Dan J reached out to me and said my life seems to have gotten interesting and he wanted to reconnect. When we originally met about 8 years ago I was under a lot of stress and didn't really put the energy into the friendship (or any) that I should have. At that moment in my life I was running Zoovy, I was depressed and isolated. I felt the entire world was always against me, and for that reason I had avoided all personal relationships. Zoovy had taught me that everybody I trusted would eventually hurt me, and I worked all the time, so I didn't really have friends outside of work. Dan was a system admin who came in after Eric Z left. Dan had his own consulting company, and agreed to come on as a consultant/backup. I always thought he liked the elegance of our architecture, and Zoovy was probably more technically savvy and had more fun problems than most of his other clients -- he was a great mentor+sounding board for Nick D.
We agreed on Thursday and Dan suggested sushi and told me he had a place which was great. We met at a restaurant called Sushi Tadokoro, it's sort of right outside old town, but fortunately avoids the parking mess. I enjoy sushi, but I'd self assess that I'm probably less snobbish than most of my other friends who enjoy sushi. I love pickled ginger (or pickled anything), I enjoy playing with wasabi, chili, ponzu, and the other sauces. I personally enjoy the game of finding the right combination of sauces to take boring sushi and making it epic.
Dan's a regularish at Tadokoro which he said was one of only two authentic Japanese resturants in San Diego, it definitely had a different vibe. He ordered a carafe of a cold sake "Gino" I think, which I think was extremely good, but I'm not a sake expert. (note to self: need to do more sake research) Then a new experience (for me) happened, we were both asked to choose an ornate sake cup from a wall with probably 50-75 different cups of colors, shapes and sizes. I'm not sure what the meaning of this was, but I immediately knew which one I wanted and was very happy with my choice, Dan asked for his regular cup I think.
Dan seemed to know what he was doing at this place so I asked him to take point on ordering. He grinned knowingly, and announced the plan is we would let the universe decide aka "all chefs special" so we both had no idea what we were getting, we'd both get served the same dishes. He also assured me it'd start tame, and get progressively more and more obscure/interesting and amazing.
Since we last met (probably 8 years ago) Dan has grown emotionally a ton, he's lost a lot of physical weight as well, I told him he got younger, and most distinctly he has a budda-esque inner calm about him that wasn't there before (or at least I couldn't recognize it last time). As dinner progressed I learned we shared an eerily similar relationship with the universe, and we had a lot to talk about/catch up on. We both like to mentally spar with the other and so there was a lot of quick witted fun going back and forth as we became personally acquainted.
Dan shared he's got a great job at a large Linux open source company (who I won't mention, but you'd know), he works from home about 3-5 hours per week which he squeezes in between cooking gourmet meals and masturbation. He is focusing on his lifelong goal of being a full time author, he's doing quite well financially, thinking about buying an apartment building. I wondered if he'd actually enjoy being a landlord of apartments or if it would be a distraction to his chill life, but I kept the thought to myself.
Dan has decided he would like to solve distributed democracy (blockchain voting) problem and we spent a bit of time dissecting that .. it's his lifelong project, he wants help, it sounds interesting but it's still very rough and clearly requires technology that as far as I know hasn't been invented yet. I told him I'm going to introduce him to Jay because I think Jay will have some excellent ideas on the project, it works in way similar to bitcoin, I also think they'll get a long.
I showed Dan a little about my gigomatic idea and he had some helpful ideas. Dan told me his special skill (what I would call a superpower) is the ability to figure out the next step(s) in a process, it's just easy for him and I told him that was "very cool" and immediately wanted his help with Gigomatic since I find myself stuck all the time. He explained how he did that, so now all I need to do is ask myself "What would Dan tell me to do" -- and then worst case I can phone a friend. :-)
I was entertained by him explaining a paradox in the book Moby Dick, did Ahab really die. Dan's was entertained by my Trail Shenanigans game and hopefully will be sending me some books to read on the trail (including his own published sci-fi book). After he took me through how he does his research and writing process, and learning how his brain processes -- I'm definitely excited about reading it, I'm sure it will be good. I'm thinking this PCT trip is going to be epic.
