Socializing

My two friends and I went to the A this afternoon. Sort of a last minute plan. We met around seven, when the sun was setting. I brought the two notepads I write songs in to show to my musician friend. He took them home to read. There's about 35 songs.

We get to the top, and it's already night. The city lights blink and flicker on. High on the horizon, miles away, we can see the skyscrapers of LA, and the orange glow hanging around the city.

My friend and I decide it's too hot. We take off our shirts. Mine was wet. We sit on top of a water resevoir - like a flat land of concrete - and stare out at the city lights.

Our other friend took a picture of us shirtless, holding up peace signs. Ironically, I guess. Or maybe not. The background is washed-out black, you can't really make-out our faces. However, I think it's my favorite picture I have with that friend.

An older, middle-aged man approaches us. He's got a blinding white headlamp and carries two walking poles. He's wearing knee pads and a loaded backpack. His hiking boots are big.

And for some reason, we get into a conversation with this guy. It begins with talks of mountain lions, and bears, and coyotes. Then we skip over to traffic accidents, and airline disasters, mentioning guns somewhere along the way. He talks over us sometimes. He gets onto rails so much that he sometimes ignores a question I ask. It's impossible to derail him in the middle of a point. I'm trying to be nice to the guy. In my mind, I don't really care about this conversation. I don't care who this guy is, or what his opinions mean. I realize this guy doesn't affect my life in the slightest bit. And there's some power to that.

I gather a few things from him - either inferring or piecing together. He says he has a roommate. He talks about buying houses and flipping them for profit with his brother. His stories of camping in the Sierra Mountains include him and his friends. He seemed reluctant to leave.

Eventually we split the conversation and he leaves. A woman sits behind us on a different part of the concrete resevoir. She confidently chimes in when we're talking about getting Subway. We talk amongst ourselves some more and she leaves.

I comment on how I liked the fact that we didn't exchange names with that man. I couldn't describe how I felt right then to my friends. One of them said I felt romantic, but that wasn't the feeling. It felt more casual, yet more than small talk. I felt as if I stumbled into an honest encounter with another human being.

We head back down ten minutes later. Just for kicks, we piss off the edge of the trail down a steep incline into some bushes. It's black outside, so we need to carry flashlights.

We get around halfway down when we pass the same woman from before. I only glance at her. I see she's a young woman - around our age - and carries a flashlight on her wrist and wears a backpack. She stops to let us pass, and something inside me says, "Hey, this woman wanted to talk to you guys up at the top. Talk to her now." So as I pass her I say, "Are you the woman from before? Up there?" "Depends," she says. "Are you the same guys I talked to up there?" "Yeah, yeah we are." "How was the tarantula?" she asked. We spotted a big tarantula inside a hole near the resevoir. "We took a picture of it. Show it to her," I say to my friend. He starts to get his phone out. "How big was it?" "Not that big," my friend says. "Probably as big as your hand." "Yeah, if your hand was the size of a football," I joked. She was still thinking about the previous thing my friend said. "That's big!" She had a slight, high-pitched accent which I only noticed after a while.

Then I started asking her questions, and we got to talking. Somehow, intentionally, my two friends sped up ahead of us, and we were left going down the trail side-by-side.

Understand that I had no intentions when I first spoke to this woman. No expectations. No false realities in my head. I spoke to her knowing that nothing would come of it. I only felt like talking. Surprising,

We talked for twenty minutes about her life, and to a smaller extent, my life. She had a rushing rhythm of talking without pausing. I ask a simple question, and a whole story comes out.

In the dark, behind our flashlights, I could only get a vague sense of what she looks like. She was about 5'5''. She had dark hair, and a tan face. Most likely Latina. When I turned and saw her shadowed profile, I saw she had a slightly prominent and sharp nose. Her eyes brows were nicely well-kept, I noticed.

