…and what a year it has been.
i woke up with nicole – the VET fell on a thursday this year. showered and shaved. walked and fed basil. cleaned up the dishes from the night before. prepped my camera and my soul. then waited for corey to arrive.
after a bit of waiting i learned that corey still had some holly-related stuff to take care of, so i decided to bide my time playing some sweet SEGA GENESIS EVANGELION. it was a blast. i made it through like two levels of sonic 2 and one level of sonic and knuckles. and spent like 15 minutes trying to get those and various other games to play on the cheap product that is the gen. 1 sega genesis.
i then amused myself with some various youtubes on such topics as the shittiness of modern films, pythagorean tuning, and why we use capital and lower case letters. i learned so much and as of this writing i have forgotten it all.
corey arrived around 11 AM. our first stop on our incredible mission was at corey’s dad’s house, to pick up some mail including the all-important license tag to ensure we didn’t get thrown in the pokey. he also got new keys to the house due to [REDACTED/UNVERIFIED] . it took us only moments and then we were off on the vet proper, as heralded by THE VET FART.
the lighthearted discussions began with sonic the hedgehog chili dogs suburban sprawl. as we drove through our hometown, we took in the sights and mused on the differences between wesley chapel past and future, the wilderness man that is SR54, the quality of life we are all headed toward, and the quiet relief of our having opted-out of furthering the human struggle.
we were both super hungry so it wasn’t long before we made landing. we hoped to find a local, potentially diner-type place similar to tiffany’s from VET2017. we wound up in dade city, a somewhat foreign place to us despite being mere minutes from where i grew up. enticed by the promise of european excellence and also comics&candy, we parked downtown and enjoyed a brief jaunt in the rain.
comics&candy was pretty sweet (for me), and i indulged in purchases aplenty (which i now realize i should have documented with photography… side note, this VET did not end up featuring the use of my camera, and instead relied on phone-generated images from corey and myself, giving the images a slightly lo-fi/shitty/depressing quality that does a good job of reflecting the day itself). i picked up some grant morrison run x-men and two candies: u-no bar [chocolate bar with airy and toughish quasi-nougat chocolatey interior that was fudgey in taste and melty in temperament and pretty much sucked] and a coconut long boy log [tootsie roll-esque tiny log of chewy caramel and little coconutty bits – surprisingly good]. pretty successful.
next stop: eurorpean jack’s eurotrash empornium. there we were greeted by a christmasy blast of fahoo fores and a ton of grocery-grade items from across the atlantic, each ever-so-slightly past the use by date. toward the back there were mugs and toys like a flea market, some bearing the classically european name “dade city”. it was neato. here i treated myself to some jelly babies and a can of beans.
this is the world we live in post-toy’r’us.
across the street was the delightful diner “taste of class” or whatever the fuck. the interior was straight out of [?????], boasting a faux-wood wallscape behind the counter and brown painted ceiling tiles. there was also a mysterious upstairs section that wasn’t technically off limits, but we didn’t go up due to terror. corey and i waffled between possible food options, he debating a burrito or a salad, i between cuban pork and pineapple boat (a monstrosity of chicken salad and pineapple cubes slapped into the hollowed out pineapple half). i went with the pork, and was rewarded with one of the best dishes i’ve had on a VET – pitch perfect roast pork, black beans, yellow rice, and plantains, drenched generously in crystal hot sauce. every bite was magic. corey got the chef salad which featured one or more halved hardboiled eggs, coating the salad in a yolky goodness that gave him his “first big boner in weeks” (his words, not mine).
i was dreadfully close to ordering their bread pudding, which featured guava, a hot buttered rum sauce, iced and whipped creams, and a cherry on top. luckily, the last few bites of pork had me on the exhaustion puke ropes, so i elected not to endure the dessert. and the world was thankful.
we left dade city more satisfied than anyone should be in dade city, and made our way northward. eventually we decided to head east, a decision which would prove the downfall of the VET. we enjoyed my 20XX playlist before the sun began to set, and engaged in video game music and playlist building discussions. passing through leesburg, we made the mistake of not stopping at the local MTG store and mecha shop, too afraid of getting beaten up by the bikers who had descended upon the city for the annual dirty man competition.
as has been the trend of recent years, our journey was plagued by questions of “did we come through this way before?” and “isn’t that exactly what you said last time we were here?” and “do you think that sign was funnier last time we read it aloud?” – quandaries typical of the elderly.
also at one point i couldn’t pronounce “algorithmically” and had a stroke.
i guess it’s scary getting older. we made our way around orlando, passing the old apartments where i lived for less than a year. we put on corey’s first playlist and continued talking about music and how cool we are and the roads began to see more and more traffic as it was around 4 30 or 5 PM and one thing led to another and we found ourselves trapped within the confines of the orlando international airport. jesus fucking christ.
it was maze-like in its construction and packed-like in its traffic. there were like four or five fire trucks hurtling toward the center, leaving us in their dust as we sat and waited to inch forward. we began to escape through an exit which was also packed to the brim with idiots, ended up ejecting and moving back toward the center of the abomination, tried to avoid more traffic and went around a back ways and GOD WE JUST WANTED OUT. eventually we tossed in the towel and google maps came to the rescue. st. cloud seemed a worthy destination, because we needed to get dinner before the world shut down on us once again.
in more traffic, we avoided starting the next playlist because we knew we couldn’t finish it before stopping to eat. we a-mused ourselves with the jeopardy theme (over and over to prevent corey from thinking of anything actually worth listening to) and the roy lookalike who maybe didn’t look that much like roy. we finally decided to listen to good old incubus, and then we made it to st. cloud. there we were greeted by the wings of god, but instead chose delicious BBQ as purveyed by granny.
granny, unfortunately, was ALL out of meat except for pulled chicken and some wings that corey couldn’t (really) eat. also they didn’t have enough pulled chicken for corey to get a normal order. it was kind of a fucking disaster. the chicken was pretty bland. the wings were pretty great. the baked beans were fine. the mac and cheese was awesome for lame mac and cheese. we discussed the futility of dealing with family, but more seriously the finality of family members passing and how that changes our relationship with the person in question – how it spurs questions, action that would not have come up when they were still with us. why is that? what makes it so difficult? we’re stuck focused on our now and don’t see beyond it until…
we made our way over to blues and brews, some kind of cop bar or some shit with live music. we were able to sit at a counter outside the venue looking in, revealing a handful of patrons and a full bar. i got a beer (their house beer, which was perfect), and corey got a water. we sat and talked about coding and complications and game development and tics – the power to make and create. and then i paid and we left.
on the road again, we worked our way through the remaining playlists – i bemoaned the difficulties of my 2021 playlist and the regrettable cuts i had to make; corey discussed the balance and symmetry of the sound of nostalgia. we went by the million lights festival which featured like ten visible lights, and then we drove by some insane construction which prevented us from really getting anywhere good. we drove through tourist orlando and complained about humanity all over again. we stopped and got coffee to power through the rest of the night.
northward, we crossed paths with our previous selves from earlier in the day, creating a temporal distortion and dooming leesburg. we blasted north, north, north, eventually rocketing to the heights of micanopy and finally petering out after running over an armadillo.
we listened to the final playlist, disko nites, and discussed where it fit into the pantheon of VET playlists.
and then we talked of our childhoods, and gigantic LEGO creations made from ancient bricks to emulate unaffordable pirate ship sets, and home movies, and evidence that we once lived and mattered to somebody or anybody despite our own failings. we listened to sheryl crow and thought about what it takes or means to forgive yourself.
and then, even though we had barely talked about work or the fact that we had to wear masks everywhere we went, it was over.