Feet in the Air, Head in the Ground (Of a Dream & a Dreamlet).

8/11/20

Shortly after I awoke, I was on the toilet, scrolling through Facebook, when I came upon something posted by a young girl I used to work with. She was quiet, withdrawn, and always seemed sweet. She was tall with long, dark hair and seemed to be one of those people that fit into the “goth” or “emo” category — not through deliberately trying, or even due to the way she dressed, but simply by being who she was. I’ve found throughout my life that I tend to like these dark, lost souls. I feel I connect with them at a deep level.

I certainly miss seeing my pretty, gothy-souled friend and exchanging, well, at least a few words with her when we worked a shift together. Some time after she left the job, I got a friend request from a girl I didn’t know and so far as I knew had never met, but she shared the aforementioned girl’s last name. I soon discovered she was her older cousin.

Anyway, as soon as I saw my gothy friend’s name I remembered part of a dream I’d had. I was walking and had noticed a house marked not with numbers, but a name — and it was the gothy girl’s name. Despite this I felt it wasn’t her house, but that of her cousin, and didn’t find it the least bit strange that they had the same name (and they do not, for the record, in real life). What I did find to be a rather weird coincidence was that her cousin evidently lived in the same town I do and that I had unintentionally stumbled upon it.

You’ve got to love dream logic.

I was perplexed as to why I had suddenly dreamed of her. So far as I know, I’ve never dreamed of her before, and certainly not of some cousin of hers that I’ve never met. Given that I’m of the opinion that dreams actually have meaning, I naturally wondered what that meaning might be.

I’m rather happy every time I remember a dream, or even a lone scene of one, as I feel it gives me potential insight into what’s going on in the portion of my mind I’m otherwise unaware of — given I can decode the message, of course. I figured I’d be happily chewing on this dream scene throughout the day, trying to discern the meaning, and I liked it when my brain could work on a puzzle as I committed my mundane tasks. It makes daily life more bearable.

While I did come back to it throughout the day, however, it turned out that this was not my main focus, my pet puzzle for the day. This was to come later, after I watched YouTube while chain-smoking cigarettes, after I made breakfast, after I masturbated, and just before I brushed my teeth, gargled, and took my shower — in other words, during my daily meditation session.

While I’m glad I’ve kept up with meditation in a limited sense, I’m nonetheless constantly disappointed with myself. I fail to meditate on my weekends, which is to say on Fridays and Saturdays. I also fail to meditate more than 12 measly minutes a day.

Still, five days out if the week, typically around 1:30 PM, I sit in my computer chair, put empty coffee cups at the four corners, cast a circle with my finger, set the timer on my phone, and try to focus on my breath going in and out until I realize I’ve been distracted — after which, without damning myself, I bring my attention back to my breath.

Sometimes, I get lost in thought, and by this I mean I get absorbed in an internal monologue, or more often, it seems, an internal diologue, sometimes complimented or compensated by memories or still or animate imagery that serve to represent the matter at hand — just as it happens when I’m awake and fully conscious in my default state of consciousness. On other occasions, it takes on the qualities I otherwise associate with the twilight state of consciousness one tends to slip into on either end of the bridge between sleeping and waking.

Still imagery, for instance, can emerge unprompted. The most recent still image of note that emerged in this context was an image of my third-story window, with the shades pulled away (and in real life, they never are), and with an owl poking its head out from the bottom of the window, only visible from slightly above the line of its eyes, as it stared back at me.

Animate imagery also erupts — dream fragments, they’re called; more rarely, dreamlets, and I find that like that term better. If dreams are novels, these are more like unconsciously-authored short stories or subliminally-generated flash fiction. What I received in this case was more akin to the latter type.

At some point as I was sitting there, eyes closed, attention fixed on the sensation of air going in and out of my nostrils, I drifted.

Suddenly I was on the shoreline of an ocean or lake at some point during the day. There was a man there, buried in the sand upside down so that only his legs were sticking out, protruding at the point where earth meets water, and around one of his ankles a rope was tied.

For awhile, I just watched it. The leg with the rope was my focus and I just watched it sway, swaying rhythmically, as if with the wind.

Then — at once, somehow — I became both the man who was buried upside down and some guy nearby in a car to which the end of the rope was fastened. As the upside down, half-buried guy, I knew I couldn’t breath and that death was an ever-approximating threat. As the guy in the car, I knew the other guy couldn’t breathe and I felt frantic, unable to let him suffer for a moment longer — so I gunned the car so as to pull him out as quickly as possible.

And I snapped out of it, returning my focus to the breath.

When my alarm went off, I promptly committed the general outline to writing, then filling in the details I could remember.

And so it was: rather than my dream, this would be what I privately chewed on throughout my workday.

So what did this dreamlet mean?

There were five discernable “dream symbols” to interpret regarding the opening of the dreamlet: the daylight, the shore, being buried, being upside down, and that fucking rope around my ankle.

Perhaps the fact that it was daylight suggested the light of consciousness, which is to say it represented the fact that I was to some degree aware during all of this. The shore represented the “twlight state” between the physical and spiritual; it represented the middle ground where my conscious and unconscious collided. Both symbols were appropriate enough given this was a dreamlet in the twilight state accessed through the medium of meditation.

