me’s blog

Picture it.  London.  August 1997.  A beautiful young peasant boy with clear, olive skin…

While perhaps not as domestically earth-shaking an event as, say, when JFK was shot, I have a feeling that most U.S. Americans - shoutout to Miss Teen South Carolina! - remember exactly where we were when we found out that Princess Diana died.

Where was I, you ask?  I was in London, coincidentally enough.  I had just been released not 24 hours earlier from a three-week stay in the cardiac ward of the University College of London Hospital.  This was a year before I started doing drugs, so this particular verge-of-life-and-death drama of mine was in no way related to that.  I’ll post the details of this story over the weekend.  Here’s a link to download a song called "Goodbye" which I wrote on the last day of my hospital stay.

My father and I stayed at the Bonham Carter House for the night following my release from the hospital, and it was 5:00am when we got into a cab to take us to Heathrow Airport.  On the cab’s front passenger seat was the early edition of the daily newspaper, whose cover indicated that Princess Diana (and that ever parenthetical Dodi dude) had been injured in a paparazzi-fueled car accident in France.  It seemed as though our cab driver, my dad and I were the only people awake in London at this hour, and therefore the only people who knew of this news.  Needless to say, the long ride to Heathrow through the sleepy London ouskirts was more than a smidge surreal.

The cab driver had the news playing on the radio.  Before we made it to Heathrow, it was announced that Princess Diana had died.  And this will no doubt sound strange, but in that moment and for a while thereafter I felt like my very recent battle with - and subsequent triumph over - a mysterious near-fatal illness in a foreign country was provided with some sort of weirdly symbolic closure by Princess Diana’s death.  I mean, the timing of it all was just too perfect.

Often I’ve wondered, if I had died in that hospital, whether Elton John would have rewritten his song about me.  Perhaps he’ll rewrite it (again) when I do die someday.  For as Sandra Bernhard once said: "Your candle burned out long before the royalties ever did."

As my flight departed the awakening city through that surreal August dawn, a nation began to mourn as it had never mourned before.  I guess I just have that effect on people.

Do you remember where you were when you learned that I left England Princess Diana died?  Let me know in the comments section below.  And stay tuned this weekend for the rest of the story…

The e-mail message below - with its rather direct come-hither opening and its awkwardly incomplete bitchslap-n-run conclusion - greeted me this morning in my AOL inbox.  If either of my two faithful readers knows this Jennifer Gervasio woman and/or has the moxie to send her an email on my behalf, please tell her that regardless of how many case [sic] she’s prepared by (?), in my estimation she’s even less than zero.  Emailing strangers to tell them they’re nothing?  Child, please.  At least I know the difference between "your" and "you’re". 

I’d email her myself, but I’m afraid my computer might catch an STD.

—–Original Message—–
To: medc2la@aol.com
Subject: He’s also observed

Hallo. How is it going? I am young female Jennifer Gervasio.  Email me at ucmrp@mailmessagecenter.info only if you would like to see some of my pictures.   It is clear that  prepared by two case. Your zero

Time for another long-awaited game of Let’s Analyze Matt’s Dream!  In this dream (from which I just woke up at the ungodly hour of 6am - ugh!), apparently I had some temp assignment in the city, and I was using a car to travel to and from work.  I had to park the car in a garage for the day, and there was some asshole of a guy who ran the parking garage.  White, middle-aged guy, kinda sizable but not huge, with a brown, almost Jheri-curlish semi-mullet and a moustache.  He didn’t remind me of anyone specific from my life, though he did perhaps bear a fleeting physical resemblance to a white(r), thicker, much more imposing Lionel Richie with way less class.  Which basically means he bore no resemblance whatsoever to Lionel Richie, so let’s leave him out of the interpretations, shall we?  I have no issues with him.  The guy in my dream was more like a Sal.  Or a Louie. 

This particular morning I had to leave my car behind another car under the garage entrance while I took the key up to the asshole in charge.  The next thing I remember is coming back to get my car at the end of the day and seeing it still sitting behind the other car exactly where I’d left it that morning.  I noticed that the other car, however, seemed to have been destroyed from above by something or other, either by some giant piece of the garage’s ceiling, or by some kind of garage door apparatus.  Kind of like in that presently ubiquitous "Life Comes At You Fast" commercial (which I loved the first thirty-seven times I saw it), except that whatever had fallen on the car in my dream hadn’t just repeatedly dented one spot on the roof - it had demolished the entire length of the car, seemingly in one fell swoop.  Naturally I was concerned, both because the car in front of mine had been completely smashed in, and because my car was still sitting there where I’d left it hours ago, mere inches behind the other car’s now ruinous remains.  So I hastily went to retrieve my keys from Sal or Louie. 

While en route to his little booth, I heard a thunderous noise behind me.  I turned around to see that something else had fallen from the ceiling and completely totalled MY car.  I looked on in horror, and ran up to the booth, furious.  I started yelling at Sal or Louie, screaming that he could’ve prevented this and that he knew this was going to happen.  He laughed at me, basically making fun of me for even bothering to yell at him.  Then he kind of dared me to fight him.  I was more than a little scared, both because I was carless in a parking garage with a falling ceiling, and also because I’m a lover not a fighter.  Good old pacifist me would completely get my ass kicked by this dickhead who basically could not wait to beat the crap out of me.  He approached me and was pulling back his arm to take the first punch… when I woke up.

Which of my two faithful readers wants to take a stab at this one?  As always, I look forward to reading any and all feedback - no matter how potentially insane - in the comments section below.  Just know that I’ve already considered and discarded any interpretations related to "Dancing On The (Falling) Ceiling".  And I’m also fully aware that now, with this morning’s subconscious Henny Penny antics, my poultry-themed nickname trifecta is finally complete.  Um, yay?