One thing accomplished
This has not been edited as well as I would have liked but I wanted to get it in by the deadline I had set for myself so here is a ruff draft of what I'm calling, "The Freedom of the Chaos Theory" (It is rather long.)
When it’s after 2 am and all the bars are closed and a car pulls up to your window in the steamy July night and the driver makes a circular motion with his hand to roll down the window I suggest you roll down the window. The humid night air won’t sober you up, it’ll only make your mellow stay all the more so. When the boy asks you if you would like to go to a party you may ask what kind of party it is. If he tells you there will be a bonfire and a trampoline do you think you could resist?
I never thought I would find myself in a situation like this on the night of my self-given farewell party. We had left the bar where Summer worked, we had decided to go just for last call, and we were now on our way back to the location where the main party was so that people could stumble home or sleep on a floor.
I was in the passenger seat, Rog was driving, Kevin (Summer’s soon to be fiancé and now husband) was in the back with two more people of little consequence (and unknown names or origins). I was buzzed but not drunk. It was my party so I didn’t feel any guilt about being as buzzed as I was and because it was the end of the night I looked around at the haze and back over to my friend and felt a kind of powerful happiness that comes at the end of a night of drinking with good company even though at the back of my brain there was a sadness in knowing that I was coming to the end of something though I wasn't sure what that was exactly.
We were just stopped at the stop light at the service road that ran along US 127. We were going north where we’d get on Saginaw and take that back east through town and to the original party. That was the plan.
Then the 1986 Ford Crown Victoria in navy blue pulled up next to us on my side of Rog’s car. Their windows were all down and they were blasting music of some kind. In my buzzed state I simply stared at them all. They looked like hippies, but hippies with an edge if there ever were those kinds of hippies. The driver noticed me and made a motion for me to roll down my window, so I did.
He seemed to be in the same state I was. He had a wooly beard and overalls on and he asked in a husky voice, “Do you wanna come to a party? They’ll be a bonfire and a trampoline.”
His breaking of my silent buzz made me react in a way I would have reacted while sober so I replied with a whiney questioned, “Party?”
At the sound of the words party, fire, and trampoline made both Rog and Kevin’s ears perked up dog-like and they cocked their head to one side and I think Kevin said, “Where at?”
At this the hippie/punk smiled and said, “Follow us.” And like magic the light turned green and the giant Ford boat of a car took off up the road.
Rog’s eyes glazed over with the look of a man who has just seen the light. He put his Tracker in gear and took off down the street after the hippie mobile. At first I was content to sit and giggle at this new adventure we were starting right at the time of night I thought all the adventures were over with for that chapter of my life. But for some reason the comfortable buzz I had been experiencing was slowly fading away and I found myself thinking more and more with the commonsense part of myself. As we followed the hippie car onto 127 north (a highway) a small shred of concern crept into my head and I thought that perhaps there was a chance this party was up in Mt. Pleasant - and hour and a half drive away. The hippie never said how far we’d be following him. When I brought this concern up to the rest of the party in my car I was told to chill out and calm down. However, after we passed one exit and were still driving north we all got quite and Rog said, “If they don’t get off at the next exit we will anyway.” That decided I was able to sit back and relax and join into the conversation of what we thought we were to expect at this hippie party.
At the next exit the car put it’s signal on and we were off the highway. We turned left and started heading east. We drove past a Meijer (grocery store) and assorted strip malls and gas stations. We went past apartment complexes and hovels you new were mainly student housing since there was no landscaping and living room furniture layout on the front lawns. But we just kept driving past all this. The street lights were getting fewer and far between. The houses were getting farther apart and everything was starting to feel darker.
Finally everyone in the car made another decision; If the hippie car had not turned off this road and into the driveway of one of the houses lining the street by the next stoplight, we’d turn right and head south, back to the party and places well lit and well known.
Of course not ¼ of a mile later the Crown Vic put its left turn signal on and pulled into the driveway of a modest white farmhouse. We followed. We followed as far as the driveway went. The gravel ended at wait tall grass. The hippie mobile did not stop, however, and instead floored it, slightly fishtailing, into the weeds and then proceeded to do donuts at the back of the lot in the tall grass. Rog and Kevin and I looked at one another wide eyed, and then Rog parked the car near others lined up just off the gravel driveway. We all got out of the car and looked back towards the hippie mobile doing donuts. Aside from the inconsistent light from the headlights of the spinning car, there was the light from the bonfire, as well as the white light coming from the street light at the road just in front of the house. This little light was enough to illuminate the trampoline, an RV, and about 10-15 other hippie or punk kids who were assembled.
