Show, Don’t Tell (Real World Edition).

In a conversation with the new maintenance guy today, a stream of thoughts popped up in my head that have emerged from the dark of my mind before: I like when people tell me about themselves, I really do, but I’ve grown very suspicious of people who tell me “who” they are with beaming self-confidence.

“I’m a good person.”

“I’m not an asshole, I’m just being honest.”

“I’m not an ass-kisser.”

I suck at writing fiction, but I read and watch a ton of videos on the art. While it doesn’t always seem to apply, one of the typical things they explain is how to show rather than tell. Don’t tell someone about a character, in other words, but rather have that character reveal her or himself in a natural manner.

This suggestion should extend to the real world, too, though perhaps for different reasons.

I mean, inevitably they’ll show me who they are if they stick around long enough, and they must know that, so the only reason I can imagine they’re telling me who they are is that they think that what they’ll ultimately and involuntarily show me will lead me to a contrary conclusion — and often enough, that’s proven to be the case. It’s almost as if they’re trying to convince themselves through convincing me.

Darkening Dreams of June & July.

6/9/23

Another person is moving into an apartment that I have to share with others, so I’ll have no privacy, no room to sleep. I look for a stash of pills I remembered having, but I’m not sure if it was in my old apartment, where I lived by myself, or this one. I look in the bookcases, everywhere I could think of.

In the midst of looking, I notice a box high up by television set that hangs from the ceiling, and its marked with masking tape on which is written “Goth Girl 1.” My friend Mitch had evidently made a deal with some creepy guy so we could get free internet. No one had asked what the deal entailed, but now I wondered if the deal was that we’d get free internet if the guy could use it to spy on a goth girl.

6/12/23

I’m marching down an endless series of hallways occupying people, gun in my hand, shooting every time I turn a corner. At some point in the process I wondered how I was managing to shoot the targets and never any innocent bystanders, as I was turning and shooting so fast its difficult to understand how I’d have time to discern which was which, but apparently, I was managing it just fine.

Store manager Kelly was talking to the former store manager, Connie, when I tell Kelly I tried clocking back in from break on the monitors several times, but it wouldn’t let me for some reason. I also recieve a text from my friend, Moe, referencing it had been nearly a year since we’ve spoken (in reality, it’s been longer).

6/13/23

I discovered there was a flat tire on my truck, someone had stolen the sand bags out of the bed, and behind the glass of either my gas gage or speedometer, there was a little gear.

Back in dumpster corrall at work, I watch as a grasshopper about as big as a Bic lighter hop frantically at about chest level. It was slightly frightening and I had the impulse to kick it away, but I didn’t want to be an asshole. Just after I awoke, it bothered me that I couldn’t discern whether this really happened yesterday or was a dream.

6/14/23

I dream about Maria Cox again, but the details elude me.

6/15/23

In a very realistic dream that was more tactile than visual, I bend down for some reason and find myself amazed at my flexibility. My head now right before my crotch, I can feel my dick through my pants — either pajama pants or sweat pants — and build up the courage to wrap my lips around the fabric covering the head.

6/16/23

I hide beneath and around a small table as at least two people are shot and killed and somehow manage to survive without being seen.

7/6/23

A guy kills two people in my room and then leaves, and after some time goes buy I realize I haven’t called the police. Later, I look and the bodies are gone and the mess is cleaned up.

It’s dark outside and raining. I was supposed to watch over my parents’ house and care for the animals, but my mother’s parrot escapes. As I’m outside, frantically searching in the darkness and rain, the parrot begins to run toward me.

7/8/23

Despite the fact that it wasn’t the end of the world, different groups had formed, all of whom were living life in their own way. At my parents’ house, we were meeting a group that seemed Native American in ethnicity. I told my friend Elizabeth that I liked it this way; if living with my current group didn’t work out, I’d simply leave and come find her.

7/9/23

It’s night and I’m in a suburban neighborhood akin to the one I grew up in until I was roughly ten years of age, and I’m walking down a tree-lined sidewalk searching for the house I had previously been in. Suddenly I watch as an obese woman in black leather clothing with a black leather fetish pig mask covering the top half of her face dramatically marches down the sidewalk, a line of people marching behind her. Eventually, I make it back to the house where my friends are at and I find that all I want to do — and desperately — is eat and sleep.

