Mean Dreams

"My brain is haunted, with mean dreams..."
- The Notorious B.I.G.
I’m dreaming about this dog. It’s one of those things where you’re watching something on television but you’re really there, and the narrator of the TV program is explaining about this dog. He said, it was originally named Spike but that later it was also called Charlie. I remember thinking “I like that name better” because of course that’s my brother’s name. Now, it’s raining out, and the dog is running around yelping in pain, saying “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I remember feeling very sad for this dog. All in all this was a very disturbing dream.

So then in the morning I was in the kitchen explaining the dream to my parents. My mom said the dog represents my brother. I said, obviously the dog represents my brother, I was even sort of aware of it during the dream. But what does it mean? What was wrong with the dog? Why did it keep saying “I’m sorry”? My dad said the dog was probably rabid, which is to say hydrophobic, so it was panicking because it was caught out in the rain. Also, he continued, the dog wasn’t really saying “I’m sorry,” it was just barking and it sounded like “I’m sorry” – like the dogs that are trained to bark “I love you” (or “rhi rhuff rhoo” or however you want to transcribe dog sounds). My dad is always good for rational answers to these things. Too bad my parents are really in Baltimore for the weekend, which I remember as I suddenly come awake in my (almost) pitch-black bedroom.

I know, I know, it was an awful trick to play on you, making you think I had woken up and I was really still dreaming. It was an awful trick to play on me, too. Now I am alone in my room and it is very dark, like when I was a child, and like when I was a child I am terrified. Specifically, terrified that there are things in the room with me. I keep sensing movements and hearing sounds but I am too scared to move. Petrified, you might say. I keep almost drifting to sleep but I am forcing myself to stay awake because there might be bad things in the room with me. The rational side of me is saying that I am drifting to sleep, that’s why I keep thinking there’s bad things in the room. All the more reason to force myself to stay awake.

Suddenly I open my eyes and I see my door is noticeably ajar, when it had been shut before. I can see a little light from down the end of the hall, enough light to realize that my door is now open when it wasn’t before. Now I am really terrified. I keep thinking to myself, why won’t the sun come up so the room isn’t so dark anymore? I have no idea how long this goes on but it seems like hours.

All of this ordeal ends when something grasps my right hand through the blanket and my hand starts tingling. Some voice with a distinct Elvis-type accent starts muttering things I do not understand or do not remember. My inner reason is telling me that there must not really be anything there, my hand is just asleep, which explains the tingling. But I can’t explain away the Elvis voice and I can’t move my body. Suddenly I realize that the reason I have not been moving all this time is not because I am too scared to move but because I can’t move, not even if I want to. Between this and the Elvis ghost I am finally so scared that I wake up.

Yes, again, I was really still dreaming. I know, I know, what a dirty trick. Imagine how I felt. The room is now blue with twilight and I sit up. It is 6:30 in the morning. I say, out loud, “If that was all my subconscious, fuck you; and if it was something else fucking with me, fuck you double. Fuck fuck fuck.” Then I got up and I stayed up. It took about an hour for me to be convinced that this time I really was awake and not still trapped in some nesting dolls recursive stack nightmare.

Giant Lemurs

Did you ever hear about the giant lemurs of Australia? Don't bother now, they've been extinct for centuries. For thousands of years they roamed the land happily, doing whatever it is giant lemurs did... now, they are all gone. Wiped out. But by who? Who was responsible for this calamity? The Patriarchal European White Male? The soulless industrialist out of touch with nature? Christian missionaries with an inquisitorial zeal? No, no, and no. The giant lemurs were killed off pretty much single-handedly by the native aborigine people. Yes, that's right, the good and simple aborigines, living in harmony with nature and in the dreamtime, picked up their yo-yos and their boomerangs and hunted an entire species of large mammal to extinction.

I'm not even sure what the moral of this story is, other than the obvious.

