beautiful, funny, sad & true

There are two realities in this dream; one in the ‘real’ world, and one that exists and looks the same, except that you access it by typing a password into a text-based Invitation screen on a very old PC, hidden in the back corner of the office building in which I work. (No, I’ve never played Second Life or any of that avatar nonsense.) There are a few people in this dream who I either know or have met in real life, but the majority of them are not.

* * * * *

The dream starts in the ‘real’ world. My supervisor is Indian (a nice guy who I met once when he was doing some training at my workplace in real life), and it’s my first day at a new job. He gets me set up with my own desk and computer. I look around the large room. It’s sort of a lounge area, dimly but warmly lit, with a handful of sofas, wooden end tables with modern lamps, and Oriental rugs. I can see some large super-computers and network cabinets just beyond the edges of the room; this seems to be a computer company. There are a bunch of people my own age and younger, male and female , who are sitting on (or standing near) the sofas, talking and laughing with each other. They seem very friendly, and before long, I find myself invited into their circle to make their acquaintance. They ask if this is my first day. I say yes. One of the women asks if I’d like to go to dinner with all of them. Apparently this is a common occurrence.

My supervisor is still there setting things up at my desk, and when I go back over to my desk, he says something like, “I have another place for you too. Come this way.” We walk clear around to the other side of the building, where the light is fluorescent and bright. Instead of desks, there are light gray cubicles. No one else is in the room but myself and my supervisor. This does not feel uncomfortable, it’s just where we both happen to be.

Periodically, I go back to my other desk, and when I do, it seems that quite a bit of time has passed. It feels like only a half hour to me, but my new friends seem to have been working for hours, and making plans for the evening, or for the next day. I check on my computer, and find that I have 693 unread e-mails, many of which are ongoing conversations that I’ve missed between my friends. I’m included in these e-mails as well, with people asking me things and explaining a few of the inside jokes. I see a message from one of the women that says, ‘Ouch. . .that remark. :(’ I don’t remember saying anything, and I certainly haven’t written anything either. I don’t even know anyone, so I decide to ask around to find out who this person is, and what she thinks I said.

I see Charles (with whom I work in real life) sitting at a desk, and I ask him if he knows who she is. He does not. I walk back to the group in the lounge area, and they don’t know who she is either. They take me to the corner of the room, where an ancient PC terminal is sitting around the corner from the main room, out of view of everything. It asks for a password, which I instinctively know and type on the keyboard.

I find myself in the ‘other’ world. CollegeGirlfriend is there with me. We are walking in some sort of hospital, and I’m carrying a large box of computer equipment. Charles is walking down the hall in the opposite direction, and does not acknowledge us. A nurse appears, hands us a clipboard, and asks us to sign in. We do, and she takes us through a long, dark corridor and into another lounge room, in another computer company. We make new friends with everyone there, but we’re not there to work in this place. Something about these interactions feels different, and I am a bit unnerved. CollegeGirlfriend is talking to someone, but I need to put my box of computer parts somewhere, so I leave her and go back out into the corridor to find another room. I find one and enter it. The lights are off, and the only thing in the room is another ancient PC with the same password screen on it. I type the password.

I’m now standing in the real world, in the warm-colored lounge office. My friends are there, but now that I’ve had this experience, I want to find out more about how it all works. I ask a couple of them to show me the old computer again, but they say that they’re unable to, because it appears in a different location each time. It’s up to me to find it for myself, and what’s more, it’s in a different place for each person. I decide to search for it, and after a while of rummaging through a few dark offices, I find it, on a desk in the hallway, next to the drinking fountain. There is some sort of colorful program running on the screen, and it doesn’t look the same as the other screens have. I pull up the rolling metal chair and sit at the desk, wondering what I should do. A voice says, “Just enter the password, like you normally do.” The colorful program stops running, and a password box appears on the screen. I type in the password.

I’m in the other world now. CollegeGirlfriend is standing there. I start to tell her about this experience. She seems skeptical about it. I decide to show her. I grab her hand and start to walk. She pulls her hand away, but continues to walk a step behind me. “What are you looking for?” she asks. We walk into the large corridor, without anyone stopping us or asking for us to sign in. We stop when we find our friends, but they all seem agitated about something. I tell her to wait for me, and I start running through lots of hallways, looking for my friend Blaine. It occurs to me that he works at this company, and that he may know the answers to some of my questions.

