(Phaysis)

In high school, I ran with a group of guys who, in retrospect, I call “The Four Horsemen”. Greg, Steve, Doug, and I, with our gaggle of girlfriends and anciliary characters. Doug was the last of us to join our group, with me the third. I met Greg in bowling class, and Steve through his friendship with Greg; I’d join them for lunch because they were nicer than most. Doug I met a year later in drafting class; a loner, he’d go off to not eat lunch down by the DECA snack bar. Finally, after enough harrassing, we got him to join our ranks and we all proceeded to do adolescent nonsense at each other’s houses.

I think it was my 18th birthday or somesuch. Maybe a sleepover. My mother, preparing for a houseful of hungry guys, made a huge pot roast with all the trimmings for dinner. It got loud and raucous, as we were wont to do sometimes. Occasionally we’d attempt to outgross each other. Stuff guys do. And so the meal went.

I took a bite of meat and chewed for what seemed like forever; there was gristle or inedible fat in my bite, so I reached in, pulled it out, and set it on the side of my plate. Without missing a beat, Doug, who sat to my right, reached down, picked up the chewed-up wad of beef fat, shoved it into his mouth, and commenced to eat it until it was gone.

It was then that I knew that my friend, Doug Marshall, was the Devil.

Run forward to the end of that year. I had returned home for the holiday after my first semester at college, and I would hang out with these guys, all high school seniors at this point, as much as possible during the holiday break. Doug’s family was gone to north Arkansas for the holiday but he had to stay behind due to his pizza delivery job, so we went to his place a lot. Can’t let a buddy stay way out there alone with no parents around, right? Call it charity.

The Marshall compound was, by my standards, a rather sizable house with a pool, hot tub, pond, patio, woods, and fireplace miles beyond the farthest end of South State Line. It took a considerable amount of time to get out there depending on which path you drove — there was no such thing as a quick run to the store. You could drive the longer, normal route, meaning you took Highway 71 and Line Ferry Road, or you could go the quicker, fun way, which is the network of twisting, half-paved, half-graveled unimproved county roads beyond South State Line. We took to the fun way as often as we could.

One night, three of us were hanging out at the Compound. Steve was on the phone in the game room, Doug was loading up the fireplace in the den, and I was in Doug’s room dubbing off CDs onto tape. Doug walks in and tells me he and Steve are going to go collect some firewood. I nod at him and return to my dubbing.

An hour later, I hear the faint sound of the outside door slam, and Doug stumbles down the hall and into his room, barefoot, dazed, out of breath, and with his forehead covered in blood. “Shawn, c’mon, let’s go. We just had a wreck.”

We jumped into his mother’s car and headed back up South State Line. “Where’s Steve? Where’s Steve?” I asked.

“We went to town and picked up Jennifer.” Jennifer was Steve’s underaged girlfriend. Their dating was forbidden by her parents, given their age difference, so she would have to sneak out after they went to bed. So by now it’s obvious who Steve was calling. As we went, I could make out the faint shape of Steve and Jennifer hobbling towards Doug’s house. We picked them up, and went up to examine the wreckage.

The wreck was at a quick dog-leg in the gravel road where a large oak sat inches from the outside of the curve. Doug’s silver econobubble looked like it was breaking quantum physical laws by sharing spacetime with the tree, like the tree was growing through the front right corner of the car. The driver side of the windshield was spiderwebbed around the impression of a head, steering wheel bent at rough angles. Doug clutched his chest. The driver seat was twisted at the right shoulder from where Steve flew into it from behind before crowning himself on the dash. Luckily, Jennifer was buckled in the back next to Steve, so her injuries were minor. The front passenger seat? It didn’t do so well, either. Anybody sitting there would’ve been pinned and damaged for life.

I don’t know what caused the wreck. Don’t know if Doug was up to his usual risky behavior. Maybe his headlights were off while going fast, trying to prove he could drive the familiar road blind. Maybe he swerved to miss some sudden wildlife. Maybe it was a random patch of ice. Who knows for sure anymore?

But I know that it was Doug’s bald-faced white lie that saved my life. If I knew they were going in to town, I would’ve dropped my tapes in search of adventure. If I knew that “collecting firewood” meant “going to pick up Jennifer”, I would’ve been in that passenger seat. But the Devil lied to me, and as a result I live able-bodied, twenty years almost to the day later, to tell the tale.

I never really thanked him for his betrayal.

