Week In Review

Lately I've been checking my e-mail to see if I've got an acceptance for a manuscript I sent last January.  The editor said they'd get back to me in May, and here it is the first third of the month.  I've got my fingers crossed, and I am trying my hardest not to get my hopes up. 

Last Friday, after increasing symptoms and difficulties starting, the starter mortor in our car went out.  We'd scheduled maintenance, but it wasn't until Monday.  Luckily, I was at work, and I was able to get a tow to the garage, but it meant that I couldn't take The Child to see Avengers: Endgame.  Waiting in the parking lot, with movie tickets to a show we wouldn't see, felt like it should have been part of "Traveling to the Airport" anxiety dream, but all I really felt was resigned.  The Child was totally fixated, not on the car, nor the fact that he'd have to walk two miles home from school, but on when we'd see the movie.  

Saturday was a new moon day, and I'm sure we did stuff, but I think we were really tired.  Also, there was a fatal shooting in the parking lot where I normally park for work.  

Saw Endgame Sunday morning.  Despite all my efforts, I really had to use the bathroom about a half-hour before the movie ended.  I liked Avengers: Infinity War more than Endgame, partially because Endgame was more focused on the end arc of Captain America and Ironman, and I would have liked more and better treatment of some of the other Avengers.  And while the fatness as an outer sign of a character's emotional distress in the movie has been done before in the comics (New Mutants c 1985), it seemed like lazy shorthand that could have been addressed by good acting.

Drove out of the mall just in time to see the staging of an "Oregon Women for Trump Flag Waving Rally."  And counter-protest.  The Child and I paused our discussion of the History of the X-Men and New Mutants to have an exchange ending with me not pulling the steering wheel out of the dashboard and saying, "while I think they're the Pawns of Evil, I'm glad they're exercising their constitutional right to freedom of expression."  I was surprised at my visceral and tribal reacton them.   And then we continued with the Marvel History of 1980's X-men Era (Muslim Travel Ban, er, I mean...) Mutant Registration Laws.  Probably five minutes after we drove over the Harlow Road Bridge, the two groups closed it as they shouted at each other over a line of Springfield Police who were there to keep the two groups from rioting.  

Monday.  Between car rental, car maintenance, and a lot of driving, I somehow managed to get the car back from the garage in time to pick up The Child from school.  Went to the gym and managed most of the workout -- I usually spend some time on the sideways elliptical, but I ran out of time. 

Tuesday I did the final polishing on two short stories -- mostly it's just little tweaks to make character motivation, staging, and plot less confusing.  I was working in the back lounge of a little bar downtown. In the past the lounge has been just me writing, with occasional other patrons.  This week the lounge was Therapy Session Central.  Loud Therapy.  I was glad I had headphones.  Phrases like, "abandonment issues," "betrayed by the community," and "what am I doing this for?" did seep in over the Stary Olsa I was writing to.  Mark says I should have just transcribed the conversations to use for dialog. 

Wednesday I did a final cleaning pass on the short story manuscripts and sent one out.  Then I went to the gym and managed a full -- if out of the usual order while I waited for equipment -- workout.

The tree pollen is very thick this year.  Usually, only my eyes are itchy, but this year I've had more than my fair share of sinus headaches and scratchy throats.  The fatigue is the worst.   April was very wet, but the last ten or so days have been sunny with highs in the 70's and 80's, which I suppose it contributing to the particulates.  I'm hoping we get some rain soon, because the wet April plants are drying out and creating a fire hazard.  Mark purchased an air filter for our room, which I think helps, but Wednesday night Mark was so congested that his snoring forced me to the couch.

Thursday morning I woke up early enough (5:30) to see a wan Venus in the eastern sky.  I'd flirted with getting up at 5 (thanks, cats) and managed to see Mars, but it had dimmed a half hour later and I couldn't find it.   As I was brewing tea for an outside writing session, I checked my e-mail, and saw that I had a 13-hour rejection for the drawing room short story I'd sent out the day before.  The market is very fast and very hard to get into, so I guess I'm not too surprised, but I was sort of hoping they'd look at it for a few more days.

Channeling Norman Thayer

In the 1990's, when I lived in Arizona, I used to skydive. Yes, it's true: for about two years every other week or so I'd go to a drop zone, spend too much money, and throw myself out of an airplane at an altitude of 13,000 feet. It was lots of fun.

