23).

4/3/23

Somehow, be it intentionally or accidentally, I pour honey on the head of a rooster in my kitchen. His head is thickly slathered in it, making his head so heavy that when I put him down he immedeately tips over and falls face first onto the floor or table. He sticks to everything, seems absolutely miserable and defeated, and I feel absolutely horrible about it. I try to gently wash his head with water from under the faucet, but nothing seems to be working, and I’m afraid of hurting him in the process.

In the midst of this, I look to the stove and see the pans atop it bellowing smoke. Then I see that I’ve left a bag of something on the stove and the corner of it is on the burner, and it starts smoking, too.

4/5/23

I’m floating in a lake of green water and one of my assistant managers, Natalie, is there. The water is cold, but it gets warm in certain areas. Natalie found some object beneath the water that she was standing on where the water was warm, too. Somewhere out in the lake there is a structure that rests partially out of the water — two long walls and a roof — where supplies are kept.

Other guys are there in the water after awhile, I think three others, and we seem to be part of a group or team. I vaguely recall us having killed someone, and then we were called back later, our duty now to dispose of the body.

Before we do, now on land, we’re having photographs taken of all of us together. They have the four of us (one of whom is black, I specifically recall) stand beside each other in different orders, but while they had the others move around me, I always stood in the same place.

Towards the end of the dream, in a part that was solely conceptual, I recall thinking about how the creators of South Park had made two shows involving groups of four friends (in reality, they have not), and there was a kid with the same name in both shows, clearly the same character, though the other three were different.

Only once I was awake did I realize how this related to me in the photo-shoot scene.

Inside the Mind Behind the Trigger Finger.

Back when I was in school, we had fire drills and tornado drills so that in the event of such an emergency we would have a fairly good idea as to what we should do.

Tornadoes never hit, though. Fires never happened. Kind of disappointing, if you ask me.

The most exciting, potentially catastrophic scenario I ever experienced while in school was an earthquake we had in the late 80s. It was during second grade, I think, and we were all sitting on the floor — that’s how I remember it, anyway — as the teacher spoke to us. Suddenly I heard something strange, and I turned my head towards the hallway just in time to see an Exit sign fall off the ceiling and hit the floor. I jumped. It was frightening for a moment, then mysterious, then kind of funny.

Shortly thereafter, chaos ensued.

The ground moved like an angry ocean, like violent fluid. Vision was akin to the shakey cameras in those horrible “found footage” movies. Everyone was fumbling around like drunken monkeys. When it was all over, we all laughed, as if to relieve the tension.

Nowadays, kids like my niece and nephew have to go through active shooter drills. Not a potential catastrophe brought about by nature or a faceless arsonist or electrical fire but potentially by a gun-towing classmate who desires to pump as many people full of lead that they can manage before they’re either shot dead by a police officer or gather the courage to turn the barrel of their own gun on themselves and spray-paint the floor and walls with their blood and brains.

As all old fucks tend to say: well, kids, I guess I just lived in a different world.

Columbine happened two years after I graduated high school. My friend and I decided to walk up to the old high school one day to visit our art teacher when we noticed a cop following us into the building, then into the school office. We noted it and expressed our confusion to one another.

The reason, as we later discovered? My non-chalont friend was wearing a trench coat.

Once we got in the office, we found another kid there, sitting where kids always sat when they were sent to the office, awaiting a meeting with the principal. This kid, we soon learned, was sent to the principals office because he was wearing a trench coat much like my friend — and he refused to take it off.

My friend and this kid were suspected members of the Trench Coat Mafia.

Me? I was just some backwards-hat, flannel-wearing, coffee-shop-going, nincompoop bystander with poor hygeine caught in the mix, yet as innocent as the other two. I was confused and irritated nonetheless. Hell, I thought it was stupid when our Vietnam Vet shop teacher would send kids to the office for wearing ballcaps or sneaking into the music room to smoke cigarettes during high school, and that wasn’t even distantly related to events involving mass homicide.

That’s when I got my first suspicion that shit had changed.

Since then, that shit has hit the fan and spread far and wide. School shootings happen with such a frequency in the good ol’ US of A that its hardly newsworthy anymore. It’s too common now. Too boring. Only during a recent, global pandemic in which all but “essential workers” — a group which I, a fast food worker, was strangely a part — were isolated did the flying bullets amidst the hallways and classrooms of schools here in ‘Murica experience a commercial break.

Worry not, though: we’re back on our game. It happened again, this time in Texas, and the ‘Murican masses remained faithful to their well-rehearsed script.

Does it piss me off?

Does it piss me off how every time yet another school shooting gets widespread media attention that all that Republicans seem to scream about is fucking gun rights?

Yes.

