It was a bit later than 10 in the morning when I found myself walking by Sutter St, close if not in Downtown San Francisco. I wasn’t running away from the green canopy- I was wandering aimlessly, giving my brain time to process the current events of self-deception that were deeply based on what I can’t define but as truthful memories of recent months.

I took a left turn on Hyde St. There was only one recognizable figure of a human leaned against the wall, trying to hide his eyes somewhat redden and swollen by tears with his hands covered by the sleeves of his jacket. I wouldn’t have talked to him if he hadn’t a familiar face. I guess familiarity drives empathy. Hell, even my new H&M pants looked like his. Compelling.

Tears. I started to talk to him, trying to calm him down. In the beginning he was reluctant to answer to my questions, but he soon recognized me. And he progressively opened his soul. As this was happening, I couldn’t help but to feel that we had been through similar storylines, though I perceived mine under a slightly more positive light.

Much like me, his life had been going through this series of reckless searches for love. A sequence of heart-striking endeavours, dominated by random attraction. Two times a year -that being a roughly average. His 2012 already had two, the first one particularly absurd. Some weren’t more than platonic. Most of them were not necessarily driven by desperation, but appreciation. He seemed to have been firing bursts of infatuation -sometimes aimlessly. A lot of them were just the ‘create your princess’ type- the infantile approach of projecting imaginary features onto her when barely knowing her. I had been there, too.

But his last and second of the year had been a bit different. He knew her much better than the usual, and the progression of their story had been weird. He realized far too late that he had ‘that kind of feelings’ for her and believed that she had moved on, forgetting equivalent feelings she once had. He seemed to be unable to accept the option of she never having had those feelings. Because it would have meant that he had been clueless, unconnected to her -victim of his own delusion. He believed that that level of miscommunication and detachment would have render most of their interaction valueless… even at a friendship level. It was hard to accept also because some of his memories supported clearly, in most interpretations, what he wanted to believe… for example, the time she was jealous and worried about something potentially happening with another girl. If I was to believe the story he told me, I would have said that his conclusions were coherent enough, and that the timing had not been appropriate.

Nevertheless, he couldn’t remember the last time he felt so sad. “When I lost my pet”- he muttered. Maybe it had something to do with that it was the first time in his life that he wrote “I love you” -and he had to be drunk to do so. The lost opportunity seemed another factor. Anyway, we kept talking. I started to feel like his psychologist. What initially was the declaration of a heartache turned out to expand into lots of underlying causes for his sorrow.

His search transcended the fulfillment of biological needs. It went deeper, into the core of his understanding of the reality. You are born alone, you die alone -he also unwillingly went through his life alone. He couldn’t remember a time in his life when he wasn’t alone. Trapped in an invisible shell, he felt the uttermost loneliness… the one that deprived him from being able to express his emotions and feelings and kept him away from a real connection with other human beings. Paradoxically, as our conversation progressed, we realized that maybe we were developing an emotional connection. Precisely the kind of connection that he (and to some extent, me) was lacking.

Fears. A lot of fears. To see the time flee from the grasp of our hands. To lose what we had left there in the background, while seeking a life that didn’t develop as well as we expected. To realize that most decisions in life that we took were wrong. To be unable to find something special. To be unable not to be alone.

Interestingly, I shared also the trouble he had on understanding his own existence. The confusion, the lack of an identity. A slight kind of detachment from reality. Partially an effect of traveling that much and not having a family around.

His thoughts started repeating- circumscribing the shape of his own distress. There was an upside for this: he basked in sadness, in the comfort of his tears. With each tear he shed he earned the retribution of relief… like erasing temporarily a bit of bad memory.

He, in the end, felt worthless, unattractive, old. And worst of all, isolated in his own long-running delusion and stupidity. A coward that never had the guts to expose his feelings. A coward that had been always rationally repressing his emotions and avoiding real connections with other humans because, in the end, was scared of life itself. Because he had built a wall around himself, a mask that showed a harsher version of himself, partially a consequence of the social rejections suffered on his adolescence that may as well have been caused by random and superficial factors but rooted on the cruelty of others.

