Ipso-Fucking-Facto Fatman: Part III

So Friday night I descended. I spent a lot of time with the Rookie this weekend. Friday afternoon he came down to hang out in the office, we listened to some music, burned some CD's, rearranged my collection a little bit. When we got home hung out for a bit and then we picked up little sister. Instead of going in the house though we sat in the driveway and watched The Simpson's movie in my car. By the time I sent him inside and went home it was well after 11. When I got home things began to go south. Now I feel comfortable saying that things began to go south for a single reason...I have no clue what the fuck happened in the eight hours between when I got home and I intended to head out to work the next morning. I have no idea what I did, who I talked to, where I went. All I know is that at seven the next morning when I was supposed to be getting ready to go to work I was making a few phone calls to assure that I didn't have to go in and then bunking down to catch a few hours of sleep. Two days later I have no idea what happened in those missing hours. That doesn't happen much anymore, it's a little spooky.

When I finally did manage to make it in on Saturday I got a lot done real quick and then called Rookie up again. Turns out the CD's we had burned were bad and we had to go get better CD's and start again. We ran a few errands, bullshit a bit, and burned the CD's. For a ten year old he's a friggin' sharp kid. But my mother has him so god damn on edge that he's afraid of his own shadow. She used to do that to me, I got over it real quick. I'm afraid he won't. We had a talk about responsibility and keeping your word. It was one of those ridiculous things that happen with kids sometimes, things that I can still flash back on from my childhood, almost arguments about things that were not worth arguing for. But, just like they had to happen sometimes when I was a kid, they have to happen for the rookie now. You need to learn to be responsible young, learn to be a man of your word. Without that you have nothing. He and I stopped on the way home and bought everybody milkshakes. It was a good afternoon overall.

Last night people were going out for Michelle's birthday, I couldn't make it to the first set of things they did because I ended up back at work. But I wanted to be there later. We played phone tag for a little bit before we finally met up at 1 A.M. at Underdog where I ran into (as always) people I haven't seen much since high school. I burned a few hours beforehand making a quick visit to someone I hadn't seen in a bit to talk about some stuff I never got a chance to talk about. I felt much better afterwards even though I never really felt all that bad in the first place.

Today I made a stop at work early, then went home and crashed for quite awhile. It was nice to get some real sleep again. I watched some tv, played some video games, and otherwise just chilled most of the day before heading out to tonight's Antioch follow up meeting. It was great to see everybody.

I think we've all become entirely too comfortable around each other though. Tonight we talked about penises and shit quite a bit. It's nice to have barometers like that to tell how far along in a friendship you are.

Follow up meetings are usually sort of a sad thing. It's the end of something we all worked really hard on for a really long time. We sort of take stock and see what we did right and wrong. And then we reflect on how it's over. How we won't be getting together every Sunday night anymore, how we won't be a team anymore. There's always next year of course, but there's a lot of time in between and every year we know that someone won't be back the next time around and that makes it even worse.

Until last year that is. See a funny thing happened last year. We all came back. Every person on team last year came back this year. That had never happened before. And whatsmore an even funnier thing happened...we pretty much all stayed in touch. When I was hanging out with these kids in March of last year I kept thinking this is great that the team is staying together, let's see how long it lasts. Then next thing you know we're all still talking and hanging out in October and here comes the official start of team again. Son of a bitch. We kept it together. It was rough and tough and sometimes fucked up, but we did it. We did something that had never been done proper before. So when we started team again, when we were in the time for bonding and getting reacllimated we were already almost there, already almost set. We were already ready.

Five months later we're sitting around talking about shit and penises and laughing our asses off just like we do every week. And yeah it's sad...but it's not so sad, because even though it's the end...well, we're still just beginning. We're still a team. We're still ok.

Next year's a long ways off. A lifetime away it seems like right now. But hey, I'm not worried, if we did the impossible once...we can sure as shit do it again.

And just like that...I'm out of the abyss.

Travel well friends.