Of Fossilized Bookworms.

6/19/24

“Who the fuck reads on their break for no reason?”

From where I sit in my truck, sweating like a nincompoop, I look up from my book, stare at her, and raise my hand.

“I do,” I openly confess. “And what do you mean ‘for no reason’? I find what I’m reading interesting.”

I mean, I find this to be a sufficient justification.

This time it feels even worse than it did a few months back, when a guy I worked with came up to me to inquire “why” I was reading. I felt like I was living in an old Bill Hicks bit. Is this really what it’s come to?

Look, reading isn’t for everybody, and I don’t look down on those who don’t enjoy it, but to regard those of us who do as bizarre is just fucking depressing. What’s wrong with it? Why is it so weird to them? I mean, what do they really think of me when they see a book in my hand? What goes on in their heads?

“You’re old,” she tells me, as if in answer to my thoughts.

And with that, I turned back to my book, having never felt happier to be considered a fucking fossil.

Mufflers for the Miffed.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve appreciated some of her music. And I confess, especially when she’s clad in black leather and she wears those knee-high or thigh-high black goth boots, I desperately want Avril Lavigne to sit on my face.

It’s just the honest truth.

I’d go to town. I’d tongue-twist, tongue-punch her one-eyed skin clam, lapping away in, on, and around those lovely lower lips and the man in the boat like a thirsty dog at a water bowl till my dying day.

But I’m so, so sick of that fucking song of hers. The one that they play fifty times a day on the radio station at work.

“Don’t call me baby.
I love it when you hate me.”

Look, woman, I call no one baby, for one thing; for another, consider your goal achieved.

Now if you insist on still singing that song, have some mercy and ensure you clamp your thighs tightly around my ears when you plant your pussy on my puss.

Much obliged.

Different Flavors of Dystopia (Pages From My Drunk Diary, Part II).

6/12/24

Here’s the thing: over the years, even within my lifetime, the positions held by the Democratic and Republican parties have changed.

Despite this, people still seem to swallow the positions of whatever party they identify with as a whole — to the point that if you learn of a person’s position on one of the issues you can with a disturbingly high degree of certainty predict what their positions will be on all the rest.

Now, ask yourself: how likely would it be that the majority of the US population would carefully, thoughtfully consider all the political issues and independently arrive at all the same conclusions presently embraced by either Team Red or Team Blue?

I’m no statistician, but I reckon it’s highly fucking unlikely.

So the cause of this black/white, red/blue grouping is clearly that people are either unwilling or have become utterly incapable of truly thinking for themselves, but instead prefer to embrace groupthink or herd mentality.

Perhaps it has been this way all along and the political polarization that seems to be becoming increasingly intensified today is just due to the change in news media.

I mean, we now largely get our news via the net, after all, which due to internet algorithms suggest content based on our viewing of previous content, thereby creating an informational echo-chamber that only serves to reinforce and elaborate upon pre-established “data” we’ve consumed and simultaneously blind us all to all else.

While this certainly seems to play a major role, perhaps there are other factors. I am, after all, a dumb fuck.

Even so, what is clear as fucking day is the core issue: people are unable or unwilling to think for themselves.

They identify with and worship groups; they identify with and worship “leaders,” investing faith (in the sense of uncritical certitude) in the beliefs of those groups out of a need for belonging, investing faith (in the sense of uncritical trust) in the proclamations of their leaders.

All of which certainly stems from our nature as a social species.

These inclinations are rooted in our genes, after all. They push and pull at us with the awesome weight and attraction of our shared, evolutionary history, like ghosts haunting us, guiding us, possessing us.

Even though this legion of the dead only applies to contexts and circumstances that we’ve left behind, they’re with us still.

Even though they apply to how we lived for nearly 99% percent of our history, they do not fit within the context and circumstances of today – for our biology is subject to evolution by means of natural selection deep beneath, on a long time-scale, and our culture is subject to revolutions by means of collective election on the surface, on an increasingly shorter one, striving to sublimate those naturally-born, evolutionary instincts so that they can assert themselves into the context of our current environmental pressures.

