quote mangling

(Originally posted 9/23/2013)

Somebody once said, I think it was George Carlin:

When you’re 20 you don’t know and you don’t know you don’t know.

The dreams started after he left college. While there were many variations, the basic dream always had to do with forgetting his locker combination. It was never the same school and never the school he actually attended. He was the new kid because there were never any faces he recognized. Sometimes he couldn’t even find the locker that he didn’t know the combination to. He would try to find his way to the office, where the proper authorities were certain to have the necessary digits, but he could never find it.

He would wake up with a start and this vague anxiety would settle over him for the remainder of the day.

Then when you get to 30, you don’t know but you know you don’t know.

Eventually, years later, his dreams would change slightly. He was a little older. Occasionally he would find himself at a locker but more frequently he would be unsuccessfully looking for a classroom in a new school. Often this would entail journeying up and down unfamiliar hallways. They would start off crowded but eventually he would be alone and a panic would set in when he realized he was going to be late.

Once in awhile he would have a longer session where he would be walking these alien corridors hour after hour, wondering to himself what troubles lay ahead when he was finally brought to justice for missing so many classes.

It was odd, at least half the time the first class of the day was music.

He would wake up with a start and this vague anxiety would settle over him for the remainder of the day.

At 40 you know but you don’t know you know.

He started to see faces he recognized. They would still feel foreign to him, more like ghosts than real people, and they would never offer any assistance. Now he was wandering around a large campus looking for the building that held his class. He would wander in and out of them, always sure that he was about to find the right one only to discover that he was way off and needed to hastily beat a retreat to a nearby building that he had written off as the wrong one only moments before. Once there he would find it to be the wrong one.

Again.

It was weird, a lot of the time he ended up entering and exiting the theater building looking for his accounting class.

He would wake up with a start and this vague anxiety would settle over him for the remainder of the day.

Finally at 50 you know and you know you know.

Recently his dreams have been about not being able to find his dorm room or his old friends anywhere. Up and down elevators and stairwells, always seeking some floor that never seems to materialize. He looks for the people he went to school with, he can see them in his mind’s eye, but they are nowhere to be found. He wants to call them and see where they are but he can either never find a phone or has forgotten their numbers.

Then one night, deep in the bowels of REM sleep, she picks up. He explains where he is and asks why she’s not there.

“Because I’m 53 years old.”

He wakes up with a start and a bittersweet feeling settles over him for the remainder of his life.