Yesterday was an unseasonably beautiful day, so it was with a light heart that I took the bus down to State street. My goal was to get all my major gift shopping (which consists of books, books and more books) done in one fell swoop. The shopping for minor gifts I can take care of a little closer to the holiday. Me, actually buying gifts to give to other people for a change! Parts of turning slowly into a grownup are kind of fun. :)
Of course, I was not the only one who had that idea. State street is a tourist destination even for locals, as landmark businesses put up gaudy Xmas-themed display windows so that people from out of town or parents with children in tow can have something shiny to photograph one another standing in front of. In theory I suppose the displays also entice people into the stores to buy things, but I've never been so enticed myself, so I can't be sure.
Let's face it. Holiday shopping can be fun to do, but it is extremely boring to read about someone else's holiday shopping. Or even read about somebody else watching yet a third party's holiday shopping. So instead, I'm going to write about the people who provide the real sounds of the season--sounds that last all winter and all summer too, if you're in a place where they can be heard. People who need gifts as much as or more than anybody, but for whom we are all unlikely to get them. Because however many we bought, it would never ever ever be enough.
Much more interesting than the shoppers down on State street were the street people. Whether slurring the same sentence over and over to ask for money, making beautiful music to ask for money, or anything in between, downtown Chicago has a sound as distinctive as its skyline, in part because of them. Many more than you'd usually see even on a weekday, these folks were there to get what they could from the shoppers the same way the shoppers were there to get what they could of the sights and stores. Firstly, there were the drum kids. These are four or five young men with drumsticks and upturned buckets who usually perform on the sidewalk near the Art Institute in summer. They are awesome at drumming, and I did regret not having any cash to give them. There was also a guy with a trumpet playing carols. Who had been replaced, by the time I left the store, by a guy singing them in a surprisingly classical-sounding tenor. Another man, on a different corner, tried his hand at Xmas music with a saxophone but wasn't quite as good. Then there were four or five people begging, either sitting cross-legged on the ground or sitting in lawn chairs with blankets wrapped around their legs. They would hold up signs bearing crudely-written messages like "JUST HUNGRY" or "please help - God bless", or by calling out their message repeatedly; "please help me out with a couple dollars, I got no place to stay, please help..."
Normally, downtown on a winter weekday during business rush hours, you'll find one person begging per two-to-three square block area. Street performers, that is, those who play instruments, sing, or drum on upturned buckets, are less common. They occur maybe once in a six-to-seven square block area, and are most likely to be found on the east side of the river--basically where someone coming from the financial distract would have to cross a bridge in order to get to the Metra station. In fact, the heaviest concentration of street people is always between the most populous office buildings and the major mass transit stations. I assume that people who take Metra (the trains that go out to the suburbs) have looser pockets than people who take the CTA (which stays inside the city limits). This could be because people who live in the suburbs, on average, make more money than whose who live within the city limits, or maybe that street people simply think they do. Then again, if a significant portion of your living comes from begging, you probably can't afford to have illusions about that sort of thing.
My favorite of all of them is a man me and Dave call "bridge guy". (I'm not counting Bernie, since he's not a performer; he's more like a kind of a friend I don't see very often anymore cause I don't work in his neighborhood. Man, I hope he's okay. Weather is evil today and he's not getting any younger.) Bridge Guy works the Madison street bridge by the Lyric Opera center like it's his regular job. Over the years, working at different places and passing the bridge at different times, I'm pretty sure he sits on the bridge Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, morning and evening rush. Doubtless he's got another gig somewhere else in the city on the other days. Weekends I think he may follow other events around the city. The first time we saw Pearl Jam at the United Center, he was outside with his drums, going ba-ba-badadada-dum "Pearl Jam!" Alas, I didn't see him on State street. Who knows, maybe he was there Saturday, and I missed him.
The concentration is higher overall in the summer, but the ratio changes too. That is, in the summer, you're more likely to see a guy playing a tamborine or a saxophone, or just calling something loud and repetitive to get your attention. The "pay to make the guy go away" principle is used differently by different people, but in the summer everyone is a little more casual and more innovative because they don't have quite as much to lose. Whereas in the winter, you're more likely to see a lady all bundled up against the cold, holding an equally bundled-up toddler, calling out loudly in front of a retail location from which people are likely to emerge holding change or small bills. There, the presence of the child is supposed to guilt you into giving, because who wants to see a child have to be cold or hungry?
It's an ecological thing, when you think about it. There's a certain amount of money that people are willing or able to part with on sight. There's a greater number of people who desperately need that money in order to obtain food and shelter. And a much, much greater number who don't necessarily need it to keep from starving or freezing, but would be able to reduce the hardship of their situation slightly if they had it. The people who need it less desperately are able to ask for it more convincingly, and so get a greater proportion of the total charity dollars available at street level. But the thing to keep in mind when you're out on the sidewalk in winter (or summer) is that you, the non-street-person, really have no way of knowing who is which.
When I first started coming downtown on a regular basis, back in the day, I couldn't say no to anyone. Couldn't bear to. How could I possibly hold back something somebody else obviously needs, when it won't make my life all that much worse not to have it? What kind of a horrible person could say no? What if I was in their situation, and I had to watch me say no to me over and over?
Those feelings never really go away. They just get shoved backwards, covered over.
First by distrust. Say you give some money to a lady who says she needs it for the bus, then she drags the kid a few steps further along the street to have her ask the next person the exact same thing. And the one after that, and the one after that too. Then you think about it, and you think, "well, if she'd asked me for $80 to take him to the doctor, I wouldn't have had it, and maybe she's got to lie in order to get people to believe her." Or maybe she's already got a job and just goes around begging for extra money for booze or whatever. Eventually you realize that no matter how creepy somebody looks, they could very easily be using their begging income for totally legit purposes. And no matter how honestly distressed they look, they could be using that money for something you'd disapproave of. So you can't use your preferred ways for them to spend the money as a reason to give or not give, not really. Because you're only human, not omniscient, and you have no way of knowing. If your conscience won't let you allow the possibility of them spending it on something you'd rather they not have, but also won't let you do nothing, you get them food. A lot of people do this. Me, I like giving 'em money, when I give. Because I figure a person needs a lot more things than food in life, and if I'm giving them enough of the benefit of the doubt to give anything, I'd rather let them choose and hope for the best.
Second by habituation. You get used to seeing street people around, until you stop really seeing them. They become part of the landscape, as much as the cars on the street or the trains on the tracks. So you don't feel them tugging on your conscience because you don't see people, just stationary objects to be avoided. A certain amount of this is unavoidable. But at the same time it is the most dehumanizing for everybody. It's bad enough when you're part of a stream of people all heading from one place to another, ignoring one another out of politeness. Day after day of that and it does make you kind of lonely, just another face in the crowd. But in that situation, if two people bump into each other, they both apologize and smile at each other before moving on. Or if someone drops a glove, three people will say, "hey, sir/ma'am, you dropped this!" and pick it up for them. But a street person in the middle of a crowd of commuters might as well be invisible. Which, if any of my much milder experiences with social invisibility are a baseline, is probably fun for about the first three minutes, ironic for the next seven, relentlessly soul-crushing for the following eight to twelve hours. After which the soul-crushing continues but you are too angry or numb or exhausted to notice. And yet, if you, me, the non-beggar individual in question were to give money or food or something to everyone who asked for it, we'd be broke very quickly. Maybe not to the point where we were out on the street begging ourselves. But definitely to the point where we or the people for whom we have accepted responsibility would be deprived of things we actually did need.
All of which to say, if you're in a situation where you think you can strike up a conversation with a street person but also have a reasonable way to end it when it gets uncomfortable, do it. It is important to be alert, though, even though it's a rare beggar who will actually do something crazy. Just like it's a very rare regular commuter who will actually do something dangerous. I think the proportions aren't as far off as people seem to think.
Beggars are generally pretty lonely people. Lonely and very proud, in a brittle sort of way. It takes an immense pride or a grudge, somewhere in there, to be able to ask strangers for money every day and not crumble under their mass mute rejection. Add to that the hope buried deep in the mind of every human being that every person we see who seems better off than ourselves is secretly a super-rich benefactor who will shower us with wealth and take away all our problems if only we can ask in the right way. You see how this can make for some extremely sticky situations if you haven't planned your conversation exit strategy in advance.
A dollar or two bucks or whatever is good for a start; it normalizes the situation so that they're not left hanging thinking you're going to give them something when you actually aren't. So do start the conversation off with some money, or a sandwich or whatever your conscience lets you give. Unless they're your local neighborhood bum and you and they both know that you see them all the time and you're totally going to hook them up next time, in which case it's not as rude. (Provided you actually DO hook them up next time.) Because even if somebody makes their living begging on the street, it's important to occasionally be able to talk to someone who looks you in the eye and treats you like a human.
As for when you should give, conversation or no conversation, that I can't tell you. Everybody's got their own strategy. When I worked in Bernie's neighborhood I'd give him a dollar or so every time I saw him and had it on me, and didn't give other people squat. Now I work in a neighborhood where we don't so much have a regular guy, so I give more haphazardly, to whomever's around and catches my eye when I happen to have an extra buck on me. Or not. I figure if I behave randomly I'm not altering the economic homeostasis too much. That is, I by myself am not driving out anyone who was there already, nor am I drawing in anybody who wasn't going to be coming in anyway. All I can do is keep an even keel, be nice to people when I get the chance to do so, and hope the tiny amounts of assistance I provide go where they are most needed.
But man, sometimes Xmas is depressing.
Craptastic.
So here's a little story.
One month and four days ago, I spent a long, long time on the phone with Ticketmaster's automated ticket-purchasing system. I was attempting to purchase tickets for an Oasis concert which is tonight. Somehow I hung up the phone with the impression that I had purchased these tickets and everything was fine.
We waited until yesterday (the stipulated 24 hours before the events) for the things to arrive in the mail. They did not, so I emailed customer service. Customer service told me they had no record of any such purchase. I got all huffy and went into my bank account so I could pdf-ify my e-statement and send it to them to prove otherwise. Turns out there wasn't any such purchase. Yes, I really do pay little enough attention to my bank balance on a day-to-day basis that the non-spending of about $120 I thought I had spent could go unnoticed by me. Financially irresponsible as hell, but still unfortunately the case.
So both Geds and Dave, who are both more into Oasis than me, who had been looking forward to this concert for more than a month, now do not get to go either. Because I misunderstood the promptings of an automated phone purchase system and then failed to follow up on my supposed purchase to the extent tat would have been necessary to discover that it did not, in fact, take place.
This is one of those things that sometimes happens which have an extremely negative impact on my general state of emotional well-being.
Oh, and I still can't figure out how to turn off the feature on my phone that makes it attempt to wirelessly sync up with internet and email service. Which it cannot do, because I have never set up the email or internet service that comes with my minutes package. So every time it attempts to do the wireless sync thing, it keeps trying and failing, trying and failing, trying and failing until the battery runs out. Which it did again this morning and I, again, failed to notice this fact.
Here's the ironic thing. I really, really, really want to do some mental-breakdown type stuff and run off and sit in a Starbucks somewhere where nobody knows where I am and cry and write idiotic, angry things on a yellow legal pad until I regain some semblance of cognitive control. Not communicate with anyone until either I have my shit sorted out, or someone comes out and finds me. Then, when I come back, get all surly and defensive and brittle because of my narrow escape from total emotional collapse.
However, to do that would cause undue anguish and distress for the people who care about me most, and is in fact very rude. So instead of doing what my instincts are screaming at me to do, I am going to describe how it tends to happen. Insecure people in great emotional pain who are not thinking very clearly have been stumbling upon this technique down through the ages, and finding it extremely effective. Though it is terribly wasteful and impractical.
It is a form of emotional blackmail. One of those instinctive action-reaction things people move through without conscious intent in their desperate desire to avoid the disapproval of others. This particular process, within its category, is milder than (for example) threats of suicide, but more extreme than (for example) initiating a guilt-trip with "you know what a flake I am, why didn't you make me double-check it?" sort of arguments.
The way it works is this:
-- Hideous feelings of guilt, loathing etc. rise up in me, far out of proprtion to the triggering event.
-- I either perceive these feelings as generally valid because of other, unrelated low-self-esteem issues, or choose to perceive them as valid for other, consciously selected reasons.
-- Having validated extreme, overreactive negative emotions and identity beliefs, I become mentally unbalanced enough to do something stupid, destructive, reckless, or otherwise potentially even worse than the triggering event.
People who care about me and/or who are affected by my reckless actions must then redirect all their attention and emotional energy to those actions rather than to the triggering event. It becomes their responsibility to prevent me from remaining in a dangerously unbalanced state or doing anything else stupid. This means people who would have been angry at or disappointed with me because of the triggering event must tone down or even abandon altogether any expressions of criticism towards me, because getting me back into a state of emotional stability is now their first priority.
Thus can two wrongs seem, on an emotional level at least, to make a right.
This process is also inadvisable because of the "boy who cried wolf" problem. Sometimes a person, no matter what their other issues, will have a serious long-term problem which they are unable to fix, or of which they are not consciously aware. But if they muddy the waters by extorting emotional support out of the people closest to them, then those people become less and less likely (not to mention less and less able) to provide them with emotional support in dealing with their more serious underlying problems.
So I am going to apologize like a big girl, and pay more goddamn attention next time I buy concert tickets, and endure a certain amount of disappointed anger from the people I have disappointed. Because it is, after all, appropriate.
Now I am going to take my stupid dead phone and go eat lunch. Working at the restaurant taught me damn well the consequences of punitively depriving myself of food when I am feeling angry with myself. Unsurprisingly, it makes me feel much worse about myself. So I will not do it.
One month and four days ago, I spent a long, long time on the phone with Ticketmaster's automated ticket-purchasing system. I was attempting to purchase tickets for an Oasis concert which is tonight. Somehow I hung up the phone with the impression that I had purchased these tickets and everything was fine.
We waited until yesterday (the stipulated 24 hours before the events) for the things to arrive in the mail. They did not, so I emailed customer service. Customer service told me they had no record of any such purchase. I got all huffy and went into my bank account so I could pdf-ify my e-statement and send it to them to prove otherwise. Turns out there wasn't any such purchase. Yes, I really do pay little enough attention to my bank balance on a day-to-day basis that the non-spending of about $120 I thought I had spent could go unnoticed by me. Financially irresponsible as hell, but still unfortunately the case.
So both Geds and Dave, who are both more into Oasis than me, who had been looking forward to this concert for more than a month, now do not get to go either. Because I misunderstood the promptings of an automated phone purchase system and then failed to follow up on my supposed purchase to the extent tat would have been necessary to discover that it did not, in fact, take place.
This is one of those things that sometimes happens which have an extremely negative impact on my general state of emotional well-being.
Oh, and I still can't figure out how to turn off the feature on my phone that makes it attempt to wirelessly sync up with internet and email service. Which it cannot do, because I have never set up the email or internet service that comes with my minutes package. So every time it attempts to do the wireless sync thing, it keeps trying and failing, trying and failing, trying and failing until the battery runs out. Which it did again this morning and I, again, failed to notice this fact.
Here's the ironic thing. I really, really, really want to do some mental-breakdown type stuff and run off and sit in a Starbucks somewhere where nobody knows where I am and cry and write idiotic, angry things on a yellow legal pad until I regain some semblance of cognitive control. Not communicate with anyone until either I have my shit sorted out, or someone comes out and finds me. Then, when I come back, get all surly and defensive and brittle because of my narrow escape from total emotional collapse.
However, to do that would cause undue anguish and distress for the people who care about me most, and is in fact very rude. So instead of doing what my instincts are screaming at me to do, I am going to describe how it tends to happen. Insecure people in great emotional pain who are not thinking very clearly have been stumbling upon this technique down through the ages, and finding it extremely effective. Though it is terribly wasteful and impractical.
It is a form of emotional blackmail. One of those instinctive action-reaction things people move through without conscious intent in their desperate desire to avoid the disapproval of others. This particular process, within its category, is milder than (for example) threats of suicide, but more extreme than (for example) initiating a guilt-trip with "you know what a flake I am, why didn't you make me double-check it?" sort of arguments.
The way it works is this:
-- Hideous feelings of guilt, loathing etc. rise up in me, far out of proprtion to the triggering event.
-- I either perceive these feelings as generally valid because of other, unrelated low-self-esteem issues, or choose to perceive them as valid for other, consciously selected reasons.
-- Having validated extreme, overreactive negative emotions and identity beliefs, I become mentally unbalanced enough to do something stupid, destructive, reckless, or otherwise potentially even worse than the triggering event.
People who care about me and/or who are affected by my reckless actions must then redirect all their attention and emotional energy to those actions rather than to the triggering event. It becomes their responsibility to prevent me from remaining in a dangerously unbalanced state or doing anything else stupid. This means people who would have been angry at or disappointed with me because of the triggering event must tone down or even abandon altogether any expressions of criticism towards me, because getting me back into a state of emotional stability is now their first priority.
Thus can two wrongs seem, on an emotional level at least, to make a right.
This process is also inadvisable because of the "boy who cried wolf" problem. Sometimes a person, no matter what their other issues, will have a serious long-term problem which they are unable to fix, or of which they are not consciously aware. But if they muddy the waters by extorting emotional support out of the people closest to them, then those people become less and less likely (not to mention less and less able) to provide them with emotional support in dealing with their more serious underlying problems.
So I am going to apologize like a big girl, and pay more goddamn attention next time I buy concert tickets, and endure a certain amount of disappointed anger from the people I have disappointed. Because it is, after all, appropriate.
Now I am going to take my stupid dead phone and go eat lunch. Working at the restaurant taught me damn well the consequences of punitively depriving myself of food when I am feeling angry with myself. Unsurprisingly, it makes me feel much worse about myself. So I will not do it.
the phone repairman
I got the chorus for this song almost a month ago, and I had been poking at it almost continuously ever since because my spidey senses (not pictured) told me it was gonna be a good one. It is! I hadn't done any guitaring for like three days, but apparently the break was part of what I needed for this thing to finish brewing. And yes, the second verse contains a deliberate reference to the Peacemakers song "Leaky Little Boat", which I love very much. I also love YOU very much. So there.
