win and tonic

I haven’t been sleeping, which itself isn’t terribly interesting, but the reasons for it perhaps might be.

My grandmother’s mind is leaving her, walling itself off from her access one section at a time. When I was 10 Grandad would tape on his hyper-sophisticated VCR Pokémon for me, and every Sunday after church I’d visit them and Grandma would make me a grilled cheese sandwich with bacon in the cast iron skillet she later gave me when she was no longer able to eat things that are cooked in it. It’s been seasoned for twice the years I’ve been alive.

When I was 12 we started discussing books more regularly - she introduced me to Steven King, and she always had a small stack of novels in every room. I read the Dark Tower series at her behest, and it gave me nightmares, but I never told my mom about them.

When I was 14 I started bringing my Xbox over every week. She loved Halo. Soon she wanted to try playing it with me. She got pretty good, but she was more interested in the story than participating.

She always talked too fast. Before her first strokes. My family always compared me to her that way, in how we’d both become unintelligible whenever discussing a subject that excited us.

I went to see her last week. She remembered me, but jumped across decades as if they were channels on a television. “You married yet?” she asked with a wry grin, seemingly aware that information was missing, but with still enough present to joke about it. “Not yet, grandma.” My window of opportunity for coming out to her has closed and now I regret it.

A friend-slash-sort-of-ex of mine moved across country unexpectedly a couple of months ago. He just learned he has HIV. I’m still a little numb about it - I’ve been tested long since we’ve been together but I’m still reeling. I know someone who’s been symptom free for 10 years, but I don’t know if it’ll be cured in our lifetime. In his lifetime. I’m reminded of Machine of Death, a collection of short stories taking place in a world that exists a machine that tells you how you die on a tiny printout. HIV is like that: You will die from X, Y and Z. And it will be awful.

I lost a couple of friends in the tsunami in Japan. They were brothers and they lived in New York City, where I met them, and I slept on their couch and in their bed and we did drugs together and I loved them dearly and they were visiting their father on his farm, they didn’t even live in Japan anymore, they just happened to be visiting on that day, and I guess I’m still in the anger stage of acceptance about it.

I dressed as a cartoon dog and made a bunch of kids laugh on Beggars’ Night.

I finished my album, almost. I’m listening to it now and hear another mistake that I need to fix. I reckon I’ll do that until I die.

Tonight we workshopped some skits for the improv troupe I’m in. We made each other laugh. I think that’s a good sign.

Things are always happening.

My belongings have become increasingly asynchronous with my mental index of them. The move into my friends’ basement was a temporary one, and my self worth continues to be dependent on my autonomy levels - which makes it hard for me to even acknowledge the disarray of my things. My clothes spill from my collapsible wardrobe; my cleaning supplies are still three tubs deep; my books are still housed in plastic, though approximately a third of them are displayed on shelves not out of pride, but due to a scarcity of boxes. Putting some books on empty shelves emptied more tubs for the next load from my apartment that needn’t be bought. When I move for real, not just two streets over, I will need more boxes.

That’s something I’ve just realized I wish I never have to have say. “I need more boxes.”

I work a lot of jobs these days. Furred children greet me every day, and my evenings are spent in a hole in the wall downtown wearing knee-high boots and straw skimmers and bow ties and guitars, singing and dancing and wailing and kissing and any number of depraved things. And one day a week I place information on the theory of sounds into the minds of children. All while spending whatever free time I have cuddling the cooing, goat-like girls that are separate and the same - goat-like in their appetite as well as their vocalizations. The same because they are the same. We’ve already done science to them: when we separate them in their slumber, and one makes noises in their sleep, the other does the same, even when completely out of earshot. Either their dreams are in sync (suggesting a supernatural link so often observed in twins), or when the presence of one another is removed from their general vicinity some mechanism activates to call to the other. I’m still here. All of their noises suggest as much to us adults. Don’t worry. Still present. Still breathing. I will require sustenance and stimulation soon, but not now.

Friendly reminder.

Mah-ah-ah.

I’ve started a project with person named Jarret: he runs an improv workshop that my dear friend found and invited me to. Jarret got me a job at a media company doing musicky things, which then led to acting, which then led to producing - a producer! I’m a producer of a thing. I can tell people that in response to “What do you do for a living”, another wonderful addition to my usual response that I delight in supplying (“I work with dogs!”) - and the two of us make a musical duo where we shout about beating children for sexual gratification and subjugating women because seriously, women, am I right? Who needs ‘em! Not us gays, that’s who, and every time we’re sing-shouting music together we make each other laugh, and whoever might be listening in tends to laugh too, and this week we’re going to go to bars and distilleries and attempt to make other people laugh in hopes of perhaps, maybe, one day, building a career out of making people laugh. With music.

