Dreams and Dating in 1997

Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 23:40:30 PST
Subject: What's up?


OK.

First off, I'm fine; the deer is fine; and my car is fine. You can say prayers to the spiritual guardians of your choice. ("Oh blessed Diana, patron saint of Deer and Automobiles...") Or not, as the choice may be.

I suppose that there were two impulses fueling the events of Monday night. On one hand was the need to get to Eugene to pick up my AIDS test and share the results with Mark (ah, dating in the nineties). On the other hand, my Deer Voice (which has successfully warned me about deer in the road twice in the last six weeks) was retelling me the story about when my Mom drove home with a shattered grill on her car after she hit a deer (on the same road I might add).

I've listened to the Voice which reminds me that the deer are migrating and I've driven through Monroe and am just about to conclude that "Oh, this time my Deer Voice must have been wrong" when all of a sudden a deer springs out onto the road from the left and decides to dash across the road in front of me.

I slam on the breaks and veer to the right. The tires screech in the rainy night. The deer tries to outrun me (while still crossing the road). I see it sort of dive on my left—dark eyes, brown coat, no antlers—suddenly bright past the perimeter of my headlights. "This is it," I think to myself, "I'm going to see hoofed feet doing cartwheels across my hood and end up with a deer through my windshield and in my lap." I close my eyes when I hear the BHMPF!

The car and the screeching tires stop.

I'm at the side of the road. I turn on my hazard lights. A car passes me. I get out. I go to the front of the car. No blood. No dents. No deer. I look around.

A large truck comes from the other side of the road and I see the deer lying down on the left shoulder of the road. As the truck gets closer the deer rises in one sustained motion and, as I watch, bounds over the ditch and away into someone's garden, where it apparently begins to munch on someone's harvest as if it hadn't just lost a race with a two ton 'Merican box of metal on wheels.

"Thank you," I say, and continue on my not-quite-so-merry way.

The mad rush to find parking in Eugene, and the wild dash up the stairs before the Health Department closes, and my negative test results, and Mark's negative test results, and the pizza, and Mark's light teasing about people with "agreements" with wild animals, and the discussion about AIDS testing as a form of homophobia, and other events crammed into Mark's 20 minute break are left to your imaginations.

So, I come home on I-5. Despite fog and some stupid drivers, the drive is uneventful. But as I pull in, what should I see dropping out of a tree but a raccoon. This is the first time I've seen a raccoon at our house.

"Aliens disguised as raccoons!" I say to myself, and then remember that the night (6-28-97) when I decided that I would simply just forget about ever falling in love, ever (and die Artistically Single, too). I was "rewarded" with a dream of Machka (my missing cat) leading a raccoon into my house (a weird dream house made of canvass). I didn't want a raccoon in my house because raccoons are wild animals and they might have rabies, and after a few futile attempts to lock the raccoon out of my house, I wound up accidentally killing it. (And what do you think rabies is a dream metaphor for; oh, I don't know, could it be, maybe—AIDS!?)

I watch the real raccoon retreat away from my headlights and into the brush.

"Is this some kind of vision-quest algebra test with power animals?" I ask, and begin to imagine story problems: "Deer gets on a train heading North at 50 mph in Eugene. Raccoon gets on another train heading South at 35 mph in Portland. Assuming they both start at midnight, what time will they meet with John's Car, and how many metaphors will he write about their meeting?"

Because everywhere you look at the intersection of cars and animals another metaphor for emotions and society springs up, begging to be used in a novel or at least some dippy-hippy new aged book by someone named Moonhawk Studmuffin. Animals rushing out of the margins and rebounding after a brush with the bright lights. AIDS. Health reduced to a piece of of paper stamped by the state. Did I say health—did I mean romance? dating? happiness? Masked bandits coming out of the woods and right into your house. Wild animals and domestic animals and cute animals and not-so-cute animals.

I expect that I will dream something very rich and strange tonight.


- John

 

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Date: Mon, 24 Nov 1997 23:44:42 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Eeek, an essay by John


OK. 

It's late and I've been channeling Marge Boule (or someone). In any case, I'm trying to get back into the swing of writing. So my questions to y'all are:

What do you think? AND Would you send something like this to your parents?



There was a deer and a BHMPF. But when I got out of my dentless, bloodless car, the deer got up and bounded away. Thanking my guardian angel, I drove on in the rain.

The AIDS test was negative. I was pretty sure that it would be; but still in the back of my mind was a swirl of old information and street lore about how the virus spread. My partner's test was negative, too. He was pretty sure it would be; but had agreed to the test because he knew that it would make me feel better.

I drove back home. A raccoon, startled by my headlights as I pulled in, dropped out of a tree and ran off into tall grasses. This reminded me of dreams of raccoons entering dream houses of canvas, and also of wild dream panthers entering through houses protected by unlocked screen doors. In both dreams I kill the animals.

I now own a scrap of paper from the health department which says I am healthy. But I have to remind myself that the clear AIDS test result is like a ticket to a safari—and not to mistake a safari for a trip to the zoo.

In bed we create a safari. In bed we drop our human masks, shed our human skins, and get in touch with our unenculturated wildness. In the darkness behind a closed door—in the shadow of a candle—we dance with the shades of wolves, bison and mamoths; harts and hinds; horses and dogs. I have to watch out for the wild raccoon behind his mask, though; he's cute, but never mistake cute for tame.