7/11/23

Through the gap at the base of my apartment door, I see movement out in the hallway. Gazing out the peep hole, I see what seems to be another door in front of my door, obscuring my field of vision. After awhile, I drift from the door, but then hear the sound of a door closing in the hallway. I then get down on the carpet, on my belly, and peek through the aforementioned gap. I see toys out there in the hallway, with one toy, maybe a car, very close to my door. I push it with finger, it rolls, and then a cat immedeately comes up to the gap. I coax her into squeezing through the gap and entering my apartment, where I rub her belly and she proceeds to meow in a very peculiar manner.

Then, in a blink of an eye, the cat is now a toy car — like a remote controlled car, but this one appears to move of its own volition. It moves around a bit beside my kitchen then seems to want out, so I open door, but as I do, a dog, maybe a weiner dog, tries to come in. I then tell both the dog and car that they’re not mine, that they don’t belong in here.

7/17/23

I’m sitting down at a table, talking with my mother, who tells me about a photo she took of her doctor’s blackboard. The doctor won’t tell her something and I get the sense that she’s trying to ascertain what it was through what was written on the blackboard. She makes some reference to parsimory.

“The principle of parsimony?” I ask her. “Occams razor? The simplest explanation that fits all the available evidence?”

She seems happy and surprised I know about it. Instead of then showing me the photo, however, she instead lets me listen to her voice messages, but I have to put my ear real close. I can barely hear anything at first, and when I finally can, I hear what at first sounds like demonic mumbling. The second message sounds like a disappointed friend of mine, an old friend, who tells me about a party on the lake I was invited to but predictably wouldn’t attend. Then my alarm goes off.

7/18/19

I left a party in an apartment that was being thrown by Elizabeth and step out into hallway, where a group of people are walking by — among them, a guy I immedeately recognize as Nathan, an old friend from high school. He seems disturbed to find that Elizabeth and I know each other, and Elizabeth is disturbed to find I know Nathan. Something happened between them or Nathan and one of her friends, and while I try not to be nosey, I am curious and try to smooth the way and ensure them I won’t judge. Nathan insists that I wouldn’t want to know.

I then try to leave. I’m carrying at least three things, but somehow lose them in my unsucessful, repeated attempts to get out of the building. Most of the dream deals with me trying to find a way downstairs and to the exit, but it seems like I just keep going in circles.

7/23/23

I’m sitting on a big bed with Bella, a redheaded girl with a tragic life that I first met when we worked together years ago. There was someone else there, too. It seemed like an enduring dream involving a lot of conversation, but all I remember talking about is how I liked sex jokes and liked poop jokes, but not jokes combining both subjects. I’d said this to the other person, and Bella laughed and seemed to agree.

7/29/23

I come into work and while changing the trash I see Kara in a tight, black dress. In the bathroom, there’s a friend of hers — a guy — who has a horse, and he brings it into a bathroom stall.

7/31/23

It was one of those dreams where everything takes place in the dark of night, where the emotions and scenery seem enveloped in shadows. I lived at my parent’s house, and though my father was the same as he is in my real lifee, I didn’t feel as though I was the same character. I had killed multiple people, perhaps even a family member, and my father, whom I loved dearly, seemed to start suspecting I was lying about where I was going at night and what I was doing, though didn’t seem to have the vaguest sense about how horrible the truth really was. As always, he wanted to believe in me, think the best of me, and my greatest fear was that he would discover, in the end, all the reprehensible things I’d done. How much it would hurt him, how he would perceive me, what position he’d be forced into given that knowledge — it was unspeakably horrifying to me.

He asked me where I’d been at night, and I lied, saying I was with a guy and a girl (who were brother and sister) that I may have killed, but I made up their names because I couldn’t remember their real ones. When he asked me to call them on their phone, I was stuck. My structure of lies was about to collapse all around me. I remember pulling myself out of the dream, it was so uncomfortable. I then fell back into the dream, or something like it, but I was no longer the character in question.

