The Anti-Anxiety Dream
Many people, including me, have experienced an anxiety dream, the kind of nocturnal event that seems to feed on the things bothering them and causes them to awaken in distress, thinking about ‘this horrible dream’. Well, last night’s dream felt like an antidote to such dreams.
It began weird, strange, and slow, with me being given clothes. The clothes were bizarre, especially the pants. White with wide legs and gold piping outlining their shape, they were made of some stiff leathery material. I was barely able to bend them. And they didn’t fit at all. Way too large.
Out on a rocky outcrop, I was supposedly doing other things but couldn’t because I put these pants on and said, “No way. There must be something else I can wear.” So I took them off and held them up, looking around for someone to talk to about my pants. Nobody seemed interested in what I was saying. I reached a point where I thought, you know what, I’m just going to toss these aside.
Someone came by and took the pants away. I was expecting them to provide me with a different pair. When none were forthcoming, I resigned myself to the jeans I wore. They fit fine and were in good shape, so I was okay with that.
Then, crack, I was suddenly lifted by a whirlwind. I’d barely began processing that when it delivered me to a piece of white machinery. It needed repaired, I saw, so, click, I had it apart. Then, click — with a blaze of yellow and red light, the machine roared to life, fixed.
I laughed with glee. Because I didn’t think I could fix it. But I did! And it wasn’t hard at all.
Fixing gave me confidence. I looked around; what else needed fixed? Bring it on.
Then I wondered about my injured foot. It has a ruptured tendon. Need to be careful, I reminded myself. Yes, because it gives out without warning, hurts like fire burning the bottom of my foot when it does, and I don’t want to make it worse before I see my doc.
A deep male said, “Don’t worry about your foot. Do what you want to do. Your foot is going to be fine. Don’t worry about it at all.”
That’s when I awoke, probably because Tucker (pronounced Tuck-ah) was singing for his breakfast. I rolled out of bed, energized by the dream still clinging to my thoughts. It left me feeling so optimistic. As I went around the bedroom doing things, an odor struck me. I almost froze, smelling, thinking, what is that? I know that smell. It’s familiar, but —
Another dream fragment returned to me. I’d been in a white convertible with a tan leather interior. I don’t know what brand it was, but it was a luxury car, and I was proud and excited about it. The car top was down. I’d just bought the car. Brand new, it had that new car smell.
And that’s what I’d smelled while walking around the bedroom.
Saturday’s Wandering Thoughts
Another grand opening has commenced in Ashlandia. A food truck and picnic table are in the parking lot. Couple chairs. Band is setting up under a white canopy on one side of the small lot. Merchandise has been pulled from the store and is displayed on racks and tables. Vintage clothing. Looks like a good turnout.
Third business in that location since I lived here, which is nineteen years. Once upon a time, that place was a bakery called Four and Twenty Blackbirds. Place to go for pies, cookies, breads, turnovers…well, bakery stuff.
Beside it was a small Italian restaurant. Wiley’s World. Excellent food. It’s now a plant store. Across the street used to be a bank but is now a Starbucks. A coffee shop, updated and modern, replaced the old, beloved coffee shop on the corner that went out of business almost ten years ago when the building’s owners upped the rent. And on the other corner was a bowling alley that is now a small strip shopping center that seems to stay half empty.
Then again, I used to walk to this corner to the coffee shop. Just about a mile, every day. When the coffee shop went away, I had to walk further and further till it reached the point that I was consuming too much of my writing day to reach my writing destination and go back home. Then COVID hit and everything shuttered and there was little walking to anywhere.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same” is the expression. The flux of business and life, revealed in the shifting landscape.
Saturday’s Theme Music
Mood: reflectiveday
Saturday came in. September 14, 2024.
He seemed like he was aged. Not much energy. I offered coffee. He gave a head shake. I took that as no. That’s my culture.
He sat, cold and broody, high thin clouds on a blue day, a sun sluggish with its heat, tired with its shine. Seemed to be studying the trees. The old oak across the street sways high above power and phone lines. It’s an old neighborhood in parts, and that’s how it used to be, black telephone and power lines hanging between poles, home to birds and dangling shoes. The oaks leaves are green but their shade seem to be yielding into the yellow that takes them every year. Saturday seems like he’s considering it like a mystery: when will those leaves change?
It’s 59 F now. Saturday plans to get up to the high seventies, that is, if he can get up. Weight is holding him back. He’s had it a long time but it still surprises his muscles. A car goes up the hill outside the window and another goes down, causing him to look, like they might be guests coming to see him. Everyone sees Saturday and no one sees him. He’s invisible and there, forgotten, overlooked, used.