We had a bit in common. She told me she had gone to the same community college I went to. Inferring from her college history, she was 25 or 26. She talked about her job, and how losing her job two months ago helped her focus her life into more things she likes to do - such as hiking. She talked about hikes she's done: Santa Monica Mountains, Sierra Madre, a place that had a overhanging boulder called Balancing Rock. She talked about a trail in the Santa Monica Mountains -  found in Malibu, I learned - which takes you all the way up the mountain, At the very top, she said, is a bench which looks out over the ocean. I imagine sitting on that bench - a small and yellow bench - and watching the sun melt into the horizon.

But at the back of my mind, the whole time I listened and asked questions, and followed-up with small 'yeahs' and 'uh-huhs,' I knew that whatever was happening, whatever this was, would not lead me anywhere. I would not start dating this girl because I asked questions and listened to her verbose answers. Judge me if you will. I've resolved myself to this fact: that the harder I try, the less I succeed. There's a power in not relying on other people to change your life for the better. There's a certain power in talking with someone whom you don't a shit about.

We got down to the base of the mountain at last. My friend was looking for his keys, and the woman stood next to us for a few moments. Then she quickly said, "Bye, it was nice talking to you." We said bye, and she left.

We went to Subway right after. Only one of my friends went. He commented about the girl. "So what were you guys talking about?" "Oh, just stuff," I said. We ordered from a very smiley employee - a woman probably in her late 20s. She joked with us a lot. I sometimes didn't understand what she was saying because of her choppy accent.

We sat down to eat. It was around 10 o'clock at that time. We started eating our sandwiches when the hiking girl came up again. "So, was she cute?" my friend asked. "It wasn't like that." "I know it wasn't," he said. "I just didn't care. I'm at a point now where I have no expectations that anything will happen with women." "You impressed me," he said. I asked him why. "Because you actually socialized with her. Some people can't just have a conversation with a woman. Sometimes I just wanna have a conversation with a girl - and not a flirty one. If I do have a normal conversation, someone always has to ask, 'Was she cute?' I'd say, 'Yeah, I guess.' Then they'd say, 'Then why didn't you get her number?' I wasn't trying to get her number, we were just talking." We laughed. He complimented me on how far my socializing skills have come. "What do you mean?" I said. "A few years ago," he said, "we were somewhere, a CVS or someplace, and we were at the check-out line." I interrupted him. "I know where you're going with this. I remember being angry at you for making a big deal out of this small story." He laughed. "We were at the CVS, listening to the music over the speakers. You were waiting to pay. The cashier was listening to the music, too. She was nodding her head a bit, and said, 'I really like this song.' And do you remember what you said?" I didn't remember exactly. "You said, 'Yeah.'" He couldn't help but laugh. "That's all you said. 'Yeah.' It was so rude." "So what?"I said. "I feel like that's such a minor detail, and you made a big deal about it." He finished, "Back then, I knew that you couldn't socialize around other people. Today, you proved that you actually can."

The smiley Subway lady came out from the back, and was dragging a plastic trash can to the door. I spotted her and said, "Do you need help?" She smiled, and meekly said yes.

We lifted it by the handles and stepped outside. It wasn't really heavy. I told her this, and she laughed. I also told her that because I work with my dad gardening, I'm used to lifting heavy trash cans around - you know, to dump out the grass clippings. We walked around the building to the dumpster. She opened the gate, and we lifted the can and dumped the trash. She thanked me about a billion times, and even offered me a free drink or juice - which I politely turned-down. I did, however, take up her offer to wash my hands at the sink.We then said a billion more thank yous and you're welcomes before I sat down to eat again.

When we left Subway, we went to a friend's small get-together. There were about 8 or 9 guys there, all of whom I knew. Most of whom I don't care for. I told a story, which went over well. I can't remember the last time that happened. (The story, in case you were wondering, was about a video of professional body builder Ronnie Coleman, right before a big lift, saying, "Everybody want to be a body builder, but ain't nobody want to lift this heavy ass weight!" And then proceeds to squat 800lbs.) Everything was chill at the get-together. I started to feel sleepy. Towards the end of the night, the guy I went to Subway with said to me, regarding the hiking girl again, and my rudeness at CVS years ago: "Today, you proved to me that you can socialize with other people and not be rude." "I don't have to prove anything to you anyway," I said, which I whole-heartedly meant. He said, "Well, you did it anyway!"

3:01 AM