Drive drive drive, six hours up the coast, quickly. May as well give each other the life stories, or rather, the life cliff notes: just the obvious stuff.
We're still strangers, Erin and I. Now we just know a lot more about each other.
Some people really like to talk, rehash everything that just happened, likes, dislikes, comments, questions, suggestions.
I like to eat.
I'm in a room in the Clift, and, as Sam will say later, "Oh no, did I put you" in another awkward social situation "?".
It's not necessarily awkward for me, to sit there, a fly on the wall in the middle of the room. I rarely have energy for strangers, but they are usually more entertaining than whatever I would be watching on TV instead.
I have one conversation, slowly sipping the screwdriver the girl I sat next to handed to me as soon as I sat down, she too drunk to drink it herself:
"I saw them at Soho."
(I didn't go because I would enjoy going: that night ended badly. I went so I would have a story to tell.)
"Soho," someone else says. He's in the room because it is his, or at least, his work paid for it. "Funny how every city has one, a Soho, that they all stemmed from the one in New York."
"New York is the epicenter of all things creative," I say, "with authority," they say.
I skipped ahead a few lines in the natural flow of conversation, because conversation bores me. They prove my point, using the next few minutes to discuss what I said and how I said it. The point was made. There was no discussion to be had.
("I'm a conversation ender," I once told someone.)
We leave. I walk with them to a bar, and keep walking as they all go in.