But why a guy half-buried in the sand, his legs sticking out? Did half-buried suggest I’d half-repressed something, and did being upside down suggest I was sticking my head in the ground, ignoring something? I mean, more than just the head was buried, but still. Or did it just suggest I was overwhelmed by something?

Assuming that “day residue” influences dream imagery, is there anything associated with the dreamlet within say, the last two days or so, that might have inspired the imagery and might assist in the interpretation? I believe there is.

The day prior, I had listened to a comedy routine that spoke about Tarot cards, and as soon as I recalled that fact I realized the associations my dreamlet had with a specific Tarot card — The Hangman, which depicts a man hanging upside down by a rope tied to one ankle. Granted, instead of a hanging, my dreamlet was a half-burial in sand, but it still depicted a manner of punishment or self sacrifice — and the man was still upside down and had a rope tied to a single ankle. The Hanged Man his supposed to represent metamorphosis, sacrifice, change, letting go, and things of that nature.

But I also had a short conversation about Fight Club, one if my favorite movies, which made me think of the song “Where is My Mind?” by The Pixies:

“With your feet on the air
and your head on the ground…”

So who knows?

On Death, Suicide, & Selfishness.

Most of the time when people die, those that knew the deceased say nice things about them that you can’t help but feel they never, not in a billion fucking years, would have said while they were still alive.

And why? I imagine it stems from the value people place in tradition.

Of course, one could maybe argue the old, existential notion that at the end of someone’s life you’re finally justified in judging them as they were as a whole. At any other point, you’re judging someone who is, by necessity, in development, or at the very least bearing the potential for change, so any judgement with respect to the individuals character is, by necessity, premature. But that it would so often be an overwhelmingly positive judgement seems incredibly unlikely.

The one exception to this traditional, unspoken rule of “The Dead Are to be Treated As Saints” is in the case where the deceased individual in question dies by means of suicide. Then, and it seems only then, people feel a bit more liberated with respect to talking shit, apparently, calling their act of suicide “selfish,” which I find to be hypocritical. Those claiming that the act of suicide is selfish are in fact the ones being selfish, unable to empathize with the deceased and at least try to come to an understanding as to why that person elected to end it. David Foster Wallace, who ultimately committed suicide himself, said something interesting on the subject which I feel is of utmost relevance:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

Comedian and author Doug Stanhope also made an interesting argument:

“Life is like a movie: if you’ve sat through more than half of it and its sucked every second so far, it probably isn’t going to get great at the end and make it all worthwhile. No one should blame you for walking out early.”

As Stanhope has expressed, the most basic form of the right to property notion is the fleshy vessel you’re residing in, and its your right to do with it what you wish — and this includes the right to discorporate.

This doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to care, to protest, to try and convince them to push through and keep on — so long as you realize its their choice in the end. They aren’t selfish for wanting to leave early, at least no more selfish than you are for wanting them to stay.

On Drinking, Dreaming, & Suffocating Masks.

Masks can be suffocating — and I’m not just talking about the practice the more responsible individuals in our society have taken up during this pandemic, but the psychological masks we donn throughout our lives. Sometimes I’m just tired of being me, or at least this version of me. I’m just so over myself. It reminds me of something Chad Gray wrote and sang in one of his songs, though I’ve forgotten if it was under the banner of Mudvayne or Hellyeah. In any case, essentially, he wrote, “I’m so tired of existing.”

I’ve often felt this way, and I think its a feeling I’ve tried to satisfy through drinking the last few plus years. I’ve found that sleeping and dreaming offer the same thing, and in many ways, its even better. And, yeah, its clearly more healthy, too. Both offer a temporary escape from the prisons of the Jungian persona and ego and give the shadow that resides behind them a little liberty, a little sunlight — or moonlight, as the case may be.

In a recent article I read regarding a study on the effects of alcohol, it was revealed that people are just as aware of the consequences of their actions while drunk as they are when they’re sober. The difference is that when people are drunk, they simply don’t give a damn about the consequences. It also reminds me of an article I read some time ago in which it alleged that our drunk selves are our true selves. It is akin to what I’ve heard regarding our dream self, specifically that the part of us that we assume in dreams is a part that is unrestrained by laws and social conventions, liberated by cultural conditioning and what we like to think of ourselves and how we wish others to see us.

Dreams, like booze, free us from our masks and gives us some much-needed breathing room.

The similarities between drinking and dreaming don’t end there, either; there’s also the amnesia that often accompanies both. As was talked about on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast with guest Malcolm Gladwell, the reason we begin to forget things and ultimately black out has to do with how alcohol effects the hippocampus. Booze begins to shut it down until that part of our brain is entirely offline. No new memories can be stored until the bubbly beverage content in our system begins to deplete.

As Gladwell explained, the frightening part of this is that other parts of the brain are not necessarily effected. As a consequence, the blackout individual can seem otherwise normal. The only way to tell is to ask them a question, wait a few moments, and ask them the same question again. If they can’t tell you’re repeating yourself, that they’re repeating themselves, then they’re in a state of blackout.

At the very least, the blackout memories — at least explicit memories — don’t retain themselves and so clearly couldn’t add up, which is to say that the amnesia here doesn’t provide some psychological compartment where something akin to an alternate personality could blossom. The feeling that you’re some alter while you’re drunk, I imagine, comes from the fact that you’re free of inhibitions and care far less about consequences, regardless as to whether such a state truly constitutes your “true self.”

