Dreaming about writing and writing about dreaming, art imitates art, and life goes on without me.

 

I only vaguely recollect what I was doing, only the faces of who I was doing it with. I was in a kind of a sitcom-like indentured servant situation with Pierce Brosnan or Charles Shaughnessy (from the TV series the Nanny) playing the dapper but endearingly inept boss. Yvette Nicole Brown, a black actress from the TV show Community, was my comedic sidekick and was also working under our Englishman employer. 

I don't know what our job was, other than to make him look less inept and to fetch him sandwiches. He sat at a computer terminal, struggling with the keyboard in front of an 80's era CRT monitor reminiscent of the computer labs at Cerritos Community college. 

The room was a white windowless void: white floor, ceiling, counters, all featureless and barely distinguishable from the white background. The only items that had form were myself, Yvette, our English boss and his white computer monitor and the sandwiches we kept bringing him, but never quite got right. We had to taste the sandwiches first, which led to us eating most of them, requiring us to start over, since we couldn't very well serve him leftovers.

Before that, I was outside, standing under the covered hallway of an elementary school-like courtyard between two rows of buildings. It had the feel of my old school in Santa Monica, Will Rogers Elementary. I was digging in a trash can and overheard a teacher talking to a group of students about the need for computer programmers. I found a book in the trash which just happened to be a programming language textbook.

"I took COBOL in the 80s," I said in a quiet voice which somehow caught the ear of the teacher. He stopped his lecture and looked directly at me, causing me just a little discomfort. 

"We need you, then," he said to me. "The languages of today are basically the same. You'll make a great addition to our team."

A girl in the dream mentioned to me that she was not a fan of the short paragraphs in today's written prose. She had been reading something I'd written and was displeased that I seldom strung together more than three sentences before breaking for a new paragraph.

"It's all about the phones, sweetheart," I told her obtusely. "I used to think like you, but then I realized that everyone was reading everything on their phones. No one wants to scroll through all that shit. It's too much work. You gotta break it into little bite-size chunks, or they will lose interest." 

That little bit of wisdom, I had come across myself when I was re-reading some of my earlier blog posts and was confronted with the impenetrable walls of text that I used to call paragraphs. For real, but also in the dream.

And finally, my last brief recollection was of another boss/underling relationship I had. I was in the livingroom of a condo which I was appointed to clean. My boss was Reiner, the ex-mini tyrant from my Yuba City Honda days. I was moving furniture around to make it more to his liking, but I kept doing it my way, since I felt I had a better feel for the feng shui than my millennial age employer. 

"How did you wind up my boss, anyway?" I abruptly broached the question which burned me in my guts whenever he would issue me orders.

"Right place at the right time, I guess," he said, not the least bit condescendingly. He did always manage to keep it professional, though I could sense that somewhere in him was a capricious Nazi, capable of workplace atrocities.

I accepted his answer and kept on arranging the furniture in my own way. He seemed content to let the situation continue and left me to it.

----

That's about it for dreamland. I want to write about the real world experiences I've been having with the two dating sites that I am on, but the only time I sit down to write in this blog is when I'm just waking up and trying to recollect the dreams that I have just been having. I write the descriptions of real events, like my daily activities or observations on life, love and the like, in texts or emails, as they come up in the normal course of conversation. 

I wish I had a search engine capable of gleaning the few brilliant things I've written, off the cuff, to my friends, relatives and women I've pursued, from the volumes of drivel I've inundated them with over the years. I could write a book. At least that's what they all tell me I should be doing. Maybe they are only telling me, in a kind way, that if I am going to be using ten-dollar words and writing treatises on every subject I discuss, that I ought to put it between the covers of a book, which they could then put up on a shelf, rather than having to bother with my pompous verbosity every time they open an email from me. 

I think of my words as my little bastard children -- so many, many of them -- going out into the world, starting lives of their own, some of them dying of neglect in some dead internet thread, others perhaps being passed on, influencing the random stranger. I could wish to claim them, to gather them up and make them mine, but why? I am a product of free love. I was conceived in the sixties, without conscious intent. I was raised in a discipline-free environment, for the most part. Why should I foist an agenda on my prose? Let those little buggers run free. 

I will have to bring some of them back for a family reunion someday before I die. Maybe that will be done for me, in the form of a life review. Isn't that what they say happens when you die, when all your words and actions are shown to you, including all of the karmic effects they had or could have had in various alternate timelines? 

I had better get off the couch, or I will wind up writing myself right into my deathbed through my own stagnant immobility. It's called life. Live it, man, don't just talk about it.