C2: If I swallow anything evil...

...Put your fingers down my throat. That's from The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes," a good song.

So, the moral of today's story will be to go another way sometimes. Becoming a creature of habit can cause life to stagnate. Making room for variety can lead to a change of fortunes.

I got up this morning knowing I had something on my plate. I usually go down to the comic store on Wednesdays, but a variety of factors stopped me. There was business to attend to at Grandma’s today, and she suggested I come on Wednesday so I wouldn’t be back and forth there today. And I thought that since it was Labour Day comics might have been shipping a day late, but that may not have been accurate. So I put it off to today.

I also went in a different direction that usual. Whereas I often go straight down Trafalgar to Lakeshore, today I took the big hill down Cross, like I used to when the tunnel under QEW was intact. I made this decision after giving a man directions to the Holiday Inn at the corner of Cross and Trafalgar. I zoned out into my own little world and headed on my way.

I was halfway up Cornwall toward Kerr when it happened. A blue van of some kind pulled up beside me. I figured it was yet another person asking for directions. I looked at the girl behind the wheel. Something struck me about her.

“Excuse me,” she says, adding something to the effect of, “I’m sorry, I’m not crazy, but I think we know each other.” It begins to dawn on me before she even phrases her next question. She asks, “Were you in Reach?”

I just look at her and say, “Leanne.”

Enraptured that she didn’t just commit some horrible faux pas, she offers to take me to my destination. I told her I was going to the Pizza Pizza on Lakeshore – which was true, as I was hungry, and that was the plan.

Leanne from Bateman. That’s a weird one. I’ve technically known her for years, but I still have to begin every conversation I ever have with her with a sense of “Do we know each other?” because we only saw each other every so often, mostly at Reach tournaments. It began one innocent day at a tournament when the WOSS kids were eating alongside the then-Elgin kids. The most vocal of the Elgins was a darkhaired girl who was introduced to me as “Leanne.” The WOSS crew and the Elgins became sort of acquainted in that way. The other Elgin kid I remember was Cliff, who eventually led the Bateman Improv Team to victory (over us,) and I think a kid with a thick foreign accent (Russian maybe?) But Leanne was the main one, I guess, because she and I hung out a lot at those tournaments. Except every time they ended, we wouldn’t see each other until the next tournament. (I keep saying tournament – really they were round robins.) And I never even asked her for her last name!

One year, our schools weren’t in the same group and I practically forgot about her. In Grade 12, we met up again. I wasn’t sure what her name was, and when I asked, she said, “colloquialism.” I still don’t know what she meant by that. The whole story is captured somewhere in this blog, I can’t be bothered to find it.

Anyway, I got a little fixated on her, it was kind of unhealthy and I’m not proud of that particular stretch of my life. It was the last time I was ever so fixated, so hooray for me for shaking that habit.

The last time I had seen her was at a tournament (round robin) in March 2005. She wasn’t even at the finals, if I recall. I figured, oh I’d never see her again, that was that. And then she pulls up alongside me in a blue minivan going west on Cornwall. Go figure.

After assuring me – as any good woman in her position would do – repeatedly, that she was not some insane stalker,* we caught up a little, I told her what I was doing, she told me where she was at, and said she still kept in touch with all the people from her Reach team (something I can hardly say, as they weren’t really my gang. Although I did see Bryan Myers not that long ago and sometimes find myself at a party with Barrett and Hilary,) and how she couldn’t wait to tell them she’d run into “that guy who knew Aaron and Moses.” This was in reference to some obscure question I’d answered all those years ago, which I couldn’t even remember today. I answered so many questions over the years that very few of them actually stuck this long. And yet she had linked me inextricably with this one random question.

*I found this privately amusing, given my past tendency toward such behaviour… and how often I find that word coming up, in the positive or nugatory sense, with regards to females. Go figure.

I also found myself living out my own prophecy, in a sense, and getting some validation that what I write has a connection to reality. We lived out a little excerpt from the Half-Past script when she mentioned some half-heard comment about a girlfriend of hers having had a crush on me (at least, that’s what I think she said,) and I , almost instinctually, answered, “you should’a hooked me up.” Needless to say, she didn’t get the reference. The conversation missed only a beat before moving forward.

Anyway, after showing off my mad conversatin’ skillz, we got to my destination. The parting was a tad awkward, in that I really wanted to get that pizza, but hey, who’s going to let a pretty girl drive out of his life? She told me it was probably not the last I’d ever see of her. Somehow, I believe that, even though there’s no reason to think I’ll ever see her again. I guess it’s up to serendipity. If I needed to, I could probably get in contact with her, since she’s friends with Cliff who used to work with Emma, so I have reason to believe there’s a connection there. It’s a small world. I’ll just leave it to chance, though. No sense worrying oneself over little things like that.

So the day went on. Eventually I had to run down to Sheridan’s IT Purgatory in the depths of the school and get my new laptop. I skipped out on the Care & Feeding, because I did it last year and still am aware of the fundamentals (water + computer = bad?! Shocking!) Maybe I’ll get in trouble over that. Probably I won’t. I know it’s a Mac – and therefore not my most familiar computer – but I’m not stupid. I know how to “care and feed” for a computer. It’s not like they’re making me rent a Guinea Pig.

Man that’d be sweet if they were, though.

Eric and I went over to a lady’s apartment this evening, in Grandma’s building. We had been hired at the price of $5 each to move some cabinets out of her storage room. It seems we’ve got a reputation as hard workers around those parts. Me, I’m always happy to do just about anything for a buck. I oughtta put that on my résumé. Maybe then I’da been hired by that Framing place.

The place is pretty hot, and thanks to mom messing around with our grocery schedule, we have nothing non-Coca-Cola to drink, and I’ve had enough of that today. So I ran out to the convenience store to get Iced Tea.

What a life.

Watched the full moon rise tonight. Think of me once in a while. You know where I’m at.

Keep on rockin’
-Scotto