My period of good fortune came to an abrupt end on Tuesday of last week. There I was at dinner, high on a good mood, a decent day, and a good meal when the corner of one of my nachos went sideways and buried itself between the gum and the space between two of my molars during a joyful bite (those things find the darnedest of places). So, in pain I finished my meal and went home to attend to my wound and fish out the nacho with toothbrush and floss. What came out was significantly more than just the nacho corner. In doing so, I removed the last of what was protecting the nerve of my tooth from the rest of the world. Pain shot like wildfire from there to engulf the entire right side of my mouth.

I slept that night only by the help of Tylenol, Orajel, and Xanax.

Wednesday morning I woke up early (through no choice of mine) and dug around for a dentist who was on my insurance plan; found one nearby and set up an appointment for that morning. Called the boss to warn him of my tardiness; he was understanding. I get to the dentist, fill out the paperwork, and am shuffled in to get an Xray and wait for my consultation with the dentist to examine the situation. Looking at the Xray of the four teeth on that side, from front to back, the shapes were: square, square, the letter C, square. I had a major cavity.

The dentist indicated two possible solutions: extraction or root canal. At 32, I’m too young to walk around with more holes in my mouth than necessary, plus I don’t want to go around dealing with the pain of shifting, migrating teeth. So my best option is root canal. Painful for a short while, expensive to perform (even with my insurance), but I’ll keep my tooth. I called my mother to inform her that the Family Curse, that of weak tooth enamel, has landed on me, and she agreed that my best option is root canal.

So, until I can find a dentist/endodontist to do the surgery, I’m living on Tylenol and amoxicillin. My liver is hating me. My best option, so far, is to set up an appointment with the UT dental school in San Antonio; for a low cost (due to me being a guinea pig), I can have good dental work done — that is if I can get on the roster and get in soon. I called this morning at 8am sharp for the better part of an hour to get through. Got nothing but voicemail announcements and hold music, which I kind of expected, but not this bad. Didn’t talk to a real person all that time.

Then it occurred to me that today is a damned federal holiday. So I’m kinda banking on that maybe they took the day off. I will try again tomorrow morning, 8am sharp, to get in for either an emergency appointment or some appointment this week. If that fails, then it’s Plan B (my original plan): Castle Dental (yes, I’ve heard the stories of that place — and I’ve heard good reports. It’s 50/50, just like any other random dentist). There, I can get everything done in one place without having to set up appointments everywhere just to get this done.

This pain is killing me. Of all the pains I’ve experienced in my life, dental pain is the absolute worst. When your teeth hurt, you’re just useless, in a darkened room, rolling and kicking on the bed, clutching yourself praying for relief that never comes. Nothing makes it better but more drugs, and that’s just temporary relief. I had some Tylenol just 4 hours ago, and the pain’s almost back in full force. No way to live. So I’ve got to get this root canal done this week or I’m pulling the fucker myself.

Wish me luck on a speedy resolution and recovery.

Today has been a Dine-In Bonus Day for Shawn here.

This afternoon I followed my gut instinct (read: hunger) all the way to the nearby IHOP which offered the kind of hot, toasted club sandwich I was craving. Going to IHOP on saturday has become a habit of mine as of late, a way to reward myself, in a sense, for finishing a week, or as just one of those weekly things I do. Anyway, I got there, grabbed my journal (the real one), walked inside and was seated right away to await my waitress.

“We should be friends!” she said as she approached my table.
I looked up at her and replied, “Yeah? Why?”
“I’m always your waitress.”
“Heh, Ok…I’m Shawn.”
Pointing to her name tag, “Um, you know my name. I’m Vanessa. Hello!”
I shook hands with an IHOP waitress.

The meal was good, I had some good journal-writing time to think about Things, and occasionally Vanessa would stop by to chat or see how I was doing or ask something about me, y’know, stuff that resembles flirting. I saw something that resembled a men’s class ring on her left ring finger, so I played it down, chatted back, and gave her a good tip. Whether it was flirting, cordial chatting, doing her job, or that she remembers my face, it was pleasant to have someone outside my sphere knock on my door to say hello. A bonus.

Some hours later, I went to my recent haunt Austin Java Company to have a caffeinated beverage, possibly something to eat, and to get into some quality laptop time. The crowd there was typical for a saturday afternoon: heavy. I was hungry for something light, so I ordered a cup of their roasted chicken soup (it’s incredible), got a soda, took my table number sign and found a nice seat in the corner. Twenty distracted minutes later (thanks to laptop crashes, etcetera), I realize that it’d been 20 minutes since I placed my order for the soup and that they hadn’t brought it to me. I did the standard glaring-at-the-counter gag, but that didn’t work. Finally, with full realization that they had forgotten about me, I took my receipt and flag up to the counter to prod them again.