With respect to one’s dream self, however, experience has indeed suggested that memories add up in secret compartments of the mind. I’ve come into dreams that come equipped with their own set of memories, suggesting I’ve either been in this dream setting before or it somehow provided for itself and my character within it an elaborate backstory.

So there do indeed seem to be clear differences.

It also makes me think of a Jim Carrey quote regarding depression that I recently saw. Though I liked the meme and saved it on my phone, I did so rather than share it on social media because I wasn’t entirely certain it was true, or at the very least always true. It has continued to hang with me, however, and I keep looking back on the meme, contemplating it:

“Depression is your mind telling you its tired of being the character you’re trying to play.”

And when you find it so bloody difficult to change yourself and your life, as it is in my case, perhaps — and I say this to provide explanation, mind you, not justification — tools like drinking and dreaming can provide a temporary vacation.

Porn, Sex, Dreams, Cunnilingus, & Other Things.

7/9/20

Just the other night as I was lying in bed in that twilight state of consciousness, I suddenly realized that I was embedded in a vivid, though dimly-lit, sensory-rich. spontaneous fantasy. I was on a bed, having worked my way down the satisfying, naked body of some woman, now passionately engaging in cunnilingus. I became aware in the midst of it, and as it continued to go on as I was sort of half in it, half in observer mode, I thought to myself: What the fuck is this? What the hell is going on?

Unless I’m masturbating and deliberately engaging in a sexual fantasy, this was unusual for me. My brain has never burped up sexual scenareos in the twilight state, at least so far as I recall; the fantasies and images that play out in my head in the in-between place are typically either terrifying, as when I find images of Gray aliens staring down at me impossibly close, or relaxing, such as images of water, nature settings, and the like.

I felt shallow. Primitive. And given as its closing in on a decade without sex and I’m not confident it will ever happen again, I shouldn’t be experiencing an involuntarily hypersexed imagination now, at 41 years of age. It immediately became obvious to me that I needed to quit watching so much porn, maybe stop viewing it entirely, as it was clearly infecting my brain.

Then, this morning, I awoke from a dream in which I was going down on girl while she was sitting across from some other girl at a table. She had literally asked for it — or perhaps in some way demanded it, as it feels as though I owed her this or something, or it was in exchange for something else. In any case, I didn’t mind — until getting down there, that is. My tongue was entirely disoriented in the bush. It was so hairy I couldn’t feel out the lips or clit. I was just diving, lost in a thick mesh of curly follicles.

Suddenly, I woke up cold, shivering. The sensation seemed immediate and intense. I know I had the fan on in the other room, but it couldn’t have been that cold, especially that suddenly. Confused, I just covered myself up in my bedsheet and comforter and tried to go back to sleep.

And it’s true, that two times may be nothing more than a coincidence, but personally, I don’t fucking think so.

I’ve only eaten out one woman in my life, and that was Anne, my ex-girlfriend from years ago. In fact, she turned me on to quite a few new things sexually since I first met her, when I was about sixteen. She took my virginity, for one thing. She introduced me to spanking. Her and I watched porn while fucking on her couch. We even fucked on a chair, which was a new experience, which was pretty damn satisfying — until the abrupt introduction of the cold, wet nose of her Greyhound, anyway.

So many other experiences could have been had, too, if my sexual imagination was as kinky back then as its become. So it goes, I suppose.

And toward the end, before the tie between us was severed entirely due to my idiocy, I began the practice of going down on her. I remember the look on her face when I could see it, when her back wasn’t arched and the top of her head wasn’t digging into the pillow, her body waving like the sea. The noises she made left me feeling powerful and creative, as if I were playing some living, musical instrument. Her inner thighs would clamp down on my ears like a vice, and it reminded me of when I was a kid and put sea shells to my ear, hoping to hear the ocean, as the old wives tales told. This warm, wet, fleshy vice worked even better.

More recently, diving in the muff has featured in a lot of the porn I’ve been watching while intoxicated. I rarely turn to porn during the evenings when I’m just smoking pot, but when I both drink and smoke, it almost seems to be an inevitability. I begin writing, working on a post like this or a more enduring writing project. Then, as the inebriation heightens, I turn to writing poetry that I post on another blog and which often either confuses or embarrasses me if I’m foolish enough to read them later, in an entirely sober state of mind. Ultimately, I either go to the porn folder on my laptop or punch in search terms ona search engine used exclusively for porn, likely adding to the aforementioned folder in the process. These videos are almost exclusively pmv (porn music videos) or videos with a dark, magickal edge to them (some o.t.o. videos come to mind, as well as some Ophelia Rain videos). A few of the videos I watch regularly feature a variety of kinky shit, though a consistent theme within them has been, you guessed it, the guy eating the girl out.

I’ve also come to save select porn videos, and though for years I was able to keep a promise to myself that I would only watch porn in the high-and-drunk state, I’ve relatively recently come to watch them when I jerk off before work.

The routine is this: jerk off before bed, then jerk off before work. If you’re too damned drunk to achieve climax before bed, jerking off before work (which almost never fails to bear fruit) is a necessity. Otherwise the chances greatly increase that I will be a hypersensitive, hypertense, easily-enraged and remarkably insensitive asshole that day. Anxiety is more likely. Depression is more likely.

