Sitting next to Samson.

Samson is my LA plant. He's a "luck tree", in a very nice sort of stone urn thing, and I bought him at a plant shop two blocks away from my apartment. His leaves are deep and shiny, and he has a little nesting of dead spray-painted moss covering up the dirt in his bowl. I like him. He cheers me up.

Also cheering me up is some red wine, and the "go fug yourself" website. I am not sure why I need cheering, but I do. I have met new people the last three days in a row, with maybe some success, and probably some failures as well. It has me a little worn out, to say the least, and I need some sort of brain-refresher...something that will let me stop thinking about these encounters, and what might happen next.

Two of the meetings were with people I've emailed a bit with over the internets, from the ok cupid site. And one of them I got along with very well -- and his brother, and his brother's girlfriend, all of whom I met in the space of two hours and then ended up spending Friday night hanging out with. The three of them together had a great vibe going on, very smart and jokey and mellow. Basically, I would like them all to adopt me -- it's the kind of feeling I haven't had since maybe the old days of TNA, when I had those brief moments of being with people who all knew and liked each other and were just straight-up class-A people. I am sorry that I was always such a drunky loser who wanted to go home by like 12:30 during our old nights out. I'd give a lot to have those nights back. I want bar friends back.

And now I'm anxious, because man, so far my meeting people off the internet game has been pretty shitty. I've been on a few dates, been dumped or ignored by a few dudes who weren't worth my time, had a few meals with strangers. None of it's really stuck, as of yet -- it's easy to forget someone that exists primarily in email form. And I really want these people to be my friends. Maybe, in particular, I miss the sort of practical feeling of being around midwesterners. There's something that feels more solid about it, like hey, these people are probably not at their core completely ridiculous. I dare you to say the same thing about the general human product of southern California.

Maybe my longtime friend depression is kicking in too now. There's a lot that's wrong with having a crazy mental disease, of course. But occasionally I feel like it keeps me less frivilous, encourages introspection, reminds me of my past. It's something inextricable from me, no matter what meds I'm on -- although of course the meds change the feel of the game, let me be the one in charge of it. My brain is a weird dance of chemicals pushing through a goopy mass of tissue. So it goes, so it goes.

The last person I met this weekend was very shy. So am I, sometimes, but I just kept trying to make conversation anyway. So it goes. There were some others in the middle, but none of them stood out.