Long-ass entry

My life over the past few days has been so interesting that blogging about it seems like a chore. I have too much to tell, so I'll try to trim it down to the best parts.

Let's begin with a week ago, when my dear friend at work, M, went into the hospital for what she thought was a panic attack. It turned out to be some serious problem with her heart that required surgery. Yet when I arrived at the hospital, there she was, cracking jokes and having a great time like she always does. She didn't let any of us be sad for even a moment, and she kept rolling her eyes as she listened to her mom cry on the phone. You can't get M down--she's just too damned cheerful. So I spent a lot of time at the hospital until Tuesday when she went home (she has fully recovered since then), playing games and making the nurses uncomfortable with my irreverent humor. One of the nurses came in to tell M all the things she couldn't do in the week after the surgery, like heavy lifting, running, etc. I felt a frisson of wickedness run through me, and I reached over to grab M's foot while I asked the nurse, "What about sex?" She sputtered and umm'ed and looked down at her chart until I said, "It's okay; I can restrain myself for the next few days." I have never made another human being that uncomfortable in my life; I actually had to leave the room to escape the tension that I had created. It was a proud moment for Muskrat.

Wednesday night I went out with Sarah to the Spiderhouse to have some coffee and relax. We ended up running into a friend of hers, Dave, and we all sat down together for a long talk about nothing. Unfortunately, it wasn't long after we sat down that a crazy drunken guy in his mid-to-late twenties started running around in our general area crying, "I've lost my guitar! I've lost my $2400 guitar!!" Dave looked up and immediately recognized him; they had met the day before at the Hole in the Wall (bar) down the street. The drunk had told Dave that he escaped from rehab that day and he was never going back. Now here he was at the Spiderhouse, completely soused and probably high at only 9:00pm. We managed to help him find his guitar, but that ended up being a huge mistake, since he kept wanting to perform for us. He sat down next to me and introduced himself.

"Hi, I'm Daniel. Like Daniel and the lion's den."
"Oh, yeah? Are you religious?"
"No, I'm not. Well, I guess I am. Sometimes. Maybe. I don't know. No. I am a little bit sometimes, I guess. I'm a very spiritual person sometimes."

This is about how all of Daniel's conversations went. He bummed a cigarette off me and stuck it behind his ear while he played us a tune by the Cure that was unrecognizable. When he finished, he turned to me and asked, "Can I bum a cigarette?" I pointed out the one he already had, and he was as delighted as if I were a magician who had pulled a coin from behind his ear.

"Some people think I'm a worthless human being. But I think I'm alright. I'm kind of a worthless person, but I think I'm pretty cool sometimes [repeat this sentence in fifty different ways]."

I tried to escape by going inside for a while, and I ended up having an interesting conversation with a complete stranger who was in seminary to be a Presbyterian minister. I didn't catch her name, but she was reading a book called The Meaning of Jesus. If you've ever wondered what the meaning of Jesus is, you'll be happy to hear it's all right there in that one book. Anyway, she was thoughtful, interesting, and kind, and I hope I run into her again. It's nice to meet religious people that don't make you want to kill yourself or them. This is what I love about Austin--you never know who you're going to meet or what's going to happen.

When I went back outside, Daniel was there waiting for me. He started playing a song he wrote called "April," and I think he might have made it up on the spot. It was so awful that people around us were starting to shoot our group dirty looks like we were encouraging him. Finally Dave and I started playing songs on the guitar just to keep it away from Daniel, but he asked for it back finally and played a song called, "It's Hard." The lyrics go something like this:

(screamed at the top of your lungs) "It's so hard!! Yeah, it's so haaaaaard! It's so goddamned HAAAARD!" It was hard.

I tried to stick it out and talk to Dave and one of his friends while Sarah went to pick up Greg from work, but then Daniel said he'd like to play us "April" again. At that point, I gave up and left to go home. I was flying home to Tulsa the next day and I needed some sleep, anyway. Daniel insisted he had to go home, too, since he was going camping the next day. I don't know if he was running away from the rehab people or what, but I have a feeling his camping adventures probably aren't going too well right now. Just a guess.

Thursday morning I flew out of Austin at 10:00am on a crowded flight. Almost everyone was on the plane and it was getting near time to start the flight instructions, when all of a sudden a large group of tanned, styled, utterly cool guys and gals wearing hats, bandanas, and sunglasses strolled onto the plane. Everyone was looking at them; they were happy, joking, laughing, greeting people like they were having the time of their lives. Two sat down next to me and three behind me, and the rest scattered around the plane. The one next to me said, "G'day!" as he sat down, and his friend in the next seat asked what I thought of his hat before handing it to me to try on. Obviously, these people were special, and it wasn't just that they were Australian. What it was exactly about them, I can't tell you, except to say that they made me desperately wish I were one of them. After a few moments, one of the flight attendants came over the PA and made the following announcement:

"Will everyone please join me in wishing a happy birthday to our passenger in seat 12E [note: Muskrat was in 12F], Phillip Dooley, the three-time cage fighting champion of Australia."

Everyone on the plane oohed and clapped before launching into "Happy Birthday." His friends around him congratulated him, looking at the other passengers and saying, "Three consecutive titles. Amazing." Something was amiss, however. "So...cage fighting?" I asked him. "What is that? Like regular fighting except in a cage?"

"Oh, yeah," Phillip replied, "It's great; they bring a big cage down over you and there's just no escape. It's basically a fight to the death." I kept questioning and he finally broke down and said that, in fact, he was only training to be a cage fighter and that he had put the flight attendant up to the lie. After further questioning he scrapped the whole cage fighting story and admitted that he and his Aussie buddies had simply lined up in front of a map of the world and thrown darts at it to see where they would land. "Most landed in the Pacific Ocean, some landed on the wall, but one dart landed right on Tulsa, Oklahoma, like a bullseye. So we said, that's where we're going." I told them that they were sure to be disappointed and that they wouldn't find much to do in Tulsa.

At this point, Joel [seat 12D) leaned over and told me to stop listening to Phil's lies. "We're actually an Australian Christian rock band and we're going to Tulsa to play for this group from Oral Roberts University." Now, of all the stories I had been told, this one seemed the least plausible, but it turned out to be the only one that was true. Their band is called Hillsong, and there seem to be about 700 people in it as far as I can tell. The video they showed me on the digital camera showed tons of people running around on stage singing and playing instruments, and Phil told me that not all of them had come on this trip. I spent the rest of the flight learning about their youth ministry outreach and their music. If you think I'm making this all up, check out their website. I think these days God is trying to get me to meet more religious people who aren't evil to restore my faith in faith. In fact, I wanted whatever it was these people were taking, be it Prozac or large quantities of the Holy Ghost. They were SO happy, and not in an annoying way at all.

Here in Tulsa things have slowed down a bit. I've been hanging with the family and eating a lot of ice cream. Tonight I'm supposed to see my oldest friend, Inayat, at my favorite Tulsa restaurant. I think I'll scandalize her by ordering a few pints of John Courage and lighting up my last few American Spirit Blues. But I'm not a smoker. No, I'm NOT a smoker. NO, I'M NOT! STOP SAYING THAT!!