I just gave my copy of Pattern Recognition to a stranger on the bus. I struck up conversation with him because he’d been hassled by the police while we were waiting. Trafficking, I figured. He looked the type. White sports clothes, white glass stud in his left ear, had that attractive young latino look going for him. Perfect black goatee and perfect black hair, though hidden mostly under a bandanna. He asked what I was reading and I told him, inscribed my name and phone number in the front and handed it to him right before he had to get off.
Today’s been busy. I got up a little early but got out a little late from playing phone tag with one of Cale’s friends. She’s been kicked out of her house and I offered my apartment for a few days or at least as a little storage space while she gets her feet under her again. It’s tough to come home and find the locks changed. I understand. My mother’s boyfriend stole my keys once and would hang up when I phoned. Slight differences in essentially the same situation.
Late, for once, was alright though. Raphealla had already been scheduled to open the store for me today so I could hit up the Office Of Vital Statistics for my Change of Name application. So after my back and forth with a crying Chloe, I plucked my ferret out of bed and went down to the Bureau and picked up my form. There was an unexpected line-up, but nothing deadly, just enough to instill me with nervousness about the whole thing.
I brought my ferret because a student of Alastair‘s needed one to map for wire-framing. That all went without a hitch. Skatia was picked up from Hypatia at around 4 o’clock and returned sometime around five:thirty. The students, an Italian couple, were very nice about it and loved him dearly, in spite of the fact that he slept more than he ran around to give them footage. After work, the barflies at the Waldorf, including James, the bartender, adored him too. Spoiled him rotten even, as apparently he has a taste for beer and pecan pie. I’m going to bring him back for visits on quiet nights. It’s a surprisingly comfortable place to spend time. I would never have guessed.
However, I knew full well that the strip club that Mike picked in New West for his Going Away To England Birthday Party tonight is notoriously terrible. Mugs & Jugs it’s called, and the name, I think, explains almost everything. It’s full of tacky lights, atrocious rock music and inhabitants whose parents drank when pregnant. We had an alright time, some of the girls displayed such amazing feats of anti-gravity on the pole that we actually watched them for more than five minutes at a time, though we didn’t get Mike as drunk as everyone had apparently promised him. Nick tried, it’s true, but he was barely slurring when Rick and I, the last ones standing, brought him to the Skytrain. I waved goodbye from the opposite platform then had to go back to get my William Gibson book, Pattern Recognition, that I’d forgotten at the club, dodging vacous drunk skater kids to do so.