Dreams of a Disorderly Mind

Look out of any window Any morning, any evening, any day Maybe the sun is shining Birds are winging; no rain is falling from a heavy sky What do you want me to do, To do for you to see you through? For this is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago

Right now at this moment I am sheltering in place. The news alert from the local university shows an active shooter within a mile of my office. The door is locked and I am here at my keyboard. No walk today at lunch. The walk was probably off because we have thunderstorms and a Torcon index of 4 meaning a 40 % chance of tornados.

Seems like a weird time to be talking about dreams but why not? Enforced and somewhat scary isolation is a perfect place to contemplate the meaning of dreams. As I hear the rain beat on the roof above I am left to wonder about the space inside of me. What it is in my mind that takes me to the odd places it does why my eyelids drop so solidly to end the day.

In the past three nights I have had the most vivid of dreams. Two stand out. In the first I was walking through a Walmart. This is not a place I usually go. I have been to Walmarts in towns where it is the store if you need anything. But where I live I have options and I don’t go there. Digression get thee away from me. In the REM induced visions I was having I was working my way to the center of the Walmart store and I came upon a Buddhist monastery. Suddenly I was with a dear friend. Not naming names this gent is the closest thing to a Buddha that I know. He is dispassionate and self deprecating, aware and learned but unflappable.

As we stood there looking at the temple someone began throwing cheap shoes and then fuggly lamps at the temple. As these rollback items hit the golden and red façade the temple began to collapse. Piece by piece the temple fell apart. The walls and filigree shattered on the ground. Shouting I urged my friend that we should run into the temple before the holy site was gone. He just smiled a knowing unworried smile and shook his head to indicate no. And then I woke up.

Okay I have not had any recent negative experiences at Walmart. Walmart is what it is. If you accept that fact you can make you own moral choices on how to deal with the place. Yes, I do have Buddhist leanings. Maybe the better term would be contemplative leanings. The hermits and monks of the Christian tradition speak to my soul also. So why would these two blend together in my dream? I mean I can get the imagery of crass cheap commercialism destroying faith, destroying enlightenment’s hope but my friend as an enlightened being? Geesh, I guess that might be the easiest to explain. You know he probably represents the whole the universe is inside of each of us line of thought. If he is Buddha in nature anyone can reach enlightenment.

Really I don’t do drugs. I don’t drink before bed. You know my mind must sure bury a great deal of what I am thinking to deal with later.

The other dream was much simpler. It went like this. I once had a romantic relationship with someone who lives thousands of miles from me. We have only recently reconnected via social media. We wish each other happy birthday when prompted by the little electronic notices. We have talked a little, when we were dating I treated her badly and I have always regretted it. I did apologize. My contrition was too long in coming.

However for some reason I had a dream involving her last night. It was very simple and straightforward. In the dream she was visiting MSU the university where we met and dated. She was there for a conference on Education and was staying at the University’s own hotel. Me,I was stopping by a local convenience store called Quality Dairy. In the dream she was picking up some Tylenol and we just bumped into her among the milk jugs and patent medicines. My old friend joked that all conferences like the current one gave her headaches.

I ditched my afternoon of work (this is how you know it was a dream) and we went across the street to a restaurant. Hell when I knew her it was a Shell Station and the Quality Dairy it was a Sunoco. We ambled over to the restaurant to talk because we wanted to catch up on each other’s lives. The dream ended there.

As I opened my eyes the damn cat was sitting on my chest and staring at me. 15 pounds of smirking green eyed sin was at 5:45 a.m. staring me down. The miserable furry bastard was trying to up the ante vis a vis getting fed.

The star of this second dream isn’t a person I think about regularly. A certain moment, a certain time and maybe she pops up. Usually such remembrances are tied to a walk on a particular part of campus or if I see a Mexican wedding blouse. Back then my hair was long and I used to wear the floral patterned linen blouses all the time. I scratched my head and thought why this person, why now.

As I have said the brain is a funny thing. On my Facebook stream there had been a picture of her with her daughter yesterday as I was checking out all the Mother’s Day posts. For some reason that image must have set a seed germinating in my head, maybe I was thinking I wanted to actually talk to her to see where life has taken her and if she is happy. If I didn't mention there was not inuendo or untoward acts in the dream.

Dreams come and dreams go, but it is fun to try and suss them out. .