Old ghosts, newly enfleshed in a modern context, with the ghosts effectively static as the current context undergoes exponential and utterly unpredictable development.

We’re children in an ever-changing, exponentially-advancing playground operating on the same ol’, ancient rules.

Survival depends on one of two avenues: returning to the way things were, the way our context was for 99% of our history, or changing ourselves so that we more effectively adapt to the presently ever-changing context.

The realization that neither option seems any more preferable than they seem probable to me is haunting, daunting, taunting, as the only alternative – which in my pessimism, my cynicism, seems infinitely more likely – is our extinction by our own hand.

This is not the future I want to see, not by a long shot, but it is the inevitable result I can’t help but see given the conditions and our present trajectory.

So if we are to survive, I fear, either of the two other alternatives must occur, either by our own hand or that of others, and in any case, the scenarios I’m presently capable of imagining only offer different flavors of dystopia.

There is a distinct difference between believing what you want to believe and believing what the available evidence seems to suggest, and that apparent fact, while I’ve long been aware of it, has never been as potent as it is in this particular and unfortunately broad circumstance.

Never in my fucking life have I hoped so much that I might be so bloody wrong.

Sequel, Not a Reload (Page From My Drunk Diary, Part I).

6/5/24

The biggest threat to democracy, to our country, to the world?

It isn’t Trump – that neurologically-glitching, narcissistic convict. It’s not Biden – that neurologically-glitching step away from a political rendition of Weekend at Bernies.

Or even Harris, as Biden would almost inevitably bite the dust and be buried beneath six feet of dirt at best two years into his second term, leaving that unconvincing semblance of a human at the helm.

No. Severe as these threats may seem, a still greater horror looms. I speak of the political polarization in the ol’ US of fuckin’ A. The greatest threat of all.

Since before Trump was elected, I felt it. The faultline growing into a gap evolving into a yawning fucking chasm where those at either side couldn’t hear each other despite screaming at each other across the gulf, much less hope to understand one another and begin mending this ever-gaping wound in our culture.

This wound that has fucking become our culture.

Even now, this void persists in widening.
And this central chasm? Make no mistake: it is only that.

Given the spotlight by the media, by social media, algorithms that only serve to feed the dismal, core dissociation, it’s clearly just the core, the poisoned heart of this issue, and by no means the whole.

From that hub, the strands of further fracturing can be found, after all. Blind feminists, alpha male fucks, and weak little incels. Extreme trans activists – who I am yet to be convinced represent the core and authentic trans community – and the predictable pushback from the far, extreme, not nearly right, right. MAGA Trump cultists and what I once would have called the Woke cultists, in other words.

I’ve become a bit wary of the word Woke, however. I mean, it’s clearly been subject to such a cultural gang-bang now it’s difficult to discern how one might even hope to define it, so I can’t help but feel dirty (in the bad way) even using the term.

Originally deriving from a song that hoped to remind the black community to remain ever-vigilant with respect to the prejudice waged against them, it was thereafter appropriated by the far left and expanded in definition, used to refer to all minorities and their alleged similar circumstances, and was then ultimately commandeered by the right to refer to whatever it was they perceived as despicable when it came to the left.

This word, Woke: it has been fucked so much, from so many angles, that it has become a whore of a word, dripping, oozing with the differing meaning pounded into it by so many, from so many countless angles, that in the end it means nothing.

Yet still, still it burns bright, shining like a neon-blazing sign, like a torch newly forged from the fires of our collective ignorance, slicing through our collective skin from countless dimensions, severing, dividing, fracturing, further serving to crack the ground we jointly stand on all the fucking more.

I so want to be done with your bullshit. My bullshit. Our bullshit.

I want to look away, walk away, leave this all behind me for the betterment of my mental health, and damned be the rest of you. The rest of us.