People of Springfield! I come to you with a terrifying message of hope...from the future!
~Homer Simpson, in that one Halloween episode where guns were banned
[the phone repairman]
my hat prevents the wind from freezing off my ears
but it still gets into my eyes
my day's spent near accountants talking dumplings
I make sure their shit's alphabetized
show me where it is written
I must demonstrate my competence to be admired
where is the world where everyone will love me
for the stubborn shape of my desire
the phone repairman
ain't been there yet
and I'm callin, I'm callin,
and I can't get get get get get get get
through, through, through
I scrawl out messages, stuff them in bottles
toss them from my leaky little boat
what I fish from the waters and unroll
I never feel completely sure you wrote
we seem to see the same world
when we talk about it hand to hand and eye to eye
but since we both were little girls
we knew that it was possible, was possible to lie
the phone repairman
ain't been there yet
and I'm callin, I'm callin,
and I can't get get get get get get get
through, through, through
I used to feel a pinprick in my conscience
when I stepped inside a big church door
whatever god is never shuts up
most religion's just a way of keeping score
if I do right by you it's cause I love you
I don't need another reason now
true holiness and beauty
always find a way to bring me to my knees somehow
though the phone repairman
ain't been there
I'll keep callin, keep callin,
until I get get get get get get get
through, through, through
to you, to you
People of Springfield! I come to you with a terrifying message of hope...from the future!
~Homer Simpson, in that one Halloween episode where guns were banned
[the phone repairman]
my hat prevents the wind from freezing off my ears
but it still gets into my eyes
my day's spent near accountants talking dumplings
I make sure their shit's alphabetized
show me where it is written
I must demonstrate my competence to be admired
where is the world where everyone will love me
for the stubborn shape of my desire
the phone repairman
ain't been there yet
and I'm callin, I'm callin,
and I can't get get get get get get get
through, through, through
I scrawl out messages, stuff them in bottles
toss them from my leaky little boat
what I fish from the waters and unroll
I never feel completely sure you wrote
we seem to see the same world
when we talk about it hand to hand and eye to eye
but since we both were little girls
we knew that it was possible, was possible to lie
the phone repairman
ain't been there yet
and I'm callin, I'm callin,
and I can't get get get get get get get
through, through, through
I used to feel a pinprick in my conscience
when I stepped inside a big church door
whatever god is never shuts up
most religion's just a way of keeping score
if I do right by you it's cause I love you
I don't need another reason now
true holiness and beauty
always find a way to bring me to my knees somehow
though the phone repairman
ain't been there
I'll keep callin, keep callin,
until I get get get get get get get
through, through, through
to you, to you
Miercoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol. 13
Senor Burns, Senor Burns
con el corazon de pero
Senor Burns, Senor Burns
el diablo con dinero!
~that one Simpsons where the school strikes oil. may have gotten the words wrong!
should I
save myself
for later
or generously
give
and do
~Bjork
Saw a rabbit this morning. I said, "Hello, bunny." It just sat there warily as I walked past, which surprised me, since like all rabbits it looked as though it were ready to bolt into the underbrush at the slightest movement.
I sometimes think my dream logs might be the most entertaining things I put on this blog, because they are colorful and action-packed. Like reading a miniature short story with a plot that doesn't make sense, but characters and images which are shiny and leave a tasty residue in the brain.
Oh, a doozy of a dream last night. A doozy! Acts 2 and 3 would make a great movie plot.
However, in order for me to understand what this dream was trying to tell me, I needed the symbolic context provided by an earlier dream. Which, in backreading, it turns out I did not write down.
The earlier one, let's call it "the laser stadium dream":
Act one. My entourage and I were hurrying through the outer hallways of an enormous building which felt like a stadium. It was well-lit and bustling with people (not pictured), its walls made of grey stone. Visible through the occasional archway in the walls (or maybe I just knew what was going on in there through dreamovision?) was a central chamber, about the size of the United Center turned on its side. Maybe a little bigger. In it, partnered teams of humans and enormous, shiny magical beasties were taking turns singing and dancing together; the music was haunting and wonderful and the dances gyrated and pranced all through the empty space. I wanted very badly to go on in and take my turn. One of my entourage handed me a vibrantly-illustrated book, and as I looked through it I realized with a jolt that I had no idea what I/we were supposed to perform. "I don't know the words," I said, stricken. My entourage-person grabbed me by the hand and we took off, flying down the halls.
Act two. We flew up and up around many halls, ramps really, and the light and the color of the stone walls gradually shifted from cool grey to a warm light tan color, like afternoon sunlight on sandstone. At last we came to a square chamber, its walls and ceiling made of large blocks of the same color of stone. Lower down on the walls there were a few round ducts or tubes, one of which we had arrived through. Instead of a floor the walls stretched down into emptiness (not pictured). I was alone. There was a round window or portal, near the top of the wall at the front of the room. The warm light should have been shining through it into the room--and thence, I understood, down into the rest of the building. Instead, there was a complicated and nasty-looking metal device which exactly covered most of the window, and in front of the device a crossbeam of iron or charred wood ran across the length of the room. In the center of the device there was a small pinhole or lens, through which the sunlight captured by the device could be focused and pointed like a laser. I floated, or was gently pulled, down into one of the tubes, and rushed out of the floorless room back down into the building.
Act three. My entourage and I were sitting at a table in a large banquet hall behind the performance chamber in the stadium. Some other people were with us--I think they may have been fictional characters or representations of people I knew, but those details are gone from my memory. The hall was crowded; everyone was eating their meal and talking and mingling. I brought my attention back from looking around at the room, and saw that everyone else at my table had gotten up and wandered off. Then laser beams, three or four of them, fired down out of the ceiling, scoring the table in front of me. I was worried by how close I'd come to being hit, and also quite annoyed.
The symbolism in that dream has come to be very understandable to me as I've thought it over! What I am fond of calling "the machine in my brain", the issues I still have that are what remains of my craziness, are represented by the machine in the window in act 2. They take something that should be wholesome and joyous and make it into a weapon. A weapon which, more often than not, is something that endangers me and drives people away from me, or me from them. The proper use of the thing the machine is sitting on top of and evilly transforming would enable me to achieve some form of awesomeness that I desire very, very much.
As I fell asleep last night, I was contemplating in some detail about some personality-construction issues that have been bugging me. It is therefore most gratifying to me that my dream-making parts were able to represent the issues with which I am wrestling in the following way! I want to call this "the pointless dystopia dream (with monster)":
Act one. Some confusion of sequentiality here. My entourage and I were hanging out in a house. I had found a seal, or went out and found a seal, who was definitely my friend. It was a happy and playful fellow and didn't seem to mind having to waddle around on land. We went into the living room of the house or were already there. A dog was there, equally happy and playful as the seal, and also my friend. I sat down on the couch to play fetch with them, and wanted them to play with each other. I had some sort of toy that I would throw across the room; whichever animal reacted first ran over to the other end of the room, grabbed it, and carried it back to me, while the other animal sat in front of me feeling miffed. When they continued in this way even after I'd explained to them what I wanted (yes, dogs and seals in dreams can have things explained to them!) I became a little frustrated and vaguely confused.
Act two. Camera pulled way back. Lighting went from midday summery sunlight to temperate darkness and gloom. Same location, different process, that much was clear.
(Interesting thought occurs to me here. I never experience temperature in dreams; it can only be inferred from the quality of ambient light, or more obvious visual cues like snow or fire. Must read around to try and find out which parts of the brain one dreams with. I wonder if the lack of certain physical sensations like heat and cold are due to the same limitations that prevent your body from responding to physical movements you make while dreaming?)
Mr. Burns had either knocked down his own house, or realized that it had been knocked down. He grinned evilly and made imperious gestures, and as he did so, mazelike walls and ramparts and corridoors began constructing themselves. The structures expanded out and out in erratic patterns, to fill the entire landscape. The whole thing was made of plywood which had been inexpertly painted black, like the plain boxes theaters use to make rearrangeable sets. Only here the paint job was bad and the wood looked either flimsy or old or both. Myself and my entourage had to hide in the hollow spaces inside the walls and flee from the place's security guards. Since the place wasn't ours, of course, we didn't belong there and we didn't want to be caught. So the ending image of this act was of us in flight, certain that pursuers were only a step behind us.
Act three. Did not take any longer in subjective time than the previous acts, but was information-dense, so I've subdivided it into scenes!
Scene one. I fled into something like a junkyard or a car scrapyard, still with the feeling that my pursuer was gaining on me. After a few dodges and darts I found an unlocked car and threw myself into the back seat, landing on some crumpled-up plastic. The chief security guard got into the front seat. This was her car. For a single panicked moment I thought maybe if I crouched under the plastic and stayed very still she wouldn't see me. But then she gave me a look over her shoulder and a little smile, and I knew that me finding her unlocked car was exactly the plan.
She looked a bit like Annie Lennox:
only with heavier makeup and one of those old-fashioned police hats. Scary, but rather hot. (Gee whiz, I wonder what recurring dream character we have here? Grr. Whee!) More dreams or movies about dystopian futures should have such a chica as main antagonist!
Scene two. The car was now a tank. There was more light in the sky, and scenery existed in the background. She drove us over to the edge of the scrap yard, where it bordered on the woods, and I saw something like a small graveyard. I recognized it immediately as the graves of my fellow members of the resistance, kept there in (supposed) secret from the guards. The area with the burial plots in it was marked out from the bare dirt by a loose line of pale stones. Narrow pathways marked out in the same way meandered throught the area. Instead of names and dates, the graves were marked with gaudy headstones made of brightly-colored metal and plastic. Even though the paths were extremely narrow and the ground was difficult to see from inside the tank, the chief guard lady maneuvered along the paths with delicate precision, turning with slow care, so as not to disturb anything. I noticed this and realized it for a gesture of deep respect, as between honorable enemies at the end of a long campaign.
Scene three. We moved further out, to the edge of the woods. No longer had the sense of being in a vehicle. It was just about dawn. Behind us and to the right, beyond the scrap yard, a nearly-intact highway stretched out to the horizon. On our right plains and woods rolled out, with some steel-colored old water towers standing lonely in the distance, the paint on them faded beyond legibility. (The old-school shape, like a hat-wearing cup on stilts, not the kind that are all bulbous on top.) In front of us was a wide river, and immediately to our left was a pool of water with a weeping willow leaning out over it. I/we looked around at the river and further out to the woods and plains, and thought, Maybe anyone who was left [from the resistance, that is] fled out there, into the wilderness. Then a flock of pigeons exploded out of the trees, their flight patterns indicative of panic. You know how flocks of birds get all crazy-swirly when there's a bunch of flocks that don't normally fly together trying to share the same airspace? I didn't recognize it till I ran through the images in my mind just now, but that's where I'd seen that before. After the first flock of flocks, more came; the birds were fleeing from every direction except the one from which we had come. And I had the horrified thought: Plague. Here we'd been fighting each other for control, while out there in the wilderness there was coming something that wanted to totally destroy us.
Right on cue, a hideous behemoth came into view in the distance, lumbering down the highway, wide as four lanes of traffic all by itself.
I scrutinized it as best I could from afar. Didn't intend to stick around once it got near. Its basic body type, my brain had clearly gotten from the behemoths in Heroes IV (oh how I miss that game! and the broken laptop all my savegames are on!), but it was distorted or mutated way beyond that. Still had the grey fur and the lumpy physique. Instead of a face-shaped face, though, its head skewed over to one side, so that one eye would have had to be much bigger than the other. (Fortunately the small-eye side was the side facing us.) Its legs were small and stubby, almost vestigial, while its arms were freaking enormous, massive muscley claw-shaped hands nearly as long as the rest of its body. Between the arms and legs it had a mass of wavy tentacles instead of a proper front-of-torso. As it continued down the road towards the scrap yard I saw it (or perhaps another one like it?) glide through the air, using its tentacle mass as a kind of wings, so that its huge grasping hands looked like a giant scoop held out in front of it. It turned right as it came to the scrap yard, and upon closer inspection it didn't look so much like the behemoth as I'd thought.
My companion (not pictured) was now apparently carrying me by flapping with her wings; I could feel the action but was not paying attention to it yet.
The beast was headed towards the pond--not hunting us, just hunting. I looked down at the water and saw the silvery side of a fish, wide as my arm, turning just under the surface. My first thought was, Hey, a fish! Maybe we can catch it and eat it. But then it kept turning and turning--eight feet long, I thought--and I realized no fish could be that long and the still same width all the way down. The idea disturbed me and I discarded any notion of possibly trying to eat OR catch whatever it was. We hovered back away from the bank as the beast approached; it passed next to the tree, brushing back the lower branches as it went by. (This was a very tall tree.) It hitched itself over, with something like a very graceful full-body shrug, so that it could lower itself into the water tentacles down. Seen up close, it was obvious to me that it was also a kind of squid, and its tentacles up close looked a lot more like fish than like part of a furry beast. Long, silvery fish.
Just then, I could feel that the wings that kept us hovering over the surface of the water were laboring harder, that we were slowly beginning to sink towards the water.
At the thought of even touching the surface of a pond with two of those fearsome beasts in it, I felt that old familiar, "well, fuck this!" feeling surge up inside of me, and woke up.
So it'll take me some time to sort out all the symbols in there, but there are some things I can say right off the bat.
The little girl character has become a woman! No longer just an unpredictable young woman whom I love dearly and fear passionately. Now she is a sexy commandant who tricks me into the back of her vehicle, honors my fallen, and then warns me of oncoming peril which endangers us both. Oo yeah. That kicks so much ass.
Mr. Burns is me again. This is like the fourth or fifth time that an active mode entered into by my conscious personality has been represented in a dream by a male cartoon character. The flimsy dingy gloomy maze probably represents a mental state. Of, well, gloomy brooding with undertones of panic. Maybe I turn into male cartoon characters when I do things that are stupid, selfish or immature? That would make sense.
The dog and seal are an interesting image. Tentatively I'd interpret them to be the conscious and unconscious sides of my hat. The dog would represent the conscious side because it is a land creature and because it was already in the house. The seal would then be the unconscious side, because it is an underwater creature and because I just recently became friends with it. So they'll each play with me, but not with each other, and each feels sort of pouty when I pay more attention to the other one than to it. Oy vey. At least they are both friends with me, though!
Yeah, the behemoth squid thing was scary-looking. But the threat it presented was potential, avoidable, rather than immediate and certain. Like keeping an eye on the wasp in the room. All the cues point to it being something not originating from within my personality, as well, which makes it a little easier to be alert against it. Whatever it represents.
What I find most interesting from a dream tech standpoint was the car/tank/graveyard/flapping bird wings thing. Okay. We already postulate that the "wilderness" represented the world of mental experience outside my personality; behemoth came from there, I don't have that many flocks of pigeons in me, etc. Which means that act three, scene one up there either represented (if I was not traveling or there's no such thing) or was (if I can and was) me and my invisibler half moving to, and then across, the boundary between my personality and whatever's right next to it in whatever part of the world we all go to when we dream. Which, assuming the second thing, suggests several items of tech.
Item the first, sexy scary chick is the person/represents the aspect of me who/which has the ability to direct energy extensions out of my personality. Textev: car belongs to her. Car becomes tank as we approach boundary. Once we cross the boundary, the tank becomes unmanifested, implying that what feels big and bulky when on the inside is like a minimal requirement for movement on the outside.
Item the second, what I refer to as "my entourage" in dreams, whoever or whatever they are, are not of use or do not manifest separately from me when outside my personality. This is the meaning of the graveyard scene. Now, I don't take that scene to mean they are dead or disempowered or whatever. I would be very surprised if they were absent from my next dream. Rather, I think it is location and function-dependent. Like in the card game Magic, when a creature you had in play is put into the graveyard, that doesn't mean it's no longer a factor in the game. There are spells that can bring cards out of the graveyard, shuffle them back into your deck, or that simply act differently when certain things are in your graveyard. So the term, and the image, are pretty fluid for me. But the whole no-entourage-outside-the-ego-boundary implication is pretty unambiguous.
Item the third. This is not a conclusion, only a suspicion. I have seen dream-beasties before which resemble the behemoth squid monster. For lack of a better word, an organism/idea/experience of the sort represented by that dream image is the sort of creature I do refer to as a demon.
(I've talked about this before and at length, but to recap a bit. In common parlance, demons and angels are like anthropomorphized quanta of moral energy under direct control of either god or the devil. According to that system, only the direct (god speaketh!) or indirect (I speaketh in the name of god with his/her permission!) intervention by one of the two ultrapowers will affect their behavior. In my personal made-up lexicon, demons and angels are either A. organisms which don't have bodies, B. memeplexes which seem to behave organically, or C. there is no difference between the two descriptions. Which means they can be treated like organisms; communicated with, befriended/tamed, chased away, eaten etc. My favorite is C, by the way.)
So then. What if, when a thing like our friend Uglybuns over there gets inside a personality but doesn't actually subsume it, part of it can turn into something like the laser-window machine from the laser stadium dream? Like a...hell, hard to think of a good metaphor for this one. Like if a lion tried to gouge out your guts, maybe, and while you were fighting it off a piece of claw got lodged in your small intestine, so that from then on all the food you digested had to move around it, so you got fed more slowly and had diarrhea no matter how much you ate?
Okay, that metaphor sucks. I'm usually better at metaphors. But, dangit, at least half of being good at metaphors is being able to notice when two things resemble one another, even (or especially) in a totally non-obvious way. And those two things did, some way or another, even though I can't possibly show them to you because my brain assembled them out of bits and pieces of sense-memory and shoved them into my dreams to try and get me to pay attention to parts of my personality that need fixin'.
Peter Carroll once wrote something to the effect that even a small ability to change oneself is greatly preferable to a large, impressive ability to perform useless parlor tricks. So even though my metaphorical analysis is gappy as of yet, the goals they describe are clear to me. Metaphorically speaking: I must get to be on even better terms with this dream lady with the too much eye makeup, and/or convince my dog and seal that they really can get along, even if the one doesn't swim too good and the other finds walking a chore. Then I will perhaps open up several new, improved avenues by which to be able to change myself into someone even more fun to be around!