One time, I was practicing back-flips in the air. I exited the plane and was falling through the sky. Freestyle skydiving was the New Thing, and I was practicing something called a stag pose (one foot down, one foot back, arms out in what I think was supposed to look like deer antlers). Then it was time for a back-flip. "Okay!" I said to myself. "I'm going to do a back-flip." I continued to fall through the air in a box stance. "Back-flip!" I had just practiced them on the ground twenty minutes ago. "No. Really; I'm going to do a back-flip now." And then the most curious thing happened.

A strong mental image appeared before my eyes, momentarily blocking out the Tucson mountains and the sun and the moon and the wispy clouds. In my mind's eye, I saw a string trailing along the ground--it disappeared into a dark hole.  I continued to fall a mile a minute through the sky.  Okay, I thought, I'm going to file this away for later and go back to stag poses.

On the ground, of course, I knew that jerking my knees to my chest in free-fall would cause a back-flip.  The next time around, I managed to one.  Memory and thinking were different while skydiving; I used to call time spent in free-fall "jumping into my sky-mind."  I think my sky-mind was using the image to say, "Look, I don't know what this phrase your saying means, so I'm going to use the symbol of strings into darkness to tell you."  Sometimes I could remember dreams of skydiving more clearly than actually skydiving.

Fast forward to 2018.  We were going to beach for the weekend. I volunteered to drive the first fairly straight part, from Eugene to Corvallis, because the winding coastal mountain roads bothers Mark's stomach less if he drives them. We had a short discussion about the merits of taking I-5 verses Highway 99W.

I got behind the wheel of our new car and adjusted the mirrors. It's different from the smaller car I've been driving for the last fifteen years. The newer car doesn't have a parking break lever: it's got a toggle that you have to press down to release the break or pull up to set--if I pretend the toggle switch is a break lever I can keep the break settings straight. It doesn't have an analogue speedometer dial: instead, it's got a digital readout. The clock is in the upper right-hand corner of a LCD screen instead of centered over an analog radio-CD player combo. The new car's body is just a little wider and longer than the old car, and the hood sits in a valley between two large headlight bulges--so there's a wider blind spot along the front sides of the car than I'm used to.

None of this is bad, only different--like wearing boots after wearing flip-flops. But it meant I'm thinking about how to drive the car instead of automatically driving it, sort of like thinking of e a c h  l e t t e r   i n   t h i s   s e n t e n c e   as I type it instead of wiggling my fingers and having whole words and phrases magically appear.

I signal, pull out, drive about a half block to a stop sign, and realize that A) I know I want to drive to Corvallis, but that B) I can't remember which way to turn to begin a trip I've made twelve times a year for the last twenty years. Some crossing pedestrians buy me time, and I play the journey backwards in my head, starting at Corvallis and heading past the airport toward Eugene. I can see a stretch of Highway 99W in my mind's eye, but I can't stitch the path from where I'm currently at a stop sign to the place on the highway. I tried again, and I get farther, to the Expressway, but I was still having an "A to B, B to C, therefore A to C" disconnect.

"Um," I said. "I've forgotten how to get to Corvallis." I heard those words come out of my mouth and tried not to freak out. "Which way do I turn?" Both ways seem equally wrong somehow. I'm hoped that going through the motions will jump-start the procedure.

"Are you impaired?" Mark asks. "Can you drive?"

"I'm fine," I said, although I felt like an Alzheimer's patent. "I just need to know which way to go."

"Turn left," he said, and I did. There was no resultant ah-ha moment as I drove along the street (in hindsight, we were facing east instead of west and I would have turned right then right again).

I played the travel tape in my head backward once more and the topology of the valley unfolded in my head like the full, four-part chorus of a song--but I needed to sing the opening verse, and I couldn't recall the first words.

I tried to recall harder, and the image of a dark hole opened up in my mind, with strings or highways disappearing into them.

I pulled the car to the side. "I still can't remember."

Mark and I traded spots, and as he took his usual route (I've never understood why he takes this particular way), I watched, and waited a few blocks for recognition. It's not exactly an ah-ha moment, more like a oh-right with a whole lot of "Holy crap, I'm going to become one of those Old People Who Have To Be Driven Everywhere Because They Get Lost And Had Their Driver's License Revoked." Before I'm 55.

