When I was a junior in high school, there was an attractive, I made the acquaintance of Becky Moran. I didn’t have any classes with her, but she had previously dated this other guy that I knew named Steve Celtaine. I knew him through Todd Derracks, who I also didn’t have any classes with but who I knew from junior high. Why I couldn’t make better friends with the people that I actually did have classes with escapes me but is probably symptomatic of the same disease that prevented me from ever dating anyone that went to my high school. Of course, there were other factors in the latter phenomenon, as Becky Moran demonstrates.

Becky was a notably attractive tall redhead. She wasn’t modelesque or anything, but she was somewhere in the mid-to-upper twos. She was tall and leggy with an outstanding figure. Had she cleaned up nicer, she could have been at home on a Hollywood set. But she didn’t clean up particularly nice at all, nor did she seem to want to. She was in the ROTC with Todd and Steve, where femininity wasn’t particularly valued. That’s probably why she hung out with the ROTC crowd anyway, because they didn’t ask her to be someone she wouldn’t have been very good at being anyway.

Becky seemed to hone in on me very quickly at the lunch table where Steve, Todd, a couple other ROTC guys, and I ate lunch for a short while. She seemed to keep drawing me into conversation, but she and I really didn’t have much of anything to talk about. Not long after she started to eat with us, another ROTC girl joined us at the table. This is a story unto itself, but the site of the other ROTC girl, who seemed like a perfectly pleasant individual and wasn’t hideous in any obvious way, made me physically ill. I had to find some other place to eat lunch. After that, Becky started tracking me down in the hallway and periodically where I was hiding at lunch.

The most convenient place for her was after sixth period on our way to the bus. Every day when I left my last class, she was always right there in the hallway waiting. She would tell me about her day and ask about mine. After a week or two, she started putting her arm in mine as we walked down the hall. After a month or so, she made a habit of kissing me on the cheek when we parted ways. She started inviting me to parties that she was attending, but I always declined because I wasn’t the partying sort, I had doubts if I would fit in with her friends (Steve and Todd notwithstanding), and I figured that the girl who made me physically ill would probably be there, too. The she asked for my help studying, which was an offer I couldn’t refuse due to Will Truman’s First Rule of Female Interaction (the subject of another post).

Not long after we started making study plans, she disappeared. I later found out that she had gotten suspended from school. At first I was relieved because it meant the pressure was off. I no longer had this person clinging oddly close to me. Then, after a couple of weeks, the thought occurred to me that she might maybe could have possibly been romantically interested in me. Like, for real.

I won’t say that the thought never crossed my mind before that epiphany, but I always dismissed it pretty quickly. Girls as attractive as that are not interested in guys like me. Girls with temperaments with hers aren’t interested in squares like me*. She had two metric tons of male friends and she’d dated guys like Steve that were more obviously appealing than myself. But as I thought about it after her disappearance, I realized that she had never, ever displayed the affection for any of them that she did for me with the exception of Steve and that was more clearly of the hug-because-we-hug sort of interaction rather than putting her arm in a relative stranger’s as she did with me.

It very well could be that my initial instincts were correct and that she was just being overly friendly to someone that she did not consider as more than a friend, but the more I’ve learned about women over the years the less likely that is. One big thing that I didn’t realize at the time is that I’d become thin. I still viewed myself at the time as the fat kid that girls didn’t really ever want in any romantic capacity. I’d also, without realizing it, become a much more sociable person. I learned how to interact with people. I didn’t realize that some of the biggest barriers that were holding me back romantically had been lowered.

Becky Moran came to my mind due to a thread in Bobvis on the subject of sexual harassment. Even if I had realized what Becky was up to (assuming that she was up to anything), nothing ever would have come out of that relationship (except, as Steve mentioned when he suggested that I ask her out, the loss of my virginity). There are a couple others that I think might have been baiting me to ask them out that things might have worked out with (at least for a while), but not really her. Nonetheless, it stands as an example of all that I didn’t know when I really wish I had known it.

* – Not true, in high school anyway. I discovered later that my squaredom combines with a relatively open and tolerant attitude (by the standards of my surroundings, anyway) can be rather appealing for particular sorts. I had an unusually high number of freak female friends. Even if they weren’t interested in me romantically, I seemed to draw a lot of them. My first technical relationship was with a girl very similar to Becky in that regard.

Back when I was in college, I had a job as a night operator over a computer network. I was also on what I call the “Water Diet”. The goal of the Water Diet is to drink obscene amounts of water. It would push the food through your system faster and keep you full to prevent you from eating too much. It was great while I was on it, but it became more than my bladder could bear.

The tipping point was when I drank 3/4 as I was leaving work and on my drive home. I figured I would be okay bladder-wise because there was usually a 45-minute delay as the water passed through my system before it needed to come out.