“Um, excuse me, but I ordered a cup of soup 30 minutes ago, and I haven’t gotten it yet.”
“What? Oh, I’m so sorry, sir. I apologize. We probably forgot about you. I’ll bring that soup right out, sir, and refund your money.”
“Please do.”

The barrista I talked to wasn’t the one who took my order, but he was crawling over himself all the same to rectify the situation. So, instead of getting a cup of soup, I got the bowl (bigger) and a chunk of focaccia bread, my entire receipt refunded ($5.32), my soda for free, and the manager’s business card with a stamp on the back good for 50% off my next entrée purchase. Talk about bonus.

Snoozy from the soup, the weather, and the caffeine wearing off, I went home to nap for a few hours. Woke up tonight around 11 and lazed around, did stuff online. Then I put on my shoes. Had no idea where I was going or what I was doing, but I put them on because my gut instincts told me I was going out at 2:30am. Then it hit me: I want to walk — because I’ve been itching to do so; the breezy, humid, cool weather tonight is most excellent for walking; and there’s nothing better to do this late at night than walk under cover of dark. But where to walk?

Ah, yes. Whataburger. Can grab a light snack and have a walkabout endpoint at the same time. So I walk. I walk across, along, and through the construction work on Koenig Lane where it’s being widened and improved, checking out the subroad, the equipment, standing on the bridge over Waller Creek to look over just in time to see a raccoon crossing a waterfall to check out the hole in the end of a pipe. I walk along the Texas DPS wrecker yard where they’ve conveniently placed plastic strips in the chain link fence around the perimeter to hide the hulking, twisted, wrecked DPS patrol cars and their workshops. I felt the breeze and smelled the earth, the trees, the creek, and that odd feeling of connection with my immediate environment, that feeling I felt in college as I had my walkabouts, came back for a while. It was nice. I round the corner and make my way up the hill to Whataburger where a long drive-thru line testified to the glacial pace inside the kitchen.

I went in anyway. Ordered a breakfast burger combo. Took my orange juice and order number to my table to await my order. It took them over 10 minutes before they realised they skipped me. So the cashier quickly pulled a bag together and threw in a free apple pie as an apology. And what are we calling that? That’s right: BONUS.

It’s just refreshing to me that by following my gut feelings as I have today I’ve met with Serendipity several times, just like that [snaps fingers]. There’s a school of thought that believes that life should always be lived like that: go where it appears brightest, follow your instincts, listen to intuition, etcetera. It’s not the best way to live life, but it’s good for brief bits of randomness among the drudgery of responsibilities. It’s those tangents that give one dimensional life some depth. A definite bonus.

“Would you like to go grab a filling but stomach-annoyingly spicy meal for a high price, followed by a wet drive to and a muddy parking at an overcrowded neighborhood coffee shop for some mediocre but hot coffee and pitifully poor wireless internet access?”

“Sure.”

It is a sunday. The UT students are back. It is raining; not the heavy rain that breeds excitement, but the light “well, I think I’ll rain…nah, hold on…would you settle for some drizzles on your glasses?” kind of rain. The kind of rain that clings to your side windows and obscures your vision when you’re trying to pull out into traffic. The kind of rain that falls from clouds that just stay all day, obscuring the sun and chilling the ground. The kind of rain that breeds mold.

It is a sunday.

I slept for something resembling 10 hours. It wasn’t a spectacular kind of sleep. It just hung there and lingered. The dreams and fantasies dragged on while my twisted backbone generated enough pain to make the dreams not worth the alpha waves. As I sit here 5 hours after waking up and after a hot shower, some stretching, and a warm meal, my back is still hurting. It’s times like this that I wish I had a drug habit.

There is this guy here at this coffee house who I don’t think I like. I’ve never met the guy. Don’t even know his name. But I don’t like him. Two months ago I was sitting at Spiderhouse, another coffeeshop, with an old friend of mine; she was giving me the lowdown on one of her ex-boyfriends who disappeared from her life and then reappeared at Spiderhouse that night to do the “I don’t see you, you don’t exist” thing at her. She pointed him out to show me who he was as he was about to walk by. He saw me looking at him and nailed his eyes back at me as he kept walking by, like he was saying, “You got a problem, fuckhead?” But I didn’t look away. For once, I didn’t look away. And now that guy is here, at Flightpath.

I shouldn’t feel anything about the whole thing. I shouldn’t. But I do. It was a glare, a daring glare. The kind of glare that communicates with the Animal Urge underneath. He’s nothing to me. I’m nothing to him. And I have this fear/anger motivation. My friends that night, when I mentioned the exchange, said, “Dude, it’s nothing. Just let it go. Don’t let it get to you.” This is the kind of thing that happens on 6th street downtown. A stare is an offense punishable by an asskicking. But nothing happened. Nothing has happened. And I’m a fool for holding onto it.