But does it also piss me off how every time another school shooting gets widespread media attention that all that the Democrats seem to scream about is gun regulation?

Also yes.

What pisses me off the most, however, is that since as far back as Columbine, neither side ever seems interested in talking about much of anything beyond the issue of guns.

On the blue end of the spectrum, people often speak of guns as if they’re haunted objects out of a Stephen King novel that telepathically summon the weak to purchase them and subsequently possess them into committing acts of violence. As a natural consequence, Team Blue adopts the position that stricter gun regulation is The Answer.

And don’t get me wrong: common sense gun laws should be a no-brainer, and I personally know sensible Republicans who agree. This is something that would certainly help, of course, but Team Blue is so hyperfocused on it that all thought stops there. In their mind, this is The Answer. If only access to guns were a far more complex labyrinth, they assert, such atrocities could be effectively circumvented.

Personally, I think they’re full of shit.

On the red end of the spectrum, however, things get similarly ludicrous. They don’t react to the gun violence so much as they react to the reaction of Team Blue to the gun violence. In other words, theyre hyperfocused on immediately going on the defensive:

“Don’t take our rights away. We have a right to own guns.”

To their credit, I do think it’s a right. I’ve never trusted my government less than I do now, nor the insanity of the herd, and that’s saying a lot. I’ve been waiting for the shit to hit the fan on a global scale since high school. As comedic genius Bill Burr put it in one of his bits — and yes, I’m paraphrasing here — you can have a library of books containing all the clever ways of living off the grid available, you can grow your own food, have a bomb shelter, and have your bug-out bag filled to the brim and ready to go, but unless you’ve also got sufficient firepower, all you’re really doing is collecting supplies for the most powerful, morally-flexible motherfucker on the block.

Yes, guns terrify me, but I support our right to have them.

Having said all that, I’ve never heard a sensible person on the left ever propose that all guns should be taken away, anyway.

So is Team Red crazier? Team Blue? Pick and choose and rate them by matter of degree, but when all is said and done, when you get down to it — assuming you’re interested in doing so at all — by and large, it becomes abundantly clear that both uber-troops of color-coded, groupthinking apes are bloody fucking idiots. Red, blue: the colors are bloody irrelevant in that respect.

Rather than travel down those typical avenues of well-established, reactionary thought every time another kid pumps lead into their classmates, why not try to stop yourself, clear it all away, and ask the actual question?

What is it that makes these individuals want to purchase these weapons and then go shoot up a school?

Guns are just tools, after all, and inherently amoral, so its utterly stupid to blame them. So really, take the relentless spotlight away from them for a moment and ask yourself: what is it that drives people to use these tools? What is it that inspires the fingers that pull these triggers? What influences them to have such a disturbing lack of value in human life?

That’s the real question, and this fact should be obvious, but no one spends much time at all looking at it, much less really examining it, and so they forever remain light-years away from exploring potential solutions.

Sure, some members of Team Red talk on how “mental illness” is really the core issue, but sorry, that’s an incredibly vague term, and they never elaborate, at least not in such a way that ever circles back to the real issue at hand.

I mean, look around you. Nowadays, nearly everyone qualifies as mentally ill. BPD. ADHD. Depression. Anxiety. And on and on.

No guesswork is needed, either. Few are shy about sharing the flavors they’ve been diagnosed with. Sometimes it seems like a badge of goddamn honor for people. Some kids almost treat it like a rite of passage. I don’t consider myself a member of either camp, but truth be known, I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression for years. I was always comfortable offering up that I was anxious, as I hoped it might explain to people the bulk of my behavior, but the depression aspect always left me feeling ashamed. I’m not sure why. In either case, despite my “mental illnesses,” not once have I considered shooting up a school. Not in high school, not in college, not fucking now.

So tell me: what specific type of mental illness inspires people to do such a thing? Firearm Spiritual Possession Disorder? Is it really that Stephen King thing?

To my ears, in my mind, to call someone “mentally ill” is just a nicer way of calling someone crazy, and crazy is just a dismissive term, a thought-stopper with respect to understanding the motivations of another. So vague as to be meaningless.

Alone, it means nothing. Fucking nothing.

So what’s truly inside the mind residing behind the trigger finger? In an attempt to get inside their heads, I’ve imagined a few scenarios. I’ve cooked up in my own twisted mind why they might do what they do. Not a Stephen King thing, exactly, but perhaps even more disturbing.

1. A Pathway to Power.

Guns level the playing field. More than that: it gives you the advantage.

Imagine some physically weak and emotionally fragile kid with a home life littered with emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Imagine he goes to school and is either shunned or beaten up by his peers.

He can’t take it anymore.

