Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
There had been decisions before, but things change, so new decisions were reached and accepted. What had been important became meaningless as priorities sifted like sand dunes.
Others ran into him, exchanging greetings, but then, privately told one another, “He’s really changed,” “Yes, he let himself go.”
They saw it as a bad thing.
Your life’s song flows through you, notes and chords struck by your routines and emotions. Sometimes, though, in your life of bent notes and thundering crescendos of cymbals and drums, you hunt different notes, just for a day, something to hear so that you can appreciate your life’s song more when you resume it, like maybe a piano concerto.
It’s like an interlude.
I think of it as the old dream, but I recall it, too, as the star dream and the blue dream. I’ve had it, or some variation, since I was a teenager, at least in my mind. My memories can be faulty, but I seem to remember being in basic training and having this dream, and remembering that I had it when I was in high school, after I moved in with my father. That thought also brings the dream a new label, the transition dream. I seem to dream it when my life is going through a change. I haven’t had it in a long while.
Roughly, because there are slight variations, but this is the dream experienced or remembered last night, I see a ridge of purple-blue bare mountains. A clear sky is shifting from azure to indigo.
At first I see a single, amazingly bold, bright star above the mountains. Then, I’m on a mountain.
I’m looking at my hand. I’ve made a fist around a cold chunk of lapis lazuli. A large piece, although it’s been tumbled and is smooth, one end is rough. I always think, it was tumbled, and then broke in half.
After seeing the lapis in my fist, I look up. The sky has darkened into a shade of midnight blue. Millions or more stars and galaxies light the sky. It’s so amazing, it transfixes me into staring and wondering about all the existences beyond now.
The dream ends.
I always feel young but pensive in this dream, and elated but thoughtful when I awaken. I don’t know what change I’m going through now. I’m not moving or starting a new job. One of my cats is probably dying (I’d be surprised if he’s alive when this year ends), but that change affects him more than me. I can argue, though, no, it’s the survivors who remain behind after another dies who are more affected (as far as we know), because we, left behind, are dealing with a void.
Writing about it helps me think and understand. I remember thinking the other day, in a moment of pique, crystallizing a decision that I am re-inventing myself. Perhaps I’ve triggered some internal change, summoning the dream.
Maybe it’s all just wistful thinking and vivid imagination. Perhaps that’s all life is.
I had multiple dreams last night. Most remain in pieces in my mind like debris after a storm. The essences:
Not much further information is available on the murder dream. Awakening and thinking about it, I attribute it more to my writing muses than an intention to kill another person. I’m always thinking about escaping, surviving, killing, investigating, flying, traveling, exploring, and robbing places. They’re exercises for my imagination, IMO.
The cat dream was a simple anxiety dream. Quinn hasn’t been well. His breathing bothered us. We’d endured a summer of wildfire smoke and hazardous air, so I put his breathing problems down to that. We’d been keeping him inside and addressing his breathing issues. When he didn’t improve after the air improved, I thought I’d take him in for an antibiotic shot.
But the vet found a lump on Quinn’s neck, so we’re going through the challenge of treating him, keeping him hydrated, and feeding him. We’re not certain of his issue, yet. Never a large cat, he dropped two pounds and now weighs just five. He’s mostly perky, though, but not eating and drinking enough on his own. I take comfort and hope in signs like him rubbing up against me, jumping on my lap, stretching, trying to claw furniture, and yawning.
Meanwhile, I’m going through the process of letting him go. I’ve endured this with other pets, so I understand some of the emotional, physical, and intellectual dynamics. It’s always different, of course, and it’s never easy.
I enjoyed the game show dream. First, you’d press a button to start the big wheel spinning, and press the button again to stop it. The big wheel had activities and numbers. If it landed on the activity, you did it. Doing the activity, such as twenty push-ups, authorized you to rob a competitor by taking a token or moving them back by a spin on the punishing wheel.