Crap. Is this Golden Pond Norman Thayer Moment early-onset Alzheimer's? Is Mark going to have to watch over me so I don't wander? Should I send him away on a cool vacation now while I can still function on my own? Should I arrange a companion for him now so I can go into a Happy Memories Fake Village knowing he'll be with someone?  (My friend Ellen laughed and said "How like a Capricorn to order someone else's life from an old folk's home" when I shared this with her.)  Can I even afford a Happy Memories Fake Village from age 55 onward? Damn, how long did Terry Pratchett have to live once he got Alzheimer's? Damn, damn, damn.

Except... that string into a shadow image felt more like that sky-diving moment than like being lost. I knew where I was--but I was stuck trying to find the starting point in the procedure... sort of like getting stuck thinking too hard about the difference between the clutch, the brake, and the gas.

Maybe this is a Frankie from Grace and Frankie style stroke. Except that I can smile on both sides of my face and raise both arms. And I'm not a 80-something Lillian Tomlin.

Maybe it was state-dependent learning--a new environment (and starting east instead of west) interfered with the recall of a normally automatic behavior. Maybe thinking about driving instead of simply driving resulted in "choking" on automatic behavior. I'm going with this explanation, because the others rattle the hell out of me. When I correctly remembered when we hit the coastal highway in Philomath at 13th street, I felt a little better.

At a stop a couple of hours later, I thanked Mark for driving and he brushed it off with a "You've always had difficulties going places." (This is true; my Adventures in Geographical Impairment are a source of frequent mirth). "You're old, you had a brain-fart." And then he followed it up with a comparison between the look on my face and that of my Grandmother in one of her less lucid moments.  (Which made me feel oh-so-sexy....)

The next day, I drove us back home. Because I could. Because when you fall off a horse, you have to get back on.  And the next day after that, I'm drove the old car around Eugene and thought, cautiously, "Yeah. It was the car."

Writing Weekend with Ice

Went to the Gym Saturday afternoon.  About 300 calories on the Nordic Elliptical.  13x(30+40+50)lbs o the pec fly.  3x13x30lbs on the deltoid fly.  13x(50+60+70+80)lbs on the lat pull-down.  3x13 curls on the Roman chair.  3x13x30lbs on the barbell curl.  3x13x30lbs on the triceps pull-down.  5x5x5lbs on a sort of combination arm-flapping motion where I keep my elbows straight and move at the shoulders while alternating the dumbbell vertical or horizontal depending on how I rotate my humorous around my radius.

The gym was filled (or so it seemed) with humorless, square-jawed, blocky folks.  Groany McSlamweights was there (I am not sure why some folks have to sound like their making love when they lift weights), and at one point one of the attendants told him to tone it down. 

Writing:  I spent a lot of time editing; on the plus side, I have a rough first-draft of an opening chapter.  I managed about 800 new words.  I'm reminding myself that forward progress is progress... and right now I am more likely to reach my 90,000 word count by May 1 if I just write without using the backspace key.  I'm thankful for Scrivener, which allows me to break up my writing into scenes, vignettes, character sketches, and parts where I'm arguing with myself into separate, organizable sub-documents.   On days when I don't feel creative, I can always dive into the waiting drafts.  I think the pit-fall I have to be aware of is getting distracted with characters' back-stories... on one hand, it's useful to have some key scenes, but on the other, I'm wanting to start the story when the main characters are in their twenties, not their teens or childhoods.   

On the weather front, we woke up Sunday to a light frosting of snow, which melted, and then returned and then melted and returned again.  The Child was ecstatic at the prospect of a possible snow day (there's no school on Monday in any case) and of extorting the neighbors for money for shoveling drives.   When the snow fell, it came down in cakes of think flakes.  Later in the day, rain drizzled down, as if it came from a greenhouse mister, in a more typical Oregon February fashion.

Mark and I (OK, mostly Mark) cleaned out the garage, so we were able to actually get the car into it.  This enabled me to drive to work without having to scrape ice and snow off of the car.  The forecast warned about black ice on the roads, but the streets were mostly dry.

