The date really isnt a date. Its a metaphor for something deeper.

The frames that the interaction takes

place with are manifold. One one hand, Im ecstatic just to be outside. On the other hand, I am not
eager to relate to anyone willy nilly. On the other hand, I am willing to hang out and be friendly with
anyone. On the other hand, I recognize that she might not like any of this.

Frames can change rapidly and good fortunes can become horrible tragedies. I think movies do this a lot.
The thing that the person wanted seems really good until the last second it turns into a horrible
misfortune. This is the only way that pursuit can continue and resist completion after all. It keeps the
game going.

My first Tinder Date

The line that worked really well came from my dad. At the moment he had Guillem-Barre
disease, a rare disease that was wrapping its way up from his feet to his shins and it would ultimately
arrive at his chest and paralyze his lungs. There was a 60/40 chance that it would rise above his waste
and that he would be paralyzed from the waist down.

Lets plan our getaway, he says.

I like it. He has not been able to move in several days, and

We meet up, and Im excited because she has a Tinker-Bell tattoo somewhere on her body. She
looks like Tinker-Bells daughter, but not exactly the Disney version. More like the real life version, with
venereal disease and on anti-depressants. She has a moderate speech impediment.

It sounded, not to be unkind, as if she had her tongue pierced and it was swollen and slightly too
large for her mouth.

We walk downtown Riverside. Many presumed crack-addicts and thieves wander to and fro
here smacking the sides of their heads as if trying to start them back up again, to feel something. Im
happy to be among them. Ive always felt safe around underachievers, and people with no direction.

She tells me case histories with her funny way of talking. Her family has a history of mental
health problems. Her brother has manic-depressive disorder, anxiety attacks, her mother with Lyme
disease and seasonal depression. Her father had several concussions from the military and a temper.

She tells me a story about their family vacation, how one time a homeless man who was already
very drunk started yelling at her and her family. She told me how she knew her father was going to kill
him and it gave her an ulcer and PTSD.

He came out of the store, saw the man yelling at me and my mom, and grabbed him by the ear
and pulled it off.

Pulled his ear off? I repeat.

The police came and it turns out that this man had lost his hearing aid, and thats why he was
yelling at us so loud, she says, craning her neck.

She says all of this to me as we sit in the middle of downtown Riverside. My ex-girlfriend, the
one who recently joined the military, who briefly dated the steroid-abusing, tattooed gym owner after
me, . Several females dance inside of the pane of glass. Humans it would seem, rather than use wheels
like all breeds of hamsters, elect to voluntarily thrust and twist their limbs apoplectically in the name of
sex or more generally fitness. Id love to meet these people, to run my hands through their hair.

A year ago my family and I visited the Occupy Wall-street protestors who pitched tents here for
nearly nine months around the time that people felt they needed to do stuff. I had recently gulped down
about three adult-heavy doses of LSD, which ordinarily would not have been a problem, except that in
addition to that I also took mushrooms and codeine and did not sleep for about three and a half days,
wandering the forest like hermits. We ran into that oceanic feeling.

Now, homeless people often wander around in front of the restaurants usually collecting
garbage. Theres a pizza shop that we entered near a dance studio. In front of the dance studio
teenagers skateboard, and several homeless people collecting trash and asking for change.

As I sit here writing this, I remember the feeling I had of being infinite. I remember the feeling of
transcending all language, of being part of that ineffable Dao that can hardly be spoken of.

An old lady limps past and she cringes as the footsteps approach her. She is right in the middle
of saying how terrified she is of homeless people.

I had forgot my ID in the car and was twenty minutes late. She does not like me and now her
face makes it perfectly and abundantly clear. She stares off into space. She receives texts and says that
her mom wants her to come home for dinner.

When he arrives he does something behind my back. I dont turn around.

Hes a marine, she says. Well, hes in the reserves, she says standing up.

Her best friend, the marine, came and I shook his hand and they left. It happened abruptly and I
was not sure what the reason was. I had forgotten my ID and was twenty minutes late and could not get
a drink, got lost on the way to the coffee shop down the street, told her how weird I was, admitted to
being a nerd, basically said all I could say without spilling my heart onto her lap. I take my organic,
beating heart and put it in my backpack.

It was nine-thirty after she left but I was happy for no reason, perhaps just because I got a
chance to talk to someone new. New people could spark and jumpstart the mechanisms of the machine

ry that had so long ago become jammed up and entangled and locked in gear. I walked several
blocks. I was lost again, and had forgotten where I parked.