If the big wheel landed on a number, that was the number of spaces you’d move. Climbing, crawling, jumping, and swinging on ropes were required to move along squares. After moving forward and stopping on a square, you were asked a question. Fall to answer it correctly — it was timed, but you had three chances — meant you faced the punishment wheel.
Come to think of it, there was a television audience cheering us on. Writing about it today prompts comparisons to an updated game of Life combined with Trival Pursuit, which sums up my writing life, I think.
Spinning wheels, killing time, chasing trivia, and hoping to advance, it’s a writer’s life.
This song’s release and popularity in 1975 began changing my thinking. While I’d always tried to see others’ point of view, I often failed, and slipped easily into the comfort of being me, sure of what was going on, and surer about how others live. I had some inklings that all was not as I thought from newscasts about riots, war, politics, and social upheaval, and I knew from friends, movies, and reading that lives often appear to be fine on the outside but it was rank darkness behind the scenes.
Then came this Janis Ian song, “At Seventeen”. As a boy, I thought the girls had all of the breaks. They controlled it all. We boys were the ones struggling with social graces and talking to girls. I didn’t know what it meant to a girl to meet a boy who seemed to like who and said he would call her, and then didn’t. I didn’t know what it meant for her to watch others being chosen, or how difficult it was, coping with body changes, and struggling with social perceptions and self-perception.
Life is usually more nuanced, layered, and complicated than many realize. We think everyone is the same, that all words mean the same, that every action carries the same weight. That these things aren’t true are lessons I keep learning and forgetting.
Emphysema, they told him. Eyes twinkling, he chuckled with charming nonchalance (gasping for air when he did), because that was his style, and because he already knew. “Tell me something I don’t know,” he said after the chuckle, although the panic in his gut said, “This is no joke.”
They put him on all that shit, and gave him oxygen to suck on, and advised him of the things that he must give up. He gave up the shit and kept the rest. Yeah, there was unbearable pain every day and hour, but it was the loneliness and regrets who were the killers.
We’ve lost our twinkling star. It came (at last, we thought with some relief even as we mourned, because the last few years were so difficult for her and her family), but it came at last, a few weeks short of her hundred and first birthday.
We think and talk about the amazing person we knew, and all the things she did in the thirteen years that we’ve known her. She’d wanted to be a comedian when she was in her teens — that would have been around 1935 — and loved hamming it up for us, and we loved her for that humor.
She also loved ice cream, and family. If you wanted to fire up that twinkle in her eyes, just ask her if she’d like to have some ice cream.
She marched in parades for social justice and equality. She put her name on petitions for change. We thought about all the change and upheaval she saw in her hundred years, the wars that she witnessed, and the others that she lost through death, and wondered if upheaval isn’t our natural state.
She was such a cool, friendly, and happy person, but this is life. You meet people, and eventually one of you goes away, leaving the other to remember and wonder.
I’ve noticed that as I’ve grown older, the span of years among my friends is much greater. I have several good friends who are older than my parents. That enlivens some conversations when I say, “Mom is getting older.”
I struggle with imagining having a friend who was twenty-five years older than me when I was, say, five, but if I wrote a novel about it, I’d probably call it, Her Oldest Friend.
Inflammation surged in her right shoulder through several days, demoralizing her. Pain afflicted her with the smallest motion, dressing, cleaning, even brushing her teeth and combing her hair. Trying to think through options, she put bread in the toaster and considered conversation with her rheumatologist. He disliked giving cortisone shots. What else was there for the agony?
The toast popped up. Flinching her shoulder at the sound, she cried out in pain and fell to the floor, where all she could do was laugh and cry. Sometimes, that’s all that’s left.
Watching others cope with diseases and declining health, slowly moving hunched bodies as they struggle to remember simple words and phrases and master common movements, do you ever wonder, what’s secretly going on inside yourself that’s waiting to come out?
It’s like looking for the monster hiding under the bed.
Michael Seidel, writer 