Braids

 

Way to haunt me in my dreams last night. Seriously. (Not Seriously, figuratively.) That was awesome. (It wasn't. And before you clamor UNFAIR I know that it wasn't anyone's fault but my own. It was my dream, after all. But bear with me here: {being a dick is the fundamen tall of maskedmandom!})

Do you ever have those dreams where people ask you things that you don't know? People in your dream know things that you don't know, what's with that?! And then later in the dream they tell you the thing you didn't know, or couldn't remember, and you know they are right. That ever happen to you?

Last night I dreamed that I was at a live concert, but since I don't go to live concerts anymore the dream shifted and I was watching a live concert recording, on youtube. Watching youtube in a balcony booth at the opera, and my date was wearing those little quaint opera glasses to see the laptop on which we were watching (hereafter: McLappy). When I borrowed the glasses to see for myself however, within the lenses was a sepiatoned motion picture reel of Diora Baird stripping while some song about the Old West and trains played, or rivers... and there was a old preacher with a beard there saying something from the Bible.

"Exalt not thyself, lest thou fall"
-Sirach

Of course, what we dream, and how we remember those dreams, and how we write those remembrances down and post them online and read those posts aloud to disinterested loved ones, may be a major clue toward revealing our future selves...
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..........not sure where I was going with that. But HEY! let me tell you a story: The other morning I was sitting around popping my lips when my ________ friend Henry showed up asking what was doing.
“What's doing?” Henry asked. Nothing was doing. We listened to the new Decemberists album and smoked some pot. Laughed scads. (I jotted this down in my notebook like it was key: “Does the name Pavlov ring any bells?” -Henry) Talked about women and music and then decided to go for a drive out to place where we could go for a walk.

He was wearing a green woolen sweater that seemed to attract the little listless blue snowflakes falling ponderously, as if almost reluctant, to reach the ground. Henry asked "So what's on our agenda for the day?"  There was no agenda for the day.  We started walking through the old wanton wing of the city.

This neighborhood was dying or dead fifteen years ago, now it thrives, having found new life in the shell of old forms.  Most of the businesses along the street were housed in old brick or stone buildings, many of them with the second and third floors rented out as small, dingy apartments. The sidewalk however, was busy with young vibrant people, most of them skinny college-looking girls and their attendant shaggy boyfriends with fringy beards. On the corner of the bright Sunday street we ran into a sidewalk traffic jam of people, most of them bundled up tight and, milling around a performer on stilts dancing and juggling in front door of a small café. The man was tall and skinny, taller still due to the stilts, and he did various canned magic tricks like pulling a coin from a woman's ear, cupping it in his hand and producing a gold-coloured rose.

“I think he would be what's called a thaumaturgist."
“Remember that thing you wrote about the darkness?” he asked, making no attempt to conceal his lack of paying attention to what I had said.
I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice. “Yes” I remembered.

I miss her all the time. And I hate to say this but over time its lessening. I miss her and I am scared by this lessening as if it means my love wasn't really ever real. But loss it is and loss it remains.

A solid emptiness.

Its worse at night. The world uneasily dark, a catalyst that quickens the spiraling searches for any distraction. There's nothing to distract you. The din of culture — the constant buzzing whirring noises of the world that surround us — all stopped, and even streetlights through the window seem to reinforce some strange silence within you, a hollowness.

I reach out into the cold, turn on a single lamp and write my dreams. I write her letters, speaking to her as if she were still here, though I am alone in an otherwise dark room. A single light in single room, so so far away from anything warm or bright.

We walked on then, past the extemporaneous performer and his motley curios, into and across a park accumulating a soft dandruff of snowfall and contemplation. The path wend round a frozen pond where I kneeled to finger the snow, drawing signs and ciphered symbols.

"Why would you write that?"
"Because of sadness."
"Are you really that sad?"
"No, but you are. And that's why you read it, and reacted to it like you did. That's why I wrote that."

He stared into the blank frozen pond, looking painfully sagacious, poignantly deep, pointedly reverent, and vanquished.

I walked home alone. No one calls. It's only half-true that I wrote the passage in question for Henry's sadness. Actually it stemmed from a bit of overheard conversation years ago at the grocery store. Two old women loading their items onto the checkout counter were speaking about a man they knew whose wife of forty years had recently died (a widower as the parlance dances,) and one commented that although he had unmistakeably been keeping active, the man was still consumed by his grief. This man reported to her, I heard, that no matter how much you do to keep yourself occupied during the days it makes no difference, "the nights're awful quiet."

Robert Frost wrote "Something we were withholding made us weak/ Until we found out that it was ourselves" long before I was born. Long before I met the first demon to haunt me (in its initial incarnation, dressed fashionably in the icy dregs of the January winds of 1998) or the second lurid monster to thwart my ascendant pitch toward apotheosis (the thick teenage braids of hair, black curly tresses and ropes falling across that pubescent girl's shoulders & touching the brim of my deskfront in 1st period Geometry)


 

Women and the Seasons. Having fought these demons now for years, both in sequence and in tandem, I can see how true Mr. Frost was. They are the same. They are me. Here comes the season again, I say to myself. That confounded dragon: winter. All things are wan. I want to scream and whine and suffocate and choke and die, and this all before morning coffee. The best way to fight this beast is through routine. I know this, I have learned this through many battles lost, I must plan my days meticulously, waking every morning to the sign that says 'Take Joy' and doing the hundred tedious little things throughout the day that reinforce the status quo.

Then comes spring and nature's song is lust. I meet a girl, there are always girls, and to impress them I bend over backwards and curse the routine. Girls like the routine but they also want me to be the endlessly playful, ever inventive and always daring rogue in the mask. The spontaneous improvisational gentleman, whom I become and it destroys me. They tell me I'm not what they expected. Not what they are looking for. I should do more, I think, and this thought is depressing. Soon I am alone again and it is winter. I make for myself a comfortable routine, knowing I should do more.

Tonight as I drift again toward sleep I fear I have done too much today already. I listened to the new album by that band she loved. I stalked her friend's boyfriends on Myspace. Someone passed who looked like her and I fear sleep where she haunted my dreams last night with reproving eyes and accusations worse than life.

It's the fear that is the monster. I'm afraid of winter and so it taunts me. I fear the girl in my dreams because they are me, and I am harsher on myself than anyone.

I don't blame you. Really. I know that my external-evolution will have to come from internal-involution, and that's a hard pill to swallow so instead I passed the buck. I'm sorry. I that hope you are well.

 

Tonight I hope to sleep. As Dylan might've said “Take me then disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind, down through the foggy ruins of tunnelled time far past the frightened frozen leaves, the proud and haunted trees, out to the extent of the winds reach, far beyond the writhing twists of sorrow, to dance beneath the diamond starry sky free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by circus sands, with all fate and memory driven deep beneath the waves, let me forget about today until tomorrow” for in this prison I have promised myself the freedom to live, and so it shall be, and I am not alone, there are three of us, you and I and the story that I am telling. A story alive and therefore prone to the wants and needs that any man may have, and therefore let us start tomorrow by giving him sex.