I still can’t decide if winning the Kentucky Derby was a good thing or not. Of course I didn’t actually win the Kentucky Derby. Well, that is to say I didn’t race in it. I mean, I wasn’t on a horse and I’ve never even been to Kentucky. I just pulled a name out of a hat.

Real Quiet. That was the name of the horse that won, Real Quiet. His jockey had some French name. Moreaux or something like that. I don’t know. I’m actually quite ignorant when it comes to horseracing. Aside from a few Charles Bukowski short stories and my grandparents farm in North Carolina, I don’t know jack shit about horses.

I just drew a name out of a hat.

The day I won the Kentucky Derby had begun like too many days had begun. I could feel the thin layer of cobwebs on my brain. Not obscuring anything, just slowing things down. The particular cobwebs I was battling that morning were from a going away party that I had been to the night before. I have been to way too many going-away parties in my life and they never become any more bearable.

The alcohol helps.

I’ve always loved spring, but college has given me a distaste for it. This year, like every year since I came to school, spring means saying good-bye to people I am close to, people who I’ve come to know and respect. People I love. One of those people the year I won the Kentucky Derby was Bill Cramer, who was my friend as a freshman, my roommate as a sophomore, a distant ex-roommate quasi-friend as an upperclassman and a professional colleague as a post-graduate.

I’ve met his mother. I know his brothers. I know what he thinks about God and football and the Beastie Boys. My friendship with him represents something more to me than a casual acquaintance and saying good-bye to someone like that isn’t an easy thing to do.

He was going off to New York to write for some swank urban magazine, a job his well-connected brother hooked him up with. I felt jealous until I heard through the grapevine that one day at a meeting, his boss came down on him too hard and he quit right there on the spot. As he was exiting the building, he stole a guitar off the wall. Ah, Bill. I love the guy, but he has the diplomacy skills of an Iraqi government official.

The parking lot of his apartment complex was the place where I last saw him. What an awful place to host such an important event. Why do airport terminals and bus stations and parking lots have to be the venues of our most bereft moments? Why can’t they be in rose gardens or cathedrals or, shit, even a coffee shop would be preferable to an apartment complex parking lot. But anyway, there we were. Two old friends trying to tell each other that we loved one another. We didn’t, though, really. We just stood there. Real Quiet.

A lack of sleep, an excess of alcohol and a duress of emotion were contributing to my cobwebs. But through them, I could hear my alarm clock’s overly-reliable refrain: 11:30 a.m. Shit, I was already running late. I was to meet Erin and her parents at noon that day. We were going to do lunch.

Erin St. John had danced into my life about a month before the day I won the Kentucky Derby. Literally. She was a dancer. And a damn good one at that. Classically-trained: ballet, tap, modern, interpretive. She loved Martha Graham and Igor Stravinski and James Joyce. She loved me too.

When I said she danced into me, I meant it. I was at a party. Drunk. Holding up a wall. This wave of frantic energy knocked me over. It was a woman. It was Erin.

She was wearing that sun hat she liked to wear when she was rolling. It had a huge brim that went all the way around her head and she liked to pull it down over her eyes. After being knocked over, I regained my composure (as soon as the gods of Budweiser would allow). As the sun hat slowly rotated upward, I saw her for the first time. Young. Dangerous. Beautiful. Eye lashes that went on for miles. A dancer’s body.

We both knew that this day would come very soon, the day she would be leaving. Her parents had flown in from Toronto. Not Toronto. Toranno. Erin was meticulous about how the word was pronounced.

I was running late, but I was sure I could get a shave, throw on some clean clothes and drive across town within a half-hour. Cobwebs be damned.

They were eating at Erin’s favorite place, Food Glorious Food. She liked to sit outside and pretend that Tallahassee was metropolitan. We had done this together several times.

As I was parking, I saw the three of them perched on the verandah of this art food place like it was on the Champs Elysees. Instead of a beautiful Mediterranean concourse, however, it had a view of a parking lot. Sometimes we must suffer, no?

I had the roasted vegetables. She had a humus sandwich. I don’t remember what her parents had, I was too busy trying to make small talk. Unfortunately, FSU doesn’t offer a class by the title: "Hob-nobbing with the Canadian beugeouis," so I had to improvise. I quickly came to the conclusion that her parents were pretty liberal and international politics is an area of interest to me, so we talked about Quebec secession and NAFTA and health care.

Erin had always told me how much I reminded her of her father. I didn’t see it. He owned a screenprinting business. His wife was a French teacher.

In an embarrassingly telling moment, I tried to parle francais with her. Unfortunately, my French was a bit rusty. Too much zut alors. Not enough je ne sais pas. Let’s just say that Le Monde won’t be knocking on my door anytime soon.

Terribly uninterested in politics, Erin started easing her hand up my leg under the table. I couldn’t believe it: A rousing discussion of international politics tempered by overpriced art food and cheap sexual thrills! This was turning out to be a great day.