Yet I’m a part of you. You’re a part of me. Like it or not.

A wise woman once told me that there is a web that stretches across the universe, interconnecting all souls, and while I can’t be sure exactly what she meant by that, I’ve contemplated it often since I was a child. However pathetic and miniscule we might think our individual words or actions might be, it’s like plucking a strand on that cosmic spider-web: the entire web vibrates as a consequence.

Like throwing a stone into a pond, the impact sends ripples that travel out from the point of impact to all edges of the body of water — and so, I guess, inject the notion of the “butterfly effect” here and all that fucking rot…

At any rate, that divine, unearthly teacher of mine believed in me, for whatever reason – believed in us, or so my unsupported memories and current working hypothesis goes – and so despite my cynicism, pessimism, and loathing for not only myself, but the species to which I belong as a whole, I hold onto all that she, my self-described Teacher, told me, who she described as an Artist.

There is a dark cloud suffocating our world, she told me during this same conversation.

And I don’t want to contribute to that dark cloud. I really don’t. I want to believe in the web of souls. I want to believe that each of us can pluck the strands that intersect the luminous beings she claimed we all are and consequently send our positive vibrations across the entirety of the webwork, to cure the disease that plagues us all and plow our way towards collective health.

As pathetic as it may be – and I know, I fucking know it is – I’m doing by best. So I beg of you, at least join me and try. And Nimi, if by some chance you’re listening, reading, scanning my inebriated thoughts, know that I – or less egotistically, we – could use some fucking help. Not dictation, mind you. Like Johnny Five, I only require more input. Some merciful illumination.

I only need to remember.

I’ve never been one for uncritical allegiance or blind faith, but something tells me you know this story, understand my position. Something tells me, my blessed bitch, that you’ve been down this treacherous road before us before, and maybe I have, too. Let me know, at the very least, the details regarding how, where, and why we went wrong.

I’d much fucking prefer a decent sequel to the same ol’ shitty reload.

I Hate It Here.

I go out in front of the building to have a smoke and briefly write about the high point of the day in my cell phone. For the last two weeks or so, this job, this town, has upped the ante on its usual bullshit and I want to capture some positive inspiration for once. As I should’ve expected, I only get in a puff or two and manage to type out a single, solitary, fucking letter when I hear someone yell, “Hey!”

Though the vibe I sense makes me feel certain this was directed towards me, I don’t look up. Maybe if I ignore this, I tell myself, it’ll go away. This is always a hopeful thought, though it never works out in practice.

Then they say it again. Louder.

“HEY!”

So I finally look up, and at the sidewalk a short distance away I see a guy in a white shirt aggressively extending a middle finger at me. I am certain I don’t know this man. I am certain I did not earn half a peace sign.

I shrug, then casually look back down at my phone.

Seconds later, I feel alarm bells go off within. I look back up. The angry man in the white shirt is approaching me, and his manner of doing so clearly communicates he is shitfaced. I casually put out my smoke, go in the door, and don’t look behind me.

I now exit out the side door.

“I don’t know why it takes so long to make two goddamn McChickens,” says the short, scruffy-looking guy I talked to half an hour ago and didn’t know was still out here. “I don’t even want it anymore.”

I don’t engage. I just take a few drags, flick the cigarette, go inside and proceed to mop the floor.

By the time I’m done and go out the side door again, it’s finally quiet. I’m finally alone. I light up.

Then people keep parking, walking towards the building, and I inform them we’re closed. One guy is bitching to me about his gift card, and how this and that is stupid. Do you see the red hair, red shoes, and make-up on my face, I want to say?

No? That’s because I’m not the fucking clown in charge of this fast food joint. I don’t make the rules.

Towards the end of my smoke, which I did not get to enjoy, another car pulls up to the door, close to where I’m crouching. A woman’s voice asked if we were open, and I tell her just drive thru is open, that the dining room closes at nine. This woman speaks to her passenger as she backs put of the space, and just as she’s pulling away does that pouty, dramatic, fake crying, and in the same vein goes, “I hate it here.”

