my hair smells like hickory smoke and barbeque sauce

[dragonlady7]

You know you had a good night when you wake up and your hair still smells like hickory smoke and barbeque sauce.

Dave had to drive to Rochester to hand in a paper to finish up his quarter. He figured while he was there, we could celebrate a bit by going to Dinosaur BarBQue, an excellent biker bar and rib joint. Corey came along for the ride, and we met up with Darius in Rochester. Darius was at fencing practice, so we swung by there to see what he was up to and whether anyone else wanted to come.
There were three fencers there from Buffalo, which was interesting. i didn't know there was a fencing club in Buffalo. I may have to look them up.

Anyhow. The incomparable Laura Taylor (wait, Tyler? Crap, I've forgotten. It's been a while) was at practice, home for the summer but unable to fence because she's still recovering from an appendectomy. Discovered that none other than Reed Walton has begun fencing, but she didn't come with us more's the pity.
We ended up with seven at Dino-- me and Dave and Corey, and Darius and Jessie and Laura and a U of R sophomore named, of all things, Teegan-- I only know one other Teegan and had always just kind of assumed her parents had made up the name, but I now discover it is not so. Go figure.
There was a 45-minute wait, they said. At restaurants, that usually means half an hour tops. Unfortunately, Dino really meant it. We waited about 5 minutes short of an hour. But we waited standing out in the courtyard / bike parking lot, next to the pit which was spewing out hickory smoke, drinking and dodging really rude bikers who wanted to park in the parking spaces near where we were standing. After a while I wanted to just stop getting out of their way and just stand there and let them work around me... They also all tended to sit atop their motorcycles and rev them a few times after they were parked, just to draw attention to themselves. It was obnoxious. But, just as we were about to go in, a guy came in with his girl on the back, and he actually cut his engine as he pulled in, and walked the bike quietly to the end of the lot, and manoevered it carefully into a spot, apologizing to the pedestrians who had to move or walk around him. (Including us, because we were called inside then.) So, some bikers are worthwhile human beings, I guess. :)

I don't have to explain how good the ribs were, or how much fun the conversation was. Haven't seen Darius in a good long time. Or, for that matter, Jessie. I think I may have offended her in my first response to something she said, but I didn't mean to. She and i have a rocky history-- we saw far too much of one another at a rather tense and unpleasant point in my life (and probably hers as well), and at various points and in varying degrees I let her know how badly I wanted to challenge her to a duel with pipe-wrenches at dawn. Not a great foundation to a relationship, but at least it was colorful. I no longer have any real desire to thwack her, and in fact find her quite inoffensive now that so much time and distance separates us from the original irritating factors, so it was rather pleasant to see her again. A nice surprise, and I realize that it sounds awfully condescending, but wasn't really meant that way...
And yes, I do remember that during my earlier troubles with her, I wrote about it to an extent in my journal, and only afterward discovered that she had been reading it all along (and Darius had known she was reading it and claimed to have tried to warn me, though I don't know why the phrase "Jessie reads that" was never used-- except that I am well aware he fueled our fires of irritation with one another for his own amusement, because to expect anything else from Darius is just flat out unrealistic and honestly, would be boring). I believe that all had intended that I should be dismayed at this realization, but mostly I just thought, "Well, saves me explaining," and I have continued to think that these online journals are a great invention.
What? If you're reading this, you already knew I was weird.

I had an awful dream last night. Not a nightmare, but an awful dream. i woke around 3 unable to sleep any longer, hot and thirsty and tangled in the sheets (I just typed "thirty" there and have spent a moment just now wondering how awful it would really be to wake up thirty. Well, i'll know in five years and seven days, unless I wake up earlier than seven a.m. Eastern time. But I digress, which is just as well).
I could not get back to sleep, so I went and opened the bedroom door (which involved putting on pyjamas, as I had been sleeping in just underpants and that bedroom opens up off the kitchen, so I cannot expose myself there because the early risers of the house would probably get too good a look-- those early risers being dave's mom and the dog. Actually the dog wouldn't care, but Dave's mom would. Can't wait to have my own house so I can sleep with the goddamn bedroom door open if I want).
But that wasn't enough ventilation, so I plugged in the box fan that I've been storing in my room for want of a better place to put it. Unfortunately there is no outlet in the room that will accept the fan's plug (I've mentioned the wiring elsewhere), so I had to plug it in in the bathroom across the hall and stretch the extension cord to the doorway. It was nice, and pleasant-- the air is humid and muggy and icky even now, and only a breeze brings any comfort. (The house has central air, but Dave's mom never turns it on. I tell you, while she was on vacation, the air was on pretty much nonstop. I see no need to suffer through summer if you've paid all that money to get the air put in. If the humidity is high, dude that switch on the wall is there for a reason and there's no need to be sticky. But again, I digress.)