I am sure I was standing with my mouth agape taking it all in because when I felt the arm come round my shoulders I snapped my moth shut too quickly and bit my lip a little. I turned to look to my right and into the face of the owner of the arm that was now firmly around me and grabbing my left shoulder. This kid was not a hippie. He had an eyebrow piercing and was wearing vans with long board shorts and a typically skater T-shirt. His eyes were glazed over and his right arm was around Kevin’s shoulder’s, which put him at a very odd angle considering the height difference between the two of us. Our host was welcoming us. His watery eyes glanced over my face and Kevin’s and then scanned the rest of our small party. He was walking us back up the driveway and more toward the area of “action”. And then he spoke something coherent and surprising, “Are you guys angry?” We all looked at each other, then Kevin said, “Angry?” Our host seemed annoyed we didn’t completely understand where he was going with this and took his arms from around our shoulder’s and said, “Yeah man. Are you angry, or pissed or fucking livid?!?” We all stood there blinking. He had walked us to the rear of a 1989 Dodge Shadow that was a sick brown color. Our host stared at us as if we were refugees, with a mix of pity and superiority. He picked up a brick from the ground and looked at the Dodge Shadow and then threw the brick as hard as he could into the side of the car. I jumped and let out a little shriek. This seemed to satisfy our host as he giggled like a little school girl and then said, “Seriously, we’re beating the shit out of this car tonight because this dude who used to live here just left it and he’s not coming back and tomorrow our lease is up so just take our your aggressions on it alright!” Kevin and Rog began to laugh and this made our host even happier and he went off with the two of them and I and the two other from our party, who I now cannot recall, walked over to the bonfire.
This part of the party was textbook hippie. There were more wooly bearded men with overalls, and girls with bandannas on their heads. Some were playing guitars and singing stereotypically hippie songs and I decided that between the violence skater punks I had just left and these calm hippies I would stay with the calm hippies for a while and slowly absorb the strangle duality of this gathering.
While I sat and talked with the hippies I noticed that across the driveway where I had left Rog and Kevin there was a brand-new pick-up truck revving its engine just behind the Dodge Shadow and there was lots of yelling from the punks gathered round it. Before anyone sane enough could stop it the driver of the pick-up floored it into the rear of the Dodge causing both of the headlights to shatter and consequently push the Shadow where the boys had all been trying to push it. There was the sound of crunching wood and loud cheers and hoots. Everyone turned and saw that the pick-up trucks headlights had been sacrificed in order to push the Dodge Shadow into a small wooden shed. A few of the boys had jumped on top of the car at this point and were beating their chests. This image flooded my brain with memories of the book The Lord of the Flies and I had to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Of course now the Dodge was stuck in the foundation of the shed and the boys all went to work at once trying to figure out how to remove the car from it’s current position and thus the rest of the party returned to whatever it had been doing before.
But by this time I was getting a little bored of the hippies, and since I was still a little afraid of the destruction the boys were all absorbed in I decided to walk along the driveway opposite the Dodge and check out the trampoline. I was about to get on the now empty trampoline, which was next to the RV, when the largest dog I have ever seen in my entire life came bounding ‘round from behind the RV. I gasped and took two shaky steps back, the third one sending me to the ground and before I could scream or yell or even put my hands up to shield myself the dog was upon me. I felt my head getting warm and wet and for a second I thought the worst and reached up expecting to find blood but as I reached my hand up I felt the huge tongue of the dog envelope it and then a paw came to my chest and then I was down on my back and a heavy chain was hitting against my raised elbow which smarted severely. However, once I realized what was happening all I could do was laugh, and laugh I did. The kind of belly laugh where your whole body shakes but no sound comes out of your mouth.
Finally the owner of the beast wandered over and called him off of me. The young and slight hippie with no beard but instead long dreadlocks was a little worried at first because I was still belly laughing which can be mistaken for crying at times. Once he saw that I was fine he helped me up and properly introduced me to his dog aptly named Bear. Bear was an Alaskan malamute and St. Bernard mix, which explained a lot. After all that excitement I decided that I was too tired to do any jumping and so began walking back along the grass that lead to the bonfire.
