Jennifer helps me move a bed, and I trespass at an old couple's halloween themed mortuary residence

 

The thresher is coming, and I'm running around, grabbing all the stalks of corn that I can before the giant mechanical predator devours my dream landscape. If I stand still, if I don't grab what I can, it will all be gone within minutes of my awakening. I have to preserve the environment, so I am letting Jimi's soundtrack play on. It's from a film called Music, Money and Madness, a documentary about the making of Rainbow Bridge, and it is just one of the many all-night movies that I keep queued up to keep my mind active while I sleep.

 

I dreamed that Jennifer S_____, aka Jennifer C___, was with me at my little Paradise house. She had been summoned by me in a moment of need, and as per her usual angel protocols, she appeared. Certain people just radiate warmth and energy, and she is one of them. 

Jennifer recently sent me a Christmas card, and now I owe her an email, which I am having difficulty composing. It has been four years since the last time I saw her, and I am having a hard time trying to summarize what has transpired in that long interval. Bullet points are not my strong suit, and my summaries need appendices, since they wind up being full-length books.

"I'm so happy to see you again, Jennifer!" I exclaimed, exuding the pure, genuine emotion which I only ever experience in dreams. 

"It's good to see you too, Andrew," she beamed back at me. "How can I help you?" 

Although Sharon had passed some months earlier, my house was still a mess. I needed to move the giant bed, the monstrous relic from her illness which was taking up the entire living room. I pointed to the double Cal King Electropedic adjustable bed.

"We need to move that outside," I said, in a dubious voice. 

She didn't even blink. She just began taking the bed apart and toting the pieces out to the front yard. I guess I helped, but she seemed to be doing the heavy lifting. I got the impression that there was some otherworldly power at work, since the job was done in minutes, and she didn't even break a sweat.

I thanked her for showing up and for all her help. Now for the part I was looking forward to: the goodbye hug. I embraced her as if we were doing a tango, wrapping my arms around her lower back and dipping her almost to the floor. She laughed, and we danced around the yard, comfortable in each other's arms. She was still married in the dream, and I had a brief thought that perhaps we shouldn't be doing this, but it quickly passed. 

As much as I wanted to remain in that moment, soon the movie scene changed, and I found myself wandering in a suburban neighborhood, where I saw an interesting looking house that appeared as if it could have doubled as a mortuary. It looked abandoned, so after a hesitant knock on the door, I turned the knob and let myself in.

The house place looked empty, but there was this feeling of a presence, as if the old tenants had taken great care to pack their memories away into every little nook and cranny, just out of view. I tested this theory by opening a drawer in one of the built-in cabinets along the wall, and it was just as I'd thought. The drawer was overflowing with little trinkets and mementos from some old couple's travels and life together. 

I shut the drawer and excitedly began exploring the rest of the house. I opened a closet door in the hallway and was pleasantly shocked to find a full-sized coffin, lining the interior of the storage space. It was as if you were looking into a pillowy satin chamber. I thought it must be some kind of Halloween decoration, since no one could possibly have use for a upright coffin built into the inside a closet. Or else, perhaps--just maybe--these people were a little freaky.

I poked around a bit more, but soon the excitement of exploration turned into a feeling of guilty apprehension, like I was trespassing, and the people who owned the place might be nearby. I bolted out the front door just in time to see a 1970s lime green station wagon pulling into the driveway. An older couple got out and began unloading groceries as I sprinted across the yard, unnoticed.

That's all I could bring back with me from dreamland. The thresher was moving too fast, and now my dreamscape is as bare as a freshly harvested field. The feeling of the radiant warmth of Jennifer's hug and the uneasiness of guilt from snooping around on the older couple's mortuary-themed home still linger in my chest and stomach.

 

----

Editor's note: Transitive vs. intransitive verbs. A transitive verb requires a direct object, an intransitive verb must stand alone. Some can be both, as in I walked the dog  or simply, I walked. Others can only have one function: to define an action, as in I multi-tasked or I gesticulated.  

Trespass is an intransitive verb. I had to look it up when I was writing the title, since I was going to say, "I trespassed an older couple's residence," and it just didn't sound right. This is the level of fiddly, fussbudgety grammar Nazism that I've become obsessed with of late. Just never you mind the rest of my punctuation and usage errors, that's just creative license or amblyopic laziness. 

And don't even get me started on commas or semi-colons again...

The Moaning Pages – January 29, 2022

Well, my vacation was a bust. I suppose, as with anything, it is all a matter of perception. A starving kid in Africa, or a prisoner on furlough, would have been thrilled to death, tickled pink or over the moon to be where I was, doing the things Denise and I did. I, Andrew Golding, spoiled rotten brat, AKA the depressed whiny dude, was underwhelmed.

It’s not that the ocean’s magnificence failed to impress. It was, as always, majestic, powerful and full of energy. Sheer cliffs and rocky outcroppings towering over the pounding surf, and the biting cold of the morning air, mitigated by the suns gentle rays, provided a setting designed to induce both wonder and gratitude. Wonder at the vastness of the ocean, the power and force of nature, and gratitude for the temporary leniency of the weather to allow two humans to stand in such close proximity to something as enormous and potentially volatile as the sea.

It’s just that it didn’t work on me or Denise. Since I’m being honest, and I’m in a personal forum where no one is supposed to be reading this, I’ll just say what’s really on my mind: I’m starting to have doubts about the two of us.

I guess this has been on my mind since the beginning. I thought it was just me at first, that I was being shallow or superficial, judgmental, petty – hmm, so it’s OK to use words like that on myself, then, but not to judge others? I will admit there seems to be a double standard going on. Obviously, we all judge others. We judge ourselves as well. But somehow, when we judge ourselves, it is seen as humility and is a forgivable trespass. When we judge others, it is seen as critical, snobby and uncool.

There are a lot of things I like about Denise. She is a compassionate, kind person. See, that’s a judgment right there, but it is a positive one, so I will be afforded a pass. But there are things that I see in her, which are also things I see in myself, that I don’t like. She is chronically depressed, makes poor choices for herself in the area of self-care, and is very flat emotionally. We are actually very alike.

Physically, she is overweight. She’s not happy about this, but she lacks the willpower to make the dietary changes necessary fix it. And she is dealing with other factors such as medication, genetics, metabolism, etc. Being depressed, she eats poorly, does little exercise and has little motivation. And she also has some food allergies which are difficult to accommodate a decent diet.

That’s just me being a sideline critic. I am not able to life coach someone else, since I’m not really the most motivated person in the world myself. I prefer to spend my days doing the very minimum of work, and yet I expect the maximum reward. A couch potato critical of another couch potato for having too many potato roots, can’t you just smell the hypocrisy frying in the deep fryer?

When we first got together, it was because we were set up by my friend Emery. Emery is a logical person, and she saw two lonely people and figured, “Hey, let’s do the obvious thing and pair them. Problem solved.” I went along with it, despite my lack of attraction to Denise, because A) I was lonely and B) I figured the lack of an emotional spark could just be my own brokenness.

I had been grieving for three years and isolated because of COVID for a year and a half. I was ready to jump into anything, compatibility be damned. Before COVID, I had a few sparks of emotion and attraction that occurred when I had dreams about my old high school flame, Lesa, and to a lesser extent Jeanette and my ex-cult friend, Diane.

OK, I probably would have gotten with any girl who would have me, a pulse being the only prerequisite. So, Denise qualified, although she wasn’t someone I would have picked out of a lineup. See how horrible I sound? But that is me, superficial, I guess.

But lack of physical attraction is a big deal when you are sleeping with someone. Sometimes, that can be compensated for by an overwhelmingly magnetic personality. A person can have a vivacious personality that exudes confidence that it casts a spell, effectively blinding a person to the physical incongruities of their appearance. Sexy is as sexy does, not always just how sexy looks. Sadly, though, Denise lacks confidence, and so no magic spell is created. It’s just lumpy, dumpy Denise and her bad hair.

Oh, God, how I hate myself! I am down the road six months with this person who I barely can soften my gaze enough to look at. I can’t claim to look past a person’s appearance, to the heart, the true inner beauty of the soul. What if there is a costume party going on, and she is actually the most beautiful soul in the room, just wearing a frumpy disguise? I am judging door number 2 to be inadequate, when in fact, behind it might be the greatest prize on the show.

But appearances are a big thing in the animal world, so I guess that’s where my level of perception rests. I can reject beautiful women as unsuitable partners because A) they wouldn’t have me anyway, and B) I equate that to them being stuck-up or superficial. But that is just me projecting. I am the stuck-up, superficial one in this equation.