Dreams Featuring The Child

Driving the Car with The Child

I think the dream started here.  I was driving a car along city blocks in the dark.  I want to say it was before dawn, but it might have been the night.  What was important was that it was dark.  I made a right-hand turn onto a slightly busy street and realized A), I was in the back seat of the car and couldn't reach the controls, B) The Child was in the front passenger seat and would need to steer the car out of the  path of oncoming traffic.  

The Child was freaking out a little, and not able to drive, so I managed somehow (through dream fluidity) to  get back into the driver's seat and continue going.

Apartment Foyer with Mark

There's a break in the narrative.  I might have been coming home for a lunch break.  I sort of remember parking the car at some point, and I have a jumbled recollection of a dream setting that was a mash-up of our house, Mark's work, and a cafeteria.  I think it was a cold day.  

I'd come home for lunch.  Mark was home, too.  We had a short conversation about how our mornings had gone.  I started to change into different clothes and then it turned into a standing make-out session with Mark.  We somehow moved out of a bedroom/living-room and into a kind of entry hall: our door was in the middle of a long space with glass doors on either end; opposite our door was a bank of cash registers and vending machines, and a raised dining area.  There were three or four people at various tables, who were too busy eating or whatever to notice us.

We'd backed up against a vending machine or phone booth when I looked over Mark's shoulder and saw a generic dream guy (dark slacks, white shirt, blue striped business tie) from Mark's work walk through the doors.  He sort of saw us -- the recessed booth we were in blocked the view of us from about the waist down.  A startled, range of expressions crossed his face, that went something like "Ooh!  Whoops!  Oh my!  Where do I look?  Yikes, they see me seeing them.  Smile!  I'm going to pretend this didn't happen and go get lunch."

"Oh," I said, "I'd better get dressed."   Getting dressed in this case meant throwing my old purple-and-black cloak over my shoulders and holding it closed.  During the rest of the dream, I went back and forth wearing underwear, my regular bathrobe, or nothing under the cloak.

Lunch in my cloak.  With Hillary.

There was another break.  Somehow I was on a college campus (possibly Reed, only with less brick buildings), eating lunch with The Child and Hillary Clinton.  The sun was shining, the temperature was pleasant, the grass was green and flowers growing.  We had been walking, but found a space under a building to have a kind of private lunch.  I recall park benches of some sort, the space was dark, with a dry gravelly ground, sort of like being underneath a bridge or underpass.

Hillary and I were chatting, with occasional comments from The Child.  I think The Child said something a ten-year-old would say about The Joker.  I told a story about being at Reed, which involved me being the only guy on a road-trip with five women (there was an important reason that I was the only guy on this trip, but I don't recall what I was trying to tell Hillary).  Hillary asked The Child about his day.   The lunch was informal and friendly. 

And then it was time to go.  Hillary and The Child scrambled through a gap underneath the wall to the bright sunny campus outside.  I had to roll up my cloak around my mostly naked body and rolled on the ground under the wall.  

We chatted a bit as we walked.  I think there was another break because it was just The Child and me, when I realized I hadn't asked Hillary about her stance on NeoPaganism and then Hillary (in white) was on a bicycle in front of us.  

"Hang on, bud," I said,  "There's something I forgot to ask her." 

Politics and Religion

I caught up to her and said, "Mrs. Clinton, do mind if I ask you a campaign related question?" and proceeded to ask her what her stance on NeoPaganism was, which lead to a muddled explanation of what it was, with comparisons to Universalist Unitarians.  Meanwhile we're walking to her next appointment, and The Child is somewhere behind us.

I don't remember her answer exactly, but NeoPaganism wasn't on her radar, and she said something generically ecumenical.  "Oh, and it's time for my next appointment."  We walked into a wood-paneled classroom, which was also my place of employment.  It was 1:15.  My co-workers sat in a row of wooden lecture chairs (the kind with a little desktop built on the right side).  My boss was the instructor, and she was standing at the head of the class, looking at me with a controlled expression that managed to say, "Why are you fifteen minutes late?" and "Why are you at work dressed only in a cloak?"

I was so busted.  "It was nice having lunch with you, Mrs. Clinton," I said.  "I hope to see you soon."  Which was awkward, because we both new that I should be in this room, too, and that I would need to leave to get properly dressed.  

