24 hours of something, for sure

Ron Soltys

I made it to Relay For Life. I must admit there’s some sort of palpable feeling of goodwill that is inspiring to me. I spent half of my time on the track walking, and the other half squeezed on a couch with three friends making inappropriate jokes and snacking on food I didn’t bring.

The crisp air was a welcome change from the dreary heat of the day, the sort of weather that prompts action but drains you of the energy to make anything from the situation. Instead, you sweat through a shirt, have your underwear turn into a swamp or something equally terrible so that a shower becomes necessary if you decide to go out. Then, when you do decide to go out, you think it’d be a great idea to go to one of the three or so places downtown with a patio, and every Tom, Dick and Harry is out there on the patio in their lousy plaid shorts making idle conversation. I’m not saying anybody who wears plaid shorts is a bad person, but if they play cornhole all day on the side of the road, their chances of being a bad person somehow inexplicably increase, and in addition, if their name is actually Tom, Dick or Harry then I submit that they are villainous.

No, I am not that ignorant — I don’t care what a person’s name is unless it happens to be particularly hilarious — there are some names that I can’t help but giggle about, though that’s not really what this column is about today. What is it about, anyway? I am not sure it was anything meaningful, but I did want to mention that Relay for Life was an interesting sort of wind-down for the end of the semester, kind of like the strange semi-social event that goes down right before you graduate high school or middle school or whatever. I think it’s weird that a big “social” event can be premised on cancer, fighting it not even coming into context at this juncture — I understand the point of the focus, I just was taken aback by the atmosphere of the track amid the cool night air.

A friend of mine, and she would die for me to mention her name but I am not going to just to spite her, said she had recently dreamed of people dying, and for whatever reason believed I was a seer or maybe Gandalf the Grey or something — I don’t know why people tell me anything about their dreams unless their dreams are hot or something, but people dying isn’t very hot in and of itself; I don’t want to ponder what circumstances could change that fact. I wasn’t sure what to tell her, but I did mention that death in a dream to me could possibly symbolize an end to something, and the most logical thing I could make out of the assumption was that she was subconsciously thinking about how school was ending.

But I don’t have any idea what her or my or anyone’s dreams mean, so don’t vest too much into that.

Ron Soltys has annoyed the lot of ye for the last time. Petition him to not write during the summer or in the fall at [email protected].