In a Daze

Ugh. I had quite an emotional weekend, I barely slept last night, and then I started my new job today. After I finish this, I think I’m going to bed.

CanadaGirl and I drove down to Richmond in a rental car on Saturday and met up with the gang that afternoon, and on Sunday we all went to Doug’s memorial service. As I’ve said before, these people are like family to me and I love them all. Whenever we get together — and there’s usually between six and eight of us at these gatherings — it’s as if we all live in the same dorm once again. It’s like we’ve never been apart. The one-liners fly across the room, the decks of cards are shuffled and played, the conversations are eloquently had.

This time, despite the circumstances under which we’d come together, it was the same. In fact, there was even a surprise appearance from one of the few female members of our brood whom none of us had seen in six years — I’ll call her M. It turns out that she’s engaged. Yeah, she’s engaged — to a woman! CanadaGirl wasn’t at all surprised by this news; in fact, about a year ago, she mentioned to me that she thought M was probably gay.

The bizarre thing is that out of about 10 or 11 people, three of us have turned out to be gay. That’s a pretty high percentage.

Anyway… it was great to see the gang again, although I wish the circumstances could have been different.

The memorial service on Sunday afternoon wasn’t very fulfilling, to be honest. I couldn’t relate to the heavy Baptist tint to everything; Doug had been part of a Christian students’ group in high school and college, and all three eulogists were from those groups; all of them prominently mentioned Jesus Christ many, many times, in a tone that suggested he was a good friend. The first eulogist mentioned that Doug had called his mother from underneath his desk in the World Trade Center. The eulogist continued, “And you know what? That reminds me of another man. A man named Jesus Christ.” He went on to talk about how Christ had tried to comfort his own mother.

It’s not my place to have an opinion in this situation, but the comparison seemed a little artificial. The speaker was putting the cart before the horse, I thought. There was too much Christ and not enough Doug.

The more important reason why the service wasn’t fulfilling was because this is so fucking unfair. Doug shouldn’t be dead. It makes no sense. He wasn’t supposed to die like this, so young, and under such ridiculous circumstances. We were sitting in the church, and the music began and the family walked in, first his parents (his mother was sobbing, and I lost it at that point), and then his sister, and his grandparents, and then his girlfriend — escorted by his roommate — and for a second I imagined that it was a wedding and Doug was marrying his girlfriend. And then I thought, Doug’s never going to have a wedding now.

We’d all met the girlfriend for the first time on Saturday night. They’d been dating a year, and apparently they’d been pretty serious. She’s really sweet, and obviously this has been really hard for her.

She wanted to know all our stories about Doug, and she wanted to tell us hers. The great thing was that there were similar threads that ran through our stories. Doug liked to have fun. And he could charm the pants off of anyone. And he could fall asleep in almost any situation — on a couch, in a bar, with his hand in a bag of chips.

Actually, I found hanging out on Saturday night much more fulfilling than the service on Sunday.

A couple of hours after the service, CanadaGirl and I packed up the rental car again and drove back up north. It’s always hard to say goodbye to these people. I’d love it if we could all get a house and live together — come home from work at the end of the day and cook meals together and sit around and talk and joke around and play spades.

We love to play spades. I suck, though. In eight years of knowing these people, I’ve barely learned a thing about the game. Finally, this weekend I realized that I could help my performance by bidding a lot more conservatively and not being so worried about taking bags.

It’s weird how our little group has evolved. For the first two years that we knew each other, we lived together in a dorm — seeing each other every day, hanging out in this one particular room, going to and from classes, griping about classes, going to various activities, going out to drink, sitting around and drinking.

Over the years, we’ve remained close, but things have changed. Two of us have married. One of us is about to be married. Three of us have turned out to be gay. Several of us have graduate degrees. One of us has died. It’s weird. Someone this weekend pointed out that this was kind of like “The Big Chill.”

After the service ended, most of us went back to the couple’s house where we were staying, standing there in our grown-up clothes, and several of us took some Tylenol. We were wiped out.

Oh, things have changed.

Anyway — I miss them again.

So, I got home around midnight last night. I tried to sleep but I tossed and turned for a while, and then eventually I drifted off. I had weird dreams. I woke up at 6:30 this morning, after about four and a half hours of sleep. I won’t normally have to get up that early, but today I had to go down to Trenton and fill out some paperwork for my job. Security was so tight — I had to put my bag through an x-ray machine and I got scanned up and down with a hand-held detector. Yay.

Later on I went to my new office in Newark. It turns out I don’t actually have my own office yet — I’ll be using other people’s offices for the first two weeks. And the computer in the office I’ll be using this week has a virus, so don’t expect any daytime blogging for a while.

I’m reserving judgment on the job for now. The people are really nice and the place seems really laid back. I don’t know if I’ll find the work interesting — so far I know absolutely nothing about public utilities — but I get to leave at 5:00, which is a big plus for me. We’ll see.

I’m reserving judgment on lots of things right now — what I think of the new job, whether I want to stay in the New York area, and so forth. I was in Richmond this weekend, only an hour away from Charlottesville, where I spent eight enjoyable years of my life. It was nice to be back in Virginia. The newly-emerged lesbian still lives in the C’ville area. It made me nostalgic. Sigh… the cost of living there is so low, and you’ve got the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains.

On the other hand, after living there for eight years I was aching to come back to the New York area. There’s not as much to do down there. But terrorism has me antsy now. I don’t know.

Anyway, I got so little sleep last night, and I’m exhausted. Good night.
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