Halfway there I noticed that while I was having my altercation with the mutantly large dog, the boys had decided that they would pull the Dodge Shadow out of the shed not with the large and new pick-up truck (with the now broken headlights) but instead with the Crown Vic. In fact I was directly between the bonfire and the trampoline when the boys decided to give the Vic some gas and pull. This meant that the Crown Vic was parallel to the driveway and pointed directly at me. I watched the rear tires spin out of control and send a cloud of rock and dust into the air. I heard the rope tied between the two vehicles grow taunt and begin to creak. And then I noticed that the tension was causing the Crown Vic to hover in a radius from the Dodge Shadow aiming the Crown Vic like an arrow first at the trampoline and then slowly at the bonfire.
I was rather paralyzed with the fear that I knew that rope would snap any second and in that second I would have to choose which location was safer; the trampoline or the bonfire. As I looked at both locations I could see that my buzz was quickly wearing off and that made me one of the most sober people on location. I looked at the hippies, oblivious in their sing-a-long, and saw that two kids had gotten on the trampoline and were jumping as if it was the safest thing in the world to be doing, and I listened to the cheers and chants from the kids encouraging the driver of the Crown Vic to give it a little more gas and then it happened.
It was like a gun being fired and I took off running for the bonfire as the Crown Vic hurtled itself into the trampoline. Launching one jumper on to the roof of the RV and hurtling another to the ground on the opposite side of the now taco-shaped piece of recreational equipment. As soon as both of the trampoline riders stood up with hands in the air, like a gymnast after a routine, showing all they were okay, the entire party erupted into applause and with that eruption something seemed to snap inside me.
I was quite surprised to see that for a long time I had been considering my move to Japan to be the end of … well of something that I can’t put into words. It’s not as though my college years were so amazing that I couldn’t bear to see them end, but there was something that being in college enabled one to feel. If you were still in college you were still figuring stuff out, you were allowed to not know what you were going to “be when you grow up” and in that indecision I found a great comfort. So I suppose that after wearing the emerald green cape and hat and accepting my BA in English lit I thought I had given up being able to live in that state of comfortable confusion.
However, this party… this insane chaotic event that I found myself at could only leave me in that place of contented confusion. It would be silly to be scared of it, and frankly I couldn’t make this kind of stuff up but somehow it found me and here I was at a party with the biggest dog I’ve ever seen in my life, a trampoline shaped like a taco, and 15-20 hippies and punks all hell bent on destroying a brown Dodge Shadow.
I turned to the group of people who were surrounding the battered car and noticed that they had managed to pull it almost completely out of the foundation of the shed. I walked over and joined the group just as one of the punks who was handling a rather expensive looking digital video camera yelled, “Let’s flip this mother fucker!” and from some uncharted place deep inside me I felt a yell build and then before the commonsense side of myself had a chance to censor it, “Flip the motherfucker!” burst forth from my lips and I along with about 15 others all began to heave the Shadow onto it’s hood. Not surprisingly in a matter of minutes we had succeeded and then turned to spinning the car on its roof before flipping it back over again.
I realized that this event, this story was the crowning glory of my 5 years in school. I had never let the night take me where it wanted to go like that before. I had never completely surrendered myself to fate and let go of control and my god it was freeing. After all my silent judging of the destructive punks the entire evening I found myself throwing a large stone through the back windshield and thinking that these skater punks and hippies had known something all along that I had been searching for.
Before we left the nameless girl in our party ripped the rearview mirror out of the car saying she had a Dodge Shadow and her mirror had broken. It was the only physical evidence of the evening and as we drove away (near the hour of 4 am or so) Kevin begged the girl for the artifact so that he might show it to Summer so that she would believe his story as to why he was two hours late home with no phone call (this was before the time when everyone had cell phones).
For a long time I thought the night might not have ever occurred even though I told anyone I could about it. I love telling stories that are true, even if I make them more interesting at times and this story needed very little embellishment to make itself one of the more amazing stories in my repertoire. However, I always felt that everyone I told it too felt it was much more embellished that it actually was. So when I come home to visit from Japan two years later and visited my old job (a video production house) I thought it odd that my bosses were so eager to show me a video that the intern from the fall had made. Of course when the video began to show a crew of wild-eyed kids flipping over a brown Dodge Shadow I knew why they had been relishing my return.