Get me to the class on time

I scurried out.  The setting had shifted a bit, it was still campus and outdoors, but it was also the inside of a vaulted college building.  I looked around for The Child, whom I needed to get to his class.

There was a commotion and I heard him.  "Oh," I thought, "Someone's found him and they're taking him along his way."

I turned a corner and I saw a woman, an amalgam of various severe teachers, dragging The Child to a class.  She was berating him non-stop.  He was trying to explain that he'd been lunching with me.   Then he tripped or something, and she became exasperated with him and pushed him as he was trying to get up.

I sailed over.  "You," I growled in my mama-bear voice, "sit!"  

She had a whiny English nanny voice.  "But he's late for his very important Artistic Expressions class."  Her red hair was done up on top of her head, and she had a beaded ribbon falling along one side of her head.

"Sit!"  

She sat resignedly on a bench or pew at the side of the hall.  

"You do not treat my child in that manner.  Do I make myself perfectly clear?"  

And the dream ended...

===

Commentary.

In the 1980's, I used to dream that I'd be driving through the streets of Corvallis, and suddenly my mother would be in the car and we'd either switched places, or else the steering wheel would switch over to her side of the car.   While I will occasionally have "I'm not in control of the car" dreams, this is the first time I've been displaced to the back seat in a while (it's more likely these days that the car's breaks or steering wheel stop working).

The make-out section of the dream is obvious anxiety about giving our back-door neighbors a show.  Which is theoretically possible, but unlikely.  Unless they're standing on our deck.

Usually, when I wear my cloak in dreams, I can fly in it.  And I'm usually not naked.  In this case I would sort of remember that I was in a state of undress, and then the dream would continue as if it were normal.

Lunch with The Child and Hillary Clinton?  The Child is preoccupied with Trump in the same sort of way he's preoccupied with The Joker.  I can only imagine that speaking about the primaries with Mark (who was reviewing local candidates for city posts) is behind this.  Though why I would want to know what Hillary's stance on NeoPaganis is is beyond me.  Maybe she'll lead us to a Goddess-based theocracy?  

I will sometimes dream The Child is in peril (usually because he's stupidly climbed onto a railing at the top of the Empire State building).  This is the first time the peril has come from a person, much less a mash-up of teachers.  Hmmm... the dream teacher was mix of some of his teachers whom he hasn't always liked the best, but the Very Important Self-Expression Art class seems straight out of the mouth of one of my teachers who wanted you do create your own unique art her way.  

This is the most that I've dreamed of The Child in more-or-less one sitting.  Maybe he was talking in his sleep.

---

Working out:  Monday afternoon's session:  20 minutes and 210 cal on the elliptical.  3x12x50lbs on the pec fly.  3x12x80 on the lat pull-down. 3x12 curl-ups.  3x12x35lbs on the barbells.  3x12x10lbs with an overhead triceps curl.  

Journal and Eclipse Dream

Writing:  weekend sickness threw a wrench into things.  So.  Let's see.  Last night I got a critique of a 5000 word story.  I can't believe some of the stupid clerical mistakes I made in the manuscript, but over all the story was well received.  This morning I remembered dreams, got up at 6AM, and wrote them down.   I've got a 1500 word story that is in Very Rough Draft form; I passed it to a beta reader who gave me some really good feedback.

Work-out:  My last work-out was seven days ago.  Sigh.  It was easier during the summer to go in Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; but lately Friday's schedule has put a kabosh on that.  I guess I'm going to have to start going in the evenings instead of the afternoons.

DREAM:   

I'd say that the majority of this dreaming was sparked by the solar eclipse coming up tomorrow (Thursday), a brief conversation about skydiving post-Wordos, and a discussion about ski trips past and future.  

Eclipse Dream

The recall begins at my parent's house.  It's dark and we're waiting for a lunar eclipse to begin.  There's some worry that the eclipse wont be visible because of light clouds.  We're looking east over the Willamette Valley, and then the clouds shift and there's a really huge moon, almost silvery white.  

As we watch, a black circular shadow passes in front of the moon.  It's too quick and small to be the Earth's umbra.  We  leave the house (I don't recall who was with me).  After a short investigation we discover that what we thought was the moon is really some kind of balloon with a light-show projector slung beneath it.  The "eclipse" is really some sort of college game entertainment.

