Lookit

I had a nightmare about ceiling fans.

I'm walking down a long hallway, the ceiling of which is packed full of ceiling fans.



They're of all different styles and sizes, and so close together that the necks have to be of different heights just to accomodate them all. They're all turning at different rates, and chopping up the light into weirdly moving shadows.

I couldn't really see the actual fans, though. The were pretty blurry. I have to duck under some of them, and as I'm walking along I start to feel my mind twisting and slipping away from me.


There was some pretty imagry in that dream, I think I'll keep it.



I never use umbrellas, but I used one yesterday.

I liked playing with it.


Swinging it about, pushing against the wind, etc.




I looked like a complete ponce.


I once entertained myself with the idea of contriving to hookup with a girl by offering her my umbrella (which I'd be carrying around for some unspecified reason) when it was starting to pour.

She'd be hunching her shoulders in anticipation of getting soaked, and I'd tell her she could give it back to me anytime, and numbers would be exchanged.



It'd be awesome.






I will never do that.


Speaking of girls, I would totally change PVC's name to Better Half if she didn't have a twin sister who I wanted to call QVC.


PVC & QVC.





Ha



ha hahaha




ha hah


haha

So, yes, she lives with her mother.

This at first gave me a very strange high-school vibe that I wasn't entirely comfortable with, but I do have my own house so there isn't really a problem.

Apparently, I've earned lots of "mommy points" (...), though I don't know how.


PVC and I have seem to settled into a groove that I at least am comfortable with. Is that bad? I forget. We had some issues, but I think we're past them now. I'm not going into specifics.




I went home, DuPont home, during Memorial Day weekend.

Home is just creepy nowadays.

It’s all the infinitely long and straight roads cutting a vanishingly thin swath through the sea of looming pine trees.

It’s so damn dead sounding.


I nearly ran over a turtle (I had to swerve dangerously close to a precipice to miss it), and when I got out to through it to the other shoulder/chasm it was like all the life was sucked out of the world.

Probably the humidity.

It creeped me out so much I actually ran from and to my car.

There was no sound, not my shoes on the asphalt, nothing from the turtle, nothing.

I chided myself on forgetting how living on the coastal plain sounds so quickly.


However, the next morning, (I got up at dawn, oy) I went for awalk on one of the roads by my house and I pause to admire its incredible length and straightness.


I like that sentence.



Wow, I think, it sounds like rush hour traffic on the freeway this morning. It’s fast and furious out there.


I roll that thought around in my head for a bit, and two things present themselves.

A. There’s no freeway for 30 miles in any direction.

2. That humming is too high-pitched to be vehicles.


What we have here are millions upon millions of mosquitoes, bees, wasps, hornets, locusts, cicadas and other buzzing things not 30 feet from me on either side in a constant dull roar.

The forest sounds alive and angry, and seems to press in on me. I really can’t convey the effect in words. Once again, I chide myself for forgetting how home sounds.



But I have not forgotten the smell. It’s roadkill, which had been knocked into a ditch that’s filled to the brim with swamp water and allowed to sit for 2 to 3 months.

That smell is in my blood. It might be in my soul, it’s certainly had enough time to soak in after 18 years of living in it.



Right.






So, obviously, I’m wondering: where are the buzzards?



Ah, They must have just woken up.





One lands about 50 yards away and stares at me, because I’m the only thing in sight.

I start to walk away and I get angry. I get fucking furious.


I will fight this buzzard.


I just did some checking, and there’s no real buzzards in North America, just vultures. I say buzzard because my dad taught me to.

It’s not a buzzard, it’s a vulture.




I will fight this vulture.


So I start closing the distance while trying to conceive of away to scrap with it.


40 yards.


Vultures will puke on you, won’t they?

That’s nasty, but maybe if I can find a convenient branch, I can just beat the motherfucker.


20 yards.









It flies away.


Well, of course.



I just stare up at it, and its three companions circling above me.

They eventually fly away. The forest continues to roar.



I spent most of my time at home not at home, but in Valdosta.

Dad and I don't really get along, so it's best that we stay
apart. We're not violent or anything, we just don't like
each other.


I drove around a lot, and went in various stores and looked
at various things and I don't remember any of it.



I visited the Magic Square.

The Magic Square was where I thought I was going to go to college, but for some reason
decided not to at the last minute and instead ended up 250ish miles away.


That was unexpected, I'm not even sure why I did it.
I sorta, at the time, had an idea on how I wanted my life to
go, and it involved marrying this one girl probably...about
now.

We weren't in a relationship, I was taking the long view of
things, taking into account how we were getting closer and
eventually she would realize I was the only guy who'd been
and would be consistently there for her and seeing as how I
obviously was completely in love with her etc etc.


Sound like a pipe dream? I don't think so, I mean, living in
South Georgia is like being trapped on a deserted island in
that you don't really meet a terrible great amount of new
people, even if you move around a little.



But hey: we'll never know if I was kidding myself, because I
never saw or spoke to her again after graduation night.

Also: so much for the whole being there for her part, since
you know, I stopped doing that.


Puppy love? It's a name at least.




No one tried to get in touch with me either.


The Magic Square was pretty deserted, which was how I liked it.

I made a walk about through the entirity of the one
(magic) square block campus and admired the pretty buildings.



I wandered into the (open) fine arts building, which was
seemingly empty, and took a little tour, wandered into an
empty theater and looked at the set they had up. I thought
about wandering through the set but didn't.


I'd been in this theater before, when my elementary school
took a field trip to see a play about the slaughter of the
Indians by the US Army. I remember the person in charge
ordering us 8 year olds not to laugh when the Indians were
cold-bloodedly murdered clinging to the white flag that
represented the truce the soldiers were obviously breaking.