Fuck.

It is a sunday. Hello.

The past two or so weeks have driven me kinda nuts. Three weeks ago I started coming down with a cold; the whole ears/sinus/throat thing. Well, it went away after an evening, and a few days later I went out to eat; had a meal with some chips and salsa. The salsa irritated my throat which started swelling up. This, of course, broke down the defenses enough to let whatever was waiting in the wings to come in and give me a full-on infection. I had a cold. Lacking the desire to go anywhere or do anything, and wracked with morals that prevented me from spreading my cold to others, I stayed at home for a week at a half. I went to work like normal, but I had to take a day off after the doctor visit because I was too ill to work. And now I’m finally getting well enough to go out; I’m still sniffling, and my chest tightens up every now and then. I’m at 80%, but that’s it.

I hate the cold, damp weather of mid-winter in central Texas.

My time spent on IRC these days is less than stellar. Each day that passes shows me that I’m not cut from the same cloth as most of the people in the one IRC channel I frequent. There are a few people I revere; the rest can rot away, I don’t mind. It is in IRC that I keep getting proven, day after day, that it’s just not worth speaking up or having discussion because someone, thanks to remoteness and anonymity, will fire off an insult or two and make my attempt at carrying a point across worth nothing. It seems the laws of the street apply online as well.

So should I give up on IRC as well, as I’ve given up on other things in the past year, or should I hold on or join other channels? This sounds so stupid. But this is the level my life is at these days. Debating my presence on IRC. Screwit. When the balance between the benefits of chatting with other people and having a good laugh is outweighed by swagger, bravado, attitudes, and insults, it is time to move on.

The balance is tipping.

Oh, ugh. I stuffed myself on Hunan Palace today. It was only a carryout of sweet-and-sour pork, steamed rice, egg roll, fried cheese wantons, and some hot-and-sour soup. :) Ugh. I feel so bloated. But it feels so goooood.

I do believe that the central Texas summer is well underway. The breezes are lightening, the air is thickening, the rain is taunting, and the temperatures are stifling. Now seems like a good time to take up that swimming hobby I’ve been putting off for so long. :) Luckily, the allergens are waning; my schnozz is feeling better. Generally, I was going through a few days where my body just wasn’t feeling well at all; little things are off-kilter here, annoyingly annoying there, etc. It’s all getting better. And that’s a good thing.

Last night, I really don’t know what I was so off about. I think my mood was OK when I left the house, but I’ll be god-damned if it didn’t take 20 minutes at Subway just to get my order taken. I swear to fucking god the *one clerk* behind the counter was stoned out of his gourd because his movements were slow and it took him forever to get simple tasks, like pulling a slice of meat from a stack, done. Anyone who’s ever been to Subway knows that their employees must be speed freaks given that they process the customers at break-neck pace. But, I’ll be damned, I just had to get a Subway sub to answer my all-day craving. And believe you me, after that experience, the sandwich was rather lackluster.

On my way back to my car, a bum, you know, that “blind” one, was leaning on my damned car. Can you believe the fucking nerve? Ok, so not only did he ask me for a cigarette when I got out of the car, but he leans on my car by the time I’m back. I said, “Man, get off my car,” to which he replied, “Oh, sorry sir. Was just waiting on my friend. Have a good evening.” As if. Obsequies aside, you just don’t lean on someone’s car unless you’re expecting trouble.

After eating the sandwich (elsewhere), I go to Mojo’s for some programming. I get a good chunk done, I think, but in order to do so I tuned out by plugging my ears with a mix of MP3′s specially selected to lift my mood and tune out the world. Well, I feel satisfied that I got some work done, but it was so tough to do with friends, people I know and/or people I’m attracted to, swirling around the shop in front of me as I sat at a corner table. I feel, sometimes, that perhaps it’s not my lot in life to be connected with Other People’s World, at least not quid pro quo. I dunno. Most of my friends there know me, but last night scarcely a few came up to me to even say “Hi.” It may have been, perhaps, my laptop and plugged ears; I have discovered that merely having a laptop open and on is innocuous, but having one and doing programming on it (gasp!) is a sure-fire killer of potential chats.

“Hey Shawn. Whatcha doing?”
“Eh, working on a program.”
“Ew. Uh, ok. You have fun there.”

I dunno, though. At times I feel I’m a Friend to All, highly sociable, clicked-ON, and other times I’m further away than that distance of three feet between me and my friends can offer.

Ugh. Ok. Enough with the teen angst. sigh

It just seems my “glass door” is closed. Let us see how tonight fares.