Gold Latch Motor Inn

I agree to meet with Doug at the Gold Latch Motor Inn because I am a fantastic human being and his girlfriend just left him. More because his girlfriend just left him. A bit of emergency apathy, apparently. He called me up at the end of last week and told me what was going on. Being the good friend that I am I told him we should go out and talk and maybe do some stuff, “just because.”

He sounded miserable, and not too keen on actually seeing me in person. I guess I didn’t so much “agree” to meet him, as “con” him into coming along and talking to me about his personal problems face to face. Whatever. I was in a great mood. Partially because I had a date that night. Also my good mood and optimism towards the prospect of walking into the emotional minefield that is my friend Doug had to do with the good weather we've been experiencing here. Typically springtime in California is dreary but lately sun. It's amazing what sunshine can do for a person's mood. The drive out to that place, normally a pale and lonely muddle of mists and raindrops spreading little puffs of death steam as they hit the ground. Is today a testament to the beauty of the natural world. Tall pine trees vomit into the sky, the bronze sun smiles on the land making every dewdrop in the trees and on the road sing with melodiously sparkling diamonds.

When I arrive, Doug is already there. He’s sprawled out on the bed. Plopped, actually. I’d wager he hasn’t moved since he walked in the door, except to grab the remote. The room smells like disinfectant, cigar smoke and starched blankets. It’s bathed in brown and orange light that blurs the edges off of everything, which actually does the room justice since I notice that the moldings in the corner are crumbling.

“Nice room,” I say. Doug does not look up.

“Fancy. We could’ve gotten one rather less sumptuous I s’pose.“

Doug, for those of you who don’t recall,

is a buddy of mine who is a scientist, or some sort of engineer. I don’t really know what it is that he does but I know that he has told me on multiple occasions. Most of those occasions involved me not paying attention to him because I was trying to drink enough liquid courage to go and talk to some foxy redhead over there. And this, in spite of how discourteous it sounds, it is probably this that Doug likes about me. He thinks of me as a bit of a Don Juan. A braggadocio. I think of him as a really good excuse to stock up on throw-away lines like “a zero dimensional one-vertex point has no mass, and its size is undefined.” Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy. They’re all Rocket Science to me. But Doug’s a cool guy to have around. Even if he is looking a little chubbier and pastier than I remember him. I try to bring this up to Doug but he is lost in TVland.

“I really like the Pause/Unpause concept they showed off in How I Met Your Mother - wouldn't it be fantastic to implement that into arguments in a relationship?”

“Watching a lot of TV lately Doug?”

“Oh a bit.” I imagine that in his briefcase is a graph that Doug has prepared for himself displaying his hourly distribution of time utilization. The red area represents a startling 32.4% increase in Television viewing over last week.

“You know you watch too much TV when the primary concern you exhibit whilst all your main shows are on hiatus for the next couple weeks is profound relief that you can actually catch up on your life.”

He flips through the channels erratically. Pausing briefly on a local news segment before finding an animated clip demonstrating some science principal on PBS.

“Now that's elegant science,” he says as I instantly begin to lose interest and daydream. “Create one pair of entangled photons, then send one immediately to a particle-wave detector and send the second through a delay, about fifty meters per second I’d say, to a second detector that can force the state to be either particle or wave, and see if you can also force the first photon to be the other one before the delay alters its twin.”

I daydream about the girl I met two nights ago who told me she is a chimera. (Speaking of twins...) said her name was Momo. We got drunk out in the valley and smoked some Mexican Pot that she had. Good shit, a little too good. I passed out, had a dream that we loved and hated. Death and resurrection, Genesis and Apocalypse and a huge white redwood tree that reached through the canopy to the stars where two meteors brushed past it and landed in a plate of late night vomit omelets at an electro-shock lit Denny’s out in Contra Costa. One of the best blowjobs I've ever gotten in my life, I think. I don't quite remember. Doug is still talking.

“That’s just elegant science right there,” Doug says, oblivious, nodding his head as if in approving what he is saying. He needs to get laid. “Elegant. Simple. Outstanding.”
“Aw cut the bullshit Doug what the hell are we doing out here?” He flips the channel again.
“What, you wanna go back to watching Sportscenter? That more at your level?”
“No! I mean here. What is UP with you? You date one girl for like three weeks and then just let yourself go all to pieces?”
Doug frowns and mutes the TV. He is about to say something good. Something important. You can tell because he is thinking about it seriously, and Doug is the type of person who is normally serious even when he is joking.

"I think it's a matter of priorities? I have willfully devoted my life to the quantifiable analysis of the world around me in its many perfunctory processes. Science always made the most sense to me, so I paid the price to devote myself to Science. I paid to study under the brightest minds in the world, in fact the last of my college loans I’m still paying for! But now it seems like the real price was in human relationships, in love and compassion. Having been so focused on explaining things for so long these inexplicable concepts seem oh so very foreign to me…"

"She broke your heart.”