There was a traffic jam that day. A huge, huge traffic jam. I was in that car for a lot longer than the alotted 45 minutes. Worse, I was unable to get off the freeway to find a McDonald’s or convenience store to take advantage of.

I’ve always had a weak bladder and I’ve never suffered it kindly. I expect at least one restroom break whenever I go see a movie. I held it as long as as valiantly as I possibly could. Then, on the floorboard on the passenger side, I saw the empty water bottle just emptily sitting there completely empty.

By the time I made it back to the university, I had filled 2 /12 one-quart water bottles.

When I got home I had to tell someone about my near-explosion, my surprising limberness within the car, and my good old fashioned inginuity. So I messaged my friend Clint and told him the whole story.

That’s what I thought I’d done, anyway. I realized my error when I got a message back from my mother.

trummama: So it all worked out, then?

trumwill: Oh crap!

trumwill: Hi, mom.

trummama: No pun intended, I’m sure.

trumwill: Sorry, I thought I was sending this to Clint.

trummama: No problem. Glad it all worked out for you.

trummama: Must be nice being male.

My mother married for the first time in Carolina. Her husband was a classmate at Carolina State University studying to be an aeronautical engineer. As was not uncommonly the case, after they got married she quit her job and supported him through school.

Their marriage was a difficult one from the get-go because of her husband’s alcohol problems. When Mom proposed that they move to California, she talked of “new beginnings.” In fact, she wanted to get further away from her family because that would make leaving him a lot easier from a social standpoint.

They divorced. Mom regretted a lot about that marriage, but one of her biggest regrets was how he got out of it with a masters degree in engineering while she was still a lowly secretary. She had no real career ambitions and hated working, so it irked her all the more that she had to spend so much time clock-punching. Worse, because he was too much of a drunk to hold on to a job, couldn’t even get alimony out of the arrangement.

She met my father while they both worked for McClellan Forrester, a defense contractor. She said early on that if there was one thing that she would never do again, it was pay to send another husband through school. Dad was perfectly fine with that because he didn’t have any aspirations of going to graduate school.

Then California A&M University came calling. They were starting a new military economics major that was available only to folks with engineering degrees. Because he had experience in the defense industry, they would cut him slack and he could do something else (I don’t remember what) in lieu of a thesis. Dad was tired of working on fighter planes and was looking to get into administration and this was his golden opportunity.

He talked to McClellan-Forrester about their tuition reimbursement program. As luck would have it, they’d just discontinued it. Not only had they just discontinued it, they were asking employees to back-pay previous reimbursements that they’ve gotten. There was no legal way for McClellan-Forrester to do this, but all they had to do was lay out the threat of laying terminating their employment.

McClellan-Forrester was in a position of great power at the time. They were a defense contractor and their employees were exempt from the draft. Any employee that happened to lose their jobs that happened to be the right (or wrong, depending on how you look at it) age was likely not going to be unemployed in the United States for very long. The few coworkers that Dad knew that had tuition reimbursements were scrambling to find the money to give back to their employer in order to stay on their good side.

With hat in hand, Dad came home and explained the situation to Mom. he refused to ask her to support him through school, but it was pretty obvious what he was getting at. She agreed and because he was getting a degree in a military-related field, Dad remained exempt from the draft.

After Dad got his degree he got a job with the Department of Defense almost immediately. The DoD knew just as well as MF that they were in a position of power, so they only agreed to pay him as much as they would if he hadn’t gotten the extra degree. It was still worth going back to school, though, because at this point things were desperate enough that you needed a masters degree to get a bachelors degree job.

Mom was able to milk Dad’s guilt for years. As soon as he got his job with the government, she was able to quit work and be a full-time housewife in a house with no kids. The way she saw it, they both got a pretty sweet gig.

I spent this past weekend in Delosa with my folks. Dad had found a few pictures that he was anxious to show me. Most of them were pictures of my ex-girlfriend Julie and I, but a few were of me and another girl named Andrea Carmine. “When were these taken?” I asked Dad.

“I don’t know. There are notes on the back. How’s she doing, anyway?”

Sure enough, on the back of each of the pictures were notes and commentary. “Pretending not to notice that a fake waterfall was fake sure was fun!!” “I call this picture The Giant and the Dwarf because you’re a giant and I’m a dwarf!!” “If vampires can’t have their picture taken, are you a vampire when you’re smiling because you never have your picture taken when you’re smiling!!” She always had to explain every joke that swept through her head.

