Stories:Remind Me Not To Take Any Road Trips With You In 2011

Author: Joe Wall
I had a melancholy insomniac night, thanks to the news on Vygis, which is simultaneously shocking and appropriately absurd. Vygis used to have a conviction, at least in 1986, that his death would be in October of 2011 and would involve him plunging, presumably accidentally, over a cliff in that ridiculous blue Oldsmobile Omega he so loved while Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" played at full volume on the stereo.
"Remind me not to take any road trips with you in 2011," I said at the time, but we ended up going our separate ways in the eighties in the way that best friends sometimes do, so it never came up. I did scan the obituaries in late 2011, just out of an old reflexive instinct, in case he'd somehow been correct in his prediction of twenty-five years previous, but friends who've stayed closer in touch let me know he was still getting by.
Lurking around my apartment in a sort of stunned funk overnight, I put on some of the music we'd bonded over long, long ago, in another century lifetimes apart, and started writing out the stories while they were emerging from the dark corners of deep memory.
You forget these things, at least in a day-to-day way, and life carries you forward into new adventures, but honestly, I've rarely topped the perverse and glorious insanity of some of our best ventures into the realm of the stupid. We've been chased by dogs released by TV's Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter, tied our cars together and gone on the highway, and created a tiny pirate radio station in a locker in our high school, which we programmed with what may have been the first matrons-in-drag gonzo surrealist science fiction radio variety show in existence. Back then, we felt like life was about waging a never-ending war on tedium and familiarity, and damned if we didn't make a dent in meeting the challenge we set for ourselves.
"Let's do something every day that's never been done in all of history," one of us proposed, and I forget which of us even put that forth, but we ran with it.
I finally got some sleep, woke up, drank a pot of tea, and had to laugh in spite of myself. I'd roll my eyes every time he mentioned the Omega and the cliff, particularly because Survivor was just...just an unforgivably terrible band, but in the end, if the news reports turn out to be accurate, he did manage an exit that's pretty dang distinct. I sat there with my tea, thinking that it would have been perfect if I'd countered his longstanding prediction back then with the bizarre declaration that he'd probably go in an inexplicable laundry accident, an ending that Douglas Adams might have come up with, and all the years in-between were gone, at least for a while.
There's a dimension to friendships at that age that you never quite find in adulthood, and though we'd been out of touch for a long, long time, some of who I am today comes from having known him then.
It seems likely to be a strange and pensive day, alas.
March 17, 2013
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