Every judgment that I lay on Denise, from her weight to her hair or even her smell (yes, she has a particular smell, and not an altogether pleasing one—kind of like wet paint in an enclosed room) I could probably find an equivalent for in my own stat sheet.

What matters, though, is whether or not the two of us are happier together than we would be alone. I’m still on the fence about that. In the absence of an overwhelming emotional YES coming from deep within my heart, the flip-flop, pitter-patter tell that would indicate true love (a concept I can’t say I grasp at all) I will have to rely on logic and cold calculated mathematics. I will have to A/B chart Denise.

This kind of thing is usually done internally and is never meant to see the light of day, much less be preserved in writing in some forum where another person might come across it and gawk. It is too personal. So, if you are another human being, someone besides Andrew Golding, you might want to fast forward, scroll down or hit your back button. You are trespassing, and the penalty is that you will become complicit in my crimes against humanity.

This has been the fastest morning pages that I have concocted to date. Very little thought went into self-censoring, editing or calibrating for an audience. If I seem to vacillate, it is because I am conflicted.

When I thought about the idea of breaking up with Denise, despite the reasons that I’ve begun to expose, I immediately became sentimental, melancholy and tender-hearted. This writing first thing in the morning business gives me a chance to get some thoughts out before they have had a chance to put on their makeup. This isn’t how I “should” feel, ought to feel or want to feel, but it is how I do feel.

Right now, I feel like I have to pee, so I am going to leave my A/B chart for tomorrow. I have a date with a cup of coffee, a guitar, amp and some weed, and I’m getting a bit hungry. My evil self bids you all a fond adieu for now.

Sharon's Advocate and a tiny, indestructible Jack Black, the transmigrating weed thief

Sharon had just passed, and I was dealing with the nursing staff at Sutter Home Health and Hospice. I had a few grievances that I needed to air, so I called a meeting with some of the staff. One of the nurses had fallen under my lens as being someone partially responsible for Sharon's demise, so I let loose on her with a torrent of accusations, some justified, others just mean and spiteful.

"It was your neglect and lack of compassion that led to Sharon getting more ill!" I rasped at the nurse.

(It occurs to me, just writing these words, that these were things that I had personally felt responsible for, and the finger of guilt should have been pointed squarely at me.)

As I spoke these words, the nurse, who was dressed in an all white nun's habit, complete with winged headdress, levitated several stories up into the air and spread her arms out, Christ-like, silhouetted by the sun. She then plummeted to the earth and lay crumpled on the ground. 

I tried to console her, telling her that I'd spoken too harshly, that I shouldn't have singled her out; there was enough blame to go around. She wasn't comforted though. She was broken, and I felt bad. I decided to channel the bad feeling into anger with her superiors. Someone had to be responsible.

Fuming, I went into the office of the administrator who ran the entire department and talked right down his throat. 

"How can you run this place in such a manner?" I choked out the words. I was getting too emotional, but I didn't care. He needed to hear this. "You've overworked your staff, and they aren't properly trained to deal with the situations they encounter. You do this to save money, but at the expense of the patient." 

I felt I'd gotten my point across because he withered under my scalding tone. That dream ended, but soon I was immersed in an odd situation involving Jack Black and some of his rowdy musician friends. 

 

I was at my house, somewhere in an ambiguous suburb, possibly near LA, but it could have been anywhere, really. I had a few people over for a jam session, but I didn't know any of them. They were all new faces except for one: Jack Black, the pudgy, over-the-top comedic actor. Jack found my weed stash and started pulling out baggies and distributing them to all of his friends. 

"Hey, guys! Look what I found!" he said gleefully, as he stuck his face into one of the bags and inhaled so deeply that bits of pot crumbles got stuck in his nose hairs.

This was not cool, and I told him to put it back, but instead he pulled out a giant bud and proceeded to eat it. Such a rookie, I thought to myself.

"Come on, Jack. Even you should know, you can't get high on it that way. It hasn't been cooked properly. It's still raw." My lecture on decarboxylation was lost on the uneducated. He stuffed more of my weed into his mouth.

This perturbed me something fierce, and I told him to cut it out, but he ignored me and put his whole head inside the baggie. This was too much for me, and in one quick motion, I grabbed the bag and Jack, and crammed his entire body down into the baggie, somehow miniaturizing him in the process. He was now a tiny, wriggling little Jack Black, no bigger than a GI Joe or some other plastic action figure. 

I quickly closed up the bag, trapping him inside. I could see his little face pressed up against the plastic, eyes wide and screaming, though his cries didn't make it out past the walls of his plastic prison. Well good, I thought, at least I'd shut him up.

The other members of the group dispersed, leaving me with a silently screaming little weed thief, trapped inside a plastic bag of his own plunder. I decided I needed to dispose of him, so I pondered how I might do it. I didn't want to just throw him and the weed in the garbage, since he was still alive and squirming around in the baggie. 

I thought I'd just find a city bus and place the bag on it. Let him become someone else's problem, like some malevolent little genie in a bottle. The problem with city buses is that there is never one around when you need it, especially when you live in the suburbs on a side street. I carried the squirmy little bag around for a while and finally decided that I'd just step on him.

I placed the bag on the ground and tried to smash it with my boot. It proved to be more difficult than I'd imagined. Tiny Jack had morphed into a Darth Vader looking black plastic helmeted head with evil glowing eyes and a crazy fixed grin on his face. 

Stomp, stomp, stomp--nothing. The hard plastic was incredibly resilient. Thankfully, he was still trapped in the bag. 

I didn't know quite what to do with this tiny, indestructible plastic demon in a weed bag, so, as usual, I woke up. Thank God.

The Morning Pages – January 23, 2022

derailleur

dĭ-rā′lər

noun

1. A device for shifting gears on a bicycle by moving the chain between sprocket wheels of different sizes.

I’m going to get fancy today, so I’m breaking out the French. OK, maybe it’s French, maybe it isn’t. It depends on how you pronounce it. But my word of the day is derailleur, or as we called them, de-railers.

I’m sure everyone is familiar with the gearshift mechanism on a ten-speed, 18-speed or 21-speed, or however many speeds the have on today’s bicycles. You push the lever on the handlebars, and it moves the chain from one gear to another. Sometimes, if it’s not adjusted right, it moves it right off of the sprocket altogether, and you wind up with a chain dangling loosely around your ankles, which results in grease stains on your trouser cuff and possibly a scraped ankle.

I have my own derailleurs that operate mostly as de-railers. They take me off track, and send my train off the rails and down into ravines from which there is no retrieval. They can come in the form of a thought, or a random event or confluence of events, or even a well-meaning text or phone call from a friend.

It can be anything that messes with my intention and focus when I have set an intention to do something, like wake up and do these Morning Pages, for example. A derailleur would be something else that occurs to me during the time I am just getting started that tells me, “You don’t want to do that just yet. You need to do this first.”

They can be innocent little things like having to get up to pee, and then deciding to brush my teeth while I’m at it, both good and necessary items. Consolidating tasks requiring my movement from the couch can’t be bad, right? Efficiency is good; why make two trips?

But then two items become three, since I’m already up, and then original intention to sit down and write these pages is lost.

Some items take priority and can’t be helped. I will take a phone call or a text from a friend at any time, because that is important to me. I’m new to the whole phone thing, so I haven’t set up boundaries yet. A call or text comes in, and I will drop everything and engage fully with the person who has taken the time to communicate with me. It is a priority of mine.

Ding. I literally just got a text right now. How perfect to illustrate my point. I will return after I see who it is, what they want and respond back.

OK. I’m back. It was my mom. She’s canceling our Sunday morning video chat due to babysitting obligations. The babysitting obligations would be a derailleur for her, if her intention was to make sure she kept her weekly chat appointment. The weekly chat appointment could itself be a derailleur for me, if I was intent on getting these morning pages done.

Not waking up at a decent time is a big de-railer. It will throw off my entire day. When I wake up at 7:30, the day still has possibilities. If I sleep in past 9:00, everything gets shoved back, reshuffled and re-prioritized. I’ll be hungry, and I won’t want to sit here for two hours writing three pages of forced material. All I will be thinking about is “how do I get out of doing this exercise?”

That goes for my regular exercise, too. If I wake up too late, I’ll be too famished to want to do my twenty minutes every other day workout routine. It will be postponed until later in the day, or somehow rationalized right off the schedule.

Habits are good and helpful for keeping things on track. Routines are habits that have become concretized. Rituals are routines that are done with a certain reverence and attention to form. Saturday music and creative exploration has become a ritual that I have elevated to a religion. I drink coffee, smoke weed and play the guitar on Saturday. That is what I do. I seldom let anything derail me from fulfilling that agenda item.