He frowned again. “

It is difficult for me to categorize these feelings. I tried a mere scratch-the-surface investigation into my feelings on Thursday and in conjunction with fear and despondency I found multiple additional types of transient emotions that I could not even begin to classify.”
“So you gave up?”
“For now.”

“We all lose it sometimes man. I am angry and violent. I punch things and pinch myself so hard I sometimes bleed, which is ironic because I used to talk to kids about being against cutting. I trust no one. I wear a freakin’ mask everywhere. Some days I wonder what it must be like to connect with people. To feel genuine compassion.”
“It is not rational. Plain and simple. It does not make sense. And I find myself in a place where I can’t explain what is going on around me, which is a very new experience.” Doug is courteous enough to overlook the fact that anything I say in the way of long and well-meaning diatribes are not at all relevant or helpful. Whenever we hang out together I notice that he does this, and I always forget when we are apart. He is much smarter than I am, and yet he comes to me for advice. Advice I valiantly try and gallantly fail to provide. I open my mouth and say these things that I think sound smart and then after I finish, he takes a breath and sternly plows ahead where he left off, as if I haven’t said anything. When he's very serious he frowns. Most of the time he smiles. It’s a nice system we have. But I can see why I always forget how it works, because for all his gracious civility it’s kind of condescending.

"I think you are intelligent and eloquent enough to explain yourself,” I say.

“I have to slow down though. When I do work, I'm too fast.”
“Like, you don't have enough to do? Or you’re sloppy?”
“I might be sloppy. I don’t know. But on top of whatever it is, my motivation has left me so I’m taking some time off.”
I suggest offhandedly “Try having an tryst with an older woman,” then remonstrate “it'll perk you right up!”
Doug raises one eyebrow like Spock. “How do you seduce an old MILF? How do you do these things?”
“Give her what she wants. She'll pay you in sex.”
“What does she want?”
“Depends on the woman. Like any woman, you just have to see what it is that she is looking for.”
“That may be the problem right there. Because in a man there is always some rational explanation for why he is doing what he’s doing, women don’t seem to follow the same framework. I have no idea what they are even looking at, let alone looking for!”
“They like a guy who can make them laugh,” I say, thinking about Momo again. Running through the parking lot in the rain. A downpour, racing. In the moment we reached the car together, our hands touching, the sky cleared and we were terrified, but then laughed again because it was amusing, it was fun, and sometimes all you can do is look absurdity in the face and laugh.“You know Doug, the cosmic and the tragi-comic need not be mutually exclusive. Just tell her something impressive and perplexing about fractal geometry or Einstein’s preference for coco-puffs.”

“This isn’t string theory! Women are abstruse. (Abstract?) I can’t even create an abstract positing their abstractions, they’re so abstract!”

“Beginnings are always the hardest, don't you think? I mean, silence is easy. So just take the time you need but not too much. I’d say about another episode of Mythbusters and then go out and actually

saysomething to someone; C'est difficile. But worthwhile.”

Doug smiles at me and then sighs, staring up at plaster flaking from the ceiling. I am not helping. I know I’m not helping.

Doug is more didactic than I make him out to be. He’s really not the easiest guy to get along with. But then again I’m not the kind of guy most people turn to for problem resolution. It tore me up to see him like this though. All bunched up inside his head, obviously putting on a lot of weight lately and not able to pin down a girl. I wasn’t being very helpful. I mean, I know of course I was but normally I am terrible company, I can be a joyless little rain-cloud. Or "distributions of atmospheric gas," as Doug would put it. But that’s exactly the point here. He’s pretty set in his ways and try as I may to be cheerful and helpful it’s not going to be some clockwork answer I can give him that will help him out of this rut. I’m not being helpful because I can’t be helpful. There is nothing I can tell him that will help him to go out and be appealing to the ladies. Nothing I can tell him that will save him from the churning blender of emotions switched on after a breakup. He’s dense, he’s a scientist. He will always see the world his way.
If I can’t control how he processes information, I can control what information he is processing.

“Let’s get out of here,” I suggest, and I’ve thrown on my coat before he can even stammer a protest.

“But.. but…”

“You like Hooters? I’m starved. Let’s get something to eat.” Maybe we'll meet a girl for him. Maybe he'll lecture me on the chemical make-up of pancake batter and feel better. In any case a change of scene will do him good. I shove him out the door sunlight flooding into the cheap motel room and I feel a sudden swell of un-accounable dizziness that takes me instantly back to last night.
“Better keep it quick though, I've got a date with a redhead tonight”