Fan’s Complaint

Earlier this morning, I was having a conversation/argument with Jay, and I said something along the lines of “nothing has ever been as important as I thought it would be.”

A bit later, I watched Vanilla Sky for the second time. At some point, one of the characters says something like, “The little things, is there anything bigger?”

Nothing in my life has changed in almost half a year now. It’s hotter, so that means I actually sweat while moving boxes now, and gas prices have gone up, so I’ve got a bit less money to spend, but overall, my day-to-day, week-to-week, paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle has remained the same since I have had this job.

During this time I’ve had various gripes. Being alone, setting my face on fire, car troubles, money troubles, boredom, the list goes on and on. There have been highs, like racing last weekend, and lows, like talking about girls after racing last weekend, or setting my face on fire. But over all, it’s been mostly contentment. Perhaps Contentment is too happy a word, so maybe complacency would be better.

It does seem that it’s the little things we remember the most, when we’re replaying our lives, or as I like to call it, having a “h. Introspective-Retrospective.” I don’t really know what I’m saying, except maybe that the readers of this blog could possibly have a darker view of my life than what I experience in actuality. Of course, this isn’t anything I haven’t said before, but now is a good time for me to remind myself of this.

10 years from now I’m not going to remember how completely used and disrespected I felt when I drove away from the mechanic’s yesterday, the car straining hard as I tried to get up the on-ramp to a safe merging speed, after he told me there was nothing wrong with the car. But I’ll probably remember smoking and drinking with Adam at a bar downtown, and how European it all felt, and how it reminded me this old woman that regaled us with stories of Paris in her youth while I was having coffee with E****a, who wore a white zip-up sweatshirt that day.

And so I’m going to try, for the rest of today (my definition of today being the rest of the day until I go to sleep, which will probably be within the hour), to focus on the positive little things, and not be bugged by the negative little things. It seems that in the end, they’re all little things, and most of them will take care of themselves. A minor or even a major setback never really sets us back for long, we tend to just get up and keep going, because hope is really all we have. Sometimes I lose sight of that, and for the next thirty minutes, I’m going to keep this in mind.

Keep dreaming of that green light, old sport.

Things are gonna change, I can feel it.

I participated in Mazda Rev It Up 2004 this past weekend. This was the most fun I have had in a long time. It’s very rare that you get to push a car, as well as your own abilities so hard. I learned a lot, and I’d like to think that I’m a better driver now than I was before I did this. After all, how likely is it that one will push his car to the limit driving to work? This was a chance to finally drive as hard as I can, without endangering others.

I’m sorta thinking about checking out other autocross events. Googling revealed, however, that a lot of them require the filling out of forms. Maybe some other year.

I should note that Mr. E. Sloth was also at this competition. Despite his having a happier life, job security, money in the bank, inner peace, a general sense of well-being and direction, an ability to construct clear and concise sentences, and various other positive things, concrete or metaphysical, that I don’t have, nor will ever have, I beat him at every run by at least two seconds. If in the future I find myself in the gutter and sucking loose change out of vending machine slots, while Mr. E. Sloth is luxuriating in his own house, with an indoor koi pond, I will at least be able to content myself with the knowledge that I was always at least two seconds faster at autocross, on May 16, 2004, than he was.

This is all a part of my new program to be happy with what I have, instead feeling bad about what others have that I lack. I think it is working splendidly.

***

There was this hot girl there, and she ran one of the training courses faster than most of the guys. On my last run through that particular course, I came within a second of her time. I was quite pleased with myself, until I was informed that I hit a cone, and two seconds should be added to my time.

I would like to imbue the dreaded cone with symbolic meaning at this point, but really, that’d be going way too far.

I can try bridge the gap between myself and the opposite sex. It takes a lot of effort and practice, but the more I do it, the closer I get, the more I improve. I start to feel better about myself, but then I hit the cone and set myself back two seconds.

That was weak and depressing. I hit the metaphorical cone there.

I drive 100 miles to and from work every day. I never see anything “interesting” in the morning on the way in. Sometimes on the way home I see “interesting” things. This week I saw three interesting things.

On the LIE, I let a London Cab get in front of me. I give him the thumbs up, and he pumps his fist.

Again, on the LIE. I am stuck behind a guy whose vanity plate says “LIEBlues.”

Yesterday: There is no shade in the parking lot at work, so I’ve acquired the habit of leaving my windows open a crack to let the hot air escape. Black cars can get pretty bad in the summer. On Monday, something snapped inside my driver’s side door, and now that window is stuck closed. So this week, when I park in the morning, I can only leave the passenger window open a crack. Yesterday, when I got in the car to leave work, the first thing I did was to close the passenger side window, so I could turn on the air conditioning. Then when I got on the highway, I started hearing a buzzing sound. It turned out there was a wasp stuck in the car.

