Of Anxiety, Shame & Windex.

So it’s the end of the workday. I’m feeling anxious and hypersensitive — a state not caused but no doubt exacerbated by having had too much coffee.

Shamefully typical.

I’ve just bought a six pack of Labatt Ice, a lighter, and another carton of smokes, damning myself for buying the cigarettes because I told myself, fucking told myself that after the previous carton I was going to focus on transitioning to vaping instead.

Still unhealthy: yes, admittedly. Nonetheless: relatively healthier, or so I’ve surmised.

Exiting Circle K, I walk stiffly between a big ass van that’s parked beside me and enter the truck. Just as I’m shutting the door, I hear a familiar, kind of sexy voice.

“Small world.”

“Hey,” I say, turning my head to my left, still caught up in my anxiety and self-loathing as I look towards the girl sitting in the passenger seat of the van.

That’s when terror strikes me.

I don’t know if it’s my anxiety-riddled brain, the darkness of her van, the darkness of the truck, the dirty, scummy, honestly revolting driver-side window of mine or some utterly catastrophic cocktail of all the aforementioned elements, but I can’t for the life of me make out her face.

Oh no. Oh fuck.

“I see you everywhere now,” she says.

I know that voice. Even the bit of body language I can pick up. She’s attractive, I ascertain that much, but that’s the length of it. How can I be so blind?

Is it my anxiety? The dirty window? Or is the dirty window just a metaphor?

I don’t want to ask her who she is, though, as that would make me seem like a total asshole. So I struggle. Juggling other potential responses and trying to see her face simultaneously.

Times passes. In retrospect, I realize: too much time.

That’s when I realize I’ve just been staring at her for an uncomfortably long time like a dumb-ass deer hypnotized by the headlights of a semi speeding towards my pathetic, utterly alien self — inviting an impact destined to decimate anything left of my fragile self-image.

“Have a good night,” she says, sweetly, and I somehow sense mercifully.

“You too,” I say, slowly and cautiously backing up the truck, leaving, and all the way home beating myself up for being an awkward little shit less than half a decade away from being half a century old and still not having managed to adapt properly to social situations.

I mean, what is wrong with me?

Really, man, I hate being so fucking awkward. If I can’t change it, one would have expected me to just have embraced it by now.

In retrospect, I think I might have known who she was. Maybe.

In any case, in the end, the awkward reaction was what it was: pathetic.

Far more within the realm of my control, though: I really, really do need to clean that window already.

Honestly, it’s fucking gross.

The deeper issue would seem to require deep-seated psychological reconditioning, sure, but the other? A roll of paper towels and some goddamn Windex.

I have those ingredients, in the very least. I can do that.

So first thing tomorrow…

Of Hearts & Farts.

For the last week or two, I’ve noticed it. Driving to and from work, to and from my parent’s house, all across the road is splattered the punchline to that age-old, eternally stupid joke: what’s black and white and red all over?

Fuzzy little puddles of stink, that’s what.

According to social media, February is their annual fuck-fest, but that doesn’t help explain the roadkill.

Unless, for whatever reason, many skunks are unable to find true love this season and, weighed down by profound loneliness and depression (and taking a cue from deer) they stand on the roadside, Goodbye-Cruel-World-style, and elect to end their horribly odorous life sentences by means of vehicular suicide.

If so, my heart goes out to those poor, little stinkers, truly.

I must confess to having something akin to a phobia regarding skunks, however, that began when I was a Little Ben and we still lived in our suburban home.

A small distance behind our garage was a chain link fence separating our backyard from a field. Beside our garage, an identical fence separating our property from the neighbor’s. At the intersection of those fences, there was a woodpile.

I was in the backyard one fine day when my mother came up to me. She guided me to the opening of the sort of alleyway between the neighbor-fence and the garage and told me to stay there. She and Dad were going to poke around and rustle the woodpile in the back and I was to keep an eye on it and yell to them if I saw anything. Without further explanation, she left.

I stood there, watching as the whole woodpile jostled, as foretold. Watching as the skunk slipped out from the woodpile and pranced one, two, three times down the alley, stopped, and stood up on its hind legs.

He froze. I froze. We both held eye contact for what seemed like forever. After that, the only thing I remember is finally summoning up the courage, despite my simultaneous paralysis, to yell:

“Moooooooommm….?”

Previously, I had only known of these creatures through Pepe Le Pew of Looney Tunes fame, whose sexually aggressive affection towards that female black cartoon pussy undoubtedly led to him being targeted during 2017’s Me Too movement.

This was the first time I’d seen such a stinker in real life, though it was by no means the last.

In my 20s or 30s, I was strolling along on a sidewalk in a nearby college town one night, passing by a fence, and when it ended, I saw movement in the grass to my left. So I turned my head. There stood a skunk on its hind legs, just as in my childhood experience.

We met eyes, my adrenaline surged, and I kept walking — and didn’t look back.

Again, I saw one when taking the trash out to the dumpster corral at work one evening, though it only turned the corner as I was smoking and swiftly darted in the other direction.

I have nothing against the Oreo-colored bastards themselves, mind you, but I’m utterly terrified of getting skunked. I remember it happening to the dogs we had after we moved into our rural home in 1988, after I turned ten.

It was horrible.

If it ever happened to me, I’d feel like the olfactory equivalent of a leper.

