A while back I had a dream of being an aquatic creature, or at least semiaquatic. The world was one of low light, overcast skies of gray and the liquid of the world was black, but translucent. The beings of the world would swim out to pay homage to a creature who simply floated in the water, and whose very presence radiated malice and harm.
I tried to swim under this creature, and my thought was if I started out long before I got close, it would not notice me. However, as I drew near, it pushed me deeper into the water with some force that was as irresistible as it was slow.
My species could not breathe underwater, yet we had a great capacity, so drowning wasn’t going to be what killed me. As the depth increased so did the pressure. I felt my brain being compressed, my skull being slowly squeezed to the point of structural failure, and dying this way would be infinitely worse. I surrendered completely, stopped fighting, and began to experience the end of my existence.
The thing released me. I drifted up slow, feeling my body from within, trying to access any damage, trying to tamp down the fear it might toy with me, pushing me down, allowing my rise, tormenting me, as it was wont to do.
I rose to the surface, near where I had began.
Since that dream, even when full awake, even at this very moment, like a scar only I know is there, the sensation of pressure on my skull, and brain, is something I can still feel.
Fencing, After the Rain
Rain, more rain, then it rained. Yesterday was nonstop waterworks, and that meant the fence might be down. The hotwire around the perimeter definitely. Dawn arrived late, cold, wet, raw, and the wind drove all warmth away from bare skin. The dogs went out with me, but only Budlore Amadeus remained. Bud has a sense of mission, the idea if I am out in the woods working someone ought to be with me, and that someone has to be him.
Bud and I walk the perimeter first. I look for one of the giant trees to fall one day, or shed a large limb, and that’s going to be a job that takes an entire day, or many. Those huge limbs from older Oaks weigh tons, not pounds, and Live Oak wood is dense and knotty. I hope nothing like this has happened, but if I live long enough I know it will.
The perimeter walk shows only one small tree has fallen on the fence, but I’ll need to lift it from the base to move it. It puts up a fight, wedges itself between a larger tree and the fence, so I have to wiggle it up, work the end of it away from the bind. Bud doesn’t like me being on the other side of the fence, and he watches with his ears up, his body tense, and a look of concern in his eyes. Bud is a simple creature; if it is different it is wrong in some way. This is an animal that has some sort of working breed in his DNA. Bud is a guard dog, a protector, and the only way for anyone to be safe is for everything to be exactly the same all the time. The tree gets freed and I go back over the fence, and Bud is happy. But the hot wire is as cold as the wind.
The pack I have now is the most secure that’s ever lived here. Bud is not going to leave the yard. He’s been out there and he didn’t like it. He certainly isn’t going to leave Mom, ever, for very long. This might be the only real home Bud has ever known. His job is here. Mom is here, and Mom is Bud’s real mission. Jessica Elizabeth won’t leave Bud. She is his shadow and isn’t looking to escape. Wrex Wyatt has bolted out of the front door two or three times, but he never goes far. Lilith Anne can’t walk away from home, much less run. Lilith is not long for this earth, and it will be sad when she goes. Lilith is the last member of the First Pack alive. Her passing will mark the end of an era in my life.
Of course, minor branches, small limbs, and downed Spanish Moss litters the fence. That’s normal. None of this is enough to ground out the hot wire, but I’ve done this so many times before, so I know there’s got to be something. Finally, a limb that has pinned the wire to the fence is discovered. Small, and not a problem, yet it’s grounded out the wire. I remove it and put the tester to the wire. Four lights blink on and off, the pulsating power of the fence charger now energizing the tester.
Bud thinks we ought to walk the perimeter again, just to make sure, so we do. Bud zooms ahead, stops to mark his territory, sniffs the fallen limbs, marks them, and if I had ten acres he might die of dehydration. I find small stuff on the fence, noting serious, and pull a vine out that was creeping up the fence. But overall, it wasn’t as bad as I feared.
