23 Dream & Synchronicities).

I’m hiding with Abbey in a cluttered room at an abandoned airport during the apocalypse. There are a lot of people at the airport, a lot of commotion, but we found this small area with what appears to be seats out of a car or plane up against the wall, where we lay next to one another for awhile, escaping the chaos. We pass the time talking and occasionally peeking out the narrow window situated just above. At some point it strikes me that this circumstance seems strangely familiar, and I confess to her that I swear all of this had happened before.

Later, I’m alone outside on the runway and I see a plane in the sky, apparently attempting to come in for a landing, but it’s nose turns upward, it’s belly facing me, and eventually it crashes in an enormous explosion.

Shortly thereafter, I see a bunch of people floating down from the sky with parachutes and I instantly feel dread. Somehow I know these are bad people, likely violent, convicted criminals. I imagine them taking over the airport and doing violent or unsavory things to us and that they wouldn’t be the kind of people we could sway or negotiate with. I feel certain that if we encounter them things will not end well.

I’m frantically trying to weigh whether it would be better if Abbey and I were to continue trying to hide here at the airport or quickly gather up our things and try to make a run for it.

As usual, there was more to this dream, but I’ll be damned if I can remember the rest of it.

Dreams about the apocalypse, about a doomsday scenario, are said to reflect fears and insecurities regarding how unprepared we feel over a chapter in our life coming to an end. The nature of my fears are likely represented by the fact that I’d taken up residence in an abandoned airport, as this is where planes take off and land, a place where people pass through on their way to and from other places, and so represents a period of transition. Given it was abandoned, it probably represents being stuck in an area in my life.

The airplane crash may symbolize my unsucessful attempts at changing, or my fears of failing to stick the landing in my present, ongoing attempts to change my life: specifically my desire to get a new, well-paying job and move closer to my family.

The violent convicts that came down in parachutes following the crash probably represent the aggressive, dark, violent emotions within me that I fear escaping me in the wake of my failures and taking over everything as I’m stuck in the period of transition — emotions that I’ve judged as dangerous and fear facing, as I consider myself too weak and unprepared to deal with them. My uncertainty regarding whether I should run or hide from them, I feel confident, requires no explanation.

So all of that makes sense. When it comes to the presence of Abbey in the dream, however, I remain confused.

For a short while a recurring theme in my dream was the presence of actors on television shows I’ve watched, or more specifically the characters they’ve portrayed, but this is the second instance in which a woman from my past who I haven’t dedicated much thought to in awhile has suddenly played a role in my dreams. First Jane, the sister of Melany, an old friend of mine from before high school, and now Abbey, who I haven’t seen in years.

Dreams about old friends can apparently deal with how the relationship you had with that person (and perhaps how it ended) relates to a similar circumstance in your life at present. Abbey and I were lying beside each other in the dream, and her and I did have some brief, intimate encounters in real life at one point. In the dream, I vaguely recalled at some point that something may have come between us and we went our separate ways, but I can’t be sure. If so, this would echo the actual circumstances between her and I.

Though I’ve tried all day to remember what the nature of the argument between us in real life was, I still cannot recall, which bothers me. Nor do I know how this could relate to any present relationship or person in my life.

Instead, she could represent qualities I saw in her that I wish to have in myself, or aspects of our friendship that I feel I need back in my life. I do miss having that sort of close, intellectual relationship with a girl I’m simultaneously attracted to. Still, I have my doubts regarding any of these potential interpretations.

The issue is that the rest of the dream has consistent elements — my fears that I’m unable to change and my fears of failing in my ongoing attempts to do so. It’s hard for me to believe Abbey doesn’t symbolize something consistent with that theme.

I kept thinking about her and what she meant for the first two and a half hours of my ten hour shift today, coming up with nothing. I thought on how I had met her, how I almost got a relationship or at least a fuck-buddy friendship going on with her — until I felt bad because Eva was fixated on her and was still a closet lesbian at the time. I eventually backed off and Eva and Abbey got together.