Doesn’t everyone feel sometimes a bit like that? Maybe not everybody. But I could understand him to some extent. I started adopting his position. What would I do if I was victim of his despair? What if I couldn’t avoid his fears and his flaws while dealing with life and the others? What if I felt the same loneliness? I deeply felt empathetic with him. But I didn’t want to be him.

I slowly swept my face with my hand. The next glimpse, he wasn’t there. I looked around… there was no sign of him. He had just disappeared. Or maybe he hadn’t ever been there. I dried my cheeks and went back towards the green canopy.

Vent here, madman Hearts Hearts Steepest We meet again Sq Fisherman’s dwarf’s wharf

…

Life isn’t very dynamic, but at least I am being productive. There’s a few projects I currently spend my time on: ratetheperson.com (to be ‘officially released’ quite soon) and a few android games. I have still yet to try to sell the prints I made around a year ago. The possibility of trying to sell things in the Venice boardwalk is quite enticing… though distance becomes a problem in that case. Anyway, it is reminiscent of that dream in Ibiza…

The romantic situation ended up being more complex than it seemed. A lot of things were to blame on a third person, namely G-man. It would take some time to assess the real damage… and to forgive. Actually, sometime I will pour all those events into fiction -while trying to avoid becoming a Danielle Steel. I guess that I craved too blindly for something special… and I ended up adding her last name on my contact list…

Anyway, I can’t promise that I won’t become entangled again in the complexity of the emotions and expectations that infatuation brings. I guess that in this case I will link those events to “Emerald Forest and the Blackbird” -as those days I had been listening to it almost once a day.

The van’s health is degenerating. Yesterday, it started peeing fuel. That lady shouting “don’t start it” wasn’t deterring enough. Heat was a cause… after releasing the pressured air by loosing the fuel cap, it stopped leaking. At any rate, it is a bad sign…

I am afraid of the film “Synecdoche, New York” sharing some common things lately with my life. Accurate and too neurotic. I recently fell sleep while trying to watch it once again. It was fun making Zoran watch that film -well, trying to.

…that responds to cycles.

It is every couple of years when infatuation hits hard -and some parts of it are rationally inexplicable. What kind of details are the cause for those feelings? What is seen in the object of infatuation? I can describe some of those features, but not enough to explain why (she) is so special -and why thoughts about her keep coming back.

I can say that those feelings -while I reckon they aren’t exactly limerence- widely transcend sexual interest. But I can’t deny that sometimes they aren’t more than a fake compound of feelings that are searching for some stability out of need when there’s almost no attraction (that brings the word “homeopathy” to my mind). But both desperation and self-deception don’t stay long. When there’s a response to the attraction, self-deception is tested. When there’s not, the sadness (risen by the loss of hope) ends up fading.

The problem is when the latter stays for more than expected. I guess it is usually aggravated when the response to the attraction is not clear. Clear…

And it is worse when ‘the crush’ has been growing for months… and then you see a chance to put your cards on the table, but miscommunication rules the game.

It could be great if both persons had equal amounts of interest and the ability to manifest it openly- without fearing rejection. For that, the first step would be not to be afraid of rejection. Ironically, exposing your interest openly may be interpreted as desperation or neediness -neither of these features is very attractive.

But I think it is worth exposing your desires. Just giving the truth, without playing games- without smothering either. If we make it so complex in the beginning, how is it going to work? And if the other part has real interest, it should work. Unless there’s a real problem in the communication of expectations and feelings -in which case, it won’t be worth it either…

Anyway, it seems that in my case, there’s always too much disparity of feelings with the other one. Sometimes the other way around -but those times I don’t write about it.

Infatuation seems a damnation more than anything else.

PS: if translated to Spanish there would be a cut with quite an intension.

Day of lies Flow

…

I have no intention other than rant about software in this post. I feel obligated to warn the possible reader, as it is a very uninteresting topic.