Then, not only will imaginary lava want to be my friend, so will other people maybe! Teeheehee! *tents fingers and tries vainly not to giggle*
That means, "I'm not crazy anymore"--in my made-up space language.
~ Saturday Night Live, one of the Jeopardy sketches
Ach, time to go home from work.
con el corazon de pero
Senor Burns, Senor Burns
el diablo con dinero!
~that one Simpsons where the school strikes oil. may have gotten the words wrong!
should I
save myself
for later
or generously
give
and do
~Bjork
Saw a rabbit this morning. I said, "Hello, bunny." It just sat there warily as I walked past, which surprised me, since like all rabbits it looked as though it were ready to bolt into the underbrush at the slightest movement.
I sometimes think my dream logs might be the most entertaining things I put on this blog, because they are colorful and action-packed. Like reading a miniature short story with a plot that doesn't make sense, but characters and images which are shiny and leave a tasty residue in the brain.
Oh, a doozy of a dream last night. A doozy! Acts 2 and 3 would make a great movie plot.
However, in order for me to understand what this dream was trying to tell me, I needed the symbolic context provided by an earlier dream. Which, in backreading, it turns out I did not write down.
The earlier one, let's call it "the laser stadium dream":
Act one. My entourage and I were hurrying through the outer hallways of an enormous building which felt like a stadium. It was well-lit and bustling with people (not pictured), its walls made of grey stone. Visible through the occasional archway in the walls (or maybe I just knew what was going on in there through dreamovision?) was a central chamber, about the size of the United Center turned on its side. Maybe a little bigger. In it, partnered teams of humans and enormous, shiny magical beasties were taking turns singing and dancing together; the music was haunting and wonderful and the dances gyrated and pranced all through the empty space. I wanted very badly to go on in and take my turn. One of my entourage handed me a vibrantly-illustrated book, and as I looked through it I realized with a jolt that I had no idea what I/we were supposed to perform. "I don't know the words," I said, stricken. My entourage-person grabbed me by the hand and we took off, flying down the halls.
Act two. We flew up and up around many halls, ramps really, and the light and the color of the stone walls gradually shifted from cool grey to a warm light tan color, like afternoon sunlight on sandstone. At last we came to a square chamber, its walls and ceiling made of large blocks of the same color of stone. Lower down on the walls there were a few round ducts or tubes, one of which we had arrived through. Instead of a floor the walls stretched down into emptiness (not pictured). I was alone. There was a round window or portal, near the top of the wall at the front of the room. The warm light should have been shining through it into the room--and thence, I understood, down into the rest of the building. Instead, there was a complicated and nasty-looking metal device which exactly covered most of the window, and in front of the device a crossbeam of iron or charred wood ran across the length of the room. In the center of the device there was a small pinhole or lens, through which the sunlight captured by the device could be focused and pointed like a laser. I floated, or was gently pulled, down into one of the tubes, and rushed out of the floorless room back down into the building.
Act three. My entourage and I were sitting at a table in a large banquet hall behind the performance chamber in the stadium. Some other people were with us--I think they may have been fictional characters or representations of people I knew, but those details are gone from my memory. The hall was crowded; everyone was eating their meal and talking and mingling. I brought my attention back from looking around at the room, and saw that everyone else at my table had gotten up and wandered off. Then laser beams, three or four of them, fired down out of the ceiling, scoring the table in front of me. I was worried by how close I'd come to being hit, and also quite annoyed.
The symbolism in that dream has come to be very understandable to me as I've thought it over! What I am fond of calling "the machine in my brain", the issues I still have that are what remains of my craziness, are represented by the machine in the window in act 2. They take something that should be wholesome and joyous and make it into a weapon. A weapon which, more often than not, is something that endangers me and drives people away from me, or me from them. The proper use of the thing the machine is sitting on top of and evilly transforming would enable me to achieve some form of awesomeness that I desire very, very much.
As I fell asleep last night, I was contemplating in some detail about some personality-construction issues that have been bugging me. It is therefore most gratifying to me that my dream-making parts were able to represent the issues with which I am wrestling in the following way! I want to call this "the pointless dystopia dream (with monster)":
Act one. Some confusion of sequentiality here. My entourage and I were hanging out in a house. I had found a seal, or went out and found a seal, who was definitely my friend. It was a happy and playful fellow and didn't seem to mind having to waddle around on land. We went into the living room of the house or were already there. A dog was there, equally happy and playful as the seal, and also my friend. I sat down on the couch to play fetch with them, and wanted them to play with each other. I had some sort of toy that I would throw across the room; whichever animal reacted first ran over to the other end of the room, grabbed it, and carried it back to me, while the other animal sat in front of me feeling miffed. When they continued in this way even after I'd explained to them what I wanted (yes, dogs and seals in dreams can have things explained to them!) I became a little frustrated and vaguely confused.
Act two. Camera pulled way back. Lighting went from midday summery sunlight to temperate darkness and gloom. Same location, different process, that much was clear.
(Interesting thought occurs to me here. I never experience temperature in dreams; it can only be inferred from the quality of ambient light, or more obvious visual cues like snow or fire. Must read around to try and find out which parts of the brain one dreams with. I wonder if the lack of certain physical sensations like heat and cold are due to the same limitations that prevent your body from responding to physical movements you make while dreaming?)
Mr. Burns had either knocked down his own house, or realized that it had been knocked down. He grinned evilly and made imperious gestures, and as he did so, mazelike walls and ramparts and corridoors began constructing themselves. The structures expanded out and out in erratic patterns, to fill the entire landscape. The whole thing was made of plywood which had been inexpertly painted black, like the plain boxes theaters use to make rearrangeable sets. Only here the paint job was bad and the wood looked either flimsy or old or both. Myself and my entourage had to hide in the hollow spaces inside the walls and flee from the place's security guards. Since the place wasn't ours, of course, we didn't belong there and we didn't want to be caught. So the ending image of this act was of us in flight, certain that pursuers were only a step behind us.
Act three. Did not take any longer in subjective time than the previous acts, but was information-dense, so I've subdivided it into scenes!
Scene one. I fled into something like a junkyard or a car scrapyard, still with the feeling that my pursuer was gaining on me. After a few dodges and darts I found an unlocked car and threw myself into the back seat, landing on some crumpled-up plastic. The chief security guard got into the front seat. This was her car. For a single panicked moment I thought maybe if I crouched under the plastic and stayed very still she wouldn't see me. But then she gave me a look over her shoulder and a little smile, and I knew that me finding her unlocked car was exactly the plan.
She looked a bit like Annie Lennox:
only with heavier makeup and one of those old-fashioned police hats. Scary, but rather hot. (Gee whiz, I wonder what recurring dream character we have here? Grr. Whee!) More dreams or movies about dystopian futures should have such a chica as main antagonist!
Scene two. The car was now a tank. There was more light in the sky, and scenery existed in the background. She drove us over to the edge of the scrap yard, where it bordered on the woods, and I saw something like a small graveyard. I recognized it immediately as the graves of my fellow members of the resistance, kept there in (supposed) secret from the guards. The area with the burial plots in it was marked out from the bare dirt by a loose line of pale stones. Narrow pathways marked out in the same way meandered throught the area. Instead of names and dates, the graves were marked with gaudy headstones made of brightly-colored metal and plastic. Even though the paths were extremely narrow and the ground was difficult to see from inside the tank, the chief guard lady maneuvered along the paths with delicate precision, turning with slow care, so as not to disturb anything. I noticed this and realized it for a gesture of deep respect, as between honorable enemies at the end of a long campaign.
Scene three. We moved further out, to the edge of the woods. No longer had the sense of being in a vehicle. It was just about dawn. Behind us and to the right, beyond the scrap yard, a nearly-intact highway stretched out to the horizon. On our right plains and woods rolled out, with some steel-colored old water towers standing lonely in the distance, the paint on them faded beyond legibility. (The old-school shape, like a hat-wearing cup on stilts, not the kind that are all bulbous on top.) In front of us was a wide river, and immediately to our left was a pool of water with a weeping willow leaning out over it. I/we looked around at the river and further out to the woods and plains, and thought, Maybe anyone who was left [from the resistance, that is] fled out there, into the wilderness. Then a flock of pigeons exploded out of the trees, their flight patterns indicative of panic. You know how flocks of birds get all crazy-swirly when there's a bunch of flocks that don't normally fly together trying to share the same airspace? I didn't recognize it till I ran through the images in my mind just now, but that's where I'd seen that before. After the first flock of flocks, more came; the birds were fleeing from every direction except the one from which we had come. And I had the horrified thought: Plague. Here we'd been fighting each other for control, while out there in the wilderness there was coming something that wanted to totally destroy us.
Right on cue, a hideous behemoth came into view in the distance, lumbering down the highway, wide as four lanes of traffic all by itself.
I scrutinized it as best I could from afar. Didn't intend to stick around once it got near. Its basic body type, my brain had clearly gotten from the behemoths in Heroes IV (oh how I miss that game! and the broken laptop all my savegames are on!), but it was distorted or mutated way beyond that. Still had the grey fur and the lumpy physique. Instead of a face-shaped face, though, its head skewed over to one side, so that one eye would have had to be much bigger than the other. (Fortunately the small-eye side was the side facing us.) Its legs were small and stubby, almost vestigial, while its arms were freaking enormous, massive muscley claw-shaped hands nearly as long as the rest of its body. Between the arms and legs it had a mass of wavy tentacles instead of a proper front-of-torso. As it continued down the road towards the scrap yard I saw it (or perhaps another one like it?) glide through the air, using its tentacle mass as a kind of wings, so that its huge grasping hands looked like a giant scoop held out in front of it. It turned right as it came to the scrap yard, and upon closer inspection it didn't look so much like the behemoth as I'd thought.
My companion (not pictured) was now apparently carrying me by flapping with her wings; I could feel the action but was not paying attention to it yet.
The beast was headed towards the pond--not hunting us, just hunting. I looked down at the water and saw the silvery side of a fish, wide as my arm, turning just under the surface. My first thought was, Hey, a fish! Maybe we can catch it and eat it. But then it kept turning and turning--eight feet long, I thought--and I realized no fish could be that long and the still same width all the way down. The idea disturbed me and I discarded any notion of possibly trying to eat OR catch whatever it was. We hovered back away from the bank as the beast approached; it passed next to the tree, brushing back the lower branches as it went by. (This was a very tall tree.) It hitched itself over, with something like a very graceful full-body shrug, so that it could lower itself into the water tentacles down. Seen up close, it was obvious to me that it was also a kind of squid, and its tentacles up close looked a lot more like fish than like part of a furry beast. Long, silvery fish.
Just then, I could feel that the wings that kept us hovering over the surface of the water were laboring harder, that we were slowly beginning to sink towards the water.
At the thought of even touching the surface of a pond with two of those fearsome beasts in it, I felt that old familiar, "well, fuck this!" feeling surge up inside of me, and woke up.
So it'll take me some time to sort out all the symbols in there, but there are some things I can say right off the bat.
The little girl character has become a woman! No longer just an unpredictable young woman whom I love dearly and fear passionately. Now she is a sexy commandant who tricks me into the back of her vehicle, honors my fallen, and then warns me of oncoming peril which endangers us both. Oo yeah. That kicks so much ass.
Mr. Burns is me again. This is like the fourth or fifth time that an active mode entered into by my conscious personality has been represented in a dream by a male cartoon character. The flimsy dingy gloomy maze probably represents a mental state. Of, well, gloomy brooding with undertones of panic. Maybe I turn into male cartoon characters when I do things that are stupid, selfish or immature? That would make sense.
The dog and seal are an interesting image. Tentatively I'd interpret them to be the conscious and unconscious sides of my hat. The dog would represent the conscious side because it is a land creature and because it was already in the house. The seal would then be the unconscious side, because it is an underwater creature and because I just recently became friends with it. So they'll each play with me, but not with each other, and each feels sort of pouty when I pay more attention to the other one than to it. Oy vey. At least they are both friends with me, though!
Yeah, the behemoth squid thing was scary-looking. But the threat it presented was potential, avoidable, rather than immediate and certain. Like keeping an eye on the wasp in the room. All the cues point to it being something not originating from within my personality, as well, which makes it a little easier to be alert against it. Whatever it represents.
What I find most interesting from a dream tech standpoint was the car/tank/graveyard/flapping bird wings thing. Okay. We already postulate that the "wilderness" represented the world of mental experience outside my personality; behemoth came from there, I don't have that many flocks of pigeons in me, etc. Which means that act three, scene one up there either represented (if I was not traveling or there's no such thing) or was (if I can and was) me and my invisibler half moving to, and then across, the boundary between my personality and whatever's right next to it in whatever part of the world we all go to when we dream. Which, assuming the second thing, suggests several items of tech.
Item the first, sexy scary chick is the person/represents the aspect of me who/which has the ability to direct energy extensions out of my personality. Textev: car belongs to her. Car becomes tank as we approach boundary. Once we cross the boundary, the tank becomes unmanifested, implying that what feels big and bulky when on the inside is like a minimal requirement for movement on the outside.
Item the second, what I refer to as "my entourage" in dreams, whoever or whatever they are, are not of use or do not manifest separately from me when outside my personality. This is the meaning of the graveyard scene. Now, I don't take that scene to mean they are dead or disempowered or whatever. I would be very surprised if they were absent from my next dream. Rather, I think it is location and function-dependent. Like in the card game Magic, when a creature you had in play is put into the graveyard, that doesn't mean it's no longer a factor in the game. There are spells that can bring cards out of the graveyard, shuffle them back into your deck, or that simply act differently when certain things are in your graveyard. So the term, and the image, are pretty fluid for me. But the whole no-entourage-outside-the-ego-boundary implication is pretty unambiguous.
Item the third. This is not a conclusion, only a suspicion. I have seen dream-beasties before which resemble the behemoth squid monster. For lack of a better word, an organism/idea/experience of the sort represented by that dream image is the sort of creature I do refer to as a demon.
(I've talked about this before and at length, but to recap a bit. In common parlance, demons and angels are like anthropomorphized quanta of moral energy under direct control of either god or the devil. According to that system, only the direct (god speaketh!) or indirect (I speaketh in the name of god with his/her permission!) intervention by one of the two ultrapowers will affect their behavior. In my personal made-up lexicon, demons and angels are either A. organisms which don't have bodies, B. memeplexes which seem to behave organically, or C. there is no difference between the two descriptions. Which means they can be treated like organisms; communicated with, befriended/tamed, chased away, eaten etc. My favorite is C, by the way.)
So then. What if, when a thing like our friend Uglybuns over there gets inside a personality but doesn't actually subsume it, part of it can turn into something like the laser-window machine from the laser stadium dream? Like a...hell, hard to think of a good metaphor for this one. Like if a lion tried to gouge out your guts, maybe, and while you were fighting it off a piece of claw got lodged in your small intestine, so that from then on all the food you digested had to move around it, so you got fed more slowly and had diarrhea no matter how much you ate?
Okay, that metaphor sucks. I'm usually better at metaphors. But, dangit, at least half of being good at metaphors is being able to notice when two things resemble one another, even (or especially) in a totally non-obvious way. And those two things did, some way or another, even though I can't possibly show them to you because my brain assembled them out of bits and pieces of sense-memory and shoved them into my dreams to try and get me to pay attention to parts of my personality that need fixin'.
Peter Carroll once wrote something to the effect that even a small ability to change oneself is greatly preferable to a large, impressive ability to perform useless parlor tricks. So even though my metaphorical analysis is gappy as of yet, the goals they describe are clear to me. Metaphorically speaking: I must get to be on even better terms with this dream lady with the too much eye makeup, and/or convince my dog and seal that they really can get along, even if the one doesn't swim too good and the other finds walking a chore. Then I will perhaps open up several new, improved avenues by which to be able to change myself into someone even more fun to be around!
Then, not only will imaginary lava want to be my friend, so will other people maybe! Teeheehee! *tents fingers and tries vainly not to giggle*
That means, "I'm not crazy anymore"--in my made-up space language.
~ Saturday Night Live, one of the Jeopardy sketches
Ach, time to go home from work.
Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol 42. (superstition special!)
Everyone's got superstitions. Some are expansions from observed obvious things, like how it's bad luck to open an umbrella in the house. Some just help to organize one's emotions, like how knocking on wood is supposed to help remove one's will from behind a statement of possible calamity.
I'd been thinking of doing this earlier, maybe declaring a Superstition Saturday (alliteration anyone?). But there really isn't enough to talk about in the superstition department to make it a regular feature, and besides, I was too busy relaxing this weekend to make it go. Let's see if I can make it happen today!
O: Observed event
I: Intentional action
>: increased likelihood of result
=: direct correlation with result
(I) Buckling down at work without outside prompting.
> I have good luck in matters which involve faceless, bureaucratic institutions OR social events in which tricky timing issues are crucial to success.
(O) I am interrupted while working on a creative, psychological or other thinky thing. Similarly, if I am trying to write something down and my pen keeps drying up.
= That thing being worked on is important, worth doing and deserving of careful thought. More repetition means more emphasis.
(O) The bus is either at the bus stop or just pulling away from it as I exit the door of the apartment building, meaning that I won't be able to catch that particular one as I don't run quite that fast.
> I will experience a frustrating and/or unusually challenging day. (Likely causation factors there involve lateness of wake-time and disruption of morning routine. Actual bus arrival times vary just enough from schedule that I can't always hold myself entirely at fault. Maybe the driver was just running a bit ahead of schedule, kind of thing.)
(O) Lightbulb or appliance light flickers when I walk past, OR I notice birds flying around in a suspiciously apt manner, OR I overhear a suspiciously apt snatch of conversation between passersby.
= Ironic commentary on whatever I was doing or stewing about in my brain, ancient Greek style. Repetition or more flamboyant bird action denotes increased sarcasm or concern on the part of the universe.
(I) I do something nice, decent, or obvious duty-as-friend for closeperson.