I didnt give a flying fuck. I was free, relatively, and though I was lost in this city, to others and
impenetrable even to myself I could ramble. I was the last person in the world who should be on a
matchmaking site. I had no job, friends, and had been alone long enough that I was growing to accept it.

Later after a day or so she unmatched me from the site and told me that I did not look anything
like my profile-picture. I wondered what Aristotles law of identity had to say about that. How could I fail
to look like a picture of me?

She also said that I wasnt what I was expecting. I was not what I was expecting either.

I had spoken to people who were transsexual, cat-fish, gays, models, gay models, tranny single
mothers, ostensible nymphos, rude people, trolls, transvestites, moms with nose-rings, gay mulattos
with purple hair. There was a single mother with a son who played little league, and a church-going
woman who had profile pictures that included Jesus.

I had used every pick-up line known to man. I had used non-sense to try and get girls to reply.
Sometimes they would respond and most times they would not.

The line that worked really well came from my dad. At the moment he had Guillem-Barre
disease that was beginning to wrap around his feet and paralyze him all the way up to the lungs.

How about lets plan our getaway, he says.

I used it and it works. What worked the best though was not messaging them at all. Simply
waiting until one of them reaches out first. I only met with one girl, but it was one more than I ever
thought I would end up meeting in real life.

My father lies in bed with his eyes closed shut. He has a condition known as Guillem Barre
disease, and the way the doctor says it works is that it starts off as a paralysis that begins at the feet and
then works its way up. It can be fatal if it gets to the lungs and shuts down the respiratory tract. My
sister and I stand around the bed watching him sleep. The condition overtook him suddenly. He and I
had gone to Las Vegas a week before and he had a horrible cough. The disease that afflicts 1 in 100,000
found a way in that way.

The hospital curtains are drawn and in the bed to his left a man cries out for God. As a visitor at
the hospital I have long since stopped signing in at the help desk. I just stroll through. The man in the
bed next to my father the nurses say has an infection of the urinary tract. and the nurses say that these
types of infections tend to make the patient go crazy.

Dear GOD will somebody get me a DOCTOR! he yells.

Oh, GOD, I dont want to die!

His words are rung out, howled, through coughing jags. Afterwards, he regroups, and yells out
again, For the Love of God I need a doctor! I have never heard someone scream the way he did
before. The tone he used was one of unmitigated desperation. That was all he had left.

After a few yells I find part of myself wanting to flag down nurses, and to call nine-one-one and
get a doctor here STAT. I walk over to the next bed and peek my head past his curtain for a moment and
look inside. He has a very plain, reddish-white face with light, very comb-able grey hair parted on the
left side.

Hi, I say sheepishly.

Are you a doctor? he says.

Me, in my t-shirt and sweatpants, answer confidently, No.

Theres an orderly here who looks like a basketball star, and another one who my dad later
accuses of coming onto him. Take off your shirt, he tells him, as he stands there in the room with his
arms enfolded to do diagnostic checks. He rubs his bicep and says, Youre strong, in a joking, fraternal
sort of way. It happens again several days later and my dad lies there again, wary of having to take his
shirt off yet again. He can barely move his arms and legs. The male nurse stands there hovering over him
watching.

I wandered off into the hall as I did in those few weeks that I visited my dad. I had no job and no
friends, so it was not a problem to visit every other day and watch the Laker game. There was a piano in
the most unlikely of places. Through the halls where many senior citizens occupied the floor-space on
rolling chairs.

Do you have any food? one asks me.

No, I dont sorry, I say, reaching in my pockets.

Do you have any change, another asks me.

No, I say to her, assuredly.

I have no idea who donated that piano to the hospital. The black Yamaha looked pristine near
the fire exit sign with the chestnut bench pushed against the door to prevent patients from setting off
the alarm. I walk past all the nurses and patients and stride up to the instrument, lift the bench, and sit
down. I noticed it sitting there one day when I was walking from the front of the hospital to the back,
through the blurred-glass windows.

I have no sheet music. I cant keep four-four time but I love playing scales and I play them in no
particular order without much reason, just keeping a general sense of where the tonic is, where I should
land. I play D Major. Then modulate to B Major. Then D flat, playing the third and then the dominant
fifth chord back to the tonic.

As I play an old lady with emphysema wheels up behind me. She wheezes but does not move. I
dont turn around. I want to tell her lady right now I have nothing to lose. I have been in hospitals before
and all the madness in the world couldnt bring me down now.

Two weeks ago my dad and I were driving to Vegas and now I am spoon-feeding him and he is
using a bedpan. The music helps. Its like a drug that for some reason gets me by. I picture myself
dancing from chord to chord, never knowing the melody and never knowing if anyone else thinks it
sounds good.