Yesterday, however, it was a Saturday, and I had other plans. There was a DBSA walk in Roseville at 11:00 AM. I prioritize DBSA stuff because the group and the people in it mean everything to me. I would even rearrange my holy days, just to make sure I don’t miss a social event with my peeps. I was conflicted, though, because I really do like the wake and bake Saturday thing. 

“So,” I thought to myself, “why not do both?” 

Not the best idea for innumerable and obvious reasons. I decided to ignore all those reasons, and drank some coffee with breakfast, and took my one giant hit of weed before hustling myself out the door down to Auburn to pick up another member before heading to the walk in Roseville.

Driving stoned is just dumb. Driving stoned to an unfamiliar town, down a highway that I seldom use is just asinine. Although I'd left in plenty of time to arrive punctually at Paul’s house, Google didn’t account for the snail-like speed of a paranoid person like me behind the wheel. A good number of other drivers were probably cursing me as well for throwing off their timetables with my slow-ass, old man driving.

Smoking weed right before a social event is a big derailleur. I tend to be a bit self-conscious when I’m high. I don’t get effusive and bubbly. I get paranoid and withdrawn. For a person who is already socially awkward, this makes things a thousand times worse. It isn’t just a derailment; I am likely to blow up the tracks right under the train and take out the engine, all the boxcars and the caboose. Self-sabotage at its finest.

I guess I listened to the little devil’s food hawker who was shouting in my left ear: “Go for it! You can have it all. Keep your Saturday ritual AND keep your DBSA date. It will be fun. You won’t get stoned and dumb, you’ll be elevated and brilliant.” Ha. I really gotta stop falling for that Charlie Brown football ruse. Things never go as promised by that little chocolate dessert cake solicitor.

I got to Paul’s house about 20 minutes late. Probably ten of those minutes were spent on his street, driving back and forth past his house, unable to find his exact address. I must have done ten trips around his neighborhood before closing in on the final destination. I told Paul about my dilemma, and he laughed. He’s a stoner too, so he could relate.

I’m not really a stoner, although I have been one in the past, so I know what that’s like. I do it just enough to say that I do it, but not enough to be good at it. In other words, it still affects me, since I haven’t built up enough of a tolerance to it to make me immune to its effects. Fully functional potheads don’t get the full benefit of the drug, and they generally settle for a less complete version of functionality, since in the long run, it does tend to dumb you down.

And just like that, two texts come in: Emery, showing me a picture of the pearl necklace her parents got her for Christmas, and Denise responding to a text I’d sent last night regarding George Winston.

And ten minutes later…

See what I mean? I can’t not respond to my friends. That takes precedence over every other activity. It is my number one priority. Order of operations. Always do this first. I have to be responsive and prompt with my replies to texts. It means a lot to me when people are responsive, so I want to be that way for my friends. 

I’m trying to find a quote from Overboard on the internet that is a reference to something taking precedence over something else. I may have to go fast forward through the movie, just so I can get it correctly. This is another instance of derailment. I will spend as long as it takes to get the quote, even if it means abandoning my original task for quite some time to do it.

Ha. It was a brief quote: “This takes precedence over your friend’s love life.” It was during a scene when Kurt Russell had employed a Coast Guard boat to take him out to intercept Goldie Hawn when they were powering away in her luxury yacht after she got her memory back. Someone called in a report of illegal fishing in protected water or something like that, and that took precedence over Kurt Russell’s big romantic gesture, at least as far as Coast Guard protocols. 

Two and a half hours later, I’m still on the couch. I’ve fielded a few texts from Emery, and I’ve typed a paltry bit here. I’m not letting anything fully derail me, though. It’s more like a detour. I’m still pedaling, just taking a couple of extra miles out in a different direction, viewing some scenery. When it comes to my talks with Emery, the side trips are worth it. 

 

A couple of my responses, snipped from our conversation:

“Ha ha. The most damaged individuals generally tend to gravitate towards psychology. Not a slight, just a general observation.”

“I’m not sure whether I would rather be blissfully unaware of all the mis-wired things going on in my brain or not. I feel that it is the socially responsible thing, for me to try to figure out how I am screwing up, so I can be a better person, maximize my potential, blah blah blah.”

“And if, in so doing, I can shed light on the some of the common issues that seem to plague people, and thereby help them, well, good karma points for me, I guess.”

 

I am, however, getting hungry, and those pushups, sit-ups and jumping jacks aren’t going to do themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Morning Pages -- January 22, 2022

 

I woke up to the sound of Gunnery Sgt. Hartman yelling at Leonard, aka Gomer Pyle. My new all night movie sleep soundtrack includes Pulp Fiction, The Sunset Limited, On The Beach and Full Metal Jacket. It’s a veritable potpourri of intense dialogue and emotionally charged themes with which I am attempting to infuse my dreams. I always fall asleep easiest to movies that are dialogue driven if I have already seen the movie a bunch of times. Otherwise, action movies will make me fall asleep faster initially, but I am sometimes awakened by explosions and a dramatic musical score.

After my motivational wake-up speech, I self-ambulated to the bathroom to pee, brush my teeth and wash my face. Self-care is a bitch. I told Denise the other day, “This kind of beauty takes a lot of work.” I was being facetious, but it is true. To maintain the illusion of being a person who gives a shit, I have a rigorous routine that I must follow. That routine can be tedious, but each little step has been arrived at to address some issue with my physical body where entropy has tried to make an incursion.

For instance, I have to clean my ears with hydrogen peroxide, witch hazel, hydrocortisone, betadyne, Neosporin and anti-microbial lotion, in varying combinations at different times, all to address the issue of itchy ears. Perhaps, instead of all that, I should just stop listening to false teachings. According to II Timothy 4.3:

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but having itching ears, they shall heap to themselves teachers in accordance with their own lusts.”

That’s what the Bible says about itching ears. Potato, pot-ah-toh, I’m still in bed, texting with Emery and the DBSA board. Here’s a text I sent to the other members of the Board. I’ll include it because it qualifies as writing done in the morning:

 

“Is there a limit to the number of affiliates that our chapter can have under our umbrella?

“A couple of years ago, I attended a meeting of DBSA Grass Valley after a counselor at Sutter-Yuba Behavioral Behavioral Health had made a few inquiries with Linda about starting a group in the Yuba City area. No one was doing Zoom meetings at the time, so we felt that it would be beneficial to start a support group for people with depression in the area.

“Then Covid hit and changed everything. I kept attending the group, and you were all so welcoming and kind that I became fully invested in this particular group and put aside my plans to start a new group. My fact-finding expedition turned into more of an adoption.

“However, if and when the day comes when Zoom meetings are no longer the primary venue, I may find that there is a once again a need to start a group in my area. I’d like to affiliate with this chapter if at all possible, should the time come. Other considerations, like finding a suitable physical location to have the meetings, might prove to be challenging, possibly prohibitive, but I’d like to think that the door would still be open, should the need arise.

“At any rate, for now, if there is a need for these people in Nevada to have a quick way to get started, and we can help, I am all for it. Perhaps, down the road, if they are successful, and we wind up having too many affiliates, they can become their own chapter.

“Those are my thoughts. I just woke up, so they may be coming out all jumbly.”

 

I like to include quotes because that’s just so much extra writing that I don’t have to conjure up out of my brain. Am I trying to flat-rate this Morning Pages exercise? Absolutely. That is what we geniuses do. It is impossible to differentiate between a genius and a lazy person, especially when they are one and the same.

I’m pretty sure that I’m not doing these exercises correctly anyway. I am supposed to be writing in longhand, in some paper journal. <annoying buzzer sound>  Wrong! That won’t be happening. I write in a digital format. It is easier, and I get to correct my mistakes. I can’t live with strikethroughs or eraser marks. I’m also not supposed to be editing these pages at all. <annoying buzzer> Nope! I’m gonna use my backspace key until it wears out. Multi-tasking while doing the Morning Pages <slaps hand before it can reach the buzzer> Screw you! I’m gonna do it how I want, or I won’t do it at all.

The Morning Protests, they should be called. The Morning How Do I Get Out Of This Crap Pages. Well, here’s some more text that I cut and pasted, completely out of context, but still more inspired than anything that I am doing in this Word document at the moment. I play better to an audience, I guess:

“I don’t claim to be a believer, nor am I a complete unbeliever. I’m pretty skeptical, but I’d like to think I have an open mind.”

“The more I learn in life, the less I know. I believe that knowledge, in the realm of human experience, is mostly subjective. Perception is reality, and even consensus reality is subject to human interpretation. And thus, none of my statements should be taken as factual.”

