Sunday was one of those days that just primed me for a night full of odd dreams. I saw it coming. I transported two puppies from a drop off at someone’s house to the next leg of the ride, which began in Ohio and ended in Florida. It went so smoothly I couldn’t believe it.
On the way back, I took the long way home, off the Interstate, side roads, and side roads of side roads. I listened to Natalie Goldberg narrating “Writing to the Bones” on Audible.
An officer in the military once told me if the Cubans and the Russians ever invaded from Florida, they would advance north, until they would run into the “I-10 Line” which is where Florida broadens out, and it would be there the southern part of the United States truly begins. A few million heavily armed, and pissed off, rednecks would pour into the area, making it impossible for the military to get in or out, but hey, they are heavily armed, and they are pissed off.
As a military commander, you haven’t lived until one of your senior officers is killed by a sniper, who turned out to be a fourteen year old girl, using her grandaddy’s 30.06 from a hidden tree stand, and on her you find ammo, food, water, and a Barbie Doll, who is also dressed in camo. There’s nothing but death north of I-10 because north of I-10 is South.
It’s pretty country out here, north Florida, that’s part of the south. Giant Live Oaks, lots of water, more history than the locals know what to do with, and it’s just about the part of the country where freezing weather doesn’t happen often enough to scare farmers. Close enough to the Gulf of Mexico to catch a sea breeze, and knock off some of the heat in summer, but that means close enough for hurricanes, too.
There’s Blue Springs in this area, a place once known as a hang out for the party crowd, but they’ve clean it up nice and respectable, and now it’s more a family place to go. The cut short from Valdosta to the springs wound in and out of fields and down nearly forgotten lanes, but all of that is fenced in now, and GPS will get you there quicker, much quicker, but the journey is more than half the fun.
But now I am in Greenville, where, I am told, is the hometown of Ray Charles, who was born in Albany Georgia, according to the people there. I pull over to check on the puppies, and they are on another leg of their adventure, their last one before they arrive home. I too, take a right turn, and I’m heading back to the house. The ride has been good to me, and idea float around in my mind like so many flashes of lightning, or gnats, depending on how hard I work on them.
It feels good to work with dirt, with soil, and to see material that might have gone to the landfill now returning to the Earth as all things should. Sweat is my salary now, sore muscles my vacation from sloth, and sitting too much to write. My arms ache with the heat of work, hard work, physical exertion that will provide the garden with its food, so it might provide me with mine, and enough to share, I hope. Years ago, I discover there is very little that will cause as much joy as giving away produce that is home grown.
Rain is supposed to come in later in the day, but clouds scud and drift, blocking the sun, providing shade, and I looked up. The photo up top is what I saw, and the picture was taken, stored in my cell phone camera, and I sat down, looking at the photos taken this very day, of fog, dogs, spider webs, of the sun, and clouds. How many generations of humans had no cameras, no way of sharing the wonders they saw except with joyous outbursts of words and facial expressions, and how many people have listened to these descriptions of wonder, and knew they would never see it, but it was enough that the sight made someone else so happy?
Sixty-one years and a few months slow me down now, and I hesitate before returning to my toil. The earth around this area of the world has been tilled before. This was part of the nation where slavery thrived, and enslaved people were worked for generations, doing very much what I am doing now. I wonder, my mind goes back to the days men and women night have, on the very spot I sit, been forced to work long hours, longer years, with no hope of knowing any other life but hard labor. Were there those among these poor people who would look up at the sky, see some marvelous cloud, and were told to get back to their task? Would an enslaved person hope for such a sight, for some rare treat in the day that might offer some beauty in a world devoid of anything resembling anything but misery?
Look back at the last 400 years, at the music composed, the inventions, the works of art, the poem, the books, the wonders humankind have created, and then see the shadow the light of that creation has cast. Those who were enslaved, and those who were descended from slaves, have lived in this shadow. First as kidnapped workers, and then as second-class citizens; Jim Crow and Red Lines, Peonage and Lynching, the light still withheld, the freedom and justice still denied, and it still goes on this very moment.
