Last night was a microcosm of my life:
I wander around in the dark for hours, aimlessly looking for something, failing to attend to prior engagements, until... at the last minute some kind of veiled jesus shows up as happening to look in that place I thought it could never be... and there it is!!! I turn the keys, but of course, the battery is dead :(
Allow me to explain.
Yesterday at five, in that dull haze I'm always in after work, I wandered to Cafe Milano to write Chinese characters by sheer force of caffeine; I had somehow forgotten to get my car, which I'd parked earlier that day somewhere in the labyrinthine hills of North Berkeley. I remembered this just before Ngan called to remind me about dinner at 8. Ok I'll go get my car around 8 and then pick you up near campus. No problem.
Problem: when I check the place where I usually park my car, a few blocks north of Work, it is missing! I look around a bit, checking nearby streets and revising the memories of my morning walk as I continue to fail (you passed that tree yesterday). Looking northward one block, I mentally shake my head--too far away--and head elsewhere to keep looking. I can already see that I will need to cancel dinner with Ngan, so I do.
Having not slept the night before, the search for my car now becomes a vision quest of sorts. I roam the streets--uphill, downhill, hill, hill--in waking sleep; they all look the same. I walk the same streets several times, expecting that in my tiredness I had missed something--the car is hidden by some extra-dark shadow and I must have passed it by; like the lost woods in the Legend of Zelda, I have to walk the streets in a certain sequence before I arrive at the spot with my car. Sick, sick, thoughts of tow trucks enter my mind.
Lost and desperate, I call Gillian Hamel for assistance. I am flipping out with horrible thoughts of tow trucks. Gillain arrives, talks me down. We walk to her house. It is a clear night and I find it funny that I forgot about tomorrow's Chinese test because my car is missing: the hierarchy of bullshit.
Gillian and I, after driving around the same streets I already looked, are about to give up, but I again look northward one block. I know it's not there, but just for shits and giggles... and there it is, next to the well-manicured lawn. And so the story ends happily and I have my car and guitar and safeway bag with toilet paper and we go to Thai Noodle and live happily ever after.
WAIT! NO!
Of course, the battery is long dead; of course, I left the lights on. So Gillian has to drive back after having left and give me a jump. And then we go to Thai Noodle and live happily ever after, with glorious Pad-Sea-Ew for all! And Gillian has to give me another jump start after we leave.
Things You Should Be Listening To, But Probably Aren't:
(hint- google these)
The Ponys
Bill Frisell
The Loving Encouragement of Your Friends and Family (seriously, they are all jealous and want you to fail)
