But it's been a long few days. I had today and yesterday off due to one of the manager's random scheduling whims, and I decided to make the most of my time off.
(I'll gloss over the six hours I wasted Friday trying to teach my dad's website to send emails without generating an error. Otherwise, the past few days have been exciting and not frustrating.)
Yes, I made the most of my time off. As the sun set on Friday, I packed up all our smore-making equipment and retrieved Dylan from town. We bought a case of beers and drove to Larson's cabin on Round Lake, which is a few minutes drive from my house.
Ah, Larson. I'm going to post a picture but I want to give a little background first. Go down to the picture to read about last night and skip the background.
Larson and I go way back, back to a homeroom class in seventh grade. I divided my homeroom time between reading about paradoxes (I was hung up on paradoxes that year, and spent a lot of time inanely asking people what would happen after a paradox occurred) and compiling a list of words ending in the suffix "-ology."
I have near-total recall of embarrassing personal details.
And back when I was a little sweatpants-wearing snotnosed kid, Larson and I apparently met and talked. I know that Larson made fun of me a lot, which shows some restraint: I would probably throttle seventh-grade Dan if I met him today. And I know that I talked about paradoxes and whatever other half-understood ideas I was obsessing about. I don't remember any other interaction, but there must have been some.
Fastforward a few years. Watch as my wardrobe changes from ugly sweatpants to tight ugly jeans. I get glasses in eight grade after discovering I'm legally blind, but otherwise this fastforwarded version of my life shows the gradual triumph of aesthetics. I'll stop the tape somewhere between my ninth-grade "deluded misfit" phase and my tenth-grade "milquetoasty catholic" phase. There's some overlap, obviously.
Yes, apparently that's how I ran back then. I call that Run Mark I. But here you can see where Larson and I really hit it off. In high school we started hanging out after school, and after we decided to be hetero-life-buddies (a term Larson has had to explain very slowly to a number of girlfriends) our friendship became a lot more symbiotic.
I would live vicariously through his often ill-advised adventures and try to provide some sort of moral guidepost in the downtime. Larson, in turn, would try to give me the commonsense advice I needed to survive in the real world and clue me in on slang words that my relatively sheltered upbringing had left me ignorant of.
I'd like to think that some fraction of all that advice kicked in at some point, and has actually helped me out. But I see you looking at him, back when he had his original chin, watching this particularly hilarious clip — the one where he asks Graham, quite shamelessly, where Scotland is — and I can see your point.
Larson might not have been the best person to go to for advice, but I was jealous of his autonomy, and even if he had different goals romantic and otherwise, his ability to reach those goals revealed a dedication that I probably lack. If some of his ideas and plans seem foolish, especially in hindsight, it's still admirable that he was able to carry them as far as he did.
I mean, some people may think that the Internet is a good place to meet people and start a relationship, and they're wrong, but they rarely get very far. Armed with the same bad idea, Larson has started at least two serious relationships with people he met online. My life would be a lot different if I had his resolve.
And that was Larson and I. We've had less and less contact as the years went on and our already unlikely friendship (as Larson once so aptly put it: "Why are we friends?") became steadily unlikelier.
I hadn't seen Larson for two years, we figure.
So here's the shocking picture:
That's Dylan on the left. I think that Thursday was his 22nd birthday, and I think he managed to top my birthday for sheer outrageousness (in the "shocking" sense). That's Larson in the middle; he used to be one of the strongest guys in school, and it was surprising to see him looking pudgier.
On the right is Larson's latest Internet girlfriend, who — if she's pissed that I'm not using her name — should note that I always avoid using a guy's girlfriend's name until it's clear that I'll see her quite often.
We had a few beers and enjoyed an Eagle-Scout-quality bonfire. Larson and Dylan did most of the talking, as I felt no need to jabber on and on. All too soon, however, things went sour between Larson and his girlfriend and they spent the rest of the night talking about their feelings.
Well, I thought to me-self, I'm glad I don't have to be responsible for anyone else's feelings anymore, at the very least. Dylan, my only Brainerd friend without a girlfriend, probably echoed that sentiment.
So I'm a lightweight, and there was quite a bit of substance in me after all that sitting around the campfire with the cooler right there. Suffice it to say that Dylan and I kept going while Larson was away.
Which made me unprepared for what happened next. After a while in the car, Larson returned and I had to talk to his girlfriend. Which was ridiculous, but I didn't have the wherewithal to argue at that point in time. I readied my best talking-to-the-RLA voice and ducked in the car.
Let the record show that I'm still a gaping well, into which secrets can be thrown and never return. But I think that my talking to her was ridiculous, because all parties acknowledged that Dylan and I were blameless for whatever was wrong and that we didn't know anything about their relationship, and, it follows, the fight. So what could I possibly add?
As I now see it, there was no reason for me to talk to Larson's girlfriend except narcissism on her part. Wanting people you've just met to think highly of you is normal and human, but turning what should be a vague wish into an actual goal, and taking conversational measures to achieve that goal as if it actually mattered… well, that seems crazy, even for extroverts.
But Dylan and I had a good time. And it was good to see Larson. We slept in the boathouse at my place (I'd sobered up enough to drive a few blocks, by the end of the night) and I dropped Dylan off in town again this morning, on my way to the a birthday party in Chaska and the long day counterpart to Friday's long night.
It was good to see my little cousins and their family; perhaps the closest thing to intellectuals that we have in my extended family. With my gramma there, we had a sort of anti-Republican cabal going, and there was homemade ice cream.
But wow, was the drive a long ways. Totally worth it, both for the group of people I got to see and for the errands I ran on the way down (books, books, books!), but I spent a good six or seven hours in my car today.
And I should have gone to sleep an hour ago. I work tomorrow. Later.
