The Sasquatch Journal

"The Blind Date" - A John Hughes film.

I felt like slapping myself in the face, because all of a sudden I seemed to be caught in some kind of male adolescent fantasy dreamworld. A split-second earlier, I had turned my head to see who was calling my name and subsequent would be picking me up on this chilly California night while I patiently waited at the intersections of Lincoln and Rose.

Casually cooing "Ryan!" out of a ridiculously expensive and shiny black sports car was a thin, young and super duper hot chick. That's right, a model-looking girl in a Porche was picking me up for a blind date we made on the Internet.


.......................... Saska, my blind internet date

Unbelievable, right? I felt like looking around to see if David Lee Roth or Vince Neil was around and they were now going by "Ryan." But she was looking straight at me.

Now if this was an 80's sex comedy starring Corey Haim, I would of said something like, "This is going to be the most kick ass blind date ever!" and jumped in the car through the door and speeding off to the The Strip.

But being that I was involved, (and don't have any trait remotely close to the Corey's), my 80's sex comedy equivalent was probably "Weird Science." "weird Science" stars dorky Anthony Michael Hall joining The Other Guy, to create the perfect girl from a computer experiment...something Bill Gates and his wondrous Pentium IV's have still been unable to replicate two decades later.

It did feel like I was in a dream, or a bad 80's movie, or who knows...when I ran through traffic to get in the car, and she smiled and we drove off to a hot club in Hollywood.


"Maybe it was a dream, you know, a very weird, bizarre, vivid, erotic, wet, detailed dream. Maybe we have malaria." -Garry from "Weird Science"

But alas, it wasn't a dream, or an 80's movie, it was real life...and so we spent most of our four hours talking about God...about our passions in life...about pain...about helping people...about the illusions of L.A.

Ok, time for a little backstory. Her name was Saska (Yeah, I know...great since I'm the Sasquatch) and she moved to L.A. a month before I did. We met each other through Craigslist...and decided we had to meet because of all the coincidences in our lives. She was a 26-year old Mizzou grad who had moved to Santa Monica in the past two months for the purpose of helping people and was looking for a (funny) Christian guy to talk to because she was tired of players who kept trying to use her. And I was admittedly a little lonely myself because all my best friends are back in Missouri and I don't have a close friend here.

Within 20 minutes of me emailing her my cell number, Saska calls and says we "have" to hang out tonight. So I said yes, and agree to meet her in 30 minutes. At this point we both have no idea what the other person looks like, so it's basically the quintessential blind date, as terrible as that sounds when I type it.

Now, in the span of .021048 seconds of seeing Saska for the first time, I realize I'm going to have nothing to talk about with this girl. I mean, seriously, this girl was in a sorority (I once had an infamous comedy bit where I dressed in drag and did a sorority girl impression to make them seem like idiots), looked like a pornstar version of Ashlee Simpson, and is driving a stick shift on the freeway at 90 MPH. This is a girl I would have had almost zero chance of ever spending time alone with in my life.

But within 5 minutes, we are exchanging life stories...sort of like strangers sometimes do sitting next to each other in airplanes. It turns out Saska is a 22-year old (she admitted she lied about her age before) former pastor's kid (affectionately knows as PK's in church circles) and class president from Blue Springs, Mo., who went through a typical rebellion stage once she blossomed and went away to college and joined a sorority.

She became a prototypical party girl, boozing, being crazy, hooking up with guys (she even spent a year as a waitress in South Beach, one of the most decadent places on Earth) except for the contradictory fact that she maintained her virginity. She said that's the one shred of dignity she held on to during that time.

But now, she wants to do something good in her life and said she wants to help homeless people in LA and educate poor families about health insurance opportunities. But at the same time, she doesn't see anything wrong with livin' it up Hollywood style.

In fact, I made some joke about her hanging out with Carmen Electra, and she looked at me funny and said "Yeah, I do hang out with her...she's totally cool."

We talked seriously this whole time, while driving, cruising Sunset Strip, and finally eating dinner at The Galley (which is also where I met Dr. Emperor a week earlier).