Dream Summoning Maria Cox.

In the course of my life, I’ve had a lot of odd and intense dreams, false awakenings, episodes of sleep paralysis, and other profound nocturnal experiences that most would undoubtedly relegate to this general category — and despite my passionate objections in some cases, I might add.

Typically, however, I only have dreams regarding people I know fairly well. They may be people I haven’t encountered in the flesh in decades, but I’ve known them well enough to justify their inclusion in my nocturnal, allegedly private, and (presumably) solely subjective and natural neurological simulations.

Occasionally, a person I’ve met only recently will pop up in a dream, that’s true, but it’s always a fleeting one-off. Never are they recurring, central characters.

And I almost never have dreams regarding an individual with whom I was associated with in the past only peripherally, merely second hand, and haven’t been in close proximity to, corporeally-speaking, for roughly two decades.

This amazing bitch, though?

She is a persistent anomaly. A chronic curiosity. An unprecedented, recurring character. Never do these dreams involve anything overtly sexual, unfortunately, but the connection I feel towards her in these dreams is so intense it’s absurd.

Out of curiosity, I just checked my dream logs. Since March of 2021, I’ve recalled at least four dreams regarding her, the most recent on June 14th — only yesterday.

Most recently, it involved only conversations and affectionate interactions, and though the details elude me, throughout the night I kept begging myself that, even if I failed to recall the details upon awakening, to please remember, at the very least, that I’d dreamed of her again.

Previously? She wore a leather coat and we had an enlivening hug. We had illuminating conversations that, for the fucking life of me, I can’t recall the details of. And also a dream of mine that echoed a dream of her own that she reported publicly on social media.

And yes, she’s blazing hot. Yes, I find her an incredibly interesting individual. But I barely know this dark beauty, and while her persistent presence in my dream life is certainly welcome, it continues to perplex the everliving fuck out of me.

How I wish there was wise man — or woman, or sexless being for all I care — residing upon a mountain I could climb to recieve much-desired answers.

Truth be known, though, I probably wouldn’t be able to find it in myself to believe the bastard’s revelations anyway.

So I remain perplexed. This here? This is my fucking lot in life.

Am I obsessed with her on a subliminal level, and it’s as simple as that? Does she represent something buried within me, striving to rise to consciousness? Is she an unintentional, unconscious telepath? Is this sexy soul an adept witch hellbent on being my dream invader?

I’m not confident enough to be sure in any case, but as I now drift towards sleep, let it be known: I officially place a welcome mat at the door of my dreams for you, m’lady.

No pressure. But be aware, let it be known, that you’re always free to visit.

G’nite, fellow insomniac bitches.

Again, Not Open.

Just outside the door, there is a large dumpster. Inside, passed the sign that reads Lobby Closed for Construction, tables are dismantled and the walls are gutted, revealing their fiberglass innards, and a large area of the ceiling is exposed as well. A thick coat of dust and a vast array of broken pieces of tile and other shit litter the floor.

Throughout the catastrophic scene you’ll find hammers, crowbars, ladders, a wheel barrow, and other equipment. A tangled mess of wires reach out from the ground in one area like the thin tentacles of some hungry creature emerging from beneath the floor tiles. As for the front counter, it’s entirely gone, with the thick sheets of plastic hanging from the ceiling serving as the only barrier between the back of the restaraunt and the post-apocalyptic state of the dining room.

Yet even while the construction workers are still present, deafening us with the relentless cacophony of their destruction, people stroll inside, passing by the sign on the door, eager to know:

“Are you guys open inside?”

Dreams of Darkness & Light (5/16 & 5/20/23).

5/16/23.

As of late, my dreams have been getting increasingly darker — literally and figuratively. From what little I recall of last night’s nocturnal, otherworldly meandering, the theme continued. It involved Damion, an ex-coworker, who had taken a job that involved living alone in huge house — maybe calling it a mansion woukd be more accurate– in a dark, cold region, and I think there was some consideration that I might take on that job or one like it myself.