Instead of pulling over or something, I decide to, while going at extralegal speeds, lean over and open the passenger side window. It took me a mile or so to get it down all the way. Instead of being an avenue of escape for the wasp, I think the open window made things worse. The wind blowing into the cabin just served to pin the wasp against the back window. I started getting freaked out when I noticed in the rearview mirror that the wasp was repeatedly trying to sting my Bobby Holik Bobblehead. All Bobby could do was shake his head in fear.

Occasionally, the wasp would disappear, and I would breathe a sigh of relief. I’d start to close the window, and then I hear the buzzing again. This happened several times.

When I finally got to the gas station, I jumped out of the car and left the door open. I ran around and opened the passenger door too. Then I grabbed the sweater that I keep in the car and batted at every surface in there. I never did see the wasp leave the car, but it was an uneventful drive from the gas station to my house.

I bet it’s still in my car, biding its time. It’s gonna get me, in the crotch or something, when I’m making a dangerous merge.

I am still freaked out and depressed from this dream and I feel like crying or running away or something.

I’m on the 9th floor at stuyvesant, where we used to do homework in the mornings. I’m having a talk with someone, and then I notice some light outside. I look out the window towards the world trade center, and I see something hit the ground beyond the buildings. Then things kinda go in slow motion. I see a flash, and it gets bigger and bigger, and I realize, “It’s the bomb.” And other people around me seem to realize also, and we start to panic. My first thought is to get underground. So I jump on th escalator rail nearby and do a Tony-Hawk like slide down the handrail. On the 8th Floor, I look out again and this time I realize I’d never get underground. There is another person standing by the window as the blast reaches us. I see him disintegrate, and then the blast gets to me and everything disappears…

The first thing that returns is some kind of corporate logo. And then I open my eyes and I am in a boardroom with a CEO type. I get so angry with him for fucking with my dreams, for making me think that everything was over, that I leap on top of the table to try to strangle him.

I wake up in my bed. I go to school. I just go about my normal routine. I get up on the 9th floor before remembering the horrible dream. “Oh shit,” I say aloud. Whoever I’m with gives me a startled look, and says “the bomb.”

As the day goes on, I talk to more and more people, and it seems that EVERYONE I talk to has had a dream the previous night about the bomb blowing up Manhattan. This doesn’t seem to really frighten any of us, as we all still manage to go about our business.

The school day has ended, and we are in a subway station. The chatter turns to the bomb. The general consensus seems to be that it was just a freak occurrence, and that no one in the world would attack us.

Then we hear a whistling sound, and people start screaming. And at this moment I notice that this isn’t the normal Chambers St. Station, but a terminal, and one that is rather close to ground level. I start to “see” the shockwave hit the cars and fling them into the air. Everyone standing around me holds each other real close. Jay, in all the confusion, somehow got pushed down to the tracks. I can “see” the blast getting closer and closer to the entrance of the station, flipping up cars one by one. And then some cars get pushed down the stairs of the entrance into the station. Everyone still on the platform squeeze closer to the corner of two walls. One car gets pushed onto the tracks themselves and it slowly heads toward Jay. “Jay, come back up!” I yell, but I can only watch in horror as Jay is run over by the slag metal wheels of this car. The driver is a charred corpse.

When the light from above finally fades, and the sound, whatever it was, stops. Jordan hops down onto the tracks to check on Jay. He reaches out under the car to touch Jay to check for a pulse, and I am horrified and in shock when he pulls back two of Jay’s dismembered limbs.

Then, from the darkness of the tunnel, the CEO type from earlier emerges. He produces a TV from somewhere and sets it down. He then stands next to the TV with his arms crossed. An attractive woman in professional attire comes out of the tunnel. She is carrying one of those bags that old doctors make house calls with. She sets the bag down and opens it to reveal a grey infant, slick with moisture. The infant’s eyes are entirely black. It opens it mouth and starts to cry. Then the pitch of its cry distorts, becoming lower, as the baby’s mouth opens wider and wider, until somehow it swallows itself. I try to scream or cry after the horrible sound stops, but I find that I can no longer make sounds from my mouth.

A second woman in professional attire comes, and from her bag emerges a baby with its eyes open. Its eyes start to bulge out and inflate.

I figure out what my fellow survivors of the bomb were in for, and I think to myself, “Jay is the lucky one.” And as I resign myself to my fate, I wake up. For real. I have never been so glad to return to my mediocre, yet hydrogen bomb and mutated infant-free life.

I love the midwest, don’t you?