It would likely happen back by the dumpsters at work. I’d have to call the store, inform the closing manager, remotely clock out, and go home. And I currently live in a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor, so I couldn’t walk inside. My putrid perfume wouldn’t be effectively camouflaged by the perpetual weed smell in the hallway, not by a long shot.

What would I do?

As I drove home from work the eve before Valentine’s Day, I wondered. As I anxiously gripped the wheel, stared at the road, I imagined. I tried to think strategically.

I’d have to park at an isolated distance in the lot, that much was clear.

Then I’d have to break into one of the neighbor’s garages and hopefully find a kiddie pool I could “borrow” and then drag it to an isolated area nearby, most likely be the cemetery across the street.

I’d then have to DoorDash a couple gallons of tomato juice, select the “no contact” delivery option, and have them leave it in the vestibule of my apartment building, wait until they deliver and leave, and then sneak my hell-scent-neutralizing tomater sauce back to the stone-labeled corpse-garden, empty it into the pool, strip myself of my second skins, jump in, and frantically slather it over my pasty, hairy corporeal form.

I’d then have to exit the cemetery gates in the dead of night, naked and dripping red, hoping no one saw me and mistakenly assumed I was a bloody zombie or had just finished conducting some violent, sacrificial, graveyard ritual, all the while striving to locate a garden hose hooked up in someone’s backyard so I could pressure-wash myself clean of veggie-guts.

Or fruit-guts. Whichever category you think a tomato ascribes to. Hell, for all I know tomatoes are non-binary now. It’s hard to keep up nowadays.

In any case, then I got home, and that vivid scenario went to shit. I Googled the fuck out of it and discovered, to my dismay, that tomato juice doesn’t really kill the smell. That it’s all a myth.

Well, fuck, I thought to myself. All that time, all that energy, all that creative thought invested in such an utterly paranoid scenario, now revealed to be based on a lie. All of it shot to shit.

What now?

Rerouting…

I’d have to DoorDash de-skunk solution with no-contact delivery, strip to pastey skin in the truck, slather that neutralizing lotion all over myself. Then I’d have to high-tail streak the way to my apartment before anyone saw me or I became a Ben-cicle in the frigid fucking February weather that these jet-black, white-backed, squirrel-tailed fart-cats idiotically elected as their goddamn mating season.

Still a dilemma. Still an inconvenience. And I’d have to de-skunk the goddamn truck, at least the following morning, too. Or hitch a ride.

I mean, fuck.

As if the Puxatony Phil Groundhog weather forecast on the second and the Valentine’s Hallmark Holiday today didn’t make this month, however short in comparison to the eleven fucking others, unnecessarily absurd and loathsome enough, it has to be the season where these fluffy, sentient stink bombs like to engage in their ol’ in-out, jackhammering festivities.

Or apparently go full-fledged, wrist-slitting emo and dart in despair into oncoming traffic.

Appropriate enough, I guess.

I mean, this wretched February holiday stinks so bad the wretched ass-gas of it has you holding back tears, am I right?

A Collection of Recent Dreams, Part II.

1/14/24

We find what we initially take to be an elaborately-carved ancient stone wall. I then find a piece of metal that, when inserted into a hole beneath the wall and twisted, opens what turns out to be two stone doors. Inside is a radio and other mechanical devices.

1/15/24

I live alone in an apartment and a dog — a Corgi — that I’ve owned for a long time but had entirely forgotten about turns up. As I’m petting him, I think about buying dog food and a leash so I can take him on walks. I begin to wonder how on earth he survived all this time without me feeding him and how I somehow hadn’t noticed his presence this whole time — though I didn’t question how I’d managed to forget I’d had him, strangely enough.

1/16/24

A.L.’s mother leaves A.L. and I new weed vape pens (the squareish kind) with new carts. She left them in this room with a couch and a coffee table so her and I could hang out, spend some quality time, and get high as fuck. I consider finishing the vape cart I already have before starting the new one.

1/18/24

There’s a baseball stuck in the pool table and someone asks me to get it out. I manage to get it out of the hole, but the other balls are still stuck even deeper inside. I keep finding clumps of differently-colored clay deep inside the pockets, obstructing the path of the billiard balls, and I manage to release them, though only one at a time. In the midst of doing this, I look towards a doorway and see a clay statue on the floor. It looks like two bent legs with a penis in the middle. Disturbed, I ask if that’s what I think it is. I’m told that it is.

Elsewhere in the dream, or perhaps in a different one, I’m walking along the crowded streets during some sort of a celebration. I see J.M., and her and I kiss, but I seem to be doing all the work.

1/21/24

I’m driving down the highway and suddenly there are hot women and horses everywhere.

Later, my father picks me up and we go driving as I sift through the newspaper, looking for a coupon he wanted. I can’t find it. I find that we’ve gotten two newspapers by accident and that the postman has left handwritten directions inside.

I’m eager to get home, go to the bathroom and read my book in private, so I open the car door and just walk there. Right outside the apartment complex there are people from work outside (like the breakfast coordinator), lined alongside the flooded sidewalk, selling things at tables. Someone I know begins walking alongside me and I’m telling them how I don’t want to kids, I want a dog.