But, like some obscure Greek statesman once said: "And this too shall pass." It did end. The meal. The small talk. Erin.

We said good-bye to her parents and walked to her car. It was crammed full of her things: furniture, clothes, books. She was, after all, moving. I thought I had accepted it, but seeing all of her possessions stuffed in a tiny Honda Civic really drove the point home. She was leaving.

I knew this moment would come. I told myself that I could handle it. I told myself that I wouldn’t fall in love with Erin. I told myself that I would know what to say.

I failed on all counts. We just stood there in the parking lot, two lovers trying to say good-bye. We didn’t, though. We just stood there. Real Quiet.

Working on a Saturday afternoon is like being hijacked from a cruise ship and held prisoner while being tortured. Springtime in Tallahassee is incomparably beautiful. It’s the reason why thousands and thousands of people come to Florida each year. Leaving this seasonal beauty for the cold, dark, windowless computer-screen numbness of the newsroom was not at the top of my list of immediate personal gratification. But when duty calls ...

I write for the local newspaper, the kind of low-level menial stuff that real writers needn’t bother themselves with: obituaries, crime briefs, weather reports. Leaving Erin and Springtime Tallahassee behind to sit in a cold, dark room writing obituaries wasn’t nirvana. But sometimes we must suffer, no?

Writing obituaries gave me a new perspective on both life and death. I had been writing them for about a year and had come to appreciate the experience. Compared to the gargantuan struggles some of these people went through -- ovarian cancer, gunshot wounds, Alzheimer’s disease -- my own problems seemed rather inconsequential. Once I interviewed the daughter of a former tax collector for an obituary. Pretty routine stuff. I shared my theory with her about appreciating one’s own good fortunes by probing the hardships of others. She smiled and told me that her father was a lying sack of shit and she hoped he would rot in hell. Suddenly, the interest my student loan was accruing didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore.

That was when I won the Kentucky Derby.

As I was writing the obituary for a 78-year-old retired Navy commander, Spud Crenshaw came over and asked me if I wanted to pick a horse. Spud was a sports writer. What else is someone with a name like "Spud" supposed to write?

My first instinct was not to do it.

The bet was only a dollar, but I’m really, really, really cheap. Against my better judgment, I did it. I made a bet on the Kentucky Derby.

We all huddled around the television. This is a festive time in the newsroom. Newspaper people consider themselves the last great bastion of the value of the written word. We mock TV news and TV news people and TV in general. But when something important happens, we gather around it: election nights, OJ verdicts, natural disasters, acts of terror-ism.

This particular day, we had gathered around it to watch twelve horses run around a mile-and-a-half stretch at Churchill Downs. Whenever I see a horse race, I think about that scene in Oliver Stone’s Nixon where J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon are at the Belmont Stakes discussing the ’68 race -- presidential, not horse, although it’s sometimes difficult to make the distinction. Nixon is explaining to Hoover how he planned to carry the South. Hoover tells Nixon that it will be easier to do now that we’ve "offed" Kennedy.

Now, I don’t believe for a second that J. Edgar Hoover had anything to do with Kennedy’s assassination and I think Oliver Stone gets just a bit too conspiratorial at times, but I find this kind of X-Files-ization of reality to be a revealing commentary on the social alienation of modern life. As the horses were making their way around the track on the tiny TV in the newsroom, I shared my Nixon story with a copy editor who’s working on a doctorate in American History. He pretended to be amused.

That’s when it happened. I won the Kentucky Derby. As it turns out, I didn’t win much. $11. You would think the most prestigious horse racing event in the world would yield more than the price of the roasted vegetables I had had for lunch, but sometimes athletic prowess must yield to thrifty wagering. This was just such a case.

Winning the Kentucky Derby wasn’t as exciting as I had always thought it would have been. In fact, it was kind of anti-climactic. No streamers fell from the ceiling. No music played. No throng of admiring half-naked women appeared to celebrate my victory. Instead, I fished the $11 out of a coffee mug. Spud Crenshaw kind of held it towards me.

He didn’t want to hand me the mug, but he didn’t want to hand me the money either. He just kind of held it towards me. I was expected to just fish the money out like someone might work a toilet flusher with a foot in an untrusted bathroom stall.

I wasn’t insulted, though. There’s a certain understanding sports writers have with non-sports writers. Something like benign neglect. Sports reporters are usually the most talented writers in a newsroom. Nobody likes to admit it, of course. I mean, after all, what they cover is so utterly trivial. But the prose those guys come up with is incredible. Too bad they waste their talent sucking up to sports celebrities.

Well, anyway, Spud Crenshaw had given me the cash and it was time to return to the obituaries. Some victory! No roses. No adoring crowds. No champagne. Just an unfriendly toss of the winnings and a return to normalcy.