There's an assumption that the certificate means you're safe (and some folks mistake the certificate to mean they will always be safe); but an essential part of remaining safe means negotiation of boundaries. Leaping deer flash across the inroads to our wildness.

We are animals. But we are angels as well—and so our angelic selves wrestle with our panther selves in an attempt to see who is the safari ticket holder, and who is in a zoo cage. Sexual orthodoxy demands that we be one or the other, not both; so in my dreams the house of canvass becomes the stone cathedral filled with pews which restrict movement. Sexual orthodoxy demands that we become "men who love men", "women who love women", "women who love men", and "men who love women."

Eros, agape and amor are not so easily tamed, however; and despite orthodoxy's attempts, we have people who love people, sometimes more than just one at a time. In the grip of the sexual act, our bodies leap over the stalls put up by our minds. The tabernacle becomes a canvass tent, the rows of pews are not enough to catalogue the passions of the human heart. In a spasm of a few seconds, we are between ordered universes. Like water poured from one cup to another, we switch between the domesticated, the feral and the wild. We reduce our concentration down to where the house cat, the barn cat, and the panther, become one; become us.

And so in my dreams the panthers come through the screen doors. The raccoons come through the windows. In my dreams my bedroom is a cathedral with the Sword of Chaos over one cot, the Sword of Order over another, and the Sword of Pleasure is unsheathed by my anima.

It's not a fairy tale ending, though. My anima is soon contacted by Death, who wants her to become his side-kick. In real life, the raccoon runs from my headlights. In real life the deer staggers to her feet and bounds off into the night. I am unable to be at one with the deer on the road without disastrous results.

But it sure beats being in a cage.

Journal: Wildlife and Critiquing List Stories

Working Out:  I've been lame this last week; I've only done a few stray push-ups and some free-weights here and there.  I can feel muscles in my back and legs and arms all twitching and missing the workouts.  I'll have to hit the gym this (Monday) afternoon.

Writing:  I got a rejection yesterday (Sunday) evening.  This morning when I remembered it, my reaction was a kind of mental "phft" and then the DJ in my head played "Nothing" from "A Chorus Line."  On one hand, I suppose that's good and I'll just send the piece someplace else. 

The other week I was critiquing a list story.  List stories are difficult for me to critique because they're usually humor pieces and I have an odd sense of humor, and I'm not sure how to apply the five-point try-fail cycle to them.  Also, I think they are a sub-set of the epistolary form, which I've found is difficult to pull off without deflating character and plot tension or raising questions of why the reader is reading a stranger's letters.  

I've decided that if I approach list stories as if they were Twitter stories--which I've got a better understanding of--then I've got a handle on how to look at their structure.  

Working Out:  Monday afternoon I hit the gym.  Elliptical: 160 cal, 20 minutes, 130 steps per minute, 130 heart rate.  Rowing machine:  110 cal, 10 minutes, about 650 cal/hour average.  Assisted dips: 4 reps of 12 at 14.  Assisted pull-up: 3 reps of 10 at 14.  Pec-fly machine: 3X12 at 40.  Lat-Pulldown: 3X12 at 75.

Writing:  Pretty much finished up folding in edits and crits from a 2000 word mom-scientist piece.  I'm doing a final run on paper to catch any stupid things that I miss on the screen.  Then I'll have to see where I can send it out.

Yesterday (Monday) afternoon as I was picking up The Child, a crow fluttered across the road in front of my car.  It was at about foot level, flapping its wings and half-flying, half-walking across the street.  A yearling dear -- it seemed to big to be a faun -- followed it.  The deer's head was down, as if it were playing follow-the-leader with the crow.  I slowed down to give the deer time to cross.

Of course a crow leading a deer across a street from left to right seems like A Sign.  I'm not sure what of, and, recalling how crows will sometime drive rabbits across highways, I wondered if this crow was hoping for roadkill venison.  

Crater Lake Flora and Fauna

When we first got to the north entrance of Crater Lake, we drove past the hordes of folks who had stopped at the first rim-side overlook and drove to the much less crowed second overlook.

I'm so used to the cedars, hemlocks, and firs that I forget that wildflowers grow on the rim.  Where the ground is mostly pumice, sand and gravel, the plants' leaves are more succulent and waxy.  Since we were there at the beginning of August, there were only a few small patches of snow on the ground, mostly in the shade of the southern rim.  Snow is on the ground about ten months out of the year.

I think this purple flower is a lupine.  




Dragonflies like Crater Lake, I think I must have seen something like fifty of them while we visited.  I only got close enough to photograph one, and managed to get a few shots of it from the above and the front.




In the early evening, we took a hike on the Vidae Falls Trail.  We didn't get to the falls, but we did get within about ten feet of a deer.  The pleasant shade was refreshing, although nearby forest fires made the sunlight ruddy.



A fallen tree caught my eye because of the way the remaining snag twirled in a corkscrew.  I always think of a tree's bark going straight up, but I guess it wraps around the tree.  




The next day on the Cleetwood Cove trail, we saw about ten, if not Very Tame Chipmunks, then at least Ones Wildly Unconcerned About Humans and Conditioned to Investigate Crinkling Plastic Bags.