoon, but that was the beginning of my investment banking career.

     That's fascinating.  Do you ever regret it?

No.  I could have healed people, created clinics and things like that.  But moving capital around, in various places, it's very fulfilling.  We finance a lot of technology companies...

     Yeah, well, you have the power now.  You're the man.

We have a whole - something I started, I guess it's more philanthropic than investment - but we support local farming.  Not necessarily a popular position in my circles.  I mean in theory it's great, we can support that.  I think ultimately genetically modified organisms can have useful production... I mean, the way we're raping the land, it's not good.

     That's very admirable.

     He put his hand in his pocket.

Well, it's who we are you know.  Everyone goes through the process of this 'getting' thing.  But it's not a real thing.  It's a disease, it's a neurosis.  There's only so much that you need to get.

     So who decides where, where the line is?

Well I think people know, you know, I have a house, I'm okay, I can stop now.  But we can't stop because it's a mental sickness.  You look at young people these days, the bulimia and the - what's the word - the anorexia.

     Well yes.  They've been around for a while.

Yes, well my ex-wife was anorexic but it's worse.  I need to see me for who I really am and break that spell.  We live in a consumer society that blocks us at every turn.  It's an addiction, like alcoholism.  We're destroying ourselves.

-chatter-

     Where are you from?

I was born in Manhattan and I grew up in Montclair New Jersey.  I went to, spent two years up in Massachussets getting my, what they call your acupuncture license and then spent four years in Manchester England where they have the only English language chinese medicine school in the world and when I came back from Manchester where I went to Newport and set up a practice and met some of the most amazing people in the world.  I went to Northeastern University then and got a degree in finance.  Got married, had my son.

     How old is your son?

He's twenty five.  Getting his degree in finance at Vanderbildt University.  I can't remember when we were talking, but he just said Dad, I'm really interested in Finace!  He's a musician too, he arranged it the music is on the radio.  But then he just decided no, I'm not going to do any  more of that.  And then he got a 720 on his GMAT.

     What is GMAT?

When you want to take a degree in business you gotta take a GMAT.  It's a test that they do, and it scores from like 400-800.  A perfect score - 800 and he had 720.  At Vanderbilt, which is the number one school in the US for master's in finance and, well, he got one of the spots.  And they gave him ten, fifteen thousand dollars as well.  There you go.

I am - well, I just moved here, I got a place up in Hollywood Hills.  Beautiful view of the San Fernando valley.  It's a beautiful 3000 square foot home, beatfil home.

      I guess your son doesn't live with you anymore.

No, no.  He was yougner, playing hockey from the playing 7-13 before he went to play at a hockey prep school.  I was in a hockey rink every weekend, you know, Christmas, holidays, because that's when they play the tournaments.

    - chatter about my work -

Skype: it's the future.  You'll have a tv that you can also use as a computer, I mean they're starting to do that right now.  we finance two companies who are doing that right now.  I do have a need for a personal assistant in a number of areas so this could work out.

We 'exchange' business cards.  He is wearing the fanciest stit I've ever seen.  The cuffs are monogrammed.

/end transcript.

Los Angeles is weird, man.

Notes from a retro booth.


One thing I do like about the flora of Los Angeles is that the big grey trees here are planted so close to the sidewalk that the roots push underneath the concrete and crack the streets apart and nobody seems to mind.  They just amble up and down the little rocky hills in the pavement.

Film: Brave - Tradition! Tradition!

*The first three paragraphs are not even remotely relevant unless you’re seriously interested in the politics of animated film production.

            Brave boasts two primary directing credits: Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman.  Andrews is an old hand at Disney, having acted as Head of Story on the very fine The Incredibles as well as his most recent (and unfortunate) screenplay credit for John Carter.  Chapman is no slouch either – she was Head of Story on The Lion King and directed one of Dreamworks’ best and most cinematically exciting efforts: The Prince of Egypt, a retelling of the Moses story that focuses on the conflicted relationship between Moses and Rameses.

            Anyway.  Nobody denies that the story of Brave is Chapman’s.  She brought the project to the studio and began to develop it as the writer/director.  (At the time, it was much more evocatively titled The Bear and the Bow.)  Not inconsequentially, Merida wasn’t the only female first for Pixar – Chapman was to be the first woman director in a company that is notoriously male-dominated even by industry standards. 