File Under Current Events

"People are right-wing, people are left-wing;
angels need both wings to fly"
- traditional

Today, stopped at a traffic light, I saw something I have never seen before: people protesting for the war. At the intersection of Rt. 9 and 9D in Wappingers, protesters flanked both sides of the highway. On the left were the peaceniks: aging hippies with one last shot at relevancy and foolish idealistic kids. They had handmade signs bearing slogans like "NO BLOOD FOR OIL" and "STOP THE WAR." I've seen those guys before. Today what was different was that on the right side were the warmongers. These guys, late-sixtyish-year-old men with beer guts and baseball caps, held up signs saying "SUPPORT THE TROOPS" and "LIVE FREE OR DIE." These signs were pre-printed and uniform; a sharp contrast to the DIY aesthetic of the crowd across the highway.

And me? As usual, stuck in traffic and impatient for the light to change. Personally I think both sides are wrong. Or not wrong -- misguided. Metaphorically tilting at windmills. I don't like war, but I know that at this time in history it is still necessary. War drives technological development. And, until we are immortal post-humans with godlike powers exploring the infinite universe and reshaping it to our whim, technology has a looooooong way to go. So: war. But by the same token it is our goal to one day no longer need war to develop, and vacuous slogans about supporting troops or how freedom isn't free do nothing towards this goal.

While I was entertaining these thoughts the light changed and I drove off, leaving the protestors of both stripes to recede to a spot in my rear view. I had moved on.

The Logic In My Dreams

"I don't understand the logic in my dreams."
- Ice Cube
In my dreams, last night, electrical revulsion. Years of buried pain and betrayal and sadness as visceral physical response. It was... cleansing. Sharpened my focus. When I awoke I marveled at how real this physical sensation had been in the dream; abstract intellectual observation quickly writing over concrete emotional feeling.

This is how its been the last few years. In my dreams there is something speaking to me. One night it is these mindless zombies (not zombies in the rotting George Romero sense, zombies in the A.I. thought experiment sense) that are coming toward me; one has replaced my sister. I scream, "Are you me?" Crypto-solipsism and dream logic combined.

Another dream; I am in a horror movie. Wander off from main cast, knowing the killer will come for me. In bleak hotel hall, dimly flourescent lit. I start yelling to whoever, "Okay, I'm tired of this movie now. I want to go home!"

The rushing roar is all around me; somewhere between tidal baptism and nitrous oxide. I am floating in black static and it is roaring. "Are you with me, God? Please don't leave me. Don't leave me God."

I look out my window into the woods (that no longer exist) and I see ambulances in the distance, emergency vehicles. A soldier appears outside my window and tells me the dead have started coming back to life.

The planets are right outside my kitchen window; large on the horizon and clustered like together like freshly-set up billiard balls. Marc and I go outside and the house is adrift in space. I point to the planets, larger and more looming than before and I say to him, ever the guru, "Those are us too -- consciousness manifesting itself in unconscious forms." I wake up and I realize that this applies both to my dream planets and to the planets that really are. More crypto-solipsism.

Outsider Logic (And Other Tales)

(all pieces from various times 2006)

OUTSIDER LOGIC
In this tired world of mothers and motherfuckers I have been driven underground. Love songs provide clues for future historians. Characters are typed in lines on the same page where I am scrawled in the margins. I am not shaped for sportive tricks. I will not play your reindeer games. I have teetered at the edge of the wheel long enough to recognize the cycles. They become familiar as friends because they do not change.

DREAMING IN TETRIS
Those were the days that I was dreaming in Tetris. When I shut my eyes I would see blocks falling, rotating, accumulating through some twisted tropism into a tower as tall and as doomed as the one at Babel, fighting gravity in vain. Even the waking world wasn't free from these flights of reverie -- any grid pattern such as tiles on the floor or wall would become the platform for the game to continue, the universe a Turing Machine that was emulating Tetris.

BETWEEN CLOCKWORK AND CARBON PAPER
There is nothing new here. Everything there is to say has already been said so we simply repeat the words of others. Rolling white paper quotes off of toner-black tongues. We go through the motions as if actors or automatons; repeating cycles that can not, will not, do not stop. There is nothing new here.

THE SCREAM
There is a scream in me that is building; a scream of confusion, of frustration, of terror and trepidation; a deafening and destructive roar. I dare not let it out, not for the fear that it could collapse and crumble these confining walls, but for the fear that it would have no effect at all, that it would pass through the air useless and unnoticed. So instead I simply stand still, listening in silence to this scream in my head.