There was no reference in the dream as to what the job actually entailed, at least not that I can recall, but maybe its irrelevant anyway. New jobs in dreams are supposed to represent a desire to change something in your waking life, to transform some current situation, and that seems fitting enough.

I have been silently juggling the desire to isolate myself further or make more of an effort to nurture social connections as of late, so the isolation of the dream made sense, too.

5/20/23.

Under the pretense of practicing some technique or testing out a hypothesis, a girl I’m close to invites me to kiss her, and I do. We both seem to like it, so we kept making out after short breaks in between. It was very nice, and I’d missed moments like this — being so close to a girl in general, of course, but making out most of all. Her kissing technique and how she used her tongue I found to be incredibly impressive as well.

In retrospect, I’m not entirely certain who this girl was, but she seems to have been a mixture of three short brunettes I have been close to at different points in my life which I suppose took on similar roles during the aforementioned periods. I was friends with all three, and in all cases there were accusations from others of a sexual tension between us, but in all but one case — the second girl in the timeline — there was never so much as a kiss between us. Though I’m still convinced the girl in the dream was some mash-up of all three, I do recall while kissing her in the dream that I thought to myself how much better she kissed now.

In another scene, I’m running down a curving highway devoid of traffic in the pouring rain. While it feels like I’m in a car, I’m certainly not, but there’s a disturbing amount of water on the road and I’m incredibly anxious about potentially hydroplaning. I’m going so fast I miss a turn and it takes me awhile to slow myself down. When I finally do, the rain has stopped and I’m standing on a structure, maybe a wooden structure, atop which an extension of the highway will ultimately be built. Deep down below there are people working on machines that for some reason will be buried beneath the road in the future.

In yet another scene, I’m sleeping in bed with the lights on — or perhaps light is just coming in through the windows — covered in a white sheet. I soon feel some creature moving beneath the sheets, feeling soft as it rubs against my leg. I initially assume it’s a bunny, because evidently in the dream I had in this dream I had dreamed about having a pet bunny, but it actually turns out to be my pet chicken.

Elsewhere in the dream, I’m cleaning the bathroom at work, first successfully unclogging a drain and then seeing the feet of someone in a nearby stall. I felt bad, feeling I shouldn’t have been in here if it was occupied. I also remember that I’m not wearing pants, though I have two pairs of jeans in there with me, but only one has a belt.

Someone I work with comes in to talk with me, and while I’m not embarrassed regarding the fact that I’m not wearing any pants, I do feel embarrassed that there is no doorknob on the side of the door facing inside and that I should have fixed that for the inspection we’d just had. I then proceed to take out the trash, and as I do so I realize my pants are around my ankles. Despite there being cars in drive-thru, the occupants of which could clearly see me, it doesn’t really bother me.

When I come back and I’m near the back door, somebody asks me about the door knob, and while I initially felt responsible for not having fixed it I suddenly recalled having mentioned it to manager Steve just before the inspection. It wasn’t my fault after all, as it had been his responsibility to tell the proper authorities to get a doorknob for me to put on.

Connie pokes her head out the door, complaining because we didn’t get 100% on the inspection, but I immedeately counter with the fact that we did, after all, achieve the high 90s. She asks if that’s really good enough in my eyes, and I immedeately answer, yes. She then disappears and the store manager, Kelly, is preparing to leave. I ask her if she had to pass a certain test to pass her Junior year of high school and her grade was in the high 90s, would she be satisfied? She laughed and said she most certainly would.

At some point before I woke up, an off-screen voice tells me to not forget to record the dream I’d had regarding having sex with Connie, a thought which disgusted me as much in the dream as it does now, writing it. As I woke up, I considered not recording this recommendation and just letting myself forget it, but — obviously — decided otherwise. More disturbing is that I vaguely recalled a dream in which I had sex with Connie as well as someone I’m actually attracted to, though I couldn’t remember who she was.

Yara’s Proposal.

It’s maybe the first, second week of May.

At work, I ask for assistance from Marjie, an old manager that has recently returned to this cess-pool, run-down town in Ohio from her two-year departure to Buffallo, New York, where she lived with her boyfriend, homeless, and slipped back into her coke habit.

