Just like the good old days

I dreamed I was taking care of Sharon again. This time we were in a cabin in the desert. It was a desert with tidal influences, so things were alternately sandy and dry and sandy and wet from the tide which would roll in and soak everything. This made keeping Sharon clean difficult. I kept running out of dry washcloths. Besides using them to soak up urine and do the usual cleanup, they would get wet from the atmospherics. I was cleaning her up and at one point ran out of them in the middle of the job, frustrating me to the point of yelling. Hey, just like old times. I justified myself up and down, making more of an ass of myself in the process. 

I went on a long trek out into the desert to find more washcloths but in the process found a couple of pairs of shoes which I appropriated for myself after checking the size. 9-1/2. Not too worn. Perfect. Someone would be missing these. They were not exactly abandoned, but stashed in a wood crate on top of some other items which I didn't find particularly useful. I had a bit of remorse, thinking of the poor shoeless person that I'd be robbing. Oh, well, if I encountered them out there, I could always give them back. 

I ran into the lady who owned the cabin when I got back. She offered me a half-eaten apple, which I took gladly. It was enormous and she was very proud to give it to me, even as a hand-me-down leftover. I took a bite and took it in the house to share with Sharon, who was under-impressed at getting sloppy thirds. 

I rooted around in the drawers to try to find more washcloths and found them full of water. Damn that tidal influence anyhow. They were mostly empty, except for a couple of drawers which contained silverware and collectable silver. Jackpot! I was in a scavenging state of mind, so everything was fair game if it didn't have someone's name carved in it. Dammit! That's exactly what this old biddy had done. The silverware had wooden handles with "Margie" carved into them in crude but unmistakable letters. I guess I'd be leaving them be. 

I resigned myself to confining my search to the washcloths, though I was really coveting some of the silver currency. And what was this? Some paper money lying among the coins? Haha! Finders keepers, right? But upon closer inspection, what looked at first to be dollar bills was actually some rare paper coins, perhaps Japanese or Chinese in origin. Very decorative and very unspendable. 

Before Sharon and I wound up in the sandy cabin, I was back in my old Paradise neighborhood. It was kinda run down but not as bad, I guess, as what the fire did to it in real life. It had become a seedy section of town, inhabited by hippies and bearded folk. In other words, just like old times. 

But there was a distinct flavor of reality which crept in, in that people were expected to be wearing masks, as in PPE for the pandemic. This was largely ignored, a fact that I became aware of when I went to a house party and no one was wearing them. Alcohol flowed and joints were being shared freely and people were shoulder to shoulder inside the tiny space. 

I wasn't in there for that, however, I had some other business to attend to which eludes me at the moment. I was beholden to some Mexican guy for something, which also eludes me, but seemed very important at the time that I find it for him and return it to him. I had encroached on some property of his and needed to make restitution, I think. But I'm grasping at this point, since this all occurred in my first dream cycle and it faded rapidly.

That's about it. I wasn't thinking I'd be dreaming at all, as I woke up at 5:30 soaked in sweat and needing to change my thermal top and my hoodie. Usually the more awake I get on a nighttime excursion, the less likely I am to enter the dream world, especially if it is almost daybreak. But I needed the extra couple of hours, so I crawled back into bed and things got underway quite quickly in this case. 

And now it is another lovely Saturday. Skies of blue, clouds of white and the LED has remained on throughout the day and night. I get emotional when it blinks off anymore, but I really keep an eye on it and beg Sharon to stick around whenever it does, so it seems to stay on despite my frustrated ranty behavior of late. She has gotten more patient with me than when she was alive. 

Perhaps she has learned to just turn the light on and then go elsewhere, leaving me with an electronic pacifier. Yeah, she's smart like that. I'd be just as glad to know that she's not observing every incident of me yelling "motherfucker!" at a small piece of food that lands on the floor when I'm cooking breakfast. I'm not a very dignified recluse, and my antics are not really quality reality show material. They aren't family friendly, to say the least.