“Sometimes, I think like a snail, in very slow, basic thoughts, with a limited view of the world. I would hate to think that reality is limited to my small perception of it, although for me, the snail, it mostly is.”

“There are as many different perspectives as there are sentient lifeforms. You are more of a hummingbird. You definitely get more traveling done in a day, since many flowers need your attention. It’s a good thing that there are so many different individual consciousness units, since it’s such a large world; it would just be going to waste if only I, the snail, were to inhabit it."

Now I have a phone call and two text chains going. I guess I’m going to have to abandon this exercise for the time being. Cats gotta eat. I gotta exercise. The morning is almost over, and I have barely cracked the third page.

The circuit breaker and gossip in the workplace

 

I asked for a dream, and I got it. Since I wasn't specific, however, I got the monkey paw version, an embarrassing dream which I am having the most difficult time finding choice words to describe, exactly. OK, I'll just come out and say it: 

I dreamed I was at a party with a bunch of football jocks. I must have been the mascot or something, because I didn't quite fit in with the white and green jerseyed oafs that were running around with their red Solo beer cups, doing their homoerotic alpha dominance rituals. But that didn't mean I didn't want to take part. I did. I wanted to in the worst way. I wanted to get dogpiled, tag-teamed, spit-roasted and all that other nasty stuff, but no one would have me. 

Hmm. So, that's what's been lurking around in my subconscious while I've been dreamless these last few weeks? 

I woke up in the middle of that dream because I had to pee. Thank God, I thought to myself. Maybe I could just go back to sleep and just forget the whole dream. It's not fun for me to relate dreams in which I am exploring this side of the sexual spectrum. My binary switch may flip occasionally, like a circuit breaker, but its primary resting position has always been straight. At least, that's what I tell my friends. 

It doesn't bother me in the least that my breaker might trip occasionally. And when that happens, I just might enjoy it, just like some people might like it when the power goes out for a spell, since it gives them the opportunity to light candles and do old-timey campout things like tell ghost stories or sit around playing Kumbaya on the acoustic guitar. Might as well just go with it, right? But when the lights come back on, it's back to the life we know and are accustomed to, the 21st century life of devices and digital everything. 

But is one orientation really any better than the other? Some people's switches are just wired differently. While some people are hard-wired DC with a single polarity, where red is always positive, and black is always negative, others have alternating current. Things have changed in the last 50 years, and more people are becoming aware of their own and other's limitless options in the area of self-definition. The big switch has been flipped for all of society, and now it is a protected and sacred right to identify as gay, bi, non-binary, gender-fluid, trans or anywhere on the spectrum that one chooses (pedophiles and beastialists excluded). 

As an unbeliever in most formal world views and belief systems, I tend to rebel against labels. Right and wrong are subjective and situational, at best. Sure, sometimes the situation is that you are a human being on planet earth, and this is just how we do things down here. Rules apply within certain contexts. But even universal rules only apply within the confines of this universe. What about all those multi-dimensional other-verses out there? Different rules may apply in the pink Jello-verse.

Anyway, I did go back to sleep, and I had another dream. It was a typical back-to-work dream. I was at YC Honda, and it was extremely slow due to the lack of new cars available to the dealerships. As in real life, the pandemic had created a supply-chain breakdown, and new cars were not able to be shipped because they lacked some critical electronic components, back-ordered at the factory level. 

I was wandering around the empty sales lot, trying to remain unobtrusive. Sales staff were being cut because of the lack of available cars to sell. As a mechanic, there were still cars to work on, but not so many as there had been when new cars were selling. Independent shops thrive in situations like this, since people tend to abandon dealerships once their new car warranty expires. But no new cars meant no trade-ins to fix up for resale, and the whole operation was grinding slowly to a stop.

I found myself in the empty showroom. A pot of coffee was lying abandoned on the low industrial pile carpet in the middle of the sales floor. I walked over to it and felt the warm glass. Just about the right temperature to drink if one didn't add any cream or sugar. I thought about pouring myself a cup, but I decided that the responsible thing to do would be to pour it out and make a fresh pot. Who knows the backstory of a pot of floor coffee, right?

I went to the sink to pour it out, and I encountered one of the female office staff. We chatted for a bit about another female co-worker. The gossip was just getting good when I noticed that the person we were talking about was right there behind the sink. I swear she must have been a chameleon. She was wearing clothing that was identical to the drapery, and she looked pretty much like a wall with eyes.

"So, this is what you say about me when I'm not around," said the talking drapery.

"Wow, Bertha. I didn't know it was you. Your red velvet dress matches the curtains perfectly." I tried to sidestep the accusation with a compliment of sorts.

"Nothing you wouldn't say to my face, though, right?" She knew my playbook and was using it against me. 

I do often claim that I only say things behind a person's back that I would say to their face, but the in-person version usually requires a lot of preliminary context building to make it sound less gossipy and mean. "Well, uh, what I'm trying to say--and I mean this in the nicest of all possible ways--etc, etc." I sometimes have to practice my justifications in advance, just to make sure I won't get caught unprepared, like it seemed I was in this situation.

I didn't remember what I'd actually said, which made it worse. Gossips that can't even keep their stories straight are the worst. At any rate, it wasn't a big deal in this case. Bertha was OK within herself, and no amount of office trash talk was going to make her self-conscious. She was just having a laugh at our expense.

My ears perked up when I overheard a group of millennials in the lounge talking about something that happened in the 80s. What did these kids know about the 80s, I thought to myself. I grew up in the 80s, and some of these kids weren't even alive back then. Apparently, I thought the words using my mouth and vocal chords, and the entire room turned as one and looked at me.

"OK, so educate us, Mr. History," said one plucky twenty-something girl, snarkily.

"Well, I can remember where I was when the Challenger blew up," I offered weakly. I really hadn't prepared a lecture on the watershed societal changes that had taken place in my lifetime.

"What's a Challenger?" someone vocalized the consensus ignorance that pervaded the room.

I had no response. The dream was winding to a close. I remembered that there was a red Corvette on the lot, and I wanted to take it for a test drive. I was mulling over just how I would manage to take it off the lot for a quick spin when I woke up.

Come home, Lucy

Arnette Miller and Lucy Barker

I dreamed I was out walking in the suburbs of greater downtown Marysville. Not that it looked like the real place, but I concluded that's where I was from directions someone gave me. I was out for a stroll when I encountered a little pug dog who had gotten out of its yard. The dog belonged to Manuel Silva, my ex-coworker at Honda. 

I first noticed the little dog as I was crossing the street at a busy intersection. It followed me across, using me as a crossing guard.

"Go on home, Lucy," I chided the little dog.

Lucy Barker was my deceased friend Greg Miller's mom's pug. Since I didn't know the name of this dog, I decided to call it by the name of Arnette Miller's companion animal. 

The dog paid me no mind, and after crossing the street, it disappeared down into a crack in the earth. It was a narrow fissure, with an opening about a foot and a half wide and the length of a city block long. It was about four or five feet deep, and in it there was an underground river that ran through the town and connected to various other underground aquifers. 

"Where does this river connect to?" I asked a lady in a muumuu who reminded me of my grandmother.

"This river is just a part of the sewer system," she told me. "It connects to all the houses in the neighborhood."

"But ultimately, where does it go?" I asked.

"Sacramento," she said. "It hooks up with the Sacramento River in a couple of miles. It will take you all the way to the ocean." 

The little dog was still within earshot, and I kept calling for it to come out. There was a rocky shoreline next to the river, and the dog was playing with some other dogs dangerously close to the banks. I knew that if it went into the current, that would be the last I'd see of it. I really didn't want to have to tell my friend that his dog had gotten out and followed me and that I'd let it get away.

I would need a flashlight to get very far in the underground network, so I left the scene for a minute to retrieve one. I don't know where I wound up procuring it, but I found myself in possession of an old D-cell Mag Lite. I played with the button to make sure it worked. Good. A faint glow. Not great, but it would suffice. 

I crawled into the crack and walked around on the gravel next to the river. I couldn't see the dog anymore, but I could hear it yelping faintly from downriver. The river was shallow enough at the point of entry for a little dog to play in the water, but farther downstream, the channel deepened, and the banks became too steep and narrow to exit. 

I waded into the stream and felt the current pulling me. There was no sign of Lucy or the other dogs. I was now at the point of decision: jump in and let the current take me, or abandon my rescue mission altogether.  Surely, my friend wouldn't know that I had been the last person to see his little dog. He'd just assume his dog had gotten out and gotten lost. I'd never have to tell him about how I unwittingly assisted it by letting it follow me across the street. 

