I woke up on Friday at my usual 6:45 am for school, this usual being a new usual; the old usual was 6:30 am, but oh! those extra fifteen minutes I do cherish; just as much as the Heaven's little slices of dreams. A dear friend from Connecticut had called me the night before, the first time I had talked to her since receiving a letter in the mail from her on Monday. The rush delivery envelope containing pink stationary was not just any letter, it was an 'L' letter and this "L" wasn't just any old "I 'L' you as a friend", letter or, "I 'L' you as the person you are" letter, this was "I am deeply and thoroughly in 'L' with you, to the point that I believe we knew each other in past lives and now we are destined as soul mates", 'L' letter. What is there for one to think after receiving such an outpouring of emotion in seven pages of Hello Kitty designer stationary? Confusion pops up when I finished reading this.... not confusion, no. Simply, total buffudlment, the kind you feel after finishing David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
The last time I had seen this girl was in January and then just for a few days as I visited Connecticut and stayed at my sister's house in Hartford with my two nieces and their cat. I saw her when she was engaged to a friend I had known since days in my blue uniform from Cub Scouts when a day well spent was spent causing trouble in woods near our houses and camping in campsites that are now parking lot for Native American Casinos. The previous time after that was last summer, one filled with melancholy and sadness. Little glimpses, teases; not something to weigh such a letter on. I don't allow many people to know me in such a core manner and I can't formulate why I allow the people I eventually do, patience can sometimes help, but not always.
After talking to that angel from Connecticut on Thursday night, wanting, desperately, to just go to sleep, but halted because of the call and oh! - she's suicidal, and being her soul mate, I have an obligation from Heaven. When an alarm goes off at 6:45 am, to get up to barely make the two buses to school, I usually hop with the jet set and go to it, but, I admit I did reset the alarm to 7:45 am, thinking; it's not the worst thing to come into class an hour late, better than nothing, still worth the hour bus ride there, still a day worth getting up for. 7:45 came and went, as did 8:45 and 9:45 and after those weary checkpoints, it was very obvious that no morning class was going to be attending this day and I will get up any Goddamn time I wanted, 'cause sleep is important to a growing mind and I am not falling asleep on my drawing easel in Life Drawing class once again. I'll make it up on Tuesday and all will be well as it should be, if that does mean I will leave school at 9:45pm to wait a half hour at the closest stop to began my journey home that will take an hour, after I get back home, all I can ever do at that hour is to go back into my slumber.
I did finally get up and made a conscious effort not to look at any clocks, it felt like a bad omen to look at a watch at all today. No little faces to tell me I am in big trouble, no little God to tell me where I should go and what I should be doing. Usually the half dream state before falling and waking can seem like days, but be only seconds. I gauged that it was sometime around 10:00 and thought I was ripe for the second and last, class of the day.
I made it on time for that class which was so entirely uneventful that I wish I had stayed in bed to sleep even more, even though my bed is just a mattress on the floor I found in the dumpster besidemy apartment. The model even left a full hour early for unknown reasons and I didn't see this girl I have lusted for like nothing else, just to tell her I'll be at the gallery she works at to take in the scene; I also planned on asking her to do something later that night, as it turns out my Brother Ben is moving, once again, to California to be a surfer.
As he's done in the past and what I the future will wash up is that he'll come back, lonely and depressed, with more stories about barely escaping a shark, or more realistically, an oil slick or some other happy pollutant off the coast of Los Angeles. Another friend of mine may be throwing a going-away party for him and his fiancé. I didn't get a chance to find her at school either. Everyone had my sleeping in and missing school idea committed better than I did.
I need people that I want to know better to meet part of my family and my Brother is the closest one to me for two thousand miles in any direction. It's also good to use him as Instant Experience; He's nine years older than me and I respect his opinions on such things as if a girl is just Fucked Up or if this interesting quality they poses is actually "Cuteness". I brought over a girl onetime after dancing with her all night and he didn't even bring her up the next time I saw him. I dated the girl for almost a year and a half, the relationship ending in tragedy. Silence can shout if you know how to read the nothingness.
I saw the girl, Beth, while waiting for the bus, she was walking on the other side of the busy street, calling my name. I waved and motioned her to come over. She nodded No. A few minutes later, she came back, I motioned "come over" she motioned, No, promptly ignoring me. I had tentively planned on traveling cross country with this individual and on trips like this, it's nice to know which side of the extreme a person is on. I don't know if she knew how to drive a stick or even if she has a license. Such questions to ask in the very near future.
On the way home, I decided that I was going on the Art Bus tonight. The Cacophony society is a group of artists that cause harmless mischief and odd functions in the name of Art. Basically, they're Dadaists of this generation, deathly intelligent and just as mischevious. If, when meeting a member of the Cacophony society, you didn't run away screaming for the nearest pair of grandmother legs to hide between, you'll feel right at home, smile, wink at the other like-minded people and start singing a song, some song- every group has a song they sing and this group wouldn't be very picky on which one you started up.
One of more mischievous things they do is the Art Bus. The bus itself is a old, rickety thing, once used as public transportation in Summit County, it probably traveled the same dusty route everyday that I did when I stayed in Dillon, just outside Silverthorne, on summers I spent with my Brother where I had to travel to Brekenridge to work as a dishwasher in a Spaghetti restaurant, the work to paying rent for a 5 by 10 room with no working lights and bunked bed, painted a dark blue. The bus, painted silver, the inside gutted out and replaced with found couch seats, a picnic table cut in half, a huge red siren light, a table for the DJ of the night to put down equipment and around the bus, as many christmas and rope lights as is possible to keep going with the converter on board.
The bus's main use is to hoard as many people as possible to the Burning Man festival held each year in the scalding desert of Nevada, where it gets even more jazzed up to appear as a full on pirate ship. On its time off from that, the bus goes around to all the Art openings in Denver that happen on the first Friday of each month and everyone that gets on the bus must be in costume, the only rule set implacably for the entire night.
A quiet art opening with a bunch of pretentious would-be art consumers will tonight be drastically changed when a huge, silver bus, blasting out electronic music with video projections coming from within the bus and soaring out onto any wall or house or street in the projectors way, overfilled with people who look like they've just got done trick-or-treating, yelling out with delight just to yell, to tell the world that we can all yell if we wanted to, to smile upon the dank of the city, to make fun of themselves just to produce glee, to become a kid that we all could stay as until we die. The amount of people in the bus is always much more than the amount already inside the gallery, so the party becomes theirs and nothing can be done to stop it, the energy is too encompassing and complete, it would like trying to lighten up a gallon black paint with a teaspoon of red, the intensity is so great as to absolutely totalitate.
In five minutes the energy will swiftly board the bus like a ghastly wind and be off to the next destination, the gallery just visited will be in silence, perhaps even closing, the people left inside feeling post coidally drowsy and ready to - if not change their lives - re-examine it, just because of a visit from a silly bus. As the night progresses ever so longer, a night you'd only think could be penned by Lewis Carrol, more alcohol is consumed, more taboos obliterated and the bus tour of galleries is less checking out people's work and more freaking the hell out of people not expecting a bunch of misfits, becoming the art of the night and not just the audience, people transforming into thick paint strokes that demand not to stand still for eons but to move and shake, to shout and to be heard in the lonely, sad, starless, Denver night.
Or so, this is what I had heard. >>>