“Me, too,” I instinctively said aloud.

She repeated what I said to her passenger as she laughed her ass off on her way towards drive thru.

And that made me smile, at the very least.

The Good Father.

A sauce packet detonates, exploding like a BBQ firework as it’s thrown against the wall. Wrappers and stray chunks of food litter the tables and floor. They yell over one another, louder and louder, a positive feedback loop that can only end in the rupturing of eardrums. One kid walks across the seat cushions right in front of me, from one booth to the other, like the floor is fucking lava.

As I’m mopping up a large drink one of the kids spilled, just beneath another litter-filled table, one member of this gaggle of giggling idiots darts by at Mach 10. In the process of doing so, he catches the leg of his shorts on the mop handle, almost de-pantsing himself in the process.

I bark, “Hey!,” and after stopping a moment to apologize and catch a breath, the jacked-up poster-child for pro-choice just picks up where he left off.

Where are the parents, you ask?

Probably at home, their negligent fathers still convinced their pull-out game is strong despite evidence to the contrary, so both them and the wives consequently busy making more unsocialized crotch-goblins they’re not prepared to care for.

No matter, they’ll just send their little sociopaths to the local fast food joint, where a 45-year-old, childless bachelor with bleeding ears and rising blood pressure will be forced to clean up after them and carefully bottle up his rage so he doesn’t go ape-shit on the little spidermonkeys.

I should’ve been a fucking librarian.

After wheeling the mop bucket into the corner, I take a deep breath, averting eye contact with anyone, and approach the door at the front of the building. Slipping out, I proceed to smoke a cigarette and reconsider my life choices.

A few puffs in, a girl walking down the sidewalk turns her head towards me, makes an “o” face, smiles, and laughs in apparent lunacy. Even given the tell-tale signs, it takes a moment for me to realize who this is, as I’m not accustomed to seeing her in anything other than her fast food costume.

It’s Psycho.

A pretty girl of perhaps seventeen years of age, she’s been a coworker of mine for the last two months or so. She’s prone to dramatic outbursts of energy which marijuana either serves to quell or exacerbate, depending on the day. As she walks up to me, I ask her why on earth she’d elect to come here on her day off, and she doesn’t hesitate to tell me that she’d much rather be here than home.

Then she bears all. Cliff’s Notes of her life story comes rushing out in firehouse fashion.

She tells me how her father and step father have both raped her. How her step-father would frequently do so when she took a shower. How her father would hold her and her nearly half a dozen siblings at gunpoint when any of them left the house. She explained how he’d walk behind her, keeping the handgun under his shirt, pointed at her back.

One day, she finally called the cops on him, and that’s how she escaped that fucked up circumstance and the state of South Carolina and came to live with her mother and her mother’s wife here in Ohio. Her mother who, while not physically abusive, at the very least, isn’t much of a mother, either. Her wife? Evidently a total bitch.

I know she’s not lying about any if this, and so it blows me away how she tells me all of it so casually, without teeth clenching, devoid of teared-up eyes. She just says it matter of factly. As if to say, hey, this is just what happens, isn’t life crazy?

It fucking breaks my heart. I feel myself crumbling inside.

It’s no wonder she has issues with men. It’s no wonder she gravitated towards that negligent and selfish bitch, May, who takes delight in lying and excuses her habit of constantly cheating on her girlfriends and obsolving herself of guilt by referencing her “abandonment issues” and other psychological glitches.

Shitty relationships is all Psycho has ever seen, ever known, and the familiar provides comfort, which is a more reliable source of psychological security than the risk of the unfamiliar, however much higher the odds of attaining happiness might be.

I was again reminded how some parents just shouldn’t be parents, which immediately brought my mind back to the circus of amphatamine-fueled midgets occupying the dining room on the other side of the window to my back.

Had my assumptions been too harsh?