If I were to have made a list of everything that I could have wanted in a girlfriend, she would have met nearly every bullet point. She had the figure that I craved at the time. She had nice, straight blond hair. She rarely wore jewelry or make-up. She was a spark-plug of energy. She was extremely easy to talk to and had a way of making me open up and smiling. There was nothing in the way of scars, excess weight, obvious disfigurements, or nail polish. My parents loved her. There was just one thing…

Andrea was a freshman when I was a sophomore and we met in theater class. I’d developed something of a crush on her friend Tanya. As I sometimes tried to do when I developed a crush from afar, I made friends with one of her friends and tried to meet her that way. I called it “pivoting”. It was the closest thing that I had to a tactic at the time and it was bolstered by the fact that I seemed to be attracted to shy girls that seemed to have at least one outgoing friend.

One of the stranger things about it all is that prior to putting my plan into action, I never once considered simply grabbing at the shorter-hung fruit… the more accessible one. I saw Andrea as nothing more than a means to an end.

Once everything was in motion, nothing worked out quite like I thought it would. I discovered that not only was Andrea Tanya’s only real friend in the class, but she just about dominated her friends. It was difficult to talk to Tanya without Andrea turning the conversation away from Tanya and back on to me or on to herself. Tanya didn’t seem to mind since she was a pretty quiet person, but it thwarted my plans.

Also thwarting my plan was that Andrea and I became really good friends really quickly. Within a short period of time, Tanya was being frozen out altogether as Andrea and I bonded. Tanya was the ultimate goal, but not only did Andrea steer conversation away from Tanya and I, I enjoyed talking to Andrea a lot more than I enjoyed talking to Tanya. I also enjoyed simply having a female friend where there was nothing else involved. She was teaching me that females are just people, too.

Classmates, who didn’t like either me or Andrea, took notice of the two of us and decided that we should be a couple and goaded the two of us. It seemed less like “you two would make a cute couple” and more like “you two losers belong together”. The class was dominated by jocks and cheerleaders. It escalated when Andrea and I did an emotional duet where she had aborted my kid and we were putting the pieces back together. Our chemistry together was great and even people that didn’t seem to loathe us started asking questions.

Then for the next round of duets I got to work with Tanya. It’s a long story, but the end result was that it became perfectly clear that Tanya was not interested in me and that was fine because after working with her I no longer liked her on any level. By that time there was a fourth person in our group named Laren. Laren always had an acerbic tongue, a cute way of rolling her eyes at anything and everything that lacked sufficient cynicism, and bug spray that she put in her hair. She was just crazy enough that I had begun to dig her a lot. I eventually did ask her out. She declined and extricated herself from our little grouplet.

Since I didn’t want to talk to Tanya anymore and Laren was gone, it was just Andrea and I again. Our friendship lasted up until my senior year when I went off to college, but nothing else ever happened. The strangest thing wasn’t that nothing happened, but rather that despite all the talk of those around us and despite how close we were it took her dating my friend before I even asked myself why that was. For a little horndog like myself, that was very unusual. I’d either want to be with someone or there’d be some very specific reason why I wouldn’t.

Clint and I discussed the matter. Though he got to know her a little bit as well through me, he’d never thought about making a move, either. As I thought about it, the thought of kissing her made my stomach feel quite queasy. I couldn’t figure out why, though, since she met all those all-important criteria. “Something about her face,” Clint noted. I nodded in agreement.

We took a picture of her that I had with me and started blocking out portions of her face. Mouth? No. Hair? No. Eyes? Holy moley… it was totally her eyes. Even then I couldn’t explain what exactly was wrong with her eyes. They were not of any unusual color or shape. The only unusual thing about them was that they almost had a Japanese double-eyelid quality about them, but I didn’t have any issues with Asian girls.

As I looked at the pictures over this past weekend, I asked myself “What is it about those eyes?”

All these years later, I still don’t have an answer.

One of the things that drives my lovely wife crazy is how lax I am about keeping my windshield view clear while driving. I finally got around to replacing my windshield wipers, which took a severe beating from the drive from Deseret to Estacado when we made the move down in the middle of last year. Also at issue is that I choose to wipe my windshield manually rather than use the wiper speeds (or even intermittent wiping) and I am not as diligent about wiping the windshield as she would like.

One would think that this issue would be of particular importance to me, because in 1982 it almost cost my father his life.

A house down the road from our was having its roof replaced. They kept a large, yellow bin on the road. Generally speaking there are almost no cars parked on our street because it’s banned from 2-6am due in part so that the police can more easily track down escapees from the juvie hall right down the way and due in part to a somewhat aggressive HOA. The roofers got a variance and thus parked their bin on the road.

Dad got up that June morning – we remember it to be June because that’s when the sun shines directly into a driver’s eyes on the way out of the neighborhood – and left for work as usual. The windshield was unusually dirty and with the glare from the sun made vision very difficult. As he was turning on the windshield sprays to clear his view, he got just enough vision to see that he was about to run straight into the large yellow bin. He swerved and narrowly averted near-certain death.

