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.

Day 116 of 365 Abandoned Forts

After 1000 miles and four days in a car with someone you begin to discover little things about the nature of the person who is sitting next to you in the front seat. These little epiphanies come even though the expanse of the front seat is quite wide in a 1972 Chevrolet Impala. As the miles click off bits and pieces of who they are come through. Sometimes what you find are little insights into thier personality that because of how you were genetically wired or brought up, (although me I think who we are is more genetics), that you didn't just don’t understand.

The first of several insights that were to reveal themselves on that two and a half week road trip showed up while camping in God’s country. It appeared at an abandoned naval base in the middle of Idaho. Idaho seems an odd place for a naval base doesn't it? But in World War II apparently having an inland naval training center was apparently very important. Bearing the name of Farragut Lake the base had in 1978 recently been converted into a state park. The work appeared to have been done on the cheap, or relatively inexpensively as they would say. Some open tent sites and a concrete boat landing for sport fishing boats were about the total of amenities. I don’t remember showers and thus it must have been a pit toilet kind of place.

This was an honor campsite at the time and you had to put $2.50 into a paper packet and drop it into a slot in a pipe to pitch a tent for the night. Cheap was good. The place was isolated. As I noted a lake abutted the campsites and a short walk away sat the old Navy barracks. The barracks were not behind any kind of fencing. If you were so inclined you could have looked in the windows and climbed the exterior staircases. They were just off to the side of the campground and they slowly starting to fall apart. It was not the decay of vandalism but just the creeping return of North Country nature.

Farragut Lake was beautiful, a naturally dammed box canyon that about a mile deep. In the need to quickly, efficiently and safely train submariners the lake was pressed into use as a training ground. My guess is that you needed the depth to teach people how to dive and surface those submarines. You also needed a place to train that was not in the active war zone like off the Pacific Coast. Going out from Seattle or the other ports of the northwest for a practice run would have put the trainees in immediate danger.

Farragut Lake was north of Coeur d'Alene and south of Bonner's Ferry. Nestled in the woods the park was just a stone throw from the Canadian border, a border mind you, where I had to show a gas credit card and $200 in traveler's cheques before they would let me in the country. My hair was a little longish and my female companion was a little waif like. For all the world we looked like hippies coming to homestead in the true north proud and free. Farragut Lake was out of the way and not a whole heck of people were using it at the time. After the day fisherman left we had the run of the place. We did not I emphasize go poking around the old barracks

Picking a site down near the water we figured we could see the sun going down. We cooked dinner as it were on a green Coleman stove (which we still have to this day). No gourmet meal it probably was fried hot dogs split in half or scrambled eggs as a main dish and baked beans for a side. After cleaning up using the campground's pump and a dinky little sample size of dish detergent we drank a beer or two and crawled into our sleeping bags. The cotton batting sleeping bags we had got stuffed into a little nylon tent that stood maybe three foot high, was three foot wide and seven foot long. We had no Coleman lantern and when night came we were done.

As we talked before sleep were covered all the topics two twenty somethings on the road would talk about. Books including Dune, Watership Down anything by Kurt Vonnegut were riffed on. We probably were still babbling about the beautiful campsite the day before in Wyoming. Lying there just talking my travelling companion then told me about her fears of abandoned buildings. Deep rooted as it was she could not explain exactly wheree it came from. Knowing it was irrational she was quite uneasy because of the old abandoned barracks.

She also had the fear of old bridges where one center piece was still standing but the access points to the bridge were gone. This fear came from a dream which had been recurring in her youth about being stuck on that center span. I joked about these being just unreasonable fears, but these were nightmare fears and I personally know they don't go away easily. These were fears that came out in dreams again and again. Me I had my own nightmare fear. For me there existed in my subconscious a pair of hands coming out from under a door and grabbing my ankles pulling me under a garage door or down into a drain. About once every three months still I have this dream and I wake up screaming and sweating. Don't know why. We drifted off.

We slept at eight hours for we were dead from a long day’s drive. As a result the time asleep passed very quickly. At dawn however the pterodactyls arrived.

At 5:45 in the morning a murder of crows was set out and about in the CCC forest that the base/campground. was nestled in. These large dark birds had taken control. As daylight was breaking they began to scream and caw like crows I have never heard before. It was unremitting. It was bone chilling. It drew a power from prehistory.

The shrill screaming scared the living hell out of me. To my travelling companion who had already given voice to her unease with the surroundings, this otherworldly message provided by those dark birds, creatures that populate Poe and so many other stories of horror, stood as the warning to get out. The screeching was a message to flee. Trust me I was right there with her, I don’t think I have ever heard an animal sound so ill timed and nerve jangling. These crows could have been a message that doom was impending. Given the ferocity of their cacophony I was buying into the "this is a creepy place" vibe.