I wasn't inclined to keep secrets from my friend, though, so I felt obligated to do my best to recover his dog, even if that meant going for a river rafting journey sans flotation device. I was contemplating the fate of both the dog and myself in this scenario, and it didn't look good for either of us. As usual, when faced with a challenging dream situation with no easy solutions, I woke up. 

Earlier in the dream, I'd been driving a bus. I was up on a winding hilltop road, trying to parallel park on a narrow, curvy section. 

"You're doing a fine job," my sole passenger, an Asian lady of 40, said to me.

"Thanks," I said. "It's my first day, but I think I've got the hang of it." 

I proved my statement by deftly backing into the smallest of parking spots without taking out any light poles or parked cars in the process. I let my passenger out and extricated my unwieldy vehicle from the constricted space, pulling back into traffic with ease. 

----

Today is taking too long to start, as usual. 

I had to write this dream down, since I haven't been able to recall my dreams much these days. My life is apparently too full, so my dream life has taken a backseat. Or it could be that my use of cannabis as a sleep aid is having a deleterious effect on my dream recollection. I don't like having an addiction, even one that I enjoy, and I miss my nightly dream entertainment. So I think, as of right now, I will go back to my once a week schedule.

Morning Pages Day 9 -- January 16, 2022

My next incarnation will be at exactly 3:30 PM on January 16, 2022. I’m going to have to get up sometime. I’ve been sleeping on the couch all afternoon. I’m having one of those post-Saturday cases of the blahs. As exciting as the world looks through caffeine and cannabis colored lenses, it is exactly the same amount duller the next day. If I do the math, the ratio of enjoyment to amount of substance consumed will reach critical mass sometime this year. At that point, I will be imbibing infinite amounts and feeling zero positive effects.

My cat is Eddie is looking at me from atop the staircase in my downstairs hallway. She is very confused these days, ever since I put her and her sister on a diet. The fat one, Patsy, weighed in at a whopping 21 lbs when I last took her to the vet. They told me that she was a 9 on the obesity scale. The scale only goes to 9. She needs to reduce her mass by 40%. Eddie doesn’t need to lose any mass. She loses her lunch regularly, and I have to clean up cat barf from various surfaces in the house every other day.

Sorry, Eddie, but there is no way I can free-feed just one cat. I tried putting the food up on a dresser where the fat one never goes. Eddie knocked the bowl off twice, spilling cat food on the carpet. The first time I picked up all the little bits and put them back in the bowl, placing the bowl back on the dresser. The second time, I angrily vacuumed up the whole mess and permanently abolished the free feeding system. I now feed them a total of 1 cup dry food and one 5 oz. can of Friskies, split between the two of them, half in the morning and half at night.

“Delay in response,” I mentally note, as I have just had to get up off the couch to feed the cats and guinea hens, as well as make a snack for myself. “Delay in response” is a text phrase that I get from Emery, when she is going to be or has been away from her phone. Since this is not a real-time journal, I guess it don’t matter none, though, do it?

Here I am on the couch again, listening to the crackle of my toasted nuts cooling off in the bowl with my ½ banana, 35 grapes, 2 stalks of celery and six baby carrots. A snack fit for a king, albeit a lazy, caveman of a king. I slept right through the prime of the afternoon’s activity time, and got exactly nothing accomplished. Right now, this moment, constitutes the busiest I’ve been all day.

I woke up at 8-ish this morning. I stayed in bed until a quarter past nine. Then, I got up, did my morning exercises and got busy making breakfast. I always make breakfast at around 10AM on Sunday morning. This is the time I have my weekly Google meeting with my mom. It was uneventful, as always, and neither of us had anything to report. No news is good news, as we say.

I am watching a show called After Life, with Ricky Gervais. Now, if I’d left out comma in that last sentence, would it have changed the meaning any? “After Life with Ricky Gervais” isn’t the name of the show. It’s simply called After Life. It stars Ricky Gervais. He’s also the writer, director and producer, so I don’t think he needs his name in the title as well. A comma for you, sir, to keep you separated from your work. Also, I wasn’t watching the show with him. He had other plans for today, I’m sure, and doesn’t need to re-watch his own series with me. 

Hmm, it just occurred to me that quotes around the show's title could have avoided most of this confusion, as well as phrasing the sentence ..."After Life" starring  Ricky Gervais, instead of using the word "with." See the kind of shit I go through just to eke out a simple sentence?

OK. One page down. I have earned myself a few spoonfuls of my fruit and nut salad.

I amaze myself by my need to feel productive. Where does that come from? Of course, society has a work ethic that is drummed into you from the time you are a kid. Work for your allowance. Mow the lawn or wash cars for the currency with which you will buy your candy and comic books. In a world of unlimited candy and comic books, with no dirty cars or overgrown lawns, how would one instill in their child the value of the dollar?

I worked for many years, but not enough, apparently. I still have some residual guilt over wasting a day on the couch. I set goals like walking 5 miles per day or completing some outside task, such as chainsawing the fallen trees on my property and burning the dead limbs, to appease my sense of duty. But the only duty I have is to keep my own body and environment in tolerable condition. This is, by the way, a task that doesn’t end, or at least it doesn’t end well. It will be over when I am dead, and at that point, it will be a fail, since I will have kept my routine up as long as possible, and yet still entropy wins.

This is a played out topic, so I won’t even indulge, not even for the sake of filling pages with empty blabber.

Empty bladder.

 

Fiddle faddle, the delicious caramel popcorn treat.

“I am annoying you now,” my phone tells me. It’s Emery. She’s showing me a picture of some caramel brownies that she just made.

I thought I was going to be relating a story right now. I had a thought earlier, one loaded in the chamber, ready to come out and waste everyone’s time, but it never emerged. It wasn’t going to be much, just a random association that needed a backstory. Oh, well. That ship has sailed.

Dum dee dee.

I am not really comfortable doing absolutely nothing. No work, no reward seems to the universe’s stubborn decree. I am determined to undermine this edict at every turn. Do a little less work, expect the same reward. Lather, repeat, until no work is done, and the same reward is still dished out. The problem is: the reward doesn’t even seem like a reward after a while. It seems like, I don’t know, oxygen? Gravity? Something taken for granted, and certainly nothing to feel rewarded over.

That last paragraph, the last few pages, actually, deserve no reward. They are a perfunctory exercise, uninspired, unimaginative and entirely repugnant to me. I want to flush them and never look at them. But of course, I can’t. I am one of those sick individuals who must turn around and look in the toilet at what has just come out of my body. Given the journey I’ve gone on, gastrointestinally speaking, I deserve a little pride in my poops. They have come a long way, baby. Dr. Gundry ain’t got nothing on me. Thank you Paleo diet. That’s one box checked on the column of responsible things that I do for myself. I do eat some pretty good, basic food.

Hmm. I’ve gotten into page three territory, and still no sign of an impending inspiration. I’m still just swimming laps. And getting texts, apparently. More pics of caramel pecan brownies, plopped on a plate, a giant pile of carby, delicious goo.

I might get a sense of accomplishment if I decided to make something from scratch. I would also have the built-in reward of getting to eat my accomplishment. The problem would be, as I see it, that I would wind up making food for myself that would be less healthy than the currently boring routine foods that I make for my staple meals. Even Paleo versions of conventional bad foods like cake are all on the far out end of the acceptable scale, since cavemen really didn’t possess mills for making flour out of nuts, nor did they have ovens to bake anything in.

Doot dee doo doo doo doo—doot dee doot doo doo doo doo

Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson. Jesus loves you more than you will know.

Whoa whoa whoa

That’s the sound of my subconscious thinking about brownies. Oh, fuck this, already. I am lying here thinking about things I should have done today, and I’m not even willing to do this little exercise in creative unblocking? I am truly the laziest man alive. I will be buried in laundry, house dust and mold before I get around to realizing that I’m already dead.

Alright, then. Big finish. What’s on the agenda for tomorrow? Let me just look at the calendar…Hmm. Zip. I guess I’ll be celebrating MLK Jr. day like everyone else. Whatever will I do? I won’t make any promises, since I don’t want to disappoint myself, but I could consider doing what I was supposed to be doing today, ie, property maintenance; a long, boring walk; a load or two of laundry; anything, everything “productive,” to make up for my lack of productivity today.