The roofers were very generous, considering that Dad never evaded responsibility. They paid the insurance deductible, paid Dad’s nominal health costs, and moved the bin off the street. Ahhh, the power of a feared lawsuit.

Instead of my standard Ghostland post this week, I’m going to do something different. I’ve been working on my novel lately. Though the whole work is not very autobiographical at all, there are various stories and anecdotes that mirror an experience of mine or someone that I know. The following is one that happened to me and some friends. It’s looking like it won’t actually make it into the book, so I figured I would post it here.

The novel centers around a handful of former users of a BBS, which was a place that people got on their computers to talk to other people before the Internet came along. The novel takes place in 2002 and the narrator is recounting a story that took place in 1992. Some of the themes of the novel is socialization, the difficulties of socialization, and the search for community, of which this scene was a part.

—

I was hanging out at Tom’s house playing video games with Tom (Tailfin), Mark (Toad), and Jeff (Okate). As was not infrequently the case, we multi-tasked and someone was on the board most of the time. I was about to take over when a girl with the handle of Bunnyflop sent him an IUM asking him how his day was. “Do you know someone by the name of Bunnyflop?” I asked Tom, whose account was online at the time.

“No. Should I?”

“I don’t know. She just sent you an IUM asked how your day is.”

“Tell her fine. Hey, can you stick on my account for right now. I want to talk to her as soon as I die here. I’ve got one hit-point left.”

I shrugged. I hadn’t sent in my subscription money yet for the month, so I only had an hour a day. Tom was a “silver subscription” account holder, meaning that he got 3 hours a day. Better his time than mine, I figured.

I told Bunnyflop that I was doing fine. I never found out exactly what happened to Tom’s game, but he must have rebounded because he was playing for at least another half-hour while I sat there and chatted with Megan, aka Bunnyflop. Megan was obviously pretty new to the whole BBSing thing and talking on line thing, so I carried the conversation. I’d been on the board six months and I was getting to be very good at first impressions (it was usually maintaining their interest that was the problem). I was on a roll that day. I can’t remember what all I said, but with all humility I can say that I was a comic genius.

“Dude, what are you laughing at?” Tom asked as he kept playing his game.

“Sorry. I’m just on a roll talking to Bunnyflop.”

“Are you still on my account? Does she know that you’re you?”

Oh, crud, I thought. Not only was I using Tom’s account, but I had told her that my name was Tom. I didn’t expect anything to come of this conversation. “Not exactly.”

“Sweet! Keep talking man. And be funnier! My account, my hero points!”

He had a point. I was using his time. If I’d decided to be funny and charming, it was all in his name. Besides that, things were looking somewhat good with Clarissa at the time and I didn’t need this particular fish, so I cold toss it over in his bucket. I viewed it as an opportunity to get some experience being charming and witty, though.

She was also a good conversationalist. She played off me wonderfully. Things were honestly going extremely well when she asked what I was up to the rest of the afternoon.

I explained that I had some friends over and we were playing some video games. We were going to watch anime that afternoon. Was she interested in coming over?

She was interested in coming over. Right now, in fact. She would bring over some movies if we wanted to. She was also an anime fan. When Tom’s character finally died, I told him what was going on. He was elated. It had been a while before he’d found any luck even on the board. I was happy for him, but I also felt a little cheated. After all, this was my kill. It bit to use all that effort scoring for someone else. Besides, if he faltered (and with Tom this was not unlikely) I would get my chance.

It actually wasn’t that big of a surprise when it turned out to be a moot point. I had picked up on the fact that she was probably going to be heavy, but she turned out to merely be a little thick. The problem was that she was hopelessly dull. It’s not that she didn’t contribute to our hanging out. It’s not even that her failure to contribute dragged on the rest of us. It’s that she somehow managed to singlehandedly make all the non-dull in the room simultaneously implode, leaving our pale and gaunt apparitions roaming around vainly searching for non-dull.

We gave her every opportunity to be interesting. We asked her questions, but she never gave a single answer more than a word or two long.

“So where are you going to college?”

“[private religious university].”

“Oh really? Why [private religious university]?”

“Parents.”

“Parents went there or they want you to go there?”

“Both.”

“So you want to go there?”

“I guess.”

“What do you want to major in?”

“Marine biology.”

“[private religious university] has a marine biology major?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you should go to a school that offers the major that you want.”

“Maybe.”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that she had been like this online as well. She mostly played off what I had to say in one or two word responses. In actuality, I had actually projected a non-dull personality on a remarkably, fascinatingly dull vessel of a person.