So perhaps porn working its way into my sober state of consciousness could be a variable here, could explain why this activity has recently manifested in the semiconscious twilight and dreaming states. Along with the aforementioned nine years of no sex, of course.

Most of the time, when I have dreams or spontaneous fantasies, I have an unofficial process. I write down quick notes so as not to forget and then later work at fleshing them out. I contemplate their potential meaning to the best of my ability and then do a Google search for the predominant symbols in the dream and explore them, seeing if they make sense in the context of the dream as well as my waking life. It rarely provides an answer, but almost always helps. I didn’t do that with respect to today’s dream, or the earlier fantasy, for that matter — at least until now — and I usually do it more or less immediately. Which makes me suspicious of myself. Which made me do it just now.

As a dream symbol, cunnalingis can mean many things: the desire to please, which can include the unselfishness of oral sex as well as using your mouth, or the words we speak, to move people, like playing a glorious song on a musical instrument. It suggests an attention to detail, as in “hitting the spot” through muff-diving or through effectively articulating yourself.

So does the fantasy and dream suggests higher aspirations or merely reflect my intensifying sexual desires? Is it just a convenient metaphor, or should it be taken literally?

Fucked if I know. And I haven’t been in some time, hence my total ignorance on this matter.

Trevor Noah’s Invaluable Insight.

After Jon Stewart left, I stopped watching the Daily Show. Yes, I was sad that he left and knew the show would never be the same, but I didn’t stop watching out of some blind prejudice against someone I saw as trying to fill Stewart’s shoes. Trevor Noah was going to do his own thing, and that was more than fine: that was preferred.

Be yourself. Do your own thing.

In fact, I really tried to watch it afterward, but I had to be honest with myself — and so I must honest to whoever might be reading my blather presently: I just felt that the show declined. I couldn’t pinpoint why.

After watching a video, presumably sent from his home, regarding the recent protests over the blatant murder of George Floyd, however, I realized what the problem was, at least from my perspective.

I simply don’t find Trevor Noah funny.

And I can see him trying to be funny whenever I try to watch a clip of the Daily Show and I simply find it too damned uncomfortable to take in. I’ve watched at least one of his stand-ups, too, and it was, at best, kind of okay.

So I tried. And I know I sound like an epic douche-bag, and I realize that, but I’m being honest. And I’m more than just a douche-bag. For reals.

So anyway, I generally don’t find him giggle-worthy. After having watched an in-depth interview with him about his life and worldview some time ago, however, I can’t help but have a deep, profound respect for the guy. He knows multiple languages, he is clearly incredibly intelligent and analytical, and he articulates himself amazingly well.

He’s had his foot in more than one world in more than one way, from the circumstances of his birth onward. He has an outsider’s perspective, an intelligent and analytical mind, and a great amount of empathy. And his insights, particularly in the aforementioned video regarding Floyd, are ones I find unspeakably invaluable and enlightening.

For instance, when he enlightened me to the fact, now clearly evident to me, that Amy Cooper “blatantly knew how to use the power of her whiteness to threaten another man and his blackness.” I feel he framed what transpired in that video accurately, and in such a way that I fear I would have failed to consider on my own.

And in the midst of it, he actually manages to make me laugh — without overtly attempting to do so, either. It was natural.

And then there was the framework he graciously offered for those truly seeking to understand the protests and riots that followed George Floyd’s murder:

Society, but what is society? And fundamentally, when you boil it down, society is a contract. Its a contract that we sign as human beings amongst each other. We sign a contract with each other as people, whether its spoken or unspoken, and we say, “Amongst this group of us, we agree on common rules, common ideals, and common practices that are going to define us as a group.” That’s what I think a society is, its a contract. And, as with most contracts, the contract is only as strong as the people who are abiding by it.

… think about how many people who don’t have, the have-nots, say, “You know what? I’m still gonna play by the rules, even though I have nothing, because I still wish for the society to work and exist.”

And then, some members of that society, namely black American people, watch time and time again how the contract they have signed with society is not being honored by the society that has forced them to sign it with them. … the only reason you weren’t looting Target before was because you were upholding society’s contract. There is no contract if law and people in power don’t uphold their end of it. … we understand in society that if you lead by example, there is a good chance that people will follow that example that you have set. And so, if the example law enforcement is setting is that they do not adhere to the laws, then why should the citizens of that society …?

In my humble opinion, he needs to do more commentary like this where he doesn’t feel the pressure to crack a joke but can express himself freely through his heart and mind, as I think he has a lot to offer — and given enough people take the time to listen, his impact could be substantial.

Dick (Do No Harm, Take No Shit).

6/18/20

After a week’s paid vacation, I felt better. I hadn’t wasted it this time at all, either, and when I went back on Monday, I was in a surprisingly good mood. By Wednesday, it declined a bit. Thursday started out well, but only for roughly half an hour. Then it took a sudden, sharp, and unexpected U-turn and it all went to shit.

I had just finished gathering the trash and taking it out to the dumpsters, ready to engage in cutting box tops in the stock room — all part of my daily routine. Then I saw Steve at the time clock, suggesting he was going to be the closing manager, which depleted my mood just a smidgen. While part of me likes Steve, there are elements in his character I entirely detest, to be honest.