I still have the video tape and I wonder if more strange things will surface from that night when the chaos theory made its wonderfully freeing confusion known to me.
When it’s after 2 am and all the bars are closed and a car pulls up to your window in the steamy July night and the driver makes a circular motion with his hand to roll down the window I suggest you roll down the window. The humid night air won’t sober you up, it’ll only make your mellow stay all the more so. When the boy asks you if you would like to go to a party you may ask what kind of party it is. If he tells you there will be a bonfire and a trampoline do you think you could resist?
I never thought I would find myself in a situation like this on the night of my self-given farewell party. We had left the bar where Summer worked, we had decided to go just for last call, and we were now on our way back to the location where the main party was so that people could stumble home or sleep on a floor.
I was in the passenger seat, Rog was driving, Kevin (Summer’s soon to be fiancé and now husband) was in the back with two more people of little consequence (and unknown names or origins). I was buzzed but not drunk. It was my party so I didn’t feel any guilt about being as buzzed as I was and because it was the end of the night I looked around at the haze and back over to my friend and felt a kind of powerful happiness that comes at the end of a night of drinking with good company even though at the back of my brain there was a sadness in knowing that I was coming to the end of something though I wasn't sure what that was exactly.
We were just stopped at the stop light at the service road that ran along US 127. We were going north where we’d get on Saginaw and take that back east through town and to the original party. That was the plan.
Then the 1986 Ford Crown Victoria in navy blue pulled up next to us on my side of Rog’s car. Their windows were all down and they were blasting music of some kind. In my buzzed state I simply stared at them all. They looked like hippies, but hippies with an edge if there ever were those kinds of hippies. The driver noticed me and made a motion for me to roll down my window, so I did.
He seemed to be in the same state I was. He had a wooly beard and overalls on and he asked in a husky voice, “Do you wanna come to a party? They’ll be a bonfire and a trampoline.”
His breaking of my silent buzz made me react in a way I would have reacted while sober so I replied with a whiney questioned, “Party?”
At the sound of the words party, fire, and trampoline made both Rog and Kevin’s ears perked up dog-like and they cocked their head to one side and I think Kevin said, “Where at?”
At this the hippie/punk smiled and said, “Follow us.” And like magic the light turned green and the giant Ford boat of a car took off up the road.
Rog’s eyes glazed over with the look of a man who has just seen the light. He put his Tracker in gear and took off down the street after the hippie mobile. At first I was content to sit and giggle at this new adventure we were starting right at the time of night I thought all the adventures were over with for that chapter of my life. But for some reason the comfortable buzz I had been experiencing was slowly fading away and I found myself thinking more and more with the commonsense part of myself. As we followed the hippie car onto 127 north (a highway) a small shred of concern crept into my head and I thought that perhaps there was a chance this party was up in Mt. Pleasant - and hour and a half drive away. The hippie never said how far we’d be following him. When I brought this concern up to the rest of the party in my car I was told to chill out and calm down. However, after we passed one exit and were still driving north we all got quite and Rog said, “If they don’t get off at the next exit we will anyway.” That decided I was able to sit back and relax and join into the conversation of what we thought we were to expect at this hippie party.
At the next exit the car put it’s signal on and we were off the highway. We turned left and started heading east. We drove past a Meijer (grocery store) and assorted strip malls and gas stations. We went past apartment complexes and hovels you new were mainly student housing since there was no landscaping and living room furniture layout on the front lawns. But we just kept driving past all this. The street lights were getting fewer and far between. The houses were getting farther apart and everything was starting to feel darker.
Finally everyone in the car made another decision; If the hippie car had not turned off this road and into the driveway of one of the houses lining the street by the next stoplight, we’d turn right and head south, back to the party and places well lit and well known.
Of course not ¼ of a mile later the Crown Vic put its left turn signal on and pulled into the driveway of a modest white farmhouse. We followed. We followed as far as the driveway went. The gravel ended at wait tall grass. The hippie mobile did not stop, however, and instead floored it, slightly fishtailing, into the weeds and then proceeded to do donuts at the back of the lot in the tall grass. Rog and Kevin and I looked at one another wide eyed, and then Rog parked the car near others lined up just off the gravel driveway. We all got out of the car and looked back towards the hippie mobile doing donuts. Aside from the inconsistent light from the headlights of the spinning car, there was the light from the bonfire, as well as the white light coming from the street light at the road just in front of the house. This little light was enough to illuminate the trampoline, an RV, and about 10-15 other hippie or punk kids who were assembled.