Yet given rain, and not too much, given warm weather without scorching heat, given luck and some skill with plants, the earth will provide those who farm a bounty, regardless of the color of their skin. Mother Earth will receive a body, if it is allowed to rest in a natural state in the dirt, and from this life will begin anew, such as it always had, and such as it ought to be. Kings and dogs, slaves and statesmen will all turn into soil, accept seeds, and grow whatever is tended, or not.
The wind blows now, the sky grows dark, and I am inside, clean from a hot shower, and writing the words you see before you. I hope you liked my photograph of a branches and sun, and clouds. I hope the photo stirs in you some sense of wonder and beauty. I wish for you to remember not everyone has ever had this, some were denied it, and some still do not have it. It is luck, chance only, that you and I do.
The rain began a couple of hours before noon, a slow descent of drops, which seemed to be the vanguard of many more. By lunch rain was coming down hard, and considering it’s been weeks since the trees or the pond or the plants and animals have seen any rain at all, it was a benison for the Earth. Like putting your ear to a seashell, a roar of water could be heard, rain falling through the leaves of the trees, rushing down to the dry earth, and replenishing what was desperately needed.
My work here is done. There will be no gardening, no composting, no preparation of the ground or building raised beds. This will be my Sabbath, my day of rest, with dogs near and books open. Even music will halt, no classical for background, no instrumentals for breaks in thought, no. This is a day of water, of the drenching of the roof and windows, and the sound of this action is all that is needed, conducive as anything created by any composer with two legs, for the human mind to be at ease in focus.
My compost pile is getting a natural dousing, which is very good, and it will be easier to fill the new garden bed. The pond needs water, but it always has and always will, and the pollen ought to find itself somewhere other than my truck. Yet the rain must also show up in print, being read or being written, and I wonder how other writers have decided when to add the rain.
A story about a group of survivors, trying to figure out if they can grow enough crops in a post-apocalyptic world, find themselves waking up to their first good rain, and they realize work is impossible for the day. Some sleep, some gather in small groups and talk, to plan, like farmers always have and always will in down time. Men seek out women, women seek out men, lovers find places to forget about the horrors of life, solace sought inside the bodies of another, and the rain comes down hard. The narrator stares out into the storm, watching in the dim light of the day, as much needed rain falls, and subconsciously he knows there’s a point of too much, but there’s nothing to be done if this happens. One bad harvest and they all will die, he knows they have to expand, and send others out to farm the land away from this place. Everything but the rain, and right now, seems impossibly far away, to this man.
I have a scene in mind, for what story I do not know yet, of a woman who is seeing a man, and their level of intimacy is getting warmer each time they are in the same room alone together. She left a bad relationship, still feels the pain of it, it still haunts her thoughts, and heart, but this man. The night before he left early, she asked him to, for her body’s desire was overriding her ability to sort it out, and after all, they were going canoeing with another couple, but now the rain.
They cancelled the plans on the phone, and without thinking about it, she went to his house, without calling, and now she’s sitting on his bed, and he’s in the shower, the bathroom door open, the rain pounding the roof, and so many thoughts are running through her mind. Join him, take her clothes off and wait, just ease back on the bed, and let him come to her, is she being too forward after last night, it’s like a swarm of cupids, all of them shooting arrows in different directions, and she doesn’t know what to do next, only she has to, now is the time.
To her horror and dismay, he goes downstairs, after all that’s where he left her. She starts to follow, then decides to wait. He calls for her, she tells him she’s upstairs, and now he’s going to find her on the bed. She can hear his steps on the wooden stairs, and she positions herself on the pillow, and hears the first roll of thunder in the distance.
Sex and storms have a long term affair going, they always have, always will, both involve so much motion, so much combining of certain elements for the conditions to be just right. Lightning, thunder, orgasms, cries of pleasure torn out of a lover’s throat like the wind suddenly blowing a shutter open hard. She’s waiting for him.
I went to a flea market today, a rather large one, and went early to avoid the rush. It was cooler than was comfortable, the wind was blowing, and the feeling of being out of place cut deeper than the cold.