            Eighteen months before Brave was scheduled for delivery, Pixar replaced Chapman with Andrews.  It’s disingenuous to say that this was misogynistic or unprecedented: Monsters Inc., Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille all had directorial switches, for reasons the company is reluctant to disclose.  But it is unusual enough that people wondered about the motives for the change.  After all, who better to tell the story of a headstrong daughter than a woman who admitted that the script was based on her own relationship with her six-year old?  Pixar has never come out with a reason, and probably never will.  But at points in Brave, the cracks show.  It’s impossible to tell whose hands shaped what, but there are definitely two sets of distinctive tonal fingerprints on the film, and it muddies it up somewhat.

            This is Pixar’s first foray into a few things: period pieces, female leads, and the dreaded Princess Movie.  In the Scottish Highlands, adventurous young Princess Merida is chafing under the controlling thumb of her conservative mother, Queen Elinor.  Unbeknownst to her goofy, encouraging father Fergus, Merida and Elinor are in an escalating cold war about Merida’s arranged betrothal.    When the day comes, Merida looks for a third option with disastrous results and must struggle to right her wrongs and understand the true meaning of family and tradition.

            It’s probably not worthwhile to go into why it’s disappointing to see Pixar, a company that has historically tried to tell fresh stories with unconventional protagonists, choose the tale of a princess who doesn’t want to get married as their first female-led feature.   That said, Merida has one quality that certainly hasn’t cropped up before in the Disney stable:

            She’s kind of a jerk.

Travels: Over The Plate [Day X]

Why hasn't there been a film made about a paparazzi who slowly becomes famous for taking particularly interesting or unusual photos of celebrities, to the point that the images themselves become considered 'art', and the person in question becomes the object as well as the subject of the media's attention?  It could be a good short, I don't know how well the concept would hold up in the long run unless you threw another cog into the works.

This may have happened in real life [Terry Richardson comes to mind as a sleazy dude who started out taking pictures of vulnerable celebs and became respected in the photography world, but that's a slightly different thing and totally eugh anyways]... I should do some research.  Being a paparazzi seems like such a strange and dehumanizing job anyhow, I wonder how people would get into that line of work in the first place.  Are they disillusioned photojournalism majors?  Star-hounds?  Film fanatics?  Or just people trying to get through a day's work.

If a paparazzi did become famous, they could set up some pretty sweet self-shot gigs.  Like how J. Jonah Jameson at the Daily Bugle always wants Peter Parker to take pictures of Spiderman for him.  Sneaky buggers.

Cheers
Julia

Travels: Assorted Bonbons [Day VII]

Notes from Brentwood Town.

Not much to say today, just a nitpick that I had not anticipated about living in Los Angeles: I am constantly earworming myself with songs about various streets, districts and landmarks in the city.    The primary culprit at the moment is Randy Newman's excellent and cutting I Love L.A., which has the audacity to include a sing-along chorus that does nothing but list the names of local boulevards.  I have found myself humming it every single day.  It is making me insane.

You will share my pain.

Cheers
Julia

Travels: STEEEEVE! [Day VI]

Wherein I become a much more useful player in Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon.


I'm down here because I Know People.  This is not through any particular skill or exceptional quality of my own; it is merely an accident of birth and subsequent neighbourly mingling.  This was brought home to me rather forcefully when Mary pulled me along to the premiere of Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World, a film written and directed by one of Dana's very good friends both in the industry and in real life, Lorene Scafaria.

As I have long suspected, for those involved above the line a film premiere is a sort of adult Prom, an opportunity to put on a pretty dress and get in a limo with your friends and drink champagne somewhere fancy.  I am frankly surprised they didn't all pack up afterwards to go camping in the Santa Monica Hills and zip their sleeping bags together.  The atmosphere certainly supported it.

Outside the theatre there was a red carpet set up, with a secondary 'lane' for regular film-festival goers whom nobody was interested in photographing.  There was a small river of paparazzi between us and the real stars [including Dana, Lorene, and an extremely pregnant and pretty Diablo Cody, whom I was too nervous to talk to], and a sort of unofficial third lineup across the street.  I thought at first that they were just observing the cacophony, but as soon as the actors appeared they revealed their true colours.  "STEVE!" they bawled.  "KEIRA, KEIRA, I LOVE YOU!"  A chant went up after a few moments: "Sign this, sign this, sign this!"  The actors gave no indication that they heard any of this nonsense, and I don't blame them in the least.  I'm sure they're coached not to cop to this in public, but I imagine the press junket is very few celebrities' favourite part of the job.  The photographers were hardly more polite: some of the writers and less-seasoned red carpet walkers looked downright shellshocked by all the noise.

