An Obligatory Entry in Normal entries

Four Something PM

I wrote the stuff below, I mean the paragraphs below, earlier. I napped. I woke up as I understand people do, at the tail the end of a dream. I understand it’s the “tail end” because you’re waking up, not an amazing coincidence, for some people, every single night. I understand that like most of you the dream of I was having was the same sort of stupid shit everyone dreams. I know that I make the correlation between not remembering dreams, at all, and sleep medication opaque, as some people have suggested that my dreams must be horrible because … well … you know … looking at shoes.

No, no, no. I mean, yeah, sometimes I do that good thirty five yards of a thousand yard stare and try to looking winsome instead of like that guy who played Highlander trying to poop, by when some I like gets that impression I’m embarrassed and say those two things aren’t cause and effect. I mean sure, I’ve had nightmares, but, you know, the same sort of silly shit everyone else has, oh, except being naked in school and falling; at least one of those is the opposite of a nightmare. Don’t be silly; I mean the falling, I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other about being naked in school, if I have to be exposed in public I’d just as soon as it were in school. It’s not like my peers are awake or like the nervous teacher isn’t picturing me naked anyhow.

I never quite got that school of public speaking by the way, but maybe that’s just me, it seems like, for one reason or the other, that picturing the audience naked is so very not helpful. I performed so many times in public, the fifty percent of the time I was scared? I use the real oldest trick in the book; I puke before going on stage. Really sucks if the gig is blowing an axe. The reed tastes like puke all night

What I woke up dreaming is a theme I remember having from back when I remember dreams, without looking for meaning or boring shit --- I was lost in someplace I know well, sometimes it’s a place I only am supposed to know well in the context of the dream. Not a nightmare, not a happy dream. The insight I had as I woke up and was debriefing myself from the dream and the novelty that I had one was that there were two sort of ways people who were embarrassed by their association with me (I am not saying there is an inherent cause for this at all or that I agree with this) come down, basically on only one side of a line or the other. Those so very much a fighter that they welcome anyone to say dick about whether they should or should not be embarrassed and those so damn self-righteous they don’t even know they are embarrassed or that there is cause (and again, I’m not saying there is).

Don’t go trying to make dream symbolism and that thought fit in the same round hole. Or do, I don’t care, I didn’t. They happened to occur in close proximity in the same cramped little skull. If anything the dream of being lost is like the dream of falling. I don’t think I’ll do it now, but I always kind of wanted to sky dive. It wasn’t fear that kept me from doing it, it was always kind of like NASA; I really like the idea but I think things like feeding people take first priority. I mean when all my parts worked well I had other things that needed doing before I went jumping out of planes. Now I think I’d probably have to lie to either a sky diving teacher or a pilot and omit the whole herniated disc and missing knee gut thing (though people must jump with knee scars all the time). I mean I love that we sent a man to the moon, but I was eight and since then it’s been too late to argue against it. Were I in charge of US budget at the time I think I would have spent the money feeding a few million people before sending a handful up to make speeches and plant a flag on some barren satellite. Just saying.

I used to try and get lost too; I’m not entirely convinced I’m not still trying. Yes, I play hide and go seek very well, but that’s not what I mean, I mean lost for recreation.

Sometime in the AM

If it weren’t for the maple leaves, if it weren’t for the sky touching the horizon all the way down, if it weren’t for the mix of old books, stale pipe tobacco and effusion lamps, the wood paneling of deciduous trees (oak and walnut ) I could almost fool myself into thinking it was an Oregon gray outside.

There is no such color for house paint, though, there is an essential oil in the shops on Hawthorne and at Saturday Market called Oregon rain, it smells as close as it can without adding in wet asphalt and wet dog, two scents I miss though I don’t think people should wear them. There’s a quote from Matthew, the apostle, that’s also a Michelle shocked song (as so many songs are, scripture, not by Michelle Shocked who doesn’t need help to write a song) on the dead man walking sound track; On the Just and Unjust alike it doth rain. I know it means something different, but you can’t add the scent of dogs, asphalt, just and unjust into an essential oil; in keeping with the meaning of the fisherman apostle (so what language did he write it in? Fishermen didn’t go to school, just sayin’, it probably wasn’t Hebrew or Latin, If I had to guess either his name was slapped on it or it was dictated either to a rabbi (unlikely) a Roman (more likely) or a Greek (and though this leans towards unlikely, that’d be my guess. Why? I don’t know, just feels right, though, intellectually, it thinks wrong.)

I mean you can’t make a scent with the all the possibilities. It’s like adding dog shit to lavender; I’m sure dogs have shat in lavender, but not all lavender. A scent can’t be based on contingencies; like a homeopathic remedy, an essential should, in theory, be a distillation of a particular property or an organic thing. Obviously rain scent doesn’t use rain, but lavender does.

Oh, yeah, back to my abstract weather report. It’s gray outside the window, gray as Oregon, or at least the Willamette Valley, gets sometimes, sort of. Portland has a low ceiling, for that matter so does LA. It’s not that LA’s ceiling is painted yellow and brown, it’s that the ceiling holds the toxic fumes down longer. As sure as any other cliché, a Los Angelino will tell you “It’ll burn off by noon”. If Oregonians said shit like that it’d be “It’ll burn off by March”. I’m kidding, sort of. And Oregon gray, however, glows like a pregnant woman; nothing you pin down as a color or back lighting or anything. I think it’s actually the green that offsets the quality of gray. Green here too. It’s a different kind of green. Not even judging better or worse, though I miss the hell out of my Oregon, just different. Rain Forest Greens are alive. Yeah, probably more alive in tropical rain forests, but still, that’s just a matter of degrees. In this case I mean degrees of Fahrenheit and/or Celsius.

I came here in an Autumn month, I mean I came back to live here indefinitely in an autumn month. Everyone I know and a few strangers too told me how mild the last three winters had been. This summer is milder than I was expecting. The last winter wasn’t exactly mild, or not the mild the previous three had been, but it was odd just the same. The snowflakes were stingy. Tight little flakes, even snowing hard you could see clear between them, more like a Monet painting than anything close to a white out.

I remember white outs. I remember explaining my open coat in Anchorage with “I’m from Michigan”. In Tok Junction (a long O makes it toke junction) they just fill your coffee or your tank, and ask where you been or where you are going. It’s not really a town so much as a profound rest stop/gas station and, I think, bar.

I don’t know, if I were embroiled in the dumbass greenhouse OD wars of 2001-2012, I’d either not write this or firmly state and repeat, the weather here is not definitive proof of anything.