The Underdog

Nine o’clock at night.

I had a dream that a T. Rex killed my dog. Aesop went up against him fearlessly to defend me but the huge lizard chomped him down. Obviously I was sad afterwards. I wonder what the dream means. Does the dinosaur symbolize something, maybe the monster of society or of life itself, and my dog represents the brave but puny individual whose valiant fight is futile? The story ends up the opposite of David and Goliath: the underdog, against tremendous odds, loses the battle. What are they battling over? Still, Aesop’s self sacrifice to the T. Rex kept me alive a bit longer, so his death was not vain. One more observation: the name “tyrannosaurus” means “tyrant lizard.” Thus, the real tyrant could be anything you can imagine: the Church, or perhaps a group of unjust politicians trying to topple democracy. But usually when I think of something threatening, it’s the menace to liberal scholarship and to education as I remember it. And of course, “Aesop” is the fabulist and moral teacher of antiquity.

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Apparition

Quarter of anytime.

I was dreaming of having an extended moment with an Asian girl. We were sitting on the floor in an out of the way place in a building of the campus. She impressed me as very wise as well as serene and beyond even reason. She said she didn’t analyze or critique anything logically but attempted to describe it, as an artist makes a drawing or a photographer takes a picture of a subject. I explained to her how my mind is trained to understand things like a Socrates or other Apollonian thinker… The moment was enveloped in silence and tranquility, and a peace and calm that were somewhere past understanding, like the Sanskrit shanti.

Revelers: A Dream

Wee hours.

The other night I had a dream of nudity and alcoholism, like a bacchanalian orgy. When I got up afterwards, I gave it some thought. It seems to me that life runs a gamut from sensuality to spirituality, and the best expressions of this range come from Dostoevsky and Hermann Hesse. In my dream, the revelers were storing away cases of beer and wine, but oddly, they weren’t drinking. Vaguely I recall something Bertrand Russell wrote about the Dionysus cult. He said that their religious experience was similar to intoxication but without actually getting drunk. So, at one time, the high of alcohol constituted the experience of spiritual bliss, until the literal wine was removed and only became symbolic. If you think on it, this idea has the capacity to reconcile the war between flesh and spirit, which is probably a false dichotomy in the first place. My dream also suggests the Bible quote, “Storing up treasures in heaven.”

Make a Wish

Small hours.

I guess what I need is a sense of pride in myself. A man in the lobby of the agency with a severe speech problem mumbled something about his finances. Apparently his payee had quit her job before he could receive his income this month, and then he needed proof of income to get his food stamps. He was in a bind. But he also made a reference to the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, saying that Scarecrow only wanted a brain. On Thursday afternoon I heard another allusion. Damien said he knew a woman at the foster home who watched The Wizard of Oz every day of the year and was perfectly happy. And for my own part, I often express a desire to go over the rainbow to escape the dull grayness of the Kansas life, which to me means the duality of sobriety and intoxication. But now I doubt if the same rainbow bridge still exists intact for me should I want to drink again. I wonder if a lot of people seek a cyclone to the colorful land over the rainbow where your wishes are granted by a good witch or wizard. Is it possible that this person is really ourselves? And the Land of Oz is really within you. 

Pixie Dust

Quarter after eleven.

I feel kind of tired and a bit anxious in general. Maybe I shouldn’t have called my sister on the phone. She has inflexible opinions on everything… I’m watching the squirrels in my backyard while Aesop pouts by the glass door. What would make him really happy?

Nine forty PM.

By now I realize that I’d love to play nineties jazz fusion with my friend here locally. It was an ambition I left behind when that style went out by around 1996 and all jazz converted to acoustic instruments. If we can get it to take off in Eugene then maybe I’ll be spending less time writing and blogging, which is all good with me.

Quarter of eleven. Perhaps it’s me who has inflexible opinions as to how much is possible?:

With happy thoughts and a dash of pixie dust, anyone can fly—

Dream about Job

Quarter of seven AM.

I’ll probably go back to my reading of Henry James, whose name was big where I went to college long ago. The father of Modern fiction, we were taught. It’s also been a long time since I read Yeats, though his taste for spooks was never for me. The Golden Dawn group and all that. I don’t see much evidence for the paranormal, but once in a while I’ll have a deja vu, the feeling that I was there before. There’s a song by K.D. Lang dealing with this, and thinking of it calls my mother to mind, and the idea of making music in that final year we had. 