He could never hope to defeat them by sheer physical strength alone, so he begins generating revenge fantasies where he manages to get the upper hand. The easiest way to get that upper hand? Have that hand hold a gun.

It doesn’t matter how physically powerful the kid’s abusers are, how physically weak he may be: no amount of muscle is a match for a rain of bullets.

The kid knows it will likely be the last thing he ever does, but as long as he knows they know he’s not such a pussy after all, as long as he turns the tables on them and can see them in the powerless position they always put him in — and by his own hand, no less — he feels he can die with some semblance of dignity.

And if guns are outlawed? This circumstance, it doesn’t go away. He’ll buy one illegally. And if he can’t get a gun, he’ll get a knife to shank somebody, just like they do in prisons, where they can’t have guns, either. If stabbing someone is too intimate in his eyes, or he can’t get the kill-count he’s aiming for, he’ll go for something more impersonal. Maybe he’ll get a copy of the Anarchists Cookbook and build a bomb.

Outlaw the book? He’ll get it online.

2. Route to Celebrity Status.

Imagine a kid who’s lost in the crowd, unable to contribute anything meaningful to the whole, which couldn’t seem less interested in him, anyway. How can he mean something? How on earth could a nobody as utterly insignificant as him ever hope to leave a mark on the collective psyche?

He watches the news. He watches the movies.

After much contemplation, he comes to the conclusion that violence is the easiest way to get people’s attention and immortalize himself in their memory. Violence is the easiest route to celebrity status. Not only would those closest to the violence undoubtedly remember it to their dying day, the media would solidify him in the minds of the greater masses by posting his photo on the news, on the videos you click on YouTube, and talking about him endlessly, and perhaps even provide his manifesto, if he considered it a worthy self-imposed homework assignment before delivering his storm of bullets.

Its just like in the movie Seven, where John Doe, played by a canceled, junk-grabbing actor, says:

“You can’t just tap people on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer. Then you’ll notice you have their strict attention.”

***

Now, we aren’t just products of our environment. We aren’t just empty vessels to be filled by Hollywood, the media, our friends, or how we grew up.

I believe in what I call free will, individual liberty, personal choice. But I also believe in what I call fate, which is the coupling of nature and nurture. Who we are and who we become is found in the tug-o-war between free will and fate.

In the gap betwixt them are a spectrum of choices ranging from the path of least resistance to the path of greatest resistance, and that spectrum is different for each one of us. What is the easiest thing for you to do may be the hardest thing for me, and vice versa.

We need diversity to evolve, to survive as a whole on every concievable level, and this spectrum of choice is it’s inevitable consequence.

We all have different points of departure that, so far as we can tell, we had no choice in. That’s the fate part. Our parents. Their psychology. Their economic status. The society we were born into. Even our own psychology and predisposition may have been entirely random for all we know.

All of this, so far as we can tell, was merely a roll of the dice. But we still have freedom of choice.

A kid born in the slums does not have the same spectrum of choices as a kid born into a rich family whose father gave him “a small loan of a million dollars,” so take that pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps bullshit and aggressively force-feed it to your posterior blow-hole and take a double-shot of empathy and compassion.

My point is that while fate — one’s environment and circumstances — don’t necessarily make an individual, they undoubtedly serve as vital ingredients in the process of development, so we should stop an ask ourselves what it is about the conditions of our society that make this choice for kids to shoot up a school such an easy and alluring one.

We are a divided country, now more than ever. There is the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. The increasing distance between The People and our not-much-of-a-choice of out-of-touch, corrupt, so-called representatives. The ever-intensifying political polarization, of course. The gap between men and women continually reinforced by modern Feminism. The systemic racism.

The cracks in our collective consciousness are stretching further, the chasms between us are widening. Our culture is literally tearing apart at the seams.

Once United, we would now be more appropriately referred to as the Divided States of America, and that’s not only a metaphor: survey says growing numbers on both left and right think we should divide the country into red-run and blue-run states.

We hate each other.

Nobody is listening to anybody else, and everyone’s voice is lost in the crowd unless they sing along in the hate-fueled echo-chambers. Sing out of tune, they label you a member of The Other.

Do so much as communicate with The Other, hear them out, strive to understand them, put some empathy and compassion into practice, and you’re guilty by means of association, and so they label you as a member of The Other.

There’s no tolerance for the gray area, no room for the spectrum between the extremes, no ability to embrace nuance. You’re only allowed to see in black or white, red or blue. It’s all binary — a rather ironic position for the authoritarian aspects of the left in particular, if you think about it.

But everybody listens to the guy with the gun. Everybody reads the manifesto of the guy who built, placed, and set off the bomb.

You can’t just tap people on the shoulder anymore, and maybe that cuts close to the core of this problem.

Inside is Closed.