Laughter, music, dogs, and kids. My life is amazing.

If only I had time for sleep.

Today we needed our sound to be more punk. “Punk”, as if we were alive and cognizant during the literally single year that the punk movement took place but we decided I should plug my guitar into my amp that I never use. I pushed overdrive, and picked the bottom three strings. My arm hurt after mere minutes. We made each other laugh. I like to think that’s a good sign.

The amp hummed as I sat on the floor next to it - a single tone. I plucked a string on the second fret and the amp responded with an additional. The fourth fret resulted in a fifth. The sixth was an additional octave. I sat there on the floor, aware of my slackened jaw, delaying our rehearsal, as I struggled to comprehend the math of it all. Harmonics! I squeaked. I - I never knew…! Or something to that effect. I’ll play with that later, I told him, and got back to rehearsing.

We’re building a backlog of cover songs, too. Big gay cover songs - the first we learned together was a very, very sad song that kind of breaks my heart - I’d never heard it before, but Jarrett described it well. “Ever hear a song that immediately after, you sit quietly with a broken heart thinking about it all? And then you listen to it again? And you need a cigarette?” I agreed. I wanted to suggest a whole list of songs that elicited that response from me but held my tongue, content to revel in this one that we played after only 20 minutes of listening to the song on repeat with me on piano. We make a good team. We make fun.

The song is called Mr. Peterson by Perfume Genius. It’s mostly two chords. It breaks my heart. It’s a good song. I’m excited to perform it.

The Girls are braying. They’re going longer between meals come nightfall. Soon they’ll only need one feeding after dark, and later none at all.

This weekend an old friend and his dog are coming to visit. We’re going to see The Lion King in 3D, and then I will be mostly naked on stage that night. And then I’ll be wearing a tux, seducing Jarrett in drag. Before that, though, I’ll serenade an audience with vivacious vibrato while a bear rampages through a picnic.

If only I had time for sleep.

Re-appropriating a song to codify your current state of emotional affairs is both fairly and unfairly frowned upon. Opening, say, a blog post with John Lennon lyrics will earn you points as “14 Year Old On the Internet” and “Unable To Articulate One’s Own Thoughts” but also, less often, as “Someone whose life experience is filled with such a specific context (but also including some common context that is shared among the entirety of the human species) that angled one’s mirror neurons in just the right way to illuminate in one’s memory a specific combination of poetry and tones that perfectly reflects one’s own emotional affairs that culture has colored so densely that any attempt at an original descriptor of one’s current state of emotional affairs would pale in comparison, so here, they should have sent a poet (whose work is known by many/all which makes the poster feel gives said quote more weight and significance than the poster’s original words could ever hope to achieve)”. Hopefully the following will earn me more points in the latter-most.

The current state of my emotional affairs is the first line from, naturally, a John Lennon song. I feel less dirty sharing it with you, Dear Internet, partly because of its deliciously tautological depiction of how I feel.

Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup.

There. You see? I have that writing itch again.

I should back up.

I went to Anthrocon again. I was surrounded by the some of the most talented and creative creatives in the world, celebrating the output of their brains with one another. Makers and makers and makers as far as the eye could see, and I got to drink beer with them.

Post Con Depression /pōst kän diˈpreSHən/ Noun
The intense despair experienced after spending days surrounded with people you’ve curated solely by their expression of taste, sincerity and values - as opposed to the more common curation methods dictated by geography, social class or school attendance - and finding yourself back home, in your previous life, bound by time zones and obfuscated from these people once again by large and/or pocket-sized computer screens

Dinners in bowties and pencils and geuze and costumes and pottery and talking - the talking! Talking about Mark Twain and the sincerity and commoditization of art and the Cultural Significance of The Internet, the density of the conversations I had with these glorious people make me reel just recalling them, I am unafraid to say that I am quite fond of my ability to curate people with which to surround myself (thanks in no small part to the baseline pool of people belonging to a fandom that is literally fueled by creative types) (SXSW will destroy me, I will kill myself after returning home from meeting all of the people I wish to meet there from the sheer despair of returning to my non-conventional (zing) (groan) life) - and singing by the river while willing the final night of the convention to not end when everyone is due to wake and depart in mere hours because the dread from PCD, the dread of the dread of the onset of dread is too unbearable to even acknowledge - and the dancing - the purest expression of joy known to humanity, and I got to dance with my favorite people from The Internet, I am so fortunate to live in an age where congregations of like-minded individuals can find one another so efficiently (but also afraid of the echo chamber effect but that’s worth discussing some other time) - and the outpouring of art from pencils and pens and turntables and guitars and did I mention the geuze?