I considered writing about it in detail, but I knew I’d have to talk about the weird telepathic experiences Eva and I had, and I try not to post about my strange and paranormal experiences in this blog. I have another blog for that in a vain attempt to compartmentalize aspects of my life. And this dream didn’t seem to involve anything paranormal, anyway. It would make the post — this post — needlessly cumbersome and unfocused, and I have enough of a problem with that, anyway.

When I finally got out of the stock room and went up front, Natalie, an assistant manager, told me it was her sister’s birthday today and she was going skydiving for the first time today, so when her mother texted “he has risen,” since it’s Easter, she texted back that her sister “has fallen.” Stranger, she added, someone had fallen at the church across the street. Ambulances had rushed there and carried a lady out on a stretcher. I laughed, and as I went outside for a smoke it hit me.

Skydiving. Parachute. Just like in my dream.

An interesting synchronicity.

For at least the last few weeks I had been noticing odd little “coincidences” like that, and finally started writing them down a few days back. So as I smoked, I typed it out in the word processing app on my phone. When I was done, I opened up Facebook, and the first thing I saw was a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon from a group I belong to. In it, Calvin is explaining how he’s constructed a kit so that he’ll be prepared for anything.

In the last panel, he mentions his umbrella can double as a parachute.

Later, Natalie’s sister came up with her boyfriend after she did her skydiving. I was tired, caffeinated, anxious and weird, but I met her, and she’s fucking beautiful. I was a bit too nervous fir my own good and probably came across as a fucking buffoon.

I should mention that Abbey isn’t the real name of the girl in my dream, but a pseudonym I chose for her long, long ago. I go out of my way never to use anyone’s real name when writing about my personal experiences, but I have to make an exception here, for something struck me as I was writing this. Natalie’s sister?

Her name is Abigail.

Kind of weird.

Two Strange & Confusing Dreams (4/3 & 4/5/23).

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 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?

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.

Sex, Religion, & Thought-Tracks.

3/15/18

For the last few months, I’ve been keeping up with the daily samatha meditation. I’ve noticed that my mind is back on hyperdrive lately, perhaps an effect of the meditation and the fact that I’ve stopped drinking. Again, I’ve noticed that much as I keep a bare minimum of three folders open at once on my laptop, I keep at least two distinct tracks of thought going on in my mind at once and hop between them. Today my mind’s been bouncing between the subject of religion and the subject of sex.

With respect to the religious track, it has a definite source. Monica came into work last night, though it was her day off. The live-in boyfriend and her had gotten drunk and she left before they got into another fight, and now, clearly inebriated, she sat down in the dining room while I was cleaning and began spilling to me. It didn’t take her long to bring up the subject of a god, though this is not a conversation she’s had with me to any extent before.

Since she can’t believe in people, she explains, she believes in god to get her through life. She just talks to “him” and asks if he’ll help her get through the day. If she didn’t believe in god, she confesses, she wouldn’t be able to take it. She’d kill herself.

Just try it, she tells me. Just wake up and decide to believe.

As I try to explain to her as gently as I’m able, I don’t think I’m wired the same way, because it just doesn’t work for me.

When I realized I didn’t believe in a god back in high school, for a brief time I saw it’s lack of existence as a bad thing — until I subjected it to analysis. Then I realized it just fucking wasn’t. In addition to the fact that there is no convincing evidence suggesting the existence of such a creative, cosmic intelligence, I also see no evidence that believing despite the lack of evidence has any real, practical utility as a coping mechanism — at least for me. I know it makes her and others feel comfortable, fills them with hope, but I was never able to understand why. A totalitarian, cosmic father figure that draws the lines between right and wrong, dangling the carrot of forever-heaven in front of us and hovering the whip of eternal hell just behind — well, it just doesn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

If such a god did indeed exist, he would, in my humble opinion, be the biggest asshole conceivable. I wouldn’t support him anyway.

