Saturday night Amanda & I headed straight home after watching our friends, A Faulty Chromosome' play at the Masquer's Cabaret in West Hollywood. Billy was up on his computer, watching movie trailers, when we walked in the door - both of us were starving and we started to make ourselves a late-dinner. Our cat, Avocado, was staring strangely out the screen-door to the balcony, I assumed he was just, as usual, waiting for his moment to sneak outside and visit his friend next door, Cricket (who is a cat... not an insect). When I leaned down to pick him up I looked up outside and at a stranger's face staring back at me.

Now our apartment isn't ground level, it's a second story apartment, this face wasn't just someone passing by, it was a man in the middle of pulling himself up onto our balcony. I dropped the cat and quickly threw open the screen door, he dropped down and I looked over the edge just in time to see him head towards the parking-lot behind the apartment.

I bolted from the balcony to the front door, calling for Billy for to follow me, but I tend to have trouble projecting and neither Billy or Amanda heard what I said. I sprinted towards the back but I tripped the motion-sensor lights and realized I was running the wrong way.

I hurried out to the street and tried to find some kind of motion on the dark - when I spotted a white t-shirt 300 feet away heading towards Magnolia Blvd, but he was walking now, I started to sprint after - holding my right hand over my thigh to keep the 2 bucks in change from making any noise.

I hadn't even made it the entire 400-something feet down the street before I felt it, my lungs were starting to burn, my limbs felt heavy, I obviously wasn't pumping enough air into my blood-stream and it was filling the void with lactic-acid. I was pissed at myself, very pissed, I knew I was out of shape, but even worse I knew just four years ago I would have been able to sprint at top-speed for a half a mile before feeling it. I was close, in a full sprint, he was still walking, just making the corner of Magnolia - I was five feet away and at the point in my mind where I realized I didn't know what I was going to do next. My instinct was to throw myself, superman style, into his torso. I'm not a big guy, but I've taken down people much bigger than myself with the whole self-catapult-thingy - but I didn't have time, without even turning around he bolted off.

At first the both of us stuck to the sidewalk, he was fast, very fast, and was slowly but surely pulling away - then he rushed into the traffic. It must have looked very strange to all the cars passing by - a tall, thin black man with shoulder-length dreads sprinting away from some pissed-looking white guy with no shoes on...

We ran down the yellow-line for a few hundred feet before he headed back to the sidewalk - I followed but I was at least 60 feet behind by then. He headed into the parking lot of Ralph's and by the time I turned the corner I lost him. I started to head inside the store but I knew he was still running and I needed a car - I didn't have my cell phone on me, so I used the pay phone to call Amanda but both her and Billy were in the street trying to figure out why in the hell I sprinted out of the front door and never came back.

Long story short - I lost him, I ran back to the apartment and jumped in the car to go looking for him but didn't have any luck. If only I wasn't out of shape - I could have kept up. And if only I was wearing shoes my heels wouldn't be so bruised.