Foremost on my mind was an incident, neither uncommon nor surprising, that had occurred a day or two ago. I had gone up front and him and Marjie were talking about how I was evidently going to be put on morning shift next week, as the morning maintenance guy was now going on vacation. I was more terrified than pissed, as I have difficulty sleeping at night. I typically need either a mixture of booze and weed or weed and sleeping pills to chill myself out and quiet my mind down enough to get on any sort of sleeping schedule, and even then I rarely get to bed before four or five in the morning. I just couldn’t hack morning shift. I had a difficult enough of a time managing the one to nine shift I had for awhile, and that only required me coming in two hours earlier than usual.

But this seemed to come from Steve, not Marjie, and Steve has a long history of telling lies. He’s gotten better over the decade and a half that I’ve worked with him, but that tendency still erupts from within him now and then and I try to keep it in mind so I don’t get too upset about the shit he says only to find out its total bunk later, leaving me angry at him — as well as myself, of course, for being an utter fool.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to trust people — that’s just another problem I have — its just that life experience has shown me that lies are far more prevalent than I’d like to believe. It disappoints and depresses me, but I desire the Buddhist approach, or at the very least the seeming approach of Gotama Siddhartha: face reality squarely, then adapt.

In any case, I checked the schedule that day. It hadn’t changed. No morning shifts.

No big reveal.

I spoke with Steve a bit, just kind chatter, and then forewarned him that I’d be boiling out the fryers that evening. This required me draining the vats of oil, filling them with a mixture of water and degreaser, draining them, scrubbing them out, and filling them with fresh oil. An irritating ordeal, to be certain, and it can take awhile and might complicate and get in the way of the work of those around me, but it has to be done. Whenever it comes to things like this, I always try to give the managers in question a heads-up.

He asked me why I was going to do it on a Thursday, as Kelly, the store manager, wanted me to do it on a Monday. I had talked with Kelly earlier in the week and asked if Thursday was okay, and she was fine with it. So as calmly as I could, I asked Steve if he was sure she had said that. After all, I told him, you claimed that I would be working morning shifts next week and my schedule’s the same.

Did I think he was pulling things directly out if his rectum like a magician pulls a rabbit out if his hat? Yes. Even so, I do my best to convey it all to him in such a way that implied that perhaps here, as had been the case with my schedule, he was mistaken.

Either he was through my presentation or simply decided to interpret what I said as the suggestion that he was a chronic liar. My sense is that the second was the case. In either case, he immediately exploded.

He barks and snarls. He didn’t say that, he told me. Don’t put words in his mouth, he says. Then he starts yelling about hoe that it was just what the morning maintenance guy told him — shifting blame and providing the excuse that he had told me what we both knew he had told me even though seconds ago he insisted he had never said it to me.

Rather than pointing out the contradiction, I told him to calm down, to chill out, to quit being such a dick. I was just asking him a question, not formally accusing him of lying. He asked me what I’d called him, and I knew that would be what he honed in on. I again,told him that he was being a dick and needed to chill out.

Unsurprisingly, he did not chill out.

He went into the office. I followed after him because I wanted this taken care of here and now. I didn’t want this hanging over our heads all day like some dark storm cloud.

“Dude, what is your problem?”

“Get out of here,” he says in that way that someone who truly thinks they have power over you speaks. “Get out if the office.”

I think that’s when the tides turned. It was no longer just dealing with someone who was pissed: it was now during with someone who has pissed me the bloody fuck off.

Calmly, I shrugged, and in a way that communicated, nonverbally, What are you going to do?, I said, also calmly:

“No.”

I think that’s when he gave me that look, and I could feel the energy in that office. I knew what he was feeling,,what he was thinking, and he wanted to punch me. And I suddenly felt that I was two parts of me at once. I was the me that had been engaging with him up till this point, but I was also that detached, witnessing, alien part of me looking at and through my ego, and from that safe distance of observation I thought to him,

“Do it. Hit me. I want to see what happens. I want to see what I’ll do.”

Well, he didn’t.

When he began ignoring me, I eventually just left the office, kind if laughing to myself at how absurd all this was, and went back to cutting box tops. Adrenaline surging through my veins, body trembling.

Short thereafter, someone asked where Steve was. I pointed to the office.

“In there,” I replied, “but be careful, he’s being a dick.”

Of course, at just that moment he was coming out of the office.

“What’d you just call me?”

“Same as I said to you before,” I told him. “I said you were being a dick… because you’re being a dick.”

Just then, Tracy, another manager, came around the corner.

At just that moment, as Steve’s finally clocking in, he says: “Go home, I don’t need you.”

“Fine. I’m gone.”

I threw down my box cutter, walked passed him and Tracy, exited the doors, hopped in my Sunfire and made it to the exit. I was patiently waiting for traffic to slow so I could turn left. I waited for what seemed like forever. Irritation was building. Rage. In a burst, I turned right, tires squealing, and made it to the Circle K in that direction, where I parked and tried to chill out.

Despite the narrative as I’ve told it up to now, I wasn’t entirely clear at the time whether I had just walked out of my job or had been sent home. I messaged Kelly, apologized rather vaguely about “the drama had just transpired,” and asked that if I was fired, to just let me know. I also texted Tracy, politely asked her to clock me out, and said that while I hope I hadn’t just lost my job of 16 years, I just wasn’t going to take his shit.

Then I went inside Circle K, bought three 23rd of Labatt Ice, and went home.