He pulls out a newspaper from the air, opening up the big, thin pages, humming as he reads. I smell the ink but can’t see the black headlines. The Neurons begin humming with Saturday. Working overtime, I finally pluck the song’s words out of the mind’s grey folds, putting enough together to get a sense of the melody. Performers arrive late to the scene: Bon Jovi. “Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night” plays in the morning mental music stream (Trademark cracked). A 1995 song that begins with a depressing litany but then rises up with defiance and optimism.
Now, as then, when I heard the song back in the day, I think of the stereotypes attached to it, like the idea that Saturday night is a good time. How that is embedded in our culture. How far back does that go?
Stay positive, be strong, and vote blue in 2024. Coffee has been brewed and calls. Here’s the music. Have a good Saturday. Cheers
Friday’s Theme Music
Mood: Chillfriday
Oh, no, it’s Friday, 9/13/2024. For some with paraskevidekatriaphobia, this is a scary day. For me, raised to beware of Friday the 13th and middle-class Protestant superstitions, reinforced by movies and memes, I’m on a mildly higher alert not to do anything stupid and exercise a skoosh more caution.
It’s 50 degrees F out in Ashlandia. One of those gorgeous blue skies that look bottomless. Not a cloud present to witness sunrise. The sun’s angle has changed. Beams no longer charge through the eastern windows. They make their appearance through a southern window and then shift to the east as the sun clears the mountains and trees. Gonna be 80 F today, a comfortable autumn day.
My wife declared that autumn has officially begun. How did she know? She grinned bigly: “My feet are cold when I go to bed, so I put socks on until they warm up. That’s how I know it’s fall.”
Ah, we all have our mysterious ways, don’t we?
I’ve been reading about Trump supporters and the comparison to Hitler’s supporters. Although there is a segment of Trump supporters who wave NAZI flags, I understand why many people don’t get the Hitler comparison. Hitler’s legend is steeped with history over rounding up and killing people, particularly Jews. A warmonger, he broke treaties and ruthlessly attacked other nations.
I read of people saying, “Trump is nothing like that. He’s not rounding anyone up. He’s not anything like Hitler, and we’re not anything like Germany. This is the United States! That can’t happen here.”
Yes, they’re looking at Hitler’s later years. Those who read and study what Hitler did in the early years can build a solid comparison between his growth and Trump’s popularity. They can point at the disenfranchised feeling pervading Germany after WW I and note how rural, white, and Christian voters experience something of the same, feeling ignored and left behind. They can address how Trump, like Hitler, made promises and accusations that gave these people hope.
Of course, in the United States, there is a swath of powerful white men and Evangelicals who expoit Trump and the right-wing disenfranchised. They’re wealthy, powerful, and want more. Besides that band, there are some who are attracted to the Trump brand of GOP reactionaryism because they are hateful, sexist, racist, and resentful, and a few who tag along because they don’t know what the hell is really going on.
You always see that last in these groups in later interviews. “I was just going along. I didn’t mean to kill anyone. Everyone was doing it. I just got caught up in it.” Or, the more commonly heard refrain later, “I was just following orders.”
As for it not being possible in the United States, consider how often Trump makes threats to prosecute or imprison political enemies, claiming in essence that if they don’t support him, they hate America. Consider how often he encourages his base not to trust the Democrats and liberals, how they’re responsible for everything terrible happening. Consider how he claims ‘the Left’ has weaonized the DOJ to go after him. And if they ‘go after him, they’ll go after you.’ Consider how often his supporters robustly cheer and amplify these messages. Consider how the majority of the GOP goes along with him, refusing to check his inflammatory rhetoric, and how they stacked the Supreme Court to support him.
Then tell me again how this can’t happen in the United States.
Moving on.
Today’s song is by Bakar. “Hell N Back” is out of 2019. Has a throwback mellow sound, slightly jazzy, but definitely chill. I enjoy the song but the question is, why did The Neurons plug it into the morning mental music stream (Trademark everything). This song is about being alone and realizing it later, looking back at how someone’s presence helped them, but also, how they used drugs to have a good time. But something about it cooks up my own sense of ‘being saved’ by my wife, how she helps me keep in check against my own worst assaults on myself and my sense of who I am. Why is it coming today? Is it just generated by a sense of change in the air, perhaps from the blue wave’s rising energy, or more merely the change of season, or from the great joy and satisfaction from my novel writing? Perhaps, and more likely, it’s a kick from all three combining in subtle ways to stimulate hormones that raise my elation and hopes. Perhaps some unknown stars and planets are aligning to make me feel strong and more hopeful.
Or maybe it’s just my imagination, or part of a regular cycle of hormones just being felt more acutely.
Be strong, and stay positive. Vote blue in 2024. Here’s the chill music. I’ll sip more coffee and listen. Cheers
Thursday’s Wandering Thoughts
Whenever I go shopping alone and I’m tasked with picking up something for my wife, it feels like the stakes soar. I must find that product. I must get the right one.
