Slip Slidin' Away

What's really neat is the street corners where there are no giant drains; you cannot cross these streets. You can barely drive across them. Boots wouldn't work--dry suits for underwater diving might be okay though. There's a lot of water out there.

Our cleaning lady does a great job of cleaning our house. I don't know what she's using on our hardwood floors, but I can now travel to one end of our house to the other with a simple push at the start. I slide down the floors, stopping only by grabbing on to a door or flattening against a wall. Whee ha! Hardwood surfing! (This is not the same thing as "hard wood surfing," as practiced in clubs all over LA on any given night.)

Rubber-soled shoes squeak on these floors. I don't mean squeak, squeak; I mean SQUEAK! It's highly annoying, so I only wear socks around the house. However, you get no traction with socks, so I go skittering, not unlike a leaf in the road-river out there.

One of the things I always do around this time of year, this being the time of year of get-togethers and family and Christmas cards, is put together a list of people I haven't talked to in the past year (or longer). I always wonder what's become of people. I always want to know how the story comes out.

Today I alighted upon the name of *Amytal, a guy I've known for years, with whom I took classes at Stanford and worked at Apple. Amytal was brilliant (as he had absolutely no problem telling anyone who ever met him, over and over again), although he was smarter and quicker before he started getting heavily involved in drugs.

He got so into various drugs that those of us who knew him pretty well wondered what was going to become of him and his insistent fast-lane lifestyle, which he described as "wanting to live as though he had a trust fund." Which he didn't.

Anyone who knows me from Apple knows who this is.

I haven't seen him since last August, before I came down here for school. I had heard that he was fired from Apple in the early part of last December, although he himself did not find out about getting fired until the late part of last December, because he never showed up at work.

So, because I have this crazy need to check in on people and find out what's ever become of them--an impulse I know is shared by some people who used to know me and check in on these pages from time to time, without saying anything--I sent mail to a mutual friend of ours today asking if there had been a wake and I simply hadn't been invited.

No, no wake.

But close.

Amytal ended up homeless a few months ago, lived off the largesse of friends, and is now living in the rural Bay Area. My friend didn't know with whom or what's happened to him since. Or how Amytal hit bottom (if it even was bottom) a couple of months ago.

Now, of course, I'm more curious than ever as to what's happened to him. But not because I'm concerned. Because of the rubbernecker factor. I want an eye on the life of someone who had a lot of promise who has gone out of his way to destroy himself.

I like to be around people who are either on my level or above me. Why I would even think about contacting someone who's clearly not on my level, or on any level anywhere around me, I have no idea.

(I do know, however, that when I achieve success--most especially, a little bit of fame--Amytal will come find me. He always came looking for me when he wanted something.)