We just closed, and I’m waiting for two customers to finish up and leave before I start cleaning the dining room, so I sneak out for a quick cigarette. A few puffs in, I look up from my phone and see an old guy walking towards the building from the sidewalk. I’ve seen him once before. He was nice enough. He talks to himself, though, and either has a speech impediment or he’s drunk all the time. Both, for all I know.

So that he doesn’t waste time and energy coming any closer, I yell out to him, “Sorry, man, just drive thru.”

He dismissively waves his hand with an, “eh,” as if he didn’t believe me, or was pissed off about us being closed. I shrug it off and look back down at my phone. When I look up again, he’s still approaching.

I give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, sometimes people develop a speech impediment due to poor hearing, so maybe he legitimately didn’t hear me despite the fact that I had yelled it to him, so I say it again. “Sorry, man, inside’s closed.”

“I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

Arby’s is right across the street, inside still open. Just saying.

I shrug and shake my head sympathetically. “The inside is closed.”

“What do you mean the inside’s closed? I come here all the time.”

As I struggle to see the relevance, he adds, pointing through the windows, “They’re in there.”

“They ordered their food before we closed.”

Then he steps forward and gets in my face, chest out and arms back, all ape-like. I do not back up. I don’t size him up. I’m not going to escalate. I refuse to give this childish twat what he wants, just like assholes who ride my ass on the road: I refuse to go faster. If the mood strikes me, I may let my foot up off the gas, go slower.

No, he cannot affect me. My inside is closed.

And I’m certainly not going to throw the first punch, either.

Having said that, Please.

I’ve never been in a real fight and I’ll probably walk away physically damaged if it happens, but I’ll fight tooth and nail, right on down to the ground. And hell, maybe I need it. There’s nearly four-and-a-half decades of pure rage bottled up in here, just itching for a justified outlet. Hungry for a reason. Oh-so patient for the right opportunity to discharge.

In my head, I hear Tyler Durden from Fight Club: “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”

“I’m sorry, man,” is what I actually say, tone not changing in the slightest, not entirely ignorant of the fact that revealing he’s not getting a rise out if me will probably enrage him further. “I can’t let you in.”

“Well,” he says, “I’m going in anyway.”

Here we go.

“No,” I calmly tell him. “You’re not.”

So then he tries to pass by me and go towards the door, which I have propped open. I step in front of him and the door, and he steps back immedeately.

Huh. Interesting.

In my efforts to get inside the door quickly, I drop what was propping the door open — a roll of trash bags — so I bend down slowly to pick it up. I could’ve kicked it inside, but I decided not to. I knew he could’ve kneed me right in the face as I bent down. Somehow, I felt he wouldn’t. And he didn’t.

I stand up, flick my cigarette to the ground, and say, with a smile, “Have a nice day, sir.”

After shutting the door as he’s still scream-mumbling bullshit my way through the window, I go take a piss with my adrenaline-shaky hands, laughing to myself.

Have I mentioned how much I hate this town?

Death, Power, & Anxiety (4/1/23 Dream).

A big storm hit and the electricity went out all over town. After reading a bit, I felt tired, so elected to take a nap under the niave assumption that once I awoke, the power would be back on.

In the dream, I’m in the hallway of some upper floor of the apartment complex I live in, though it is far grander and fancier than my actual apartment complex. It even has elevators. People are driving small vehicles down the hallway and out the elevator doors at top speed directly into the walls, intentionally killing themselves. I remember taking cover behind a wall as one slammed into it.

Later, on a lower level, I’m with my parents and some guy who seems to be both their friend and bodyguard (who is clearly based off a character played by Jay O. Sanders on a show I’ve recently been watching called Sneaky Pete). They seem to be babysitting or adopting two kids, a girl and a boy. Though I know this, I never see the girl in the dream. I do recall the other kid, however, who is a skinny black boy, probably in his teens, who immediately tries to run away. He tries to jump out of the kitchen and into the hallway through the interior window and has a hell of a time with it. I go grab a hold of him in the hallway and as he tries to escape my grip in a panic, I casually point to the cased opening, nonverbally indicating that his overly-dramatic escape attempt could have been done in a much easier way, and he calms down and just laughs.

Later, on the bottom floor, my mother and the bodyguard were going somewhere and I was supposed to go along, but they walked out the door without me, which made me happy, as I didn’t want to go anyway. Then the bodyguard comes up to the door’s window, stares at me, and holds up his hand, where he’s holding a sheet of pills, and though he says nothing, I know he wants to know whether I’ve seen anything like them around here. I had, in fact — the black kid had them.

