all this in one day.

Yesterday I woke up around one in the afternoon and went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology to meet up with my class. I've been there several times, and was originally supposed to go to New Mexico this weekend, but I went hoping to get some useful talking done with the class. I sat and chatted with David Bunn my professor and watched a movie about Russia and micro-miniatures. Sometimes the subtitles would keep rolling even when no one was talking, and sometimes the narrating lady would pop into the screen from below the camera frame, in an odd transition. I liked the point of it, the dryness and the ambiguity, but I still fell asleep for five minutes. At the front desk I asked where my class had gone, and this weird lady looked at me with such intensity—I thought she was mad at me for cutting in front of her or interrupting or something. And then she bursted out with "Stephen Torrential! You don't remember me?!" I went up to her like an unfamiliar animal and blatantly stared, trying to figure her out, while she went on about how her hair has changed. It was Nadine Rambeau, fellow CalArts creative writer, recently graduated. Then, our class plus Nadine went to the India Sweets and Spices (Culver City location) just next door. It's as good as the other one, but in different ways—no rasmalai, but better meal selection. Also pricier though, and a smaller market. And the mango lassis are better. I was the last to sit down, and we were all gathered around a table outside. The wind blew strong, so when little feelings of wetness hit my face, I rightly thought it was from the forks and spoons of others at the table. I went and grabbed napkins, wiped myself off, then continued eating and talking. I still kept feeling tiny amounts of splattering on my face, or noticed something fall near my food. Finally, a big piece of something splashed into a girl's curry, which then splattered on our professor's face, and into my now-empty plate, and we all became silent and looked bewildered. The curried professor mutely motioned upwards, and we all saw: on powerlines twenty feet above us, a flock of fifty-or-so pigeons. Later, at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, I was still horrified and began to whine about it, and this girl in my class said when it happened I had this look on my face that made her want to cradle me in her arms and rock me.

Came home after that and talked to this guy online who previously told me in confidence he has HIV. In the original context, it was in a sentence also containing "it's good we've never had sex because..." I asked him why his profile still misleadingly said "HIV-" on it. He said it doesn't matter because he doesn't put anyone at risk and hasn't had sex since he got it. And according to him, at least half the gays in WeHo and online in LA have it and lie about it. I've heard that statistic before and wouldn't be terribly surprised if it were true. He also said he hasn't sought medical help, and plans to die "the Philadeplhia way." I told him that's like driving drunk on purpose and that he was a fool.

Fell asleep for two hours, and when I awoke, Alex Castle and I journeyed down to Long Beach to go to a pool party that I was invited to accidentally by some guy on MySpace. The invite said things like "Heated Pool, don't pee in it!" and that it was clothing optional, so I was there. We pulled up and parked; the house was directly across from the beach and looked like it was designed by Thomas Kinkade. We let ourselves in, since no one was inside the house. We walked from room to vacant room, leaving it to the imagination what kind of people we were about to encounter, feeling like burglars. Then the doorbell soon rang, and Alex went merrily to the door, and we were rich people for a few moments as we let in two guys who later turned out to be party crashers. Next we went toward the pool area where everyone was at. Within the first five minutes of meeting the host of the party, he told us how he was in a relationship with a French guy and made him get circumcised. You the reader may or may not be aware of this: adult circumcision is a painful process that takes over a month to recover from. Your penis gets bandaged for several weeks, and every time you need to piss you dread it. Shortly after this guy went through that for him, he dumped the guy! I was inwardly outraged, and his only defense was that he paid for the procedure. Then we sat by the chips and I got fat on French onion dip, and then we jumped into the pool (in swimsuits!), well into jacuzzi temperature. A big black girl with huge boobs was fully naked in the water, and when I conversationally praised the nice warm pool, she cooed "uhh huhh!" They were blasting the same playlist on repeat, songs by Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, and "California Love", during which these dancing naked guys would contort around the fire and shout along to the line "Long Beach in the house!" For me it was a formal welcoming to Long Beach a long time coming. Soon a bunch of people arrived at once, and the host said he didn't know a single one of them. After they were told to leave, I yelled out "Don't leave, we like cute crashers!"; at this point I had had my fair share of Jägermeister and lime juice. It was true though that they formed a big line at the alcohol and in no way blended in: a bunch of tough gangsta Latinos in a faggy fairie nudie party. One of the crashers called out to a friend that they were going to "the lot," and then Alex and I wanted to go with them, wondering what kind of place "the lot" was.

I was about to succeed in trying to convince this one guy to get naked in the pool with me when the host came up and said, "oh no you don't, you need to go to the hospital." What? I thought they were tricking me into drinking more, but when I got to the kitchen, there was Alex Castle with blood pouring out of his head all over his body, smiling and surrounded by the drunk and concerned. He had diven head first into the pool. He felt fine though, even if there were two gashes in his head, one one-inch-long, the other two inches, perpendicular like a cross. They thought I was too drunk to drive and called an ambulance. When the fire department arrived, they argued with the host guy as to whether the ambulance was entirely necessary. The fireman made it sound as though it was a waste of energy, resources and our own money to get one if Alex could be driven or have a taxi. The host guy was mad that the guy wouldn't just do his job and take Alex away, thinking him lazy and intrusive, and insisting he'd pay, no problem. Then, I said we could call a taxi, and then the fireman passive-aggressively insisted on taking him anyway, and off they went. I lingered for an hour or so more, finding myself in debaucherous scenarios with the guy I was trying to seduce in the pool. On the other couch in the same room that that was happening, I could see the big black naked girl getting banged by a Japanese guy. And later, I got even more debaucherous underwater with a guy who ended up being eighteen. Oops! Why do I always get nasty when my friends are in the hospital?

Eventually I half-drunkenly drove around Long Beach until a Google text message told me where the hospital was. When I came in, the man at the service desk told me I couldn't visit Alex because I wasn't family. I said, "Well, I'm his best friend and practically family, and I'm his ride home, too." He said, "Well, he didn't list anybody on the form." Then I said, "Well, why don't you talk to him then," and handed him my cell phone witth Alex already on it. I came to his bedside just in time for the head stapling. First there was an injection of something numbing, and then the stapler was pulled out, and click-click-click, click-click, and so on. The doctor let me hold my cell phone an inch away from his head as I photographed and as he stapled. Then, I conversed with the lady in the neighboring bed through the opaque curtain as we waited for Alex's release. It started out because she had gotten stapled when she was c-sectioned. Now she was here for heart issues. Her name was Elaine, 54 years-old and vaguely sad because her boyfriend wasn't going to visit her. She said he has one eye, that they both are living in a public park, they're both on crack, and that he's too busy to visit her because he's sleeping. She said she'd dump him if he didn't visit come morning. Then she told us three jokes. Question: "What do you call a black prostitute with braces?" Answer: a blackendecker pecker wrecker. And she gave me a shirt she found with a quote from Jesus on the back.

On the way home, I accidentally drove us through LA harbor, traversing a tall bridge amongst industrial wilderness in twilight. We passed downtown LA just before the sun showed itself, the buildings looking uncharacteristically glowy and polished in not-yet-smogged air.