When I was a teenager, I suddenly reexperienced — as opposed to simply remembered — something that had occurred earlier in my youth. This kind of thing had happened before, but this particular instance was different.

I was at my friend’s house, in the bedroom he shared with his four other siblings. It was a rare instance in which they were left alone, unsupervised by their strict parents, and apparently all the energy they’d been forced to repress had built up a surplus so that when they were finally alone for a brief period, it all exploded.

They were running around like lunatics. The youngest, a boy, climbed atop the toy chest, wrapped a blanket around him and lifted a flashlight high into the air with one hand, pretending to be the Statue of Liberty, and began singing the Star-Spangled Banner at high volume.

Given I knew what was coming, this must have happened before. I dropped to my belly, scooted beneath one of the bunk beds, and awaited the inevitable. I didn’t have to wait long until the door burst open and in came the father with his belt.

For all I knew, maybe it was the same with these kids. Maybe their parents were as insanely violent as my friends father was, and now that they were unsupervised, the volcano of energy erupted.

When the cat is away, the mice will play.

Maybe I just don’t understand because, unlike them, I had loving and present parents. It’s true that my mother and I had serious issues up until maybe my mid-30s, but it’s clear as day to me how lucky I was — how lucky I am — and certainly in a relative sense.

Many boys have fathers that are abusive, negligent, or altogether absent. I can say without hesitation that my father is and has always been my favorite fucking human being ever. I could never hope to express how much I love the man.

So yeah, I’m lucky, so maybe I’m just being ignorant given my different, personal, historical context and I really shouldn’t be mad at those untamed circus monkey children that invaded our fast food dining room.

Later, I was talking with Brian, another maintenance guy, back in the stock room. In the midst of conversation, he tells me he thinks I’d make a good father. This is a strange coincidence, as I’ve told him nothing about what occurred that day or the shit that had been going on in my head as a consequence.

My immediate response was that he shouldn’t say that.

I tell him that I’ve finally settled into the thought of being alone, and that it probably suited me best. I need my alone time, and that never went iver well on the rare occasion I had a girlfriend — it sure as hell wouldn’t make me suitable for a wife and kids, and at 45, I’d dodged all that thus far.

Come August, I’d be quitting this job, hopefully landing in a better-paying one, and moving into a trailer close to my family where I’d likely live alone until I die. I was good with that.

Maybe I’d get a cat, that was it.

I calmed a bit and thanked him, and confessed I’d been told that before, but it always perplexed me. Plus, I’m not sure I’d want to bring a kid into this world, particularly given it’s trajectory, at least as I see it.

He tells me that this mentality is part of the reason I’d make a good father.

Then he jokingly says this conversation almost seems like a flashback sequence. That we’ll both be looking back on this moment sometime in the future and laugh at my reservations.

“Oh fuck no,” I tell him. “Please, please don’t say that.”

I’ll settle for a cat. I’m just fine with a cat.

Claire & My Chinese Box of a Mind (5/23/23 Dream).

I’ve met up with my family at a gathering in some large, densely-packed room at a house in Pennsylvania. At some point, I notice Claire is there, too, standing against the wall. I haven’t seen or spoken to her in years. So I walk up to her, and as we talk and interact, her state of body and mind concerns me.

She is incredibly skinny, very frail-looking, and speaks in this sort of baby voice. She doesn’t seem to be all there mentally, either. As we speak, she mostly whispers in my ear to talk. She tells me she’s an alcoholic. That she came down here to get into a program, to go to a special school.

She begins kissing me on the lips, which eventually prompts me to deeply kiss her. This surprises her and she pulls back after a moment, seemingly embarrassed. Behind me, I see some woman, maybe in her 50s, looking in our direction in a very disapproving manner, and I suddenly feel guilty over the public display of affection.

There’s some other guy we both know with us now and suddenly, without warning, Claire tries to reach her hand down his pants, but we both stop her.

“We used to date,” she says, suggesting that, to her mind, this made it okay. I try to make her understand that if she did this, it would be bad, and that it would perhaps me many years before she could look back on it and see it as funny in retrospect.

