Journal

I wanted to go back to sleep, but nothing was happening. Earlier for diversion I started reading the dictionary Willie gave me. That did the trick then. This time for diversion, I started to re-read a book. Although it’s a favorite of mine, I didn’t get very far. I couldn’t relate to the feelings expressed in it.

By the way, Willie called last week from Manhattan. It was his last night in the US, and he’d just gotten in from the bar. He said he really enjoyed Cirque du Soleil Saturday night. It was a short call. Probably because if it were any longer we’d have started crying.

When I checked mail yesterday afternoon, (for the first time since we got back) there was a note from him among the 11 others. The subject was "Disoriented in Nicaragua." He was feeling the effects of the flight home, and was experiencing a bit of culture shock. He starts his job today, and is looking for a second job, teaching at his university.

Just after I went to bed the first time tonight, Danger-Boy’s girlfriend, Debbie, called looking for him. I explained that I hadn’t seen him since Saturday afternoon after we had our big fight late Friday night, (or early Saturday morning if you prefer.)

She said she had just heard that we were back in town. He told me that after I sent him away after our fight, that he had walked over to her place and crashed. And he said that she’d awakened him when she walked in with another guy. He joked that he’d lost both his guy and his girl in the same night. Someone’s lying to me.

Anyway, sleep was not coming, reading wasn’t helping, so I got on the net to try to catch up on all the journal reading I’ve missed in the past several weeks. Well, actually my original intent was finding some new porno for a bit of J/O, but somehow after I clicked Favorites, my mouse pointer stopped at Journals rather than Porno.

Boy have I missed a lot. I got to about the fourth or fifth journal and noticed a reference to a new journal by a guy who I’ve exchanged a few e-mails with. I followed the link and was reading along and suddenly found myself laughing. This startled me. I was feeling something. It didn’t last long but it’s a step in the right direction. Thanks daVinci!

A few years ago Symantec bought X-Tree and the familiar X-Tree keyboard commands live on in both the Windows 95 and Windows NT versions of Norton File Manager. You can choose Explorer compatible commands, or X-Tree commands. In a case of "old dog, new tricks", I use the X-Tree commands. For me, it’s the best of both worlds. The old familiar keyboard commands are there, and I can point-and-click, and drag-and-drop whenever I like.

In any event, one of the things I really like about Norton File Manager is it treats FTP sites in exactly the same fashion as local and network drives. Everything is point-and-click. So to delete the site, I just logged into the web-server, highlighted the appropriate directories and hit the Delete key. Presto! No more Scenic Route. Then I zapped the local copy from within FrontPage.

Although I had no backup of the site as a whole, I still had most of the components kicking around in other places on my PC. I write in Word so all the journal entries, music reviews and such, were intact as doc files. So all I could have lost, would have been any edits I made after pasting the text into FrontPage, and the half-dozen or so single pages, (like About the Site) that were created entirely within FrontPage. All the images and graphics I’ve downloaded for use in the site are in one directory, and the GIFs and JPEGs I’ve created are where Microsoft Image Composer and Adobe PhotoShop like to keep them.

So in the worst case, should Hiway not have been able to restore things from tape, I could have re-created the entire site from scratch in a few days. I wasn’t really worried about that because I knew I could get everything back from tape.

I may be impulsive, but I’m not stupid.

What Microsoft Internet Explorer users may not have noticed is that the home page, which I call the Scenic Route On-Ramp, and the top border of every page have changed slightly. They each make extensive use of tables for formatting. Explorer and Netscape Navigator and Communicator treat table borders a little differently. So while the table borders were invisible to Explorer users, they kinda uglied up the page for Netscape users. Now they look the same in either browser.

All I keep around is version four of each program. So if you have an older version of either browser and things don’t look quite right, upgrade. By the way, I try my best to stay out of the browser wars. They each have their own little quirks, and some differences in features. It boils down to a personal preference issue. Use the one you like best. One of these days I’m gonna check out another browser called Opera. I just never think to download it when I’m online.

There. Things are flowing again. Now, to fill you in on the past couple of weeks.