I could sense her internal struggle of living the Hollywood life, yet secretly yearning for something more substantial and spiritual like the days of her youth(which in theory is I guess why she decided to hang out with me.) and she ended up crying at one point.

But in as much as this was not an 80's movie, it also wasn't like "Before Sunrise," either - and we didn't talk all night and realize we were unlikely soulmates that couldn't ultimately be together. She got bored and restless by the end of the dinner, and she didn't really dig my humor.

I did much less neck licking than Anthony Michael Hall on Kelly LeBrock.

And so we parted ways, exchanging hugs and well-wishes, not even making the pretense that we were going to hang out again. We both knew we were in two irreconcilable worlds. I probably will never speak with Miss Saska again.

At the same time, it was almost a transcendent experience because I was able to connect on some meaningful spiritual level with her just as two people being open and honest with each other. I was reminded that there is much more depth to what seem like shallow party girls, and maybe she learned that guys she normally would consider a loser are actually pretty cool.

All I know is...Corey Haim would be very disappointed with me right now.

(Postscript editor's note: Yes, I realize how ridiculously self-indulgent and silly this entry is, but I'm sticking to it.)

The Bizarre Culture of Elitism and Status


Beverly Hills, that's where I want to be!

For the first time in my many years of working retail, I was actually discouraged from providing good customer service.

The owner of the ISoldIt On Ebay! store I work part-time at in Westwood was on the phone at the front counter and I was sitting in front of a computer when a twentysomething woman came into the store and stood in front of the counter to be helped. I then reacted in a way that was second nature to me after my aforementioned indoctrination into the world of retail...I walked up to the counter to help her.

"No, I'll take care of it," sharply ordered my boss while still holding the phone. With a slight nod, I walked back to my seat.

After a minute or two, she got off the phone and finally took care of the customer. Afterwards, my boss approached me with this perplexing order.

"Make people wait a little...this isn't McDonald's, and we have imporant things we're doing. We don't have to jump out of our chair for them." She went on to tell me about some fancy clothing store in Beverly Hills that routinely makes people wait 15-20 minutes for someone to help them.


McDonald's, where we love to see you smile!

I immediately nodded, which again is part of my engrained retail instincts “OBEY THE BOSS WITHOUT QUESTION.” (If I was a Customer Service Robot, my circuits may have exploded after trying to follow my programmed orders to always help the customer and always obey the boss. Johnny 5 is ALIVE!)

It took me a bit, but I eventually concluded that my boss seemed to be trying to create an aura of prestige and elitism around the Ebay store in imitation of other upper class stores. Now the Ebay store (which is not that far removed from Goodwill or a Pawn Shop) seems like a comically bad choice to do this. But then again, the whole idea seems a little bit odd.



The culture of elitism in L.A. is one I’ve observed but never fully understood. Why, as my boss said, would many upper crust clothing and jewelry stores or restaurants often make you wait for service? Why would people pay $1,000 more dollars for the name Louis Vuitton on a purse than a nearly identical product. Why do people wait hours for a table in a restaurant that charges hundreds of dollars for a little piece of lamb and some green stuff?

The truth is, many people don’t shop to attain actual physical items. They shop for the social capital of being seen in a bourgeois store or showing off their name brand shirt, or feeling extravagant by eating in a certain restaurant. It’s about having the symbols, sometimes quite literally of being well off. In other words, class distinction by consumerism.

Now you could make arguments about the benefits of elite, high-priced neighborhoods, they tend to be safer and quieter than poorer neighborhoods, and there are better schools. But it also seems capricious as to what items or places qualify as elite.

That’s maybe part of the reason we see so many famous rappers drinking Cristal, driving fancy cars, and wearing hordes of diamond and platinum jewelry. Status can easily be purchased with a Visa Check Card and a large bank account. But is Nelly and the bling parade self-conciously attempting to mock the system of status, or is he just trying to look like a pimp?



I’m not sure, but I do know it’s getting too philosophical in herrre.