Get Back into Formation and Throw the Fucking Football

Sports metaphors kind of suck no matter who uses them. Over the years politicians have talked about how they will win the election using the ground game. Lawyers talk about a last minute trial ploy that brings about an acquittal as a Hail Mary pass. Sports metaphors are so over used that even when you are watching ESPN the hosts kind of grimace when someone starts down the road in an interview with one of the hoary old chestnuts.

Yesterday was rough. Nobody died. Nobody was arrested. Things failed. People failed. I shook and quivered. I cried. My heart pounded and my head hurt. Nothing is easy anymore, not for me, not for those I love. The biggest hurt, the gaping wound that strains my one last nerve is that I can not fix any of the situations; any remedy lies in the hands of others.

As bad news washed across me like waves the only thing that actually soothed me was a bit of a recent Bruce Springsteen lyric that I heard as I left my office weak and red eyed. It was from the song Wrecking Ball. The section of the song is this:

Now when all this steel and these stories, they drift away to rust And all our youth and beauty, it's been given to the dust When the game has been decided and we're burning down the clock And all our little victories and glories have turned into parking lots When your best hopes and desires are scattered through the wind And hard times come, and hard times go And hard times come, and hard times go And hard times come, and hard times go And hard times come, and hard times go And hard times come, and hard times go Yeah just to come again Bring on your wrecking ball

The two pieces that stuck with me were the chorus, “And hard times come, and hard times go, Yeah just to come again,” and “And all our youth and beauty, it's been given to the dust. When the game has been decided and we're burning down the clock. And all our little victories and glories have turned into parking lots.” Yeah the hard times have come but they have come before. If they don’t pass for me well someone else will get a break and things will improve. Somehow change will happen. Coming round to that particular thought kind of calmed me down.

But the other piece of the song resonated more. “When the game has been decided and we’re burning down the clock.” I turned 58 last week and it is at least quite late in the third quarter if not early in the fourth quarter. Lots of fouls are being called. There are tons of offside and late hits calls right now but has the game been decided for me? Can I grind out a real win in the ground game? Can I throw a “Hail Mary” hoping for a receiver to be in the end zone? Don’t know the answer to either of these questions. While I might say I wish I did in reality that wouldn’t be true. I just want to keep living. I just want to keep trying.

Probably the reason I began this blog was to capture the important moments in life, to remember the people that mattered and to try and sort out what it means for me. Names like Kathy, Nan, Barb, Wendy, Nancy and Francie are hidden in each line I write. Moments of honor like giving my 8th grade graduation speech, being elected the President of the MSU Communications Undergraduate Students or winning the notorious Homo-owner’s case, I have so wanted to work through them and memorialize them. And somehow I have to capture a variety of bad behaviors like a late night trip to Philadelphia following some brownies eaten at a Jefferson Starship concert or being stuck under a truck on the Lodge Freeway waiting for someone to come rescue us after a car wreck following a long night at the Woodbridge Tavern. All of this I needed to craft into something, a stretch of words that interests somebody sometime.

This isn’t just running down the clock for me. It is an act of creation. It is me trying to create something in the nature of art. Why I write whether the days are bad or good is because I still want to be on the playing field.

Talking with Buddha About a Rough Day

Hope and desire, one is the drug and the other the addiction. Walk away, do it now, leave these obsessions and compulsions behind. Accept the pain and regret but know it will fade. Why? Because sometimes you just have to leave quietly abandoning what you thought mattered. What you believed was important simply wasn’t. The truth is the things you want most in life will be denied you. You only hurt yourself when you hope and desire.

Why you can’t get there (wherever there is) is something you can’t fix. Why you can’t have the thing you long for whatever flashy sparkly bauble it might be (or intangible state or accolade) is not amenable to you doing anything to change the situation. Why you are not rewarded when you know you have put the time, effort and energy in (and the product is quality) is most often beyond your control.

You and I just have to keep telling ourselves that we are not the center of the universe and understand what that means. Our hopes and desires aren’t in the calculus of how the world exists on its own terms. We don’t know what is right in a manner that is any more valid than anyone else. But our journey coming to this state of acceptance is something that stymies. Facing the end of a hope or a desire with equanimity proves elusive.

I know I am just facing what everyone else faces. Still the hurt caused by attachment to the hope and desire is so strong. There are times I feel so broken, so lost. Maybe if I work my way through this dark place I will find that acceptance. Maybe I can come to a point where letting go is easy because I never grabbed onto something for my egotistic purposes. The world is and I am; I should be able to grasp that.