I could get really cheesy and describe my experiences before and during the afterparty as Seeking A Friend For The End Of The Film, but I won't, because that would be declasse and God knows I am eternally bound to classiness.  After some theatre lobby nervousness, Dana handwaved me in to a very strange bar where the shot glasses had LED lights in them and cater-waiters were swanning around with mysterious looking puffs that turned out to be crab cakes.  Her kind assistant Kate let me stick close to her and gawk surreptitiously at all the finery, but it did strike me that perhaps the function of these parties is less to exclude the unworthy and more to give the people who do have face recognition some time where they can celebrate their achievements in peace.  I imagine there are very few places in urban North America where Keira Knightley can just sit down and have a friendly chat in a restaurant without being semi-consciously interrupted by a stream of well-intentioned admirers.

It was a very surreal experience.  For me, that is.  Not for Miss Knightley.  I suspect she is fairly acclimated to the LED-infused shot glasses.

Notes from an American premiere.

The film itself is a sort of apocalypse-meets-Lost In Translation-meets-Punch Drunk Love-road-trip... thing, and I was pleasantly surprised by it.  Steve Carrell does downtrodden, passive Everyman [an archetype I'm not particularly fond of] with appropriate hangdog aplomb; Keira Knightley is basically playing a quirky Dream Girl [again, something that tweaks a lot of film critics].  That said, they brought a lot of humanity to the characters and they have good onscreen chemistry.  And I'll admit, I did find myself tearing up a bit during Carrell's confrontation with his father, played by Martin Sheen.  The writing can be darkly funny in parts, and I reckon it's worth a watch even though the predictable last act/love story and uneven tone does bring it down somewhat.

Cheers
Julia

Travels: The Magic Kingdom [Day V]

Disneyland: ITSO the great, sadly late, Ray Bradbury. Old Dead Things.

In the centre of the park, a grove of carefully tended flowers surround a statue. The bronze is sun-warm to the touch.

Far away, under the earth, eyes blink.

Steam drifts through vents in a cold dark room, pulling heat from a tube in the centre. The body inside, empty, twitches in the cold as the throat works. Veins that once pumped blood now ooze acids: gel and nitric and mystery magic. The mouth is motionless. In a nearby chamber, a heart ticks with mechanical precision on a bed of ice. The brain was removed long ago - everybody knows it is the heart that really matters.

He waits.

Beat. A little girl holds the hand of the statue.  Beat. Tourists squint in the sun, flash cruel lights in his eyes. He cannot close them.  Beat. Underground, his breath steams silently inside the tube, trapped. His fingers yearn to shade his face. Above, a pigeon passes over the sun and falls, suddenly, into the shadows of ringed palm trees.

An enormous, deformed animal lumbers past the statue, and the man in the tube feels a pang of kinship: the monsters that roam the park are trapped too, marooned in a prison of felt and sweat - their hands foreign white bodies hanging from rubbery wrists. He imagines tongues lolling in the heat, sunken eyes inside the bobbing heads. They glint out at him with empathy.

His knuckle itches. It has always itched.

The room has no clock in it, but they check on him twice a day. The door creaks open; it is Connors. The man in the tube imagines a smile. Connors is the best of them, the gentlest and the brightest. Most days he brings a thin sketchpad into the room with him and draws lying on the floor, thin legs kicking at the air like a boy.

"Good morning, sir," says Connors with respect. "It's a beautiful day out there."

He sits and draws next to the tube for a few minutes, gentle-eyed women in flowing dresses and dragons and shining castles, and speaks casually of the world. He has been away from the facility for several days: "My baby sister, married. What a doozy of a place this old rock of ours is." He shakes his head and looks up. "But you always knew that, I suppose. One day you'll see it again."

Yes! the man wants to shout. He wants to reach out and flip through Connors' book, make the skirts on the women twirl and the fire flick forth from the dragons' mouths. He wants to claw away the fog of the room, clamber up, up, up to the sun and the light and the hurt and see his world, the perfect world he always knew he could make and he did, he did make it better than anyone could have imagined. Too well, perhaps. In a perfect world, there is no room for decay.

Move, mouth! he commands. Gnash, o Teeth! Bend, knees, bend and break and bleed, bleed blue fire! The tube trembles, earth reaching out to him. He wants to sing.

