Last night I dreamt I was in a diner. Not one I recognized, a pretty generic diner, but we were all grateful to be there. T’was me and the band and Jade and Justin (Heather’s brother) and Chris Ehrich and Brennan. Weirdly we all fit at a relatively small table and we were strangely quiet, eating fries.
I must admit, I’ve been having a Denny’s craving recently. Don’t judge.
We were seated by the front door, which now that I think about it, may have actually made it the diner from Betelgeuse Lampshade… wait… no… C4 Smoothie… damn… Sandpaper Gooseberry?
Ahem.
Gunpowder Milkshake. I THINK we were in the diner from Gunpowder Milkshake, sitting in a shaft of sunlight and watching people come in and out. There were no overtones of being in an assassin’s diner, it was purely a visual setting.
In any case, the diner was in a weirdly suburban location. It felt like Pittsburgh, with its vertiginous tiny streets. I watched as across the street a white semi (you know, the tractor of a tractor trailer?) pulled away from the house on the corner across from the diner, headed up the hill, pulled WIDE around the next corner and up onto the lawn of another house. It climbed the hill poorly and rolled over on its side in a ponderous sweeping demise.
We were all just eating fries from one big communal bowl and chatting quietly but I was trying to get my friends to turn and look out the window, but no-one would… the driver got out of the truck and went back to the house from whence he’d come and started banging on the door. My internal dream narrative said he was going to complain to the house’s owner about the hills and claim it was THEIR fault that he’d crashed the truck, but that was all interrupted by Alex Gereshnov walking through the diner’s front door.
Now, it’s absolutely fair that you probably don’t know who Alex Gereshnov is, unless you went to high school with me. I’d stumbled across him again via Facebook a while ago but can’t find him now, so maybe this post won’t get weird with people looking him up, but maybe it will and I just have to face that because I’m a semi-public figure.
IN ANY CASE – Alex was to rob as rob was to Zak and probably none of us really ever appreciated the comparisons but I really admired Alex and whether I just fell into it or consciously modeled myself after his hair, walk, demeanour, clothes, whatever I’ll never say. I was definitely the lighter version. I wore cool socks, socks that Alex would never have been caught dead in. I painted my denim. He stayed with black Sharpie. He seemed more dangerous. He sold me my first butterfly knife because I wished *I* seemed more dangerous. His art was definitely darker. He was more metal than I was. Zak was more punk rock. I can’t speak to whether ANY of us, in high school, understood our substance as well as we understood our style but we ALL had great hair.
That’s neither here nor there. Alex Gereshnov walked into the diner, looking like he always did, black denim all over, guitar case strapped across his back (I don’t think he actually played guitar) and as he flashed through the sunlight he glances over the diner and heads towards the opposite end.
I play it cool.
“Alex”, I nod. He nods back. An upward toss-off DC nod, not a down-chin friendly Baltimore nod – but we knew each other from high school, from PG County, so I try not to take offense as he walks on past.
I sit back and say “man, in high school I so wanted to be that guy”…
The whole table choruses with a slow ripple of “yup”s and everyone goes back to their fries.
…
I wake up to a text from my old friend Jade. Before bed I’d asked her if she had any reading suggestions because I was caught in a Pratchett loop. She says she’s been caught in the same loop. We’re all caught in the same loop. I’d LIKE to think I’ve grown a little over the years but damn Alex still looked so freakin’ COOL in my dream… and I bet he SHREDS.