Talking to her, though, I leave that part out.

She tells me it doesn’t have to be that, but that I should just “believe in something.” I never understood it when people said that. What do they mean? That we all have to invest uncritical certitude in the notion that a creator of the universe exists? That we all should have blind, unquestioning servitude in some external force? Neither seems necessary to me. Neither seems healthy. Any way you slice it, no god — not even The God of the Infinitely Vague — seems attractive to me.

I tell her I see evidence suggestive of reincarnation and that consciousness is but a resident of the body, that there may be other planes of existence or parallel universes our consciousness can access — that I am an atheistic dualist. But her god, her Jesus, the concept of original sin, the notion of heaven and hell? I can’t, don’t, won’t swallow it. And the notion that this singular book — anthology, really — is a guidebook for life? I don’t see it. That shit just never made sense to me.

I can cherry-pick stories and lines from Dr. Seuss that are as relevant to life. The bible doesn’t stand out as a book, let alone a guidebook, sorry.

I don’t say all of this to her. I like her. And if it keeps her from killing herself, let her have the crutches. I’m thankful something is keeping her alive, even if it’s bullshit. But I can’t stomach it. And my mind and my soul relents as well.

So that religion was on my mind makes sense given last night’s conversation, but the thought-track dealing with sex? That’s another matter. The memories just sprung out at me from nowhere; jumped into my consciousness from the seeming void, unprovoked.

Once, when Claire and I were going out during high school, I was with her at night in the front seat of a large vehicle. It may have been my old Celebrity, my first car, but for some reason, I remember being higher up, as if in the front seat of someone’s truck. In any case, we were parked at night in the dirt lot beside a house just around the block, where her cousin went to practice in his band. I wish I remembered how it started, specifically if I actually had the balls to initiate it, but my hand was down her pants. Fingers worming around. It was warm, moist, wonderful. I was working away as I watched the illuminating expressions wash over her beautiful face. She seemed to be enjoying it, but I was forever uncertain, and I remember getting incredibly nervous, certain that I was doing something wrong, and ended up stopping. I later confessed this to her and she stated the obvious: that if she seemed to be enjoying it I should have just kept the fuck at it.

I never had sex with her. I had better get the chance and take it before I die. At least once. Bare minimum.

Even after I lost my virginity at age twenty, after it blew my mind, I didn’t do that again for five years. It seemed to establish a pattern of sorts, one in which I would suffer enduring periods with no sex (I’m on a seven-year-stretch right now, as a matter of fact, and it stands as the longest period of inactivity yet), punctuated by short periods where I make up for lost time. Anne, the complex gal who took my virginity, probably fit the profile of a nymphomaniac, but it always seemed to me that she just liked sex, and there’s nothing wrong with that. During the last time we were together, I remember her telling me that our sex drives were similar, and how, based on that, she didn’t understand how I could go so long not having any sex at all. I reminded her that I was a rather chronic masturbator, but its true, it’s not at all the same thing. So am I a self-denying nympho, then?

I also remembered when Anne came back from Texas, how I had sex for the first time in years, and out of nowhere, in the midst of me doing the ol’ in-out, she spanked me on the ass.

I stopped a moment. She then asked, and I confirmed: Indeed, I like that.

Over time, she was interested in letting me try out new things. I bobbed in the muff for the first time, we had sex while we both watched porn, had sex in a chair until her greyhound tried to cut in.

I thought to myself how I haven’t had sex since I started smoking pot, and given that it makes masturbation infinitely better, I’m really eager to do the real thing in that state of body-mind. I need to find an interesting, pothead girl who wants to stone-bone rather than simply continue to engage in my nightly, solo weed-whacking.

Why has the desire suddenly flared up like this? Is it because I’ve stopped drinking and my sex drive isn’t buried by the haze that it’s been on my mind again lately?

