The Recurring "I Missed the School Bus" Nightmare

You know what I am talking about. You suddenly realize you aren’t wearing any pants, in the mall. Your teacher throws a pop quiz on a subject you know nothing about. You are onstage and you forget your lines; in fact, you don’t even know what play you are in. Your mouth is full of pounds of stretchy gum that you can’t pull out. You try to run from a dangerous person and you can only move in slow motion. You have to pee real bad and all the toilets are clogged and overflowing so you have to go in the sink (this one runs in my family). You try to dial 911 when someone attacks you and you keep hitting the numbers wrong or no one answers.

Twenty years after graduating high school, I still have dreams where I am running to catch the school bus as it pulls away, or I get on the wrong bus and it drops me off in a strange place. A few weeks ago, I experienced one of these unfortunate nightmares while I was awake.

It was about 7:30pm when I sat down by the fire to read the newspaper, specifically the Ithaca Journal business section that had come in the mail that day. As I sipped my bourbon and flipped through the pages, I saw a blurb on the blogging workshop that I would be teaching next month in Trumansburg. “That’s advertised about four weeks early,” I thought. “Wow, those T-burg Chamber people really plan ahead.” I turned the page and started reading another article. Leah came in from the kitchen. “Look, honey,” I said. “My blog class is advertised in the paper already.” As I flipped back to the page to show her, my eye caught the date of the workshop: November 17. I stopped breathing. “What’s today’s date?” I asked Leah. “November 17,” she said. My heart turned to ice. I looked at the article again. The workshop starts at 7pm, it read. I looked at the clock. 7:36pm. Sh*t! I had missed my own workshop.

But not totally. Though I didn’t know it in my moment of panic, the blogging workshop technically was scheduled for December 17; it was just advertised wrong to, say, around ninety thousand people.

The “Blogging for Business” workshop will be held this Wednesdsay, December 17 at 7pm at the Trumansburg Public Library. It is free and open to the public. I swear I’ll be there this time.

To read the funny details on how this nightmarish evening resolved, you can check out the longer version of this story at my other blog, www.drinkmywords.com.