While it takes some effort to confess, I like Marjie as a person, and really enjoy working with her. Our dynamic is ripe with sarcasm, risky jokes, and mild flirtation, and she tends to bring out the deep well of spontaneous, biting one-liners in me. Our banter is rather cathartic, I’ve found. And when we have a serious conversation, it’s untainted, likely due to the fact that we’ve purged Anything But from our system.

Plus, I think we work well together as a team. She’s fun, and when we work together, we get shit done.

So naturally, given the inspection coming up on the 10th, I requested her help when I felt another individual was required. And it was required. I had to clean the light fixtures outside of the building, which would have been easy enough a task if not for how high up they were, and how high up the ladder was that I needed to use. I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of heights, but this height and the unlevel ground, it made me feel more than a bit uneasy.

I asked if she could help me out by holding the ladder. I trusted her enough to do so. Plus I knew if I asked, she would.

And she did.

She did for a short while, anyway, but then we got busy and, given her responsibilities, she had to go up front for a bit. I decided to tell her, when she returned, that we’d just do it later, maybe after my break. Maybe another day.

So much for all of that.

I went out front, lit a cigarette, and crouched down. Eh, I’d tried.

A hit or two in, I turn my head to the right and I see Yara approaching the building. She sees me. I wave. She smiles. She waves.

Eventually, I go back inside, carrying that absurdly long ladder with me. With business still hopping, I come to the conclusion that my greatest contribution right now would be to clean the lobby, the dining room, or whatever you wish to call it, and so that’s what my dumbass does.

And as I proceed to do so, I hear my name being called. It’s unmistakable. I look up, to the source of the attention, and I meet her eyes. She’s standing at the counter. It’s Yara.

I walk up to her, our eyes still locked. She extends her hand, and I almost instinctively extend my own so as to hold her own. Touching the soft, radiating, probably-too-young ethically-speaking, but fuck-it-she’s-legal skin. Mingling, flirting with the energy she’s giving off like a radiant, rogue star passing by — a star having decided, for whatever fucked-up reason, to let herself be caught in my gravity, and revolve around me for what will certaintly turn out to be but a limited time only.

And I, a rouge planet, spinning helplessly around the dining room in the wake, cleaning tables, sweeping the floor, and an eternity later going behind the counter, where I look up only to see her staring back at me from across the boundary.

Unlike other customers, she doesn’t seem annoyed in the eternal wait. Still meeting my gaze — forever calm, confident, and deeply thirsty — she lifts up her hand to obscure the side of her mouth, asking something I’m sure I heard right, though it’s a question I’m somehow conditioned to doubt.

I have to pass by counter, walk up to her in the ill-defined line, all to ask her what she said, ask her to repeat it, to lean my ear just to take it all in, just to ensure I hear her right.

She asks it again.

“Wanna fuck?”

I’d heard her right?

Fuck.

“Yes,” I tell her, instinct overwhelming me, dominating reason. After a moment, with the boundary of the counter still between us, I find myself adding:

“I admire how direct you are.”

And I do. I so fucking do. Yet in my mind, it’s all too, too fucking good to be true. so much so that later, doubt intervenes, and as is my chronic tendency, I need to reinforce the truth.

So later, I text her.

“Did I hear you right?”

And I did. Over a decade dry, maybe twelve years in this agonizing, sexless desert of a decaying, dying body, and at last: an offering.

At last: an oasis.

And I could run, yet given my deeply-embedded trust issues, I crawl.

I crawl towards…

Not That Old.

I. Baphomet.

I think it was the last Thursday in April.

I’m walking up to the side doors after taking out trash and I hear a car honk from behind me. I turn around and a nearby car rolls down the driver-side window, and from inside I see a cute, familiar face. It’s Baphomet, as I’ve come to call her — a former coworker who often, and without reason, would make the noise of a goat at an incredibly high volume.

In the course of our typical, sarcastic exchange, my age is brought up, and it comes to my attention that she thought I was well into my fifties. When I tell her I’m only 44, she seems legitimately surprised. She tells me it’s the gray beard.