The Connecticut adventure was a true disaster. What was supposed to be a five-week job and experiment for me in living away from Rochester, turned into a two-day fiasco.

First, the players. There was this company, call them "CM", that was moving 1,500 users from five old facilities into one new facility. They contracted another firm, call them "M-A", to handle moving the PCs. M-A contracted two other firms, one of which was Tek Systems who I work for, to supply the personnel to do the work.

So just before we left Rochester, the project manager called to confirm I’d be coming, and to inform me that CM didn’t want us to work on 4^th of July, (probably because CM’s employees balked at the proposition and CM didn’t want to pay us double-time.) Instead we would work extra hours on Thursday and Friday, and clean things up on Sunday and Monday.

I thought that was strange since one of the conditions placed upon me for accepting the job was that I HAD to work on 4^th of July. But between the extra hours on the other days and eight-hours holiday pay for the 4^th, I figured it wouldn’t be too great an impact, so we went anyway.

Last Thursday’s entry (which is embedded within last Sunday’s entry) kinda sets the tone for the rest of the job. One thing that isn’t said in that entry, is how pissed I was at the hotel on Wednesday night. And I’m afraid that I took it out on Danger-Boy. He took it well, understanding that I wasn’t angry with him, I just needed an outlet.

Thursday morning I had a breakfast meeting with my representative from Tek. This was when she learned about us not working on the 4^th. I told her about the hotel situation. She said there wasn’t anything she could do, that there were only a couple of places in town. I whipped out the two pages I’d removed from the phone book and told her that wasn’t the way I saw it. I explained that Danger-Boy was going to work the phones and find us a cheaper place to stay. She took the pages from me and promised to make the calls. Anyway, I signed my contract and reported to work at the job site a few minutes before out 10:00AM start time.

At an organizational meeting with Tek’s project manager, M-A’s Senior System Engineer, myself and three other System Engineers from Tek, we learned that we weren’t going to work at all on Sunday, only a half-day, if at all, on Monday, and that we were going to try to wrap things up on Thursday so we wouldn’t have to work on Friday. We were supposed to take this as good news, being a holiday weekend and all. To a man, we four System Engineers were stunned and angered.

Suddenly the 50 to 70 hours I’d been expecting based upon what I’d been told by both Tek and M-A’s Account Executive before I accepted the position, vanished. The three other guys felt they’d been sold a bill-of-goods too. And to be told this by the project manager, who is a Tek Systems employee (as opposed to a contractor), was just the icing on the cake.

The long and short of it is that, on good faith, I drove 700 miles round-trip, stayed two nights in an overpriced hotel, showed up on-time, ready, willing and able to fulfill the job as described to me, only to get just 10½ hours of work. Since the client had requested us to work on the holiday but reneged, I also put 8 hours of holiday hours on my timecard, and M-A’s guy signed it that way.

Since things had turned out so badly, I pressured Tek for the round-trip mileage and the amount of the hotel costs which exceeded the per diem. As of this writing, they’ve come through on the mileage. The payroll department forgot about the per diem entirely, so I’ll have to wait for the next paycheck to see what’s happened there. In any event, I had paid cash in advance for a week at the hotel. They don’t give cash refunds. I’m waiting for a check from them too.

All this left me strapped for cash on the return trip, and boiling under the surface. Danger-Boy had discovered a nice little state park he wanted me to see before we left. Reluctantly I agreed to go. It was a nice enough place, a pond with a beach, rental canoes and paddle-boats, but given the state of mind I was in, I didn’t really appreciate it. When bad things happen to me, no matter where I am, all I want is to go home.

We had enough cash for either fuel or the Thruway toll. So we bought fuel and took the Scenic Route home. I-84 West, to NY 17 West, to I-390 North. Route 17 is touted as one of, if not the most, picturesque drives in the northeast. Car and Driver magazine gave it a Ten Best award last year. So I was looking forward to it. And with all the sunshine and the temperature in the 80s, it was a nice day for a drive.

Seventeen is a standard four-lane divided highway that winds it's way through the Catskill Mountains then along the Delaware River valley on it’s way through the southern tier of counties. It goes all the way west to Jamestown, (hometown of both The 10,000 Maniacs and Lucille Ball.)