And why am I ping-ponging betwixt sex and the religious issue in my head today, specifically? As I chewed on that for the latter half of my work shift, it struck me again that there’s probably a link between our romantic feelings for a significant other and their religious feelings for a goddess or god. To me, this helps explain why conservative men talk about Jesus in a manner that in any other context would, to their ears if no one else’s, sound blatantly homosexual. It also makes sense out of the hypnodomme thing, as they seem to strive to link sexual, romantic and religious feelings through hypnosis in order to condition some heightened sense of drooling worship and control in their subjects. I’m glad I got out of watching those videos at the same time that I kicked the booze: once I blew the nightly load, and certainly after I sobered, the thought that I was watching those videos made me feel nauseous.

I am more apt to deal with Pagans and Buddhists; their concepts are more attractive to me. Eastern religions in general, and Native American beliefs, they fascinate me. Even Satanism seems to have some merit, at least one form if it. Not that I could be certain I’d ever call them my own.

Maybe I need to have sex with a Pagan stoner with Buddhist leanings or something. Let today’s mental tracks crisscross, let those trains of thought collide.

Monica’s Rut.

2/16/18

As I walk in the door to begin my shift, a young coworker is changing the trash, and as I go to throw away my coffee her eyes meet my own. She tells me she’s upset. Naturally, I ask her why, and she responds by telling me I should just look at Monica’s face.

Monica is a shift manager and a rather unique woman, to say the very least. Though I’ve never been good at judging age, I imagine that she’s in her sixties at best. She has three daughters and a few grandchildren. Her life has been riddled with drug use, criminality and prison time. Currently, she’s a pill-popper (and snorter), often engages in heavy drinking, and on occasion cocaine — which used to be her drug of choice, though, as she has told me on a few occasions, she gave it up long ago.

When I asked her how she managed, she told me, quite blatantly, that she just began using other drugs.

While a hard worker, her work patterns are inherently chaotic; she is a dedicated multitasker who is not at all good at multitasking. She often sings songs at high volume, typically ones she has created on her own, and is known for her dancing. She also has the tendency to mishear what others say, thinking that they said something far more absurd and perverted — which is often amusing, but not when you’re attempting to have a serious conversation with her.

She has a live-in boyfriend, Chuck, who she essentially saved from homelessness years ago. He is still out of work, allegedly because he hurt his back, and he’s addicted to pain pills. She supports him entirely, and as a token of his appreciation he consistently steals money and drugs from her. They’ve also frequently gotten into fist fights that also involve breaking furniture, biting, and pulling each other across the floor by the hair.

So when my coworker told me that I should just look at Monica’s face, that was really all I needed to hear.

As I walk behind the counter on the way to clock in, I say hello to Monica and take a look at her face, which is black and blue like rotting fruit, the bill of her cap pulled to the side to hide her shiner in the shadows. I turn away and walk to the touch-screen in the back to clock in. When I go back up front to change trash, I ask her the question I’ve asked two or three times before – needless, I suppose, as I’m always aware of the general answer.

“What the fuck happened?”

Her and Chuck got in another fight, she explains. He ran out of pills, went into withdrawals, borrowed money from a friend, got drunk, beat the shit out of her and subsequently attempted to smother her with a pillow. She tells me all of this in that “shit happens” sort of way that at once blows my mind, enrages me, and plunges me into the depths of depression. This time, though, she refused to fight back, she tells me, as if this is a heavy leaf she’s turning and the clouds are parting now and it’s all rainbows, cheesecake and blow jobs. Ever the skipping fucking record, I tell her that what she needs to do is to get the fuck away from him.

When one of her beautiful daughters — the one out of the three I honestly really like, as she’s an entriguing cocktail: compassionate badass — comes in and goes up to the counter later on in my shift, I beg her to convince her mother to leave. This isn’t the first time I’ve expressed this to her. I more or less said this the last time she came in, which was the last time her face looked like this thanks to Chuck.