I tried not to drink too fast. Multiple people messaged me. Two of the kids from work, asking first if I was all right, and then what happened. Marjie messaged me, and she wasn’t even there at the time. Steve’s wife messaged me and told me she knows her husband can be a duck. And Steve — even he finally messaged me — to tell me I’d forgotten to clock out.

What the fuck, dude.

“Slipped my mind,” was my response.

Over messenger, he also apologized and told me I could come back if I wanted to. He’d even offered to pay me gas money. I told him that I was already home and drinking, so that was a bad idea,but if I got fired over this, to just let me know. He assured me I wouldn’t be.

Kelly finally messaged back and asked for details, and I gave her the,mouse honest account I could — including the fact that I had called him a dick several times, and that while I thought he had sent me home, that I wasn’t sure, and that she should ask Tracy, as she caught the tail end. I admitted fault, and made it clear that all the blame couldn’t be laud upon him. I could have handled it all much better.

She assured me I wasn’t fired, that I should come back up,on Sunday, which was a load off my back. I then proceeded with smoking my weed and consuming too much alcohol.

I was more ashamed at my way of handling it all more than anything.

Octopuses & Earth (6/16/20 Dream).

In the dream, I’m with a group of individuals in a large pool on one side of a boundary; the other half was reserved for a large group of octopuses. They were all huge, the size of people, though they appeared friendly. Curious, I wanted to interact with them, but then I got close to one that I suddenly realized was on our side of the pool. Though they had shown no aggression, it suddenly struck me that if they wanted to, they were fully capable of hurting us. That’s when I felt fear rising in me, fear that outweighed my curiosity, and I suddenly increased my distance.

After that, and just before waking up, I saw an image of the earth from space at a distance, but there was a shine or reflection on a portion of it that made it look artificial to me.

Apartment 311.

5/19/20

Turning left out my apartment door, I walk down the hallway, and just before I walk down the steps on my way to work, I pass by apartment 311.

Ordinarily, if any thought crosses my mind as I turn my back to that door in order to walk down the steps, its: whatever happened to that band?

Fuck, I’m old.

Not lately, however. For at least three days, perhaps longer, there has been an Amazon Prime package leaning against the door. It hasn’t budged. Clearly, this implies the door hasn’t been opened.

Whether I’m more worried or curious, I don’t know.

I keep thinking how someone could have died in there, someone without family or many friends, and until the smell of rotting flesh punched someone in the face as they walked by, no one would have the vaguest suspicion.

And after all, there are a lot of elderly in my apartment building.

Or, given the COVID plague, they could merely be a responsible individual self-quarenteening. They could be a shut-in and I might just be overreacting in my endless supply of paranoia.

So I walk down the steps, walk passed the vending machine and enter the vestibule. For roughly a week a UPS box has been resting atop the shelf just above where all the mailboxes are. I’ve been curious, but I’ve never connected the Amazon package or the box before today. I check the address on the box. Sure enough, its 311.

I wondered to myself: how long is it appropriate to wait before calling the apartment complex and asking them to look in on whoever is in there?

I could have knocked on the door myself, of course, but I’m more than slightly socially anxious. I could have called the office at my apartment complex or even the cops to check in on the person, but I kept telling myself I was just overreacting, just being paranoid.

So as I typically do in circumstances like this, I wrote about it. And then I posted it on a social media site; specifically, The Book of Faces. Replies came in rather quickly, with nearly everyone saying I should call the police or just knock on the door myself.

“Can you knock on the door?” Someone asked.

“I’m physically capable,” was my response.

When my mother commented and said to give her the landlords number and that she would call for me, I took out trash at work and finally called as I smoked a cigarette. I studdered. I stumbled. I fear I sounded frantic. The lady on the other end of the line sounded like she was just humoring me, probably thinking to herself: is this the same jackass that called us when he locked himself in his bathroom?

In any case, she said they’d have someone check, and upon arriving home both the UPS and Amazon packages were gone. Though many hours had passed between when I’d called and when I arrived home, I comforted myself thinking that no one had died and I had done little more than ask others to annoy a shut-in for me.

As I did after I called and even before I arrived home, I kept beating myself up inside. I overreact. Make too big of a deal over everything. And I made this far more fucking complicated than it had to be, as I could have, should have just knocked on the door before I left for work.

Thing is, this has sort of happened before.

Before moving to my present, one-bedroom apartment, I lived in a considerably shitty area of a college town for maybe five years. Prior to that, I lived in the same apartment complex I live in now, only I had an efficiency apartment in another building. While there, I happened to have a rather interesting neighbor right across the hall.

I first met him one evening right after I had gotten home from work. He stood beside the porch light at the entrance to the building. He was an awkward-looking fellow — tall, with his long, gray hair tied back, wearing red plaid and sporting a pair of those tiny, round glasses that perch on the bridge of your nose. He was warm and polite, almost absurdly happy.

Spoiler alert: this would not last.

It turned out that he lived in the apartment right across the hall from mine, and there were a few incidents that may have triggered his descent.

At the time, kids would occasionally bolt down the hallway like stampeding elephant, and I heard the approaching sound one day. Peeking out the peep hole in my door, I saw this young kid zoom into view from the left, put a 24 pack of Natural Light right outside his door, knock on his door violently a few times in rapid succession, and bolt just as swiftly back in the direction from which he came. I was curious enough this time to actually open my door, and just as I did, the neighbor opened his.

