Dear diary,
You don’t need an alarm clock to scare you awake in the morning. Just sleep by a window that’s near a city street. The city sleeps like a baby, every night; so you’ll be able to get your usual eleven hours of shuteye without a problem. Then, just a half hour before you need to rise, the people in the houses near your window will start their cars, one after another. The first car will be squeaky, in a playful way, so you can sort of half-sleep thru that noise. Then you’ll hear someone loading soft boxes into their trunk, which make a pleasant plopping sound when they land, and then the trunk shuts with a clicky-lock noise that you love (this helps you wake up even more, gently and unobtrusively: you don’t even know that you’re ascending into daily consciousness: note how the experience is MUCH better than using a noisy alarm clock, which beeps like a warning alert in a hospital, like someone has just unplugged their grandfather’s heart monitor; and it’s the life of Father Time that is at stake, so it’s a genuine ordeal; cuz space cannot survive without its obverse.) Then one more car will come chugging past the street outside your window; this last car has an engine that sounds like it’s made of cardboard: yes, it’s a maraca-shaped cigarette filled with iron shavings. Now you’re awake. Time to write your blog entry.
As I said (parenthetically) above, space cannot survive without its obverse. I was speaking of space as if it were a coin, and its reverse side is the expanse of matter and basic stuff that we all are made of, while its obverse is flux, stream, succession, movement, force, possibility – the inescapable terror of hastening doomward…
My point is that people should freeze how they appeared just after high school. We all attended public high school in the midwest U.S.A. Now, consider how we all looked & acted just a year or two after (barely) graduating. We all met up at a party and had a good time. OK here’s the problem. After that party—that one (1) single party—years pass. And by years I mean years and years. So now we’re all in our mid-40s, just like the temperature here in the midwest U.S.A. during autumn which precedes wintertime which signifies death.
Let’s say that you dream a dream, just before being awakened by all those succulent sounds from passing automobiles, and in this dream of yours, you meet a number of friends from high school, and these friends haven’t changed a bit: they’re all the same friendly faces and naive attitudes that you remember from that party, which occurred so long ago. This is good; this is how it should be. But note that it’s only a dream. And what is a dream? It’s a world that you create unknowingly within the world that God is creating outside you (also unknowingly). But God’s dream isn’t as fluxy as your dream. God’s dream REMEMBERS and keeps constant all the absurd rules of physics, and the pace of doom. So what I’m getting at is that the fine feelings that accompany your meeting up with old friends in your own dream, which is superior to God’s, I say, all these feelings vanish when the fun cars wake you up; because you realize that even if you were to contact your friends from the past and meet them today, when you’re all icy and snowing, none of you will seem very much the same: you’ll seem like bad actors doing a bad job of parodying your once-vivacious selves. So nothing’s any fun. Anxiety ruined your youth, and incapacity ruins the rest of your life.
ADDL INFO
The entry above was occasioned by the dream that I had, where I met many friends from my old high school, and we all had a happy night together; and then I was awakened by the frolicking of motorcars in the street outside my broken window, and, upon awaking, I suffered the realization that the wonderful feelings that my dream blessed me with were no part of reality (except the secret part I own: my imagination). So this left me blue. But one thing that I’m thankful for, with regard to the fact that my dream did not trump God’s reality, is that one of my best friends, in my dream, had cut off his own hand in an accident, and he was holding this hand in his other hand (the one that was still attached), and one of the fingers of the chopped-off hand was mangled too; so I don’t know what charities Joe had been committing in my dream that caused him to mutilate himself like this, but I’m glad that it ended when I woke. It was all just a dream. One minute, he was holding his own hand in his hand, and saying “Pardon me,” as he worked thru the crowd of us all who were mingling excitedly with each other yet congesting the path to the hospital, and no one was helping poor Joe, and I spotted him and tried to get the attention of all my old comrades, the bystanders, but nobody could be pulled away from the warm conversations that they were engaged in. Then I woke up. The cars began to pass, and I exclaimed aloud in bed: “I hope you’re OK, Joe, wherever you are out there.” Cuz I haven’t talked to Joe in ages. But I don’t believe that dreams have any jurisdiction within God’s nightmare, so I’m not worried that my old friend Joe actually severed his own hand off and mutilated his middle finger. Probably he was misusing a weed whacker; also known as a weed-whip or a whipper-snipper. (I sure would love to wake to the sound of THAT.)
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