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Who do you spend the most time with?
I’m not one who likes to drive. I’ve been making a lot of trips up and down I5 between Vancouver and Everett. When you spend that much time in a car, you spend a lot of time inside your own head. That is spending time with yourself.
Our dog Luna understands deeply. She hasn’t finished her drivers license test yet.
That’s not a bad existence for a short time if only I like to drive. So myself Speed Racer (my car) and Luna are the dream team right now.

If you had to change your name, what would your new name be?
This is the story I wrote where named myself Breve. It is mostly true.
Breve was wildly excited about this evening. He finished a long run along the C & O canal earlier in the day. The endorphins seemed to stay with him the entire day. It was a picture-perfect spring day in Northern Virginia. Lovers, runners, and street vendors were active because spring burst brilliantly upon the scene. The blossoms on the Potomac River were extra special this year. He noticed events such as this when interspersed with the endorphins in a budding relationship. He and Gabrielle had been dating for the last month and a half. Up until this point in his life, he formed relationships on a day-by-day basis. He was never great with relationships and always seemed to screw this up now. This juncture was different than most as he did what he tried to avoid his entire adult life. He had fallen head over heels for Gabby to the point of distraction. He always thought this was the lore of tacky love stories. But it happened to him, and he was an ebullient ray of obnoxious sparkling sunshine.
He picked out a cheap little Indian restaurant by Ballston commons. The thing that made “Food Fight” so darn special was how banal it could be. You could get curries and a side for a few dollars. He knew the owner Ravi by name and gave him a furtive wink when they ordered. He felt like he belonged to me here. DC was a fun, yet difficult, place to live and he felt like he had it all figured out. The first time we live in a major city can be intimidating. He even brought along a cold bottle of sparkling wine he bought the prior weekend. She met him out front and she glowed with the splintered light of the slowly setting warm evening sunshine. Her smile had an extra radiance.
It was a casual evening where they sat on a bench under a newly blossoming cherry tree. He later walked down to the store, and they each had another bottle of cold beer. They were loose and easy, and the conversation flowed freely. They briefly discussed some big issues such as pets, travel, and family traditions. They were both in a flirtatious mood. There was no tension in the air, and he looked deeply into her eyes and broached a subject he had not rehearsed in his head. He had rehearsed many conversations, and this was not one of them.
He grabbed her tenderly by both hands, looked her in the eyes and asked, “Where do you see you and me twenty-five years from now?” He doesn’t know why he asked the question, and she didn’t show signs of being surprised or offended. She sat and thought for a while and seemed suddenly distracted by a newly risen crescent moon that sat heavily in the sky. A few birds sang in the trees nearby adding to the serenity of the night. There still was no tension in the air.
Breve I am going to tell you where I will see you in twenty-five years. I can be cynical about the institution of marriage. It is myth of sorts. Divorce runs rampant on my side of the family and who knows how long it will take me to get sick of this country of yours. Who knows how that works out? I love you Breve, which was the first time she used that word, but there are no guarantees in life.
She once again looked at the slowly sinking crescent moon as it was quietly dipping below a barely visible set of stratocumulus clouds. She hesitated for a second and removed nonexistent hair from her temple.
She then raised one eyebrow showing she was ready to speak.
“A quarter of a century is a long time from now. It is as long as we have been alive.”
Breve started to interrupt but she once again raised her eyebrow. He felt like he knew her well.
“I see both of us happy and successful. We will have a great run of play. I picture you sitting in a restaurant visiting our children wherever they decide to live. I assume that will be somewhere in Europe. Given my citizenship that will be in Germany. It is a wonderful place to get an education. “
“Let me get this straight. You see us having two children and I am visiting them without you. I assume you think we will not be together then.”
She smiled flirtatiously and raised her eyebrow once again.
“And we are going to have two children?”
“That’s my gut feel.”
He sat and looked back at where the moon once sat in the western sky. A gentle warm rain started to fall. He sat and stared, taking in the absolute beauty of this warm spring evening.