I walk outside and ask them to just leave the kid alone. As I look down, I realize I have two phones, so go back inside to ask the kid if the other one is his. When I go in he’s already walking up to me, and as I’m holding out the phone and asking him if it’s his he aggressively grabs it and turns to angrily walk away. I grab his arm and tell him to knock it off, that I’m on his side. Much like when I spoke with him earlier, he suddenly relaxes, meets my eyes and sort of smiles at me while kind of laughing at himself.

When I go back outside, I begin walking with them and ask my mother why she doesn’t just leave the kid alone. He’s taking pills, but it’s his body, his business, and just because I wouldn’t do that doesn’t mean I should force my opinion on him. Even if we take them away, he’ll get more elsewhere.

As I’m saying all this, however — or at least trying to say it — my mother keeps talking over me, not stopping fir a second, not listening in the least, forcing me to talk louder and louder in the vain hope of getting a word in edgewise. I finally scream at her to just let me speak, to just shut up a moment, but she doesn’t pause or slow down. I want to hit her, the urge is overwhelming, but I just put my hand on her cheek, asking, almost begging her to shut up and let me talk, trying not to let my building rage overpower me so I go ballistic. I get so unbelievably enraged at her that I wake myself up.

I’ve had a few dreams as of late where the anxiety or anger has been so intense at the end that I awaken myself out of it with a jolt. I thought the common factor was CBD, but I’ve been largely abstaining from both that and weed as of late. I’m curious what’s really behind it.

Celebrities, Authorities, & Ex-Girlfriends (3/22/23 Dream).

I’m not asleep for three hours when I awaken in my dark bedroom at 7 AM, filled to the brim with anxiety, the dream I just pushed myself out of still vivid in my mind.

I’m sharing a large hotel room with a group of people, all of us hanging out on our respective beds. In the midst of various conversations and activities, my attention begins to narrow on this one guy, who looks incredibly familiar, though I can’t quite place him at first. After some time passes, it suddenly occurs to me that he looks remarkably like the actor who played Lucus, the private investigator from the television show House, MD. I asked him, though through indirect yet strong suggestion, if this was who he was, but he responded with dodging and denial.

After he had left the room for some reason, I told one of the girls about it, and both her and the others in the room seemed to show great interest. At this point in the dream, however, there was a sudden and irrational shift in the narrative: this guy didn’t just look like the actor who played Lucus, but actually was Lucus. Furthermore, I was somehow a stand-in for House, as I had been in a relationship with Cuddy — a revelation that came to the surprise of everyone, as she was evidently our boss — after which she began dating him.

Shortly thereafter, another girl I used to date strolled in through the door — a slender, petite, sexy woman with short hair who looked like some mixture of Kelli Renee Williams, who played psychologist Dr. Gillian Foster on the show, Lie to Me, and Christa Beatrice Miller, who played Jordan Sullivan on Scrubs. She kept eye contact, slowly approaching me, and immediately started being flirty. Her knee was rubbing me between the legs, her hands were all over me, and she was speaking in that soft, seductive way.

She takes me into hallway, clearly suggesting she wanted to get it on, and I ask her if there’s anything I should know. She says that she doesn’t like condoms, and I say that that’s a problem. I don’t want kids. She says, regarding raw-dogging, “but it feels so good.”

We go through another hotel room door down the hall into what I presume will be her room, but other people there, sitting at rows of tables, busy with paperwork, handing off folders to agents that I know to be assignments. This is the FBI. They hand me a folder, but I refuse. I don’t work for them. Turning to her, I tell her I was under the impression that we were going to have sex. She then tells me she intended on getting an assignment alone so we could go find a place somewhere.

They aggressive insist I take a folder, specifically some large black woman who is sitting down, handing it to me without even looking up from her work, but I still refuse. As i go to exit the room, my ex says my name and then says, “take a folder or I’ll kick your ass.” I say no and casually grab a weapon off the table — like a fancy police stick — on my way out the door.

I go down the hall and enter what I think k is my hotel room door, but as soon as I’m inside, weapon in hand, all the fa es of the group turn to me, and none are familiar.

“Sorry, wrong group,” I say and promptly exit. I don’t want to go towards the exit of the hotel, as there is a police station there, so I go in the opposite direction.

I’m frantic because I’m lost again, and then I wake up with a jolt.

The three central symbols in this dream — hotels, celebrities, and authorities — are all symbols associated with transformation.

Hotels aren’t a place you live, of course, but constitute a temporary residence, and so may suggest a transformational change in one’s life and their uncertainty about the coming change they’re reaching for. Given the group I was with seemed to be my present workmates and the FBI tried to forcibly recruit me, this is likely in reference to my search for a new job as of late.

Sex with celebrities (or the roles they’ve played in television or movies, if referenced) may represent ideal qualities that you desire to develop and integrate — or once had and have since lost and wish to re-integrate. Given both Cuddy and the slender girl were exes in my dream, they perhaps represent lost aspects of myself I want back — or that I’m “flirting” with the idea, in the case of the slender woman.