Then I wake up.

I grab the yellow notebook nearby, and try to commit the dream to writing before the details fade. I get distracted by the actual party, however, and after it’s over and everyone leaves, I leave to walk home. I kept getting lost and trapped, however. I was trapped in a pit surrounded by garbage at some point, trying to get out, and then found myself trapped in fenced-off areas in what seemed to be backyards.

I finally got out my cell and called my dad, but failed the first time. The second time, he picked up, but he speaks in an ominous tone and in a cryptic way that seems to suggest he’s angry that I’ve forgotten something, or have failed to realize something.

I asked if they could pick me up. He asked if it was Wednesday, and then said that maybe we should wait until midnight. As I wake up — again — I’m uttering aloud a perplexed and frustrated, “What?”

A dream within a dream. Again.

I grab the yellow notebook — again.

My mind is a fucking Chinese Box.

(No) Help Wanted.

Some people will look upon your efforts to be polite, kind, and helpful as an act of empathy, and they appreciate it. Others? They see it as a sign of weakness and, devoid of guilt and drunk with power, they waste no time attempting to exploit it, to control you, to make you their servant, and I’ve found that its important to shut that shit down as soon as possible.

And then there is something in some people that makes them instinctively percieve your act of offering to help them as insulting, for they interpret that as you perceiving them as being incapable of doing it themselves, of being too ignorant to know this or that already.

Most of the people that have this within them recognize that this perception has more to do with them than the true perceptions or motivations of the other person, and while they can’t help how they feel, they realize their feelings don’t necessarily reflect reality. They’ll grin and bear you helping them or politely decline assistance. I respect that and once I sense this in them, I steer away from attempting to help them. Discomfort is contrary to my objectives here.

There was this regular we had who was in a motorized wheelchair. There was a sign taped to the back advertising items for sale, which I thought was unique, but nit as unique as the helmet he always wore. I quickly found he wore it so he could hit the button on the hand dryers in the rest room or help push open doors with his head without bruising his skull. He was a guy who wanted to be as self-sufficient as possible despite his handicap, and I admired that. He’d grin and bear it and give a warm thank you when you opened the door for him, but you could feel he hated it. That it hurt him.

Others who are like this aren’t so self aware, however. To the contrary, they become possessed by their overwhelming fears of feeling or being percieved as weak or ignorant about anything, and as a means of self defense convince themselves that they know all, can do all, and immediately go on the attack, responding to your attempt to be helpful with viscious bitterness. Often these same people also like to assert their dominance over others even in the absence of having any recognized authority over them. They don’t want anyone to offer help, no, they want to tell you what to do — not because they can’t do it, of course, but because they can do it better than you. Because they know better than you. Than everyone.

And these are one of a handful of personality types that in turn triggers something dark in me.

I feel myself shift from my painful default of hypersensitive to unbelievably insensitive in a flash. I feel a rush of insane rage and profound hatred that I try to hold inside myself with every ounce of effort I can fucking muster. I dig my nails into my palms, bite my tongue until it bleeds or my coffee-and-cigarette-stained, not-so-pearly whites shatter into countless pieces and I find myself compulsively, aggressively ranting to someone about it or bleeding it through my fingers just to relieve the unbearable inner pressure.

So yeah, I guess we’ve all got issues.

Relationships, Doomsday, & UFOs (Another Collection of Dreams).

2/2/24

Its nighttime and BB has a tree house in my parents backyard. When you go inside, there’s a hatch on the ceiling that gives you access to a scope, almost like you’d get on a submarine, and it allows you to see off into the distance. As we’re in the treehoise, we see these kids come by in this crazy, futuristic-lookomg flying car. There are two guys in the front seats, I believe, and two hot girls in the back.

At some point I get separated by my family and get held up in this building near the treehouse. I have something like a CB radio and I thought I heard my father’s voice. I try to think what my call sign would be, and decide on Bald Eagle. As I’m considering what my father’s would be, someone interrupts my chain of thought.