Oh, and before when I said I felt only “partly” dirty opening this post with someone else’s specifically contextual creative output (read: a song that wasn’t written for the purpose that I am repurposing it for) (but that’s how all art works anyhow, the re-contextualization by the viewer because of his or her own sovereignty of collected memories and experiences from everyone else’s in the history of all time) like a 14 year old girl on Livejournal is because very few things will make me feel dirty now that I’ve just returned from Anthrocon, a convention celebrating a fandom that does, occasionally, involve boners (ignoring this is unuseful but acknowledging it also so, but less so, perhaps), but anyhow, “I can not feel any dirtier than I feel now because I went to a furry convention joke” (this is not actually true) (it is a joke) (jokes!).

And so now all of my clothes are clean and all of my things unpacked and I went back to work today (dogs, still, still dogs, dogs forever, I have the Best Job) and I hugged the two year old who greeted me at the door (roommates’, not mine) and life Resumed Normal today and I think back to this weekend and go Gosh, I love these people. These people.

Thank you, these people. For existing and becoming the people you are today so that we could find each other and share and exchange joy. I love every single one of you.

Let’s do it all again very, very soon.

Perhaps in a year or so.

The hardest part is riding up the off ramp. I’ve never trusted traffic to treat my back as though it were part of a whole person, suspecting they abstract my back the same way one abstracts a car into a literal car, not the person driving it. So on the left side of the road I ride, making eye contact with those behind their wheels when need be, exchanging enough information to ensure one another’s safety. This arrangement is most conducive when crossing the overpass where the freeway pours onto the main road of my town, where my vantage point as I cross the bridge grants me plenty of time to choreograph my velocity with the cars spilling from the clover exit ramp that swoops for stories below.

I’ve gotten quite good at it. Only three places are on my route that possibly require me to come to complete stop, waiting for a light to cycle so I can cross the street to ride along the unnamed road connecting the Wal-Mart to the Speedway to the Giant Eagle to the hackneyed smoothie drivethru on the end of a stripcenter housing the once-staple but now-dying Blockbuster, of which obviously I have opinions about, obviously because I am a member of my own generation who has seen the birth and death of multiple modern multi-media distribution models, some great, some obviously great, some terribly underinformed in the way a groupthink committee comprised of members of exactly the wrong generation to be in charge of such matters could conjure.

With all three stops completed it takes six songs and half a Gatorade to arrive to work. Endorphins and music and lonesome meditation as I loop around the yet-another-road-widening construction along the main road bookend a noisy day filled with beasts requiring every level of attention they can think of with a respite full of battles against hills and weather and sweat and reflection and appreciation for a job without a commute, meta-reflection on my thankfulness on an “outlet” (of sorts, as outward as reflection can be described as being) for said self reflection.

The narratives built around the songs that I hear are verbose and lush and feel as though they require documenting, but I don’t know to what end. I fantasize about teaching myself to draw just so I can storyboard a romantic dystopian epic filled with dogmen and eyepatches and kung fu and Daft Punk, but it won’t happen. So I’m learning to just enjoy my thoughts without the always-on daemon indexing what I think, curating my thoughts so I can lambast and bombard the internet with my Extremely Important Ideas.

I’ve started reading without a pen again. I do this once every couple of years, making a decision to stop defacing my books with my own thoughts “as if they matter” - as if my highlighted passages will actually make their way onto a blog or a tweet and change someone’s life like The Shins or will somehow be re-examined by the book’s next owner, as if they might have missed the importance of that passage had I not painted it neon pink and green and yellow for them.

I live in a basement these days. I share a bathroom with a two year old. I have gracious friends. Pretending to be a dad while The Dad watches hockey is… blessing isn’t the right word, I’ve moved away from a world where I think of “blessings” but I can’t think of a better word. I think I still want a kid or three, but first I need a dog. Is that weird? That’s probably weird.

