Oh, Dresden. The middle of the night cradles me. It arms me. It placates me. What shall I do?
I am at Mc Donalds at the moment and waiting.
WAITING
Waiting for the train which will roll me far away to the place I would like to be because sleep pervades every thought. Well, perhaps the vodka does, as well, but I really don’t feel it.
I met a couple of dudes tonight. I forget their names, which is unfortunate. One was a music lover, as am I. We traded songs for a simple amount of time. Heh. That means two hours or so. He reminds me of Wayne. Wayne - the wayne I destroyed. Did I? Sadly, I believe I did. His autistic brother made me feel it intensely, though he denied it. It went like this:
Wayne should not rely on other people to give himself his life, to succeed. I have done it myself without anyone’s help. See this design on this fucking shirt? I did it! I fucking did it!
Wayne did nothing. He wanted into the IT business because it was a fashionable thing to do. He used you.
Wayne gave me his homework. We were stoned and drunk. We were listening to the MIX I had made for Brynn, which included Porcupine Tree and Stolen Babies, among others. That was one of the best nights of my life. I still have the scraps of paper on which I made Wayne write Haiku. Well, I did, too.
We were friends then, but we are not now.
Who knows where he is.
He gave me his homework to do for him. I was insistent that he’d do it in Haskell, but Java was his professor’s thought. I wish I’d know Clojure then, for I’d have tried to teach it to him in that moment. Of course, it’d have been impossible because of the immense amount of alcohol which pervaded the evening.
So, as the week progressed, I binged. Yeah, I binged. So Wayne’s homework was never done. I sat in the Thai place on that fucking street I cannot remember the name of. I regurgitated my knowledge of functional programming onto this laptop on which I am typing. None of it was about Wayne. I’d left his homework at Cranbrook.
Now, that homework sits in a box in Seminole, Texas.
I wasn’t aware, as most people aren’t when recovering from a fabulous binge, that what I had not done had destroyed a person’s journey into the world.
Nick (Wayne’s brother) told me that he thought Wayne shouldn’t blame me. I’m not sure who I blame now. I sit in McDonalds in Dresden thinking about it.
I believe it affected someone.