I shake my head in disbelief and sigh to myself. I’ve had some version of this conversation on at least two other occasions in the last week or two, and it’s not as if I’m seeking it out.

II. Twelve.

As I’m walking by up front, a coworker playfully puts up her fists. I don’t blink.

“Bring it,” I dare her.

“I’d never beat up an old man.”

“I’m not that old.”

“How old are you?”

I’m not going to make it easy for her. Anyway, I’m curious how old she thinks I am.

“Guess.”

She shrugs. “53.”

“Jesus Christ, I’m not that fucking old,” I bark back in disbelief. “So what are you, 12?”

She looks offended. “I’m 18. So really,” Twelve asks. “How old are you?”

“You’re nine years off,” I confess. “And if you’re thinking in the wrong direction, I’ll punch you.”

She’s trying to do the math. I decide to take mercy on her and make it easy for her after all.

“44,” I tell her. She looks shocked, and now this is really beginning to hurt my feelings “What, is it the gray in the beard?”

She nods.

“Well, that’s why you don’t work here for 19 fucking years.”

She shakes her head, jaw still hamging open.”You’re old enough to be my grandpa.”

“I’m not that fucking old, damn it.”

“Well,” she says, reconsidering, “you’re old enough to be my mom’s boyfriend.”

“Is she hot?”

Finally, I felt satisfied. The look on her face told me I’d won.

III. Yara.

The week previous is when it all began.

I’m cleaning the dining room when my name is called out. I follow the source and arrive at a table with familiar eyes staring out at me from a familiar face.

It’s Yara. Her hair is different, like every time I see her, and we get into a short conversation when she asks another question people have been chronically asking me as of late: how long I’ve worked here.

“Nineteen years,” I confess.

Then it comes: “How old are you?”

“Fourty-four,” I confess.

Her eyes bludge. Her mouth drops open. Rather skeptical, clearly cconfused at first, she finally accepts my sincerity. As she’s at the booth, I watch her do the math.

“When I worked here,” she tells herself, she tells me, “I was eighteen.”

She’s quietly laughing now, covering her mouth.

“I totally would’ve fucked you.”

I have to look away.

Through covert laughter, aided by the hands covering most of her face now, she adds, “I still would.”

I pretend not to hear that, though I did, and she clearly knows I did. I continue wiping tables, cleaning lobby, trying to work it out in my head.

Before I depart to the back, I tell her it was nice seeing her. That it was good to see her again.

Dreams of Sociality, Change, & Violence (5/23 Dreams).

5/10/23

I’m at a party taking place in a house I’m living in with others. Someone had bought food, but ate most of it, having left empty pizza boxes on the counter of the vacant kitchen. I found a warming burrito on the counter that I proceed to hide behind something in fridge so I can eat it later. I met the daughter of an old friend, Mr. G, at the door.

5/12/23

They’re remodeling my apartment complex. I come into my apartment, but its like my old efficency, essentially just one, big room. My current sink, stove and refrigerator are gone. Someone tells me that they always move them when they remodel.

5/14/23

It’s dark and I’m outside at some crowded gas station, where someone I know is backing up a semi alongside one of the pumps. He’s scraping against other vehicles, against the gas pumps, and I scream for him to stop but he just keeps going. Suddenly there’s nothing left to do but run away and take cover, as I’m terrified the place is going to explode.

In another scene, it’s still nighttime and I’m by the open door at the end of a long building, and the area, inside and out, is crowded with people. There is a scuffle outside and just before the door closes I see a blur as one girl suddenly bolts to the right just as a train races by the building from that side at lightning speed. The most horrible scream from outside fills my ears, the kind that seems to wound your soul, and I see another person vomit at the sight of whatever is left of the body.

While I didn’t see it myself, immedeately I feel the overwhelming horror, knowing that she had gotten hit and that there is a gruesome sight beyond that door. As the door swings back open I look away and begin navigating through the crowd, walking in the other direction.

In yet another scene, I’m walking on some crowded campus at night and see two familiar people approach me, one in a trench coat, and I want to follow them. I become momentarily distracted by a bar I come across as I make my way towards them, however, on which people hang their jackets. As I walk by, I grab my big, blue, fleece jacket off of it. As I struggle to gather up and get a good grip on the jacket and the metal hangar, I look up to see I’ve lost my friends.

