Episode LXXXIII-Every action has an opposite.

Maybe it was karma for my grandstanding. Maybe it was simple disease theory. Whatever the cause, later that morning, I ended up worshipping the porcelain god. At first I thought it was a clear case of “bad-beeritis”. But, once my stomach was empty I realized that the beer probably had nothing to do with it. The vomiting was the first sign that I had a nasty virus. It was so nasty that it spread to all of my family and left us wandering the house like zombies for Christmas. At first I thought that this disaster would immediately place the holiday in the family annals as “one of the worst”, but instead, it actually took the edge off of everyone, and made everything more tolerable than those first awkward minutes that had occurred after I had returned home.

The second day after I felt better, the phone rang. It was Mysterious. At first, our conversation was stilted and awkward. We talked about how much time had passed, and made stupid jokes about the other person at inopportune times. Eventually, the conversation reached the ego-humbling point where he asked if I had time to hang out. I told him that I was leaving for L.A. the next day, and when I returned, I would be leaving for school. Nonplussed, he asked what I was doing that moment, and when I told him I had no plans, he asked if I wanted to go climbing. Before I could think about it, my mouth had committed my body and I found myself riding out to Mission Trails Regional Park.

It was a dry desert winter day where the sun cooked the cold sky into a perfect pale blue. Eventually, I turned around to fix something innocuous on my harness as we passed from the manicured lawns of the coast to the brown scrub of the mountains.

“This is going to be great…I haven’t been climbing in four months or so. Do you have the rope in the trunk?” I asked.

“Rope?” He replied with that old sardonic grin on his face. “Don’t need no rope. Today’s just as good as any to die.”

I had been hearing Mysterious say that stupid phrase for years. He said it about everything, from anything even remotely dangerous like: “Run the stoplight? Well today’s just as good as any to die!” The phrase also was used for incidents that were perfectly silly, like: “Eat twenty Chicken McNuggets that were in the trash and are now covered in yogurt? Today’s just as good as any…”. I wasn’t sure where he had picked up the phrase, but if he could put up with my little idiosyncrasies, I wasn’t going to say anything about his dialect. After all, because of all of the mindless repetition, the words had long lost all meaning to me. But this time, something was wrong about the phrase. The laughter that had always been behind the words was missing.