The older woman selling honey growled the price out, her tone of voice suggesting anyone who wanted the honey badly enough would somehow discern the price, perhaps telepathically. Dressed for the Artic as she was, perhaps she feared a transaction might somehow weaken her defenses against the soon to arrive blizzard or distract her while a polar bear ambushed us both. Her gray hair was pulled back and stuffed into something that mostly resembled a hat, and her face was crinkled with deep grooves that spoke of poverty and bad choices with men who came into her life like trees falling onto a house. I moved on.
It’s a covered flea market, with a few enclosed shops, but mostly just a roof, with nothing to slow the wind down. Smokers with their cigarettes can be smelled a mile away, and some guy selling cheap tools is talking loud enough to be heard over the smoke.
“They ain’t gonna do it,” his voice rising with the power of his opinion, “I bet they ain’t, com’on, you bet me, they ain’t gonna do it,” and he takes his white cowboy hat off and waves it at imaginary betters in the air. He’s one of those big hat, big belly, big belt buckle men, with a shirt that’s red and white checkered, like someone stole a picnic tablecloth and tortured it with a sewing machine. The tools on the table, still in a package, are lightweight, no steel or iron, and they’ll break during hard work. But this is a man who is putting on a show, advancing on the would be customers like ants at a campground, who brought their own picnic tablecloth. Meanwhile the three guys he’s talking to, slowly back away, not gambling against his info. One of them gets far enough away to turn around and make a break for the next stall, and the other two now have an excuse to follow. Cowboy Hat Man snorts, and looks around for his next audience, but I’m on the move.
I was once good at this, navigating crowds, weaving in and out of people effortlessly, a shadow barely seen or heard or felt, but it’s been too long now. The Plague has sapped me of my invisibility. Stopping, sidestepping, waiting for people to move, my glide is gone, the people moving the wrong way at the wrong time, and collisions nearly occur.
Another shop is selling confederate flags, but near the back, in plastic packages, not on the wall like they once did. There’s a flag from the old Soviet Union, hammer and sickle, and it’s not being flown either. More cheap tools, but this time power tools, deeply discounted, in case you need a power saw for one project, you’d likely get it. Machetes, two for ten dollars, or five-fifty for one, thin, cheaply processed metal, and you couldn’t hack your way out of your 70’s girlfriend’s pubic hair with that thing.
Used clothes, more clothes, clothes, clothes, clothes for sell, dresses, jeans, shoes, and even hats for sale. The jeans are going for twenty bucks, a green down jacket for twenty-five, and this morning that’s a bargain, and I wonder who owned that jacket, and why they sold it, and how the jacket came to be here.
A teenager, young girl, is sitting in a chair at a small table, not seeing me, not seeing anything at all. She’s the daughter or granddaughter of the shop owner, and if this girl was holding a gun on you it would be your last moment on earth and you would be certain.
Her eyes are boring a hole through the air, through everything there, the people, the used clothes, the treason rag, the flimsy machetes, the parking lot, the hostile honey salesperson, and nothing from the outside world can break through that stare.
I want to sit down next to her, and ask her why the stare. With someone who is a young teen, it could be social media, or it could be she’s trying to figure out why her body and mind are going through what they’re going through. It could be the cold boredom, endless, dirty, smokey, cold boredom, of used retail, cheap clothes off dead people sold to the dying. Or it could be worse, much worse, as she found a hidden camera in her bedroom, and her new stepfather is creepy. Tell her Mom about it? Not tell Mom? Tell social media, tell no one, silence encourages aggression, she already knows that, and that stare is trying to decide if she walks away right now, into the abyss of the world, would it be that much worse than what awaits her in her own home? The stare lazars its way through me, past the greasy food stands, past the shop selling boom boxes, past the used CDs, past the next state and the next country and into deep space, but she will find no help anywhere anymore.
Moving quickly now, the mojo is returning, and I dodge those who are milling around like cattle in a pen, grazing on anything that might be slightly interesting in the cold stockyard of the flea market. It’s time to go, time to get away from this place, and as I leave the old woman with the honey calls out, wanting my money, even though she rather not speak to me again. I pull out, another car pulls in behind me, and someone will buy fleas here today, I think.