In a conversation between the three of us later, as we’re all standing outside in the cold, Ohio rain, Monica proceeds to provide the usual excuses as to why she can’t just up and leave or kick him out. How if he catches her in the process of moving or she tries to kick him out or she calls the police that he’ll start wailing on her again, maybe even kill her.

I feel the pain of her daughter as she says all this. All the hatred. All the fear. All the exhaustion that comes from dealing with this endless cycle of pain. From dealing with and impulsively caring about Monica and her apparently inescapable rut.

I tell Monica she should save up money and buy some muscle to protect her in the process, or get him sent to jail for a day or two as she, with some help, can throw her belongings into a U-Haul and get the bloody fuck out of dodge.

All this falls on deaf ears. Just pissing into the wind. And it arises again in my mind, how fucking lucky I was, how lucky I am. For though I know it appears very unAmerican of me, its true: I was never physically or sexually abused as a child and my parents never divorced. There was no drug use in my family save for the occasional alcohol and my maternal uncle, who used to smoke. Only as I grew older did I discover that what to me was normal was, in fact, rather atypical.

The kind of lives — childhood and adulthood — many if not most of the people I’ve encountered in my life have lived and are living, especially in this cesspool of a town I work in, are depressing and enraging, to say the least. I can’t seem to offer a damn thing but listen to the stories, offer an open, empathic ear and hopefully some comforting words, and try not to fall into the same traps myself — a plaguing, conditioned fear in me despite my blessed lack of those wretched, foundational experiences.

In the end, I face the inevitable. That endlessly fucking frustrating and heart-wrenching fact that I just can’t, just can’t manage to find a way to really truly help them.

I feel like Superman, hopelessly trapped and frustratingly impotent on a planet composed entirely of kryptonite.

You Do It To Yourself.

If you can imagine the voice of Beavis from Beavis and Butthead fame, but make him mumble even more and talk at a speed that makes nearly everything he says utterly incomprehensible, you have a fairly good idea how difficult it is to have a conversation with Monica. To make matters worse, she’s one of those people that never knows when to shut up and tends to trap you in conversation.

Even so, there’s a place in my heart for the woman.

Years ago, she was a manager here in our fast food joint in this hellscape of a town. I assume it’s true that ADHD is over-diagnosed, and this despite the fact that I’ve come to fear I have it myself, but Monica has to be the most obvious and extreme case of it ever to grace the fucking planet. Her work habits were chaotic as hell and she never seemed able to finish a task.

Still, in those days she managed to hold down a job, rent a house, pay bills and buy groceries. Sure, she had a mutually abusive relationship with her boyfriend, sure, she took in far more stray cats than I thought a single state could have, let alone a shit hole town, but in comparison to now, she was amazingly stable.

Now? Now this woman, in her sixties, is homeless by choice and brings in money exclusively through selling stolen items on Facebook. Until she recently went to jail — again — only to find that the abusive boyfriend I’ve been begging her to get away from for years drained her bank account and took off with most of her possessions. On top of all that, she got locked out of her Facebook account, so she can’t sell anything.

The week before Christmas, she visits work to tell me about it and to ask if her daughter was working. She was not.

Monica has three daughters: the twins and Beth, who has been one of the assistant managers here for years. Its amazing how stable she turned out, but the fact that her mother was in jail for the bulk of her young life probably had something to do with it.

Though she’s an empathic person, Beth seems just as annoyed with her mother as I often am. Her mother frequently asks her if she can crash at her place, bum a ride, borrow some money. To me it seems like a role reversal, where her mother is the child and she is the parent.

Some time ago I began a tradition: if I see Monica in the store or hanging around outside, I’ll Facebook message Beth and give her the heads up, occasionally trying to be comical when I write about my encounter with her. This was precisely what I did when I saw her mother the week before Christmas. I told her that this coked-up looking elf had dropped by and asked about her, and I think she wanted money, so to be on the lookout.