I finally get to my apartment, I’m finally alone, but there are people looking in through the windows of the bedroom. I get into the bathroom, hoping people can’t see through the windows lining the ceiling of the bathroom. I sit down but suddenly my wife appears at one of the open windows of the bathroom and she’s there with our newborn baby. She holds up the infant so we can see each other and then looks in at me herself. I then drag her down to me and kiss her on the lips.

1/27/24

I live in a city, and I’ve been trying to quit smoking, maybe drinking as well. At some point I discover that walking through particular doors will allow me to walk back and forth through time and space — different times, different locations.

The last place I went to seemed familiar. I had been here first as a kid, and the last time in my 20s or 30s, or at least that’s what I told my guide when I came across her. My family was having a tour at the moment, elsewhere in the building, and she just assumed I had strayed (though strangely didn’t notice my advanced age). The news that my family was here unnerved me, as I didn’t want to bump into my younger self.

She left me alone for a bit outside the wooded building on the porch, where I knew there was a false floor and a hidden compartment. I opened it, but it was just filled to the brim with junk now.

I strayed out into the yard, out to this little cliff with a wooded structure like an old gazebo at the bottom, within which was a stone, with a creek just beyond it, I think. I knew I has childhood memories associated with the area, but I couldn’t access them. I was going to go down there, but I saw others in the area so decided against it.

I went back into the building, walking through various doors, hoping to find the right one to take me back to my time before the guide caught me or I bumped into mh younger self. I was getting rather frantic, but I finally found the right door and got home. There I spoke with someone else, giving him intelligence, it seemed. It appears I had been on a mission of some kind.

1/28/24

I had two black cats, one with blue eyes, one with green eyes.

1/29/24

I’m on my back, fully clothed, and H.H. is naked, laying atop me. It’s clear she wants to get it on and is frustrated that she can’t, as she has a boyfriend. Then we reposition and she sort of lays in my arms while I’m in a sitting position, and we’re hugging, and while I’m a good boy for the most part, I do lightly slap her ass.

Then I wake up.

I’m confused, because she’s gone and there’s a depression in the bed where she was. It must have been a dream.

I also hear something playing on my phone — a soft, sexy, hypnotic, barely discernable female voice. Looking at my phone, I see a timer and it’s closely approaching zero.

I turn off the timer and stop the voice coming through my phone, but I think I can also hear it coming from downstairs. When I open my bedroom door, three cats barge in and jump on my bed. I then go back to sleep, cuddling with them.

Then I wake up. This time for real. Presumably.

The message? Not only can I not get laid in my dreams, but even in the dreams I have within my dreams.

The cats at the end of the dream, though? It makes me think my unconscious is just mocking me now.

“What’s that? You want pussy? Here’s three.”

1/30/24

Early on in the dream, I’m outside having a pinic on the ground and the eldest of my two younger sisters is there. She keeps talking iver me, disregarding me, and I become enraged, verbally cruel, and violently destroy and scatter her food.

Later, there is a guy in a mask cleaning the sink faucet of my parents’ upstairs bathroom with a toothbrush, so I go into my room. Upon looking in the mirror I discover, to my confusion, that I have long, dark, thick hair and a dark goatee and mustache, just as I had when I was younger.

I go back to the bathroom and find the guy is gone. I look.into the bathroom mirror and find that I now have short, gray hair. I look away, look back, and I have this blue crap on my face around my eyes. I look back, I have a pig nose and monstrous features. Every time I look away and look back, it’s something different, and it’s starting to freak me out.

Of Lights in the Sky & a Disembodied Voice (1/13/24 Dream).

1/13/24

A large number of us live in a large area that’s made entirely out of concrete. There are no windows. There is no sky. We refer to it as a concrete jungle. We think we might be in an asteroid for some reason, but when we manage to break out we discover it’s some underground structure beneath some guys house.

Once I’m outside I hide behind sone trees and watch as others emerge, one by one. Then I’m on the run, being chased by helicopters, because “they” want all of us back in the bunker for some reason.

In another dream, I’m again with a large group of people and we’re sleeping over in a big house. In the middle of the night, someone wakes me up and tells me to come outside.

Between a set of trees, nearby what seems to be a cliff, what I feel are my family members and I all watch the sky in amazement as millions of streaking “stars” slowly glide down from the sky, all side-by-side. The sky is filled with them entirely. It’s psychedelic, surreal, colorful. Beaitiful. Its reminiscent of a Van Gough painting.

I remember having heard this was going to happen, I think through my cousin. Later I heard an announcer on the radio talk about how “they’re here.”

It may or may not have been a part of the same dream, but I decide to take a bath upstairs but then decide to use a secret passageway to get to the downstairs bathroom to use the shower instead. I do this for the sole purpose of frustrating C.S., the boyfriend of B.R., who I know wants to shower. Unlike he is in real life, in this dream C.S. is a well-dressed, well-manicured prick, though.

S.N. swings by in a car driven by a chauffeur and it has a big bed in the back. I go inside and she tells me she did something bad. I tell her it can’t be that bad and this somehow leads to us making out for awhile.

At some point shortly thereafter in the back of her bed-car, a disembodied male voice tells me to write this dream down. So I pull out my notebook and see dreams written down that I didn’t remember dreaming and certainly didn’t remember writing. There were also a series of intricately drawn block-like designs, each of which seemed to cryptically reveal a single letter. They were cool and I didn’t remember having drawn them. If they spelled out a word or message, it didn’t occur to me.