The dream began with a group of us high school students still in Early County High working on “the final project”. Steel boxes, no, not coffins, nothing that obvious, but the boxes were thin and flat, like security cases for cookie sheets. I didn’t understand how we could be in post-graduation mode and still have this “final project” but that made as much sense as having a teacher scream at us about acting like adults but not letting us go to the bathroom when we had to pee.
In the dream I walked home, and one the most enduring memories I have of the high school was this: a cow pasture with cows in it sat next to the school, and if you think the coffin metaphor was cliché’ imagine the cattle comparison. But right next to both the school and the pasture was a cemetery, so there is that, too. The sidewalk beside the pasture was my path to and from school, and I grew up thinking concrete fence posts were common, because that’s what was holding up the fence around the pasture. As I left Early County, and Blakely, and got out into the world, I never saw another concrete fence post.
In the dream, the pasture was already gone. In Blakely Georgia, the cycle was for someone to build a new “shopping center” that had a new grocery store, everyone would leave the old one and it would close, then in another seven or eight years it would happen again. There was the Piggly Wiggly when I was a kid, then the IGA when I was in high school, and finally, there was the cow pasture strip mall, where they paved over the cows’ home, built a new store, and I think it’s closed now. I haven’t been back for over a decade and won’t unless someone else I care about dies.
I was looking for one of the concrete fence posts in the dream and couldn’t see one at all. The shopping center was in ruins, and broken concrete pillars were half buried in the dirt. The ditch that had run like a scar across the field, and across the cemetery, had drainage pipe laid in it, and buried, which seems stranger than anything else for some reason.
Reality began to set in when girls I knew became pregnant and dropped out of high school to have babies. Their boyfriends, or husbands, which were usually the same guy, would get some menial job, they would put a trailer in the backyard of her daddy’s house, and live there until they could afford to move. In due time the baby would grow up, go to the same school with the same teachers, and be taught no to have to pee until class was over. They would be taught not to be tardy, and they were told to just say what the fuck ever to drugs.
No one wrote, no one painted, a few people played piano or guitar, and I did know a trumpet player. But by and large, no one left, no one did anything but produce the next generation of students, unless they died young.
I woke up from the dream wondering about the fence posts, and what the symbolism was with the cookie sheet steel security boxes, with their heavy-duty rivets, and hinged flaps in the front. I wondered if they ever fixed the electrical outlet on the north side of that room, where we dug out the granular insulation, a small pile each class period. I wondered if all the teachers I once knew, and hated, were all dead now, and if former students came to the funeral, and were sad.
I wonder what happened to those concrete fence posts, dozens of them, now remembered by only a few people, maybe just one. A day will come when that school is torn down, another built, and someone will send me an email, telling me it’s gone, just like the other schools I went to as a kid, yes, all gone. The lesson they never taught us, for they themselves did not know it, is this ends, this all ends, everything, and one day, nothing will remain of the world we once knew, and we certainly will not survive it.
The cows, the kids, the teachers and the posts, the building and the final projects, yes, even those, will simply cease to be, except in dreams.
“Remember that party at Beth’s, you walked up and we cracked up laughing?” she asked in the early morning darkness, the chill of the morning slain by our bodies.
“Yes, neither one of you would tell me what you were talking about, and you turned a very lovely shade of red,” I replied. She and I had been friends for a while, and recently decided to date. We went to the beach with some friends, spent time together and enjoyed it, walked by ourselves and talked. On the ride home, we were sitting next to one another in the backseat, and I reached over, held her hand, and she squeezed mine back in reply. It’s odd how two people can wake up one morning alone, and then the next morning they are together, and perhaps in more ways than just physically.
“So are you now going to reveal what you and Beth were talking about?” I asked, and she laughed again, and again, turned red.
“Before we started dating I had sex dreams about you, three or four times, and honestly, I’ve never had sex with a guy I didn’t know. I’m not easy,” she said with a smile.