Obey! Obey! Obey!

Connors looks up from his drawings, startled. Above, the nails of the statue shift and bite into bronze. The tick of the heart falters. It slows. Connors rushes out, his sketchbook open on the floor.

In a perfect world, there is no room for old dead things.

Notes from a tired brain.

Still not super happy with this, but part of this exercise is letting go of writing before I stomp it into the ground, so there you have it. I am pretty sure Walt Disney's cryogenically frozen body is in no way attached to the statue of him in the park, which is actually quite charming, but Bradbury is the best at body horror and I couldn't pass up a real-live I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream scenario.

In actual news, Disneyland is definitely cool in its own way, though I'm sure I come to it very differently than I would have as a child. Now it's more food for thought than mindless amusement. Still definitely a worthwhile experience. Also, a thriller/chase sequence set inside the It's A Small World ride would be amazing. I want to shoot that now. Kind of DIVA meets Charade - it's a scary and surreal artifact of bygone times, much like Disney himself.

Cheers
Julia

Travels: A Triple Decker Afternoon [Day IV]

Wherein I am already late and a thick fog of capitalism descends upon the land.

Just under the wire with this one - writing from a hotel in Anaheim.  My good friend Matthew is down here at a voice actor's conference (who knew they had conferences... but doesn't it sound like fun?) and has roped me into Disneyland.  I've evaded it for twenty-two years, but to be honest I'm a little excited for tomorrow.  It's all a bit 'the lady doth protest', especially after Matthew extracted a promise from me that I would not say anything that could be termed snarky while inside park bounds - he thinks I have some sort of inner child that requires release.  As I generally rely on my snark to protect me from the reality of any given situation, I am understandably nervous.

In unrelated news: man, Union Station is really really and truly a beautiful building.

Notes from a beige bedspread.

I think I will resurrect the ITSO tomorrow.  It was an old writing exercise I used to assign myself to practice pastiche, with ITSO standing both for 'in the style of' and inspiring hope that a reader would say "it's so [writer you were emulating]."  I always secretly wished a teacher would assign it as a project and I would have tons of experience and kill it, but no such thing ever occurred.  Life is bleak.

Travels: One's Lot In Life [Day III]

Wherein I take the bus in the wrong direction and Darth Vader presides over Fox.

I often wonder how a studio set functions without occasionally acknowledging the tension of twenty minions politely waiting for their big break... while working for the person whose job they would like.  Bad sentence, but I'll come back to it later.  Point being, at school we all know we're competing, but at least we can kind of do a friendly jostle here and there and there's an understanding that eventually anyone who works hard and has a reasonable balance of good luck to bad will make a stab at it.  Not so at Fox.  I met a good fifteen people today: they would all like to be in the writers' room.  They are not.

I was walking around the lot with Dana's lovely assistant Kate when she circumspectly referred to this weirdness.  I asked her for advice about the summer.  The lot has large murals painted on several of the buildings - the one behind Kate showed a vaguely anemic Luke Skywalker doing battle with Vader.

"Don't be pushy," she said.  "Don't be too smart.  I mean, be smart, but not about the writing.  Make friends who write.  Be smart with them, get your lines out at your dinner parties.  I'm still working on the balance."  We looked up at the mural.  Poor Luke, about to have his hand cut off by the Force.  Stuck up there forever.

"Does Dana ever show her scripts to you, though?  In private."

Kate beamed.  "Dana's really nice with me, actually.  I'm lucky.  One of my jokes made it into the pilot; I called my parents, I was so excited."  I asked her what the joke was, but she wouldn't tell me.  "It'll seem like bragging," she said.  "I don't know you well enough for bragging yet.  Try again next week."

On the way home from the lot, I took the bus in the wrong direction and ended up at the Santa Monica airport.  It's as close as an airfield can get to cozy, with little carts puttering around on the tarmac.  I bet the air traffic controllers there are happy with their jobs - they don't want to eventually get into the cockpit.

Lucky air traffic controllers.

Notes from a stucco workplace.

Any flat surfaces in LA which are not regularly cleaned acquire a thin layer of chalky black dust.  Mary says it is from the big ships that come into the harbour; it makes me feel like the volcanic apocalypse is approaching.

I may come back to this later, but shredding Mary's old patient notes is killing the writer in me.  Every file is a real character - you'd never need to come up with a backstory again!

