Please choose from ass or cake dessert tray

Had another crazy morning at the J-Hole! This one was not to be believed, it was like everything I've been thinking about all summer just knitted itself together. O.K., so this guy comes walking up to where I'm sitting (the window, naturally) and he's talking. I thought he was talking to someone who was with him but he was talking to me. He didn't look too weird, he was in a spandex bicycle suit and he seemed, well, not un-normal. So he keeps trying to engage me in conversation and I'm like, yeah, uh-huh... and then looking back at my book (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I'm telling you, these days everything in my life has something to do with all these cosmic lessons I've been learning). So finally he says to me, you know, I'm going to keep talking to you. He tells me, this is a coffeehouse and for centuries this is where people go to interact with one another and nowadays people sit there with their computers and don't say anything to each other and the become part of their computers (I assume he means like cyborgs... I looked down at my book, which I really was getting into, and thought am I becoming a book because I'm reading it and not interacting?). Although he was pushy and somewhat annoying, I saw the logic of what he was saying and, in truth, this summer for me has been all about connecting with people, other actors on stage, other people in my life... getting outside of my head, all that stuff. So I was like, O.K., you're talking my language, pal. Plus you seem lonesome and it's not going to kill me to listen to you jabber for a while.

So he starts running his mouth. Running it about the Bush family, running it about what's wrong with this country, all the nonsense that people get too worked up about without really thinking through for themselves some really complex, solid reasons for bitching in the first place. I try to offer an opinion myself, indeed, even to just agree with the guy, and he can barely wait for me to shut up so that he can keep jabbering. (I'm describing it this way because of subsequent events, at the time, he just seemed like he probably hadn't talked to anyone in ages, like he was sick of being silent and had stuff to get off his chest). He told me that he had ridden his bike all over America for eight and a half years and he saw what WalMart and McDonalds are doing to this country and he hates it, and that people should listen to short-wave radio because it's the only way you can get a real perspective on what's going on. Radio Amsterdam, he tells me. I thought to myself, it seems a little odd that you would be walking the earth for that long and feel so cynical... I always thought that if one really took to the byways and really connected with people that they would be less cynical and more hopeful (real connection being the operative concept here).

So he keeps talking. He starts telling me about the conspiracy going on between Hollywood and the American Government to emasculate the American male. He tells me that it's no coincidence that women are always portrayed as the smart ones and men as the dumb ones in the media, because if the government can make all the men feel dumb, then there will never be a revolution. Now, I'm not dumb. I know that since women are the primary consumers of entertainment that that kind of stuff is generally geared towards us, but I suggested to the sexist fellow that since all the American Males are getting emasculated that perhaps women would run the revolution, and he pretended like he didn't hear me. Then he started going on about how it was women's nature to be peaceful and nurturing and men's nature to be warlike and whatever. That's when I took the wheel.

I said that I was concerned about his limited view of what men and women are, that he was selling himself short as well as the women he meets. He kept trying to interrupt, but I decided to continue and say my peace because the poor guy has been walking the earth for eight and a half years looking for connection and he really needed to hear this. I told him that as long as his masculinity is dependent on women's femininity, that it's a total illusion... not worth the paper it's printed on, so to speak. I told him that he was saying he wanted was connection but what he was really asking for was affirmation, which doesn't really connect anyone to anything. I said he'd be a happier person and a deeper person and way more able to make friends if he could see women and men as people instead of as sets of rules pertaining to their genders. Dudes, I don't even know where I was getting half the stuff I was saying, but I'm telling you I was brilliant. Or God was, whoever it was that put those words into my head at that moment.

Well, the guy put his bicycle helmet on after I said the word 'illusion' and I don't know how much he actually heard me say after that point. He seemed really pissed off and I probably pissed him off even more when, as he was leaving, I told him to be good, and not to get too cynical. A guy who had been sitting next to us leaned over and said he was so annoyed by the bicycle guy that he was about to leave when I started in on him and then he decided to stay because he really liked what I was saying, which was nice to hear. I don't know... I mean, this interaction... the protest on Saturday... I wonder how much good it does to try to talk to people who really don't want to hear what you have to say, but I can't help but hope that maybe that guy will be riding along a byway somewhere and the idea will come to him and suddenly make sense. And then, after all these years of riding around looking for fulfillment, he'll totally be able to find it because the way to it will finally be clear, intellectually and emotionally. I mean, a lot of important truths didn't make a damn bit of sense to me the first time I heard them.

Oh, well. Meow!