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February 8, 1997, Saturday

I'd been talking about embarrassing dreams of being naked in high school with the usual Dynashack (my house) gang. And so one of these recent periods of sleep I had a dream of going to school in one of those short "retard" buses with some nameless youthful people. Not only was I wearing no pants, but I was also inexplicably the same age as I am now.

I suppose that in dreams that take place
in some historical setting we still have to account
for current issues.
So no matter what the setting is,
we are the age we are
when we actually have the dream,
not the age of the setting.
And the setting itself is influenced by the contents
of the conscious of the dreamer;
morphed into some hybrid anachronistic world.
It's a creepy thought.
It's part of the reason aging is so depressing to so many people;
our memories humiliate us in our dreams.

I awoke not long after 7am, unable to sleep any more. So I took a shower and went to the White Spot (the only place open) and had a cup of remarkably good coffee and then to work. Evan had done Bn's night shift for some weird reason.

The phones attacked me mercilessly while at work. People were losing power and having to reconfigure their Windows 95 machines after the crashes that resulted. I wasn't being too helpful either. One woman must have called me back a dozen time. It was difficult to concentrate on my projects, which mostly concerned the Blue Penny Quarterly. I also updated the Virginians For Wilderness and Lobster Liberation Front Homepages. The latter is a frequent victim of neglect and relative HTML primitiveness (relative to my other pages).

At home I managed to nap until about 11:30pm.

Sometimes one just doesn't have the energy for party small talk, what going to a party was going to entail.
I was half-resigned to another lonely boring weekend night. Snow had fallen last night and in the night it made the world seem inhospitable and unfit for human life. Steve, his sister, and his girlfriend Shelly were content to just watch teevee all night. Sometimes one just doesn't have the energy for party small talk, what going to a party was going to entail. But when I learned John and Elizabeth were going to some manner of UVA studential party on 15th Street, I wanted to go. It was to be a Mardi Gras sort of thing. Suitably enough, I had one of those feathered Mardi Gras masks, dumpster dived by the girls this summer behind the Salvation Army.

So we three set out on foot, stopping by Liz West's apartment above the shops on University Avenue on the way. Liz West has an ancient house cat that is too cool for the likes of dorky little me.

The party on 15th Street was related to a UVA fraternity known as SERP, with which Jaques DeBouffert the artist/movie-maker/friend-of-the-Dynashack is affiliated. Last time I had anything to do with SERP was Halloween night, 1996, the most miserable night of my recent life. As you may recall, that was the night that operatives Big Fun battled with SERP in hand-to-hand combat on the no-mans-land in the front of the fraternity. Tonight things were much more civil and much less interesting. On the porch there was a keg of Natural Light, the single most horrible beer on God's green earth, and in the kitchen was a kiddie pool filled with hot water for chilled feet (everyone was required to take off their shoes). On a couch, I chatted some with some anonymous girl who was very enthusiastic about my status as an artist. She continued chatting with me while some diminutive frat boy climbed up on her lap facing her.

It wasn't such a great party, so Elizabeth, John and I headed back to the Dynashack. I was wide awake, but John was tired and he passed out. These days I can't just hang out in Elizabeth's room alone with her like I used to, so I went to bed. It was by now three or four in the morning.

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