Anyway. These are thoughts I’ve had in the past week or so that I’ve recalled without that daemon running. They were easier to retrieve than the Instapapers and “tweet this!” buttons of the world would have you believe, I daresay.

Bars for Men

Gay bars are a beast. An organism sovereign and complete from other liquor establishments. Its natural habitat is seedy at worst and gaudy at best.

Sex is on the mind of men. Men, being the “pollinators” of the two sexes, are more comfortable/capable of truly no-strings-attached sex, so sex happens between two guys more often then between a guy and a gal - and with (ostensibly) less emotional baggage. This isn’t some sweeping generalization, it’s a physiological truth: men can have sex with less emotional impact on themselves than women can. Also, I may be bragging a little.

Alcohol served at a gay bar is at once necessary and inconsequential. Liquid confidence that’s more of an excuse for socialization, rather than the other way around. Like salad as an excuse for the dressing.

Walking into a gay bar with a clear motive that isn’t “bang a dude before the night ends” is more difficult than you might expect. I’m totally that guy who smiles and talks to you in line at the bank. I like people. People are pretty great. But I’ve recently come to the conclusion that of the people I regularly hang out with, none of them are people that I would date.

A short aside on dating: Here in the West (read: America), a “date” is a sporadic gateway into another person. People go on dates with one another while they are still nigh but strangers - a name and an acknowledgment of mutual attraction is present, but not much else. You get to know the other party through dating. Which is an awful, awful filter to ask anyone to shine oneself through (“What do I wear?” “What should I talk about?” “What can I humbly wield to impress them?”).

In my high school French class, I learned about European culture’s approach to dating, which is quite elegant in its simplicity: you only date your friends. You’d think that breakups would lead to more bridges being burnt, but that doesn’t happen for precisely that reason: you’re more likely to know and understand a person before you begin any sort of romantic commitment with them (therefore contributing to lower breakup/divorce rates), and more amicability between both parties before, during and after a relationship ensure a much smoother transition between “friends with” and “in a relationship with” Facebook statuses.

Now, obviously the Western style of dating seems rather broken when you look at it that way. Every Western romance film in the history of ever can be sorted into one of two scenarios: I Just Met Her and I Love Her, or, I’ve Known That I’ve Loved Her Since Before I Even Heard The Word ‘Puberty’ For The First Time¹. Never is it one person that is just-barely-creamier-than-the-cream-of-the-crop-of-my-date-able-friend-pool. That’s nowhere near as exciting as a Sexy Epiphany about the hot girl/guy at a party — and tends to be a terrible setup for wacky (but romantic!) hijinks.

So in an attempt to burn less bridges (which isn’t to suggest that I’m currently stranded - I’ve only had one messy breakup, and even that wasn’t that bad), I’m trying to become friends with more gay men. Already the connotations of that sentiment immediately suggests ulterior (read: carnal) motives, but that’s as much of a societal projection as it is that you (a reader of my tumblr) and I (some dude with a tumblr) being forever 12 years old. (I bet you want to make “friends” with more gay men.)

(“Butt-friends.”)

Anyway, back to bars.

Walking into a gay bar (of which there are plenty in the sometimes frighteningly gay-friendly Columbus, Ohio) with the intention of asking someone what their favorite book is only results in everything that you say being filtered through the “pick up line” mesh of obfuscation.

The straight-bar corollary of my ideal camaraderie-begetting introduction would be a guy walking up to another guy and talking about sport, or a guy with — actually I have no idea what other corollaries might exist outside the sports one, I am not a straight dude.

So for instance I walk up to this guy at this gay bar and say “Hey, I like a guy who can rock a sweatervest” and then we find that we both like Fiona Apple and that neither of us particularly care for Vonnegut but have no ill will towards those who revere him, I find myself thinking “I could totally bro out with this guy and watch art-faggy movies with him and it doesn’t have to be gay!” but then LO AND BEHOLD I start having Gay Thoughts about him and my delusion of pure innocent platonic bonding is shattered and is nothing sacred and it is then that I am reminded that dating is hard.

Perhaps what I’m longing for is not necessarily “gaybros” but rather a group of friends who I can go to a bar with and actually enjoy just being at a bar. Right now all of my friends’ current recreation involves the consumption of something - movies, TV shows, video games. We have to be doing something; simply talking isn’t a favorite past time of ours. But at a bar, you have a drink or three, and then talking is all that you need. No loud music. No toy plastic guitars. Just words (with friends).

