Tag: change

Dreams of Change

Last night’s dreams were all about change. Of what I remember, one was a vignette where I made coin change for people, including my wife and other family members. Another sequence featured me searching for and trying to change my clothes, which originally were white and light gray, and then trying to change my shoes. That moved into me trying to change the cat kibble, and being totally confused about what I was doing and why I was doing it. An additional series had me helping others change things. In one, I helped my father and friends trying to change a tire.

They’re laughable in the morning light. I realized that each scene and story shared elements.

  1. I was confused about what I was doing and why I was doing it.
  2. In the end, nothing that I set about changing required changed.

It was amazing. I’d make change for peoples’ dollars, and then they’d discover that they had the right change and didn’t need anything. They’d thank me and move on, leaving me standing there with change. The tire that we were trying to change was okay, just a little low on air, giving us a laugh. My clothes were the best choice, so I ended up not changing them, and the people with the other clothes suggestion left, and the cat kibble bowls were full, and the cats were eating them, so, confused, I realized, nothing was required of me.

Hmm, I wonder what message I’m trying to convey to myself with this night of cryptic dreams?

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Orange

Yes, I’m wearing orange today.

I don’t belong to a political party. I support those who will speak truth, and support freedom, justice, and equality for every person. Neither the G.O.P. nor Democratic Party does that well in America in recent years. The Green Party and Libertarian Party try, and they have some good ideas, but lack the political will.

I like what America’s founders set out to do. The Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights are fine documents, with great aspirations for what we as a nation can be. It is not a perfect document. Neither were the people who wrote and ratified it. As the Preamble says, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

They were forming a more perfect union. It wasn’t perfect, and it isn’t perfect. It was not meant to be never changed, for the founders recognized they weren’t creating a perfect union, and built several mechanisms for change into it. They recognized that not many ideas or plans begin as perfect. You do the best you can to give yourself a place to start. If you want for the perfect plan, you’ll probably never begin.

I support the idea of a more perfect union. I want to secure the blessing of liberty for ourselves and posterity. To achieve this, we can’t support or give in to lies, fear, or oppression. To continue the pursuit of a more perfect union began over two hundred years ago, we must continue to address wrongs and injustice, and change and adjust  without abandoning the basic premise that everyone is equal, and have certain rights that others cannot abridge nor abrogate. Until that level, we continue to seek a more perfect union.

Which is why I wear orange today. 

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How

Just before his grandmother died, she told him stories about her grandmother. Her grandmother had gone across America in a covered wagon, traveling from the Appalachian Mountains to Seattle. It’d been a long and bumpy journey. She didn’t remember how long it took. She didn’t like it there, so she took the train back. It was hot. Black smoke and cinders filled the car whenever they opened the windows for a breeze, so they kept the windows closed and dripped with sweat.

His father heard the story and and remembered his father telling him about driving a Chevy station wagon across the United States. They’d started in Indiana, where it was raining, and drove across the flat plains of corn to the towering Rocky Mountains and up them, and down into California. It took five days to reach San Francisco. They stayed in motels every night. There was a swimming pool at one. Gas was less than two dollars a gallon.

His father’s brother remembered flying from San Francisco to Washington, and how it took almost a day to get there. He remembered looking out the window and watching the ground roll past as the engines roared and the plane climbed into the sky. He remembered the clunk of the wheels going up into the aircraft’s belly, and the change in the engines’ whine, and the wisps of clouds slipping past the windows. They’d had to be at the airport a few hours early, and then they stood in line to check their bags, and stood in lines to go through security, and stood in line to get on the plane, and stood in line to get off and get their bags.

He’d asked each of them, what’d you do when you traveled like that? Well, they said, we sang, and ate, and talked, played games, read books, watched television, listened to music, slept, looked at the scenery, and met people.

He remembered all these things in the time it took him to teleport from his home to the teleport center and out the other end at the moon colony. His last thought before he glanced out at Earth and went into his meeting was, what he would tell his children in his old age, and how they would be doing what he was doing now?

 

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And Another Thing

Someone asked me if I could tell them where there’s an “ATM machine” nearby. 

WTF? Really? What do you think that M in ATM stands for? Money?

That kicked in a memory stream. I remember when ATMs first came out.

Yes, I am that old, children.

(I also remember when cable sprawl began, and when we started having color televisions, microwaves, and all the kinds of satellite things we now have. Get over it.)

We thought ATMs were great. Before them, you had to park, go inside, get in line, and take care of business, or drive into a line, if there were drive-through tellers, wait, and take care of business. Whichever option you chose, waiting was involved.

There was a forty dollar limit on what we could withdraw from ATMs back then. Forty dollars was a lot more money in that era. A tank of gas cost me less than ten, or maybe just over ten, dollars. Coffee – hello? – was a dollar a cup. Believe it, children.