> I have good luck or miraculously avoid bad luck in tricky relationship situations or in the arena of personal care.
(I) Play or sing my songs in front of new people who respond positively.
= I get more songs more often, and have good luck in a random area of endeavor depending upon the nature of the audience.
(I) Defer gratification of my whims in order to pay attention to someone else and validate them.
= I am more able to sneak, slack, cut corners or laze about. Especially at work, but also regarding situations when, say, I might want tell two people who don't talk to each other that I'm hanging out with the other one so that I can stay home and sleep. Mostly used for work slacky. (Have I mentioned I've taken up the Kingdom of Loathing again?)
(I) Smoke my last rolled cigarette without having either rolled a replacement or bummed a replacement off of someone who smokes ready-mades.
> I will do something else stupid, like forget to call someone back or leave the house without my keys. (Likely this one's just a correlation, a mental state barometer of sorts. If I'm being lazy and not planning ahead in one area of my life, I'm more likely to do the same in another, ja?)
It's interesting to hear different people give different provenances for why their superstitions work or how they came about. Most positive superstitions get the thumbs-up from God, angels, or in the case of one lady I know, a dead loved one. Negative superstitions can fall under Murphy's law, demons, etc. Though I suppose there are people out there who will blame bad fairies, the government, or terrorists for all their little woes.
Who knows how this stuff works, though? Maybe the universe likes to run in grooves; maybe it's the quantum oberver effect of the person holding the superstition that nudges reality around them to form a correlative habit. Or maybe there are nice angels and bad fairies who get some unknown form of benefit from annoying us, poking us in the rear when we get sulky or complacent, and helping to make sure that if we've been being inattentive to other things, we lose our keys, too.
I'd been thinking of doing this earlier, maybe declaring a Superstition Saturday (alliteration anyone?). But there really isn't enough to talk about in the superstition department to make it a regular feature, and besides, I was too busy relaxing this weekend to make it go. Let's see if I can make it happen today!
O: Observed event
I: Intentional action
>: increased likelihood of result
=: direct correlation with result
(I) Buckling down at work without outside prompting.
> I have good luck in matters which involve faceless, bureaucratic institutions OR social events in which tricky timing issues are crucial to success.
(O) I am interrupted while working on a creative, psychological or other thinky thing. Similarly, if I am trying to write something down and my pen keeps drying up.
= That thing being worked on is important, worth doing and deserving of careful thought. More repetition means more emphasis.
(O) The bus is either at the bus stop or just pulling away from it as I exit the door of the apartment building, meaning that I won't be able to catch that particular one as I don't run quite that fast.
> I will experience a frustrating and/or unusually challenging day. (Likely causation factors there involve lateness of wake-time and disruption of morning routine. Actual bus arrival times vary just enough from schedule that I can't always hold myself entirely at fault. Maybe the driver was just running a bit ahead of schedule, kind of thing.)
(O) Lightbulb or appliance light flickers when I walk past, OR I notice birds flying around in a suspiciously apt manner, OR I overhear a suspiciously apt snatch of conversation between passersby.
= Ironic commentary on whatever I was doing or stewing about in my brain, ancient Greek style. Repetition or more flamboyant bird action denotes increased sarcasm or concern on the part of the universe.
(I) I do something nice, decent, or obvious duty-as-friend for closeperson.
> I have good luck or miraculously avoid bad luck in tricky relationship situations or in the arena of personal care.
(I) Play or sing my songs in front of new people who respond positively.
= I get more songs more often, and have good luck in a random area of endeavor depending upon the nature of the audience.
(I) Defer gratification of my whims in order to pay attention to someone else and validate them.
= I am more able to sneak, slack, cut corners or laze about. Especially at work, but also regarding situations when, say, I might want tell two people who don't talk to each other that I'm hanging out with the other one so that I can stay home and sleep. Mostly used for work slacky. (Have I mentioned I've taken up the Kingdom of Loathing again?)
(I) Smoke my last rolled cigarette without having either rolled a replacement or bummed a replacement off of someone who smokes ready-mades.
> I will do something else stupid, like forget to call someone back or leave the house without my keys. (Likely this one's just a correlation, a mental state barometer of sorts. If I'm being lazy and not planning ahead in one area of my life, I'm more likely to do the same in another, ja?)
It's interesting to hear different people give different provenances for why their superstitions work or how they came about. Most positive superstitions get the thumbs-up from God, angels, or in the case of one lady I know, a dead loved one. Negative superstitions can fall under Murphy's law, demons, etc. Though I suppose there are people out there who will blame bad fairies, the government, or terrorists for all their little woes.
Who knows how this stuff works, though? Maybe the universe likes to run in grooves; maybe it's the quantum oberver effect of the person holding the superstition that nudges reality around them to form a correlative habit. Or maybe there are nice angels and bad fairies who get some unknown form of benefit from annoying us, poking us in the rear when we get sulky or complacent, and helping to make sure that if we've been being inattentive to other things, we lose our keys, too.
dead man's blues
Woke up this morning and had this sneak up on me just as I was heating up my morning cocoa. When, oh when, will I stop writing songs about death? Eh, probably never. One of those big themes that tends to characterize a person's work in general. Even though any particular example can be read through a number of different conceits as well.
This one, however, is unambiguously about death. It is also unambiguously the blues! Dave had been saying to me a time ago that it would be awesome if I wrote something else that did the thing that but the ghost does. While that song has things that I don't yet know how to do again (that being the nature of magic), I can write more blues. And I have never yet failed in a songwriting challenge / commission once I have decided to accept it. I am still a little growly and suspicious of this song because the tune is too similar to Pentecostal basement dream. However, if I have to play one and hoard the other up, this is the one I will play. It is the tighter and craftier example, equally Minerva methoded but better revised between breakfast table and desk.
[dead man's blues] 12/2/08
when you get busy dying
you let your buildings go
you open up your heart
and turn them out into the snow
won't fix their leaky rooftops
won't mend their broken glass
you root through your possessions
for a torch that you can pass
what you're afraid of losing
it isn't yours to lose
who's gonna keep on walking
in a dead man's shoes
your bank account is empty
your guns have turned to rust
you look round at your friends
and realize whom you can trust
not to give you affection
not not to lay the blame
but who'll use the right inflection
when it's time to speak your name
you'll break your heart in choosing
what isn't yours to choose
who's gonna keep on walking
in a dead man's shoes
the flowers by the sidewalk
smell much sweeter than before
you catch yourself a' weeping
when the wind comes in the door
you wrap yourself in music
to warm your shivering soul
you tried hard not to abuse it
but you never had control
thought you knew just how to use it
but that was all a ruse
who's gonna keep on walking
in a dead man's shoes
it's like you never paid attention
to what happens every day
now there's a whole new dimension
nothing getting in its way
not who will love you tender
or what they'll put you through
but how will you be remembered
and most of all, by who
shame you can't stick around
to hear the news
who's gonna keep on walking?
that's the dead man's blues.
This one, however, is unambiguously about death. It is also unambiguously the blues! Dave had been saying to me a time ago that it would be awesome if I wrote something else that did the thing that but the ghost does. While that song has things that I don't yet know how to do again (that being the nature of magic), I can write more blues. And I have never yet failed in a songwriting challenge / commission once I have decided to accept it. I am still a little growly and suspicious of this song because the tune is too similar to Pentecostal basement dream. However, if I have to play one and hoard the other up, this is the one I will play. It is the tighter and craftier example, equally Minerva methoded but better revised between breakfast table and desk.
[dead man's blues] 12/2/08
when you get busy dying
you let your buildings go
you open up your heart
and turn them out into the snow
won't fix their leaky rooftops
won't mend their broken glass
you root through your possessions
for a torch that you can pass
what you're afraid of losing
it isn't yours to lose
who's gonna keep on walking
in a dead man's shoes
your bank account is empty
your guns have turned to rust
you look round at your friends
and realize whom you can trust
not to give you affection
not not to lay the blame
but who'll use the right inflection
when it's time to speak your name
you'll break your heart in choosing
what isn't yours to choose
who's gonna keep on walking
in a dead man's shoes
the flowers by the sidewalk
smell much sweeter than before
you catch yourself a' weeping
when the wind comes in the door
you wrap yourself in music
to warm your shivering soul
you tried hard not to abuse it
but you never had control
thought you knew just how to use it
but that was all a ruse
who's gonna keep on walking
in a dead man's shoes
it's like you never paid attention
to what happens every day
now there's a whole new dimension
nothing getting in its way
not who will love you tender
or what they'll put you through
but how will you be remembered
and most of all, by who
shame you can't stick around
to hear the news
who's gonna keep on walking?
that's the dead man's blues.
Musical Monday vol 3.
A busy and good Thanksgiving weekend!
(Song/poem at end for those who wish to skip diary entry part.)
Got to go to family T-day on Thursday, which was fun. I like our relatives, truly. They are nice people and pleasant to be around. Jamie and Joel made is down from far Wisconsinonia and JP stopped in for a bit, so we got to see all the Joe & Rosie cousins, as well as having me, Mom & sisters all there. Practically a family quorum!
I am adjusting myself to the idea of representing a permanent minority worldview within my biological group. So what if their groupthink contains mores and standards of propriety I find limiting or occasionally non-life-affirming? Let them be happy in the ways that seem best to them. I can set up the Venn diagrams of mental states in myself to minimize the pangs of cognitive dissonance. Perhaps I can hope that finally, slowly I have grown mature enough to not try to convince people who truly do not wish to change their minds. It's not bothersome what the rules are, in particular; every such groupthink has slightly different ones. It's the manner in which rules are decided upon and enforced, and the emotional tenor of the disapproval earned by those who deivate too far from standard. Pity and fear, ja. Pity, that the deviant has bought for themselves inevitable misery and possible damnation should they not see the error of their ways. Fear, that such a one will not see the error of their ways, or will influence others to follow their polluted ideas and behaviors.
How much of this is me projecting memories of others onto my relatives? I'm not sure. Some, no doubt. And different individuals manifest their participation in the family groupthink differently. But I no less than anyone else am hesitant to generate controversy about it. Because while the resulting arguments could certainly help many people understand one another better, others would end up understanding each other worse. Or end up suffering emotional hurts they would not have the tools to mend. Hell, I'm not even thinking of any specific things between people--it's one of those inevitable things. Reminds me of the 30 Rock where Jack and his mom (who openly loathe one another) teamed up to prod Liz's nicey-nice and super-supportive family until all the hidden resentments poured out. It only took them one afternoon, and sure enough, the Lemons were screaming bloody muder at one another, Xmas or no Xmas. However nice we are, even if we are all genuinely sweet and friendly people, just being close over a period of decades is going to give any humans reasons to scream at each other.
I got to play some music for the fam, though, which was fun and they did enjoy. :) Where home is and road don't go, and Twisting (the TMBG cover), can't remember what else. I am becoming bolder with each instance! Aunt Rosie gave me a Diana Krall CD to listen to, said my voice reminded her of Krall. She's good; croonier than my style, and a smoother voice than me by far. Not a smoker, this Diana Krall character.
Saturday me and Dave hung out with Paula and did Thanksgiving 2. This also was pleasant and fun; there was no stringy thing there, so alas, no playing for me. We had food, had good hanging out and talking time--and then all ended up crashing way early because of food coma. Mmm, food coma. Sunday morning (with all the obligatory Dave vs. Paula snarkage, which indignity both bear with their own version of noblesse oblige) we loaded up into Paula's car all of me and Dave's stuff that was still in her place, and drove it back to Chi-town so that we can figure out where the hell to put it.
Then Sunday afternoon me, Dave & Pearl went out to Kyle & his girlfriend Amanda's place for Thanksgiving 3. Delicious food, numerous jello shots, and I got to drink mead for the first time! Amanda's mom Judy was there, and also her daughter Brittany. Brittany was cool, as cool as the only ten-year-old at a party can be, indeed. Amanda had made her a bunch of non-alcoholic jello shots, and she herself had sneakily filled an empty wine bottle with vitamin water in order to give Kyle a heart attack. (Almost worked, too, and we all got a good chortle.) So Dave got a hilarious cameraphone pic of this feisty kid, to all appearances getting terribly drunkened. But actually not. Twas good times all around. Meg had a heckuva time driving tired in the sleety snow all the way back to the city, but she made it with no mishaps. Kudos to her. Oh yes! While we were there I played teeth of the storm and destination please.
I came to wonder if the turkey part of my tower/turkey dream could be read to reveal my feelings about Thanksgiving. Though I've met people who've had dreams whose events happened in real life, for them it always seems to be more direct. I doubt either my brain or the windows in it would do things in any such straightforward way.
On Friday night, I had a dream. Instead of transcribing it here, since I was on the train Saturday morning, I wrote it out as a poem-song sort of thing. In my mind I heard it sounding a little bit like Bob Dylan's 115th Dream, even imagined Dylan singing it. (This helped me not mind so much when I didn't keep regular meter.) So here's my song for the week, even though it's not the one I thought I was going to have by now:
[the Pentecostal basement dream] 11/29/08
we walked past some construction
maybe twenty stories down
and fifteen more of scaffolding
away beneath the ground
we knew we were pursued but I
just didn't like the fall
she leapt off of the sidewalk
like it mattered not at all
I watched her plummet,
saw the puff of dust when she struck wood
and thought, "I hope she is all right;
I'd never land that good"
I made it to the bottom floor
my entourage in tow
there's something we were looking for
(where she went, I don't know)
we walked along a cell
with chain-link bars and handcuff locks
all hanging loose but hip to grab
a seeker who just knocked
I told the crew to wait outside
and slipped into the place
got some idea it noticed me
so I picked up the pace
there at the front
sat a skinny little book all bound in red
I did not wish to touch it
for I knew just what it said
I shoved it underneath the fence
with scissors that I had
then dropped them and got out
with my whole skin and was right glad
but when I reached the hall
my entourage had picked it up
it filled them with judgmentalism
disguised as Jesus' love
they lectured me for stealing it
and said I'd pay the price
I shook my head and smiled at them
and would not hear it twice
I took the book, its message flowed
I chuckled at the end,
"the Pentecostal Holy Ghost--
it's only this again!"
The last part of the dream
was a confusion and a rout
two newlyweds both found
that they were gay-when they came out
the disapproving citizens
glared till they could not speak
then the house filled up with water
like the ocean sprang a leak
(Song/poem at end for those who wish to skip diary entry part.)
Got to go to family T-day on Thursday, which was fun. I like our relatives, truly. They are nice people and pleasant to be around. Jamie and Joel made is down from far Wisconsinonia and JP stopped in for a bit, so we got to see all the Joe & Rosie cousins, as well as having me, Mom & sisters all there. Practically a family quorum!
I am adjusting myself to the idea of representing a permanent minority worldview within my biological group. So what if their groupthink contains mores and standards of propriety I find limiting or occasionally non-life-affirming? Let them be happy in the ways that seem best to them. I can set up the Venn diagrams of mental states in myself to minimize the pangs of cognitive dissonance. Perhaps I can hope that finally, slowly I have grown mature enough to not try to convince people who truly do not wish to change their minds. It's not bothersome what the rules are, in particular; every such groupthink has slightly different ones. It's the manner in which rules are decided upon and enforced, and the emotional tenor of the disapproval earned by those who deivate too far from standard. Pity and fear, ja. Pity, that the deviant has bought for themselves inevitable misery and possible damnation should they not see the error of their ways. Fear, that such a one will not see the error of their ways, or will influence others to follow their polluted ideas and behaviors.
How much of this is me projecting memories of others onto my relatives? I'm not sure. Some, no doubt. And different individuals manifest their participation in the family groupthink differently. But I no less than anyone else am hesitant to generate controversy about it. Because while the resulting arguments could certainly help many people understand one another better, others would end up understanding each other worse. Or end up suffering emotional hurts they would not have the tools to mend. Hell, I'm not even thinking of any specific things between people--it's one of those inevitable things. Reminds me of the 30 Rock where Jack and his mom (who openly loathe one another) teamed up to prod Liz's nicey-nice and super-supportive family until all the hidden resentments poured out. It only took them one afternoon, and sure enough, the Lemons were screaming bloody muder at one another, Xmas or no Xmas. However nice we are, even if we are all genuinely sweet and friendly people, just being close over a period of decades is going to give any humans reasons to scream at each other.
I got to play some music for the fam, though, which was fun and they did enjoy. :) Where home is and road don't go, and Twisting (the TMBG cover), can't remember what else. I am becoming bolder with each instance! Aunt Rosie gave me a Diana Krall CD to listen to, said my voice reminded her of Krall. She's good; croonier than my style, and a smoother voice than me by far. Not a smoker, this Diana Krall character.
Saturday me and Dave hung out with Paula and did Thanksgiving 2. This also was pleasant and fun; there was no stringy thing there, so alas, no playing for me. We had food, had good hanging out and talking time--and then all ended up crashing way early because of food coma. Mmm, food coma. Sunday morning (with all the obligatory Dave vs. Paula snarkage, which indignity both bear with their own version of noblesse oblige) we loaded up into Paula's car all of me and Dave's stuff that was still in her place, and drove it back to Chi-town so that we can figure out where the hell to put it.
Then Sunday afternoon me, Dave & Pearl went out to Kyle & his girlfriend Amanda's place for Thanksgiving 3. Delicious food, numerous jello shots, and I got to drink mead for the first time! Amanda's mom Judy was there, and also her daughter Brittany. Brittany was cool, as cool as the only ten-year-old at a party can be, indeed. Amanda had made her a bunch of non-alcoholic jello shots, and she herself had sneakily filled an empty wine bottle with vitamin water in order to give Kyle a heart attack. (Almost worked, too, and we all got a good chortle.) So Dave got a hilarious cameraphone pic of this feisty kid, to all appearances getting terribly drunkened. But actually not. Twas good times all around. Meg had a heckuva time driving tired in the sleety snow all the way back to the city, but she made it with no mishaps. Kudos to her. Oh yes! While we were there I played teeth of the storm and destination please.
I came to wonder if the turkey part of my tower/turkey dream could be read to reveal my feelings about Thanksgiving. Though I've met people who've had dreams whose events happened in real life, for them it always seems to be more direct. I doubt either my brain or the windows in it would do things in any such straightforward way.