The dinner was great, one of the best sushi dinners I've ever had. It started with various standard stuff like tuna and halibut sashimi .. all meat that I recognized by sight, but by the third or fourth plate it delved into the obscure. It was amazing -- UNTIL the chef served the live prawns (which I've had before, but not for a while). After the prawn was put on my plate, within a few moments I found myself mentally communicating as if by ESP (the "E" is for emotional). The prawn told me his name was Spike and he was very scared to be on the plate, he didn't know what was going on but he couldn't move. I told Spike things didn't look good for him, he couldn't move because his tail was sitting adjacent to him AND that *I* was supposed to eat it, and eventually eat him as well. Spike said "what the fuck dude" and wiggled a bit, he asked for his tail back and to be released into the ocean. At that moment I realized I was communicating with a crustacean. Dan had noticed my hesitation had come to the conclusion I had a fear of eating live food and told not to worry about it. I explained I wasn't afraid, in fact I've eaten live sushi before.
I explained the situation and introduced Dan to Spike. We concluded at this point I was a bit more in tune with the universe and the level of violence and torment towards Spike seemed unnecessary to me. Spike was sitting on the plate listening to us talk about him. By the end Spike's tiny crustacean brain had accepted he was going to die, he knew it, but he still didn't want to watch me eat his tail, at the same time, I didn't want to waste his tail, he told me to eat it, quickly .. so I quickly dipped it into some ponzu and ate it as Spike and Dan watched on. Dan then asked the waitress to have Spikes head cooked, which I ate as well, but I definitely did not enjoy eating my fried friend. Having to tear into Spikes thorax made me sad, I imagined him swimming through the ocean, until one day he was caught. I ate two more tasteless dishes and realized I was overcome with guilt and asked Dan if we could get the check and continue our discussion at a whiskey/therapy bar. Dan said he wasn't a whiskey nerd, and I explain I wasn't either, in fact I'd never been to whiskey bar, but that it was a bucket list item for me that I wanted to explore and I thought it would be fun. He agreed.
Authors NOTE: I realize that the crustacean is effectively a bug, and bugs have no ability to process pain and they will all eventually die, probably a brutal death. I felt like the presentation was unnecessary. Dan picked up dinner and told me I could buy the whiskey, and I must admit I felt better knowing he was the one who paid the sushi chef to brutally dismember, and then subsequently cook my recently-deceased friend spike. RIP spike the prawn.
We went down the road to Aero club which advertises itself as a whiskey bar, but it's basically a dive bar not far from the airport. Upon entering there were hundreds of bottles of whiskey from around the world. I know virtually nothing about whiskey. Dan made a bee-line for the restroom told me to buy the whiskey and "not the cheap stuff", and I went over and made friends with the bartender (Barbara). She handed me a book with probably 75 pages of whiskey and descriptions, I explained I hadn't studied and was unprepared for the test. I explained I was there with a friend who had just treated me to a wonderful and expensive sushi dinner and so we wanted to explore "the good stuff". She laughed and told me what I wanted was a "not jameson" whiskey. Barbara the Bartender took great care of us .. they had hundreds of types, and so it was a lot of fun and I left with a lot more confidence in my ability to discern different types of whiskey's from all over the world. .. at various points I was also really drunk, but after an hour or so I was okay to drive, one of the advantages of coming down from the mountains is my liquor tolerance has increased or I've simply trained my liver to deal with it. I think we had probably 7 or 8 glasses each over the course of a few hours. I've got photos of the bottles I liked, but the Bastille French whiskey was certainly one of my favorites. She told me I was the most fun customer of the night because I wasn't like the other whiskey snobs she usually gets, I actually wanted to learn something.
Afterwards I drove Dan back to his place and walked Gravy all around mission hills while discussing so many nerdy topics I wouldn't even know where to start. Lots of fun, got home about 1am and crashed. I still need to work on Vita and Gigomatic this weekend.