The Mousetrap (or, The Terrible Futility Of Revenge)

May 2007:

I was angry when I realized that mice were getting into my snack drawer from under my bed. So duct-taping a cardboard cover over the open back, cutting off their access, wasn’t enough for me. I set a mousetrap. Not a humane mousetrap — a snap-your-neck mousetrap. I slid it under the bed behind the snack drawer and let it go. I was angry at the time. I was not angry, however, when I found the dead mouse in it two days later. I was horrified. It is one thing to be angry and wish death upon something or someone, it is something else entirely to follow through on that wish, to plot death and carry it out, to set a trap and kill a mouse. I felt terrible about it — this mouse, who for all I know was bringing food back to its children, did not intend me any harm and I murdered it for daring to trespass on my snacks. As I lifted it up with a plastic bag over my hand and placed it in the trash can I whispered a prayer for its soul, hoping its death wasn’t long and drawn out, that it died instantly and not injured scared and alone. I asked it for forgiveness, prayed for my soul as well. “You deserved better,” I said as I shut the lid on the trash.

I Don't Believe In Democracy

"People tell me that if you don’t vote you don’t have the right to complain. But I never voted in American Idol, either — does that mean I can’t complain about Kelly Clarkson?"
- overheard

Now let me right off the bat start with, when I say I don't believe in democracy, I don't mean there's another form of government I would prefer. I don't mean that democracy has been tried out and proven a failure. I mean it in the same sense that I don't believe in unicorns -- because though I have heard about them all my life I have yet to actually see one myself. I saw Santa Claus up in the sky when I was a kid. I've seen a couple other UFOs since then. One time I woke up from a particuarly vivid and surreal dream to find a giant bearded face watching over me. But I have never seen a democracy. Like many great, world-changing belief systems (i.e. communism or Christianity) democracy is not a failure because it has been tried and failed but rather because it has never been tried at all. Certainly not on a large scale. Athens? Only the elites could vote. America? Blacks only got the vote 138 years ago, women only 88 years ago. Convicts still can't vote -- which in a prison-industrial society like ours leads to a large disenfranchised class that is taken for granted.

Besides, not to split hairs, but even if everyone in America had the vote, the true powers of the federal government are not democratically accountable. Much of the power of Congress is in its committees, which we do not and can not vote for. The selection of Supreme Court justices is not democratic at all, and everyone already knows about the electoral college and how it, not us, truly picks the president. Everyone since 1876, at least. And seriously, it's a bit late for democracy to be tried out on a large scale anyway. Thousands of years ago when the Athenians coined the term, democracy was a revolutionary step, a quantum paradigm shift. Before democracy, someone had power over you and you had to do what they said since they controlled the military. With democracy, you get to pick the person who has power over you... and then, you have to do what they say since they control the military. That was thousands of years ago, like I said, and I find it hard to believe that this is the best system we can come up with. Scudder Klyce, in his referenced-more-than-read classic Universe said that democracy was right and every other system was wrong. If you're interested in his proof, I recommend you track down a copy of the book like I did. My belief? Asking which form of government is the best is like asking which type of cancer is the best. Democracy might be the best form of government but on the real when are we going to evolve to the point that we don't need to prop up a government to watch over us anymore?

Here's my proof that any form of government is doomed to fail, that the very notion of government is inherently flawed. Ready?

1. Government exists because people cannot be trusted or relied upon to do the right thing of their own accord. Instead, they prefer to rely on an external authority to punish or reward them.

2. This external authority, "government," is comprised of people -- who cannot be trusted or relied upon to do the right thing of their own accord.

What's the solution? A meta-government to watch over the governors? A meta-meta-government to watch over them? Stack meta upon meta until it's one meta too many and the problem is still the same.

Instead of debating whether this man or that man would be a better leader, lead yourself. Throwing aside the shackles of external authority, whether as god or government, is a crucial step towards reaching our true potential. This is an election year, and everyone has an opinion. My opinion is rather like my opinion of American Idol -- I don't vote for it, I don't care who wins. Because, like American Idol, the U.S. presidency is just a machine designed to generate loads of bucks for the shadowy capitalists behind it. Lead yourself.