Hollywood missed connections. w4m.

Walking back from Java Jones with Rose, I was stopped in the middle of the State and De La Guerra by a tall man holding his coffee in line with his necktie. He looks at me for a long while before stopping me as we pass each other. He reaches out to lightly touch my arm.

"We really miss you at Hollywood," he says.

I am always so caught off guard when things like this happen. The witty part of me is dead.

"Do you, really?" I say, turning back.

"Yeah, we do. Seriously."

"Thanks." Because smiling is all I can do.

As we walk away, I know everything about this guy except his name. He always came in late, 10ish, and I always gave him shit. He would purposely ask for bad movies because he knew that I would give him some snide look that said, "Are you fucking kidding me?"

Seeing regulars outside of the Hollywood Video environment is definitely odd. I feel like Donna Beth, my Chaucer instructor, must have felt when she spun around after getting her hair done last weekend to see me sitting in the chair opposite her. She looked at me like she was watching a dog walk on its hind legs. (Or a dog with no front legs at all, for that matter. Evidence here.)

It's nice to know that I'm that memorable, and that I managed to create a lasting impression with regulars. Somehow, that makes it better that I spent nearly 4 years of my life working for Hollywood Video, because I built a relationship with customers that made them feel less like they were entering a part of a giant corporation and more like they were visiting a neighborhood store. So many of them were so happy that I was taking a better job, a career-type job. But its nice to know they miss me.

Still, the exchange in the middle of the intersection was odd. What business does he have in a tie? And what business do I have in dress pants and heels? This is not how we know each other. Two-legged dog odd.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

There are a few regulars I pass on the way to work in the morning, the Latin woman with the wheely suitcase who never fails to compliment me on my choice of skirts, the aging Hepcat who dresses like Johnny Cash and wears a black Fedora over his Elvis Costello glasses and impeccably trimed silver goatee--no matter what the weather might be.

I see these people nearly every day and feel like I ought to introduce myself to them, all friendly small neighborhood style, since we travel on the same trajectory every day, by which I mean we all have specific places we like to part our cars and probably get very irrationally angry when we can't park in our usual favorite spots.

I like to believe these individuals are like me, anyway.

I've always liked the idea of saying hi and being friendly with the neighbors, after all, you never know who's going to have a file to chisel melted plastic off your stove when your teapot . . . or, conversely, who you're going to have to report to the police when you start seeing little red dots all over the complex. (Yep, that's the Colonial for you and the dual personalities of the boys in 41: two were really awesome and helpful and rode motorbikes, the other two were drunken domestic abusers and drug dealers who I hear are now in jail somewhere.)

Why not strike up some sort of kinship bond with people who also walk equally far from their vehicles to the office?

Soon to follow: Why Carpinteria and Summerland are kind of like West Virigina.