In either case, they represent, again, a desire for transformation, but perhaps once again a hesitancy.

In this case, it may reference a desire for sex and intimacy with a girl and the confidence that develops during those frustratingly rare periods in my life. In a dream I had the night before, some guy was trying to get me to do at least three sexual things to Melania Trump, and I refused, likely on account to the disasterous douche nozzle she’s married to. I don’t know what the other two acts were, but after repeated insistence I agreed to lick her pussy. I did, too: a simple lick upwards between her lower lips. It tasted salty, but nice, and the taste felt so real.

Given this repeats the celebrity and sex theme, I’ve got to wonder.

Authorities in dreams are said to represent parts of ourselves that organize and control the aforementioned integrations and transformations, and given that we supposedly often dream of them when trying to make big changes in our lives.

As for the end of the dream, new rooms represent new or old and unconscious extensions of ourselves. At the end of the dream, as has been a relentless theme lately, I felt lost. That one probably needs the least explanation of all.

Origins Of Anxiety (3/19/23 Dream).

While most of the dream is lost in memory, I remember that my family and another family had met at the house of Danny Sable, after which we were going to all go to a party. The rest of my family had left, but I for some reason stayed behind, and I increasingly felt that I was overstaying my welcome. I remember investing a lot of time putting on my belt, and I was having a host of issues with the process, which confused me.

The entire time I was there, Danny said nothing to me, and actually appeared to be avoiding me, and right before I left some people walked with him to the bathroom door, talking with him quietly before he went inside.

I then go outside and walk into a small field of tall grass beside the house and alongside a road, where I find my two sisters. I’m surprised to see them there, as I thought that they would’ve been picked up by now and left. I then see my parents, who were apparently the ones picking them up, and they’d been patiently waiting on me, too, which for some reason I didn’t suspect. Dad was in the back of a pick-up truck and I was talking to him about seeing Danny, and how much I wanted to punch the asshole in the face, and we both start laughing.

I found this dream interesting, as I haven’t remembered a dream involving Danny Sable in many, many years. He essentially constituted the devil of my childhood. One of his sons, Jimmy, was my best friend when I was young, and on more than one occasion Danny would mercilessly beat Jimmy and his siblings in front of me as I hid behind a door or beneath a bed, terrified beyond description. I would have flashbacks regarding the household years later, after having forgotten abput Jimmy and those circumstances for years, and then began having a host of dreams in which I could not, for whatever reason, see his face.

In retrospect, I noted that I didn’t see his face in this dream, either, but that the terror I typically associated him was suspiciously absent.

After some contemplation after waking up today, I reflected on last night, and what may have triggered the dream. I’d been getting down on myself for wasting my weekend, on not filling out applications to find a new job. Instead, I’d spent most the weekend binge-watching a show, Preacher, which contained the elements of religion and violence — two elements also deeply associated with my childhood experiences in that house.

Just as relevant, perhaps even more so, I watched a short clip from The Joe Rogan Experience podcast last night in which Rogan was speaking with one Gabor Mate, who spoke on his perspective on anxiety disorders. It hit me deeply and made me feel hopeless and depressed, mostly because what he had to say seemed very relevant with respect to my own anxiety.

He said that when we’re children, some parents will not pick up a distressed, crying child because they want to instill in him a sense of inner strength and independence, and the parents don’t want to train the child to be dependent on the comfort and security the parents can provide.

He insisted they had it wrong. Backwards, actually.

It’s nature’s intent to make us independent; that’s the plan — what the child needs is a solid foundation of comfort and security provided by the parents, namely the mother. When the child is not emotionally nurtured but left to cry in distress, the emotional foundation that results is debilitating. It communicates to the child that he lives in an unsafe world. He grows to feel insecure and hopeless at his very emotional depths. It made me think of reading about the “separation cry” years ago, where the child will cry for the mother but if it goes unanswered for long enough he’ll just give up, solemnly accepting his fate.

It also reminded me of a story my mother told me years ago. Evidently when I was a child I would just cry and cry, and it was driving my mother crazy. She consulted the doctor, who suggested she just let me “cry myself out.” That she essentially ignore me and I’d eventually just exhaust myself. She explained how she did as suggested, and how it worked.

This was exactly what Mate said a parent shouldn’t do.

I had constant power struggles with my mother in my youth, and she acted like a cold-hearted bitch to me until about my mid-thirties. We’ve since made amends and we’re good now. She seems like an entirely different person. All is forgiven, though not forgotten, and I’ve always noticed how the nature of our shitty relationship back then influenced me — and influences me still.