My Three-Legged Trigger For Transcendence.

5/7/23

Often when I’m outside for a smoke or taking out trash at work I see one of two people out walking their dogs. There is the big, bald, black man who walks a small, fluffy, white dog about the size of a football, but he basically just walks the fluffy little guy back and fourth on the sidewalk in the front of the building. Then there is the white lady, maybe in her late fifties, who walks around a three-legged white dog — and she takes her fucking everywhere.

This adorable, sentient tripod is so energetic, so full of enthusiasm for life, so intent on bolting around, exploring, and stretching the leash to its limits, it almost seems as if it’s the dog who’s walking the woman.

Today was the second time I’d gotten to pet her — the dog, to be clear; not the woman — and just as was the case the first time, as soon as I began to do so she instantly calmed, soothing my soul in return as she stared back up at me with her big, bright, entranced and entrancing eyes, as if she wanted nothing more in the world.

Just by petting her, she seemed to cleanse my dark, weird little soul. All those plaguing sources of anxiety and depression as of late — the haunting dreams, the widening cultural divisions, my mid-life self-loathing, people with perceptions poisoned by the extreme, ideological nonsense they’ve adopted, political nitwits that have or had no business being in power, climate change, insane rent increases, the price of eggs — all of it, once my drowning-in-shit world, suddenly shrank to an infinitesimal size and was blown away by the wind, leaving me buzzing as I floated freely on a happy little Bob Ross cloud.

Maybe I need more three-legged dogs in my life.

Maybe that’s the answer.

So Sick of This Dream Theme II (5/8/23 Dream).

While they were at some celebration being held elsewhere, I go inside the house owned by Channing’s parents in order to play with their dog. They suddenly return unexpectedly, however, with Channing’s father — here a tall, Jewish-looking guy for some fucking reason — irritated, borderline enraged at my presence, though the mother remained silent on the matter.

It seems like a good time to leave and I grow increasingly anxious when I realize that I don’t know how. The house was positioned high on a hill with wide, wooden stairways, turning on at least two occasions, leading down across several smaller hills. Though I knew where the truck was at the time, there was no apparent way to get back to the road. Not that it would have mattered, I suppose, but I didn’t even consider in the context of the dream how I’d gotten the truck to that location to begin with.

Suddenly the aforementioned celebration moves to their house, with crowds of people everywhere. Still unable to discern how to get back to the road, I bump into Channing, who I haven’t seen in ages. I woukd have considered my best friend in high school, but over the last two or three decades he had grown tired of my isolationist tendencies and failure to ever reach out.

In real life, he woukd often be a total dick to me online. Once he sensed that he’d legitimately pissed me off, he’d send me a DM and say we should hang out and catch up sometime. I’d fail to respond, because: fuck that.

On the rare occasions I would go to a social gathering and we’d cross paths, he’d spend at least the first fifteen minutes giving me that side-eye stink-eye of his. Once I called him out on it, he’d proceed to have a passive-aggressive conversation with me. Early on, I spent most of the time aroubd him apologizing for my need for solitude and almost begging for his forgiveness, but I’d grown tired of that shit over the years. I have a limited social battery and work drains it. I hide away off the clock and often enough, on the weekends. I needed to. It’s how I’m wired. If he can’t get over it by now, it’s just not my fucking problem.

In the dream, however, we spoke, had an actual conversation, and he actually seemed happy to see me without any of the underlying bullshit. He only got angry when I told him I was going to leave, but I really needed to.

Not only is it still the case that I haven’t the foggiest clue how to get back to the road, now I couldn’t find my truck, either. It was dark out now and there were cars parked everywhere, every which way, utterly randomly. I used my clicker, but it apparently worked on vehicles that were not my own, too, and at one point I even remotely started someone’s car.

My need to leave is boiling over now, and like in another recent dream, I had the suspicion that I was dreaming — but unlike before, I gave up on finding the truck before it ended and just escaped the party through intentionally waking myself up.