Blog

I got home yesterday and had a message from Fabish on my answering machine. That never happens. He's not the calling type, you see. He likes to be called. Anyway, he was inviting me to dinner, so I couldn't say no. We went to a Mexican restaurant where we talked about his future wife, my lack of a future wife, and the plans to move in together. Afterwards we were just going to go back to my place, drink some beer, watch a movie, something boring like that. But as we were heading back, we saw Steph getting off the interstate. I sped up and passed her while honking and flashing my lights like an idiot. She looked really freaked out.

She followed us back to my place and invited us to a movie. They were going to see Family Man, which I really wanted to see. Fabish hates Nicholas Cage with a passion, so he decided against going. I felt bad just dropping Fabish off, so I told him I'd go see a different movie with him, and we'd meet the rest of the group afterwards.

So, me, Fabish, and Steph saw Vertical Limit while Angie, Marissa, and Marie saw Family Man. That worked out nicely. After the movie we stood around in the lobby like idiots for 15 minutes trying to decide what we were doing next, when finally we all just decided to go to our respective houses.

Then I went home, painted a few hours, and went to sleep.

I had a weird dream last night though. Now, for those of you not in-the-know, Fabish and Steph used to date. Fabish has done a slightly better job of moving on than Steph has, although she's made leaps and bounds lately. So, in this dream Fabish was marrying his future wife, Christina. I was throwing a party for him, since I throw parties for everyone these days. I was his best man. During the services, I couldn't take my eyes off Steph, who looked like she was about to cry. Then there was the party where much drinking followed. Fabish and Christina excused themselves and Steph started crying her eyes out. I tried to comfort her, but she wouldn't let me. She stood up and I stood up to give her a hug. I opened my arms, and she hit me square in the stomach and ran away. Angie called me a jerk and ran after her.

I have no idea what any of this means.

This weekend was pretty uneventful. I knew it would be when it started, so I can't say that I was too upset about it.

Friday night me, Steph, and Angie went to Damon's. I paid, as per usual. Afterwards we call came back to my apartment where Tim Callahan stopped by. We discussed erections and masturbation in depth. The girls had many questions which we were all too happy to answer. Girls do not understand the phenomenon of erections, let me tell you. They thought every time I guy had one, it meant he was aroused. That is way, way, way off. Most of the time they're annoying, not exciting. Ah, but I digress.

Saturday I helped Alan, my brand new roommate move in. He didn't have a lot of stuff, so with 4 people movie it took about 20 minutes to get everything jammed into his room. Afterwards he took us all out to dinner. Steph, Angie, and Molly were going to come over and I really wanted to either drink or go see Dracula 2000. We drank a little, but not nearly enough for my tastes. We talked even more about masturbation, pubic hair... interesting stuff. I'm so happy people feel comfortable enough coming out and telling me this crap. Molly and Angie left early, and me and Steph discussed my general discontent with my love life. Even though she totally disagreed with my stance on the subject, hopefully she understood and doesn't think worse of me because of it. She told me she'd be a little disappointed if I stretched my boundaries to see what else was out there, but sometimes you have to live for yourself and not worry about what others will think about it. I just need to see what else it out there for me, and I need to do something different. What I'm doing now isn't doing much for me.

Sunday I went to the art store and picked up some supplies. They changed the whole store around. It had been a while since I had been in there, and everything was changed. I picked up a canvas, huge drawing paper, some pastels, lead holder, graphite, acrylics, new brushes... I'm all set, hopefully. I started a new painting last night too. It had been a long time since I just sat down and painted. Or, I guess I stood up and painted.