She didn’t appear to be having any more fun than we were. We realized that we were sort of bombarding her with questions, but it was mostly in an effort just to get her to talk. As a joke, Tom got a flood light and aimed it at her. “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” he asked.

“No,” she replied, flinching in the light. She didn’t get the joke, answering as though we’d asked if she knew the capital of Zimbabwe or some other non-offensive, serious question.

We all just looked at each other and realized that we were dealing with something peculiar here. We put in the anime tape, watched the show, and decided that we would rather all just go home than spend any more time with the dull-producing machine. Tom, of course, was the one that couldn’t escape because he already was home. He decided that he had some homework to do.

We all ended up going to my house. Once he was sure that she was gone, Tom joined us.

That night he got a System Message from Bunnyflop. She said that she’d had a great time and that she would like to hang out with us again and maybe watch some more anime. We were stunned and a little mad. We were partly stunned because she’d had a good time when we were sure that she was as uncomfortable as we were. In fact, we’d kind of thought that was why she didn’t say much. We were also partly stunned because it turned out that she could string multiple words together. We were a little mad because if she’d just managed to do that at Tom’s house, everything might have turned out very differently.

Tom never responded and we only saw her online a couple times after that before she stopped logging on.

Like most youngsters, when I was a little kid I wanted to be a big kid. Big kids at St. Jude’s Episcopal School had Ms. Mencker as their teacher. She taught kindergarten at a school that only went up to kindergarten, so her students were just as big as big kids could be. Except my brothers, who were really big kids of course but that escaped my attention because they wanted to be even bigger kids. So they weren’t really big kids in my mind, even though they were bigger than the big kids in Ms. Mencker’s class. Cut me some slack, my mind was only capable of managing pre-school thoughts at the time.

Whenever I brought it up, they’d just say “you will in time” or somesuch, they just didn’t get it. So I found another way of telling Mom that I wanted to be a big kid: I told her that I wanted to be in Ms. Mencker’s class. My logic was that Mom would give me what I wanted since it didn’t cost money and then I would magically be a bigger kid. I’d found a loophole in the system! Unfortunately, Mom denied my request but did file it away for future use.

When I was about ready for kindergarten, my teachers privately expressed concern with my parents that I was behind the other students. I would stare blankly when I was supposed to be finger painting, I ate inordinate amounts of glue, and other stuff like that. They wanted to hold me back a year and figured that the best way to do this would be for me to attend kindergarten at St. Jude’s (and perhaps by coincidence, pay an extra year of tuition) and then attend it again at West Oak Elementary, the local public school.

When I asked how come I was not going to West Oak like everyone else, Mom said that she was granting me my wish: I was going to get Ms. Mencker just like I had asked.

—-

When I was in the second grade, standardized testing was becoming all the rage. At the time, Delosa elementary students were taking the California Achievement Test Test (The word “Test” being in there twice because it was called the CAT Test). Ms. Nolan, the counselor at West Oak Elementary was concerned because I was now staring off into the distance during mathematic lessons and still eating more glue than my teachers would prefer.

So Ms. Nolan called my mother in for a conference and outlined her concerns. She said that she was worried that my self-esteem would be hurt by failing the test and that I should refrain from taking it. It would also go in my Permanent Record, which was bad. And perhaps by coincidence, West Oak Elementary would look better on the standardized test scores, though I’m not sure that she was very upfront about that.

Mom said she would take it into consideration and looked further into it. As it turned out, the deferment Mom was being asked to sign would have put me in a special group that would have required my taking special instruction classes for the rest of my tenure at West Oak Elementary. If I deferred from taking the class a second time, I would be put in a special category that would, at the completion of my 12th grade year I wouldn’t receive a diploma but would instead get a “Certification of Attendance” which is more like a GED. So if I didn’t take it in the second grade and the fourth grade, or even if I didn’t take it in the second grade and was sick that week in the 10th grade, I would likely have to start my college career out at the local community college.

When Mom brought this to the attention of Ms. Nolan, Ms. Nolan said that this was true but that it was probably for the best. Quite bluntly, Mom said that deferment was basically for the mentally handicapped kids and I was not a handicapped kid. Nolan condescendingly responded that of course I was not stupid and of course I was a very talented and smart young man, but that it would be best if I were put with other kids that were uniquely smart and talented like I was. In short, she was saying that I was “short bus special” and Mom needed to come to terms with that. Mom declined, I took the test, and as it turned out my self-esteem was not hurt because my Permanent Record was so secret that even Mom and I couldn’t find out about it (this law was changed shortly afterwards and my folks were given access to all of my later standardized tests).

