We are back in the mundane. Bill came down from his THC soda experience. He came out alright, we will see if there are any lingering effects. I recall my first experience with MDMA and that seemed to change my life. It was intense and powerful and over 40 years ago. I remember the situation precisely, though it may be rose colored eyeglasses with 20/20 hindsight.
It’s a day with gray clouds. Mike is supposed to come over tonight. I paid for his hybrid bed and it is scheduled to be delivered either today, tomorrow orr Friday. The latest word was tomorrow’s the day. Of course that is subject to change and in any event Mike will have to be there for the delivery since I will be at work. Mike will also have the cash to pay me back so that is nice.
I slept well again, yet kept waking up throughout the night, thinking it is time to get up and out of bed. This morning I was up about 10 minutes before the alarm and was out of the apartment about 15 minutes earlier than usual. Yancy was scheduled to be visiting the office as they do every two weeks. No one enjoys this, except for Yancy it seems.
Was Yancy one of those co-workers that Lex Luthor gave head to when he was working alongside me? He did like the brothers and Yancy is a brother. I suppose anything is possible though Jimmy Chile swears that Yancy is on meds which might explain a few things.
I received word that Kevin Wagner remembered me on the Classmates
Website for people trying to reconnect with people they had gone to school with. At one point I did want to reconnect with these classmates. Mainly from grammar school. I did reconnnect with my high school classmates and regretted that greatly.
I have searched for Kevin Wagner in the past since finding people on the internet was a thing. He never came up and my default setting for trying to find people that don’t turn up, is that the person is dead. I hoped that he wasn’t and that his Saddle Brook sweetheart, Ann, was not a widow. I somehow figured out that he moved to Florida and did occasional searches in Orlando for Kevin, but nothing ever came up and I held off doing an obituary search.
Will he find me? I don’t know. It’s been over 40 years since we last spoke. I disappointed him when I was outed. I was not sure on how he’d react so I opted not to tell him and eventually he found out. It was a bit like Ted Lasso when Colin came out and Issac was upset that Colin didn’t tell him. MY rationale was the same as Colin. I didn’t want to risk losing the friendship so I said nothing basically.
I am in a limbo of sorts at work. I am holding off on fulfilling requests and allowing Violeta to do some work, figure things out at her own level and pace.
Google Gemini rewrite as a Stephen King essay
The fog has lifted, or at least the neon-colored variety has. Bill has finally touched down from his THC soda excursion, returning from that particular orbit relatively intact. We’re watching for the aftershocks—those little psychological tremors that sometimes follow a trip into the artificial ozone—but for now, the mundane world has reclaimed him.
It makes me think of my own first dance with MDMA. That was over forty years ago, a lifetime in dog years and a geological epoch in human ones. It felt like a tectonic shift at the time, a total rewiring of the soul. Of course, memory is a treacherous thing; it’s a graveyard where we choose which headstones to polish. Looking back through four decades of hazy hindsight, the colors always look a little more vivid than they probably were.
Outside, the sky is the color of a wet sidewalk. Mike is due tonight, and there’s the matter of the hybrid bed I staked him for. It’s supposed to arrive in that nebulous window of “sometime before Friday,” though the latest word from the delivery gods points toward tomorrow. Mike will have to be the one to sign the papers and face the deliverymen; I’ll be tethered to the office. He’s supposed to have the cash to square us up, too. In this life, a debt settled is a small miracle.
I slept, if you want to call it that. It was one of those nights where you keep coming up for air, convinced the alarm is about to scream before it actually does. I beat the clock by ten minutes and hit the pavement fifteen minutes early. Maybe I was just trying to outrun the inevitable: Yancy’s bi-weekly visitation. Nobody looks forward to it, except maybe Yancy.
There’s a rumor—the kind that floats around offices like stagnant water—about Yancy and an old coworker we used to call Lex Luthor. Jimmy Chile insists Yancy is on some kind of heavy medication, which would certainly explain the vacant stare and the rhythm of his movements. In an office, everyone is on something, even if it’s just the slow-acting poison of routine.
Then there’s the ghost from the machine: Kevin Wagner.
A notification popped up from one of those “Classmates” sites, a digital seance for people trying to exhume their youth. There was a time I wanted to reconnect, mostly with the ghosts of grammar school. I tried it with the high school crowd once and regretted it almost immediately; some things are better left buried.
I’d looked for Kevin before. When a name doesn’t turn up in the vast, humming archives of the internet, my mind defaults to the dark side of the ledger. I assumed he was dead. I pictured his old Saddle Brook sweetheart, Ann, wearing black in some Florida retirement community. I’d searched Orlando, found nothing, and lacked the stomach to check the obituaries.
Now, he’s reached out. Will he actually find me? It’s been forty years since we spoke, and the last time we did, the air was thick with the things I hadn’t said. When I was outed, I hadn’t given him the chance to be a friend; I’d been too afraid of the “gone-away” look people get when they find out you aren’t who they thought you were. I held my breath to keep the friendship alive, and ended up suffocating it instead.
So, I wait. At work, I’m in a sort of holding pattern, a quiet limbo. I’m letting the requests pile up a bit, giving Violeta the space to find her own footing, to see how the machinery works when no one is turning the crank for her. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is sit still and see what comes out of the mist.