Tuesday, my amp is supposed to arrive. I will have to be here for that. Wednesday afternoon, I need to take my old amp down to Sac to get it looked at. I’m sure I’ll wind up spending enough on the repair that I won’t want to sell it. I’ll be married to that bitch forever, since I’ve come this far with it already. Why, exactly did I need 75 lb Fender Twin? I think I was super super high when I watched the demo video. My reason took a mini-vacation when I heard the beautiful tones they were getting out of it. It will probably arrive all broken, and I will have to file a claim and get it repaired. And Skip probably won’t want to work on it since it has an overdrive circuit. Damn Fender and their “improvements.”

Is this the final line? Have I come that far today? Good. And if not, too bad, I am done.

 

Revolution Amid Dry Spell

 

Things were falling apart fast in this country. There was a culling taking place, and scores of people were fleeing its shores in boats. I sat huddled on the dock with some other refugees.

"You know they're going to kill us, right?" a man in a green army jacket said glumly.

I felt the cold, numbing reality of his words. It was true. Those who weren't immediately useful to the cause were being executed en masse. I realized that I was among the not so useful, and it scared me.

"We have to hide. They'll be coming through here soon," I said.

----

That's all I can remember. I woke up as the dream was still congealing, so most of it went through the sieve. It's been several weeks since I've had anything even resembling a dream, so I haven't really had anything to write about. 

I'm spending my writing resources on an exercise called the Morning Pages, and it is really sucking all the creativity out of my brain. It isn't supposed to do that, so today, I may forego the exercise. It is Saturday, after all, and generally, I take a break from all responsibilities on this day.

The Morning Pages is basically a free form, stream of consciousness journal designed to get artists unblocked. One is to write three pages of anything and everything that enters one's mind. No judgment, no editing and no re-reading. Just plop. Like a morning dump. Out with the old to make room for the new. And like a morning dump, it is pretty much a private affair.

I haven't been following the prescription to a tee, though. I started re-reading them last night, and I found myself inserting commas and correcting various typos and poor word choices. I'm even thinking about dumping them on here, since this blog was--and is still--my primary dumping site. It's not any kind of finished product, but it's a good look at the thought process behind any writing I might produce.

If I. Were to. Produce any. Ever.

I am as honest with myself in this forum as I am in any written venue. Too honest, perhaps, but still not as honest as I am in my head. I know the real deal, and I'll admit it to myself, just not always on the written page. 

I have a special area of myself that is cordoned off and away from public view, away from my family, friends, even my therapist. I've only let one other person inside this zone, and they abandoned me, taking all my secrets with them. I promised myself that I'd never do that again, let someone depart with leaked bits of my posthumous memoirs before I've even published them. 

OK, Saturday, let's get going, shall we? Giddyup!

Morning Pages Day 8 -- Jan 14, 2022

Good morning, god-awful Pages. I am only indulging in this exercise today because the alternative (getting off the couch and actually starting my day) is even less appealing. It’s cold in here because I left the heater off most of the day yesterday. It’s 59 degrees inside and 39 outside the house. I am officially a wimp. But I’m OK with that. I am a warm, cozy wimp lying on the couch with a blanket, pretending that writing this down is something important enough to keep doing.

I had a good group last night. Emery was still sick, so she asked me to fill in again. I was hoping someone else would step up, since I facilitated last week, and I don’t want to feel like I’m oversaturating the market with my shtick. Once again, however, the group was warm and receptive, and I felt nothing but good vibes coming from all the members. I admit, for the ego, it is a bit intoxicating.

As nice as that is, I can’t say they really like me for me. They like who I present myself to be. I haven’t opened up to them about areas in my life that might alter their perception of me as a saintly older gent. I may allude to a dark side or uncomfortable secrets, but that’s as close as I’ll get. Within myself, I am a conscienceless sociopath, and as such, I am OK with me. If something can lie buried beneath the surface, then no one can stumble over it, and no one gets hurt.

Such unnecessary disclosures would not be productive, since I don’t really want to set up divisions. I’m not trying to recruit anyone to my way of thinking, to my amoral lifestyle. If everyone were a dirty rotten scoundrel like myself, would the world be a better place? No. So duplicity it is. When you go out into the world, you look in the mirror and do what you can to make the face you see into something presentable. Combing messy hair, shaving, wearing clothes that hide visible faults—these are things that normal people do. No one purposely goes out of their way to show off a pimple or an infection.

“Dude,” I say, “no one wants to hear about your deviance, except perhaps other deviants. And do you really want to out yourself to the world, rally around the deviant flag and normalize your socially unacceptable behaviors? No. I didn’t think so.”

So why can’t I just let it go? What about this stupid area of my life is so important that I have to play 20 questions with myself and wind my narrative around a twisty rope-lined queue? Why can’t I just cut to the head of the line and say, “Here I am, deal with it” and move on?

It’s a social conditioning thing, I guess. I don’t have any reason to rock the boat. I’m not making a stand because that would be unpleasant. It’s easier to compartmentalize. I am this one person 99% of the time, but then, randomly, out of some compulsion or inner mechanism that I am not altogether aware of, I become this other person. I turn, like a zombie or a werewolf, into some other creature, who is compelled to eat human flesh. No, cannibalism is not my thing, silly. That’s just a metaphor.

Although I am fine with my actions, and find no reason to prohibit myself from acting in accord with my random whims, at the same time, I find myself blocked creatively, since I A) won’t write about it directly and B) can’t ignore it, since it is like a speck of dirt on my glasses. So hard not to talk about the elephant in the room.

“What elephant?” I ask innocently.

“Haha. Not so fast,” I say. “You aren’t going to get it out of me that easily. This shit has been a dark secret for years, and you expect me to fall for that little maneuver? Not a chance.”

But having less than a clean slate to write upon makes one have to acknowledge the stuff that is written on the slate, even as one does their best to erase the chalkboard. But let’s use that metaphor and attempt to do just that, shall we? What’s done is done. Yesterday’s sins, if you believe in that sort of thing, belong to yesterday. Who am I right now? What am I currently engaged in?

I’ll tell you what. I’m a lazy couch lump, too cold to get out of bed, too uninspired to even write in my blog. My dreams have been very thin and unmemorable. I can’t weave a narrative out of a single image, which is all I’m left with these days, if I dream at all. If I were disciplined, I could use the time to write something more interesting than this internal monologue crap. I’d sit down with my headful of memories, choose one and write about it. Whether that would make interesting reading or not, I don’t know. But it would sure beat this ring around the rosy business of trying to journal without complete transparency.

Fuck it. I am who I am, I do what I do. If I don’t want to talk about it, I’m not going to. Discussion closed. For now. Who knows whether I’ll get some urge to spill about my proclivities in some future timeframe? Right now, I am am uncomfortably comfortable holding my cards close to the vest, though even mentioning that I am holding some cards means that I am in the game.

La dee da. I’ve rambled incoherently about nothing for a page and a half. Can I be done now? Writing three pages seems excessive. I would go for one page of quality over three pages of fodder. Maybe the idea is to get enough stuff out there that I can go through it later and glean the salient bits, I don’t know.

I need to re-listen to the audio book. It was just another distraction for me, not like something I was taking notes on, just background audio for my walks and quiet moments in between TV shows and music. I perked up when she mentioned the Morning Pages because it sounded like something that I might be able to pull off. I was already in the practice of writing in the morning because I was doing my dream journaling.

The book smacked of too much new age spiritualism. Too much deference to a Creator. Too many references to God and spirit and the universe. I can’t stomach that. What I believe, or more precisely, refuse to believe, as a sentient unit, singular and disconnected in many ways from the quote unquote universe, may be wrong, may be inconsequential, may be keeping me from graduating or realizing my potential or whatever, but it is my operating system. I can’t do warm fuzzy universe crap. Not after the shit the universe has pulled.

Haha. I can be mad at something and still not believe in it. I am cool like that. Cognitive dissonance at its finest. Yes, I can hold two contradictory views and function just fine. I can engage in sinfully immoral behavior and flog myself over it, while at the same time not subscribing to a moral code. I can eat meat and still love animals. I can say “thank God” and mean it, without believing in the motherfucker.

So, no, I won’t be kneeling and asking for guidance, forgiveness or anything. I don’t have assurance that the other shoe won’t drop anyway. I can live my life like there’s no tomorrow because that is the reality. For all practical purposes, I live like there is going to be an infinite number of tomorrows. I do that because it’s all I can do. I have to assume the continuation of my being. Waking up each morning, I must act like there is a day stretched out ahead of me that I will take part in.

I like drugs because they make more things seem possible. Time can tend to slow down, and things can be more fully paid attention to, when one is on just the right amount of the right substance. I use weed to achieve this effect. But I fall into the trap of letting the weed become an end in itself. The feel good sensation becomes a pleasure to be indulged in, rather than a medicinal tool.

