Innocent bystanders
In any action movie worth its salt, there's a point when some nebbish carrying a load of packages gets caught up in a chase scene. One moment he's enjoying daily life, half asleep, and the next he's sprinting, running with a swagger because of the fifth of bourbon he's carrying, chasing some camel-masked idiot in a shopping cart that seems destined for a perilous crash at the bottom of the cliffs by the ocean.
I mention this largely because it happened. (The bourbon was Knob Creek. There was a sale.)
I'm not really certain where this story starts. It might be a week ago, when I, through a series of somewhat strange coincidences, walked into a birthday party for a girl I had only met twice. It might be somewhere in the vast, sleep-deprived wasteland that was this week's delightful collection of problem sets, But really, I think it begins with the old man outside the liquor store.
Anyone over the age of fifty in Isla Vista may without prejudice be assumed to be a hobo, and the guy looked the part, down to the over-warm winter coat and the guitar. And he was collecting change, said it was to help the homeless and promote social justice. He turned out to be one of the vaguely cool ex-hippies that frequents areas near housing communes and organic food co-ops. I'd said hi to him a few times, and dropped off whatever cash I had spare. We started to talk blues and folk guitar - the name "Mississippi John Hurt" is a shibboleth in some circles - and then I mentioned that I was a physicist.
Now, normally I tell people this reluctantly (although I've found that "I'm a theoretical physicist" stonewalls salesmen who try a "friendly talk" pitch very effectively), and doubly so for strange random people. After all, I take enough shit from the guy on the corner screaming about vegetarians and minerals for hours on end. So you can understand my surprise when he starts rattling off Einstein's field equations. "I took general relativity from Kip Thorne at Caltech, back when his book was just some typed lecture notes."
You know, I don't chat with many people I meet on the street. Maybe more than average. But the odds against running into one who knew Feynman have got to be ludicrous. So you can understand a certain consequent confusion.
Which might explain why, when one of my friends showed up on the doorstep at half an hour past a reasonable bedtime (even by my standards) yelling that it was time to go out and get drunk, I agreed.
I should probably tell more of this story - at least mention the broken vacuum cleaner, the drunken nerdery and horrible dancing, the fact that Seattle came to scope out the stars at the Santa Barbara Film Festival and brought along its weather, but I won't. The reason is that the crazy stories started to kind of make sense. Like living in this place was more than an accident caused by its location next to the university, like I was going to understand a lot more about why my life works - and when it doesn't.
So if there's a tag, that's it: I'm understanding things better. Except for the camel mask. That's still just fucking creepy.
I mention this largely because it happened. (The bourbon was Knob Creek. There was a sale.)
I'm not really certain where this story starts. It might be a week ago, when I, through a series of somewhat strange coincidences, walked into a birthday party for a girl I had only met twice. It might be somewhere in the vast, sleep-deprived wasteland that was this week's delightful collection of problem sets, But really, I think it begins with the old man outside the liquor store.
Anyone over the age of fifty in Isla Vista may without prejudice be assumed to be a hobo, and the guy looked the part, down to the over-warm winter coat and the guitar. And he was collecting change, said it was to help the homeless and promote social justice. He turned out to be one of the vaguely cool ex-hippies that frequents areas near housing communes and organic food co-ops. I'd said hi to him a few times, and dropped off whatever cash I had spare. We started to talk blues and folk guitar - the name "Mississippi John Hurt" is a shibboleth in some circles - and then I mentioned that I was a physicist.
Now, normally I tell people this reluctantly (although I've found that "I'm a theoretical physicist" stonewalls salesmen who try a "friendly talk" pitch very effectively), and doubly so for strange random people. After all, I take enough shit from the guy on the corner screaming about vegetarians and minerals for hours on end. So you can understand my surprise when he starts rattling off Einstein's field equations. "I took general relativity from Kip Thorne at Caltech, back when his book was just some typed lecture notes."
You know, I don't chat with many people I meet on the street. Maybe more than average. But the odds against running into one who knew Feynman have got to be ludicrous. So you can understand a certain consequent confusion.
Which might explain why, when one of my friends showed up on the doorstep at half an hour past a reasonable bedtime (even by my standards) yelling that it was time to go out and get drunk, I agreed.
I should probably tell more of this story - at least mention the broken vacuum cleaner, the drunken nerdery and horrible dancing, the fact that Seattle came to scope out the stars at the Santa Barbara Film Festival and brought along its weather, but I won't. The reason is that the crazy stories started to kind of make sense. Like living in this place was more than an accident caused by its location next to the university, like I was going to understand a lot more about why my life works - and when it doesn't.
So if there's a tag, that's it: I'm understanding things better. Except for the camel mask. That's still just fucking creepy.