But I was concerned that I had better unplug the fan before the dog and Dave's mom got up, because the cord was across the hallway and would be a tripping hazard. So I lay there in bed not sleeping and thinking about unplugging the fan. I was sure I wasn't sleeping.
The neighbors began to become rowdy, and as I peered groggily out the window I noticed that they were loading furniture into their minivan, and generally milling about on the lawn. I only recognized one of them, and the others were people I didn't recognize. I had trouble opening my eyes, and was moving very sluggishly. As I looked out the window, one of the men, who appeared to be on the lawn, looked in the window at me, and noticed me.
I moved away from the window and sat in bed, and thought drowsily of other things for a moment. I knew I had to go and unplug the fan. In the white noise of its motor and blades I could hear that other sounds were masked. The floor outside the bedroom door and in the bathroom across the hall squeaks quite badly, and I thought I could hear it squeaking as though someone were there. I knew I had to get up and turn the fan off because it was probably the dog and Dave's mom would trip over the cord and I'd never hear the end of it (or she'd be hurt, God forbid-- imagine that guilt). I thought perhaps I heard the door to the house opening, and I began to grow worried that I couldn't hear well over the fan. All kinds of things could be happening and I wouldn't know. I was sure now that I heard the dog's feet, and possibly a person walking on that creaking floor. But I just couldn't keep my eyes open, or move my body in any controlled way.
I looked up and a strange man was entering the bedroom, taking off his hat and smiling at me. I was terrified-- couldn't breathe and couldn't move-- and dimly heard myself slurring as if drunkenly that this was REM sleep and thus I was hallucinating. The man immediately disappeared and I struggled to sit up to turn off the fan, panicking, but I couldn't move. I couldn't even keep my eyes open, so I had only seen him in flashes.
In a moment, the man returned, in the exact same manner, in a replay of his earlier appearance, and this time he spoke but I was so terrified I didn't hear what he said. I thrashed violently and again dismissed him as a hallucination, but I could not master my body or my eyes and was panicking.

Finally it dawned on me that all my attempts to move weren't real. I had to stop trying to move in the dream, and actually move my body. It was as if I had flipped a switch. I abruptly surfaced from dreaming, opened my eyes, sat up, and looked around the bedroom. Of course there was nobody in it. I went and unplugged the fan and shut the bedroom door, my heart still pounding a bit, and noted that it was almost six o'clock-- which is when the dog often gets up, so I was really just in time.
It took me quite a while to fall asleep again after that. And I was only dozing when I heard the dog come downstairs, and Dave's mom with her to let her out and feed her breakfast.

I hate it when you can't tell that you're dreaming. And it just goes to show you-- a little bit of knowledge about how the sleep process works is actually more harm than good. Creeepy. I really hadn't known I was asleep, and now have no idea at what point the dream began, because I never left the pink bedroom where I sleep now, and it was all quite consistent with what I had just observed while awake (except the man entering didn't have to step over the fan in the doorway and hadn't tripped over the cord in the hallway).

Ugh.

Much nicer to remember the good ribs I ate last night than to think of that ridiculously scary dream. I honestly have no idea who the man was or what he wanted, and he said something but I don't remember it.

Oh-- one final note, on the subject of the better portions of this post-- Dinosaur BarBQue is planning on opening up another location besides its original Syracuse and branch Rochester offices. Where, you ask (slavering in anticipation)?
New York City.

They didn't say where in NY, but apparently that's what Dave read from their website.

So, Dino in the City-- it may happen. Then you really can get anything in NYC.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

though I don't know why the phrase "Jessie reads that" was never used"

It was used on multiple occasions.

I confess a certain entertainment in observing conflict in general, but also felt that fair warning would be necessary, especially during your famous creative writing stunt. Put yourself in my shoes and think cynically for a moment; if your arch-nemesis read about your clever idea on the web before you unveiled your masterwork, that would spoil the fun!

darius

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

>multiple occasions

Apparently, multiple occasions at which I was not present. My first inkling was when she said so, at that party at the house where Ruskin was living, when Sharon and Jeremy came to visit. Though from everyone else's expressions, it had certainly been discussed before by most of the others in the room. Shrug.

I honestly don't know whether I mentioned any of the "creative writing stunt" on the journal; I had little inclination to go back and read what I had written, as rereading one's own journal of boring and depressing times tends not to be exactly riveting entertainment. But she wasn't your arch-nemesis, so why would it spoil your fun if I wrote about what I was doing? On the contrary-- if I think cynically, it would be more amusing for you if she did, because then she would know what was going on, whereas if she had no previous warning, she may not have noticed the parody in the 'masterwork'. So actually, the amusement value could go either way.

There-- how's that for cynicism?
;)

I've never really been able to muster enough of an opinion on the whole episode to determine whether it all amuses, chagrins, or offends me. I just don't think I have enough depth of feeling. Irritation can lend great force to emotion, but once the irritation is removed and the blisters heal a bit it is difficult to remember what the big deal was.