Monk

I dreamed that I was at the mall clowning around with a few pals. Horace is the only one I can identify. It was kind of like we were teenagers. I get isolated, though, lost. I don't even know how to get home on my own. At first, I think I only have to call Arthudo to pick me up. But then I cannot recall the phone number. Nothing comes to mind. I am desperately fishing through my wallet to see if something might have the number. I can't find anything, and I'm getting quite scared. But then Arthudo just wondrously shows up. He said that he had been looking hard for me. I woke up with the sense that it was a happy dream. A really touching note was that Arthudo was his younger self as well, maybe even his thirties or forties. The funny thing is, I really cannot remember my phone number.

* * *

I cut out of the Ricky Gervais show "After Life". He was coming out of his depression and getting all warm & fuzzy with the people in his life, and was even getting ready to form a new romantic relationship. That's not what I paid for, and so I left. I liked 'suicidal' better. However, I learned that that was the last episode of the season anyway. I doubt they are coming back for a second season. It would just be an "Everybody Loves Raymond" or "Frazier" kind of thing. The TV world doesn't need another dose of warmed over blandness.

* * *

My daily Blurty wrap-up has evolved into something else. It's no longer really a wrap-up, though it still bears the same form of three items consisting of one little paragraph each. I now take the exercise to be another sort of collection. Once I get up in the morning, I am mindful that I need to find at least three experiences that I would like to keep from forgetting and falling into the void of oblivion. I am trying to keep to a minimum, if I cannot avoid altogether, weather reports and news items. I also don't really care for items like this one, that is, writing about writing. But asking for three veritably interesting items from my day ... can be a challenge.

A disturbing dream. It's the whole family, though. Teri as well as Pop. It felt like Jack was part of this dream world, too, but off-stage. At first, it seems as if this dream was from the early Bay Horse years, when Teri and Pop would get the groceries on their own, and I'd help to unload when they got home. However, in this dream, I have the full expectation of being able to get the groceries, too.

In the dream, Teri and Pop surprised me by having gone early to get the groceries, and I am upset and very angry. I look through the groceries they brought home, and I don't see some of things that I wanted, and I throw down. I'm not going to live like this! I tell Pop that he can live on his own. He asks me what am I going to do. And I actually answer that I'm going to be like Walt Whitman. I'm going to hit the road and write about it. But I know this is a cover-line. I don't intend to live at all. I don't know how much Pop understands that. Worse, I'm not honestly sure what I will do, or can do. It's gross blackmail, or else ridiculously childish - "If I don't get my way, I'm just going to hold my breath until I die!"

It also becomes clear that the dream, or at least part of it, the latter part, is meant to represent the present, because at one point I tell Pop, "I know you have been taking care of me for over 50 years, but..." It's an ugly scene, like a bad adolescent tantrum, except I'm in my fifties.

I will go ahead and write down a dream from a few nights ago. It is a Bo dream, after all, but such a little thing it was. I was brushing his coat. I had him standing on his hind legs, and I suppose his forelegs were pressing down on my shoulder while I was down on one knee. I was combing out the knots in his coat. He would give a little cry as I forced a bundle of knots out, effectively tearing them off him, but he let me do what I needed to do. It was a very brief bit of dreaming, and that was all there was to it, though I suppose there is an aching sweetness about it - being able to get back from the long-ago past a moment with my one true friend in life. I would be willing to pay a lot of cash for more such moments if I could buy them.

A striking dream ... In this dream world, it seems to just be me and mom, and she has apparently just married into another family, and I am part of the package deal. The cats were supposed to be part of the deal, too. However, after we moved in with this white family, the man's own mother, or possibly his sister, decided that the cats have to go. I naturally object. Weakly, I ask why. She says that she cannot walk around the house without getting the cats' fur on her feet. My mother just cringes in a corner crying (she is also her younger self, complete with that red sweatjacket from Yokota days). I apparently understand myself to be too weak to fight this, and I just walk off frustrated and hurt, trying to accept this new edict.

Lately, I have bemoaned the waning of the imaginative power of my dreams, resigning myself to the likelihood that I will never again have interesting dreams. This dream would seem to belie that. It's a doozy. I cannot begin, though, to see where it came from or what I should take from it. It's certainly not a happy dream; maybe my consolatory dreams are indeed gone for good. But at least this one was interesting.

It speaks of powerlessness, I suppose. Maybe it also speaks of my mother's own powerlessness, despite how much I suffered her as an emasculating tyrant. Socially, at least, being poor and colored, perhaps we were all just caught in a dismal trap.

Sammy must have gotten into another fight. I see another gauge mark on his head, deep enough to see red. My poor warrior. I fear that his skull must be close to cracking up on him, having taken a number of serious hits already. It isn't affecting his behavior in any way, except perhaps to make him appear a little more ginger about life today, a bit downcast. In conjunction with his old age, I wish this latest episode might tame him. I wish that he might feel it is time to retire from wild nightly searches for adventure, especially since it is not as though the poor thing can ever enjoy the deep masculine satisfaction of sexual conquest. Sammy has always been my most troublesome and annoying cat, but I am reminded, seeing him in his vulnerability, of how much I love the little feline beast.

While I have a page open for a journal entry, I think I'll use it also to get down a dream from last night. The dream is not really worthy of another page of its own, but is yet worth remarking on. It was a McDonald's dream. I haven't had one of these in years and ages. I was in the shop and working about, helping to cook the food. I was struggling in it, not having seemed to master all its little routines, but I was doing well enough to keep bumbling along, with nobody pulling me aside and asking me what the hell I was doing.