I am sure I was standing with my mouth agape taking it all in because when I felt the arm come round my shoulders I snapped my moth shut too quickly and bit my lip a little. I turned to look to my right and into the face of the owner of the arm that was now firmly around me and grabbing my left shoulder. This kid was not a hippie. He had an eyebrow piercing and was wearing vans with long board shorts and a typically skater T-shirt. His eyes were glazed over and his right arm was around Kevin’s shoulder’s, which put him at a very odd angle considering the height difference between the two of us. Our host was welcoming us. His watery eyes glanced over my face and Kevin’s and then scanned the rest of our small party. He was walking us back up the driveway and more toward the area of “action”. And then he spoke something coherent and surprising, “Are you guys angry?” We all looked at each other, then Kevin said, “Angry?” Our host seemed annoyed we didn’t completely understand where he was going with this and took his arms from around our shoulder’s and said, “Yeah man. Are you angry, or pissed or fucking livid?!?” We all stood there blinking. He had walked us to the rear of a 1989 Dodge Shadow that was a sick brown color. Our host stared at us as if we were refugees, with a mix of pity and superiority. He picked up a brick from the ground and looked at the Dodge Shadow and then threw the brick as hard as he could into the side of the car. I jumped and let out a little shriek. This seemed to satisfy our host as he giggled like a little school girl and then said, “Seriously, we’re beating the shit out of this car tonight because this dude who used to live here just left it and he’s not coming back and tomorrow our lease is up so just take our your aggressions on it alright!” Kevin and Rog began to laugh and this made our host even happier and he went off with the two of them and I and the two other from our party, who I now cannot recall, walked over to the bonfire.
This part of the party was textbook hippie. There were more wooly bearded men with overalls, and girls with bandannas on their heads. Some were playing guitars and singing stereotypically hippie songs and I decided that between the violence skater punks I had just left and these calm hippies I would stay with the calm hippies for a while and slowly absorb the strangle duality of this gathering.
While I sat and talked with the hippies I noticed that across the driveway where I had left Rog and Kevin there was a brand-new pick-up truck revving its engine just behind the Dodge Shadow and there was lots of yelling from the punks gathered round it. Before anyone sane enough could stop it the driver of the pick-up floored it into the rear of the Dodge causing both of the headlights to shatter and consequently push the Shadow where the boys had all been trying to push it. There was the sound of crunching wood and loud cheers and hoots. Everyone turned and saw that the pick-up trucks headlights had been sacrificed in order to push the Dodge Shadow into a small wooden shed. A few of the boys had jumped on top of the car at this point and were beating their chests. This image flooded my brain with memories of the book The Lord of the Flies and I had to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Of course now the Dodge was stuck in the foundation of the shed and the boys all went to work at once trying to figure out how to remove the car from it’s current position and thus the rest of the party returned to whatever it had been doing before.
But by this time I was getting a little bored of the hippies, and since I was still a little afraid of the destruction the boys were all absorbed in I decided to walk along the driveway opposite the Dodge and check out the trampoline. I was about to get on the now empty trampoline, which was next to the RV, when the largest dog I have ever seen in my entire life came bounding ‘round from behind the RV. I gasped and took two shaky steps back, the third one sending me to the ground and before I could scream or yell or even put my hands up to shield myself the dog was upon me. I felt my head getting warm and wet and for a second I thought the worst and reached up expecting to find blood but as I reached my hand up I felt the huge tongue of the dog envelope it and then a paw came to my chest and then I was down on my back and a heavy chain was hitting against my raised elbow which smarted severely. However, once I realized what was happening all I could do was laugh, and laugh I did. The kind of belly laugh where your whole body shakes but no sound comes out of your mouth.
Finally the owner of the beast wandered over and called him off of me. The young and slight hippie with no beard but instead long dreadlocks was a little worried at first because I was still belly laughing which can be mistaken for crying at times. Once he saw that I was fine he helped me up and properly introduced me to his dog aptly named Bear. Bear was an Alaskan malamute and St. Bernard mix, which explained a lot. After all that excitement I decided that I was too tired to do any jumping and so began walking back along the grass that lead to the bonfire.