When the voice then proceeded to ask me if I’d already documented the “lights in the sky” dream in writing, I confessed that I hadn’t, and he got very upset, sounded very disappointed in me, so I woke up in bed and began documenting that dream or dream scene and all the others I could recall.

Which was kind of weird.

A Collection of Recent Dreams, Part I.

11/18/23

I’m asleep in a bed positioned in the back of a moving bus or RV, but no one is driving. My sense is that it’s on autopilot, but the thing proceeds to drive off a cliff and I can feel the falling sensation.

11/19/23

I appear to be the leader of a small village in a post-apocalyptic world. I bring a lady in, ropes around her arms like handcuffs, and put her in the jail cell. I know she could easily break out, though at the same time feel confident she will comply and accept her punishment.

Later, at nighttime, I go outside to sit around a small campfire and notice the same lady sitting nearby in a chair. I’m livid. I knew she hadn’t broken out herself, so I bark, “Who let her out?”

As soon as I say it, she gets up and someone starts escorting her back to her cell.

“There’s a chain of command,” I bark to everyone.

11/23/23

M.G. (a guy I used to go to school with who is currently a Satanist) conducts a ritual with me, and at the end of it has me take his welcome mat outside.

12/1/23

I’m at work and people keep accidentally setting fires. It first happened to one of the fryer vats in the kitchen, and I managed to put that one out, but they keep occurring at multiple locations behind the counter for various reasons, so I’m running around trying to put them all out one by one. Eventually I come to wonder if my efforts are in vain and these fires are inevitable — if the destiny of the store, no matter how much I tried to stop it from happening, was to just burn down, and that was that.

12/30/23

I’m dating R. from work, and though I keep thinking about it, I never seem to get around to having sex with her. Nor am I sure I want anyone to know we’re dating. At the end of the dream, I go into store to get beer but accidentally pick up Natural Light, which I find disgusting, and break part of plastic holding cans together in the process. Then I put it back and get my usual Labatt Ice.

1/2/23

I’m in a building in some city, standing in a long line to get food. I ask for tortillas but they tell me they ran out. I then exited the building for some reason and when I came back inside I got lost. I couldn’t find my way back to the resteraunt or cafeteria I had been in.

When I’m in either a basement ir one of the lower levels if the building I encounter this glob of water maybe the size if a golf ball just levitating in the air. Curious, I watch it fir a moment and then put my hand through it in the form of a horizontal karate chop and it disperses.

As I continue trying to find my way back to the resteraunt, I pass by two women passing by a third woman, with one of the two women who are going upstairs talking about a seance she’s going to attend.

Suddenly the dream seems to cut to a scene from a movie, apparently one based on a Stephen King novel. It’s a side view of John Lithgow sitting on a bed in a dimly lit room with this tall, skinny guy standing nearby. Someone, possibly Lithgow, says, “You opened a portal to hell.” At that point, the skinny guy seems to get sucked into this invisible vortex at the center of his chest: First his torso, then head, legs, and arms.

Watching this, I remember thinking that Lithgow was in a previous Stephen King movie and wondered if he played a cross-over character in this one.

1/5/24

In one short scene, I see a car wreck between three vehicles, one of which looked like the SUV owned by J.D., a friend from work.

In a more enduring dream, I visited my youngest sister after walking down to a park near where my parents live (one with “Hell” in the name). In perhaps the same dream, I’m driving during the day when my vehicle slows and then stops. Nothing works. I tried to find the hazard lights and put them on. Nothing.

1/9/24

A young boy and girl visit a house with two brothers, one of whom doesn’t have legs and moves around by crawling. The young girl is curious about a hatch in the house and where it leads. She asks everyone, but no one seems to be nearly as curious as her. It continues to plague her as she grows older.

1/11/24

Dinosaurs are destroying everything. I see a stegasaurus attack a building or vehicle with my own eyes. A small group and I are hiding not just from the dinosaurs, but people as well, and eventually find a small, cramped room to hide in. I see the door opening, then slam it shut with my foot.

On How the Reasonably Empathic Can Rule Like Psychopaths.

When I first started working here in this fast food shit show of a job, we had six-month reviews and raises based on merit. We had picnics and parties at some fucking park every year where all crew members from every store in the franchise would be invited. Where you’d get free food and enter your name in a raffle to get prizes. Then, over the years, that shit started going away. Slowly but surely, until it was entirely flushed down the drain.

Though I only saw him on the rarest of occasions, I began to think of the franchise owner, who I’ll call Bob, as a psychopathic tyrant who cared not the least bit for those beneath him – those workers in each of his stores who made this shit happen, that made all of this possible for him.

I remembered reading at some point in the late aughts or early teens that according to studies, just 1% of the general population had psychopathic traits compared to 15% percent of the prison population. These were power-hungry, control-thirsty assholes devoid of empathy and compassion who were often able to utilize their charm to disguise their true nature to achieve dominance, profit from their manipulation, and elude capture when they committed crimes. Compared with the 15% of psychopaths that comprised the prison population, however, it was found that up to 12% of CEOs had such psychopathic traits as well. They were just the more intelligent psychopaths who learned how to play society’s game and used it to climb up the corporate ladder.

This, I thought, must surely be the nature of Bob.