That weekend, a day or two before Christmas, I get a message on my phone. It’s Beth — or rather, a message from Monica, who it turns out had borrowed Beth’s phone and decided to read my messages to her.

Immediately, I felt that sinking feeling coupled with a surge of adrenine. I felt like an asshole, particularly that she read that during the holidays, but at the same time, I felt pissed off that she had read messages that were not intended for her.

It’s not that I don’t care for her, but she generates a lot of her own problems. She brings it on herself, and often enough, not even in a roundabout way, but goddamn directly. She elected to be homeless, to rely upon crime to generate income, to take the hard drugs that landed her in jail, to run in the sketchy circles she does, to stay with the abusive partner who had consistently fucked her over. Eventually, anyone would run low on empathy for a person who generates their own chaos like that, especially when they don’t take responsibility for it.

I’m far from fucking perfect, and I’m no stranger to self-sabotage and generating my own issues, but I realize it, acknowledge it, and don’t try and rely on others any more than is absolutely necessary. It’s not fair, and my guilt surges when it comes to that.

And Beth? She shouldn’t have to play the role of the parent to her own mother.

Having said that, I’m still left feeling like an asshole.

Shifts With the Collapsing Kid.

Back arched, head down, ball cap pulled almost down to his eyebrows. To call him quiet would be to make a mole hill out of a goddamn mountain.

He almost hugs the wall when you walk passed him, won’t make eye contact when you try and speak to him, and any loud noise or sudden movement startles him to a nearly shit-the-pants level.

I happen to be next to him in the kitchen and I have to ask. “Be honest: is any of this getting any easier for you?”

Eyes still fixed on the table before him, he shakes his head up and down only slightly, and then gives me a brief side-eye.

“Yes,” he lies.

I keep asking Gus, who trained the kid, if he seems to be relaxing a bit more, if he seems to be getting better.

“No,” he tells me. “He’s getting worse.”

Even Gus feels bad for the kid, and he isn’t typically the kind of guy that gives people a chance. He won’t get halfway through a shift with a new employee and he’ll inform me with blazing confidence that they’re not going to work out, that they’re idiots, and he’s often cold, bitter, and sharp with them. I’m rather proud of him in this circumstance, for while he complains that the kid is a slow worker, he’s shown some uncharacteristic empathy with him.

He asked me what could make a person be like that. He assumed trauma, and I told him that for some people, it would indeed take a lot of trauma. Others, they may just be hypersensitive and even a little trauma could send them collapsing in terror for a goddamn lifetime.

This is probably more akin to a case of psychological projection than it is empathy, but I constantly find myself wanting to ease his anxiety. Suggest medication. Daily mindfulness meditation. A little CBD.

A joint. A beer.

Wanting so much to help when its really none of my goddamn buisness, it so often inspires a rather hopeless feeling and a fear that I’m being emotionally intrusive.

Still, I suppose it’s better than being a fucking psychopath.

Damn Fabric Magick.

Usually, I’m pretty good at turning it off, at burying it. No matter how attractive a woman is, if she’s with a guy, particularly one I respect, or she happens to be a lesbian, I can force myself, out of my respect for her, not to think of her that way.

Not to gawk or even give her a passing glance with the high-beam, hungry eyes broadcasting the dirty mind hardly hiding behind.

Sometimes, however, she wears a particular item from her wardrobe — a pair of pants; a shirt, perhaps — that hugs the body in that concealing-yet-revealing fashion so expertly, accentuating the figure so lusciously, bringing out the inherent sexiness so goddamn perfectly, that it’s like some wicked fucking fabric magick summoning the most primal part of my being.

So then I have to fight to avert my eyes, to push down the building charge in me, and my little moments of inevitable fucking failure leave me spending the rest of the day wracked with guilt stacked upon intense sexual frustration.

It’s times like these that make me thankful humans aren’t an advanced, telepathic species…