We were up and packed in minutes flat. No coffee was brewed. No toast or pancakes were made over the Bunsen burner like elements of the Coleman stove. We just got the hell out of there and started heading north to that interesting exchange up at the border I mentioned. We didn't look back. Odd moment, odd night we spent there on the north edge of the country. Mental note was made by this writer, no abandoned building infested future camp sites. Also beware of crows for they are nasty loud creatures.

http://parksandrecreation.idaho.gov/parks/farragut

Fragment

Morning came. He awoke. The bag of aching meat he had become was stiff. With no slight effort he pulled himself to an upright sitting position. He paused on the edge of the bed. How long he would rest there didn’t matter it was just time. For a moment he let his eyes adjust.  Enough light was filtering into the room to move about it.  As things stood despite a desire to get moving he had to remain seated. Until his mind cleared a bit he would not be able to find his glasses.  

Memory not failed eyesight would locate his specs.  Let the seconds tick by until memory comes. Are then on the headboard or on the chair. Myopia is a terrible thing, it can lead to broken toes. Done that before.  

As his mind slowly cleared, groggily kicked into process he knew he urgently had to pee.  When he was six years old he would have done a crazy hold the pee in dance bouncing to the john.  Six years of age was long ago. He doubted any real memories of that time existed within his consciousness. His mind was producing cogent simply structured thoughts now, ‘Oh let the eyes clear. Let me find my glasses and head to the toilet. Don’t want to pee on my toes’.  

He had slept soundly and that is why his bladder was screaming.  No two a.m. trips by feel to the head last night.  Sad thing though, he knew he was old cause he didn’t have the morning “I gotta go so bad” hard on.  Old was now measured by the fallen barometer of his dick. Sleep now was induced and regulated by Xanax. 

Placing his glasses on and shuffling to the bathroom he knew the day was different.  To an observer nothing special stood out.  The world within this room was in place.  The body next to him when he had gone to sleep was still there as he rose.  Softly breathing the relaxed form moved in the rhythms of sweet and gentle rest.  The light coming through the window was the warm yellow light that spring as it comes to the north provides at that hour. Her sleeping form conveyed peace. 

On the dresser his old bible sat covered with the tiniest little bit of dust.  Last week he had found himself rereading that passage about not worrying about tomorrow.  The Lord gilds the lily; the birds of the air survive.  After that reading he had put it down and had not revisited the Holy Book.  

When trouble comes everyone has a specific place they run for support.  His was there in the Gospels of the New International Version of the Bible. Living with acceptance that life would be providently provided for he tried to move on.  As sure as a dog won’t give up a meaty chew toy he worked over that thought again and again.  He had been mulling that concept up ever since he had turned those onion skinned pages. Life it seems was pressing in.

Another week day, another work day, the rituals were beckoning.  His shoes sat in his closet shinning.  His shirts were clean and pressed. Silent white oxford button down shirts hung there above his shoes. Old ties hung in a row on a tie rack.  He stood and looked at them and only one thing crossed his mind, revulsion.  Yesterday it was boredom.  Today he knew it was revulsion he felt; it was if he had a flu coming on.  A mild perspiration appeared on his brow.  A knot came to his stomach, his hands clenched.

Glasses found he walked quietly but quickly to the other side of the room.  Grabbing a patterned t-shirt, tightly whities and blue jeans he made his way to the shower.  Oh he had to pee. It almost hurt.  How long can you clench without blowing out some ureters? 

The hall was carpeted so the only being who would know he was moving about would be the cat.  As he got to the door of the shower the cat lifted up on his hind haunches and raised his head.  A more blatant cry for a head scratch and some attention there is not. He bent down and stroked the top of the cat’s head.  The cat reached up and grabbed his hands with his front two paws.  There was going to be a minute or two of petting at the very minimum. He was probably going to pee himself.  Cat might get caught in the crossfire.

Tiring of the ritual the cat raised a furry black tail and walked from the bathroom.  I’m and old man living in an old house, he thought.  He turned on the faucet in the tub and let the water run it would be 30 seconds to warm and then he would jump in.  At 60 seconds it would be getting pretty damn hot and he would turn the handle to the spot where he was comforted by the heat but not scalded.  Before that 30 seconds passed he voided with the power of a firehouse.

For men the shower is sacred.  It erases aches in the shoulders, aches in the back and aches just about anywhere.  It cleanses the pores and hair.  It carries away the residue that results when those two women you saw yesterday evening at the bus stop are suddenly a whole lot prettier and a whole lot more naked and are furiously engaged in lesbian sex in your mind. It is where you organize your lists of to dos for the day.  It is where you pray to whoever is listening out there among the stars that this might be a better day. And then you twist the handle and the shower is done and you are reaching out for a towel.

A Prayer *

Seek that which is higher than the world. Entreat the four winds and the stars and the sky to show you the true nature of all that is holy. Humankind is so small, so very insignificant. One being is a mere grain of sand on a planet made up of sand, the epitome of insignificance. But one being, one grain of sand, is not less deserving of the divine than any other.

Approach the sacred and consecrated with openness, the greatest openness you can muster. Approach that which is holy with open hands and open hearts, with ears listening for that which lies beyond the din of daily traffic. Approach the divine without expectation or demand. Approach the holy with a hope to catch a glimpse of what is pure and what is right. Look deeply seeking the balm for your soul.

I am not the first to have trod this path. Pablo understood. I use what is below without legal permission but I hope with spiritual permission.