I’d like to create a few magic rituals. The problem is that I don’t really have the heart for it. I don’t believe in magic. I’d like to believe, but I’m one of those people who likes to have the horse in front of the cart and not the other way around. “Believe, and thou wilt be shown!”  No, that’s not for me. Show me the money, and then I’ll believe. I guess that would obviate the whole need for faith. It wouldn’t be a belief; it would be knowledge.

And while we’re on the subject of semi-colons, like, what the actual fuck are they good for? Kurt Vonnegut called them “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” I would argue for the use of a comma following the word hermaphrodites, but that’s just me.

I used to use commas like a pre-diabetic uses sugar. They would go anywhere I could fit one in, just because it makes things go down easier. I tended to agree with Kurt on the semi-colon, though. Who needs a fake-ass period with a comma underneath it? If you want to make two short, choppy sentences, do it. And if you want to use a comma splice, do that as well. It represents a poetic choice, giving the reader a gritty, real-time look at the internal narrative. No one takes the time to think in complete, grammatically correct sentences. Those people are pompous asses. Or royalty or something.

Yeah. And fragments. I used to employ them like day workers. No need to long term commit to forming a complete sentence. Just shoot the thoughts out there, machine gun-like. Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat. I’m gonna revisit the use of fragments in my next incarnation as a writer. Or not. We’ll see.

 

Morning Pages Day 7 -- Jan 13, 2022

So, I skipped a day. So, what? I don’t owe it to anybody to do this. I do it for myself. And if myself feels inhibited or put upon, myself will tell the Morning Pages to take a flying fuck. That’s where I’m at, so deal with it.

I had a nice day yesterday with Denise. We went to Collins Lake and then to the Yuba River. We logged about 4.9 miles, although her pedometer gives her credit for 6 miles. At this rate, I will have to walk an extra 1/6 of a mile just to keep up. Unfair!

I don’t know what you (vague amorphous judgmental cosmic lump) wish for me to report in about. Clearly, I’ve exhausted my reservoir of interesting party topics.

I am blocked because I refuse to deal with some of the issues that are foremost on my mind. Sure, this exercise is supposed to liberate me from them because I can get them out here in a consequence free, judgment free environment. Kind of like a confessional: just spew it and be rid of it.

Not so easy, that. I am honest with myself on the inside. I let myself think the truest things, the vilest, most abhorrent, and yet accurate in detail things. To mine own self, I am true. But to these Morning Pages, I am still guarded.

Who am I fooling? Some people like to call those thoughts “automatic” thoughts, as if they had no culpability at all in their formation. Like they were just walking along and ZAP, out of the blue, Zeus sends a lightning bolt down, and a thought hits them square in the cerebral cortex. Or the little devil on their shoulder says, “Psst. You wanna hear something funny?”

No, I prefer to own it. Although, I may have subscribed to a thought, I’d like to think that I could unsubscribe. Somewhere, there is a button with a link to let me do that. “Please remove me from your list of people to bug with these horrendous thoughts. Thank you.”

I don’t necessarily even think the thoughts are “bad,” as in evil, Nazi baby-killer bad. They are just some run of the mill socially unacceptable thoughts. They might need to be rehabilitated and given a fresh coat of paint. Perhaps, I can dress them up in little tuxedoes and take them out on the town, put some dark shades on them and get them past the cameras quickly, because the façade won’t stand up to scrutiny.

What are my dark, ugly thoughts about? Can I at least begin the process of unearthing them? No, I think not. I have the shovel in my hand, but I’m using it to bury these thoughts, not start an archeological dig in my cranium. Let the leaking septic tank stay buried. If it collapses in on itself, I guess that will be the time to deal with it.

Now that I’ve gone on for nearly a page and still said nothing, I guess I’ll address the issue that is most pressing on me at this very moment. I’m hungry. I am tired of writing. I’m a shallow well of quicksand, and I don’t want to be stuck here all day skimming moisture off the top, then boiling it and sanitizing it for consumption.

Maybe sometime soon, I will feel the need to unburden myself of some of these never to see the light of day thoughts. But for now, in the deep recesses of my gray matter storage facility they will remain archived. Goodbye for now, my untrustworthy friend.

---end of entry for January 13, 2022

Morning Pages Day 6 -- Jan 11, 2022

I’m hiding something from myself. I don’t want to write about __________. It is the elephant in the room. It is the 130 lb lump of consistently inconsistent hypocrisy lying on my couch. Something about this guy is bugging me, but I don’t want to say what it is, since it’s kind of personal, and I don’t want to slander myself. So, there is this one walled off area, a giant septic tank, and it’s getting full, but I am afraid to lift the cover because it has been on there for 14 years, and I’m afraid to damage the tank by prying it off.

That part is not a metaphor. That is really the state of my septic tank. I noticed a depression in the earth below my well house. It looked conspicuously close to where I remembered seeing them dig up my septic tank to pump it out and inspect it when I first moved here. I was afraid it might be getting full, so I dug it up and found the lid was right there where I was digging.

The lid was covered with a plastic garbage bag. I removed the bag and looked underneath. The handle to the lid was broken, and the lid was cemented shut. I remembered when they had tried to get the lid off before how they had broken the handle and wound up having to use a prybar to wrangle the lid off. I also vaguely remember them using some quick dry cement to fill in the crack they had made by prying on the top of the tank. There was about a ½ inch wide by 3 inch long gap between the tank cover and the tank.

I peered into the tank through this little gap, and I could see that the water level was where it should be, about 6 inches from the top. A low water level would indicate a compromised tank. I found a 3 foot long stick and poked down into the broth pot. It came out clean. Ha, well, not clean as in you could use it for shish kabobs, but clean in the sense that it didn’t look like I’d stuck it into the center of some uncooked brownies. No sludge.

That was good enough for me. I put the plastic back in place and re-buried the tank. I couldn’t account for the amount of dirt that had seemingly gone missing. I made a mental note to tread lightly over that area, since some part of the tank could have been breached allowing the dirt to cave in. I’d just as soon not have to make that 911 call:

“911, what is your emergency?”

“Um, I seem to have fallen into my septic tank.”

Yeah, you know how that goes. It goes viral. Someone is going to leak that tape, you just know it.

So, as it stands now, I have a slight depression in the earth that reminds me constantly of the fact that my septic tank is right there, possibly in need of attention. Who knows what I might find if I went ahead and dug up the whole top surface of the tank. A giant rabbit hole filled with the corpses of the dead rabbits that had happened to burrow down and became trapped in the filthy dungeon of decaying fecal matter.

Out of sight, out of mind. I’m fine with not digging around looking for problems. Wait for them to come out in the open of their own accord, then deal with them at that time, is my plan. I don’t sweep things under the carpet. But if there is something lurking under my carpet, I’m not going to be the one to peel it up and look for it. Let sleeping dogs lie.

And lie they do. Like a kid stealing cookies from the cookie jar. Once the deed is done, they will lie to everyone, even themselves, about their guilty deed. So, too, am I lying to myself, or at least not being completely open with myself about doing _______. I know that I stole the cookies. I know there’s something amiss in my septic tank. But I don’t want to deal with that right now. I just don’t feel like getting into the nuts and bolts.

So, this is me in avoidance mode. I’ll be walking around that giant depression in the earth, ignoring the lump under the carpet and claiming ignorance of the missing cookies. That’s just how it’s going to be. Some secrets are going to the grave with me. I’ll sort them out later.

Well, that’s a load off. Not really off, but re-shifted. I am actually fine with my actions. A complete sociopath, I tell myself on my good days. Why feel guilt? I’m not actually hurting anyone, am I? What’s that they say, “What they don’t know won’t hurt them?”

I’m not hurting anyone directly. I’m not even lying. I’m just giving full disclosure a vacation. My _______ is on a need to know basis. So who needs to know?

Well, I for one, need to know. And since I already know, there’s no point in flailing myself over it. I stand by my sins. When I stand before God, and I have to account for all that nonsense, I’ll be ready with my excuses.

This is not about the cat food that I stole from Walmart the other day. That was a crime of laziness. I thought I’d scanned all the items, but as I was halfway out the door I remembered the case of Friskies which had been under another item in the cart. I just kept pushing my cart past security, knowing full well that I had an unpaid for item in there. I was just too lazy to go back through the line.

A friend that I told about this suggested that I double scan the item the next time around.

Yeah, that’s not going to happen. I’m not proud of that little cat food burglary, but I’m not repenting either.

Is it bigger than a breadbox? Did I kill someone? No, that was ruled out when I said that it was a victimless crime.

“God dammit! What is it?” Honey Bunny said with anxious anticipation.