I'd been expecting sweeping vistas and scenic overlooks. Alas, there were none. Just mile after mile of being walled in by monotonous green mountains. I felt almost claustrophobic. All you could see was the road ahead, and no more than a mile, usually less, on either side. I suppose the autumn with all the colors is the best time to drive it, so I’ll reserve final judgement until I drive it at that time of year. And I was equally unimpressed with the Delaware River, at least the part that winds through New York State. Had George Washington wanted to cross the Delaware here, he wouldn’t have needed hip-boots, let alone a boat. It’s a creek. Plain and simple.

Anyway, we stopped in Elmira for fuel. Danger-Boy pointed out the Elmira State Correctional Facility, where he’s spent some time. It seems he knows every prison in the friggin’ state. Everywhere we go he points one out. He knows all the names and whether they’re county or state, men’s or women’s and maximum or medium security.

Danger-Boy likes my collection of baseball hats. Most of them I’ve picked up as souvenirs in Las Vegas. His current favorite is a white and burgundy one from the Monte Carlo. He was wearing it, backwards as usual, on the drive home. So we’re tooling along and he turns around to get something out of the cooler which was riding on the back seat. Well a gust of wind came in through the sunroof, and whipped the hat right off his head and out the window. It took me a while to understand that when he said, "My hat blew out the window" that he meant it had just happened. I thought it had been in the back seat and blown out somewhere along the line and he’d only just noticed it.

This would have been the fourth hat of mine he’s lost, so we turned around at the next exit and went back. Well that particular exit was a nightmare. Whoever designed it should be institutionalized. We must have spent five minutes trying to find the eastbound on-ramp. The next one was just as bad. The westbound on-ramp was easily a half-mile up the road from the overpass.

Back on NY17 westbound, we cruised along in the right lane at about 45 looking for the hat. We’d just about given up hope when I spied it, jumped on the brakes and swung onto the shoulder. He had been looking for hat-shaped objects, I was just looking for the colors. When I saw the colors, I was able to read "Monte Carlo" on it as we went by. I jumped out of the car and ran back to get it. It was up against the concrete wall of an overpass. Had things gone just a little differently, it would have been over the wall. It was a long way down too.

Anyway, it had been run over by a truck, The visor is permanently creased at a weird angle and there’s identifiable tread marks over the top. Well, Danger-Boy was really happy to have his, (my) hat back, tire tracks and all.

The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. On I-390, we stopped to take a leak at a scenic overlook just outside Dansville. On one of the "Do Not Enter" signs, someone had written "No Fagats Allowed." Someone’s going to have to teach those kids how to spell. I snapped a picture, and on we went. The sunset was great that night. Periodically, Danger-Boy would tuck the hat away safely, grab the camera an poke his head out the sunroof to take a picture. I’m still a little cash-poor, so it’ll be a few weeks before I can afford to have them developed. I’ll post the best ones, and the picture of the sign.

As this whole thing unfolded, I kept thinking to myself, "What is the lesson here?" So many things went wrong, things way beyond my control, and for no apparent reason. Maybe it’ll just take time to sort out. Another one of the Rules for Being Human kept coming to the front of my mind. Rule Five says:

If you don’t learn lessons, they get harder. External problems are a precise reflection of your internal state. When you clear inner obstructions, your outside world changes. Pain is how the universe gets your attention.

I was, am still, feeling pain alright. The universe has my attention. But to what end? With regard to external problems, things were/are going to hell in a handbasket. If one follows the guidance of Rule Five, then internally I must be going to hell in a handbasket. Click. True, I’ve not felt right, felt grounded, in quite some time. Even before Danger-Boy arrived on the scene. Perhaps he’s the messenger. If so, what’s the message?

It’s beginning to come together. Maybe by the time I’m finished recounting the events of the week, something will gel.

Back to last Friday. It was still twilight just after sunset when we got back in. Rather than make several trips up and down in the elevator, we carried everything into the basement hallway, then jammed it all in the elevator for one trip up. I went down the hall and turned the electricity back on, turned on some lights and started the refrigerator while Danger-Boy brought everything in. (Yes, after threatening to do it for months, the freezer’s finally defrosted!)