—-

Flash forward about five years or so and Delosa no longer takes the CAT Test but has now switched to something called the Delosa Assessment of Knowledge (DAK). Students who didn’t pass the DAK were relegated to remedial reading in the 8th grade while other students got to opt out of reading and take an elective. I failed the DAK and ended up in a class with hoodlums, misfits, and the folks I would have gotten to know at West Oaks Elementary had Mom not opted for me to take the CAT Test.

Mom was quite distressed when the reading teacher asked for a student-teacher conference. I’d failed the DAK and she was probably going to ask that I not take it the next go-around. Mom got all of her evidence in order and went to see Ms. Cordoza. Turned out it was quite the opposite. Despite reading being my worst subject, I was blowing the other kids out of the water. In fact, I was positively bored and was drawing and writing comic books, which in turn was distracting the other students. Whereas other teachers were bothered by my looking blankly out into space, Cordoza apparently would have liked me to do more of it. Cordoza asked if she could have me teach other students or, if there wasn’t anything I could do for that, go play around in the computer lab across the hall.

Cordoza could not believe that I had failed the DAK and actually looked up my test scores, which were apparently just shy of passing. At the end of that year I took the DAK again… and failed it again.

—

Over eight years later, I graduated from Southern Tech University with honors. When I got the piece of paper, Mom asked if she could borrow it to have it framed. She did frame it for me, for which I am grateful. What she also did was photocopy it and send a copy of it to Ms. Nolan, for which I am also grateful.

I am not a particularly heavy drinker. Having grown up with a mother that sometimes veered into borderline alcoholism, the notion of being in a perpetual drunk state scares the living crap out of me. Further, I don’t really like the taste of any alcoholic drink except maybe sissy wine coolers. So by and large I consider my alcohol-drinking habits to be pretty normal. When it comes to people that I’ve lived with, however, it’s very abnormal. All three of my college roommates Hubert, Dennis, and Saresh were non-drinkers. My post-college roommates Karl and Dennis (same guy) were non-drinkers. My wife? Non-drinker.

I respect non-drinkers on the whole. Society would be so much better off if there were more of them. But as the drinker in a crowd of non-drinkers or in mixed company, it can be decidedly inconvenient.

My friends Kyle and Clint, my college roommate Hubert, and I were all at one point part of a small little production company. We were contemplating special features on a DVD and decided that it might be funny if we all got piss drunk and filmed ourselves. We’d make it an easter egg or something. Kyle, Clint, and I were drinkers, but Hubert was not. Hugh wanted to be included, though, and this presented a bit of a problem. He wanted to pretend to be drunk, which we were all quite unsure about.

I don’t remember a whole lot from that night. One of the things that I do remember, however, was when I spontaneously decided that I would become a spokesman for Delosa’s Finest Beer. I held the bottle of DFB in my hand and said, “Delosa’s Finest… great f***ing beer!!” Then Clint did the same thing. Hubert wanted to join in, but I said, in front of the camera, “You can’t, man, you don’t drink!!!!” That kinda teed him off because he was pretending to be a drinker. Kyle then got in front of the camera and we did a “great f***ing beer!!” together. A couple minutes later Hubert stole the camera and did his own rendition of my Shakespearesque line. His faux-stumbling looked far too deliberate. His fake-slur was awful. Dead silence. Then, in the back behind the camera you can hear Clint exclaim, “Oh my god, he killed our ad campaign!” That brought back the laughter and we commenced acting stupid in a non-deliberate, believable manner. Except Hubert, who started to pout.

All of the material was likely entirely unusable, but we wanted the ad campaign portion of it. Unfortunately, Hubert said that the tape had accidentally been taped over so we never got to see it.

In another case involving Hubert, Dennis, and Karl, we came up with this game to play a drinking game with F-Zero, a challenging and unforgiving Nintendo game. The thing about F-Zero was that unlike other racing games, one of the challenges was just to survive the course. There were 100,000 ways to fall off the track or run out of energy if you were sober. The idea was that we would make a reverse-drinking game out of it. In most drinking games the loser has to chug, but in this case the winner would. That would make it easier for someone else to win next time and they would drink. By the end everyone is drunk and going two miles an hour try desperately not to veer off the track.

The entire game, though, requires that everyone drink. Hugh absolutely failed to understand this and kept trying to come up with ways that he could play (“I’ll drink Diet Coke instead!”). Dennis, meanwhile, accused us of rigging the rules just to exclude him. Karl said he would play and drink, but we were a bit cautious about serving him the first alcohol he’d ever had in his life when we didn’t know if a sober person would be there if he had a reaction. Unfortunately, drunken F-Zero was basically banned from the dorm because of all the ill-will. Dave, Clint, and I played it one New Years. I played it on a couple other occasions with a girl that I was sorta dating, though it wasn’t as fun with two people, and every now and again some of us would have access to the dorm when no one else was there and we’d play. The second Hugh came in, though, one of us would dart (stumble) to the TV and turn it off so he would think that we were just drinking rather than playing some sort of game that he would have to be left out of.