“I can attest to that. But if you were already thinking about having sex with me, why make us both wait?” I asked.
“Men allow their dicks to make decisions for them, women are more prone to ignoring the advice given by their vaginas. Not that it doesn’t happen; we are hormonal creatures, after all,” she sat up and looked around.
“So were the dreams, uh, specific?” I asked, feeling that this conversation was leading somewhere.
“All of them were us on the floor,” she said grinning, “right there.” She pointed beside the bed.
“I can make your dreams come true,” I said tossing a pillow overboard, and she grabbed a blanket.
Apparently, there was four dreams involving two different positions. There was nothing earth shattering about acting out the dreams, there was no astral choir or trumpets, I think that would have been a distraction, but it was different. Later, she told me the beach trip was set up so the two of us could spend time together, but she wanted to make sure we were compatible before she started flirting seriously with me. I’ve always thought women had the hardest part to play in dating. In my life, I’ve had two women ask me out, and one of them told me she had never done that sort of thing before. That sort of thing, like asking a guy out is akin to soliciting sex or sending him a nude out of the blue. Women seem to think that asking a man out is too forward, while I think it’s culturally backwards for the channel to only run in one direction.
The first time we were making out, and it was very clear things were heating up, she suddenly stopped me, put her bra and shirt back on, and just seconds before, I thought more clothes were coming off. Later, she told me she wanted to make sure I would stop when she asked me to, and she wanted to make sure if she was ever in a vulnerable position, I wouldn’t simply overpower her and keep going, unless that was what she wanted. How, I asked, was I supposed to know? She said if I knew her well enough, I would know, and that’s one of the reasons she stopped me, was because neither of us were at that point yet.
All of this is way past what I was going to write about this morning, but pertinent because last night I dreamed I was sitting in a coffee shoppe, drinking coffee with a woman I know only from Facebook. Sharply dressed, in a black outfit and her make up expertly done, for some reason I thought she was going to a job interview, or something work related. Florence and the Machine was playing in the background. We were talking about if snakes could survive in a zero gravity environment, or if catching prey would be too difficult.
“I’ve got to go,” she said, and putting her purse on the table, she pulled out a Glock, aimed it, and shot me in the chest.
People screamed, as I fell over backwards, and hit the floor. It felt like I had been kicked by a mule and the pain flared like a supernova.
She walked over to where I lay on the floor, pointed the gun, smoke still wafting from the barrel, at my head and said, “Don’t bring that up again, okay?” And fired.
As far as odd, and detailed, dreams go, this one went on for a while. It started with me talking to my girlfriend, and we were both excited about being at the beach for a week. She was pretty, blonde, great smile, and we were standing outside a nice restaurant waiting to be seated. The sun set in about half an hour, with hopes of getting a table on the patio. It was perfect.
Let’s call her Mary. In the dream no one said her name, or I don’t remember it, and so Mary sees a motorcycle parked near the restaurant and wants to take a photo of it. She walks over to the bike, and at that moment, the hostess steps up to speak to me, and her nametag reads, “Devvin” as her name, and underneath it someone has written, “by the sea”.
Devvin and I exchange greetings, I look over and see Mary talking to the guy that owns the bike, a tall, skinny, and long bearded man, she looks at me, looks away, then she gets on the bike with him, and they ride away.
I tell Devvin to hang on for a minute, walk over to where the bike was parked, and wait. I call Mary on her cell and there’s no answer. I send a text. Nothing. We’ve been dating a while, and this was our first real vacation together. A week at the beach during off season. But now she’s . . .? Gone?
After waiting a bit, I go back to the condo and wonder what to do next. Call the cops? No, she wasn’t kidnapped. I call again. No answer. But this is a dream that takes place in current time, so there’s one answer to every problem: social media.
I walk out to the beach, take a glorious photo of the sunset, post it on FB with the caption, “a fitting metaphor for today” and change my relationship status to “single”. It’s the most passive aggressive form of communication ever invented because you can get other people to do your dirty work for you, and the mutual friends of Mary and I quickly react to what’s happening, whatever that may actually be.