You know, maybe I’m not ready to write about this. It’s been four hours now I’m still avoiding it. I’ve been doing everything but writing. I'm focusing on how things crashed and burned, (and continue to crash and burn) between Danger-Boy and I. Perhaps some more healing is in order before I finish the story.

We showered and changed, and headed out to Muther’s after a brief detour to the ATM. I was still in a fairly foul mood, and Danger-Boy was headed there too. We each tossed back a few cocktails in a very short amount of time. Nothing was happening on either the dance floor or the pool table, so we decided to head over to the Forum.

Between feeling the effects of a long day, a long drive and a few cocktails, coupled with not really wanting to search for a parking spot, I decided to drop the car off at home and walk over. It’s only up the block and around the corner anyway.

The drinks were weak, and the crowd was poor, so I decided to head home at about 1:30. Danger-Boy had found someone to play pool with, so he stuck around. When I got home and started emptying my pockets, I found his keys were on the speaker. Not wanting him to be locked out, I grabbed them and walked back to the Forum. He thanked me, gave me a hug and a kiss, and I came back home and got ready for bed.

Shortly after 2:00, (2:12 according to Call-ID,) the phone rang. I was, shall we say, indisposed, and it rolled-over to voice-mail before I could answer. No message was left, Call-ID said, "Unavailable", so I figured it was Danger-Boy calling to say he’d found a party or something and wouldn’t be home. I went to bed.

A few minutes later I heard the garage door open and my car drive out. I was none too pleased. I wasn’t in any shape to drive, and Danger-Boy, having been drinking beer since Route 17, damned well wasn’t either. I started stewing. While I was trying to decide whether to call him or not, the phone rang again.

There was no response when I answered, but I could hear voices in the background. It didn’t take me long to figure out that he must have hit "Send" by accident, and didn’t really mean to call.

Well, I got an earful. Piped directly from my cell phone to my home, I got to listen to Danger-Boy hustling tricks from my car. After the bar-closing traffic died down, (without success for Danger-Boy,) he started hustling the other hustlers for crack. He eventually struck a deal with one of them. I heard the car start and Danger-Boy say that he had to stop home for his stem. This bit of news made me absolutely livid. All this time he’s been telling me he’s off crack, and he has a stem hidden in my apartment!

I got dressed, switched from the corded phone to The Ultimate Fag Phone with Headset, and went outside to lurk for him. I could tell from the conversation that they were coming down East Ave., so I crossed the street and stood in the shadows. When I saw my car stop for the light, I moved to the curb. When the light changed and the car turned the corner, I stepped out into the street, and proceeded to play "chicken" with Danger-Boy behind the wheel of my own car. I won. He very nearly hit me, stopping less than six inches from my shins.

All the while, I heard everything in my headset. "What the fuck? Awwww, shit!" Coming around to the driver’s door, I reached in the open window, turned the car off and pulled his keys from the ignition, as I said as calmly as I could, "Hi Danger-Boy, you’re busted."

He says, "What did I do?" I said, "You’re picking up your stem on your way to Baldwin St. where he’s gonna get you $20.00 of rock." I truly enjoyed the shocked look on his face. J "What makes you think that", he asked. I told him to look at the cell phone. He stared at it in disbelief. The display said "Call to [my phone number]", and the call timer was dutifully logging every second. I reached in, removed the phone from his hand, and pressed the "End" key as the timer clicked over to 16:52.

"I’ve been listening to every word for the last sixteen minutes and fifty-two seconds. Both of you, out of the car." The hustler in the passenger seat started protesting, "Hey man, who the fuck are you?" I yelled back, "YOU’RE IN MY FUCKING CAR, RENTBOY, AND THIS RENTBOY’S STEM IS IN MY FUCKING APARTMENT. I’M STANDING HERE WITH TWO PHONES IN MY HANDS. HOW LONG DO YOU THINK IT’LL TAKE FOR ME TO CALL 911?" He was out of the car and down the street in a flash.

Danger-Boy leapt out of the car and yelled after him, "Hey, man! Just lemme get my coat!"