I’m uncertain if the following was part of the same dream or an altogether different one, but I’m feeling angry, so I go into the art room — like the old art room back in high school — to gather paints with the intention of going to paint in the woods. As I’m doing so, my mother comes in the door, approaching me, wanting to talk. She tells me she’s experienced strange things throughout her life, too. I sense she’s trying to connect with me, but I just won’t have it.

“No,” I tell her. “You had your chance to listen to my experiences. I’m going into the woods alone.”

She then leaves, and K.B. comes in the door. Sge gives me one of her epic, rejuvenating hugs. As she does so, I feel something wet on my thumb, and look down to realize I’ve gotten this sky blue paint on her. It’s smeared on my thumb. She hugs me tighter and neither of us let go as we just glide down the street. At the end of the street, in a yard, there is a sign that says, “No Smoking,” and my sense is that it’s in reference to weed. She assures me the sign is just sarcasm. She wants me to come with her to go see someone, though I don’t recall who.

In another dream, my parent’s black shepard is staying over at my apartment and he someone finds a white ball by the lamp in the corner of the room. Looking outside, I think to myself that I shoukd get him a leash so that at the very least he can play in the grassy area outside my apartment complex. My father buys some dog food fir me to feed him and I realize how expensive it woukd be to own a pet.

2/9/24

This girl — who is at once NB, a girl I knew from high school, and KAA, an ex-girlfriend’s cousin — hangs out with us and asks me if she can touch my face like she did “that one time.” I allow it, closing my eyes as she does so. She touches my face very lightly, very seductively. It’s incredibly relaxing and hypnotic. I fall asleep but remain aware and I can hear myself snoring.

In another dream, one of the apartments my friends are staying in was flooded. The maintenance guys arrive, all wearing blue coveralls, and one of them looks at me strangely. He had trained me, but I’d quit the job.

The situation with the flooding almost feels like an apocalyptic scenario, as people collect themselves into groups. My group was planning on taking a trip somewhere, but we’re all in the kitchen when my paternal grandmother calls it off in a very dramatic, over-the-top fashion. She’s freaking out. She then calls some man on the phone and tells him how she thinks she may have touched or ate some food to which she had an allergic reaction.

2/10/24

Went out with KM to some place, doing yoga and rubbing each other’s backs. I needed cigarettes, Circle K had closed. Walk all over town. When I come back, I don’t see her. I see JW in dreads. I also see MM, who is celebrating her birthday, but it’s not November, so I’m confused but say happy birthday anyway.

Eventually I end up sharing bed with girl I’m not initially attracted to but sge flirts and cuddles with me. She says that if her kids wake up to act natural, like we weren’t doing anything. Later she takes off her shirt and her body looks like a ripped man’s abs and it immedeately turned me off, disgusted me. A guy nearby the bed sitting on a chair looks at her looking at herself in mirror and goes, “You’re hot.”

Her kids are three girls, one of whom is mentally retarded.

I go into a closet and put on a Johnny the Homicidal Maniac T-shirt at some point.

2/11/24

In this short dream scene, I see the upper legs and vagina of a girl, as if she’s laying down and spread for me on a table. I’m about to stick it in her when I decide to instead lick around her inner thighs before doing so. She thanks me.

2/12/24

I woke up to the sound of music. I got up out of bed, ran into my living room, and turned off my phone by my laptop — but it hadn’t happened in my home reality. This was a false awakening.

2/13/24

KH, the general manager at work, comes over. Evidently we’re celebrating Christmas, even though it’s not Christmas. I feel bad because I hadn’t been informed abd so didn’t get anyone gifts, though I notice she had gotten me one.

2/15/24

I’m talking to Jon Stewart, telling him I liked his show in Apple, but that he’s at his best on The Daily Show. He kept turning everything into a joke when I was trying to have serious conversation with him and compliment him, though, and it got frustrating.