Banks touted ATMs as a wonderful invention. It would save them so much money, and they would pass all those savings on to you through increased interest rates on your accounts and certificates of deposit. You could get your money from any ATM. Isn’t that great? Yes, it was wonderful!

Then, the banks and credit unions started complaining about the unanticipated costs. There were lines at the ATMs because there were longer lines in the bank, because they’d cut back on tellers to reduce overhead. The number of ATM transactions started to be capped. Going over that number meant you’d be penalized.

Then came the networks. Networks were formed to share the costs and reduce the burdens – for the financial institutions. What it meant for you was that if an ATM wasn’t in your network, you’d be charged for the luxury of using that machine to access your money. Piss me off?

You betcha. We were always wandering around towns, looking for ATMs and asking, “Is that one in our network?” Everyone had their eyes peeled for ATMs, crying out, “There’s one!” Then we’d aim the car that way. Yes, children, this was before ATMs came to be in other businesses, or stores. This was also before debit cards.

The ATMs typically had a list of networks that the institution belonged to. You’d need to figure out if one of those networks included your institution. If you couldn’t find one, you could be charged, with good ol’ Bank of America (who else, right?) leading the way in outrageous fees. Eventually, the banks and credit unions were forced to warn you if you were going to be charged, and accept that fee before going on.

Of course, the reverse of this was not having ATMs, but depending on your bank and credit union by writing checks, or going in, standing in the lobby for a while, and withdrawing some funds. That wasn’t fun, either.

So, even with my complaints (I am Michael, hear me complain), the ATMs are a lot better than the way it was. Just remember to heed the unspoken warning, “User beware.”

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Three Strange Dreams

Three strange dreams afflicted me last night, one after enough in a line of dreams.

  • I dreamed I’d removed my penis from my body and was making pencil sketches of it that I shared with others. There was no blood loss or discomfort. I was showing the drawings to friends and families, and was holding my penis in my hand. They never noticed that I was holding my penis, but were surprised and appalled by my sketches (which were very realistic, in that style of drawing that I used to do).
  • The second dream placed me in an uncomfortable backwoods setting. I was with people that reminded me of the folks I knew in West Virginia. These folks are hard, shallow, and bitter people, with little empathy. Their circumstances might make them that way (although I also think, if it’s so fucking terrible, why don’t you leave and find something better?). I was looking for change to make a call. They weren’t concerned with that, but instead obsessed with how ignorant I was. This was because I’d found change in a stream (a quarter and a penny), but a dead body was in the stream. They thought I was going to get sick by getting in water with a dead body. I insisted on doing it because I needed the change. I thought there was more there, so after looking elsewhere, I returned to the stream and searched. As I did, I looked at the dead body, which turned out to be a large, black dog. I wondered how he died and arrived in the water, and hoped that he hadn’t suffered.
  • In the third dream, I was in an all-white place, like a ship, wearing an all-white flight suit. Others were there, dressed in the same way. There was no one familiar to me but I knew them in the dream. We were concerned mostly with the toilets, and which toilet to use, and why the toilets was dirty, and whether the toilets worked. I was less concerned about this, and kept trying to direct the conversation and activity to something other than fucking toilets, but it was a challenge; these people were obsessed with the damn toilets. We finally got around to other things, like, hey, we’re supposed to be flying. An involved conversation about who was supposed to be doing what, like flying, developed. I was dismayed and perplexed by how the others all wanted to assign people narrow tasks. Moving off by myself, I went ahead and flew. That impressed others, who weren’t aware that I could fly, and peppered me with questions about how I’d learned and what else I could do. Their questions amazed me. I told them, it wasn’t hard, I’d always known how, people only made it hard for themselves by thinking they had to be special to do things.

Yeah, weird dreams. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

 

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Monday’s Theme Music

I like songs about change. This particular song, “Change,” by Blind Melon, has lyrics that cling to my dreamer’s mind.

So I want to write my words on the face of today.

And then they’ll paint it

And oh as I fade away,

They’ll all look at me and they’ll say,

Hey look at him and where he is these days.

When life is hard, you have to change.

I heard the song the year it was released. I thought the lyrics haunts the shadows of our existence. We strive to live, and some attempt to make a difference, but we’re such small drops of beings in such a huge ocean of beings. The song’s lyrics seemed sharp as volcanic rocks when Shannon Hoon, the group’s singer, died three years later. He’d been fighting addictions and substance abuse. He had to change, but couldn’t. Happens to a lot of us.
In the era of the Internet of Things, change is a speeding variable to modern life. See an actor and wonder, like the lyrics, where is he/she these days? To the Google machine to see. No, they’re not dead; they just faded away.
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Saturday’s Theme Music

I’ve always enjoyed the domestic image this song, “Our House,” produces. Whoever wrote it was looking back on a working class household. The song was released in 1982. Hearing the lyrics, I wonder how much of it would be written differently. Would Dad still put on his Sunday best? Does Mother still iron his shirt before he goes to work?

Something to think about.

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