Of course, having non-drinkers can be awfully handy at times. Before he turned 21, Kyle was our constant designated driver. When he turned 21, he celebrated by we mourned.

I’ve mentioned on a couple of occasions the rank snobbery and spoiled nature of my high school. This week’s Ghostland will consist of two stories about such.

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My Freshman year in high school I was at a table where I overheard an upperclassman explaining how she hurt her wrist.

It seems that she was driving down one day and went through what she was sure was a yellow light. Out of nowhere, a car must have decided that even though their light was red (which is what it would have to be if the light was “definitely yellow” as the upperclassman was driving through the intersection) they would go ahead and dart into the intersection.

Upon seeing that they were entering an intersection on a light that was still read (as it must have been), the other driver slammed on the breaks. The upperclassman swirved to miss the car, dinged it, but went across the median into oncoming traffic where she hit an oncoming car whose driver “wasn’t really paying attention”.

No one was killed or anything, though the driver of the other car (the one that wasn’t watching for cars crossing the median, apparently) did have to go to the hospital.

Upperclassman girl was pissed. She was pissed at the driver for darting into the intersection and forcing her to swerve. She was pissed that the other driver couldn’t dodge her. Mostly, though, she was pissed off at her father. Why? Her father wasn’t going to buy her another car for a month. Further, Daddy was going to get her another Mustang rather than the car of her choice (can’t remember what kind she wanted).

Her friends, throughout this entire story, were completely sympathetic. One expressed dismay that upperclassman was going to be stuck with another Mustang when she wanted something else and they were going to have to replace the car anyway.

—-

My sophomore year I took a theater class with a group of cheerleaders. Bessy was a cheerleader and not among those that I cared much for. We would sometimes have class in the auditorium for whenever we needed to rehearse for something. The auditorium was cold and she was either wearing her cheerleader outfit or something else that wasn’t particularly covering her up. She put word out that she wanted a jacket if anyone would be so kind as to loan her one (she didn’t use that terminology).

Now ordinarily I would gladly loan my jacket to any young lady (or even a guy) that needed one since I was a pretty warm guy anyway and I’m a sucker for a damsel in distress. But not for Bessy. I wasn’t surprised that she never asked me for one as she made the rounds. But then she asked her friend Ally, also a cheerleader, to ask around as well. Now Ally I liked, though I’m not sure why. Anyhow, when Ally asked me for it I handed it over despite knowing that it was going to Bessy.

Bessy snuggled herself into my jacket and thanked Ally for procuring it for her. Then she asked whose jacket it was. Upon finding out it was mine, she yanked the jacket off of her and threw it onto the ground, saying “ewwwwwwwwwwwww!”

Ally shrugged and handed me my jacket back.

A couple years later my class looked at me in confusion when I said “Yes!!” to the PA announcement announcing that the head cheerleader was going to be Donna Lerner. No one expected me to be the type to give a rat’s patoot about who would be the head cheerleader. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have, except that Bessie was supposed to be the odds-on favorite and Donna was okay by me.

I’ve mentioned before that there are five television shows and/or movies that have had a profound effect on me. One of them is Hedwig and the Angry Inch. If you haven’t seen the movie and are open to a musical about a transexual rock star*, I recommend it. I won’t be giving too much away in this piece that isn’t already alluded to early in the film or that isn’t predictable from early in the movie.

Near the end of the film is a confrontation** between the protagonist, Hedwig, and her former love Tommy. Tommy did some really quite rotten things to Hedwig, moved on, became a star, and ignored Hedwig thereafter. When the two meet at the end of the film, the overriding feeling is that there is nothing he can say that will make what he did okay, and there is nothing that she can hear that will make the pain go away. Hedwig was left to confront that she had lost everything not only because of Tommy, but because of her inability to let go of him.

That was the part that I focused on when I first saw the film because I was dealing with the breakup between Evangeline and myself. The part I saw was the breaking up and moving on. Or trying to move on, anyway.

Several years later I find myself focusing on another aspect of the same scene. It was two people looking at each other, one destroyed and the other sorry. It was two people that obviously loved one another in their own way, but in a way that couldn’t ultimately be anything but destructive. Hedwig lost her identity; Tommy lost his soul. They each needed to get back what they had lost, but it was apparent that they would not be able to do so together.