I come to a metal door, and when I open it, I poke my head out to see a small room painted completely white, with a large, vertically sliding metal door that is slid up to reveal daylight, and a street. Cars are driving by on the street, and Blaine is standing outside, being interrogated by three men in suits, navy blue, charcoal gray, and light green, respectively. I pull my head back inside and shut the door behind me, thinking that the three men will think this is a movie set. I lock the door with my thumb and sit down against the wall. I can feel the thin wall shaking as the men are now banging on it and trying the door handle in an attempt to get inside. I sit for a long minute and then decide that I should go and check on everyone else. I run back to the room where they are, and I see them hurriedly packing their things, and leaving with whatever they can carry.

I don’t know who this guy is, but I do know that it was 1991, and mullets were hot.

Just the other day, I got the invitation from my high school for my graduating class’s twentieth anniversary reunion, which is happening a month from now.  A month?  You’ve got to be kidding me.  I need much longer than that to prepare myself for that kind of trauma.  I laughed like a hyena as I crumpled up the invitation and threw it in the recycling bin.  I immediately posted a message on Twitter saying, “Got my high school reunion invitation today. Is there a polite way to say, ‘F Off, I Hated High School?’ “

The next day, I e-mailed one of my friends from back then who lives down in Newport (Oregon) now, and who tracked me down on MySpace last summer after seeing one of my gigs on TV.  I asked if he’ll be going to the reunion.  The short answer is that he will not be.  He mentioned a few people who he’d been in contact with lately, and who he wasn’t excited to see, and they were all names of people who had either bullied, ignored, or insulted me back in the day.  You see, in high school, I was a quiet, shy, kinda nerdy guy (I know, it’s hard to believe) and most people didn’t talk to me.  The ones who did talk to me usually did so in a mocking way.  The precious few who were my actual friends are some of the people I’m still in contact with today.  A handful of them I’m very close to.  There are about ten people I’d like to see, out of my graduating class of four hundred, but the rest I couldn’t care less about.  I’m not nostalgic for high school at all.  College had its moments, and its close friendships (some of which I still maintain), but I have to admit that I’m really enjoying life now much more than ever before.  Even with the extremely painful things that have happened recently, I feel alive now in a way that I never used to.  I was a shell of a person back then, and I feel like I had nothing to offer anyone.  If I were to go to a reunion now, it would just be too freakin’ weird, with people trying to talk to me as if we were friends, or trying to feign interest in my life in the interim.

Not to mention the fact that I don’t go by my middle name anymore, like I did back then, so I’d have to tell THAT story about four hundred times.  No thank you; I’ll pass.

I remember one person who I ran into when I still lived in Yakima and worked at the video store.  She walked in the door and instantly recognized me.  “Oh my gosh!  Hey [my middle name], how are you?”  She told me her name, which I recognized too.  She looked great, and had been a cheerleader all through high school, but she also played the flute, which is how I had known her.  We talked for a few minutes about the usual pleasantries, and then she said, “What’s your last name again?  I want to say [my last name], but you’d kill me.”  The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I replied, “Well it IS [my last name], and why would I want to kill you for that?”  She sputtered, “Uhhh . .ababah. . .I gotta go.  Good to see you!” waved over her shoulder, and ran out the door.  I just stood there, dumbstruck and fuming.

In other news, this trip down Memory Lane has got me thinking about someone completely different; my girlfriend from my college years.  She comes up in conversation every once in a while, and every time she does, the people who knew me then say things like, “You sure loved her a lot.”   And it’s true.  Ours was a complicated relationship that lasted for about five years, and we split up for good when I moved to Portland and she moved to Seattle.  We talked on the phone a few times after that, but then the trajectories of our lives took over, and we haven’t talked since.  She’s the one I’ve wondered about more than any other, and I’ve even looked her up occasionally online.  I’ve had the feeling that her life hasn’t gone in the way that she expected it would, and that she’s not happy about it.  What I’ve found recently is that she’s not married, she’s still living in the Seattle metropolitan area, she’s still singing both jazz and classical music, and she’s still working for a video game company.  She was doing all of those things the last time I talked to her.  I haven’t tried to e-mail her or contact her in any way.  I wouldn’t know where to begin, really, other than to say that I’ve thought about her a lot over the years, and that I really hope she’s well, and that I would love to talk to her sometime and see what she’s done with herself.

Man, life is weird, but I suppose I wouldn’t have it any other way.

This makes me laugh for so many reasons. . .