Halfway there I noticed that while I was having my altercation with the mutantly large dog, the boys had decided that they would pull the Dodge Shadow out of the shed not with the large and new pick-up truck (with the now broken headlights) but instead with the Crown Vic. In fact I was directly between the bonfire and the trampoline when the boys decided to give the Vic some gas and pull. This meant that the Crown Vic was parallel to the driveway and pointed directly at me. I watched the rear tires spin out of control and send a cloud of rock and dust into the air. I heard the rope tied between the two vehicles grow taunt and begin to creak. And then I noticed that the tension was causing the Crown Vic to hover in a radius from the Dodge Shadow aiming the Crown Vic like an arrow first at the trampoline and then slowly at the bonfire.
I was rather paralyzed with the fear that I knew that rope would snap any second and in that second I would have to choose which location was safer; the trampoline or the bonfire. As I looked at both locations I could see that my buzz was quickly wearing off and that made me one of the most sober people on location. I looked at the hippies, oblivious in their sing-a-long, and saw that two kids had gotten on the trampoline and were jumping as if it was the safest thing in the world to be doing, and I listened to the cheers and chants from the kids encouraging the driver of the Crown Vic to give it a little more gas and then it happened.
It was like a gun being fired and I took off running for the bonfire as the Crown Vic hurtled itself into the trampoline. Launching one jumper on to the roof of the RV and hurtling another to the ground on the opposite side of the now taco-shaped piece of recreational equipment. As soon as both of the trampoline riders stood up with hands in the air, like a gymnast after a routine, showing all they were okay, the entire party erupted into applause and with that eruption something seemed to snap inside me.
I was quite surprised to see that for a long time I had been considering my move to Japan to be the end of … well of something that I can’t put into words. It’s not as though my college years were so amazing that I couldn’t bear to see them end, but there was something that being in college enabled one to feel. If you were still in college you were still figuring stuff out, you were allowed to not know what you were going to “be when you grow up” and in that indecision I found a great comfort. So I suppose that after wearing the emerald green cape and hat and accepting my BA in English lit I thought I had given up being able to live in that state of comfortable confusion.
However, this party… this insane chaotic event that I found myself at could only leave me in that place of contented confusion. It would be silly to be scared of it, and frankly I couldn’t make this kind of stuff up but somehow it found me and here I was at a party with the biggest dog I’ve ever seen in my life, a trampoline shaped like a taco, and 15-20 hippies and punks all hell bent on destroying a brown Dodge Shadow.
I turned to the group of people who were surrounding the battered car and noticed that they had managed to pull it almost completely out of the foundation of the shed. I walked over and joined the group just as one of the punks who was handling a rather expensive looking digital video camera yelled, “Let’s flip this mother fucker!” and from some uncharted place deep inside me I felt a yell build and then before the commonsense side of myself had a chance to censor it, “Flip the motherfucker!” burst forth from my lips and I along with about 15 others all began to heave the Shadow onto it’s hood. Not surprisingly in a matter of minutes we had succeeded and then turned to spinning the car on its roof before flipping it back over again.
I realized that this event, this story was the crowning glory of my 5 years in school. I had never let the night take me where it wanted to go like that before. I had never completely surrendered myself to fate and let go of control and my god it was freeing. After all my silent judging of the destructive punks the entire evening I found myself throwing a large stone through the back windshield and thinking that these skater punks and hippies had known something all along that I had been searching for.
Before we left the nameless girl in our party ripped the rearview mirror out of the car saying she had a Dodge Shadow and her mirror had broken. It was the only physical evidence of the evening and as we drove away (near the hour of 4 am or so) Kevin begged the girl for the artifact so that he might show it to Summer so that she would believe his story as to why he was two hours late home with no phone call (this was before the time when everyone had cell phones).
For a long time I thought the night might not have ever occurred even though I told anyone I could about it. I love telling stories that are true, even if I make them more interesting at times and this story needed very little embellishment to make itself one of the more amazing stories in my repertoire. However, I always felt that everyone I told it too felt it was much more embellished that it actually was. So when I come home to visit from Japan two years later and visited my old job (a video production house) I thought it odd that my bosses were so eager to show me a video that the intern from the fall had made. Of course when the video began to show a crew of wild-eyed kids flipping over a brown Dodge Shadow I knew why they had been relishing my return.
I still have the video tape and I wonder if more strange things will surface from that night when the chaos theory made its wonderfully freeing confusion known to me.