On Friday night, I had a dream. Instead of transcribing it here, since I was on the train Saturday morning, I wrote it out as a poem-song sort of thing. In my mind I heard it sounding a little bit like Bob Dylan's 115th Dream, even imagined Dylan singing it. (This helped me not mind so much when I didn't keep regular meter.) So here's my song for the week, even though it's not the one I thought I was going to have by now:
[the Pentecostal basement dream] 11/29/08
we walked past some construction
maybe twenty stories down
and fifteen more of scaffolding
away beneath the ground
we knew we were pursued but I
just didn't like the fall
she leapt off of the sidewalk
like it mattered not at all
I watched her plummet,
saw the puff of dust when she struck wood
and thought, "I hope she is all right;
I'd never land that good"
I made it to the bottom floor
my entourage in tow
there's something we were looking for
(where she went, I don't know)
we walked along a cell
with chain-link bars and handcuff locks
all hanging loose but hip to grab
a seeker who just knocked
I told the crew to wait outside
and slipped into the place
got some idea it noticed me
so I picked up the pace
there at the front
sat a skinny little book all bound in red
I did not wish to touch it
for I knew just what it said
I shoved it underneath the fence
with scissors that I had
then dropped them and got out
with my whole skin and was right glad
but when I reached the hall
my entourage had picked it up
it filled them with judgmentalism
disguised as Jesus' love
they lectured me for stealing it
and said I'd pay the price
I shook my head and smiled at them
and would not hear it twice
I took the book, its message flowed
I chuckled at the end,
"the Pentecostal Holy Ghost--
it's only this again!"
The last part of the dream
was a confusion and a rout
two newlyweds both found
that they were gay-when they came out
the disapproving citizens
glared till they could not speak
then the house filled up with water
like the ocean sprang a leak
the rite of the Drinkgredients
11/27/08
w/ Dave
starring GIN as Chief Drinkgredient
The dicey ice is removed from the Place of Cold.
They are counted one by one into the chalices.
Whilst so doing, the following is to be thought, silently:
"One for me, one for you..." etc.
The tray of dicey ices is returned to the Place of Cold.
The GIN is removed from the Place of Cold.
She saith, "Let there be GIN,
and there was GIN."
And, there,
is GIN.
"In the beginning, there was GIN, and lo,"
The Shots are poured. "it was poured, and did divide the night from day,"
The Splashes are poured. "and the day from night."
The other DRINKGREDIENTS are removed from the Place of Cold.
She saith, "She spaketh,"
whilst holding in her hand the first Drinkgredient,
"let there be tonic for those who wish tonic,"
--lo, she poureth the Drinkgredient into the appropriate chalice(s),
and placeth it then upon the Surface--
"and juice unto they who wish juice,
in accordance with the prophecy."
This Drinkgredient, also,
she poureth into the appropriate chalice(s)
whilst these words are spoken.
And then, verily, she placeth it upon the Surface.
The onlooker(s) proclaim(eth): "Yea."
The DRINK(S), yea, she distributeth.
The Drinkgredients are returned to the Place of Cold,
whilst she saith,
"And lo, the Drinkgredients were returned to the Place of Cold.
The administration has no further comment."
The Drinks are consumed.
w/ Dave
starring GIN as Chief Drinkgredient
The dicey ice is removed from the Place of Cold.
They are counted one by one into the chalices.
Whilst so doing, the following is to be thought, silently:
"One for me, one for you..." etc.
The tray of dicey ices is returned to the Place of Cold.
The GIN is removed from the Place of Cold.
She saith, "Let there be GIN,
and there was GIN."
And, there,
is GIN.
"In the beginning, there was GIN, and lo,"
The Shots are poured. "it was poured, and did divide the night from day,"
The Splashes are poured. "and the day from night."
The other DRINKGREDIENTS are removed from the Place of Cold.
She saith, "She spaketh,"
whilst holding in her hand the first Drinkgredient,
"let there be tonic for those who wish tonic,"
--lo, she poureth the Drinkgredient into the appropriate chalice(s),
and placeth it then upon the Surface--
"and juice unto they who wish juice,
in accordance with the prophecy."
This Drinkgredient, also,
she poureth into the appropriate chalice(s)
whilst these words are spoken.
And then, verily, she placeth it upon the Surface.
The onlooker(s) proclaim(eth): "Yea."
The DRINK(S), yea, she distributeth.
The Drinkgredients are returned to the Place of Cold,
whilst she saith,
"And lo, the Drinkgredients were returned to the Place of Cold.
The administration has no further comment."
The Drinks are consumed.
Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol 41. (primetime social mores, or, why Kareen yos'Phelium should watch more TV)
An original is a Code unto herself.
~Liaden proverb
As mentioned in earlier posts, I've been reading a lot of Miller & Lee lately. So I've spent a lot of idle brain-time (for example, while standing over a copy machine for hours at a time, getting a crick in my shoulder from repetitive paper-shuffling) pondering the differences between the world I live in and the Liaden universe. What sort of things make it so immersive and attractive, and how similar social necessities are addressed differently here versus there.
There are different measures one must use when considering relationships with others as individuals, versus those same people as members of a group. The proper ways to respond to various circumstances, the duties and privileges attending one's role in a relationship, are slightly distinct for each. Furthermore, virtually none of the parameters of such duties and privileges are things made explicit in our culture. With the arguable exception of the workplace, where relationships-as-members may be defined by an employee manual, company code of conduct, etc. Otherwise, persons learn normal cultural expectations of behavior in a sink-or-swim immersion course. Because the cultural norm is at best loosely defined, the quirks of individuals may be compared and contrasted only against one another on a case-by-case basis.
Now, a Liaden, or many another character in the worlds of fiction, would have little difficulty distinguishing between the many roles of the individuals with whom they relate most closely. they would say, This individual upholds such-and-such melant'i, of which this or that aspect pertains to the current situation. If a Liaden were concerned about how to properly serve the interests of clan, kin, and allies given limited resources, she would need only to study the Liaden Code of Proper Conduct in its many volumes to enlighten her as to the most appropriate path. (And in most extreme uncertainty, an intrepid seeker could dare to elicit the advice of one Kareen yos'Phelium--the editor, reviser and expander of the Code, mother of one, and stickler extraordinaire.) There would thus, in Liaden society, be an explicit standard of behavior, an absolute baseline against which all action might be judged.
That our culture does not have an equivalent of a Code of Proper Conduct is by and large, to my eye, a good thing. A very very good thing. For while it would make people like me a lot more comfortable in knowing where we stand, it would give many jerks needless weaponry against those who are honest yet unsubtle. I would rather life be more difficult and confusing for me than have it be wretched and helplessly miserable for a much larger number of largely blameless persons.
The closest thing we have to a Code, I suppose, is the collective attitudes and mores of the characters on primetime sitcoms. No joke, there. The tenor of the cultural norms provided therein neatly fits the phrase "lowest common denominator". Sitcoms, like any representative art form, may be considered to serve two purposes for the viewer--an exoteric, or revealed function and an esoteric, or hidden function. Let us take as given, as an aspect of its definition directly extrapolated from its name, that a sitcom is a comedic piece in which the driving force of the story is the complexities of a social situation. Hence, situation comedy; sitcom. Inherently an aspect of our cultural understanding of social behavior.
The exoteric function of sitcoms is to entertain, amuse, distract. Following the Greek tradition of the comedy, comic main characters are persons equal or lower in social status than the average viewer. Modern usage has transformed this into moral equality rather than economic. For example, the Bluth family in the series Arrested Development. They possess (at some points) a great deal of money and a certain amount of social power, but are made morally equivalent to viewers through their arrogance, stupidity, and dysfunctional treatment of one another. Watching the exaggerated misfortunes and bunglings of our equals lets us laugh, and provides relief from the strain of facing similar troubles in real life.
The esoteric function of sitcoms is didactic. The way characters behave in primetime is the way that network executives believe the average viewers are least likely to object to seeing characters behave. Primetime is, by definition, the part of the programming schedule with the largest viewership. The rise and fall of programs in and out of that coveted timeslot is determined, in turn, by ratings--a statistic which itself measures viewership. It is rather like a real-time democracy among those who own televisions. A vast majority of persons who are part of this viewing public are aware of this process, even if they could not fully articulate their awareness. Therefore one may take it as a known, a cultural commonplace, that the social norms understood collectively by the characters on primetime sitcoms, are a very good approximation of the social norms prevalent in our society as a whole. I say prevalent, because this situation is also understood to be informal.
Now, in any society, a stigma attaches to a person who deviates overmuch from social norms, whether by falling short or by demonstrating too much zeal.
In Liaden society, a person who was lax or ignorant of Code could take on the shame of being considered barbaric, unreliable, stupid--qualities usually ascribed to foreigners. (As witness the phrase, "rag-mannered as a Terran.") A person who erred in the other direction would take on the stigma of being too stuffy, uninspired, or waspish. In other words, they would suffer the more genteel shame of a person too unimaginative or too cold-hearted to vary outside the accepted structure.
In our society, the stigmas are almost reversed. Television, and with it the "original" versions of the current acceptable social paradigms, is something brought into people's homes. The expectation is that a person will watch television on her own and later discuss it with friends, or watch it along with friends and discuss it as they watch. The group will thereby add nuance and interpretation, confirm some aspects of the "original" norms and reject others. Thus, it logically follows that a person who adheres too exactly or too enthusiastically to social norms as they are practiced on television is considered barbaric, not socially integrated, or inept. A person whose ignorance or even knowing refusal not to practice TV-sanctioned behavior patterns is given the benefit of the doubt, provided she shows herself willing to correct errors once made aware of them, and so long as her eccentricities fall within widely acceptable limits. A lack of knowledge of TV standards of behavior might, for example, indicate a social life so rich and active that the person's social group has evolved from the standard into behaviors far beyond the meager efforts of one's own group.
Then again, there is always the remote possibility that the person is an alien, newly beamed down from outer space, or a foreigner whose channels are all different and holds no passion for Americana, or a lost wolf-child who has bumbled through life seemingly without the benefit of any television whatsoever. Based on the occasions when I have fallen into the role of lost wolf-child in that sense, I would surmise that humans, Liadens and all other thinking beings are equally frightened and off-put by the discovery that you and they have no common source of culturally expected behaviors. Whether they sketch a hasty bow and retreat (Liaden style), or nod and smile in a frozen sort of fashion while edging unobtrusively towards the door (American style), there is no help for the situation. One must pick up Volume One and turn to the index or plop down in front of the set and start surfing, or risk remaining a pariah for life.
But do not despair, children of the children of the counter-culture! For even lacking in a large and opinionated social group to facilitate the process, one's individual responses to the standard have been known to suffice. So long as there is a response, preferably one which reveals an ironic and nuanced understanding of the social values and obligations of duty inherent in the standard, this is enough to allow strangers to judge one's character. If for example, your favorite Simpsons character is Nelson Muntz's mother, but you put up a spirited defense of your unusual choice and remain conscious of the irony, then few social groups will fail to accept you with open benefits of the doubt!
~Liaden proverb
As mentioned in earlier posts, I've been reading a lot of Miller & Lee lately. So I've spent a lot of idle brain-time (for example, while standing over a copy machine for hours at a time, getting a crick in my shoulder from repetitive paper-shuffling) pondering the differences between the world I live in and the Liaden universe. What sort of things make it so immersive and attractive, and how similar social necessities are addressed differently here versus there.
There are different measures one must use when considering relationships with others as individuals, versus those same people as members of a group. The proper ways to respond to various circumstances, the duties and privileges attending one's role in a relationship, are slightly distinct for each. Furthermore, virtually none of the parameters of such duties and privileges are things made explicit in our culture. With the arguable exception of the workplace, where relationships-as-members may be defined by an employee manual, company code of conduct, etc. Otherwise, persons learn normal cultural expectations of behavior in a sink-or-swim immersion course. Because the cultural norm is at best loosely defined, the quirks of individuals may be compared and contrasted only against one another on a case-by-case basis.
Now, a Liaden, or many another character in the worlds of fiction, would have little difficulty distinguishing between the many roles of the individuals with whom they relate most closely. they would say, This individual upholds such-and-such melant'i, of which this or that aspect pertains to the current situation. If a Liaden were concerned about how to properly serve the interests of clan, kin, and allies given limited resources, she would need only to study the Liaden Code of Proper Conduct in its many volumes to enlighten her as to the most appropriate path. (And in most extreme uncertainty, an intrepid seeker could dare to elicit the advice of one Kareen yos'Phelium--the editor, reviser and expander of the Code, mother of one, and stickler extraordinaire.) There would thus, in Liaden society, be an explicit standard of behavior, an absolute baseline against which all action might be judged.
That our culture does not have an equivalent of a Code of Proper Conduct is by and large, to my eye, a good thing. A very very good thing. For while it would make people like me a lot more comfortable in knowing where we stand, it would give many jerks needless weaponry against those who are honest yet unsubtle. I would rather life be more difficult and confusing for me than have it be wretched and helplessly miserable for a much larger number of largely blameless persons.
The closest thing we have to a Code, I suppose, is the collective attitudes and mores of the characters on primetime sitcoms. No joke, there. The tenor of the cultural norms provided therein neatly fits the phrase "lowest common denominator". Sitcoms, like any representative art form, may be considered to serve two purposes for the viewer--an exoteric, or revealed function and an esoteric, or hidden function. Let us take as given, as an aspect of its definition directly extrapolated from its name, that a sitcom is a comedic piece in which the driving force of the story is the complexities of a social situation. Hence, situation comedy; sitcom. Inherently an aspect of our cultural understanding of social behavior.
The exoteric function of sitcoms is to entertain, amuse, distract. Following the Greek tradition of the comedy, comic main characters are persons equal or lower in social status than the average viewer. Modern usage has transformed this into moral equality rather than economic. For example, the Bluth family in the series Arrested Development. They possess (at some points) a great deal of money and a certain amount of social power, but are made morally equivalent to viewers through their arrogance, stupidity, and dysfunctional treatment of one another. Watching the exaggerated misfortunes and bunglings of our equals lets us laugh, and provides relief from the strain of facing similar troubles in real life.
The esoteric function of sitcoms is didactic. The way characters behave in primetime is the way that network executives believe the average viewers are least likely to object to seeing characters behave. Primetime is, by definition, the part of the programming schedule with the largest viewership. The rise and fall of programs in and out of that coveted timeslot is determined, in turn, by ratings--a statistic which itself measures viewership. It is rather like a real-time democracy among those who own televisions. A vast majority of persons who are part of this viewing public are aware of this process, even if they could not fully articulate their awareness. Therefore one may take it as a known, a cultural commonplace, that the social norms understood collectively by the characters on primetime sitcoms, are a very good approximation of the social norms prevalent in our society as a whole. I say prevalent, because this situation is also understood to be informal.
Now, in any society, a stigma attaches to a person who deviates overmuch from social norms, whether by falling short or by demonstrating too much zeal.
In Liaden society, a person who was lax or ignorant of Code could take on the shame of being considered barbaric, unreliable, stupid--qualities usually ascribed to foreigners. (As witness the phrase, "rag-mannered as a Terran.") A person who erred in the other direction would take on the stigma of being too stuffy, uninspired, or waspish. In other words, they would suffer the more genteel shame of a person too unimaginative or too cold-hearted to vary outside the accepted structure.
In our society, the stigmas are almost reversed. Television, and with it the "original" versions of the current acceptable social paradigms, is something brought into people's homes. The expectation is that a person will watch television on her own and later discuss it with friends, or watch it along with friends and discuss it as they watch. The group will thereby add nuance and interpretation, confirm some aspects of the "original" norms and reject others. Thus, it logically follows that a person who adheres too exactly or too enthusiastically to social norms as they are practiced on television is considered barbaric, not socially integrated, or inept. A person whose ignorance or even knowing refusal not to practice TV-sanctioned behavior patterns is given the benefit of the doubt, provided she shows herself willing to correct errors once made aware of them, and so long as her eccentricities fall within widely acceptable limits. A lack of knowledge of TV standards of behavior might, for example, indicate a social life so rich and active that the person's social group has evolved from the standard into behaviors far beyond the meager efforts of one's own group.
Then again, there is always the remote possibility that the person is an alien, newly beamed down from outer space, or a foreigner whose channels are all different and holds no passion for Americana, or a lost wolf-child who has bumbled through life seemingly without the benefit of any television whatsoever. Based on the occasions when I have fallen into the role of lost wolf-child in that sense, I would surmise that humans, Liadens and all other thinking beings are equally frightened and off-put by the discovery that you and they have no common source of culturally expected behaviors. Whether they sketch a hasty bow and retreat (Liaden style), or nod and smile in a frozen sort of fashion while edging unobtrusively towards the door (American style), there is no help for the situation. One must pick up Volume One and turn to the index or plop down in front of the set and start surfing, or risk remaining a pariah for life.
But do not despair, children of the children of the counter-culture! For even lacking in a large and opinionated social group to facilitate the process, one's individual responses to the standard have been known to suffice. So long as there is a response, preferably one which reveals an ironic and nuanced understanding of the social values and obligations of duty inherent in the standard, this is enough to allow strangers to judge one's character. If for example, your favorite Simpsons character is Nelson Muntz's mother, but you put up a spirited defense of your unusual choice and remain conscious of the irony, then few social groups will fail to accept you with open benefits of the doubt!
Miercoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol. 11
[This Wednesdays unintentionally left blank. If ever I figure out what I originally meant to write about on this particular Wednesday, I will do it. Otherwise, enjoy the brevity.]
Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol 40.
Is there a theme to Tuesdays with Abhorrent Fiends, really? Naah.
It hasn't had a theme, really, it's just been my excuse to get in a blogpost on Tuesdays. But now that I'm shooting for a different type of blogpost on every day of the week, it makes sense to try and impose some specificity on it. So, if there's been one, it's only that everyone (including me) may be classified as Abhorrent Fiends at one point or another. And that by contemplating the Abhorrent Fiends I know on Tuesdays, I may gain some insights into the dark and sinister nature of the Universe.