Cheers

Julia

Travels: Paying It Forward [DAY II]

Wherein I embark on a long walk on the beach and God goes with me.
OK, I get it now.  I get the long walk on the beach thing.  This is a most momentous occasion.

Santa Monica is its own municipality, and the TAP [Transit Access Pass] I bought doesn't work down there.  The bus driver was very kind about it.  "You mus' be a tap dancer," he said.  "We don't tap dance down here."  The buses are otherwise much the same, but the beach is wildly different.  Broad and flat and sandy - real sand, not the rocky kind we have at home.  Twisty grey trees of indeterminate taxonomy line the edge of a steep cliff with steps carved into it, leading down to the flat plane of the beach.

Once you get down, the enormity of the whole place strikes.  On a Thursday morning the beach was fairly quiet, a few runners trudging along near the strandline.  I took off my flip flops and immediately sank a good three inches; I had thought perhaps my feet would act as small snowshoes, but the sand is so fine and soft any weight just plummets.  Anakin Skywalker would enjoy it.  As I trundled slowly down the beach, a parasailer wafting overhead, one of the few sunbathers caught my eye and I smiled.

"Come here, sweetie," she called, and I could see her front tooth had been replaced with a silver one.  She was wearing a bikini and worn-out running sneakers.  I hurried towards her.  "It's okay to smile!" she said happily.  "You having a good day?"  I nodded and thanked her.  "God bless, God go with you," she said, and I turned away to walk and watch the parasailer.

I hadn't gone more than a couple dozen feet when the voice called me back.  "Sweetie!"  The woman was waving at me; I turned around.  "Do you have any money?" she asked when she got close.

I am fairly used to this at home.  "A little," I said, and reached into my purse.  She had a bag of her own, and was rummaging in it as well.  I paused, curious, and she pulled out a wad of dollar bills, proferring them to me.  "Here, take this.  Take it and go with the Lord."  I politely told her that I had plenty of money to get home.  She shook the bills at me insistently.

"Do you live in the desert?" she asked.


I did not know what to say.  I nodded.

"Only take the money if you need it.  Do you need it?"  I shook my head and closed her hand over the bills.  She smiled, turned to return to her blanket, then ran back towards me, her untied sneakers kicking up sand.

"I just want you to know, that - I didn't, you know, give you that because of anything about you.  The Lord is in me, is all.  He just got up in me and told me to give it to you."  I opened my arms for a hug - she beamed.  "God is good!" she said.  "I love you!"

Nearby, a man in a full-on Ghostbusters jumpsuit was shuffling up and down the beach with a metal detector.

Writing notes from a windy beach.
Too much to see, not enough time to write.  Point form for now.

- Walking down the shore was kind of like playing real-world Where's Waldo.  Lots of weird stuff.
- Four separate mom-and-baby-outdoor yoga classes under the trees on Ocean Avenue.  Everyone appears very fit here.
- Line cooks, still in their kitchen whites, playing soccer in the covered parking lot of a hotel.
- A store with beautiful pottery in the window and no entry door that I could find.
- Three men in beige jumpsuits and yellow plastic rain hats ducking in and out of the surf with metal detectors.
- Huge brown pelicans swooping over the waves at the shore.  One landed a couple of feet away from me near a beach umbrella and eyed it balefully before bobbing its neck and ascending with a weird clumsy grace.  They are really enormous.
- More bird sightings: cowbird, what looked like it might have been a curlew, and mystery tracks in the sand.  The pigeons on the beach struggled to stay on top of the sand just like me, especially a club-footed one that left uneven tracks.  There are also a bewildering assortment of gulls - of the red-billed, mottled, and enormous varieties.
- Los Angeles squirrels are much braver than the ones at home.  They are brown underneath and have smaller, rounder faces.
- A couple dug into the sand like a reclining chair alone on the beach.
- At the Santa Monica Pier Amusement Park, the World's First Wind Powered Boardwalk Game.
- Along the pier itself, two carts side by side, both selling hand-drawn depictions of people's names.  The proprietors were glaring daggers at one another.

There was more, but it is already being whisked away by the fog.  Next time I will bring my camera.

Cheers
Julia

Travels: Your Bank Of America [DAY I]

Wherein I find five dollars and the Veteran's Act is put on display.

The Bank of America is the devil, says Mary, but it is within walking distance.  Mary has an account there already and she knows a few of the tellers.  Inside, the bank is neutral and clean, with a collection of red chairs near the entrance.  As we sit down, a ragged-looking man in a canvas jacket stands and brushes past us.