“That sounds good to me.”
I am Breve. I write this little reflection in a torn and tattered well-loved journal that I packed especially for this solo trip to Mainz. What a lovely peaceful city this can be. I will master the language someday. My kids are on the next train and will be here soon.
Describe your dream chocolate bar.
It has been a long time running.
Many years ago I worked with a girl named Sheila at the Chocolate factory in town. We were casual friends at work. She was the first person to sit with me during our lunch break. Finding somebody to sit with at lunch took him back to his days when he started attending a new school in the tenth grade. Well any grade for that matter. As a kid whose family moved often. Something drew him to Sheila or maybe she was simply a nice person.The stories we create in our own minds, Sheila was much older than me and helped him find my way at the the chocolate factory. I had a radio at my desk that kept me company. I loved music almost to a fault. We listened to the local classical radio station because it had intense weather reports. Any hints of favorable running weather uplifted the spirits. He waited for that weather report everyday at 3:45 on WHYY in Philadelphia.
My lust for debits and credits noticeably diminished when I did not have lunch with Sheila. I liked the breezy interlude of the day. We bitched about our jobs, talked mostly about music and the big world outside of Reading, Pa. About six months into his assignment she told me she was taking a vacation out west. I had never been out west and could not wait to hear about her trip. I realized this job was mundane and I was not all that good at it. I had a harder time faking it on the week that she was away. She was an ally whom I could confide. She was in payables and I was in inventory. There was a connection there. You accounting types might recognize the blurred connection.
One thing that kept me sane that week was going for a run after work. Outside of work I had plenty of friends and connections. My daily run kept me sane, fit and semi-focused. We were also good at having a beer or three after the run. The debits simply were greater than the credits. It was his equity, it was his goodwill. I knew I wasn’t an accountant. It paid the bills. I had very few bills back then, I did not know that at the time.
Sheila came back from her vacation with a new found verve, It seemed the vacation served her well. On her first day back, she unexpectedly came to lunch ten minutes late. Sheila was the polite type, she was the punctual type. She timidly explained there was a journal entry that needed done. She was more animated than usual when she sat across from me, She told me about seeing the Rocky Mountains and long stretches of deserted road, and the night sky. She explained it in lovely detail. I was captured by the stories she told. One could see the wild west in his mind. This was something I always loved the night sky. Her descriptions were spectacular and made me want to head west and see it for himself.
Then she got all hushed and quiet and told me about an experience she had driving through the mountains at night . She said she was driving alone on a particularly star lit clear evening. She feverishly described how she loved the solitude of the drive. She described the twinkle of the stars in full detail. She described the constellations revealing themselves one star at a time. That is how I like to remember the story.
Then she explained how a song came on the Radio in the middle of the night and how the music was simply me. I was awestruck that she heard a song and the song made her think of me. Sheila was amazing, but it was the music that intrigued me.
That music was The Tragically Hip. The year may have been 1989. I never did get around to listening to the music Sheila described. I remembered the stories of the mountains and the stars and what mattered to them the most was the music.
I eventually did move west and heard the music of the Tragically Hip while finishing a running race in Ocean Shores, Washington. The music was pure and perfect, and is now a longtime companion of mine.
Don’t tell me what the poets are doing
Don’t tell me that they’re talking tough
Don’t tell me that they’re anti-social
Somehow not anti-social enough, that’s right
Do you remember your least favorite dream from childhood?
If I could give my past self one piece of advice, what would it be?
If I could give my past self one piece of advice, the first thing I would tell my past self, is, do not be alarmed that this older version of you is trying to talk to you. I would tell my past self that there are no real things such as monsters or ghosts.
I used to have this dream as a kid about a lion under a bridge by a stream?I still can see the stream quite clearly and it bothered me.. the dream bothered me and it intrigued me a little.
But the first thing I have to do is convince that past self to listen to a person of another dimension. It gets complicated. Yes, life is complicated..