Maybe it really began with the unanswered separation cries when I was still an infant.

I still remember Anne, my girlfriend from eons ago — my last girlfriend, in fact — once making the comment, when I was complaining about my mother: “I know, you never bonded with her.” She said it so matter-of-factly, as if explained so much about me. Maybe she was right. Perhaps it does.

After seeing the video, I fell into this well of despair and solemn acceptance, thinking: maybe this is in me too fucking deep. Maybe it cannot be changed. Maybe I can’t change.

For a big period of my young life, I focused on trying to let go of things that held me back, but this was different. It was the reverse: it was about needing something I don’t have. A sense of security, of confidence, of independence forever fucking lost to me.

But then I remembered that book, A General Theory of Love, and how it said that attachment styles and the lifelong issues we develop due to our bonds with our caregivers can be changed through subsequent, intimate relationships in adulthood. That gave me a glimmer of hope for a nanosecond until I realized I hadn’t had a relationship with a woman in almost two decades and could never imagine having one again because of my isolationist tendencies, trust issues, and fears regarding commitment.

Anne would’ve been my best bet, but I killed that hope permanently. Worse still, me ending it all was based on what I’ve since come to recognize was a false assumption.

I’d always thought that if I got in a relationship, I’d surely remain stunted, because the other would compensate for my shortcomings. I’d just ride her coattails for the rest of my life and never develop those aspects myself. But when I realized how my parents changed over the years, how they’d learned from one another and developed strengths where they were once weak through their relationship with one another, I saw how wrong I’d been, and how right the authors of the aforementioned book were.

I’d made my choice to be alone and it had been the wrong one.

I wasn’t getting tired last night and was no longer drunk, so decided to take sleeping pills, but I thought that maybe I’d already taken them an hour or two earlier. I wasn’t sure. Eventually I decided to take them anyway; in either case, I didn’t get tired. At all. Ultimately, I decided to lay down in bed anyway, and just found my mind spinning the same thoughts as before. I’d fall asleep for what seemed like a moment and would then wake up into the twilight state, vivid images in my mind, feeling the comfortable paralysis of my body.

Finally, I fell asleep and had the dream about Danny.

Was that dream suggesting my relationship with my mother wasn’t the issue at all, but rather my chikdhood experiences of that house — or that it wasn’t just my relationship with my mother, but watching what he did to those kids as well?

I can’t be sure. And I have the sinking suspicion I never will be, and it wouldn’t help me change things even if I did.

More Dreams of the Lost.

3/17/23.

I’m walking along a sidewalk when I put down my bookbag for a moment to do something, maybe check my phone. Then I start walking again and some time passes before I remember that I’d forgotten my bookbag. I look down the sidewalk, retracing my steps, but I couldn’t find it. I found a gathering of other bookbags in the bushes, but they weren’t my own.

In another dream, I’m on an outing with the Critical Drinker, a guy who runs a movie review channel that I find amusing and insightful. He drives me to his house, and it’s time for me to leave, so I say goodbye very awkwardly not once, but twice. He remains staring forward, saying nothing. I exit the car but forgot how I got here or how to get home. I don’t see my truck anywhere. So I start walking, using Google maps in the attempts to at least figure out where I am.

Fear in the Dark & a Dream of the Lost.

3/9/23

I had taken a CBD gummy and watched two episodes of the Netflix documentary, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared. Early into the third episode, I began feeling dreadfully tired, so went into my dark bedroom and crawled into bed. Immediately, I had the distinct sense that I was being watched and felt this overwhelming fear. Only moments ago, I could hardly keep my eyes open, now I was suddenly on high alert. I told myself I was being irrational, but I couldn’t shake it. I leaped out of bed and walked back into the front room, grabbed the pillow from my papasan, and laid down on the couch, continuing to watch the third episode. Again, I found myself struggling to keep eyes open, so I turned on my bathroom light in my bedroom, crawled back into bed, and finally managed to go to sleep. I woke up around 8:30 AM, still tired. Around noon, I took a nap and had a dream.

3/10/23

I go to a small apartment where I had previously met Peach, a friend of mine, though I knew she wouldn’t be there. I was inside for a short time before Nicky, an old friend of hers, walks out of a room. She seems mildly annoyed that I was there, and I immediately felt guilty. I apologized, explaining how I didn’t know others lived there. Almost hurt now, she goes, “Oh, you came to see Peach.”

Others turn up and walk in to the living room, and feeling out of place, I make my exit, but I’m entirely lost. I dont know where to go. I passing by a group of people to go down stairs, but then walk back up, passing by the same people, from whom I sensed annoyance.