1) It’s from Yakima.
2) The creators actually won some sort of award for it.
3) “If you’re over 100, come down anyway and enjoy the beautiful view” of the parking lot,
from a second-story window.
4) They go straight from “Need a dress for homecoming or prom?” to “Want to join the Army?”
Silky smooth.
5) My biggest crack-up is the opening sentence. I’ll let you experience it for yourself.

June 29th was homecoming day. We slept at Breanna’s uncle and aunt’s house in Meridian, Idaho, but we had arrived so late the night before that everyone was either already in bed or pretty much comatose in front of the television. The morning was when we actually got to socialize.

Say hello to Breanna’s nephew and two nieces.

Kids kinda freak me out, especially when they’re either little, or if there are lots of ‘em. Doesn’t matter how cute they are (and these kids are VERY cute), they still make me feel really anxious and weird. So I kinda kept to myself for a while, reading and then coming back in and out, or talking with Breanna’s uncle and aunt. Their house was great; it’s a shame we didn’t get any pictures of that too. Her uncle cooked Swedish pancakes and bacon and sliced some cantaloupe for breakfast, which was all completely amazing. They were very open and generous people, and I hope our paths cross again.

The drive back was beautiful and remote. Idaho and Eastern Oregon are sort of interchangeable in my mind. Every once in a while we’d pass a lovely ravine. . .

. . .or mountain (I THINK that’s Mount Hood). . .

. . .but for the most part, it looks like this.

The landscape went from greenish yellow to brownish yellow, and we went from the high desert down into the rolling hills. There are actually signs stating things like ‘now entering the Pacific Time Zone’ and ‘now crossing the 45th Parallel.’ We stopped to eat in Pendleton, at a great little 1950’s restaurant called the Main Street Diner. The way we found out about the diner was priceless. We stopped in at a convenience store to buy some water, and I asked the young guy behind the counter, “Is there a good cafe here in town?” The guy’s response was, “Uhhhh. . .for food?” Justin turned away and tried not to laugh.

After our lunch, ‘we continued on’ (Lewis and Clark’s phrase), and the temperature climbed and climbed all through eastern Oregon. I tried to take a picture of the thermometer when it read 108 degrees, but my camera’s battery was completely dead by then, so I wasn’t able to. By the time we thought to try with Breanna’s camera, the temperature had fallen to a mere 105.

The windows of the van were unpleasantly hot to the touch. We would roll them down if we wanted to take a a picture, but other than that, we kept the air conditioner turned on full blast that day. We passed what appeared to be a tree farm, in which all of the trees looked exactly the same, and were planted the exact same distance from each other, and were in plots of land that were perfectly square. On each side of those plots was normal Oregon desert. It was like, yellow desert/LUSH FOREST/yellow desert/LUSH FOREST/yellow desert. How’s that for a verbal visual aid?

Interesting.

Finally we got to the Columbia River, which is when we really started to feel like we were close to home. If you’ve ever lived in or spent much time in Portland or northern Oregon, then you know that the Columbia is the lifeline for this part of the world, and there’s something comforting about looking over and seeing that huge river beside you after you’ve been away from it for a while.

The last couple of hours we spent listening to Kathleen Edwards. If you haven’t heard her music before, you owe it to yourself. I now completely associate her music with road trips, because the first time I heard her was on last year’s trip to Nevada. Her songwriting is strong and catchy, and brutally honest. She’s really one to watch for. And her music is perfect for long, open roads.

True to form, it also started to get cloudy as we got nearer to the city, and by the time we pulled up to Breanna’s place, there was thunder and lightning, and big, threatening raindrops.

We took some end-of-the-trip pictures. . .

. . .and then I packed my stuff from the van into my own car and raced home before the rain really started. I just barely made it, too.

A trip is never really over until the rental car has been returned. This van served us so well, and was the perfect road trip vehicle. It was flawless, and quiet, and comfortable in all the heat, and it even got good gas mileage, even though it was pretty crammed full of people and their stuff.

Parting thoughts about the trip:

1) Justin and Breanna are amazing, and sweet, and talented, and genuine, and I’m very proud to call them my friends.

2) I can’t wait to hit the road again. This country has some breathtaking landscapes.

3) I want a better camera, dang it.

4) I need to work on my gangsta pouts and poses.

So that’s it. Trip’s over. Hope you enjoyed reading about it. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled witty and insightful blog, already in progress. . .

OneYearAgo