Last night after midnight my phone started ringing. And it rang and rang and rang. I was exhausted, and I decided I was not getting up to answer it. I decided that if it was some emergency, there was nothing I could do that time of night, and if somebody was dead, they were still gonna be dead this morning.
I really thought it was my brother calling to tell me he was in love again, or some such twaddle.
It started again at four am. I was having a really cool dream in which I'd been in some totally hetero situation and some other fellow emerged from the crowd and hung with me, and we were on the verge of making friends, so to speak, when . . . .
The phone started ringing again. This time I did get up, but what I did was unplug the phone.
This morning I checked my messages. There were four. This was the first one: "Hey man. It's XXXX. I'm at your apartment building. I wish you'd pick up, 'cause I need a place to stay." The other three were all dead air and click.
The caller was a friend from high school who recently moved back to North Carolina, to the Raleigh area, from Florida. He was staying at his sister's house there. There must have been some incident. I'm sorry as I can be, but it was after midnight. And I have the suspicion that if I let him stay there once, he'd be hard to get rid of. Plus, while I don't know his sister very well, back in the day she seemed really level-headed, and if she kicked him out of her house she probably had a damn good reason.
And that dream. I don't have sex dreams all that often, and this one got interrupted. I can't tell you anything about the guy, it's pretty vague now. Maybe it was you.

Ruth is Stranger than Friction
My friend Rob camped solo in Virginia the other night. He stayed at a public campground, and there were some interesting people next to him. They struck up a conversation with him at some point. One of the guys told Rob he'd lined a wall in his house with beer cans so that it spelled out "Pink Floyd." Another time he mentioned it he said it spelled out "The Who." These cans were secured in place with glue, but - the fellow said - he'd neglected to wash the cans out before he glued them in place. Now he's having problems with cockroaches and other creepy-crawlys.
Their vehicle had Texas license plates.

Dude. Sweet. Dude. Sweet.
Here's a well-written passage from the novel I'm reading, The Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason. It's rather pessimistic, and I'm not sure I agree with it, but it is well-written.
"Hope, Paul said to me once, which whispered from Pandora's box only after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion. That, I think, is the only explanation for what happened to my father and me, just as it happened to Taft and Curry, the same way it will happen to the four of us here in Dod, inseparable as we seem. It's a law of motion, a fact of physics that Charlie could name, no different from the stages of white dwarfs and red giants. Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years."

Gift of a Weekend
I'm going to take a summer school class. It meets on Saturdays from nine am to four pm. (I'm harbouring hope that the instructor will be like the professor of the Saturday class I took last semester. That class was supposed to meet from nine to three. The professor said that was just too long; we would go home at one. Don't tell the Dean.)
Somehow I became convinced that the class started last Saturday, the 19th, and Wednesday of last week I double-checked the schedule and low & behold, class doesn't start until June 26. I hustled together plans for the weekend, urged to make something of this suddenly free weekend.
It was great. A fine time was had by all.