Ultimately, I climb out a window onto these barrels stacked at least three stories high, then hop down other stacks piled closer to the ground. Eventually, I jump down maybe a story and land surprisingly gracefully on sand, where I feel myself sinking for a brief moment before hopping to solid ground.

A group of people are behind me, and one says something about a cop. I see him and pass casually by, though I think he stops me. I explain I’m lost and that I’m just looking for my truck.

I then proceed to walk around town, unable to find it, thinking I did at one point only to discover it wasn’t really my truck after all. Finally, I use the clicker on my keys and hear the chirping, even the reflection of the flashing lights, but still can’t locate it, though at least now I know I’m in the general vicinity. I think I find it before waking up.

So I had another dream about feeling out of place, afraid of the judgement of others, and being lost and seeking motivation. I suppose that’s fitting enough.

Dreams of Early 2023.

1/2/23

Saw S.M. in a dream and we hung out for a bit. I left him in my room for what I intended to be a short time but then got distracted by a bunch of junk of mine I’d left downstairs and had forgotten about, and it had to deal with aliens and UFOs. I thought how when I went back upstairs I’d tell him how I had had three dreams of him over the years, all dealing with UFOs, but the more I thought about it, I could only remember two. I kept wondering: why did I think three?

I didn’t realize until awakening that I may have been referencing the very dream I was having while I was still in it.

1/4/23

I’m walking around college, unable to find any touch screen monitors to clock in, nor can I find the right buildings, and not because just they replaced all the names of the buildings with numbers. My memory seems frighteningly absent. Someone, I think Emory, tells me that I’m late for class, that they were asking about me, but someone had said that they had seen me on campus. I finally walk home, but then realize that I had left my phone somewhere on campus, so I go back. In the end, I’m watching some spacecraft in the sky. Then I wake up.

1/6/23

In the dream, I was cleaning the break room at work when I found something like a strong fishing line coming out of the ceiling. I kept pulling it and it didn’t seem to end, so I took it in hand as I exited the break room. My intention was to ask one of the managers about it, though that never came to pass. Instead, I just started walking home while holding the line and it just kept going and going.

1/7/23

I’m driving, but it was as if I were one with the car and running super fast. I think I missed a soft turn and kept on the road as it turned into a dirt road, at the end of which I stopped. I asked a group of people, at least some of whom were from work, what road this was. “Andrews,” someone said, I think manager Steve. I was on the wrong road. Then manager Beth was there, and they all piled into a van I assume was hers, but there was no room left for me.

1/17/23

I’m in bed, it’s dark, and I’m awakened by my paternal grandfather putting a Bible beside me. I make some offhand comment about my atheism, I think, but it goes unacknowledged. He says farewell and, assuming he means to indicate he’s about to die, I begin to cry, but within a moment I realize my grandparents have been dead for decades. The intense emotions of sorrow and loss bubbling up within me, overcoming me in the emotional equivalent of a tsunami, is abruptly cut off as I realize this and I fall away from the dream.

In retrospect, I was never that close to my paternal grandfather. Also in retrospect, it seems as if I was the one dying, perhaps even in an open coffin, and my grandfather was saying farewell to me. I didn’t move and when I spoke, my voice seemed only to be in my head, and he made no sign to indicate he’d heard me.

1/22/23

I dream of having just crossed a river, and then felt an earthquake.

2/12/23

My two sisters and I are in pond or a river with rapid waters and we suddenly become aware that we’re approaching a waterfall. Eve hangs onto me, Linda onto Eve, but Linda loses her grip and falls over. It turns out it was a very short waterfall, however, so she’s all right. I’m suddenly worried about all the litter and sewage I suddenly remembered being in this pond, however, and frantically want to get out, so try not to touch the bottom as I make my way to the shore.

2/18/23

I’m outside on someone’s lawn, looking at Gwen’s sketchbook, and come upon a drawing of a threesome. It’s expertly drawn and colored in colored pencil. It depicts a guy sitting on a chair with two girls in positions I can’t remember. I then look up and find a sex act actually taking place nearby me on the lawn, and I end up talking with this girl as she’s getting banged. She has streaks of purple in her hair and tells me she’s from Wisconson, but she likes it a lot better here (presumably, in Ohio). After the fucking is over, she puts on these purplish blue, one-piece pajamas that covers all but the top half of her face. She then goes into a public restroom a few feet away. It has a large doorway without a door and most of the inside is exposed. I look at my phone and find that Gwen has sent me dozens of texts.

2/25/23

It seemed like a post-apocalyptic situation. We were hiding out in a building, but I kept seeing this one guy through the windows and doorways of an adjacent building and feared us being seen by him. It made me want to leave before he did spot us, though we stuck around. Even so, I was in constant fear, wondering if I should have my bag packed and nearby at all times just in case I had to make a sudden run for it.