On Thursday we get word that a Los Angeles county worker, who previously had said "...don't waste my time with resourcescout...", is trying to get hold of us. She wants to have a presentation, meeting, and demonstration of the product "...anytime, at your convenience..." This starts an entire round of telephone calls amongst the resourcescout partners as we try to figure out what has changed her mind and what her motivation is. The resourcescout partners agree to meet on Monday night to finalize any material for a mid/late week meeting. We are excited about our prospects.
As I'm dozing off to sleep and making telephone calls to Dao and Person M_P, Brandon calls. He has postponed his return to pharmacy school in New York for another week. Joe and Brandon are headed to a club in West Hollywood tonight and as they invite me to go, they also admit that they are lost. Rather than taking the I5 (off the I605) they took the 210 freeway - ending up in Pasadena. After countless times driving to West Hollywood, Joe and Brandon have become lost! But I give them directions on how to get back to familiar territory. The phone rings about 5 minutes later and they say that they cannot find the 110 Southbound but as we speak they finally see the sign for it. Every outing with Joe and Brandon is an adventure!
Friday sees another drifting day at Northrop Grumman prior to a late night ice hockey game. This is another game where I'm playing against the team that I used to play with. We trail for the majority of the game at 1-0 and 2-1, but we finally get a 3-2 lead and hold it until the end for the win. I get home and lay down near 1am on Saturday morning but I cannot sleep. So the light goes on and I continue reading a book about The Three Stooges. I don't know when I finally decide that I am ready to sleep.
On Saturday I get out for a good bicycle ride, cleanup the rose garden (click for "before" and "starting growth" pictures), and do the laundry. Person M_C calls and offers me Ice Dogs tickets for tonight. But then he changes his mind and says that they are Kings' tickets. Another call later and he decides that they are, indeed, Ice Dogs tickets and that he needs directions to the Long Beach arena. I have to decline the tickets, but I do ask Person M_C if he's going to let me listen to him pee again. And he starts laughing and has a hard time stopping.
In the middle of Saturday afternoon I'm a bit restless so I go work in the yard improving the water flow to various sprinkler heads - this task having been on my list of things to do for quite a while. Seeing that the ground is soft, I pull out the maul, and start chopping at the roots of a rather large rubber tree that I want to remove. Eventually I get tired and go back inside the house and have a good nap.
Following a good session with the weights I call Person J_VKPI and reinforce "Be ready at 9:50" as we head to a club in West Hollywood. Person J_VKPI is only 8 minutes late. We head to the club and Brandon calls and says that he won't be coming because he's sick. The club is empty to start with and there are no acquaintances present. But then the fun begins.
Person J_VKPI and I start a discussion about our lives. And he starts getting upset at the people that I'm hanging out with. We find a relatively quiet corner in the club to continue the discussion. Person J_VKPI becomes more heated and more unreasonable as the conversation continues. I continue to calmly listen and respond to Person J_VKPI's unreasonable thoughts. "I spend time with other friends just as I spend time with you - there isn't anything funny going on." Before long a couple of security people come by and hover near us - probably alerted to the fact of a heated conversation (on one side) by a patron who was previously following the conversation and recently left. Eventually Person J_VKPI sort of calms down and goes to dance. I wander back into the club and now, of course, how could I possibly have thought that this evening was going to return to normal, Person M_P walks in.
Person M_P is surprised to see me there and I am surprised to see him there. I tell Person M_P that I am here with Person J_VKPI as friends - nothing more and nothing less. Now Person M_P and I are finding a corner to talk. And pretty soon the security people come over again and give me a "How many more times and with how many different people is this going to happen tonight?" look. I calmly smile at the security people and they see that I am under control even if the people who want to talk with me are not. And I explain to Person M_P, "I spend time with other friends just as I spend time with you - there isn't anything funny going on even if some of them are exes." The most surprising thing of this entire set of discussions, back and forth between Person J_VKPI and me and between Person M_P and me, is that other people want to get involved and start a conversation with me. But we won't worry about the psychology involved in those desires.
The evening proceeds from the low level of quality as explained above
and takes a turn into the gutter. A very deep gutter. We cannot go into the
details of the remaining hours of the evening here. The points to be made
are:
Person J_VKPI is being unreasonable at wanting to be involved in decisions regarding
who I hang out with and who I spend time with even though Person J_VKPI is just a
friend now and there is nothing funny going on with anyone.
Person M_P is being unreasonable by extrapolating too far with regard to what
our relationship (if I can use this word here) is and by being jealous of me spending
time with other people when there is nothing funny going on.
Ray is being unreasonably naive in assuming that he would be able to spend time
with friends at clubs listening to music and hanging out without his trust being
called in to question when there is nothing funny going on.
Nopey provides the following paragraph:
before he's getting up on Sunday morning. The neighbor comes by on his bicycle and pretty soon Ray is leaving to go ride. But this ride doesn't last as long as the usual ones with the neighbor - Ray is returning to home a bit after an hour of riding. He doesn't look happy. And I see that he pulls the rear wheel off the bicycle, so he must have broken more spokes. After he returns from somewhere in the truck - without the bicycle wheel anymore - Ray lays down on the couch and starts crying. Maybe the bicycle ride was short today because his hips are hurting. After a while we go play in the backyard as Ray waters the roses. (And he keeps yelling at me to get out of the fenced off area where the roses are.) But we play for a while and then I need to go rest.Near 1pm I am headed to K-Town on the motorcycle to return a backpack and set of keys to Person J_VKPI that he left in my truck from the previous night. We have a continued discussion on friends, enemies, acquaintances, how they interact, and how much say one friend should have in another friend's life. Person J_VKPI wildly disagree on this last point. At least this time the security people are not called to hover around this discussion. But Person J_VKPI maintains his unreasonable demands.
Seeing that I am in K-Town on the motorcycle, I make it a doubleheader on the way home by stopping in at J-Town (or, more appropriately, Little Tokyo). I wander around for a few minutes, check out a bookstore, and just ponder the situation that I am in.
On Sunday night Dao calls and postpones the 6pm meeting that we were going to have.