Then maybe a decade ago they tore down our store and initiated a rebuild. During that process, there was a day when another guy and I were supposed to help out Bob. He drove us around, got us a meal, and we all talked. It blew my mind that he turned out to be such a warm, reasonably empathic, even funny guy.

He wasn’t a psychopath. Not. At fucking. All.

I say this with reasonable confidence because I’m convinced that I’d know a true psychopath if I were around one for long enough, as I feel I was with Bob. I say this with reasonable confidence because I feel that I’ve met roughly half a dozen people in my life who I’m convinced were full-blown psychopaths, and two stand out, at least with respect to the road I wish to go down and explore here.

One was an Uncle of mine, the other a girl I worked with. Concerning these two, while every red flag and alarm bell went off in me regarding their nature, I found it utterly amazing how calm I felt when in their presence. With most people, the “energy” or “vibes” on the surface are often in a state of chaotic flux, with the core rather complex but consistent, but with these two, who I presumed to be psychopaths, there was a dark, angry, ambitious core, but the surface “vibes” were eerily still, disturbingly quiet. Given my hypersensitivity to the emotions of others, however, as disturbing as I knew it was given my intellectual understanding of what it signified, the surface experience itself was calming.

Bob? He was a perfectly normal guy in terms of emotion. Not a psychopath in the least. This confused me greatly. After all, how could someone like that run a business the way he did? I kind of felt the same way recently when watching some clips of the Lex Fridman Podcast where Lex was talking with Jeff Bezos. To me, Bezos has been the real-life embodiment of Lex Luther. While the portions of the interview I watched didn’t sway me from that perception entirely, he didn’t exactly resonate with the stereotypical supervillain I’d made him out to be.

Assuming Bezos is not a mustache-twirling, villainous psychopath, the same question I had after meeting Bob is also true in his case: how can he run his business as if he is?

As far as I can tell, at least in Bob’s case, it’s for no less than two reasons: isolation and delegation.

The higher you are on the corporate ladder, the less likely you are to develop an understanding and empathy with the workers at the bottom. You’re isolated, insulated from those social ties because you don’t work with those people daily, week after week, sometimes year in and year out.

The higher up the corporate ladder you are, the more you can delegate, and the more you can have those just below you do your dirty work for you.

If you need to lay people off or fire them, it doesn’t hurt you, at least as much, because you haven’t developed ties with them, and on top of that, you don’t have to be the one doing the laying off or firing — you have the store managers do that for you. You don’t have to slowly get to know people, empathize with them, and then look those same people in the eye and tell them they no longer work here.

A lot of people might look at the up to 12% of CEOs who show signs of psychopathy and wonder how it could be so high, but honestly, I’ve looked at that percentage for years upon years and wondered how on earth it could be so low, given how those in power tend to treat those below them. Given the perspective granted to me by Bob, however, I feel I’ve come to understand the remaining 88%, and that’s the understanding I’ve attempted to articulate here: they’re not psychopathic. They might even be exceptionally empathic, for all I know. It’s just that the system allows for a perfectly empathic person to rule over a hierarchy of underlings in a psychopathic manner because it allows them to be cut off, and isolated by the masses over which they rule through isolation, through delegation.

Given that those capable of exhibiting psychopathic tendencies – whether or not they are themselves truly psychopathic – are at the top in our society, this means that they constitute the equivalent of apex predators in the natural environment.

In others words, we have built a social system in which psychopathic tendencies serve as the optimal means of survival. We’ve constructed a culture in which psychopaths, or those who can operate in a psychopathic manner while not being psychopaths, constitute the most successful mutation, bear the greatest survival advantage.

Humans have managed to construct an inhumane society.

We’ve self-domesticated ourselves into believing that becoming narcissistic assholes with a tunnel-vision aiming for the greatest conceivable manifestation of dominance is the way to our rendition of the promised land.

In conclusion, this seeming revelation makes me sick and I don’t want to be a part of it. Furthermore, I don’t think I serve as a suitable member of a social species and I’d like a lawyer who can provide suitable divorce papers for me to sign.

That is all.

Of Ghosts & Gray Alien Costumes (12/3/23 Dream).

It’s a Halloween celebration and I’m in a town close to where my parents live, where my friends and I would often meet up when we were in our teens and twenties. With me are my old friends Channing and Moe, and as we were walking around each of us recieved a packages. Upon opening them, we found that they were inflatable mask and costume combos that we were expected to wear. Each was of a Gray alien, though in different colors, with mine being a gray-green, I think. Channing put his on, but then disappeared, and then Moe put his on.

Moe and I ended up in this shed with large windows that reminded me of a bigger version of my mother’s new greenhouse and we sat at a large table that took up most of the room. There, I inflated my costume, but from what I recalled I never put it on, though I did think I had lost it for a moment only to find it had merely fell off the other side of the table.

Also sitting at the table was my old friend, Gibbles, and I told him how if all went well I’d be moving into town the following year. He went on to explain how there are ghosts in town and how they manifest in one of two ways. When he mentioned that they sometimes manifest as smoke in the air, I found it peculiar that I immedeately got a clear image in my mind of a plume of smoke sort of hovering over my bed at home.

Others, he said, look like a stream of water in the air, and he moved his arm to simulate the motion. I told him I’d be moving into a new trailer — implying that the place wouldn’t be haunted. He seemed interested or amused by that piece of information for some reason; the look he gave me was curious.