“That yours?” he asked.

“No,” I said, making a face and shaking my head.

“Well, it ain’t mine,” he barked, and then slammed shut his door.

That beer remained on the hallway for perhaps a week and a half before someone, likely maintenance, removed it.

As happened occasionally around that time, my friends Eva and Abbey had come over to visit. We were laughing and having a good time, but we were, admittedly, getting a bit loud. Then we heard a knock on my door and we all immediately shut up. After a short while, we heard some mumbling — without doubt, the neighbor — and heard him walk towards his door and slam it shut. We spoke in whispers for awhile until they quietly left.

Time went on. As he passed me in the hall, he would walk around me in a wide, exaggerated manner, looking at me suspiciously. He came to leave his apartment with declining frequency. Most extreme, however, was a new routine he developed: locked in his apartment, alone, you would hear him yelling things difficult to make out. You would hear him making wild, utterly insane sounding primal noises. You would hear what sounded like him violently shoving something against the wall over and over.

It was as if I were suddenly provided the all-natural soundtrack of an old man going insane, alone inside his apartment.

Inevitably, the cops were called on him a few times, though not nearly as often as one might suspect. On at least one occasion nearing the end, I heard, through my door, the conversation two cops had with him. He was explaining, and rather loudly and defensively, that people were antagonizing him and his wife and he wasn’t taking it anymore. He just wanted them to leave him alone.

The guy lived alone.

Then one day, I heard commotion in hallway. There was a lot of movement, my neighbors voice, sounding even more insane than usual, and maybe other voices. I didn’t peak out to investigate, but the next day, there was a huge wet spot in the hallway a short distance from both of our doors.

Did he piss on the carpet? I never did find out, but for a week afterward, something was undoubtedly amiss. It was silent. Deafening silence. No screaming, no slamming sounds. Nothing.

I began to fear he might be dead in there, but there wasn’t the slightest chance in hell that I was going to knock on his door in an effort to find out. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I actually had a dream about him and the inside of his apartmemt, which was huge in comparison to mine. He sat on a chair in the dream looking sad, nearly catatonic.

After maybe a week, I built up the courage to call the office, and of course the cranky woman with the face of death is the one who picked up. I told her there was a neighbor I was worried about and feared may have died. I forgot how I described him, but it was sufficient enough to make a light bulb go off in her head.

“Oh, I know who you’re talking about,” she said. “He’s in jail.”

It was a relief, in a way. I don’t know if he died shortly thereafter, got put into a psyche ward, or what, but maybe a week later there were people cleaning out his apartment, boxing things up.

At least there was a presumably happy ending to my concerns regarding apartment 311, even if I made too big a deal about it. As for my old neighbor, I felt that perhaps the night with Eva and Abbey had helped to trigger his decline. I certainly felt guilty about that possibility. I don’t know if he was entirely sane up to that point, but I couldn’t help but think how sad the small portion of his life that I witnessed was and how frightening a prospect it is to be, nearing the end of your life, sitting alone in an apartment, slowly growing insane, believing you and your presumably dead wife were under attack by nonexistent enemies.

Outsiders & Attention Whores.

5/20/20

Just go away. I thought I finally had a handle on this, but I can’t fucking deal with you today. I’m pissed at my emotions and my inability to control them — my infantile, entirely unjustified jealousy; my sexual desire; my interest in who you are; my hurt and raging anger.

My inner child is, among other things, a metamorph. It can be an animal. And its emotions have been so high as of late that I’m frighteningly uncertain as to how much longer I can contain it.

So keep away right now.

I’m too hypersensitive, and that often leads to anger — which can make me incredibly insensitive. And I have no right to be. None of this is my business.

A day ago, I thought I had it all under control. I pulled into a parking space right outside the entrance to work and started reading my book or fiddling on my phone before my shift started. My usual routine. Then you came out for a cigarette.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw you exit the door, place the wet floor sign in between the door and the door frame so you wouldn’t lock yourself out, and then come bolting towards my car door, slapping your hand on the window, trying to scare me. And despite having seen you coming, I jumped anyway, because I’m an easily startled fuck for whatever reason. You said something about not having seen me in awhile, and I opened the door and you fucking freaked out over a bumble bee. Squealing, arms flailing.

When you finally calmed down, I sat beside you on the curb, both of us suckling the butts of our cancer sticks, and you ignored me for what seemed to be an awkward eternity as you diddled away on your phone. This is like a small-scale rendition of that week of tension and hope. You lour me out of my shell and then cut me off. Like I always said of my friend Terra back in the day, you’re like a cat. You come up to me, rub yourself against my leg, purring, looking up at me with those eyes, and you’ve finally got me. I reach down and then you bolt off into the blue.

Its a tease.

Finally, we started talking. You need an apartment and a car and I suggest taking a look at the classifieds in the newspaper. You make the newspaper sound like a relic from a former era, telling me how some male figure in your life — your father, or grandfather perhaps — used to collect old newspapers. Like on the JFK assassination. I said that my uncle did that, too; he had one on the first Apollo moon landing.

“You mean the FAKE moon landing?” you immediately responded. And then I went on a mocking spiel.

“Yeah,” I said sarcastically, “and we’re living on a flat earth. And space is fake. Those aren’t stars, they’re just light bleeding in through the holes they punched in the lid of the mason jar we’re all trapped inside.”