I get a call from her best friend who is freaked out. I tell the woman what happened, and she tells me I have to call the cops and report Mary as missing. If something goes wrong, and it might, then I was the last person she was with. What she says makes sense. If the biker kills her, then I’m left trying to explain her disappearance. I call the cops, they arrive, and tell me there’s nothing they can do, but get the video from the cameras around the restaurant, but they understand me making a report.
More calls, FB explodes with WTF, but no one has heard from Mary. I call the person who rented me the condo, tell him I want to check out, and he tells me this happens more than you’d think. A newlywed couple checked out after fifteen minutes when the bride bolted. She changed into her street clothes and walked away while her husband was in the bathroom. He tells me if he can rent the room the next day I will only be charged for that time, but if he can’t, I’m still on the hook for the entire period. I tell him to hold that thought. I might stay.
There are two suitcases, some clothes hung with care, and Mary’s purse. Truly, what are my responsibilities here? She’s left me, I think, and there’s no reason for me to pay for a condo just to keep her stuff, yet she made the decision to leave, so what do I do? I decide to spend the night drinking, and then drive home the next morning.
Three hours after all this has started, I get a call from Mary. Yes, she left me for a biker she had met and was overwhelmed by the moment, that was how she put it, and she left me. The problem was, and is, for her, is that he was meeting his group of friends in another town to take a tour of Florida. He’s got his stuff to carry on the bike, he’s sharing a room with a friend of his, who isn’t thrilled about either giving up his half of the room to Mary, or having to rent another room, and there’s little room for all of Mary’s stuff. She has no riding gear, and apparently her new found love has a history of picking up women on road trips that aren’t road savvy. Worse, she has no money because all her belongings are in the condo. I lie. I tell her I left right after she did, and I’m two hours out, on I-10, heading home, and I left her stuff beside the door of the condo where she could find it.
“My purse?”
“In your suitcase.”
“Fuck”
“Seems one of us will be.”
And she ends the call.
Mary finds herself in a hostile environment, and the group of riders tells her new love this is his issue to solve, and he can catch up with them. Mary freaks out and asks him to take her back to the condo, and he calls Uber to drive her back, and is done with her. Meanwhile, Mary is texting her friend to come get her, her friend is texting me to please go back and get Mary, it’s a five hour drive one way, and I’m kicked back on the balcony being a terrible person for dragging this out, and lying about it.
I go across the street to a store that sells mixed drinks to go and bring back a quart of Margheritas. I take Mary’s credit cards, all three of them, and call the numbers on the back and tell them I found them lying on the ground, and they kill off the cards. I also take her cash, and I make it look like someone went through her stuff. I sit in the hammock on the balcony and drink, and wait.
Mary calls in a couple of hours, she’s at the front door of the condo, and her stuff has been plundered, could I buy her a plane ticket home?
“Greyhound would be much cheaper,” I tell her.
“You want me to get on a damn bus?” Mary is furious. “Don’t be petty about this.
“You could always ride a bike.”
“Fuck you.”
Her friend sends me a text, and tells me it’s going to take over a thousand bucks to get a plane ticket this soon, and would I please turn around and go get her? I tell her I’m nearly home now, an hour or so out, and if I go back, I’ll have to find some place to stay, and I’m sure as hell not spending the night with my ex. I recommend greyhound. A couple of hundred bucks and it’s a done deal. Mary gets an Uber ride to a bus pick up point and is on her way back home by midnight.
Okay, it wasn’t really this detailed, but the gist of the story was what I’ve written. Then the dream shifted into an even more surreal adventure.
I get a text message that seems all the world to be some sort of scam. A guy saying his name is Mark texts: “I got a great idea for a book but I can’t write good, you wanna help?”
I ignore the text and keep going. The phone rings, the caller is Mark Smith, and I let Robokiller handle it. Mark leaves a message, “Hey boy, call me, I got a great idea for a book. You gonna love this shit.”
Sorry, no.
Then I get a call from a friend who admits she gave Mark my number. Mark is into science fiction and has started trying to write.