It usually takes a while. Especially if it’s a product she needs but doesn’t have a sample to show me. I’m visual.
On today’s mission, I suggested that I should take my phone and take photos to send home. I was joking and left without my phone. I should’ve had my phone.
Yes, I should’ve had the phone.
Well, I do have the receipt and can take it back.
Thursday’s Theme Music
Mood: Fallandfell
Today is Thursday, September 12, 2024. A chilly morning here in Ashlandia, the rain has stopped and the sun is crowning over obstacles, trying to toast us a little today. Right now, it’s 54 F, and the high won’t wander much more than the low seventies.
Yesterday was supposed to see us in the upper seventies. We never made that mark at my place. When I was out writing, rain was dumping on the intersection where the coffee shop sits. Like, wow, very cool to see the silver bullets splashing up on the soaked asphalt and cement. Heavy streams built up fast, gushing into sewers. But driving home, just a four minute event, I was quickly out of the rain; we didn’t see that rain event at our place. Weather can be fickle like that.
The cats took to the rain like cats who don’t like water. After some feeble efforts to assert himself as an outdoor animal, Papi stretched out in front of the fireplace. Although it wasn’t on, it has a pilot light when I lit a few days ago, so it emits some heat. He stayed there for hours, deeply asleep. Tucker (pronounced Tuck-ah) on the other hand headed for the bed and sacked out.
Last night at the beer gathering, a small group ended up discussing birds. One asked about robins and their migration habits. Like me, he’d been taught in grade school that robins fly away for the winter. Like many life aspects, it gets more complicated than that. Our retired biology professor recounted that a friend of his did several bird counts at a slough for several years and discoverved exactly where the local robin population went each winter, living off various winter berries.
Other than that, we talked about the election and the debate, and the vice president’s pearl earrings. You now, on the right, they believe those were audio devices, giving Vice President Harris an affair advantage over Trump. That’s why he did so poorly. Because how else could he have done so poorly when she did so well? Yes, that was morning snark, undiluted by coffee.
The Neurons fired up Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble from 1989 in the morning mental music stream (Trademark caught). The song is “Crossfire”. It seemed to come into mind as I gazed across the valley. The air feels like autumn but most of the trees didn’t get the text in this area. And then I just sort of mused about how we were caught between the two seasons. And ‘lo, “Crossfire” began playing. I always particularly enjoyed the lines, “Money tight, nothing for free. Won’t somebody come and rescue me.” Used to sort of identify with it.
Stay positive, be strong, lean forward, and vote blue in 2024. Breakfast has been consumed; so has some coffee. Time to get up and do things. Here’s the music. Cheers
Wednesday’s Political Thoughts
NYTimes article today:
Pundits Said Harris Won the Debate. Undecided Voters Weren’t So Sure.
“She still has to impress me,” said Ms. Ali, 19. As someone who recently moved into her own place off-campus and has had to buy groceries for the first time, Ms. Ali said she wanted to hear Ms. Harris speak more about housing costs and inflation. “I’m still deciding,” she said as the debate neared its end.
Seriously? And she heard something from Trump that reassured her?
Keilah Miller, 34, who lives in Milwaukee, grew intrigued by Ms. Harris too. Ms. Miller said she had voted Democratic in past presidential elections but decided to stop voting altogether about a year ago. Her own situation, and that of other Black women in Milwaukee, had not improved, she said.
On Tuesday, she felt nudged unexpectedly toward Mr. Trump.
“Trump’s pitch was a little more convincing than hers,” Ms. Miller said. “I guess I’m leaning more on his facts than her vision.”
Facts? Trump’s pitch? What facts, what pitch? Project 2025? The fake narrative that immigrants are eating pets in Ohio, or the false one about “abortion after birth being legal in six states”?
Mr. Henderson, who voted for President Barack Obama and then for Mr. Trump, allowed that Mr. Trump “came off as crazy,” but he was no different from his appearances at rallies and in interviews.
His answers on Ukraine were weak, he said, but Mr. Trump successfully attacked Ms. Harris on the border and immigration. While the vice president gave better answers on abortion and race, he said, she did not get into specifics about her tax plans for parents or small businesses.
As he watched post-debate commentary on cable news, Mr. Henderson said he bristled at the pundits who widely panned Mr. Trump’s performance. Had they watched the same debate, he wondered?
Yes, did this man, this undecided voter, watch the same debate as the rest of us? He acknowledged that Trump acted crazy but seems to be okay with a crazy president.
I just don’t get their logic. It seems like they’re trying hard to come across as thoughtful and impartial, but I end up seeing them as short-sighted, misguided, and uninformed. Fer instance, Mr. Henderson, did you know that a bi-partisan bill for the border had been worked out and that Trump ordered it nixed because he didn’t want Democrats to be successful?
Sigh. Moving on.
Michael Seidel, writer 