“Is that what I think it is?” Ringo asked Jules as he stared into the open briefcase, its luminous contents casting a golden glow on his face.

“Uh-huh,” said Jules.

“It’s beautiful,” said Ringo transfixed by the shimmering vision of whatever was in the case.

It never got revealed what was in that case that Jules and Vincent were retrieving for Marcellus. It is just assumed that it was gold bars. I’ll let you assume what you like about what I am concealing. If you ask me if it is what you think it is, I will say, “Uh-huh.”

Meanwhile, back in obsessive-land. I am having second thoughts about the amp I ordered. It hasn’t been shipped yet, but my credit card has been debited. My second thoughts are not that I may have been ripped off for $1200 by a fraudulent seller. They have only positive feedback on their site. My concern is more that I bought a giant amp that is going to be too big for me to ever haul around anywhere. And if I never haul it anywhere, why would I need an amp this loud and heavy just to play in my little room?

Also it is nearly 40 years old. Like a classic car, it is sure to have some issues down the road. It may have just gotten repaired, so now it is up and running, but for how long?

I messaged the seller to see when they anticipated shipment. I am waiting to hear back from them. I just heard an email alert. Is it them? Nope. Just another spam email from Presonus.

Presonus is the audio interface and recording software that I bought a few years ago to try to get back into multi-track recording. I installed the device on my PC and am using it in lieu of a sound card. The recording software, however, is very confusing, and I seldom use it. I never got familiar with all the terms and drop down menus. I hardly know where to look to access the right menus, and every time I go to use it, I wind up having to relearn what I barely was grasping the last time I tried to figure it out. It’s like I’m playing hopscotch in reverse.

This has been fun. Well, not really. I’m just saying that. Fun would be me saying, “I ____ a ____ in the _____ last night” just to watch your reaction.

I got myself removed from the mailing list of some right wing Christian university. They mass mail this horribly political newsletter each month, and every time I get it, I find myself triggered by the outrageous claims on their headlines, mostly pro-Trump, anti-vax, anti-anything progressive or liberal. I don’t give a damn about any of the causes, for or against, but I just don’t like their certitude. It smacks of Rush Limbaugh. Is he still alive, I wonder? Note to self: Google “Rush Limbaugh” and find out if he’s still alive. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead.

That’s probably a good policy. When I’m dead, I’d like to not think that there are people speaking ill of me. It’s the kind of thing that will keep a person hanging around, never going to the light. One can’t defend their actions when they are dead. It’s a done deal. So, let the dead be, already. Unless, of course, there is some cautionary tale to be told, some justification for making the dead person’s life an example of what not to do. Oooh..I’m done. Yippie.

Morning Pages Day 5 -- Jan 10, 2022

 

This Morning Pages business is like some kind of torture device. I feel like I am being locked in a room with a piece of paper and a solitary crayon and being told to draw myself an escape hatch. It’s just me and the thoughts in my head, inside a windowless basement with poor ventilation. Drama queen much? I know. I am not given to hyperbole, I AM hyperbolic in nature.

If I were on a 10 hour train ride, at least I’d be able to look out the window or talk to a fellow passenger. This “inside my head” stuff isn’t the way I want to spend my time. When I go for a walk, I put on some kind of audiobook or listen to music. I can’t tolerate the endless gibber jabber going around in my head otherwise. Perhaps schizophrenics have more interesting conversations with themselves, I don’t know. People with multiple personalities can at least be entertained by the novelty of their characters distinct vocal characterizations. It’s just me in here with me, and I don’t like it.

I suppose I should…

That’s no way to start a sentence, much less a paragraph. Let me try again:

I, um, would rather be tasked with chronicling my dumb dreams. Lately, they haven’t been happening, and I don’t know if it is because of the weed that I’m smoking before bedtime or if these Morning Pages have usurped the rightful spot of my dream journaling. I just don’t seem to have memorable dreams these days. It could be that I’m sleeping on the little couch downstairs again. I’d switched to the bed in the master bedroom after Denise broke me of my long drought of sleeping alone.

Now that we’ve established a rather regular bi-weekly visitation schedule, I am no longer a completely bachelorized caveman. I have female company from time to time. I have a reason to keep things tidy (besides just the general idea that sanitation is a good thing). She’s not very demanding, though, so it is still a matter of self-motivation. I can’t say that I was really a slob before, and I’m certainly not a clean freak now. I’m just a little more aware of the level of filth that I must maintain to keep up appearances. Clean freaks move furniture around and go looking for dirt. I am happy to just take care of the visible nastiness.

I’m having second thoughts about my decision to purchase a Fender Twin. They are heavy and bulky. Probably 100 lbs. How I am going to get that thing moved from the front porch to my downstairs room is kind of iffy. And there will definitely need to be some rearranging that has to take place, since it is twice as big as my Blues Jr. I don’t mind all that, but I’m thinking that it certainly won’t be an amp that I want to take anywhere. The Blues Jr. was at least portable in theory, although I’ve never tested that theory.

I would like to start a band or join one at some point. I miss having that collaboration with other musicians. Something about being by oneself just makes every activity just a little bit less satisfying. Music is rarely an individual thing. Even soloists crave an audience. There’s a kind of external validation that comes from even the presence of a single listener. For me, the trick is to get past the self-consciousness that comes from having an audience. Being in a band seems to solve that. Others are playing music too, so the entire show doesn’t rest on any one individual. It’s an interactive activity, and players play off of one another, creating a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts.

In the pale blue light of the morning, I look around this room (to the extent that my arthritic neck will permit) and I see that it is getting toward the time that I should get up. Perhaps I will exercise today. I realize that I am not under compulsion to do anything. I just settle for the routine that I have adopted out of an abundance of prophylactic caution. If I exercise, I will be healthier and therefore feel better in the long run. In the short run, I will grumble and feel like this is just another unnecessary chore.

Getting up to pee is another thing I probably “should” do, but you know me and shoulds. Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em in the ear with a screwdriver. Tell me what I should do, and I will launch into a long diatribe about the intrinsic meaninglessness of life and the lack of any schematic outlining purpose or propriety. Anything goes. Except that, in some cases, it doesn’t. But I usually wait until I have confirmed, though trial and error, that something is an untenable or unsustainable practice. Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it. I figure that someone has to be the teller of the cautionary tale, so it may as well be me. That’s for the non-obvious stuff. Things like, “Should we step in front of a bus to test out our mortality?” I will leave to other fools. I am content to go along with consensus reality on issues like that.

Whether I need to get up to pee or not is a subjective matter. And since I’m the subject, I’m going to say that it doesn’t matter. If I get up now, I will lose my momentum. I will have to sit back down on the couch to finish this little exercise. I will lose valuable time. Ha. As if. My time is about as valuable as, hell, I don’t know, you caught me off guard. No handy analogy or metaphor to spice up that descriptor. My time is as valuable as ______. I’ll come back to that thought later.

Cruising right along, here. Me and my voice have decided to get along for the moment. I’m not mad at myself for not being brilliant. I can’t do that all the time, you know. I am glad enough that I can fool some of the people, some of the time. It is my superpower. The illusion of intelligence. It’s a façade that I have worked hard to create. I don’t have to have actual working plumbing or electrical. My façade is only exterior. Uh, is that a bit redundant? Façade = exterior. A veneer. Not the real content, but only a surface display.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who are you trying to fool, anyway? There is no audience. There is only a thing, trying to fool itself into thinking that it’s many distinct personalities. I may be part of the illusion, or I may be the whole shebang. I won’t know until I leave this mortal body, whether or not there is anywhere to go, or whether my energy will evaporate like pond water in the summer heat. I don’t reckon thinking about that will change it, so I guess I will put that out of my mind for the time being.

January 10, 2022. What a wonderful time to be alive. I just like the number 22. It is a lucky number for me. My wedding day June 22. My birthday April 22. Double the number 11 and you get 22. Eleven is another number I like, though I don’t know why. But here we are, already eating up the month of January like so many Christmas cookies. Mwam-nom-nom munch. And now it’s almost half gone. When I eat, I keep careful track of how close I am to halfway finished. If I am half done and I am not quite half full, I have to slow way down. I don’t want to be left with any sense of deprivation when I am taking my final bite.

This is going to be another short page, I can just tell. I am not altogether pleased with the results of this everyday chore. As you can see, there are already gaps an holes in my coverage. “Fill three pages” has become “try to at least start on the third page.” I’m not going to get all legalistic about this, however. I don’t want to get my rant on. Not when I have to pee.

And on that note, to the delight of my hungry cats, I will get off the couch and get my day started. Pee first, then exercise, then feed the cats and myself. Then, who knows.