August 27th, 2008
“Son of a bitch, you’re running up the meter!”27 comments
August 20th, 2008
"Hey bro, remember me? You wrote that story about me in the paper."3 comments
August 13th, 2008
“It’s the Californians, man, the Californians are the worst.”15 comments
August 6th, 2008
The middle-aged man I picked up at Vendetta is in a hyperactively verbose lather ...0 comments
July 23rd, 2008
When I step into the obese old woman's apartment5 comments
July 16th, 2008
The obese old woman at Fred Meyer has a bad hip and a wheelchair...8 comments
July 9th, 2008
“...I need to take a shower first and wash all of this blood off.”6 comments
July 2nd, 2008
“So I’ve got these two women in the back of my cab who just refuse to get out...”8 comments
June 25th, 2008
“My friend’s getting divorced, and he’s really drunk,” says the bartender...8 comments
June 18th, 2008
There’s nothing like a good Friday night, and I’m referring to the money.3 comments
[May 4th, 2005] I'm a reasonably bright individual, but I cannot do math. I have a mental block of the impenetrable kind. I am explaining this to my passenger.
A half hour ago, I had picked him up at Union Jacks; we stopped by Napa Auto Parts, then headed for Milwaukie. He's an older guy who either has a Harley or once had one, with a bit of a belly covered by a lurid floral print shirt and a remarkable head of long, thick hair streaked with gray.
The whole way south, we talked about relationships: how some people think I'm weird for being close friends with exes, how his best friends are his exes, too. He said it was probably due to his fondness for strong uppity women, women like me. He managed to make this sound like a compliment rather than a come-on. He asked me what sort of things got me going; we talked about listening to other people's music and playing our own, about books. A pleasant but entirely ordinary conversation.
Now we're sitting in the parking lot of the River Roadhouse, and somehow the subject of stuff I decidedly don't like has come up; math tops that list. And this is where Retired Biker Guy takes flight. He talks about the elegance of math, how it contains some of the few principles that are truly universal, its simultaneous simplicity and complexity. He tells me I'm a beautiful person in tune with the world, so there's no way I couldn't understand it if I really tried.
Then he heads off into the bar, leaving me to do the math to determine just how much he overpaid me.
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