At some point, though I can’t recall when, I remember thinking that I might live in this shed, though quickly dismissed the idea. With these huge windows, I’d feel too exposed.

November Dreams.

11/5/23

A group of people who lived in a mansion invited us over. It was huge, on a large, beautiful plot of land, and there were a series of large stone steps that zig-zagged up the large hill the mansion rested upon.

While inside, I went into a hot tub but forgot that I had my cigarettes and phone in my pocket. The cigarettes were ruined, though there were only a few left in the box, and though the phone’s screen was cracked and it was bent in half, it held together, flip-phone style. And while the phone still worked to some degree, it reverted to an old screen I used to have on a former phone long, long ago and I couldn’t call anyone to come pick me up. I tried to run outside in hopes that Margie from work hadn’t left yet and I coukd maybe hitch a ride, but she was gone. Once back inside, I tried to use the steps to go upstairs, but they don’t go anywhere and I’m confused.

11/7/23

I’m sitting on a toilet in a stall in a public restroom, but the stall is like a narrow hallway with no door on the end. Just outside the stall, to the right and outside my field of vision, is my friend, Moe. Then a girl comes in — sister to his ex-friend and a girl he used to occasionally fuck. She was and is porn-star beautiful and has the sex drive that makes that association difficult to dispell. She’s also fairly intelligent and I always enjoyed talking to her. She asks for a kiss from Moe, and they subsequently kiss — just a brief peck and outside my line of sight. Then she approaches me in the stall and as we’re talking, she tells me how she doesn’t have a phone because she doesn’t have any friends, which I found difficult to believe.

Though I hadn’t invested much thought in it, I found it curious the other day about the theme of phones having emerged in my last two — and now three — dreams and wondered what it meant. First was my false awakening, dream-within-a-dream on the 4th, then the dream the following day, and now this one. Here, however, she gave me the answer, which my subsequent internet searching and contemplation seemed to confirm. Given that everyone has their cell phone on them nowadays, where we can call and text each other and interact on social media, the phone has become a symbol of connection to others.

11/9/23

In a crowded area inside a large building, I’m pissing into this bowl higher than your average bathroom sink. As I’m doing so, some guy reaches his arm across me and I piss on him — and intentionally, though in such a way it could be passed off as an accident. I continue peeing, yet don’t notice until I don’t hear the process for awhile that I’m pissing in such a way that it ricocheted back onto my pants.

I see Zeke (some annoying guy I used to work with who I haven’t seem in years) nearby afterward and I tell him that if this other guy (the one I peed on) says another thing to me that I’m going to pick up a nearby pencil and stab him with it. The guy then proceeds to say something else to me and Zeke just looks at me eagerly. “No interest in stopping me?” I ask.

Elsewhere, I’m putting together this rolling shelving unit with all my work on it — papers and so on — but it’s not holding together well, and I struggle to keep it sranding straight and from falling apart completely. As I do this, my boss explains to another worker how their work had dropped in quality, and it’s said in a very dramatic fashion.

11/11/23

I’m walking in a city when I hear gunshots and see people dropping, so I quickly try to hide in this narrow crevice, but I only fit halfway. So I just sort of lay there for awhile, playing dead. After awhile, feeling the coast was clear, I got up and fled the scene, and as I ran down this narrow alleyway, I passed by a person who was just casually walking around and it blew my mind.

11/12/23

On my birthday, I took a nap maybe around noon. At first, I kept falling into false awakenings and waking up again, and while it happened a few times, I only recall one in particular. I had walked into my dark bathroom, felt my new underwear and was confused to find it had padding like a goddamn diaper. Then I woke up.

When I finally managed to remain asleep, I had a dream that we went vacationing to my paternal grandfather’s house. I know we left and then I returned alone at one point, eventually joined by the others, but I don’t recall if the following scene happened there or not.

In any case, I’m alone one moment in a huge room in this house that seemed largely made of stained wood, but the next moment people start crowding in through the door upstairs and coming down the steps — and many remain on the stairs, either standing or sitting.

My attention became drawn towards an Indian woman who was meditating with a pleasant look on her face and she floated from where sge was on the stairs, slowly over the railing and then slowly down the side. I suddenly noticed that to my right there stood an Indian man who seemed angry I was watching her.

I finally decided to climb the stairs, weaving around people as I did so. When I made it to the first step there was a friendly guy sitting there in a black shirt and he made some comment about me being there that I don’t recall, and then told me that this was a leadership meeting, or leadership training, or something like that.

I said, “Oh, that’s what this is about.”

He said this was a strange town and seemed to want to tell me about it, but I was in a hurry.

On the Sloth & the Dynamics of Mutual Paranoia.

It’s an all-too-common workday. Outside, probably around four or four-thirty in the afternoon, I’m sweeping the lot — my usual routine at about this point in the work shift — and this older woman comes out for a smoke. Skinny, skin wrinkled and sagging over her boney frame, in between siphoning the life out of her cigarette, fumes seemingly bellowing out of every orifice above her neck, she asks me about that bicycle parked way out there, in far the corner of the lot.

I tell her it belongs to the Sloth. I don’t say that, of course, I give her his real name, but even so, she doesn’t know who I’m talking about at first.