I think my sister appeared at the moment and says something like, "I didn't think this was the real eclipse." or "I didn't think we'd be able to see the eclipse from the house."   I looked north, and there I saw the real moon, thin and pretty far advanced in the eclipse.  White wispy clouds passed in front of it.  We could see it because we were east of my folks' house, but the people inside would have a nearly impossible time siting the moon.  (In waking life, I'm realizing that the moon was in a part of the sky in the dream that it would never be able to reach).  I remember pointing at the crescent moon.

There's a break in the narrative, and the eclipsing moon is over an ocean at the coast.  A front is moving in, and where the ocean meets the shore, a layer of white clouds forms.  

I can see all this because I'm in an airplane on some sort of special tour, with a bunch of middle-aged (60-something?) ladies (there might be some men).  Mark may have been there, and the pilot was a guy.  The pilot was talking about the eclipse and the clouds, and we started climbing.  

I don't recall exactly what happened next.  Either the plane when into a dive, or the engine stopped working, or else this was a skydive tour.  I'm thinking the latter because we were suddenly in jump suits.   

Insert falling scene here, I guess, because we were on the beach.  I had traveled with my portable Stonehenge, which in the dream had transformed from a circular object into a rectangular track that was somehow a cross between a cribbage board and a mancala board.  In the fall, most of the pegs were lost, only the black descending moon's node peg was still in place.  I remarked on this, and then found a $20 bill in one of the mancala holes.  There were some other small trinkets (not possible to be there on the real board) in the mancala holes... things like novelty coins or Renaissance Fair necklaces and beads.  

There's another break.  I think Smokey the cat woke me up here or something.

I was on a airport or train tram with Mark.  We had parked a white rental van in a large dark parking structure.   A track ran straight through a parking lot that was about a block wide on either side.  I want to say that we parked in lot 184A or something like that (at some point in the dream I wrote the number down on a white sock, which subsequently got washed and the numbers ran).

I've got the sequence of events jumbled.

At some point I fell asleep on the train and woke up with it having passed my stop.

At some point I was in a convoy with Mark and possibly our friends, the Husbands.  I think I was driving a white truck.  I think I took a wrong turn and went a considerable distance the wrong way before another off ramp appeared.  And at some point I was in the back seat and no one was driving the car, and I had to reach over the car seat and press the break pedal with my hand to stop the truck before it went through the intersection.  

I vaguely recall a bunch of us were staying in a guest house or an A-frame chalet.  

I may have been driving the truck through a visitors' center or mall.  And the truck may have turned into me just walking.  

I was in a kind of rustic alpine building.  Lots of cobblestone and dark wood beams.  There was a Saturday Market feel, because every three yards or so, there was someone with a booth selling something (like scarves), or handing out brochures.  There may have been someone like Manfred Fischbeck leading dance hikes.  

Behind a tall counter sat a late 20-something guy with two Siamese cats crouching on either side of him with their eyes closed.  "Are your cats friendly?" I asked.

"Well, give them a try; but they don't like just anyone."

I held up my index finger and presented it to one of the cats, who opened an orange eye and started rubbing its whiskers on it.  The other cat came over and they were rubbing their faces all over my hands.

"Wow, they really like you," the guy said.  "You must have a powerful aura."  He stood up, suddenly tall, and his eyes focused just behind me.  I think he said, "You have a lot of yellow in your aura." I recall he said, "You are lord of fire."

"Fire, huh?" I said, "People usually say I'm air."

For some reason I woke up with the name JJ Keek in my head.  There may be such a person with that name, but I have no idea who they could be.

Ocean Wave Dream

Whew, a storm blew in this morning.  I always expect the neighbor's house and the hill to protect us from storms blowing in from the west, but the really big ones with lots of rain always rattle the bedroom windows.  I was expecting things to be blown around when I went into our backyard, but the wind sounded worse than it was.  We need the rain, and I wish I didn't feel the change so strongly in my hands and feet.  In the course of the morning we've had direct sunshine, a rainbow, and more rain.

Crazy out of control car dream this morning.  I was driving a small jeep with Mark and T.E and somehow I was driving off the road (oh, the joy of the failing to control the car dreams) between houses and then somehow managed to drive into someone's house (the car turned into a plastic kids car and through the magic of dream-logic, with simultaneously fit in the car and in the house's entry hall).