I thought about Puppy and wondered if she saw any plays here
and how she was liking college and life and how she was
doing and was she happy and would we have been happy
together even though I was obviously from the wrong sort of
background and so on.



I think about the past a lot, probably too much.

I'm trying to break myself of the habit of leaving everyone
behind, because even though it may seem like I obsess over
it, I don't do anything about it.



So I'm thinking about contacting people and see what happens.




Maybe.



Hey, everything is so run down back home, it's like
everything went to shit after I left.




Solipsist, much?

I brought my keyboard back up with me.

All it took was to tinkle out a couple of strains of "May the Force be With You" and I had to buy the Star Wars DVD set.

But, to purchase it I had to give out my name and address, swipe both my credit and debit cards through the machine ("ID purposes") and sign up for a subscription to Sports Illustrated.

I am telling the truth. The checkout line has gotten motherfucking complex these days.



So, I saw Star Wars for the first time in 4 years last night. You can totally see David Prowse's eyes behind the mask when Darth Vader's fighter is careening away at the end of the movie.

I think my movie preference goes, from most liked to least: 5, 3, 6, 4, 2, 1.


I liked Revenge of the Sith.


It made me hate Palpatine.






Don't let him kill me!


But wait, why does Anakin get to do the light-side ghost thing after he slaughtered little kids?

That simply wasn't nice.


I watched select scenes from the trilogy, such as Luke vs. Vader in Empire Strikes Back (which reminded me of how much it really affected me when I was a child, especially the part where he's just hanging from the antennae, that was cold harsh yo) and...Luke vs. Vader in Return of the Jedi.

I must say, I cheered when Vader picked up the Emperor.

I'd had three glasses of whiskey.


I was like, fuck you Palpatine.


Darth Maul was too cool for you, Darth Tyrannus too noble (I have it fixed in my head that Mr. Lucas was trying to impart that maybe he didn't think the Sepratists were all bad, and maybe Dooku wasn't either, obviously I'm reading too much into the series, but that's what you're supposed to do, yes?), and Darth Vader was just an emo angsty teen that you corrupted with your millenia long subtle plans and mechanations and alliances and strategies that aren't going to do a goddamn thing against that empty ass shaft you've found yourself in, you manipulative fucker.


Plagueous saved you a special spot in hell.

Ian McDermott did a good job.


Drama.




I have no job drama. I got a job at the Edifice only a couple of days after classes ended.


I like the word Edifice, it's nice and grand-sounding and sounds so much better than "Student Learning Center".

That's not always the reason I use fake names, i.e. "Puppy" isn't nearly as pretty to me as "Nicky", but it gives a nice distance. Plus I can be all witty, like with What's her Face.

Speaking of which.


She was a bridesmaid at a friend's wedding that I recently went to, so she was down from Boston for a couple of days. I was very nervous about seeing her because this is ostensibly the last time I will ever do so in my life, and I'd just started dating PVC, whom I like and would really rather not deal with the complications of liking two different girls in two different ways at the same time even though I know it happens and in and of itself shouldn't be considered wrong, but...

So, in keeping with my whole be more outgoing attitude, I had confided to one of PVC and I's mutual friends (whom I'll call Strero[and she was my friend first, dammit]) that I was worried that I was going to fall completely back in whatever with What's her face and in my weakness totally forget about PVC and exclaim about my feelings for What's her face because it's the Last Time I'll Ever etc etc.

I barely spoke to her.

I said "Hey how are you" and "What are you doing these days" and made frequent visits to the open bar at the reception to stop my insides from writhing and spent most of my time following around some other girl (Felix, let's call her) talking to her.

Felix is a mutual friend of What's her Face and I, closer to What's her Face, but we've been keeping in touch (though I need to email her back because I haven't done that in a few weeks).

I once thought I was interested in both What's her Face and Felix at the same time, but Felix and I are just friends.


Later, we went bar-hopping when we got back to Athens.


Strero thought I was being too chummy with Felix (I was still avoiding What's her Face, though she was along for the ride) and decided to warn PVC that apparently I was looking to cheat on her, and so we had a fight later and I hadn't cheated on her and was right so it doesn't matter.

What's her Face insisted I drink more, and while at the bar ordering me a drink some random guy starts kissing her and she kisses him back and I acted amused and looked away because it still makes things flip over inside. Rachel was always kissing the other guys.


Felix still owes me a game of pool, a game which I'm terrible at. The bar's tables were all full.

She's pretty, so maybe that's why Strero was so bothered by it.

But she also makes noises like a cat, randomly.


The Edifice is pretty.


I have/had a thing for architecture, it would have been my
dream job if not for the whole thing where I can't do math.



I get paid (not very much but more than my last job) to sit
at a desk for 9 hours a day and answer the phone (2,3 maybe
5 times a day) and read books (the ones I bring).


I'm a secretary.

I've had three jobs, and this is by far the cushiest. I'm so
happy.


No cuts, no angry customers, no eye protection, thick
gloves, name tags, inconsistent hours, aprons (denim or
otherwise), rubber boots, baseball caps, or scorch marks on my clothes or skin.



I sit in an air-conditioned room and read Television without Pity all day.


So I now know all the goings-on in Lost, even though I've
never seen an episode. I'm working on Desperate Housewives,
and I'm contemplating taking on the entire series of Alias
and possibly 24 when I'm done.


Busy summer.

I'm also taking a class, so that'll cut into it
when it starts, but I think I might be able to keep from
crying over it.

If I try hard enough.




I might find the inner strength.