I first saw the guy when he worked behind the register at the Circle K I often stop at on my way home from work. He was overweight, low-energy, and moved at a snail’s pace. Aside from his apparent lack of happiness, he both looked and moved like a Sloth.

Anyway, I describe him to her and a little light bulb flickers on just above her disturbingly skeletal cranium, and this in turn sets off highly-pressurized diarrhea of the mouth.

Oh, him. That guy. He’s disgusting, she tells me, blowing a thick stream of pollutants into the dying sky above her. He wipes his face, doesn’t wash his hands, and he gives her the creeps. She’s told him constantly, wash your hands. And the looks he gives her, she says, it’s like he wants to kill her. Something’s not right about him, she can tell.

And she kind of smiles.

Between you and me, she says, blowing out another puff, he won’t be around for much longer. Margie, a shift manager, she already got permission from Kelly, the boss, the store manager, to fire him.

I don’t tell her that I already know this. Even so, I do tell her what I had guessed was common knowledge. How he had worked here before, months upon momths ago, and did a no-call, no-show, and was subsequently fired.

Then, given the fact that we had such a low number of employees — that too many people were leaving, essentially, and we were too selective in who we hired — one of the high-ranking members of the franchise was called to step in. Sarah, a wonderful woman with an awesome stoner daughter we used to work with. Anyway, she was brought in to hire people en masse. Unaware Sloth had worked here before, she rehired him.

Unaware he had worked here before — which to my mind was totally understandable, given our truly epic turnover rate as of late — one of the assistant managers subsequently put him on the schedule. And now he was here on most nights I worked.

She was amazed at all of this, and I was amazed that she was amazed, and upon recognition of that fact I instantly felt guilty for being an unintentional rat and further feeding her clear loathing for the guy. I try and be a polite guy, force myself to engage in small talk with a creepy woman, and this is the result. I felt so ashamed of myself.

Time goes on. The night proceeds.

Between ten and ten-thirty in the evening, I go out back door, broom and dustpan in hand, my intent being to give the parking lot a final sweep before I leave at eleven. As a slither out the back door, I see the Sloth, holding a clipboard by the side door — the main entrance — with a cop just behind him, his cruiser in the parking space just behind him.

This is unexpected. I’m curious, and my body language, my facial expression, evidently conveys that with crystalline clarity, as after I greet him, the Sloth proceeds to fill me in.

Someone has stolen his bike, he tells me, and the minute he does, my face falls. I felt bad for him, but really, how didn’t he see this coming? Parking it way out there was stupid. He could’ve hid it behind the storage shed, like that skinny old guy with the mustache, or hid it back in the corral that contained the dumpsters, or even — hey, here’s a radical idea — gotten a chain and locked it to the gate in front of the building.

I hate to be a dick, but you must know the town you live in. Come on, man, it was only a matter of time.

Anyway, he just wanted to come into dining room to sit and write out his report. I tell them to give me a minute, and I go back inside and ask Sean, the closing manager. He seems annoyed — evidently the police already spoke with him, I’m assuming through drive-thru, wanting to see the camera footage he didn’t have the authority to access — but in any case, he said yes. Sure. Whatever.

So I let him in through the main entrance. I talked with him a bit, sensing he needed that. I confessed that I’d just been saying that I was surprised it hadn’t gotten stolen yet, given where he put it, and he more or less agreed. His justification for putting it there struck me as surprisingly stupid, however. Essentially his logic, as he explained it — and admittedly, I’m summarizing in my own words here — is that if the bike was chained, it probably wouldn’t stop someone who realky wanted to steal it, anyway, so fuck it.

But leave it far out there, in the corner of the lot? No offense, I thought, but that just seemed stupid.

As to his prospects of ever getting it back or identifying the perpetrator, I only hoped he realized how unlikely it was. I kept remembering that scene from The Big Lebowski when The Dude’s car was stolen, he spoke to the cop, and the officer mocked him and laughed in his face uncontrollably.

That bicycle of yours? It’s gone, man, I wanted to say. I’m truly sorry, my Sloth-like, apparently only temporary coworker, but it’s just fucking gone.

I then went out the door to tell the cop Sean couldn’t access the footage, but added I didn’t think it woukd show that corner of the lot, anyway. He said it was a pretty unique bike, so it should be easy to identify.

The following day, towards the end of the night, I pass by the Sloth and say, I don’t imagine there was any luck regarding your bike. He said no, but that he’s been checking Craig’s list and Facebook marketplace — and I smiled and laughed, because I was just going to recommend he do so. He said they probably wouldn’t try to sell it online for a week or two, and I said, yes, if they’re smart, but this us Ravenna. You might even see them biking it around town. He seemed to concede this was true.

There’s something fishy, though, he said, about how they can’t access the footage.

At this point I assumed he’d spoken to Kelly, the store manager, and based on this assumption, I said that it was possible that the camera doesn’t record, and if it doesn’t, they don’t want us to know it doesn’t record, and confessing that would blow their cover. He seemed to get that look on his face that conveyed, good point, I should have thought of that.

Then I asked him the question I should have asked him to begin with, which was whether he’d spoken to Kelly. He said he hadn’t had the opportunity to yet. That may change things, I told him.