Mary beckons over one of the tellers, a youngish man with blue eyes whose nametag announces him as Beau Kasinsky.  I have never met a Beau before.  They exchange pleasantries.  On the ground near my feet is a crumpled bill.  American bills are much less exciting than our Monopoly money, but five dollars is five dollars.  I smooth it out a bit dumbly, then present it to Beau with the appropriate I found this on the floor caveat.  He laughs and calls his supervisor, 'Nick' - no last name on his tag - who nods jovially and presses the bill into my hand.

"I think the person who dropped it left," I say awkwardly.  "Does it belong to the bank now?"

"Nah, you're a winner," says Nick.  "The bank can't take it anyway, and I think I know who lost it.  He won't miss it."  He drifts off.  He had strangely blue eyes too - I wonder if our teller's are contactually enhanced.  They are very bright.

Beau leads us past a counter with an Investing and Accounting sign over it: the jowly man seated at the desk talks to himself and pokes at his iPad.  He promises to pick up the Prius at five - he looks pleased.  I doubletake and Mary taps the side of her head, smiles.  "Bluetooth," she says.

The man who was sitting in the red chair when we arrived hovers around the door of the bank before opening it and drifting past us.  He looks haggard close up, mostly bald.  Mary glances at him.  "Oh, I thought that was Steven.  He's not, of course, but he could be.  Wouldn't that have been fun?"  I nod knowingly.  I cannot remember if we know a Steven.  Perhaps Mary is thinking of someone in Rochester.  At any rate, the tall man wanders into the line for the clerk and Beau nods at him.

"If you want to return that money, he's the guy who lost it.  He lives next door, comes in here all the time.  He'll just withdraw stuff and then toss bills away as he walks out.  We try to keep things civil - he's on VA.  Really messed up, poor guy."

"Veterans are the only minority group that get guaranteed health coverage down here," Mary whispers.  "But it's not always enough."  I look at the man again.  He shuffles in slow increments towards the teller counter, though there is no one in front of him.  To our left, Investing and Accounting is asking about Fannie Mae - he looks totally insane, nodding at thin air and tapping on his pad.

"Um, if you want, I can give back the money for you."  Beau holds out his hand and I pull the bill from my wallet.

"Thanks."

He hurries over to the man, tapping him politely on the shoulder.  The veteran's back is turned to me, but Beau comes back and smiles.  "He says thank you."  We finish up with the account and Beau jokes with me about my Canadian response to finding the bill.  "My roommate would be pissed," he says.  He thinks you guys are all crazy socialists up there.  He's very, um, American.  Not like, racist or anything though."

I smile.  "You should tell him you met a Canadian Communist and she gave her money to a homeless guy."

"Yeah, I think I will."  He laughs, shakes my hand and waves us out.  I look back through the glass doors, and the veteran is still standing in line, rocking back and forth on his toes.  His beard is unkempt, and his ears stick out.  A thought occurs to me.

"Mary, when you said he could have been Steven - you didn't mean Mr. Spielberg?"

"Well of course.  He lives just up the block."

We walk back to the car in silence.


Writing notes from a large city.

Los Angeles is one shade greyer than Vancouver.  Enormous dead palm trees recalling Cousin It line the streets, bolstered by ten-foot high concrete retaining walls, and every house looks arbitrarily planted on its street, with no connection to its neighbours.  The primary colour palette seems to be sand, beige and white, with pops of green scattered randomly through the town.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it looks like David Lynch's colour corrector got to it.  The brightest thing I saw today was a garish billboard for Madagascar 3: THREE DEE THE MOVIE stuck on top of a Trader Joe's.

[Unrelated: Trader Joe's is the best.  Why do we not have them at home?]

Cheers
Julia

Relationships: 'Unconditional Love'

Conversations overheard on the bus tend to spark me.  They don't always light, but a little dialog flint-and-tinder wisps off in my lap when I hear people in front of me chatting.  Today two girls were sitting together and talking love, as we are all wont to do.  And one of them, probably in her early twenties or late teens, turned to her friend and said the following words [Arlo Guthrie style]:

"Real love is unconditional."

This concept is not new to me.  Many people have said and written and shouted it in my space over the years, and I don't generally have a verbal response.  Perhaps this is due to the shameful inner voice that pipes up immediately upon its utterance.

Mine sure isn't.