Elsewhere, we’re at work when BR asks me if I want her to make me a list of girls — presumably those I should have sex with. She says that she’ll do it so long as she can be on the list. Then she starts kissing me. They’re just pecks on the lips, but she keeps doing it again and again. It’s nice. She’s still at it when my alarm awakens me.

2/17/24

I’m walking around a dog on a leash, and at one point the caveman — one of the troublesome regulars at work — pets my dog, but there’s a boundary between us, and I begrudgingly let him.

There was a point in the dream where I was in some town and just sat down on a curb. I just felt myself inside and realized that I had never achieved the maturity others at my age or even far younger had. They had let go of childhood, sacrificed all those qualities and immersed themselves in the outer world, chasing relationships and careers, worrying about taking the kids to school, keeping up with oil changes for their vehicle. Me, I just had no desire for any of that. It’s like they had additions, external structures I didn’t have, and I felt that sense of being immature, so far behind, like I’d just fucked up what could have been and it was too late now.

2/18/24

It’s the apocalypse. There was something about kids from a clone facility, but I’m not sure if that was the cause.

People rushed the markets. I’m there with KH, my store manager from work, and I grab two boxes of granola bars.

“Why?” She asks.

“Protein,” I tell her, stuff it in my shirt, and exit the door. Despite it being the end of the workd and all, I still feel guilty fir stealing, I tell her.

I pack up my things and I’m on a plane for awhile. Some areas are trashed, others are not. The bathroom was trashed, but I had to pee. Afterward I discovered that one of the boxes wasn’t granola but these sugary bars.

There is a large group of us outside, on the move. There are black guys with berets and large guns marching in front, and we’re either behind or to the side. I suddenly think of RB, who’s probably held up at home. As a prepper person, he’s made for this. A while back, he said he’d accept me as part of his group but I don’t think he’d accept my group and I can’t just abandon them.

2/19/24

In a building, a robot turns on, picks up a metal drum and opens it. I am inside. I had been put in suspended animation during a zombie apocalypse, and as I exit the littered building, I see zombies still wriggling on nooses.

I’m outside when a large, humanoid alligator-person dressed in cloths appears behind me, and he looks frightening, but when I turn to face him he instantly transforms into a small alligator no bigger than my hand. I then put him in a plastic container and he turns into this purple liquid.

2/24/24

I’m arguing with my mother, screaming at her in a rage.

3/2/24

It’s nighttime. The blackest of conceivable black. Cloudless and entirely absent of light pollution during the deepest, most dead hours of night.

My family and I are just outside my parents’ house, and I’m meandering about their beautiful, rural property, watching the crystalline clear night sky, bathing in its cosmic beauty. I think it was the eldest of my two younger sisters, the middle child, that first drew our attention to them: these strange lights above, dancing in the heavens. As soon as all our eyes were brought to the skies, they began producing these bizarre, hypnotic displays. Veering across the full length of the property, they executed these breathtaking aerobatics and luminous, seemingly miraculous acts in this grand light show far above our silly, dumbstruck heads.

All of us are utterly captivated. We watch them with increasing enthusiasm and elevating, entranced attention, drawn into their ominous and unearthly beauty. Investing more focus than we would if we were witnessing something even as awesome as a meteor shower, fireworks display, or those heavenly, truly illuminating lighting storms above the forest lining the front yard that we always enjoyed observing from the safety of the garage, from out its open door, when my sisters and I were young.

After an enduring period of total psychological absorption, I finally break from the trace long enough to realize how important it is to document this profound experience. How mindless I had been until this moment. Until now. So I grab my phone, open it, tap video, and try to record the astounding, otherworldly light display that our eyes had for so long been permitted to behold.

Yet I simply couldn’t catch it. However much I tried, I always seemed to fail. It was so real, but yet again, I had no documentation. Nothing even approximating substantial evidence. Nothing tangible to hold onto.

And with that frustration, the dream ended.