Sorry, no. I’m the last person on earth a new writer ought to talk to about beginning writing. They need someone who has been in the education field, not someone who just writes.
“I’ll buy you lunch if you just talk to him, okay?”
Will give writing advice for food.
I call Mark and it takes a good five minutes to get him to shut up long enough to have a conversation. Most of my questions about what he’s done, and how he’s gotten to this point are answered with, “I ain’t worried about that shit, just listen to me.” And then he goes on with the narrative of his story which isn’t at all science fiction.
Mark’s Great American Novel is the story of an CIA spy who has to get into Russia to stop a nuclear bomb from going off that will destroy all life on earth. The Russians have built this device, and are going to set it off in Russian, then blame the Americans. The Russian will then attack the Americans and move into their country and live happily ever after.
Mark sees no plot holes. Of course, he doesn’t know what a plot hole is.
After another five minutes of nonstop jabbering, Mark finally answers two questions I find pertinent; one, how much has he written in regards to this story, two, how much has he written in his lifetime? The answer to both questions is zero. I ask Mark what books he has read. Incredibly, Mark doesn’t read, and he has never written anything. Ever.
He tells me the spy is going to rescue Maren Morris from the Russian and he’s going to get Maren Morris to play Maren Morris in the movie. I have no idea who this person is.
“Write the first chapter,” I tell Mark. “And email it to me. I’ll make some suggestions and we will go from there.”
“I ain’t writing shit, that’s your job, you’re the writer,” Mark says as if it’s a given I’ve bought into this thing. He then goes into the scene where the hero of the story kills one hundred guards using nothing but a broken bottle.
“Is this a cartoon?” I ask.
“What?”
First off, Mark, no one is going to do the writing for you. It’s the hard part. A narrative, no matter how compelling, is the easy part. Everyone has an idea. Ideas are easy. It’s telling the idea that makes it work, or not work, or give the reader the idea that someone has worked hard to make it work.
Mark pauses. For the first time, I think I have actually reached him.
“You ain’t stealing my idea, boy.”
And I hang up, block his number, and call my friend, who swears she had no idea he was that bad. She didn’t actually know him. Mark is a friend of a friend.
For what it’s worth, I will help anyone, anyone at all, who wants to write. But you have to be a reader, and you have to have tried already. You have to have horrible writing you’ve done before you can say you’ve begun.
Memory, in your brain, in the human brain, isn’t like memory in a computer. I once read we do not store memories at all, but store the scaffolding of it, and rely on external input to fill in the blanks. This doesn’t make sense at all, until you think about the number of times you’ve remembered the words to a song, but only after hearing the song on the radio. You couldn’t have written them down, but now the song is playing, you’re singing along just like you were a very long time ago.
Dreams are worse, in as far as remembering them goes, for they are not reality, sometimes not even based on reality, so there’s nothing there to grab to build on. They are here, somewhere, in your brain, then the dream is gone, and you cannot remember anything but how it made you feel.
I started getting up and writing down my dreams, back in the 1970’s, when I was in high school, and that helped me remember them. As is usual, the effort you’re willing to make to do something will define how well you do it. But most people ignore their dreams, consider them transient things that happen, and afterwards, only a vague unease exists.
Last night a dream began, ended, and as it was gone before any sort of writing could be done, I cast my line into the darkness trying to snag an image or feeling, or anything that night help. A house, in the darkness, lights on, and that was it. I knew who lived in the house, a woman I have not seen, literally, in decades, and right now I’m having trouble remembering anything about her at all. Wait, it’s the house she lived in with her husband and kids, and I want to say I know where the house is, but I cannot.
You would recognize the house where some character on television lived in, the rooms, the kitchen, but you know it’s a set, not a real structure, and in your mind there are places that actually exist but you’ve never seen them in their totality. Ever been in the kitchen of your favorite restaurant? Ever been on the roof? You go home with someone for the first time, you sleep in their bed, and leave the next morning, and if you see that person again, they show you their garden in the backyard, and it’s a surprise to see the rest of their living space, just as it was a surprise to see their body for the first time. Interesting tattoo you have there, why did you get a unicorn riding a unicycle?