I owned a very nice Stingray Bass with a teal finish, and the color seemed to follow me everywhere and bring me good luck. I bought it with my earnings from the disco band at Musician’s Depot on Centennial Loop. But after my mother died, I did a lot of crazy things, so I no longer have the Stingray. Easy come, easy go. In fact, before she died I did crazy stuff. And yet it seems that life has a way of forgiving you and restoring to you what you have lost, if you play by the rules. It’s like what happened to Job, sort of. He got everything back. Lately I’ve been dreaming of the Book of Job, and it’s probably significant. God and the devil strike a bargain to test Job’s faith, like it’s all a big game. But what’s interesting is how evil is just an instructional tool, and all part of the same plan. I finally let the dream play out to its conclusion the other night, and that’s what I found. 

From the Otherworld

I’ve just got up from an evening nap. Then I checked my emails: someone liked my post from last October titled “A Calling,” after two other people had since Friday. I frankly didn’t remember it, so I went back and read it again. Turns out it’s about transcendence and also the moon in the sky over the Maxwell overpass: rather a romantic observation, especially when the surrounding streets are in a fallen state of poverty and squalor, ashy gray barrenness like a human desert. Above all that, the moonlight calls from very far away as I trudge the sidewalk early in the morning, the spirit of Diana luring me on (although I didn’t say that in my post). And now I think not of Mallarme but of Keats’ Endymion, which describes a lover’s tryst of himself with the moon goddess. But this wasn’t in my post either. Maybe it was better without the allusion to Keats and Diana. The best part of it is the contrast between reality and the ideal that you can feel tugging at you like the moon’s magnetism causing the tides; still I’m embellishing what is only implicit. I should probably write another post on the same subject: maybe when the moon shows up above the overpass again in the clear sky like a smudge of white chalk against the blue blackboard, a little hazy and dreamlike, a fantasy of Vishnu, not quite real. Kind of like when I walked out of the market and it was virtually framed by an arc of rainbow 🌈 to either side of the doors and the whole building, like a blessing from God, a token, a benediction from a high place, and again, a vision in a dream.

Flight

Quarter of three at night.

For the first time since I can remember, tonight I had a dream of flying. I even flapped my arms like a bird and didn’t seem to fall from my great height. Just now I went on Google and looked up the interpretation of flying dreams: the consensus is that they mean an internal desire for freedom— which comes as no surprise to me at all. In connection with my dream, I now recall reading a passage in Native Son a few weeks ago where Bigger observes a skywriter making an advertisement for Speed Gasoline, and he says he wishes he could fly. It was a perfect figure of speech and an instance of foreshadowing. So now I have to read the remainder of the book to see how it ends for Bigger Thomas. 

Leo Rising

Nine o’clock.

I’ve made Aesop an appointment for a toenail trim for tomorrow morning. Now I just have to get us there. The colors outdoors were beautiful as I walked off to market. I saw many small blueberry clouds on the blue sky, and the ground was soaked from the rain last night. A few teenage girls kept Michelle busy at the store. My body was still wrapped in a dream when I came up to the front doors, huffing a little. A man leaning on the counter gabbed with Suk, saying it was almost Christmastime, and I unconsciously rolled my eyes: good grief. But the world should have the kind of dream I had this morning, a sweet dream of romance. Although Freud has been persecuted and pushed out of public consciousness, he has only lain dormant all this time. I was also asking myself how a person on disability income can be a rugged individualist with any kind of coherence. The cars on Maxwell Road whirled past me on the sidewalk, adding to the bluster from the street. I felt like the bum with big dreams of something sublime and yet attainable on earth. An Aphrodite sort of vision, born from the ocean and determined to conquer everyone.

Nine forty. The rain has started again from dark skies, but I somehow feel more alive than in the weeks past. The love that lies sleeping is bound to wake up and shake off the anesthetic of twenty years. More than a hope, it’s a necessity for the human future, even if I don’t see it in my lifetime. 

Lady Windermere

Quarter of three. Just now I went to the little store around the corner. In his driveway, Colin was blowing leaves a bit early in the season. The same smoke alarm started cheeping again, so I’ll have to hit the button on it. At the market, JR helped a woman out with a lot of plastic bags of empties. Cathy covered the registers and rang up my Snapple tea. I saw some rather rough looking people today, strutting around puffing cigarettes, and I think they come out in the afternoon. Generally, the morning bunch is nicer and more reputable. I’ve been going to that place for nearly twenty years, to begin with for a watering hole, but now just for convenience of location. When I reflect on it, the place seems haunted with old memories of how it used to be. Since those days, I had therapy that was traumatizing, opening a can of worms we should’ve left alone. But as it is, I know more than I ever did before the experience… The little store in the afternoon is quite a seamy place, or can be, depending on when you hit it. Sometimes I feel that I fit right in with the squalor; yet other times I long for something better, like a gutter ball looking at the stars on a romantic night. I’ve got one foot in each world, though I know I’ll never live to colonize the stars: or perhaps I’m wrong about that. Stranger things have happened.