After I smoked and locked the doors, I found there was a customer inside, still waiting on his order. I recognized him immediately. He was a great guy and used to be a regular back in the day, but now frequented the local GetGo, where a fellow employee of mine often saw him. They had talked about me the other day, and he brought up what was said. It regarded by 200$ rent increase, how I could barely afford it, and how by August my plan was to move into a trailer near my family and get a job nearby.

He left and a while later, as I was cleaning the dining room, Birdie, a young, short-haired, bone-thin girl I work with leaned on the counter and wagged me over with her finger. Curious, I walked over and leaned in as she whispered to me what had been going on beyond my eyes and ears.

Sloth thinks someone that works here stole his bike, she says, and that’s why Kelly won’t show him the footage — she’s covering up for them. Then Sean evidently said to Sloth, in jest, that I’d stolen the bike because I needed the parts.

I laughed. Really? I confessed to her that aside from “stealing” food from this place, I think I stole one thing in my life — a candy bar when I was a small child, and when my mother realized what I’d done he’d scolded me, made me return it, and I’d never done it again.

My conscience just wouldn’t allow it. I’m so sensitive the guilt would kill me.

Now I felt bad, though, that he might actually think I took his bike. It would be an illogical conclusion, of course, as I was working at the time of its disappearance, but if he was so paranoid as to concoct the Kelly conspiracy on the basis of such meager suggestive evidence, he might believe I’d somehow pulled it off, or got someone to do it on my behalf.

He’d also heard my conversation with the ex-regular, I soon realized, and so would know I was short on money, so stealing and selling a bike would fit right in to that sort of paranoid suspicion, too.

Now I was paranoid he was paranoid about me. His paranoia, it was contagious.

Not wanting to further reinforce his paranoia, I found myself instinctively avoiding any opportunity to do so. If I tried to blatantly tell him, convince him it wasn’t me, that might just amplify his suspicion it was me — or plant the seed if no paranoid flower was already sprouting.

So I said no more to him. Avoided eye contact with him. Deliberately tried to not make it look deliberate. Which I realized, in the process, was also likely to increase his suspicion of me if he already had it and generate it if it wasn’t already there.

I felt trapped. There was no way out.

This was worse than when I found myself driving behind someone who for whatever reason was taking the same, often long and elaborate route somewhere as myself and I became paranoid that they were paranoid I was deliberately following them for some reason, rather than just incidentally following them.

This circumstance, it was almost exactly like the positive feedback loop you find in the area of racism paranoia.

Here in the US, the history between blacks and whites is ever-looming, and both black people and white people are acutely aware of it. This generates a fucked up psychological dynamic between blacks and whites — mutual paranoias that feed off of one another in a horribly negative cycle.

If you’re a pastey fuck like me, try and put yourself into the mind of a black person — not just their shoes, mind you, but their minds.

You walk into a convenience store one night. No one else inside, just you and an old white guy at the register — an old white guy who, for the sake of argument, let’s say isn’t racist, but fears being labeled as such. Even so, shoplifting is frequent in this area, and so he’s on the lookout for anyone who looks suspicious.

As the black guy, you fear potential racism and you don’t want to just assume anyone’s racist, but if the white guy is racist, you don’t want to feed it, either. So you deliberately try to act calm. But trying to act calm typically doesn’t look calm. You also don’t make eye contact for awhile, but you’re curious if you’re being watched with a suspicious eye, so you involuntarily look towards the old white cashier — and that look conveys your anxiety. This, in turn, makes you look suspicious to the clerk, who happens to catch your eye, sense your anxiety, and so he gets anxious as well. Sensing his anxiety, fearing you’re being discriminated against, you avert eyes and try not to meet his eyes again, but your anxiety is elevated now, and on top of that you’re angry due to the indications of what you fear is racism. He interprets your anxiety and act of averting your gaze to mean you’re going to shoplift.

And so on. And so on.

You can see how these paranoid perceptions — mutually paranoid, yes, however distinct their sources given the individuals involved — seemingly reinforce the paranoid suspicions of the other.

I fear I am the innocent black guy here to the whitey honkey cracker Sloth, and that only feeds this horrible cycle and I don’t know how to break out of it.

Once finished cleaning the dining room, acutely, painfully aware now of this potential dynamic betwixt our mutual paranoias and the dire positive feedback loop that could be at play, I roll the mop bucket, wash cloth, broom and dustpan through the door separating the dining room and the area behind counter all at once, because I’m no two-trip bitch.

Once I make it to the back, far away from the Sloth up front, the circumstance becomes even more dire. I am accosted by at least half of the remaining employees in the store before I even unload by cleaning supplies. They want to share with me how weird his conspiracy theory regarding Kelly and the mysterious bike-napping coworker is, they want tp tell me how he thinks there’s “something fishy,” how he’s been texting with the police all night, and they all tell me it in whispers. None mention the joke Sean told, but that is to be expected, but everything else is downloaded into me from countless directions.

This is not uncommon. I am a walking confessional with a pulse. People spill things to me.

But I suddenly see what it might look like from the Sloth’s eyes up front. While I can’t confirm he’s looking, as I refuse to look in that direction, my paranoia regarding his paranoia is still there. To him, people are whispering things to me like they’ve been dying to tell me. To him, they’re likely telling me he’s onto me, that he’s onto the conspiracy. The jig is up. Disclosure is imminent.

To him, this only reinforces his paranoid, erroneous conspiracy theory — or so my paranoia tells me.