Gautama Christ

The names of God and especially those of His representative

Who is called Jesus or Christ according to holy books and

someone's mouth

These names have been used, worn out and left

On the shores of rivers of of human lives

Like the empty shells of a mollusk.

However when we touch these sacred but exhausted Names, these wounded scattered petals

Which have come out of the oceans of love and fear

omething still remains, a sip of water,

A rainbow footprint that still shimmers in the light.

While the names of God were used

By the best and the worst, by the clean and the dirty

By the white and the black, by bloody murderers

And by victims flaming gold with napalm

While Nixon with his hands

Of Cain blessed those whom he condemned to death,

While fewer and fewer divine footprints were found

on the beach

People began to study colors,

The future of honey, the sign of uranium

They looked with anxiety and hope for the possibilities

Of killing themselves or not killing themselves, of organizing

themselves into a fabric

Of going further on, of breaking through limits without stopping

What we came across in these blood thirsty times

With their smoke of burning trash, their dead ashes

As we weren't able to stop looking

We often stopped to look at the names of God

We lifted them with tenderness because they reminded us

Of our ancestors, of the first people, those who said the prayers

Those who discovered the hymn that united them in misfortune

And now seeing the empty fragments which sheltered those

ancient people

We feel those smooth substances,

Worn out and used up by good and by evil.

Pablo Neruda

Lunch Rooms as the Great Equalizer

Lunch rooms in state office buildings are places where one is never quite sure of their footing. All levels of staff pass through whatever small space the building administration assigns to house a refrigerator, a microwave, a table and some ratty broken assed chairs. From managers to temporary workers, from attorneys to lifer worker drones we all share the fridge and the microwave.

The lunch room at my office is small. At maximum it holds about 7 seated people. Two small tables sit inside. Space in the “break room” is so limited that one table is wedged into a corner and thus only two seats are possible. The other is wedged against a wall limiting it to accommodating three or maybe four people max.

Most of the time I opt not eat in the lunch room. Frequently I go out for lunch but on one or two days a week I don’t I eat at my desk and type up orders. My office and the branch office of the Secretary of State are distinct in their functions and as a result of that differentiation in task for some people there is awkwardness in comingling in the break room. Sometimes there is even a chill when the attorneys are sitting in amongst the clerks and eating.

Mostly I don’t think the branch staff or we have ever put a finger on that fact but the awkwardness is often palpable. I think this squirmy feeling may actually have to do with branch clerk’s perception of the attorneys as management. We are not; we are more or less stand alone professionals.

For the most part we don’t care about the branch personnel’s’ peccadilloes as to total time spent in the lunch room (the branch is totally production/time clock driven) or what kind of drinking binge they were on the previous weekend. Their managers would care, we don’t. My guess is that they think we are watching every move they make just waiting to turn them in. Thus there is always a sense of something that maintains a distance.

Two very nice ladies take lunch about the time I do. One of them is quite gregarious. She is talkative, opinionated and has lived life. The other has lived life too but the trail leading her to this point is different. She emigrated from Romania. She has an intriguing accent. Her questions sometimes show the differences in cultural experience and cultural expectation.

Today she brought a salad. It was something like a densely packed potato salad but with a wonderful flavor. She served it up on crackers to the other woman and myself. The basic flavor per her comments came from parsley root and pork. It was very delectable. The flavor hung around with a sense of taste not unlike a good fois grais.

The American bred woman asked me if I had ever had anything like it. In all honesty I replied in the negative. What I did bring up was that my ex-sister in law was from the area where Germany and Czechoslovakia abutted. I do remember spatzle and other dishes mostly with very savory flavors from the couple of years they lived in the same little town as I did.

I brought up that are family was the true American family with Russians, Mexicans, Germans and Irish all blended in. All of these were melded onto authentic red neck roots from Kentucky. My American lunch friend began to talk about watching her southern sister in law cure pork. I opined about how my grandmother used to store sweet potatoes in something akin to a buried teepee filled with sand. And then we were off.

I talked about sitting on the front porch of my grandmother’s house in the shade of the live oak tree on an unscreened porch. She talked about how much more important family was back then. She recalled camping Up North with Grandma, Grandpa, Aunts and Uncles all up near the lakeshore with people sleeping in and under cars. When the family tent came along she thought she had died and gone to heaven.

In coming back I talked about renting a house by the ocean and squeezing 14 people in. Compromises were made and some people only got cold water showers. Some people slept on the couch.

Today our Romanian émigré friend remained quiet talking mostly about cooking. She described a dumpling that I believe I have had that has a marmalade in it. The role of raspberries were debated.

I of course engaged in this discussion wearing bunny ears. The brown appendages were well received.

If we can just get beyond what barriers status and class create I think we can find the common elements that unite as human. If we can just forget about the issues of power maybe we can see what common elements we share in this our life on this planet. Bunny ears, food and vacations by talking about these things we can seek common ground. While every management book out there tells you to keep up the barriers, to define the roles, to make distinctions I think we always have to return to the fact that we are people with families, of a large human family seeking sustenance and joy.