Friday is a glorious day! It starts out with a good motorcycle ride to work - important therapy after not riding the motorcycle for three day's in a row (during the downpours). It is a bright and sunny day! I talk with Person Roy during the day and find out that a friend of a friend of a friend has chickenpox. Um, I can't remember if I had chickenpox as a kid, but I don't feel any bad effects. And Person Roy also adds, "Ralph and Mark saw you leaving the club with a really cute guy the other night." There is nothing to be said to this. After a reasonably productive day at work I go lift weights, take Nopey for a walk (his first in three days), and continue on for a longer walk to the ATM. When I arrive home I start in on taxes. But it is still a glorious day!
There are way too many telephone calls and cards that arrive on Friday and Saturday (to get ahead of myself a bit), so I head for Fire Island to clear my head. This is an uneventfull night and the music is not even that good, so I'm home in bed by 1:30am or so.
Saturday I get up and do the laundry and consider not going for a bicycle ride because I'm tired and emotionally drained. Besides the chickenpox, who knows how many communicable and infectious diseases I've been exposed to in the last couple of months? But I get out and start pedaling. It is a rewarding ride. As I pass people I point out to them how high the waterline was during our recent rains. These informational comments are met with, "Oh wow! I didn't know it gets that high." The ride is exhilarating. On this weekend, with the river and the air cleaned from all of the rain, it is MY Los Angeles river. It isn't anyone else's - its
The exhilaration of the ride gets the day going and after I buy topical flea medication for Nopester, I perform a few other errands, patch the dining room, and do more web development. I get in a nap in the afternoon which is not interrupted for once. Nopester and I get out for a walk before I drop him off at the house and continue on for a longer one.
For tonight's visit to a club in West Hollywood I choose the tight Levis and a shirt which shows the outline of my trapezius, bicep, and tricep muscles. (These muscles have really responded and grown to the latest HST program. And I have not started in on the antibiotics.) I get to the club a bit early - about 10:20pm - and handle a call from Person T_T before going in.
And what's going on here? I scratch my head in amazement. I am not in the club for 15 minutes and I already have three offers. Three good offers. But the night is young and I'm voluntarily celibate, so the offers are dismissed. The remainder of the night sees a rhythym of about two offers per hour made. And a number of people cannot quite verbalize their offers or choose not to: They stand along side me for a few minutes, entangle their arms around mine, hold on tight to my biceps/triceps, and listen to the music and have fun. I eventually leave near 1:45am. This has been a good visit because the music is good and because security did not have to come and oversee any of my conversations - Person J_VKPI and Person M_P are nowhere to be seen. Though a common friends stops by and asks me who I'm with and doesn't believe me when I say, "Nobody".
I'm up on Sunday morning in time to catch the 20 year old
neigbor for a bicycle ride. "We need to head for the dam like we were
trying to do last time when my spokes broke." So we head up the LA River
to the Whittier Narrows dam. Again, because it has just rained, there's
a fair amount of debris and mud as we cross below streets, but this
is MY Los Angeles river for this entire weekend. We're making a
good pace, as my riding partner says a number of times, because I have
this ecstacy-induced, searing bravado synth laced song in my head from
last night:
Hold me in your arms
Make me feel like something
We finish the forty miles without incident and having crossed paths with
a good number of cyclists who are out enjoying MY Los Angeles
river as well as everyone else's San Gabriel river.
Sunday afternoon I'm wandering aimlessly through a Border's bookstore when I hear my name called. I look up and around and see that it is Person Roy. He's with Ralph and Mark and we have a brief discussion. I try to keep my distance from Mark even if the chickenpox is beyond the infectious stage. I see Person Roy's new car and we talk about other things. And I tell Mark, "Just call me when you want it". He knows what I mean.
After a walk with and without Nopey, I take a Kava root extract and get ready to crash. (Nopey seems to be responding well to the hidden Aleve that I give him occasionally for his hips.) I'm in bed and almost dead to the world by 8pm. Though I wake up occasionally throughout the night - this time a slightly different response from the Kava.
Monday morning starts with an invigorating and brisk walk at 5:45 am. There is the typically light traffic of President's day, but I can unfortunately only make it up to 131 mph on the motorcycle before traffic gets in the way and I have to slow down.