And that’s where true networking could happen, I think, socially. When your relationship with a person isn’t based solely on Shared Culture but rather on Shared Ideas or even shared anything other than consumable media. This could easily turn into a The Internet Is Ruining Everyone’s Social Life rant but I’ve made too many meatspace friends via the Internet so let’s not even go there, okay.

So I would like friends that I can go to a bar with and just sit and drink and talk and laugh. Once I have those friends, they will begat more friends and it will be refined and expanded and curated and then besties! I have some great friends now, but they are consumption friends and I need more I guess.

So where do I go for my starter kit of said friends? Gay bars don’t work because sex doesn’t need to be central in anything that I’m seeking (though sex is pretty great guys, not gonna lie, but not right now, okay). And straight bars are hard because if you semi-casually make eyes at a cute guy you might get the shit beat out of you (it has happened more than once because I am incapable of decoding nice (but possibly homophobic!) man from flirting man). So keeping it in my pants seems like the easier of the two options, but then how do I not be a creeper, etc. so on and so forth.

Basically, I would like a bar mentor. Where can I get a bar mentor. Is that a service that is available, I feel like I would benefit from being a bar prodigy.

At the same time, dating still needs to be a Thing That I Am Practicing (not unlike Judaism, or yoga). My latest attempt was with a guy that I like who came to visit after moving away and then moving back again and the conversation is kind of lacking and the sex is kind of terrible and he’s more interested in the semi-ironic appreciation of kitschy 80s music than he is in the hyper-sincere singer-songwriter Bon Iver ilk that I so revere and I am now realizing that were I to follow through with seeing this guy then I would be “settling” merely because we were both friends first, and so I realize this and I go “No no no, that simply won’t do, you deserve better” — not to imply that he is bad but that there is certainly a dude more right for me than him, and well so much for the “it’s better if we’re friends first” theory that I so eloquently set up several paragraphs ago.

So tonight it’s snowing and the past few weeks have been regularly remind me that yes, my libido is indeed still intact, and the Little Black Book just isn’t doing it for me any more and after nigh three years of rockin’ bachelorhood I’m just trying to be less paralyzed by indecision and just go out and talk to strangers and see what comes next while keeping in mind that the only thing that I do know going in is that whatever is next, it’s gotta be better than how it is now, right?

Right?

My friends and I have been trying to think of or invent the word describing the space that lies between nostalgia, which requires fondness of a time or a memory in order to be experienced, and trauma, which requires, uh, the opposite of fondness. Ever since my high school friends’ wedding¹ there’ve been callbacks to the world as it existed five-to-ten years ago, and it’s startling how easily any of us can fit back into the slots we carved out for ourselves in the time spent constructing ourselves as a person through purchased goods or shared culture now that we’re in each other’s presence again. I don’t like the person I was in high school (in my opinion if you don’t dislike the person you were years ago, then how much can you really have grown as a person since then?), but high school itself wasn’t a traumatic experience for me, rather I’m simply in no hurry to revisit those memories.

I can’t listen to Dave Matthews Band without instantly snapping into the headspace I occupied before I’d “figured out” which gender I preferred to sleep with while living in the whitewashed upper-middle-class city (that I have since returned to because home is where &c &c) I attended high school in, and I still can’t listen to early Coldplay because a) it reminds me of the time of my first boyfriend (which was a completely unremarkable experience - I’m pleased to say I’m friends or on friendly terms with all my exes save one) (that’s a story for another time, maybe) or b) because “Fix You” is the song we listened to the night we all met on the marching band practice field and lit candles and reminisced about Illy who died with her mom and little brother in a car crash on her way to register for college classes that morning. I guess the latter might actually be in the “trauma” column (I’ve been thinking a lot about Illy this past year for a myriad of reasons), so that’s probably a poor example of the “middle”- or “neutral”-stalgia that my friends and I have been grasping for the word for over the past month.

Does such a word even exist? I’m convinced that it does, but some of my friends aren’t so sure. Déjà vu isn’t right at all, but memories feels just as strong when we get together and reminisce about high school living. “Reminisce” still has that specific twinge of fondness attached to it, so it too doesn’t feel quite right. Not “neutral” enough, or something.