There was some more that I've forgotten, but we ended up on a train or bus.  Sitting across from us was a guardian swordswoman in a 18890 man's suit (dark Dorthy Hamill hair bob) and a young (blonde?) girl with Tarot cards.  The swordswoman carried a two-handed broadsword.  The girl offered to read the Tarot cards for the swordswoman, who firmly declined, saying that the present was a gift and that trying to poke holes through the present to peer into the future was to deny the gift.  (Man, I must have been channeling Mark...)

But the best part was when the train--which turned into a bus--carried us to the ocean.  I was wrapped in my fish quilt (my sister made it), which was larger in the dream.  I went out onto a platform that ran along the side and front of the bus-train.  

The bus drove through some sort of camping ground, and then onto a short flat beach.  There was a row of VW bus/vans parked along the dunes.  The dream threatened to turn into a Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello movie...  But the bus went to the ocean, and a wave came to meet the bus.  I was wrapped in the quilt, which trailed behind me out of the vehicle and a little over the front edge.  When the ocean wave touched my quilt, the blues and greens in both merged together and it was like I was wrapped in a warm ocean.

First Week of the Year

Gah.  What a busy week.  The students came back, my family came back, and suddenly I've got much less free time to do stuff.  I probably had an anxiety dream about it last night.

Typically, I was in a car that had sluggish breaks and steering.  I was coming down a hill and tried to break to avoid bumping into the fender of a car in front of me. The breaks sort of worked, but I still tapped the car in front of me.  Then the car started sliding backward.  Up the hill.  I tried to turn the wheel, but the car kept sliding backwards up the hill... To where a train truck waited.  It had a big radioactive material symbol painted on its side.

On the plus side, my office is now looking like an office and much much less like a junk closet.

Walking and Imagination

Yesterday our Matrix was in the car shop getting maintenance. Somehow in the thick of things, we added a few more things for the garage to do, and so I was without a car for a little longer than I thought.

The result was walking. About twenty-five blocks. Luckily, there wasn't too much rain. What usually takes about eight minutes to drive takes fifty walking. Since I wasn't being pampered by automotive technology, I had to purchase sustaining chocolate donuts to nibble on every three blocks.

Walking that distance reminded me of my Grandma Agnes. She was a farmstead girl in 1920, and she walked to school along an lumberjack trail and through a pasture holding a bull. I wonder what sort of thoughts went through her head as she walked--I imagine she had conversations with her dog, Sport, or any animals she might have encountered.

When I was walking the city blocks of southern Eugene, I was thinking about the various yard plantings and garden features (OK, and the next donut). It's easy to imagine stories attached to the differing houses. Why do those folks have a fancy gate across their driveway, and do the stars and moons mean anything? Is that a haunted house and what happened to the owners? In contrast, when I'm driving, I'm listening to the radio and imagining what on earth could be motivating the driver in front of me to be driving they way that they are.

Well... speedily arriving somewhere or exercising one's imagination. To quote the Baker's Wife from "Into the Woods," why can't it be both? With chocolate.

Writing Moments

Writing in the car is paradoxic and strange.

The car's engine is off. I wonder how long the car battery will last with the ignition key turned half-way, classical music playing on the radio and the car's clock counting down the minutes until I have to hop out and go to work.

A wireless keyboard rests on my lap; I'm staring at the iPad, which is propped up on the steering wheel.

This narrative I'm working on is moving forward, even though the car is still.

---

Later.

I'm trying to write, and it's a chore. I'm tired. My throat hurts. I give myself permission to rest.

But after the rest, which goes on much longer than I expected, I'm looking at the stack of revisions I have to do with a sense of weariness. I always seem to feel tired and rundown when I have a largish chunk of time to write. So here I am, trying to jump-start writing by blogging.

On the business side, the computer with my submission tracking software on it died. This isn't so bad, and I have a back-up, only runs on a different platform. I'll have to see about porting it somehow. And then there's that longish, wandering, non-fiction thing I wrote. I should do something with that--on one hand, I could serialize it; but on the other hand, it might be interesting to e-publish it and see where it goes.

Ugh. Business decisions. Quick! Start writing!