Speaking of secrets of the universe, I have found a shiny new toy: the Galaxy Zoo. This is a wonderful website where mutual enrichment between scientists and laypeople can take place. Scientists who have obtained images of galaxies from around the universe can get laypeople to slog through the tedious images and help to classify them according to certain basic types. The laypeople, meanwhile, get to look at pictures of galaxies on the internet and classify them, FOR SCIENCE. Which is way different than looking at, say, pictures of humans on the internet and classifying whether you think they are hot or not FOR LULZ. Or looking at pictures of cats with captions and deciding whether or not they are funny enough to email to all your family and friends FOR YOUR EVERLASTING SHAME.
And if you are lucky, you might come across something as exciting as Hanny's Voorwerp! Voorwerp, sadly, is merely the Dutch word for "object". Since Hanny is Dutch. So it's not some cool scientific name for a hitherto undiscovered race of space goobers. I bet Hanny wishes it was. On second thought, she might not. Especially if the goobers turned around and eradicated all human life for being so impolite as to notice them.
It hasn't had a theme, really, it's just been my excuse to get in a blogpost on Tuesdays. But now that I'm shooting for a different type of blogpost on every day of the week, it makes sense to try and impose some specificity on it. So, if there's been one, it's only that everyone (including me) may be classified as Abhorrent Fiends at one point or another. And that by contemplating the Abhorrent Fiends I know on Tuesdays, I may gain some insights into the dark and sinister nature of the Universe.
Speaking of secrets of the universe, I have found a shiny new toy: the Galaxy Zoo. This is a wonderful website where mutual enrichment between scientists and laypeople can take place. Scientists who have obtained images of galaxies from around the universe can get laypeople to slog through the tedious images and help to classify them according to certain basic types. The laypeople, meanwhile, get to look at pictures of galaxies on the internet and classify them, FOR SCIENCE. Which is way different than looking at, say, pictures of humans on the internet and classifying whether you think they are hot or not FOR LULZ. Or looking at pictures of cats with captions and deciding whether or not they are funny enough to email to all your family and friends FOR YOUR EVERLASTING SHAME.
And if you are lucky, you might come across something as exciting as Hanny's Voorwerp! Voorwerp, sadly, is merely the Dutch word for "object". Since Hanny is Dutch. So it's not some cool scientific name for a hitherto undiscovered race of space goobers. I bet Hanny wishes it was. On second thought, she might not. Especially if the goobers turned around and eradicated all human life for being so impolite as to notice them.
Musical Monday vol 2.
This weekend I sent Mom the setlist and lyrics for [moving all the same]. Yep, I have enough songs for an album now! Twelve guitar-arranged songs--unless you count emptiness / the only road as two songs, in which case it's thirteen. Check it out:
1. but the ghost
2. emptiness / the only road
3. distance
4. road don’t go
5. that bitch
6. give the people what they want
7. static
8. promise to keep
9. Morningstar
10. teeth of the storm
11. where home is
12. destination please
I love all these songs, and think they will make a wonderful album. Thematically sound, ordered in a way I like, covering all my bases: some of the very first songs I wrote right along with some of the most recent. Now all I have to do is practice them more...and record them...and play them in front of non family members. XD Not necessarily in that order.
This morning I have a song stuck in my head that I haven't written yet. Haven't finished writing anyway. I know generally what it ought to sound like and I have the chorus, but the rest hasn't shown up yet. This is exactly what happened with [teeth of the storm]--I was carrying that chorus around in my head for two years before I got the rest of the song. It goes (with G, C, F, Am on each line):
the phone repairman
ain't been there, man
and I'm calling, I'm calling
and I can't get get get get get get get
through
Every time I sit down to play I'll run through that a couple times, then experiment with possible chord sequences for the verses, then bitch poutingly about how I don't have the rest. Then Dave will snort and smile and shake his head at me, and I'll sigh and blow myself a raspberry and play something else.
Yesterday, it was [mama winter]. Wanted to play that and [teeth] back to back in honor of the year's first snowfall, which I did. I figured out the chords for [mw] on the keyboard, then looked them up in my handy-dandy guitar chord chart. (Dm C Bb, FYI.) I will need to work on finger-picking a lot more before I can make it sound close to how it's supposed to, though. [mw] is an aria, so I always imagined it with just a few drifty violins in the background. This is possible to recreate on an acoustic guitar, but will take practice. The song was demanding enough vocally all by itself, and the smoking and the pharyngitis do not help! :) But I will master it. Gotta have something to do till I can lay ahold of the rest of the phone repairman song!
Now I want to write about the thing I'd thought about writing last Monday.
Me, Mom, sisters and Dave had gone to see some Olympic gymnasts perform that weekend, Amber's treat. It was a wonderful show, full of highly talented and trained people who made dazzling feats of athleticism look easy and fun.
The band, however--the band stuck in my craw. Not because they are other than what they're supposed to be, but because I'm still immature and filled with envy. They got have the stage, see, and they got to accompany the awesome gymnasts and exhort the crowd (unsuccessfully) to go crazy. I got to sit in the audience and eat my liver. They are called KSM and are a Disney recording group. One of their songs, Permission to Fly, was actually quite good. It helped that the song was accompaniment to some of those acrobat ladies who suspend themselves from two long silk banners and swing and twirl and look awesome doing it. The acrobats started out the song wrapping one banner around themselves, holding out the other like a wing, and being lifted up into the air to swing out over the crowd.
But I was jealous of the band even before they ever came on stage, to the point where it detracted somewhat from my enjoyment of the show. Right at the beginning, when everyone was being announced, the lights went down and some people carrying glow-in-the dark dragons (the kind they have in parades) danced all around the performance area. Which I should have been deeply stirred by, especially considering how much Miller & Lee I've been reading lately. But there were two things fighting each other in the middle of me: the crying-cause-it's-pretty feeling versus the scowling-cause-I-feel-stupid feeling. Stupid, sadly, was not eradicated, and kept getting in the way when I wasn't forcibly shoving it out of the way. I still was able to be awed by things and moved to good tears or near them once or twice. I don't see live shows that often and this one had a lot going for it. Wrestling with my insecurities, however, is a dumb, dumb reason to stint on emotional impact from a show.
Not too long into it, it occurred to me that this is exactly the sort of thing my tower/turkey dream was telling me about. The turkey, in this reading, would represent emotional satisfaction, the recharging of the spiritual self which takes place when you allow yourself to be moved and awed by beauty. I deny myself spiritual nutrition when I let envy get in the way like that. The rich dreampeople I was mad at would represent people like KSM--people who have the audiences and the visibility I crave, but whom I feel I can outdo musically. The fact that I didn't have a ticket in the dream translates to me not feeling I have the right or don't deserve to have that kind of power. Or maybe that I don't have the actual right to count myself among them, since I am not a performing musician. So they are richer than me, even spiritually, in that specific way. Because what they have, they share with everyone who hears. And the storm is--gotta think on what the storm is. The emotional energy swirling around in a concert hall? The unconscious spiritual life of music-listening people? Something like that.
But I should cut this entry off now. Some of my co-workers want to hear me sing Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You again, and I have to brush up on the lyrics.
Thanks, universe. (And coworkers.) That really does make me feel better. :D
1. but the ghost
2. emptiness / the only road
3. distance
4. road don’t go
5. that bitch
6. give the people what they want
7. static
8. promise to keep
9. Morningstar
10. teeth of the storm
11. where home is
12. destination please
I love all these songs, and think they will make a wonderful album. Thematically sound, ordered in a way I like, covering all my bases: some of the very first songs I wrote right along with some of the most recent. Now all I have to do is practice them more...and record them...and play them in front of non family members. XD Not necessarily in that order.
This morning I have a song stuck in my head that I haven't written yet. Haven't finished writing anyway. I know generally what it ought to sound like and I have the chorus, but the rest hasn't shown up yet. This is exactly what happened with [teeth of the storm]--I was carrying that chorus around in my head for two years before I got the rest of the song. It goes (with G, C, F, Am on each line):
the phone repairman
ain't been there, man
and I'm calling, I'm calling
and I can't get get get get get get get
through
Every time I sit down to play I'll run through that a couple times, then experiment with possible chord sequences for the verses, then bitch poutingly about how I don't have the rest. Then Dave will snort and smile and shake his head at me, and I'll sigh and blow myself a raspberry and play something else.
Yesterday, it was [mama winter]. Wanted to play that and [teeth] back to back in honor of the year's first snowfall, which I did. I figured out the chords for [mw] on the keyboard, then looked them up in my handy-dandy guitar chord chart. (Dm C Bb, FYI.) I will need to work on finger-picking a lot more before I can make it sound close to how it's supposed to, though. [mw] is an aria, so I always imagined it with just a few drifty violins in the background. This is possible to recreate on an acoustic guitar, but will take practice. The song was demanding enough vocally all by itself, and the smoking and the pharyngitis do not help! :) But I will master it. Gotta have something to do till I can lay ahold of the rest of the phone repairman song!
Now I want to write about the thing I'd thought about writing last Monday.
Me, Mom, sisters and Dave had gone to see some Olympic gymnasts perform that weekend, Amber's treat. It was a wonderful show, full of highly talented and trained people who made dazzling feats of athleticism look easy and fun.
The band, however--the band stuck in my craw. Not because they are other than what they're supposed to be, but because I'm still immature and filled with envy. They got have the stage, see, and they got to accompany the awesome gymnasts and exhort the crowd (unsuccessfully) to go crazy. I got to sit in the audience and eat my liver. They are called KSM and are a Disney recording group. One of their songs, Permission to Fly, was actually quite good. It helped that the song was accompaniment to some of those acrobat ladies who suspend themselves from two long silk banners and swing and twirl and look awesome doing it. The acrobats started out the song wrapping one banner around themselves, holding out the other like a wing, and being lifted up into the air to swing out over the crowd.
But I was jealous of the band even before they ever came on stage, to the point where it detracted somewhat from my enjoyment of the show. Right at the beginning, when everyone was being announced, the lights went down and some people carrying glow-in-the dark dragons (the kind they have in parades) danced all around the performance area. Which I should have been deeply stirred by, especially considering how much Miller & Lee I've been reading lately. But there were two things fighting each other in the middle of me: the crying-cause-it's-pretty feeling versus the scowling-cause-I-feel-stupid feeling. Stupid, sadly, was not eradicated, and kept getting in the way when I wasn't forcibly shoving it out of the way. I still was able to be awed by things and moved to good tears or near them once or twice. I don't see live shows that often and this one had a lot going for it. Wrestling with my insecurities, however, is a dumb, dumb reason to stint on emotional impact from a show.
Not too long into it, it occurred to me that this is exactly the sort of thing my tower/turkey dream was telling me about. The turkey, in this reading, would represent emotional satisfaction, the recharging of the spiritual self which takes place when you allow yourself to be moved and awed by beauty. I deny myself spiritual nutrition when I let envy get in the way like that. The rich dreampeople I was mad at would represent people like KSM--people who have the audiences and the visibility I crave, but whom I feel I can outdo musically. The fact that I didn't have a ticket in the dream translates to me not feeling I have the right or don't deserve to have that kind of power. Or maybe that I don't have the actual right to count myself among them, since I am not a performing musician. So they are richer than me, even spiritually, in that specific way. Because what they have, they share with everyone who hears. And the storm is--gotta think on what the storm is. The emotional energy swirling around in a concert hall? The unconscious spiritual life of music-listening people? Something like that.
But I should cut this entry off now. Some of my co-workers want to hear me sing Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You again, and I have to brush up on the lyrics.
Thanks, universe. (And coworkers.) That really does make me feel better. :D
True Story Thursday vol 2.
I've been reading far too much Miller & Lee lately, so I'm afraid my prose for this entry will be in the mode of Liadens talking about other Liadens. For me, this style of writing is something I associate with wry good humor. When I read or write it I am always alert for little puns, little refreshing or fun things to be read between the lines of an otherwise straightforward statement. I've been having a weird day for inside-the-brain snarking at myself, mainly because I'm still sick and that tends to make one cranky. So I figure a True Story Thursday done Liaden style will help me feel better and drain away some of the snark.
A couple of weeks ago I encountered an individual named John.
He was an older fellow; I'd've guessed him at early to mid fifities. Short, Caucasian, vaguely heavy in an American sort of way. Graying brows, a hat he professed himself too embarrassed to remove, a nose just on the bulbous side of normal. Prominent blue eyes which sat squarely on that odd little edge between total intensity of focus and utter lack of expression. Mind locked up like a bank vault below the public level, sense of space hypervigilant. His clothing had been chosen with the same sort of slovenly exactitude I myself have employed when low on self-confidence and/or desiring to appear an unattractive target to would-be beggars and thieves. We were standing in line at a McDonald's. I found his hamburger order to be so unusual--no cheese, no condiments, double onions--that I couldn't resist a quick visual scan for curiosity's sake. As I had made eye contact with him, he felt it appropriate to engage me in conversation. Not being otherwise busy during my lunch break I decided to see where this went.
Within a few minutes the talk had degenerated into the sort of life story-swapping chiefly sought out by those whose current levels of human interaction have been far, far below their preference for a considerable time. To make a comparison among persons I have known well, John's manner of interacting could be compared to Myke. Save Myke was always more circumspect, more aware, and more cautious of how he spilled his emotions. I found John's way of interaction, his eagerness to reveal all within himself as readily as may be, to make himself of service in any way possible, made me miss the kid. That nostalgia was a good part of why I continued to lunch in his company for some few days.
Which is not to say that I found John's company disagreeable for himself. Only that, as Douglas Adams has noted, doing anything whatsoever a person wishes is a very strong grip to have on them, indeed. And that the more intense and obvious became John's desire to be of service to me in some way, any way, the more cool I felt inclined to be. Inclined especially to be more protective of my personal information--phone number chiefest of all. He had flat out asked, as though he had every expectation not to be refused, that we exchange cell phone numbers the first time we met. So another aspect of this man I found interesting was his seeming (perhaps, pretended? twittered my mental antennae) total ignorance of the true balance of obligation. This balance being: that the person who does a favor puts the receiver in his debt. That his eagerness to have me owe him a debt, even a small and informal debt such as may go unremarked between friends, aroused primarily my suspicion. And not the gratitude for his solicitousness he seemed to think was the natural response.
Needless to say I insisted from the outset, and continued to insist, on paying for my own lunch.
I was intrigued by this person; I wished to know the depths of his self-awareness regarding the structure of his actions. Here was one who was at every turn positive, encouraging, complimentary. (Though quite defensive on the subject of compliments. He seemed to take the word "flattery" for an insult and was painfully certain to insist that all he said was heartfelt and genuine. With which I readily concurred, that aspect of truth being entirely beside the point.) Was this behavior the result solely of low self-esteem--the sort which leads a person to believe others always their superiors, and themselves fortunate to be noticed? Or did he seek to place myself in his debt in order that he might, through the manipulation of emotional bonds, seek to direct or even constrain me in some way?
It is rare to find a male so adept in the latter art that he will practice it knowingly upon the unwary. But I confess myself half convinced. After nearly two weeks of meeting for lunch every day, I had refused to budge on the subject of contact information. I was always vague on the subject of making plans for anything other than lunch, with or without a third person present. He had run up against certain hard limits on content areas I was unwilling to discuss. (And the content areas in which those hard limits were discovered, indeed, cemented my suspicion even further.) So it came about that on a Thursday two weeks ago he told me, professing his regret, that he would be busy on Friday and could not make lunch. We agreed to lunch again Monday at the same time and location. That Monday, and the entire week following--whether out of habit or curiousity or on the off-chance the poor man had been on the level and merely taken ill, I cannot say--I undertook to be in the usual meeting place at the usual time. He was not.
In truth, I am uncertain how to react. To send my prayers into the taig, for the health of a friend gone missing? Or to gloat over my perspicacity and peruse the Wanted postings to see if I recognize a sketch?
A couple of weeks ago I encountered an individual named John.
He was an older fellow; I'd've guessed him at early to mid fifities. Short, Caucasian, vaguely heavy in an American sort of way. Graying brows, a hat he professed himself too embarrassed to remove, a nose just on the bulbous side of normal. Prominent blue eyes which sat squarely on that odd little edge between total intensity of focus and utter lack of expression. Mind locked up like a bank vault below the public level, sense of space hypervigilant. His clothing had been chosen with the same sort of slovenly exactitude I myself have employed when low on self-confidence and/or desiring to appear an unattractive target to would-be beggars and thieves. We were standing in line at a McDonald's. I found his hamburger order to be so unusual--no cheese, no condiments, double onions--that I couldn't resist a quick visual scan for curiosity's sake. As I had made eye contact with him, he felt it appropriate to engage me in conversation. Not being otherwise busy during my lunch break I decided to see where this went.
Within a few minutes the talk had degenerated into the sort of life story-swapping chiefly sought out by those whose current levels of human interaction have been far, far below their preference for a considerable time. To make a comparison among persons I have known well, John's manner of interacting could be compared to Myke. Save Myke was always more circumspect, more aware, and more cautious of how he spilled his emotions. I found John's way of interaction, his eagerness to reveal all within himself as readily as may be, to make himself of service in any way possible, made me miss the kid. That nostalgia was a good part of why I continued to lunch in his company for some few days.
Which is not to say that I found John's company disagreeable for himself. Only that, as Douglas Adams has noted, doing anything whatsoever a person wishes is a very strong grip to have on them, indeed. And that the more intense and obvious became John's desire to be of service to me in some way, any way, the more cool I felt inclined to be. Inclined especially to be more protective of my personal information--phone number chiefest of all. He had flat out asked, as though he had every expectation not to be refused, that we exchange cell phone numbers the first time we met. So another aspect of this man I found interesting was his seeming (perhaps, pretended? twittered my mental antennae) total ignorance of the true balance of obligation. This balance being: that the person who does a favor puts the receiver in his debt. That his eagerness to have me owe him a debt, even a small and informal debt such as may go unremarked between friends, aroused primarily my suspicion. And not the gratitude for his solicitousness he seemed to think was the natural response.
