On Saturday night, Susan and I accompanied her mother and a group of fellow professorial rat-experimenters to The Revels, a traditional holiday musical event that they attend every year. The Revels are a sort of Medieval/Renaissance Anglophilic song-and-dance collection, featuring everything from pleasant early English instrument tunes to the annoying jingles of Morris dancers, who rank just behind mimes among people that will be slain when the Muses wreak their earthly revenge. One of the audience's favorite parts - repeated year after year - is the Abbots Bromley Dance, which is basically a slow-motion square dance performed by people holding deer antlers on their heads. There's also a man wearing a horse costume and another person carrying a tiny umbrella. All if it is done in utter solemnity that is rather charming. [1]

The Revels prevented us from attending a housewarming party thrown by Peace Corps pal Laura, who just moved from the Godforsaken wastelands of Vienna, Virginia, to the merely Godforgotten outposts of the Baltimore suburbs. I've never been close friends with Laura, but we share the bond of having survived our Senegalese life. Not all we knew were so lucky. Also, we've seen each other naked while skinny-dipping with friends. Call me old-fashioned, but I still feel like having exposed the quirks of one's true nude form to someone imparts a particular kind of intimacy, even if the revealed body parts kept a respectful distance from each other. Like it or not, having viewed Laura's bare butt creates both familiarity and responsibility for the friendship on my part. Laura, of course, doesn't know this, which is fine.

In another example of constructed familiarity, I put aside my duties as Ryan White Awards' Volunteer Coordinator for a few minutes on Friday night to chat with digerato and friend-of-friend Tara. Once again, I remarked to myself how frighteningly similar she looks to former girlfriend and current Memphis lawyer Heather. Naturally, I haven't pointed this fact out to her, although I've wondered if my reaction the first time I met her betrayed the sudden flush of confusion I felt. There was one paranoid interval in those first few seconds when my mind considered the possibility that Heather had changed her name and moved to Washington DC. But why would she do something like that? I had to dismiss the most likely motive -- that she had come back to shoot me down in cold blood -- when Tara made no move to draw a weapon. Over time, I've gradually accepted that Tara might be who she claims to be, and that I am in no immediate danger.

Still, it spooked me a little when Tara-not-Heather walked into the Ryan White Awards. One's discrete life periods are simply not allowed to cross like that; there are laws of physics designed to prevent it from happening. My brain cued the Twilight Zone music and I glimpsed Rod Serling doing the episode's intro behind a nearby pillar.

One side effect of my familiarity with that face - or one like it - is that I found myself chatting with Tara and her friend as if they were old pals, and as if this wasn't really only the second time we'd met. At that point in the evening, I was receiving constant radio chatter from the rest of the production team through my Flash Gordon 2-way headset, and I had been running around directing volunteers for what seemed like half my adult life. I was glad for any friendly face, even if it was one from the distant and painful past, so I buttonholed the poor couple and issued a ten-minute monologue about the joys of being Volunteer Coordinator, running this web page, and God knows what else.

Then, serendipity: she told me she's starting a 'zine and might be interested in having me doing some writing for it. The 'zine is about obsession, and given my demeanor, I probably passed the early qualifying round for familiarity with the subject matter. She'll be stopping by this website to read some of Tales and make up her mind. She might be reading this one right now, and experiencing the revelatory power of the medium. In any case, I've been looking for a new place to get some writing out into the world, and this might be a fun gig.

Speaking of obsession, during the entire time it's taken to write this Tale and the previous one, I've been listening to the same two tracks off a Dead Can Dance CD played repeatedly and nonstop [2]. It's ridiculously adolescent stoned-goth mood music, but it feels nice to listen to a song over and over again, savoring the fact that I don't have to stop until I suddenly sicken of it. I thought I had lost the capacity for doing that at age 14.

2 - Tracks 4 and 5 on Into the Labyrinth. For a really cool experience, order it here and then come back and read these two entries while listening to those two songs. You can actually listen to samples here, too, then write me and tell me what shitty taste in music I have.