First of all, I can’t stand synergy. Every version -whether beta or stable- has innumerable bugs. “Well, it is open source, so go and find them”. True. Maybe it is unfair to criticize FOSS. But, nevertheless, it is a source of many frustrations. And going through the code trying to solve the bugs doesn’t seem very practical timewise.

Anyway, synergy is not the only piece of software that produced an anguish that I can only compare to some printers and Microsoft Word. The second contender is Eclipse. I wish everything was about C, Assembler and C++ and things like Java had never existed -I know, it wouldn’t be very practical. Back to Eclipse, the lack of performance (in both speed and memory terms) and the proclivity to crashes (in the many different configurations I am working with [OS, JVM, etc]) is appalling. I know that many people are quite happy with Eclipse. I am still trying to.

In the third place, Inkscape. Its inconsistencies made me lose a lot of time. Crashing, not allowing to save, et cetera. Inkscape and Gimp. I have better experiences with the latter (and we will wait more years for the 2.8 to come)… but as much as I like them and would like to feel grateful of having them for free, I think that they aren’t ready for the prime time… and they carry with them heaps of frustration.

I could keep on criticising. The next one would have been the whole Ubuntu 11.10 distribution… but I never upgraded (in my main linux computer). Better to stay with Gnome 2.

“Get out” -kept shouting the stupid bouncer of The Fox and the Hounds. His voice was irritatingly loud as if he thought that he was part of the military and the clients of the pub had the obligation of tolerating his offensive behaviour. He was, indeed, an uneducated douchebag.

The human interactions continued in the street, but not for long. It was time to get back and beat that Super Mario level that we were stuck on. Shawn was as drunk as everybody- but nobody had known him for more than five minutes… and he was going to become victim of the (slightly paranoid) suspicion that was going to rise afterwards.

After some absurd choreography involving “mushroom” poses and one-leg hops we bid farewell to Patricia, Lisbeth and Ana. The void they had left wasn’t to be filled by anybody else. A void parking spot.

So there we were, when I tried to prove (and I was somehow successful on that) that nobody chooses the shortest path to the apartment on the first try. And Kateryna tried, while Aldijana, Amadeo, Gagan, Shawn and I followed.

But she did a right turn that wasn’t right. That right turn opened a door- a door from where an intoxicaded female would appear. She, nude, with a porn star body, offering it explicitly. Hot. Very. Body. Not the face though.

She actually went for Shawn first. At some point Aldijana had started recording with her camera, as she did many times that night… so there’s a bunch of material there. Actually, that seemed the main reason for Layla -the presumably intoxicaded porn actress- entering my apartment after the refusal of Shawn. At that stage I felt that they were invading my personal space. I wasn’t scared (because everything seemed under control) but shocked… and dazzled by the sexual availability and explosivity that she showed. Rationally, there were many reasons not accept the offer: lack of familiarity, STD’s, et cetera. But the animal instincts contradicted that thoughts. Anyway, as I expressed afterwards, I would prefer to record an orgy with people that I know and appreciate than sex with an absolutely unknown -albeit hot- stranger. And I’m not even sure that I would be comfortable in the former either…

So we had that girl, trying to put some logic in what she was saying -trying to see if Aldijana “the Hot Mama” had recorded something. As an investigation technique she offered herself for recording additional footage. And Shawn was about to accept that offer bringing the cell phone out. But she declined, as she was just trying to get to know if there was a camera. That’s understandable as actresses have to be concerned about their image, and I didn’t she her signing a release. But it was her fault to be intoxicated and run nude, asking for sex, through the corridors. Anyway, no harm done.

After a few minutes of incoherent communication and lies about nationalities (minutes in which Gagan destroyed my anonymity pointing at me as the tenant of the apartment) she left. Gagan instilled more concerns about the situation by saying “I think you’ll be robbed soon”. At that point, I wasn’t very comfortable. Shawn entered the bathroom… Nikola’s bathroom. I was pissed because I didn’t want anybody to use that bathroom -as Nikola deserves the same respect that he shows.