Needless to say I insisted from the outset, and continued to insist, on paying for my own lunch.
I was intrigued by this person; I wished to know the depths of his self-awareness regarding the structure of his actions. Here was one who was at every turn positive, encouraging, complimentary. (Though quite defensive on the subject of compliments. He seemed to take the word "flattery" for an insult and was painfully certain to insist that all he said was heartfelt and genuine. With which I readily concurred, that aspect of truth being entirely beside the point.) Was this behavior the result solely of low self-esteem--the sort which leads a person to believe others always their superiors, and themselves fortunate to be noticed? Or did he seek to place myself in his debt in order that he might, through the manipulation of emotional bonds, seek to direct or even constrain me in some way?
It is rare to find a male so adept in the latter art that he will practice it knowingly upon the unwary. But I confess myself half convinced. After nearly two weeks of meeting for lunch every day, I had refused to budge on the subject of contact information. I was always vague on the subject of making plans for anything other than lunch, with or without a third person present. He had run up against certain hard limits on content areas I was unwilling to discuss. (And the content areas in which those hard limits were discovered, indeed, cemented my suspicion even further.) So it came about that on a Thursday two weeks ago he told me, professing his regret, that he would be busy on Friday and could not make lunch. We agreed to lunch again Monday at the same time and location. That Monday, and the entire week following--whether out of habit or curiousity or on the off-chance the poor man had been on the level and merely taken ill, I cannot say--I undertook to be in the usual meeting place at the usual time. He was not.
In truth, I am uncertain how to react. To send my prayers into the taig, for the health of a friend gone missing? Or to gloat over my perspicacity and peruse the Wanted postings to see if I recognize a sketch?
Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol 39. (nothing is final!)
Well sir and ma'am, here we are again.
I had a really great idea for Musical Mondays yesterday, but didn't post it up due to a combination of lethargy and actual work to do. But that is not what this post is about.
Also had an interesting dream last night, which involved my dream-posse being superheroes and working together to demolish an enemy yacht which was sailing towards us. And a different member of my dream-posse getting chompsorbed by an evil biomachine thingy after reading words on a screen connected to a pillar which turned out to have been part of the machine. But that, also, is not what this post is about.
This post is about this post I made on my other blog.
I am quite proud of it. Although I am nervous about it as well.
I stopped posting the POEE forums several months back out of a combination of boredom, bereavement, and cowardice. Those boys do not play nice, nor are they especially big fans of the types of content I produce most readily. Also I do not like doing things that upset people, which is a favorite hobby for many of them. I like to gain people's trust and then sneakily trick them into thinking of things from a point of view slightly different than the one to which they are accustomed. I do not like taking a radically different point of view and beating someone across the face with it until it leaves some kind of an imprint in the brain. I admire and enjoy people with the chutzpah to do so, but it is not my style. Also some of them made fun of me. Which under normal circumstances I am able to stomach, in the service of building a case for the legitimacy of my opinions through sheer stubborn reasonableness. But I was using my stubborn for other things this spring and summer and thus didn't have that much to spare for them.
However, the element of cowardice still leaves me disappointed in myself. In my private mind I feel I've gone down a peg and must do something to regain my own good opinion. To reaffirm my faith in my adherence to my nominal faith.
If you decide to be a Discordian, as I see it, you must work out for yourself what exactly that means in practice. It could be extremely vague. It could be totally meaningless to anyone but yourself. But it is important to come up with some standards of behavior for yourself, and then once you've come up with them, live up to them. Or at least judge yourself by them in as accurate a manner as you can devise. Otherwise, what makes you better than all those Sunday Christians and Saturday Jews and Friday night Satanists--the ones who talk a big game, but don't actually try to live out their so-called religions on a day-to-day basis?
I fall more in the category of "completely meaningless to anyone but myself", I think. Since I believe all judgments of morality are contextual, the distillation of a concept of honor is itself a process of experimentation, a sort of drunken lurching towards a dimly perceived truth. I worship chaos principally by attempting to create order. First in my personality, so that my perceptions of the world around me are filtered only through symbol sets with whose construction I am intimately familiar. Second, in my interactions with others, so that I evoke only those responses and provide only those stimuli which I judge to be appropriate expressions of my will given the structure of the relationships between me and the other people. Third, in the pattern of events in my life, so that I behave in ways which produce the kinds of experiences I want to have for reasons based on observation rather than assumption. (i.e., I pay my gas bill because I've had it cut off before and hate to be cold, rather than because paying one's gas bill is the sort of thing a grownup and a good citizen simply does.) Makes for a longer learning curve than is strictly necessary, but it suits me fine.
This is a religious observance for me because the attempt to create order, especially when the attempt is continuous, only throws into sharp relief how permanent, self-evident, and omnipresent is chaos. How even the most restrictive set of rules and laws is a thin stick dancing in a mighty wind. How really, really flexible I have to make the stick if it's gonna be worth dangling from.
But I am digressing in order to stroke some of my favorite shiny words and watch them refract.
Today I was reading a quite nice book lent to me by Amber called No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies. It is an exploration of American laws regarding women, in the context of the perceived legal balance between obligations and privileges. I am just now getting into the chapter which discusses the relationship between the privileges of citizenship and the right to bear arms.
And it occurred to me that this topic has implications in an area dear to my heart. That is, membership in a social group and the presumption of the authority to determine legitimacy. Different members of a group, based on their differing levels of authority within it, have of course different mandates from the group for determining the legitimacy of an idea, viewpoint, course of action, what have you. But this mandate to bear ideas is analogous to that of bearing arms. To be a citizen conveys the right to bear arms, just as it conveys the obligation to bear arms in defense of the group. To be a citizen conveys the right to hold opinions, just as it conveys the obligation to express those opinions regarding things one judges to be for the best good of the group.
So inasmuch as I am a member of my extended family, my presence and participation in it can be expressed in a number of ways. For example.
I had a really great idea for Musical Mondays yesterday, but didn't post it up due to a combination of lethargy and actual work to do. But that is not what this post is about.
Also had an interesting dream last night, which involved my dream-posse being superheroes and working together to demolish an enemy yacht which was sailing towards us. And a different member of my dream-posse getting chompsorbed by an evil biomachine thingy after reading words on a screen connected to a pillar which turned out to have been part of the machine. But that, also, is not what this post is about.
This post is about this post I made on my other blog.
I am quite proud of it. Although I am nervous about it as well.
I stopped posting the POEE forums several months back out of a combination of boredom, bereavement, and cowardice. Those boys do not play nice, nor are they especially big fans of the types of content I produce most readily. Also I do not like doing things that upset people, which is a favorite hobby for many of them. I like to gain people's trust and then sneakily trick them into thinking of things from a point of view slightly different than the one to which they are accustomed. I do not like taking a radically different point of view and beating someone across the face with it until it leaves some kind of an imprint in the brain. I admire and enjoy people with the chutzpah to do so, but it is not my style. Also some of them made fun of me. Which under normal circumstances I am able to stomach, in the service of building a case for the legitimacy of my opinions through sheer stubborn reasonableness. But I was using my stubborn for other things this spring and summer and thus didn't have that much to spare for them.
However, the element of cowardice still leaves me disappointed in myself. In my private mind I feel I've gone down a peg and must do something to regain my own good opinion. To reaffirm my faith in my adherence to my nominal faith.
If you decide to be a Discordian, as I see it, you must work out for yourself what exactly that means in practice. It could be extremely vague. It could be totally meaningless to anyone but yourself. But it is important to come up with some standards of behavior for yourself, and then once you've come up with them, live up to them. Or at least judge yourself by them in as accurate a manner as you can devise. Otherwise, what makes you better than all those Sunday Christians and Saturday Jews and Friday night Satanists--the ones who talk a big game, but don't actually try to live out their so-called religions on a day-to-day basis?
I fall more in the category of "completely meaningless to anyone but myself", I think. Since I believe all judgments of morality are contextual, the distillation of a concept of honor is itself a process of experimentation, a sort of drunken lurching towards a dimly perceived truth. I worship chaos principally by attempting to create order. First in my personality, so that my perceptions of the world around me are filtered only through symbol sets with whose construction I am intimately familiar. Second, in my interactions with others, so that I evoke only those responses and provide only those stimuli which I judge to be appropriate expressions of my will given the structure of the relationships between me and the other people. Third, in the pattern of events in my life, so that I behave in ways which produce the kinds of experiences I want to have for reasons based on observation rather than assumption. (i.e., I pay my gas bill because I've had it cut off before and hate to be cold, rather than because paying one's gas bill is the sort of thing a grownup and a good citizen simply does.) Makes for a longer learning curve than is strictly necessary, but it suits me fine.
This is a religious observance for me because the attempt to create order, especially when the attempt is continuous, only throws into sharp relief how permanent, self-evident, and omnipresent is chaos. How even the most restrictive set of rules and laws is a thin stick dancing in a mighty wind. How really, really flexible I have to make the stick if it's gonna be worth dangling from.
But I am digressing in order to stroke some of my favorite shiny words and watch them refract.
Today I was reading a quite nice book lent to me by Amber called No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies. It is an exploration of American laws regarding women, in the context of the perceived legal balance between obligations and privileges. I am just now getting into the chapter which discusses the relationship between the privileges of citizenship and the right to bear arms.
And it occurred to me that this topic has implications in an area dear to my heart. That is, membership in a social group and the presumption of the authority to determine legitimacy. Different members of a group, based on their differing levels of authority within it, have of course different mandates from the group for determining the legitimacy of an idea, viewpoint, course of action, what have you. But this mandate to bear ideas is analogous to that of bearing arms. To be a citizen conveys the right to bear arms, just as it conveys the obligation to bear arms in defense of the group. To be a citizen conveys the right to hold opinions, just as it conveys the obligation to express those opinions regarding things one judges to be for the best good of the group.
So inasmuch as I am a member of my extended family, my presence and participation in it can be expressed in a number of ways. For example.
a tower, a turkey, a text and a tart (dream log)
These notes are marked return to sender
I'll save this letter for myself
I wish you only knew
how good it is to see you
see you
~Foo Fighters
Well now! I've been speculating on the symbolic functions of several types of activity in my dreams, and last night I had a dream with all of them and then some.
As a final word on my scary and embarrassing medical saga, I resumed penicillin-ing last night. It does cause some notable throat irritation. But in the absence of a panic attack and the other things I'd done to make my throat and lungs angry with me, it does not in fact cause me to die. Or even to become convinced I am going to die. So I can continue medicating my stupid pharyngitis. Good news there.
I went to bed early, a little before eleven. My hope was that the extra sleep would do me good and help my immune system win faster. Instead (or perhaps in addition) I got an awesome long dream! Sequentiality was disturbed during this dream, so I'm just going to set down these scenes in a sequence that seemed most fitting as I reviewed them over the course of the morning.
I was on the floor of a dimly-lit room which was shaking violently. The floor was carpeted, with that functional thin carpet of an indeterminate dull color through which you can feel the hardness of the floor. The ceilings were high, I wasn't paying attention to entrances and exits. I felt very calm, comfortable even, as though being in a dim, violently shaking room were a perfectly normal situation. On a low table in the middle of the room were several things, including my glasses. I had to get to my glasses and put them on. But because the room was shaking and jerking and trembling so violently, it was incredibly difficult to move even a few inches from where I lay. Again and again I tried, clawing determinedly for handholds on the carpet with both hands, then with both hands and feet, trying to scoot myself across the floor. Finally I did reach the table, get my glasses, and put them on. The feeling of satisfaction was the sort that makes you say, "hmph! 'bout time."
I was on the top floor of the Sears Tower. Through the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows I had a crystal clear view of the city, and the storm brewing over it. The sight of both exhilarated me. Clouds and lightning and wind and rain and all their stormy colors raced over the city, which despite the cloud cover was lit all through by the clear glow of the half-sunlight you get at dawn and dusk. I was practically dancing with excitement. I had to see more. I knew the view from the east side of the building would be best, so I ran around towards that side of the tower.
When I got there, however, the place was filled with rich people in fancy dress, who looked at me scornfully. I knew that the entire top floor of the tower was filled with them, that this was their party, and I didn't have a ticket. I was moved away from the windows by means not pictured, bitterly enraged and frustrated that I was no longer allowed to look out through the windows at the storm. I ended up in an interior room, low-ceilinged, lit with wall sconces that filled the room with yellowish electric light. The room could be compared to a smallish conference room at a rather nice hotel, right down to the high-quality fake ficuses by the doors. Other people were already seated at dinner tables throughout the room. They were also in fancy dress, but like me had been refused entry to the party going on outside. Some looked up at me sympathetically when I came in.
There were serving tables to one side of the room on which roast chickens could be seen. The food did smell delicious. I moved towards a seat, still fuming. Some fellow--waiter, maitre d', or simply a guy sitting at the table I was headed to, not sure--asked me if I wanted to eat. I responded acidly, "I don't have a ticket, are you sure I get to?" I was then presented with a sort of basket in which there were only two pieces of chicken left, one of them clearly a wing. I picked up the other, hoping it was a drumstick, though it didn't look much like a drumstick. When I turned it over, it in fact was a drumstick, but a huge one, which had clearly been torn off the rest of the cooked bird and was a bit ragged-looking. It had to have been a turkey leg; no chicken drumstick is that large. I picked off a bite of meat and tried to find a nice crispy bit of skin to go with it. The skin was pretty soggy, though, and the piece I eventually tore off and ate didn't best please me. Come to think of it I'm not even sure whether I ate any meat or not. Just a substandard piece of skin.
Latter half of the dream is where remembering the sequence really gets tough. Frustrating, because a different sequence here would make big differences in how I should interpret it.
I was reading a poem. I got a distinct author-feeling in my mind, and when I was awake I easily identified the author-feeling as Mark Danielewski. The author of the awesomely fantastic and inimitable House of Leaves. He has a second book, a poem-book, called Only Revolutions, which is written with just as much skill but is too dense and over-the-top with the "omg look how formally convoluted I can make my poetry and it still lets me put blood in it!" to be any fun to read. (Not that I am in a great position to criticize on that score. We see our own faults in others most clearly, eh?) The thing I was reading was different, a dream of an epic poem. As I read, I went to the place the poem was about.
This was a cave; the walls, ceiling and lower parts were all roughly carved or worn from the same matte rust-colored stone. I was calm here, in the same way that I had been in the shaking room at the beginning of the dream. The ceiling was very tall, and the room was several times longer than it was wide. The floor was all pockets or little pits, some empty, some piled with human bones and skulls. They may have been laid out in a rough sort of grid, but I wasn't paying attention to that. A slightly wider ridge of the same stone ran down the middle of the room; I was standing on this. Through both the empty and the full pockets, and in and out through some of the crumbled holes in the walls, things like tentacles or smooth worms slid endlessly. They coiled around the bones and shoved themselves through the eye sockets of the skulls. Interested, I carefully thought about what would happen if I were to fall into one of the pockets, or even just leave the central ridge on which I was standing. The tentacle things would swarm over me, eating away all my flesh and leaving me a skeleton like the ones I saw. But I would remain aware; it would hurt when they took away my flesh, and every time one of the things slid over or through my bones, I would feel the crawling nastiness of it. And this would go on for ever and ever, just as it was for the bones I could see in the pits already. (Seriously, if dream-me didn't understand the practical difference between think, which causes dream things to actually happen, and think about, which causes dream things to be represented, I would be so metaphorically screwed in dream situations like this one. The idea made me shudder a little bit when I woke up and thought it over.)
Impressive as this design was, I still felt a feeling of smug superiority. I had a thought something like, "this is a place worthy of inclusion in Dante's Inferno, but my work has all three parts--the inferno, the purgatory, and the paradise."
I then turned my attention to the exits. The first exit, I knew was a trap. Ahead of me and to the right, just before the partial wall marking the midpoint of the room, there was a rectangular hole in the ceiling through which bright white light shone. I could see a thin ridge, which would provide less solid footing than the central one on which I stood and ran perpendicular to it. It met the right-hand wall at a spot almost, but not quite, under the hole. There were enough pocks and crumbled gouges in the wall--throughout the room, but there in particular--where it seemed quite possible that a person might be able to climb up the wall and pull themselves up through the rectangle of light. How I knew this was a trap, I don't know. What would happen if the trap was sprung, I also don't know, and didn't stop to think about it. The second exit felt dangerous, but wasn't a trap. It was straight ahead down the center of the room; if I just kept walking forward on the ridge where I stood, I would eventually reach it. This exit was just a door-shaped rectangle in the wall with total darkness visible in it. I experienced a mild and momentary worry about the lack of a nonthreatening exit.
Then I was reading the book of the poem again, and as I read I grew more and more excited, thinking to myself, "I am so better than this guy. I can best this, no problem", or thoughts of that nature. The last few pages were not like regular pages; they were behind iron brackets that made the book bigger and more solid but also made the text harder to read. The last couple of pages I almost couldn't read, until I realized they were meant to be backlit, and viewed through the brackets like stained-glass windows. I held it up until there was light behind it and managed to read the end of it. Still felt confident as hell I could do better, or had done better, something like that.
Hardest scene to place in sequence. Hence, likely most important in the dream. I was in the basement bathroom of the house I grew up in, and I was pouting and/or having a tantrum. Not only had I locked the door from the inside, it was a tall steel door with a reinforced lock plate, rather than the flimsy wooden one the actual bathroom had had. Pearl and Dave were outside the door, very worried about me. From time to time one of them would call through the door, trying to convince me to come out. I paced back and forth, sometimes almost totally calm, other times angry and sullen and crying. I must have come out, but I don't remember opening the door to do so.
Last scene, me and some other people were in a room chatting. The room felt a little bit under-constructiony, but was in the same place or building I'd been in when I finished reading the hell poem. I needed to go into the bathroom to make a wardrobe adjustment, and a hot blonde chick followed me in there. We didn't close the door completely. She was fully visualized, which is unusual in a dream-person for me, and just barely underage so she was deliciously taboo. She came on to me outrageously and I totally let her, up to a point, at which point I said something like, "We need to be careful, there's other people in the room out there."