It's one of the most personal paintings I've ever done. From my conversation on Saturday I was all in the mood to get over myself and change the direction my love life is going. The best way is to do that, I think, is to forget what has happened up to that point. Hopefully this painting will help me get there. There's 2 girls I have to get over completely before moving on, the first being Barb, who I still have some issues about. I dug through all my old notebooks from high school and found my Economics notebook from senior year. This was the notebook I would write notes to Barb in, then pass it up to her, and she'd write one back. They're very random and hard to make sense of, but I read some of what we had written to each other, for inspiration. They didn't help. Then I looked in the margins of the notebook, where I'd always sketch and doodle little weird things. These are always some of the most interesting drawings I do, but unfortunately don't translate well to anything outside a notebook. I figured I'd give it a shot anyway. I drew a weird collage of a whole bunch of these weird old drawings. Most of them are filled with hate and violence, which is incredibly appropriate. My favorite is a very child-like drawing of a woman looking very mean, complete with devil horns. She's standing there with a cut off head in her hand. There's a label that says "barb" and points to the woman. Kinda weird, huh? I have no idea what I was thinking when I drew that, but it was obviously strangely appropriate.

Look at me. I saved my own life this morning. Allow me to explain.

My stupid car is a mess. I haven't ever washed the thing, ever. It's really dirty and salty and snowy and the windshield washer fluid container leaks, so I can never squirt off my windshield when I need to. When I park it, I usually take a handful of snow and drop it on my windshield, and that clears up a lot of the dirt and salt on there so I can see. Of course, a few miles down the road it looks horrible again. It's usually not a huge deal, where I'm afraid I'll crash or anything, but every once in a while the sky opens up and shines the brightest light on earth right on my windshield. The dirt and salt reflect the light directly into my eyeball, making it impossible for me to see anything, driving blind. That's just the preface to the story. Now here's the story.

I'm hopping in my car this morning and hear a revving engine and spinning tires. I look down about 2 parking lots and see a little Cavalier stuck in the snow. The girl behind the wheel is getting really flustered and looks on the verge of tears. I go down there, introduce myself a little and offer her a hand. Well, we get the car out in just a few minutes and I go on my way. I throw the handful of snow on my windshield and turn on my wipers. It clears off a lot of the nastiness, not all, but I figure it's good enough since I'll probably be late anyway.

I got on the interstate and was driving a little faster than usual because I was kind of late. I get out of Peoria and am heading up a big hill. Right then, the sky opened and blinded me. I slowed down a little and squinted a lot. I could make out the car in front of me, so I just planned on following him until the clouds covered the sun again. All of the sudden he slams on his brakes. I couldn't see his brake lights right away, so I ended up hitting the brakes even harder.

We stopped completely. Now, traffic jams in Peoria happen very rarely. I work outside of Peoria, and once I get through downtown they never happen, unless there's an accident. The traffic was stopped for as far as I could see, which wasn't very far, granted. A mile or 2 up the road we had to merge into one lane (amazingly hard to do if you can't see out of your windshield) and a mile or 2 later I see why I was stopped. There was a 5 or 6 car pile up. None of the cars had bumpers, and all of them were really smashed up.

At the time there was one cop car there, but as I sat, not moving, in traffic more and more passed me, and finally an ambulance.

I don't know how long before it had happened, but just think if I hadn't wasted 4 or 5 minutes pushing that girl out of her parking space. Kind of makes you wonder, eh?

I had 2 weird dreams that I remember really well, so I feel like I should type them.

The first one was at my parent's house, which wasn't really their house. Fuller, one of my more estranged friends, called me on the phone. He said something about no one understanding him, but I had the key. I was holding it in my hand. He said he had written everything I needed to know about him on the side of the phone. I looked at the phone but didn't see everything. He was mumbling something I didn't fully understand as I fumbled around, looking for the message. I was throwing drawers open and tossing things everywhere, looking for this message. Finally my dad brought me a big pile of about 15 phones and I looked at all of them until I found his message. It was some sort of nonsense about God and love and peace. I didn't fully understand it. I then put that phone to my ear and heard what Fuller was trying to say, but before he finished I hung up.

In my next one, Dave called. Dave has called me about 3 times in my life, and twice was so I could buy him beer. He was begging me to do something with him. I just remember him saying "Dude, I don't care what it is, as long as we do something together. C'mon, let's do something. We have to do something. Let's get together." I hung up on him, too.