I’m cold. Bud is cold, and the wind picks up. We’ll have to do this again tomorrow morning, I’m sure, but for the moment, both Bud and I are heading inside to warm ourselves. The fence is up, the electricity is coursing through the wire, and Budlore Amadeus has once again kept me safe from anything evil. We stop on the deck and I scrub his back, pet his ears, and tell him what a good dog he is. Bud wiggles with excitement, happy that he got to go out and work with me, and happy to return to the rest of the pack, and the warmth of home.
Take Care,
Mike
The odd thing about being this old, is I have always been as old as I am in the current moment. Yesterday I was as old as I had ever been, and when I was ten the same was true. Life’s experiences were measured in a full life, because it was that it total, at the time, as it is now.
At some point, however, unless you are certain death is imminent, you have to learn to look at now as a past that will occur in a matter of seconds, then days, then years.
What you once thought is gone, and this has happened so many times you cannot remember all the thoughts that evolved, or failed. Or simply vanished.
Yet here you are today, certain you are right again.
I Dream of Bricks
I have reoccurring Dreamscapes. Usually buildings, houses, rooms, and even one or two cities that do not exist in waking reality, at least as far as I know. One of the more recent is a structure made of red brick.
The bricks are normal. They’re every day red bricks, but solid, not the kind with holes.
The structure is round, mostly, once or twice it’s been slightly oval. But the magnitude of this thing is what gets me every time. As far as I can tell, it’s got to be at least six hundred meters tall. Yes, that high. People are indistinct from the view at the top, and vehicles are tiny spots. The café at the north side of the structure is a small dot. The whole thing is impossible, from an engineering standpoint because the walls are only about four meters wide at the most.
Because my mind works the way it does, whenever I’m there, maintenance crews are usually working on repairing the bricks that have fallen down, patching places where and there, and I did this in one dream, and fell all the way to the bottom. It hurt but I was uninjured, and I’ve seen other people fall, too. They usually get up and walk away, a little gimpy but okay.
Some people fall and just lay there, in the grass, the rich, thick, tall grass, super green, and eventually the grass absorbs them and they’re gone. No one knows where.
Living quarters of some sort exist somewhere in this place, I’m not sure where or how, but a woman was taking me to her room once when I woke up. Dammit.
Last night I was there only for a few minutes, walking around, look up at flocks of birds as they flew up and up and up. Bricks fall sometimes, spinning, hitting the wall, breaking, and sometimes but the time they get to the bottom, they are just crumbly collections of dust, and other times they hit hard. I’m not sure death as we know it exists here.
What should I call this place, until I can learn its true name?
Take Care,
Mike
Naked With The Moon.
Sisyphus on a Coffee Table
“Can you change anything or is it static?” I asked the woman sitting next to me.
“Mmmmm, like what?” she replied, slightly drunk, her voice slurring a bit, but tone of voice suggested she hoped this wasn’t a lead in on me hitting on her.
“The stone, the guy, the scenery, maybe?” I was fascinated, not by the woman, but by the animation in the model. I had never seen anything like it.
“Yeah, you can,” another woman sat down beside the first, and she had what looked like a television remote. “Watch.”
The model on the tabletop showed a man, dressed in central casting Roman garb, toga, sandals, laurel leaves on his head, and he was pushing a huge bolder up a mountain slope. He would get to a certain point, the rock would slip, nearly crushing his body, and he would trudge downhill to start all over again. This was a three dimensional thing, the man about 200mm high, with the rock a bit taller than he. It looked realistic and you could hear him groaning, straining, then moaning when the rock slipped away.
The woman pressed a button and the rock was crystal, glowing, then she hit another and it was a diamond, another and it was burning, a ball of fire, and then again it was a dazzling star.
“And if you’re petty, like I am sometimes…” The man changed, the face was different.
“Petty?” I asked.
“That’s my ex.”
“Look up.”
I looked at her and she took my picture with the remote, and suddenly I was pushing the rock up the slope.
“Damn, that’s pretty good,” I swore.