Laughing all the while, you break in: “Space isn’t fake, we just haven’t been there yet.”

We’ve fucking been there, my dear.

I just shook my head, laughing. Finally. Fucking finally. When you’re attracted to a beautiful, maddening, gothy, delightfully devilish, complex, strange and endlessly intriguing female of the species and have been struggling to get over the impossibility of meaning something to her, of getting inside of her — struggling to at least take her down a peg or two in your mind — hearing bat-shit insane shit like that truly helps, I thought to myself.

Half the night, I even contemplated posting that as a status on The Book of Faces, but ultimately thought the better of it. In either case, I felt confident I was finally on my way out of this hellacious emotional torture. And for the rest of the shift, for once, you weren’t at the forefront of my mind, as is nearly always the case when I work with you. (I was busy being concerned over a neighbor, but that’s sort of a story unto itself.) In any case, I thought to myself: finally, I’m getting over this.

But I was fucking wrong, and today showed me just how wrong I was. I’m not even sure how it fucking started — and that’s a little bothersome. In many ways, it seems like emotional intensity can have the same effects as being drunk: there are gaps in memory and I always feel guilty or stupid or embarrassed after the emotion or booze has worn off.

For the last few days, I kept seeing you pop up in my “suggested friends” and saw you add people from work, one by one, yet I was still blocked. I was pissed off that this depressed me so, and, on top of that, pissed off about being so pissed off. That may have been a vital ingredient to my mood.

Kelly, the store manager, and Tracy, the newest shift manager, were hanging out after their shift, talking by their vehicles in the lot, and its always a bit awkward when I go out for a smoke and they’re still there. I figure they’re having a private conversation and I don’t want to overhear anything or constipate their talk by being there. You were out there with them, too, however. I think Kelly was taking you home.

Tracy wants you. You want Kelly — for the moment, anyway. And you all seemed to be having a blast.

I went out to have a smoke, all of you were still there. After my smoke, I was happy to be inside and away from you, but then you came in wearing that pink, button-down shirt, a tie, and a pair of sunglasses — Kelly’s manager’s uniform. And, of course, you looked damn good.

Later, I went to take trash out, and you were all still there. Upon coming in, I was talking to Steve and you walked toward me on the sidewalk from where you all were, still wearing the manager get-up, and I felt I made it fairly obvious I was trying to ignore you. I mean-mugged you by means of side-eye.

That’s when I first realized I was angry, depressed, and jealous.

I remember going into breakroom in exasperation, asking no one in particular, “When are they going to fucking leave?” I think it was Steve’s son, Anton, who is also a manager, who said, “I know,” in a way meant to convey he shared my irritation, but I know he thought I meant Kelly and Tracy and felt compelled to make myself clear. “I don’t care about them being here,” I said, “I just want Kara gone.”

I just couldn’t deal with you anymore that day.

Its then between six and six-thirty, when I typically take my break, and so as usual, I clocked out and then went and hid in my car. Shortly thereafter, Paula came out. She had been in the breakroom when I had my little angsty moment, and if other emotions weren’t so amped up in intensity within me and hogging the spotlight, I would have felt ashamed before her. As it was, I just wanted to be left the fuck alone to write, to vent silently for my thirty minutes.

Paula’s a very young girl that seems like she’s had a fucked up life and who reminds me a lot of Anne, an ex-girlfriend from long ago. She’s looking at me with a cigarette in her hands and motions in such a way that suggests she wants to sit in the passenger seat beside me. After a moment of consideration, I wave her over and unlock the door.

We don’t speak for long until you came around the two cars obscuring mine, and since my drivers side window stopped opening a week or two ago, I opened the door. The darkness I felt as you hung there by my open door was overwhelming. Why the fuck to I have to be so intensely attracted to you?

You asked if either of us had a cigarette, and I gave you one. You then asked me for a lighter and joked if I wanted to smoke it for you, too. You then looked at my lighter, adorned with my astrological sign, Scorpio, and told me how your boyfriend and girlfriend had that very same lighter.

You say a few things, though the chronology of what you said is lost to me. My emotions were too fucking intense. You mentioned that you finally broke up with your boyfriend and girlfriend. They’d gotten in a car wreck and when you broke up with them they asked, “Why, don’t you don’t like us anymore?”

Clearly, your interest — is it only sexual interest, or romantic as well? Who can tell? — can be quite fleeting, so if they know you as well as they should, this should come as no surprise. You have ADHD of the heart and pussy.

In any case, I immediately doubted you were through with them. If you were, I wanted to ask, why not unblock me? I didn’t, though, as that would reveal the very heights of my childishness, my hypersensitivity. I didn’t say much throughout all of this. I could hardly hear myself think, my boiling mood was so loud.

You also said something about how you didn’t really think people liked you, which sounded like bullshit you didn’t really believe. Tracy has fallen for you. I have as well. And while Kelly has a boyfriend (who is also her former girlfriend), she’s expressed no intention in getting down and dirty with you, but the attraction is clearly there. So what the fuck were you talking about?

You also said, perhaps pertaining to why people “don’t like you,” that you were an “outsider.” Outsider my ass, I thought. We can smell our own, my dear, and you simply don’t carry the scent.

Guys want you. Women want you. Even if they detest that fact. And I want to believe you’re more than an attention whore, I really do, but you have yet to provide sufficient suggestive evidence.