Episode LXXX – If you can’t stand the heat, stay away from the party.

Tongues of flame gushed over the concrete barrier before winking out. This was no wimpy box fire. It was a real three-pallet lung scorcher. I would know. I had just heaved the third pallet on top. It had crushed the two partially burnt pallets underneath, and caused a swarm of sparks to pour forth from their fiery nest angrily. Absently, I picked up my can of beer from where I had left it. The chaser of sand that had glommed on to its top had done nothing for its bargain basement flavor. I grimaced and poured it out in the smoldering fire pit adjacent to our fire.

Without knowing it, I had placed myself outside the party for the first time since arriving. Everyone was clustered around the hungry fire, shadows shifting, cascading and rippling across their faces. I stared. All I could hear was the babble of endless similar conversations playing out across the group. Senor Inteligente had been right though – everyone was there. Well, everyone from our high school group of friends – the Doctor, Bismarck, Mr. Clean and more, much more, even people I had only known tangentially in a vague sort of way. And yet everyone wasn’t there. The light shifted across faces making them distort in a familiar yet unfamiliar way. They were the people I had known, and yet they weren’t. I shook my head doggedly to get the brooding shadows out of the corners of my mind. I hadn’t felt right all night, even before arriving.

I took one step, and I was absorbed back into the party as if I had never disappeared. Wryly, I internally laughed at my moment of reflection. Of course people were bound to be different. It had been months since I had seen them. Appearances were bound to change through the scalpel of time. While faces and bodies had changed, one thing was consistent about everyone I met at the party. Everyone had a story, or stories. Even I had stories. There was something classic about sitting around a fire sharing stories of journeys and trials with old friends, and it was relaxing to sagely listen and laugh, while occasionally contributing a tale or two.

At this Zen moment, while I was listening to some epic about someone’s roommate who continually mistook the corner of their room for the bathroom, I accidentally overheard the conversation occurring behind me. It was accidental, because one word had caught my attention: “crew”. After I heard it, was listening to see if someone else had had equally disastrous results on another crew team. Instead, what I heard was a bastardized version of what had happened to me outside of Columbia. However, instead of the van gently nosing over to the side of the road, it had apparently been a “flaming death trap of doom” that I had jumped out of at forty miles per hour.