Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
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If You Saw These People Coming Down the Street, Would You Run?
Posted on September 21, 2002 in Blog Meets
I don’t know who most people thought was the most curious of the characters who met outside the carousel at Santa Monica Pier: it would have to be lumbering me with my beard or Mikey who had a brave style about him, like a Buddhist monk with attitude. I give the honor to Mikey. Mikey gets his own entry in my photo blog when I get around to putting up the pictures of the day.
Few people appeared to notice but while Lynn talked to people, I shuffled around the fringes seeking artifacts to photograph. I took many more pictures of people than I have since Lynn’s sister Carey got married up in Ellensburg, Washington four(?) years ago. I did deliver a long lecture on California cemeteries to Alan, who humored me well. He and Marcie sat across from us at the luncheon table. I felt obliged to talk. (Alan shares my interest in cemeteries. I wonder if he’d like to be a columnist for the blog I plan to attach to City of the Silent?)
For me, the one frustration of the day was that people kept not finding us. We loitered in an amorphous mass, unrecognizable to any passers-by. When we first arrived at the well-disguised carousel that Skits (Wendy) had chosen for the rendevous, we had no idea of what any one looked like. A few cel phone calls were placed in the name of finding stragglers. Many of us walked down to the platform on which the amusement park stood before getting the sense into our heads to ask someone for directions. We waited for an hour, trying to direct Jason to our vicinity. When he appeared, kd mentioned the names of two more missing persons who had promised to come. I responded with a curtness that I thought I only possessed when there was a keyboard underneath my fingers: “They’ve had enough time to find us,” I ejaculated. “Let’s go eat.”
I think it was Mikey who led the cry for food. My logic carried the day with kd and the rest. We moved due east towards the promenade, stopping several times to take pictures of friends crammed in toy trucks, to allow Mikey to go to the bathroom, and to decide where to enjoy our communal repast. The walk gave me plenty of opportunities to catch interesting scenes and I am afraid I squandered most of them. I have not yet developed the audacity of Gary Winograd in taking street shots, though I did get one shot of a well-scrubbed beggar who was collecting money, it appeared, to pay a fine for impersonating a police officer.
Our chaotic aggregation of ideas coalesced on eating at California Pizza Kitchen, a safe chain. This was when I bored Alan and possibly frightened Marcie with my talk about the unusual country cemeteries I’d discovered in northern San Diego County and along the Tecate/Ensenada highway in Baja.
Yvonne was the last to join us. Mikey and Francisco spent a lot of time guiding her down Wilshire to the statue of Santa Monica on the Pacific Palisades. “Are you pointed towards the sun?” we’d hear them asking her. “Keep going until you see the ocean.”
The last of us convened at Houston’s, about two blocks up from Ocean Blvd. Mikey stole the show for me with his hamming and playful mock-groping of Yvonne.
How did I feel about this? I guess it was a good time. I’m in post-gathering stage when I examine myself critically for every possible gaffe. I write of the bathos I observe in others while fearing my own grotesqueness. kd says I did fine. Lynn hasn’t complained. Still the demon gnaws at the arteries leading to my heart. And yet I am enthralled and happy to have met all these people. To crimp my feelings into a metaphor: My head’s feeling like I’ve let the whole sky in, clouds and all.
Attendees
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