I woke up briefly, a couple hours before my alarm rang. Both because I'd gone to bed a couple hours earlier than usual and because I'd left a ponytail holder around my right wrist, which had caused my right hand to fall asleep. Fell back asleep almost immediately, and I don't know if any of my dream occurred after that or not. I suppose it doesn't matter.
There's a lot of stuff in there that I'll be thinking about for quite some time. Right off the bat I can tell my unconscious mind is very, very happy about the idea of doing another epic poem. I also suspect that dream-me wants to shoot for a triptych, with denizen being the first part, the poem I need to start soon being the second part, and the third part yet to come. That's what I initially take the Dante comment to mean. Dream-me also believes (meaning that I myself internally believe) I am a better poet than Mark Danielewski and is prepared to be boastful about it. Conscious me tries to be more polite and always makes sure to point out my own bias and the relativism inherent in the appreciation of art, dangit.
I think the dream-poem may actually have been denizen. What other epic hell-poem do I really know well enough to visit as a dreamscape? Further, if at very least the template of the dream-poem was based on denizen, it would support the idea that this dreamscape was connected to my other dreamscape, the basement of the old house. And in this subject as in no other, my belief makes it so to a certain extent. Plus if the poem to which I felt so superior was in fact my own, I don't feel nearly so bad about my haughtiness and scorn. I hate scorn, as the early part of the dream makes clear!
It occurs to me the Dante comment may also have been referring to phases of spiritual development. The rectangle of light in the ceiling of the hell-place was familiar and not just because I knew it was a trap. And since we're talking about representations of the internal architecture of my personality before, I can say with confidence have dreamed that rectangle before. From the other side. That danged "demon factory is closed" dream. In the empty-and-freshly-painted workroom in the basement of the old house, there was a rectangle in the floor. Through that rectangle I could see into a hell-place, and the monochrome little girl looking up at me from it. Neither of us moved towards the other, nor did anyone present move to speak while I was in the workroom. From which I conclude that opening is now a window, not a door. Used to be a door. Now a window only. Hence, to one on the underside, a trap. A bird smacking into a window horizontally can be horribly injured or killed. How much moreso a person (or thing) who makes a precarious climb up a sheer wall above a pit of certain doom, and makes an awkwardly angled leap at what looks like a clear opening? If I can figure out a way to do it, I should find a way to write something on the window. Y'know, for safety's sake. I'm not in full communication with all parts of me at all times, and in any case I wouldn't want any of my invisible friends (or friennemies) to get hurt.
If I go ahead and make that connection, declare those dream landscapes to be flush against one another in this way, then this dream says some interesting things. The existence of the second exit down there I find especially intriguing. A further basement of mine, or a point of egress into some admittedly unpleasant area of the collective unconscious? I am not entirely sure I want to find out.
The earlier part of the dream, in the tower, I find encouraging in some ways and embarrassing in others. For example, the glasses. Things which, when you look through them, make your sight clearer. A good symbol for the availability to the unconscious self of a personality faculty which would otherwise be difficult to describe in terms of its components. An ability to put things in perspective. Very good to have. It interesting, because ever since the time I accidentally took the image of the measuring stick with the broken-off pointy end into a dream with me, I've been trying to think of a more permanent weapon-symbol I could transit in a similar way. Seems I've been wanting to make something other than the thing I needed next. Ah, well. Let's not get ahead of our curriculum, young Skywalker.
The shaking room, which turned into the Tower, is one of those locations that makes me want to conclude the action was taking place outside my personality. At very least it represented many aspects of my relationship with the world outside myself. In the past I've had dreams where I encountered something like a massive burst of static which felt like a powerful electric shock and woke me up out of my sleep. Sometimes with a temporary holdover of dream paralysis, sometimes with an out-of-breath feeling as though I'd just been dropped into bed from a height. The shaking room in this dream was actually a hell of a lot like one of those bursts of static/electricity. Except I was able to hold myself together and just barely able, with a great deal of effort, to recognize what I needed to do to compensate and then do it. Good progress there if so.
My anger and envy of rich or powerful people, and bitterness because I feel excluded from the most exciting parts of public life, were right upfront in the dream. I try to be polite and not let such feelings make me act like a jerk in waking life. But it's clear I still need to deal with those feelings. Or else my desire to act mean and rude, even to people other than the ones at whom my anger is directed, will still be there. And I will deprive my soul of its best available sustenance (soggy chicken skin, anyone?) because I am being sullen, which isn't good either.
Basement bathroom part is interesting. That was one of my childhood scaryplaces and I have dreamed it before. But this is the first time I was my full self and also in that room. I had locked myself in, I was upset, and realpeople were worried about me and wanted me to come out. So, some areas of negative emotion that I am walling off and keeping entirely to myself. Which are hurting me and making others worried about me. When I am able to move outside of this pocket of sulky and bitter and angry and scared, then good stuff happens.
Whole morning spent on this dream log--so glad things at work are slow. :D But I haven't managed to create the very first Fiction Friday yet. :( Maybe this afternoon, maybe next week. We'll see how I feel.
I'll save this letter for myself
I wish you only knew
how good it is to see you
see you
~Foo Fighters
Well now! I've been speculating on the symbolic functions of several types of activity in my dreams, and last night I had a dream with all of them and then some.
As a final word on my scary and embarrassing medical saga, I resumed penicillin-ing last night. It does cause some notable throat irritation. But in the absence of a panic attack and the other things I'd done to make my throat and lungs angry with me, it does not in fact cause me to die. Or even to become convinced I am going to die. So I can continue medicating my stupid pharyngitis. Good news there.
I went to bed early, a little before eleven. My hope was that the extra sleep would do me good and help my immune system win faster. Instead (or perhaps in addition) I got an awesome long dream! Sequentiality was disturbed during this dream, so I'm just going to set down these scenes in a sequence that seemed most fitting as I reviewed them over the course of the morning.
I was on the floor of a dimly-lit room which was shaking violently. The floor was carpeted, with that functional thin carpet of an indeterminate dull color through which you can feel the hardness of the floor. The ceilings were high, I wasn't paying attention to entrances and exits. I felt very calm, comfortable even, as though being in a dim, violently shaking room were a perfectly normal situation. On a low table in the middle of the room were several things, including my glasses. I had to get to my glasses and put them on. But because the room was shaking and jerking and trembling so violently, it was incredibly difficult to move even a few inches from where I lay. Again and again I tried, clawing determinedly for handholds on the carpet with both hands, then with both hands and feet, trying to scoot myself across the floor. Finally I did reach the table, get my glasses, and put them on. The feeling of satisfaction was the sort that makes you say, "hmph! 'bout time."
I was on the top floor of the Sears Tower. Through the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows I had a crystal clear view of the city, and the storm brewing over it. The sight of both exhilarated me. Clouds and lightning and wind and rain and all their stormy colors raced over the city, which despite the cloud cover was lit all through by the clear glow of the half-sunlight you get at dawn and dusk. I was practically dancing with excitement. I had to see more. I knew the view from the east side of the building would be best, so I ran around towards that side of the tower.
When I got there, however, the place was filled with rich people in fancy dress, who looked at me scornfully. I knew that the entire top floor of the tower was filled with them, that this was their party, and I didn't have a ticket. I was moved away from the windows by means not pictured, bitterly enraged and frustrated that I was no longer allowed to look out through the windows at the storm. I ended up in an interior room, low-ceilinged, lit with wall sconces that filled the room with yellowish electric light. The room could be compared to a smallish conference room at a rather nice hotel, right down to the high-quality fake ficuses by the doors. Other people were already seated at dinner tables throughout the room. They were also in fancy dress, but like me had been refused entry to the party going on outside. Some looked up at me sympathetically when I came in.
There were serving tables to one side of the room on which roast chickens could be seen. The food did smell delicious. I moved towards a seat, still fuming. Some fellow--waiter, maitre d', or simply a guy sitting at the table I was headed to, not sure--asked me if I wanted to eat. I responded acidly, "I don't have a ticket, are you sure I get to?" I was then presented with a sort of basket in which there were only two pieces of chicken left, one of them clearly a wing. I picked up the other, hoping it was a drumstick, though it didn't look much like a drumstick. When I turned it over, it in fact was a drumstick, but a huge one, which had clearly been torn off the rest of the cooked bird and was a bit ragged-looking. It had to have been a turkey leg; no chicken drumstick is that large. I picked off a bite of meat and tried to find a nice crispy bit of skin to go with it. The skin was pretty soggy, though, and the piece I eventually tore off and ate didn't best please me. Come to think of it I'm not even sure whether I ate any meat or not. Just a substandard piece of skin.
Latter half of the dream is where remembering the sequence really gets tough. Frustrating, because a different sequence here would make big differences in how I should interpret it.
I was reading a poem. I got a distinct author-feeling in my mind, and when I was awake I easily identified the author-feeling as Mark Danielewski. The author of the awesomely fantastic and inimitable House of Leaves. He has a second book, a poem-book, called Only Revolutions, which is written with just as much skill but is too dense and over-the-top with the "omg look how formally convoluted I can make my poetry and it still lets me put blood in it!" to be any fun to read. (Not that I am in a great position to criticize on that score. We see our own faults in others most clearly, eh?) The thing I was reading was different, a dream of an epic poem. As I read, I went to the place the poem was about.
This was a cave; the walls, ceiling and lower parts were all roughly carved or worn from the same matte rust-colored stone. I was calm here, in the same way that I had been in the shaking room at the beginning of the dream. The ceiling was very tall, and the room was several times longer than it was wide. The floor was all pockets or little pits, some empty, some piled with human bones and skulls. They may have been laid out in a rough sort of grid, but I wasn't paying attention to that. A slightly wider ridge of the same stone ran down the middle of the room; I was standing on this. Through both the empty and the full pockets, and in and out through some of the crumbled holes in the walls, things like tentacles or smooth worms slid endlessly. They coiled around the bones and shoved themselves through the eye sockets of the skulls. Interested, I carefully thought about what would happen if I were to fall into one of the pockets, or even just leave the central ridge on which I was standing. The tentacle things would swarm over me, eating away all my flesh and leaving me a skeleton like the ones I saw. But I would remain aware; it would hurt when they took away my flesh, and every time one of the things slid over or through my bones, I would feel the crawling nastiness of it. And this would go on for ever and ever, just as it was for the bones I could see in the pits already. (Seriously, if dream-me didn't understand the practical difference between think, which causes dream things to actually happen, and think about, which causes dream things to be represented, I would be so metaphorically screwed in dream situations like this one. The idea made me shudder a little bit when I woke up and thought it over.)
Impressive as this design was, I still felt a feeling of smug superiority. I had a thought something like, "this is a place worthy of inclusion in Dante's Inferno, but my work has all three parts--the inferno, the purgatory, and the paradise."
I then turned my attention to the exits. The first exit, I knew was a trap. Ahead of me and to the right, just before the partial wall marking the midpoint of the room, there was a rectangular hole in the ceiling through which bright white light shone. I could see a thin ridge, which would provide less solid footing than the central one on which I stood and ran perpendicular to it. It met the right-hand wall at a spot almost, but not quite, under the hole. There were enough pocks and crumbled gouges in the wall--throughout the room, but there in particular--where it seemed quite possible that a person might be able to climb up the wall and pull themselves up through the rectangle of light. How I knew this was a trap, I don't know. What would happen if the trap was sprung, I also don't know, and didn't stop to think about it. The second exit felt dangerous, but wasn't a trap. It was straight ahead down the center of the room; if I just kept walking forward on the ridge where I stood, I would eventually reach it. This exit was just a door-shaped rectangle in the wall with total darkness visible in it. I experienced a mild and momentary worry about the lack of a nonthreatening exit.
Then I was reading the book of the poem again, and as I read I grew more and more excited, thinking to myself, "I am so better than this guy. I can best this, no problem", or thoughts of that nature. The last few pages were not like regular pages; they were behind iron brackets that made the book bigger and more solid but also made the text harder to read. The last couple of pages I almost couldn't read, until I realized they were meant to be backlit, and viewed through the brackets like stained-glass windows. I held it up until there was light behind it and managed to read the end of it. Still felt confident as hell I could do better, or had done better, something like that.
Hardest scene to place in sequence. Hence, likely most important in the dream. I was in the basement bathroom of the house I grew up in, and I was pouting and/or having a tantrum. Not only had I locked the door from the inside, it was a tall steel door with a reinforced lock plate, rather than the flimsy wooden one the actual bathroom had had. Pearl and Dave were outside the door, very worried about me. From time to time one of them would call through the door, trying to convince me to come out. I paced back and forth, sometimes almost totally calm, other times angry and sullen and crying. I must have come out, but I don't remember opening the door to do so.
Last scene, me and some other people were in a room chatting. The room felt a little bit under-constructiony, but was in the same place or building I'd been in when I finished reading the hell poem. I needed to go into the bathroom to make a wardrobe adjustment, and a hot blonde chick followed me in there. We didn't close the door completely. She was fully visualized, which is unusual in a dream-person for me, and just barely underage so she was deliciously taboo. She came on to me outrageously and I totally let her, up to a point, at which point I said something like, "We need to be careful, there's other people in the room out there."
I woke up briefly, a couple hours before my alarm rang. Both because I'd gone to bed a couple hours earlier than usual and because I'd left a ponytail holder around my right wrist, which had caused my right hand to fall asleep. Fell back asleep almost immediately, and I don't know if any of my dream occurred after that or not. I suppose it doesn't matter.
There's a lot of stuff in there that I'll be thinking about for quite some time. Right off the bat I can tell my unconscious mind is very, very happy about the idea of doing another epic poem. I also suspect that dream-me wants to shoot for a triptych, with denizen being the first part, the poem I need to start soon being the second part, and the third part yet to come. That's what I initially take the Dante comment to mean. Dream-me also believes (meaning that I myself internally believe) I am a better poet than Mark Danielewski and is prepared to be boastful about it. Conscious me tries to be more polite and always makes sure to point out my own bias and the relativism inherent in the appreciation of art, dangit.
I think the dream-poem may actually have been denizen. What other epic hell-poem do I really know well enough to visit as a dreamscape? Further, if at very least the template of the dream-poem was based on denizen, it would support the idea that this dreamscape was connected to my other dreamscape, the basement of the old house. And in this subject as in no other, my belief makes it so to a certain extent. Plus if the poem to which I felt so superior was in fact my own, I don't feel nearly so bad about my haughtiness and scorn. I hate scorn, as the early part of the dream makes clear!
It occurs to me the Dante comment may also have been referring to phases of spiritual development. The rectangle of light in the ceiling of the hell-place was familiar and not just because I knew it was a trap. And since we're talking about representations of the internal architecture of my personality before, I can say with confidence have dreamed that rectangle before. From the other side. That danged "demon factory is closed" dream. In the empty-and-freshly-painted workroom in the basement of the old house, there was a rectangle in the floor. Through that rectangle I could see into a hell-place, and the monochrome little girl looking up at me from it. Neither of us moved towards the other, nor did anyone present move to speak while I was in the workroom. From which I conclude that opening is now a window, not a door. Used to be a door. Now a window only. Hence, to one on the underside, a trap. A bird smacking into a window horizontally can be horribly injured or killed. How much moreso a person (or thing) who makes a precarious climb up a sheer wall above a pit of certain doom, and makes an awkwardly angled leap at what looks like a clear opening? If I can figure out a way to do it, I should find a way to write something on the window. Y'know, for safety's sake. I'm not in full communication with all parts of me at all times, and in any case I wouldn't want any of my invisible friends (or friennemies) to get hurt.
If I go ahead and make that connection, declare those dream landscapes to be flush against one another in this way, then this dream says some interesting things. The existence of the second exit down there I find especially intriguing. A further basement of mine, or a point of egress into some admittedly unpleasant area of the collective unconscious? I am not entirely sure I want to find out.
The earlier part of the dream, in the tower, I find encouraging in some ways and embarrassing in others. For example, the glasses. Things which, when you look through them, make your sight clearer. A good symbol for the availability to the unconscious self of a personality faculty which would otherwise be difficult to describe in terms of its components. An ability to put things in perspective. Very good to have. It interesting, because ever since the time I accidentally took the image of the measuring stick with the broken-off pointy end into a dream with me, I've been trying to think of a more permanent weapon-symbol I could transit in a similar way. Seems I've been wanting to make something other than the thing I needed next. Ah, well. Let's not get ahead of our curriculum, young Skywalker.
The shaking room, which turned into the Tower, is one of those locations that makes me want to conclude the action was taking place outside my personality. At very least it represented many aspects of my relationship with the world outside myself. In the past I've had dreams where I encountered something like a massive burst of static which felt like a powerful electric shock and woke me up out of my sleep. Sometimes with a temporary holdover of dream paralysis, sometimes with an out-of-breath feeling as though I'd just been dropped into bed from a height. The shaking room in this dream was actually a hell of a lot like one of those bursts of static/electricity. Except I was able to hold myself together and just barely able, with a great deal of effort, to recognize what I needed to do to compensate and then do it. Good progress there if so.
My anger and envy of rich or powerful people, and bitterness because I feel excluded from the most exciting parts of public life, were right upfront in the dream. I try to be polite and not let such feelings make me act like a jerk in waking life. But it's clear I still need to deal with those feelings. Or else my desire to act mean and rude, even to people other than the ones at whom my anger is directed, will still be there. And I will deprive my soul of its best available sustenance (soggy chicken skin, anyone?) because I am being sullen, which isn't good either.
Basement bathroom part is interesting. That was one of my childhood scaryplaces and I have dreamed it before. But this is the first time I was my full self and also in that room. I had locked myself in, I was upset, and realpeople were worried about me and wanted me to come out. So, some areas of negative emotion that I am walling off and keeping entirely to myself. Which are hurting me and making others worried about me. When I am able to move outside of this pocket of sulky and bitter and angry and scared, then good stuff happens.
Whole morning spent on this dream log--so glad things at work are slow. :D But I haven't managed to create the very first Fiction Friday yet. :( Maybe this afternoon, maybe next week. We'll see how I feel.
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