2002-09-15 - 6:55 a.m.
My e-mail program has an option to "Switch Identity." It strangely captivates me -- if only it were that easy, selecting a menu option between "work offline" and "quit." To my disappointment, all it does is change e-mail addresses.
So the girl of item 17 said she only wanted to be friends, and as disappointing as that is, it actually comes as a victory in defeat for me. I didn't drag it out as is my usual technique; I acted decisively, and now I don't have to worry about it anymore. Do I dare disturb the universe? Hell, I'll murder and create and pursue whoever I want to, because at this point I have nothing to lose except more years of my college career.
Except... I started out the year hotly pursuing this girl at a time when there never has seemed to be more eligible gay men. It is easier to switch e-mail addresses, especially at a place this small and incestual. I remember the thought process that hit me in archaeological field school, when I discovered that I liked a girl in our group -- coming out and positing my identity as a full homosexual allowed me to act much more decisively. However, I never really tested the option of advertising bisexuality.
Enough of this. The pre-dawn morning spread out against the sky as part of the evening before is a color of purple that cannot be reproduced, and the asphalt streets sheets of bluish-gray to match. The struck me driving home at 7 a.m. yesterday, and it struck me again just now, as I drove back from a expedition to get mushrooms from a Bradenton field. I didn't find any, which may be because there's been too much rain or because of the summer's end. Since it's probably the latter, and these trips are usually stressful, I will put the shrooming identity on the shelf and buy my drugs from now on.
About a year ago near the beginning of the school year hippie Daniel had driven off on a Saturday morning, and what struck me so vividly was that it was last hurrah of the brilliant summer of drugs, and was flirting with the prospect of enjoying periodic hallucinative experiences in perpetuity. We drove up around the airport, and looking out across the runways, with their fields of lights like stars, and I said that it would be a great place to go tripping. He said the airport would be a great place to go go-carting. Yeah, I said, except you'd have to make sure you didn't get hit by a plane!
Then it hit me: No you wouldn't. It was two days after September 11, and the airports were still shut down. We didn't find many mushrooms then, either.