But then the person is gone. This person you were once joined at the hips with has eased out of your life, and you’ve eased away from the backyard and bedroom, and now you are a memory, and so is that person. There was a fight over money or infidelity, or there was nothing there but heat to begin with. Or you were unable to keep from being weird. That happens.
Now, years later, something sets off the scaffolding and the memory is recreated, flawed and patchy, holes in the details which your mind dutifully fills in, and destroys the memory in doing so, but you still, even if you know this as a fact, accept the memory as whole.
We cling to the scaffolding of memory, not the memory itself. The memory doesn’t exist, it never has, and it never will. We accept this, unconsciously, subconsciously, for it is all we have ever known, literally. Dreams lack this, so we allow them to pass into the ether, and even though I suspect the two are closely related, we will declare one a crop, and the other a weed.
The house, the woman of decades ago, the memory of the past is an illusion created in my mind, and after I am done writing this, soon now, it will recede again, a coin flashing and reflecting as it sinks deeper and deeper, until forgotten.
Back in the 60’s when I was a little kid, one of my favorite toys was a white plastic Dimetrodon dinosaur toy. I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up and I would be the one who dug up thousands of new dinosaurs, never seen before, and eventually, find one that was taller than buildings and bigger than mountains.
One day, I took my white plastic Dimetrodon, and using a small shovel I buried it in our sandbox, past where the sand ended, and I used the shovel as a measuring tool to mark where it was. The dinosaur was buried a shovel head away from the southeast corner. I decided not to look for it for an entire week, which was extremely difficult, and to make matters worse, a week later I was kidnapped by my parents and we spent an entire weekend at my grandmother’s house.
It was still raining when we returned, so it was almost two weeks before I could dig again. I couldn’t find it. It was too cold to be allowed to stay outside very long, and eventually, my mind turned to the possibility that my Dimetrodon had been poached by some kid in the neighborhood who might have seen me bury it.
Mike Church was an older kid with a mean streak. When I asked him if he had seen my Dimetrodon, he claimed a dog had dug it up, brought it to him, and he had thrown it away because it had been mauled so terribly. Now, this was a small neighborhood, and the idea of some random stray dog arriving to dig at a certain spot at a certain time was totally ludicrous. Yet we were children, and fantastic stories were more fun to believe than the truth. Mike and I actually went out hunting for the dog, and this was really strange because I suspected his story after the description of the dog shifted a few times.
Then there was another possibility, one far more sinister, in that my father could have thrown the Dimetrodon away. My earliest memories of my father were of him pushing me to grow up faster. I was supposed to be able to figure out models and puzzles meant for much older kids, and “That’s for babies” was what I heard more often than not when I wanted something. Some of my favorite toys went missing for no good reason, and more than once I rescued one from the trash can when no one was watching. Oddly, my father kept throwing things away as an adult. Anything he didn’t like he would toss it and simply not tell anyone he threw it away. It was an odd form of control to exert over people.
Eventually, I assumed the dimetrodon was extinct. The world was harsh and cruel, I knew that, and forces beyond my control were at work to create misery. Kids pretended to be your friend to steal from you, and your parents weren’t to be trusted with your toys or innocence.
One day, maybe two or three years later, I remembered the dimetrodon, and decided to dig for it, one last time. Using my hands, I dig into the soft sand, now in the corner of a flowerbed planted where little kids once played. There was a flash of white plastic and I stopped digging. No. It was not possible. Frantically, I dug down, and saw the tail, a leg, the back fin, and finally pulled the dimetrodon from the earth.
But it had shrank. It was smaller than I remembered. Once, my index finger fit inside its mouth, and now it did not. The once large toy I treasured was much smaller. In its smallness, I felt diminished, as if for my abandoning the creature had somehow led to it becoming less than it had been. The idea that I had grown larger never occurred to me. But my world was changing, swirling away like water out of a drain. My family was falling apart. My parents’ marriage was failing. My grades in school were dropping. As now, as if it were a sign from the Gods, a lost dinosaur had been found, much less the being he once was.
The Hickory Head Hermit 