I’ve mentioned that I have been gathering my thoughts on with Evangeline off and on since I found out that she was getting married. It felt sort of like my stomach settling. Things were rumbling around because some gas needed to get out. When I have relevent dreams it’s often a case of something on the periphery of my mind needs to be let out, so when I had the dream of Evangeline, I took it as a sign that I had some things to think about. Namely, why the happy occasion of her engagement discomforted me a little bit even though I was the one that shut the door on the relationship and I would not want to reconcile even if I weren’t well married.

When I decided to go forward with the marriage to Clancy, I closed the door on reconciliation with her. When I actually got married and moved to Deseret, the door was locked. When she ended up finally leaving her stable-but-unmarriable boyfriend Kelvin, my main thought was being thrilled that she wasn’t waiting for me to reconsider. It may sound egocentric of me to say that, of course, but it’s sort of what she said she would do, it’s what I might have done for her, and it’s precisely what my friend Tony’s wife Lara did for him when she waited years for Tony’s relationship with Julie to fail. Upon finding out that she was getting married, it wasn’t even the sound of a door being shut or locking. Rather it was an echo of the door closing years ago.

In that echo I heard the song Wicked Little Town, and I heard something that she once said to me.

The gas that escaped was the realization that taking a broadside look at the relationship five years since its destruction that we each had a profoundly negative impact on one another’s life. I guess I knew that one some level, but I honestly never really looked at the tally before. And with each step away from it, I realize that all of those costs incurred will never be recouped. It will never be made good.

I am left to ask myself how it is that two people with such an intense connection and such strong feelings can end up in something so destructive. How can the rhythm in our hearts beat in such synchronization and yet leave us so ultimately incompatible with one another.

The connection I share with Clancy, and the foundation of our relationship, is one of similar values and thoughts. This past weekend at the Oasis we found ourselves thinking the exact same thing at least a half-dozen times. I don’t always agree with what she’s thinking, but I understand what she thinks and how she thinks and I have the deepest love and admiration for her.

The connection with Eva was something on a more emotional or spiritual level (this is why she thought the decision between them was a heart vs mind that lead to my alternate future). In the same way that I can tell what and how Clancy thinks, I had a remarkable intuition as to how Eva felt. I was pretty consistently able to figure out what she was going to do before she did it, when the choice came down to her emotions. She also had a unique understanding of a part of me that no one else really sees, much less understands.

You would think that that kind of empathy would lead two people close together, but it never worked out that way. It almost made the two of us too sensitive to be around one another. I could feel when I was hurting her and she could feel the same. We’d hurt, we’d pull away. Most importantly, we’d process our emotions differently. Then we’d expect the other person to understand because of how good they were at understanding us the rest of the time.

How could something so special go so wrong?

The answers to that question are legion. Those things that I saw of myself in her were those aspects of myself that I was least comfortable with. She had trouble accepting how someone that felt so similarly to her could think so differently. The passion of our emotions always outstripped the virtue.

And at the end of the day, we caused more harm to one another than good. I’m married and she’s getting married. Even if I wasn’t married, she is not where I would turn. It’s too late to ever change the score. To ever make things even. To ever make things good. Ever.

It’s not unlike attempts to quit smoking. The parallels between breaking up and quitting smoking deserve a post all their own, but I’ll explore an aspect of it here. I can stop smoking for weeks at a time and I do. The problem is that there’s something in the back of my mind that freaks out at the thought of never smoking another ever, ever, ever again. That echo of a door shut.

With Evangeline, it isn’t that she and I won’t be together again or anything like that. Rather, it’s that the potential we had will never be realized. I will not attend her wedding as she never attending mine. I will never meet her children and she will never meet mine. We will never be friends. I haven’t spoken to her in over a year. When we were together we wallowed in our weaknesses. I don’t know if it had to be that way or not, but it was. And like Hedwig and Tommy, we are at our best when we are confronting life apart.

Despite all this, I don’t regret having met her. I don’t even think I regret the wasted time and the anger and the sadness. I met her at a time when I was emotionally dead and she brought me back to life. It’s hard to regret that on the whole because it made me who I am. It made the kind of person that could make things work with Clancy. If it weren’t for her, there wouldn’t be a me.

Even though she and I will never be able to make things right, things ended up alright. I’m sure at some point in the future I’ll have another little burp of gas from the past. Some song will come on the radio and it will make me think of her. That’s the way things work with memories. With the latest news is the opportunity to recognize that our lives intersected on our way to happy endings. Separate endings, maybe, but who can ask for more than two happy endings?

And in the end, who could ask for more than two happy endings?

* – I was and am viscerally uncomfortable with transexuality, but that didn’t stop my enjoyment of this movie one iota.

** – I call it a scene, but it’s actually a musical number. The song is really good, but the dialogue-free acting is phenomenal. It was better than any standard dialogue could be.