Perhaps I’m overstating the drudgery. I’m blessed with the ability to type very fast and knocking out several obituaries is no big deal at all. To be honest, I usually finish my work in a fraction of the time my editors think it takes. That was the case on this particular day and, like most Saturdays, I headed home to catch Capitol Gang on CNN.

I made myself some dinner, caught up on the latest Linda Tripp gossip and convinced my roommate that we should go to the Underground Cafe that night. After all, the spring semester had just ended, Erin was gone forever and I had just won the Kentucky Derby. It was time to celebrate. It was time to engage in unbridled hedonism. It was time to dance.

The Underground Cafe is a misleading name. It’s not underground and the word "cafe" is a gross overstatement of their menu. But they play pretty good music. That night the in-house DJs were spinning. By the time I got there I was spinning too.

Walking into the Underground Cafe, one is immediately struck by several things: the heat, the ravers and the DJ booth. Although the Springtime Tallahassee weather was the perfect blend of crisp night air and refreshingly mild gulf breezes, the inside of the club was sweltering with the body heat of 200 dancing ravers: Adidas logos, racing stripes, fluorescent appendages and all.

The DJ booth at the Underground Cafe is flanked by two electronic devices -- like those things that you see in movies about Frankenstein. The ones where electric current flows between steel rods in the center of the contraption and the outside of the device. The Underground has two of these, circular ones that are placed at either end of the booth. When you stand at the back of the club and face the DJ booth, they look like eyes.

"The gods of techno are always watching you, simple raver," they say.

The way those electric currents dart around that contraptions made the eyes look intimidating, frightening, powerful. Knowing that the DJs were right behind the wall, it all seemed quite appropriate. After all, they are the brain behind the whole operation. Feeling sluggish? Put on a break beat. Apprehensive? Jungle. Nostalgic? Retro.

DJs are funny like that. They don’t like to admit to it, but they are the masters of manipulation. A good DJ knows how to scope out a room, how to determine the pulse, how to root through the psychic trash. A good DJ is a psychological whore and the night I won the Kentucky Derby, the DJs at the Underground were up to their old tricks.

I danced for a little while. I thought of Erin. She could dance. I mean, she knew how to cut a rug. She knew how to use her body and use it well.

I, on the other hand, was awkward, self-deprecating and uncoordinated. If Erin was here, she could do an interpretive dance of existential angst. All I could do was act it out. Badly.

But Erin wasn’t here and she would never be here again and I was going to have to get over that.

Fine, whatever.

Eventually, I stopped dancing and started watching the crowd. As it turns out, this was much more amusing.

I know that nothing is forever. And I know that, as Pericles said, "this too shall pass," but that doesn’t make it any easier. Every spring I have to say good-bye to people who I’ve come to cherish and admire. People who I’ve come to know intimately. People who I love. Spring is a time of beauty and birth and renewal. But the realities of modern college life have turned it into a season of loss.

As I stared into the face of the techno god on call at the Underground that night, I started thinking about what it would have been like to live a century ago. When home was home and everyone you ever met lived in the same town you did. And nobody ever left.

The 20th century has granted us mobility and self-reliance and technology, but it has stripped us of community. As Trent Rezner says in The Downward Spiral, "everyone I know goes away in the end."

The town I went to high school in is not all that dissimilar to the town I went to college in. Both have McDonalds, Targets and Barnes & Nobles. The floor plan to the Wal-Marts are even the same, for Christ’s sake. Mass communication has wrought mass assimilation. Even the ravers in Tallahassee aren’t too different for the ravers in Tampa, or for that matter, Dallas or St. Louis or Seattle.

But were they all watched by these eyes? Were the gods of techno smiling upon any but Tallahassee ravers? Had I really won the Kentucky Derby or was this all some sort of ivory tower over-intellectualization of my real problems?

On these questions, the gods remained silent. As did I.

From the back of the club, staring into the face of technology, I let the day I won the Kentucky Derby fade into the next day, which faded into the next and on and on ad infinitum.

The special merged with the mundane. The extraordinary became burdened by the ordinary. I moved on, but the day I won the Kentucky Derby has since stuck in my mind as a significant day. A day of winning and losing. A day of delight and horror. A day of reckoning and evaluation.

I thought these things as the gods of techno stared at me from their DJ booth. As the masses danced. As the thick electronic beats rocked the building.

It was loud. But inside, there was peace. Inside there was quiet, real quiet. The kind you can’t buy at Wal-Mart. The kind you miss when you roll over in the morning and no one is there to tell you that they love you. The kind that won’t intonate itself through the cold, fabricated beats of electronica.

Inside there was an understanding, a reckoning. I may have won the Kentucky Derby. I may have lost a few friends. I may even have lost a lover. But the Tallahassee Spring would blossom anyway. The thick smell of azaleas would crowd the air and my sorrow couldn’t stop it. This became more and more apparent as I stared into the Underground face that night. And as the music got louder, my thoughts became quiet. RealQuiet.