Facebook keeps trying to get me to come to a five year anniversary of our graduating class. Even though I’m “in the neighborhood”, I’ve decided that I’m not going, mostly because I’m ashamed that I don’t have much to show to “wow” everyone there with (Which is silly, right? The number of people who have “made something of themself” five years after graduating high school is going to be very small and due to extraordinary circumstances, and placing myself next to these imaginary quote-unquote “successful” people has precisely zero use or value to anyone anywhere), but also because I spent years combing the globe for my closest friends and I’m pretty pleased with the small group that I have now, and the work involved in unlearning all those people from Darby High School Class of 2005 of the 2005 Corey and teaching them about Corey, 2010 Edition seems like a lot of work and an entirely unhealthily narcissistic way to spend an evening, and fielding all the other people who are desperate to do the same to/with me about themselves isn’t my idea of a good time - a phrase I use when describing my aversion to the recent slew of snuff films (because getting emotionally invested in a character in Final Destination 7: This Time It’s Personal or developing a vague attraction towards any number of the “up-and-coming” actors in Saw 14: With a Vengeance only to then watch them be killed/mutilated/tortured in creative and/or unusual and/or squirm-inducing ways with CG that’s virtually indistinguishable from real life is no longer a “slasher film”, so what else are you gonna call it?) or doing cocaine or riding a roller coaster or any other thing that “isn’t my idea of a good time”.

In other news, last weekend I dressed like a dog for the first time in my life and it was pretty great.

I spent the night dancing with dingoes and dragons and tigers. My blood and face and clothes were both hot and cold from Kevin’s gin flask. He’d already gone up to bed, and Michael and I staggered across Pittsburgh at three in the morning to our respective rooms. I was excited about sleep.

“Is she alright?” I thought aloud upon seeing a lump of a blouse on her side on the grass outside the Double Tree. I knew that the faster I went to bed, the sooner the world would stop spinning. The adrenaline I willed into my veins kept me alert, reactionary and rambling.

The girl sat up. “Oh, good.” She smiled. She was pretty with black hair over face. Two sets of noodle straps, one black and one white, adorned her slender shoulders. She caught my gaze and patted the grass next to her, brushing the hair from her eyes while beckoning me to sit. “Hahah, no thanks dude, I’m good.” Mike and I had already shrugged off one beggar that night, and I was in full beeline mode: priority number one was Go To Bed. Immediately I regretted my reflexive dismissal of the nice-looking girl. Why did I call her “dude”? I passed through the revolving door and was on the elevator before it occurred to me that I could go back - Mike had his own room to get to, and my roommates were still partying. I should go back, I thought in the elevator. Go back to the girl in the grass. My drunken brain was unable to parse the suggestion before priority one was in my sight.

I sat in my bed with my laptop illuminating the room. The towels on the floor made the room smell like chlorine. I checked Twitter in a trance while trying to will away the energy preventing my body from sleeping away the exhaustion of another day filled with sparkling, shimmering creatures. I thought about that girl while not-reading the goings-on of people I know or wish to know, thought about going back and sitting next to her on the grass in front of the hotel. “Hi,” I’d say. “Hi,” she’d say back. We’d sit there, on the grass, staring at skyscrapers that stood like tree trunks whose leaves were unmoved by the dank breeze of the city. We would sit there while I slowly sobered up, her too, maybe, and I’d make another friend, another person to add to the list of people I desperately wanted to populate the rest of my life with.

I’ve never been afraid of talking to strangers. I’m never afraid of singing in the car when other drivers might see me. The chances of me ever meeting whoever saw me are practically zero. The chances of meeting said person with either of us recognizing the other is even smaller. If we were to meet without memories attached to the other person, then the event never happened. It wouldn’t be the same person as our first encounter if there are no experiences associated with one another’s face. For all intents and purposes, I think whenever someone cuts me off in traffic, or catches me swaying my hips to some tune in my head in the checkout line, I’ll never see you again for the rest of my life.

Last year, three thousand people were at this convention. There were more this year, probably.

I will never see that girl again for the rest of my life. I thought this while swaddled in my pocket of crisp hotel sheets, and for the first time in recent memory, the thought made me slump.

My roommates arrived soon after that. We breathlessly recounted the events that took place in the short period we spent apart before collapsing into our beds. There were still two whole days left, I thought, momentarily forgetting about the girl.

The low point of my trip was a moment’s regret in not talking to a stranger on the street.

Needless to say, it was a pretty special weekend.

Thanks for making it great, guys.