Amadeo then said that he had seen Layla in the pub. Then, a lot of theories were thought of… the suspicions reached a paranoid level with the theory of that Shawn and Layla knew each other and everything had been staged with evil purposes. That theory was immediately deemed remote, but was an expression of the present uncomfortability. Actually, I know that travelling for so long had changed how reluctant of trusting anybody without a reason I was… though I don’t know the direction of the change.

It was then time to ask Shawn to get out. It wasn’t very cool to kick him out with the beer that I just opened for him… but well, I guess that it was late enough to justify such a thing. And he didn’t seem to fit very well in the plans for the rest of the night -he accidentally threw food in the floor when the plan was to accidentally spill beer and coke. Better safe and (slightly) sorry.

So we beated that level, and played our personal pictionary. The labyrinth of corridors of ArchView awaits, with many new adventures.

PS: Then I researched about that porn actress. Apparently she has a bunch of porn flicks… she’s… well… :/ !!!

And other year is gone -this one as strange as many others.
The last two months haven’t been quite productive. I guess I can consider them as the period needed for settling down.
They were fun months though. And one of the reasons were the ‘surfers’ that stayed here… Neven [hk], Samantha [tw], Luisa & Arianna [it|ca]…
Not many resolutions for the next year: to get closer to a healthy lifestyle, and to start doing what I came to do.

– Do you play guitar?
– More or less…
– Which fret for the E?
– Ein? Open 1st and 6th.
(assuming a standard tuning, so it would be only in one of the guitars that I have)
– No, but as barre chords…
Silence.
– Is on the fifth. F on the first, G on the third and A is on the fifth.
He seemed pretty content with his answer. More than to see if I really played guitar, I felt like he was trying to prove that I didn’t know something that he knew, reaffirming his knowledge. But I was considering that the question was incomplete, considering the different tunings and number of strings… in a 8 string with standard tuning, I would play the lowest A major chord starting on the third fret of the 8th string.
– I don’t know why you ask such a trivial question.
And it is… if he had been asking for the intervals on a mixolydian flat 6… well, at least it would have been more fun -though the reason for asking (‘testing’) would have remained as pointless.

–

It kind of reminded me of another guy asking “how much is 13 times 13”, trying to prove his skills answering his own simplistic questions… while I was startled at the possible reasons that made them ask those in the first place -and afterwards impressed by the satisfaction that answering their own trivial questions generated.

A guy with a wheelchair -let’s call him Rod Neck- gets out of the 7/11 at Studio City. When he’s trying to put his wheelchair in his pickup, another guy approaches him. Darker skin, smaller, wearing a kippah. Let’s call him Hashim Yiu. As he approaches Rod, his intentions aren’t shown clearly- but it doesn’t look like he wants to steal anything from Rod.

– Get off me! -says Rod.
– I was trying to help you, trying to help you -Hashim replies, with a strong Middle West accent.
– I don’t understand what the fuck you’re talking about. -Rod says.

At this point, we can say that the confrontation was clear. Both start insulting. The reader may decide know which dialog lines were said by the redneck or the jew. It is easy.

– Speak fucking english.
– Go back to your country. (I consider this one particularly easy, as most dumb rednecks have said it at least one hundred times in their lifes)
– I was trying to help you, %#*@! rat.
– Fucking muslim.
– I am Jewish. am going to fuck you.
– Now I’m going home.

So here are two possible explanations. I think the first one was the real one:

– Hashim Yiu wanted to help Rod Neck, but Rod is so afraid of anyone resembling Islam, that reacted as it was expected: fear drove the confrontation. Hashim felt offended when, what in his mind was a good deed, was rejected so explosively. Instead of ignoring Rod, he wanted to settle that he was just trying to help- And repeating that he was jewish, was a way to become normal (2% of the population).

– Hashim actually had bad intentions. (0.1% estimated chance)