Meet My Brain, Whose Name Is 'It'. (It's a Dick)

     Last night was rough. I got to bed at a normal time, around 2:30ish, and set my alarm for my early lab the next morning. But in the few final moments of peaceful sleep this morning, my brain thought it would be fun to try Its hand at nightmares again.

     Now, my brain must've have a real long talk with Itself about this. "What is it that scares our host these days?" It asked of Its different lobes. Finally, after much deliberation, It chose death. But not my death, because that's actually not too scary. It chose someone else: Alex.

     Yeah, Cain. Which is odd because most of my people-dying dreams are about someone I know I couldn't live without, like Gina or Hillary. And they're terribly depressing. But it seems that the worst ones are people you love but whom you wish you were closer to (The dream involving Jesse in a plane crash was a particularly hard one to get over). And this one was certainly no exception. Alex and John are currently tied for the Best Guy Friend Ever award. Seriously, they're amazing. But the problem (that my brain clearly exploited) was that I've never stopped to think about how life would be like without them. I never wanted to.

    And It didn't skimp on the special effects budget for this film, either. I mean, it was an epic. It was if the movie 'Australia' was a dream happening at lightning speed in my head. Alex and I were on a trip New Zealand, visiting Annie Dykstra (whom I personally can't stand). We did all kinds of fun things. We went to a planetarium, we did some crazy shit with the Maori natives, and it was in the middle of yoga or something that he started coughing up blood, Satine-style. When we got back to the states, he told me he had AIDS.   

     Now, if Alex were actually hearing this, he'd start cracking out the gay jokes. But keep in mind that in my dream this was serious business. He was actually dying. And I had a strong suspicion that he knew this before we went on the trip together, as if that were his way of saying goodbye. And yes, brain had me by his bedside in the hospital, waiting for the final breath.

   And then It didn't even give me five fucking seconds to recover. I didn't set my alarm the night before, so the sun woke me up at 8am. My class was at 8am. I threw myself out of bed, into my shoes, and left. I didn't even pee or check my hair or anything. I just sprinted.

I was halfway to my class before I finally stopped running. I managed to sprint across the entire campus in three fucking minutes. As Greg Behrendt says, "That's faster than I've ever run. I wouldn't run that fast if you fucking set me on fire." It dawned on me, then, that my class wasn't until 8:30, but the emotions of the night before and the adrenaline carried over to my awake-state. I stood there, hands on my knees trying to keep them from buckling, alternately crying and panting and suffering from asthma, until I managed to walk myself to a Starbucks and calm the fuck down.

Dear Alex: Don't die of AIDS.