In the past, I tended to think that these dreams reflected an inclination to go ahead and get another such job. I cannot begin to believe that this is the case today. In my fifties, there is not even a half-thought that I might join the work-a-day world after all this time. My fate is done and wrapped up, with only the dying left to do. I suppose this dream is merely nostalgia-borne. I do think about, from time to time, my experiences and the people I knew from those teenage years, and I suppose this errant dream is but some of the emotional detritus from such musings.

A couple of snippets of dreams. In one, we have a new house. Teri is with us, and I am showing her a neat feature of the kitchen sink, though I cannot recall exactly what I wanted to show her and I pause in awkwardness. Arthudo breaks in and mentions her special mirror, that big one she got for two-hundred dollars at Bay Horse.

This is not a great dream, but I haven't dreamed of her in a long time. And it did seem to be a happy dream, as we were apparently moving into a new and better house. It also made me think of that mirror, and I don't remember seeing it anywhere. I thought it might be in Arthudo's room, but it's not. I guess she gave it to Jack and Jill when we moved here, apparently unable to see where she might hang it up in this smaller house.

In the second dream, I am looking out at the patio, and I see a calico cat with Ash and Sammy, and as the cat separates herself from the feline tussle & play, I begin to wonder if it might actually be Coco somehow. It's seems impossible, but maybe there was a gigantic misunderstanding somehow, someway. My mouth agape, my eyes opened wide, I am so happy. However, the dream, or my memory of it, cuts off too quickly and abruptly, so that I don't know for sure if this was supposed to be Coco, but I assume so.

This dream brings to mind my fading relationship with the cats. Maybe it's because of the long dry period, with them remaining outside all the time, so that my life with them is almost a reversion to the old days with the feral cats when all I could do with them was feed them. Lately, Ash has especially turned me off with the way she runs off when there is some loud thunder rather than come inside the house like Sammy. It's like she doesn't even know me.

It doesn't help that I have become even more distant from Ash and Sammy on account of my war with the ratsoes. A couple of weeks ago, I caught one drinking water from the cats' bowl. It wasn't that gigantic ratso, but another one, a more reasonably sized one. I realized that the water is too much of an invitation. So, I now also bring the water bowl in the house along with the food plate. I bring both out again a couple of times over the course of the night for a few minutes, when I get up for a bathroom run. Since the ratsoes seem to be nocturnal animals, it only seems to be a nighttime problem, though since the cats are also really nocturnal animals themselves, this is still a big problem for the cats.

In the past, I avoided this step, thinking a ready supply of water being essential for them. And I feel like this move has estranged the cats even more from me, including Ash, further weakening our relationship. And I wonder whether I would be this hard and austere with the water if Coco was still here. She wasn't the most beautiful calico cat, but her calico-ness might have been enough to give her that special place in my heart that opens one up to suffer more for love.

A fascinating dream. Ash apparently had kittens, two of them, which seems to be the litter-limit for the small girl. Apparently, her spaying didn't completely take. This was stressful. I really don't want any more cats. And we obviously need to do something about Ash's regained fertility, not to mention fixing the new kittens. But I was pleased to see that these were at least lovelier kittens: white ones. It takes me a little while to realize that they probably are not kittens at all. They are clearly more like puppies! Beautiful, playful Eskimo puppies. As if Bo and Princess are reborn.

A dawn-drawn dream of me with my mother. Teri and I seem to be in the big room, the TV room. She wants me to adjust the window blinds. I am not really happy with the idea, but what else can a dependent son do but oblige. As I am fixing the blinds the way she wants, the room seems to blend into my bedroom, with my bookshelves near the window. As I am moaning over my displeasure with the way she wants the blinds, she deflects me by pointing to the shelves and saying, "I like the way you are looking at me in that one." I figured she is talking about a photo of her that I keep there, but I am mistaken. In this dream world, there is another photo there, and she hands it to me. I have never seen it before. It is a black & white picture. I am a baby in it, and we are lying on a mattress on the floor. She is on her back and holding me up. As I am looking and studying this photo, I am deeply moved, but I try to focus harder to make sure that it is what I am seeing (as I am sure about seeing her but not so sure if that is me), the photo in my hand changes, becoming almost like a mini-computer screen, like a Kindle, and even becomes like a movie, with people streaming into the room, so that I can no longer make us out.

Among my dreams last night, one scrap I have been able to keep has me and a younger Teri seated in a rather crowded bar & restaurant, and it is just us two together, mother and me. At one point, I look over toward the bar and feel a particular longing, and I said to her that I really would like to get a margarita. She immediately agrees and takes out a checkbook to pay for it. The last thing I can recall is my trying to tell her that she does not need to do that.

I had a Sugar dream. It had been a long time. She was my Sugar: a young 22, blonde, and girlie cute rather than a super-feminist. It was a sexy dream too, or at least the first part. We're alone in her bedroom. She says I cannot touch her, but it's clear that she is playing, especially when she starts peeling down her jeans,revealing a lightly tufted cunt, driving me mad with desire as she smiles broadly. And I score a touchdown!

The second half of the dream is a comedown, back to reality. There's a group of people in the room now, the living room perhaps. They and Sugar are making plans to go somewhere. Maybe it's a concert. I catch Sugar's eye, and she gives me a knowing arch of an eyebrow, knowing that I am still filled with what happened between us the night before. Nevertheless. despite having gotten to play 'the man' with her last night, I am weak and helpless as a child in the group. I cannot go anywhere. I don't have a driver's license or money. She offers to take care of me.