“And I was so afraid the lightning would hit the building,” another woman was telling a story, and we paused to listen, “and we were so high up, it was like the one hundredth story and I was afraid if lightning broke the window we’d be sucked out and die.”
“You mean like in an airplane?” someone asked.
“Yeah, you know, something breaks a window in a jet, and everybody gets sucked out into the air,” the woman nodded.
Everyone started laughing at her, and I choked on my drink.
I woke up.
Fifty degrees is not always fifty degrees. It’s predawn, raining, and a good breeze is coming through the window. At this moment, fifty degrees feels glorious. Last summer was brutal. It was so hot my garden wilted if I didn’t water it for two hours straight in the middle of the day, and my squash stopped producing for a month. Triple digit heat stayed with is for over a week, and upper 90’s stayed longer still.
Of course, back in December it was down in the upper teens for five days, but the cold didn’t bother me the way the heat did. I worked outside in the heat, and if felt as if my body were melting in my boots. The water was warm right out of the tap it was so hot.
Maybe that’s why I think this fifty degree weather feels so good. Yesterday it was close to eighty. Now, it feels more like it should. I’m down to a pair of shorts, and that’s all. I want to feel this. I want to experience the coolness of the air, the feel of my body not sweating, the bare skin totally free of mosquitoes hunting.
Were it dark enough, I would walk around nude on the deck.
Darwin, Newton, and Me.
It’s so rare when a new form of stupidity surprises me in traffic it’s almost enjoyable when it occurs. Almost. The thing about traffic that some people seem to miss is traffic laws are a social construct that are transmutable, and the laws of physics are why people die in traffic, in horrible ways involving twisted metal, blunt force trauma, blood, fire, broken glass, and people behaving poorly after the event.
I would apologize for the digression, but honestly there seems to be a certain large proportion of the motoring population who do not understand the forces driving, no pun intended, vehicle accidents, and how to avoid these events. Rather, they seem bent, again, no pun intended, on daring Newtonian Physics to work against them.
Like Darwin, Newton has no fucks to give.
The car in front of me eases forward, we are both in the left turn lane at an intersection, Gornto and Saint Augustine, turning onto Gornto from the west, and all is well. There’s a line of cars behind me. Ahead is clear, the lead car has time to turn without tempting his particular god or Newton to smite him. He turns ever so slowly, and then inexplicably, he stops in midturn.
Did he die? Did his car quit? Was he the one person in south Georgia that actually was Raptured? Did he stop to finish singing a Taylor Swift song about loss? I look forward. Cars are coming. I need an escape route if this gets any stranger. Check mirrors, I can go straight into the left turn on the other side, illegal, scary, but the lesser of many evils, the greatest of those in traffic is not doing a goddamn thing when you could get the fuck out.
Get. Out.
Don’t stay with it. If someone is doing something stupid, just get away from them. Go. It doesn’t matter if you have to go ten miles to turn around, or if you miss your turn, or anything. Just go. Leave the circus, because Brother, I am here to tell you one thing for certain and that is stupid rarely self-cures and it most definitely gets worse before it gets any better.
The car eases forward, horns are honking now behind me, and the window of opportunity for escape is closing, but he is moving forward into the turn, and he stops. Again.
Now the only out is to pass him. It’s a single lane at that point, and to pass I have to go into the double left turn on Gornto, but that is still better than sitting still. Cars are coming towards me. The guy behind me is losing his mind; he is likewise trapped. I make eye contact with him in the rearview. “Follow me!” I send that thought and I am getting the hell away from all of this now.
Suddenly, the guy goes forward. Slowly, but forward, and I’m good, the guy behind me is good, but we’re the only two to escape. This guy in front is going ten miles an hour, but he’s moving.
He makes a right turn at Publix, and I am free. The guy behind me follows the offender into the parking lot. This might go poorly, but I am moving on.
I have never seen that form of stupidity before. It was amazing.
Take Care,
Mike
The Hickory Head Hermit 