Anxiety Dreams

Not up so early this morning.  I'm working on a short story that is done enough for a reading tonight, but really not quite finished (it wants to be too long for the reading), accordingly, in the dream department:

I dreamed that Peter Gunn (the one from Carleton College) and I were late to a History Class being taught by my Middle School History teacher.  What I remember was that people were performing presentations, on the Civil War, I think.  And then there was a test.  When I got my test back, I had an "F".  I looked at my answers, which seemed more or less correct, but I'd been marked down rather arbitrarily based on the teacher's obscure formatting rules.
"Well," he said, "It's OK, entertainment isn't your strong suit."
I was upset, and must have been awake enough to be annoyed that a twenty-five year old me could fail a Middle School History class, and now I was going to have to go to the principal's office to get the grade changed to Pass/No Pass to try to salvage my GPA.

No, I haven't just started a new job.  That couldn't have anything to do with it.



There was another dream, which mostly involved taking a bus tour--I think... there might have been much more.  The only thing that I really recall was that a small black bat flew from a red barn, into the bus, and between my Mother and her friend, J.D., then sort of crawled along the back seat, over my shoulder, and back out the bus.  Maybe the bus was a van, because the side was open.  There was a short discussion about how some people would over-react.  (I'm guessing the cat was active during this one.)

Fortune Cookies and Dreams

Today is my first day back at the UO English Department as a technology consultant.  I'm looking forward to re-joining the team because they appear to still have a friendly esprit de corps.  Coincidentally, I got a fortune from a cookie last night which seems apropos: "You will be soon be part of a team.  Work cooperatively for success."  (Yes, there's an extra be in there.)

Last night's Chinese food probably is the source of the non-stop dreams I had...


I was working on a play.  All I can remember at the time was that I had written it, it involved a mailbox, and I'm guessing that it was supposed to teach astronomy.  I was working under a deadline, throwing all sorts of things together, and I needed an iMac with which to print the script for the rest of the small cast and also 3D print the mailbox.

The iMac I wanted to use belonged to another IT department (this was an amalgam department, which, now that I think about it, was housed in the rocky foundation of the Very Large Gazebo (which was possibly also a library or bookstore).  There was a kind of hand-shake agreement that I could borrow iMacs, but someone in the other department made a sudden decision that I wouldn't be able to.  I was furious.

So, I had to improv my one-man play (OK, there was an assistant).  Without a 3D printed mailbox.  I gave a lecture about the rotation and orbit of the Earth and how it produced the seasons, spinning a large multi-colored umbrella for the earth while I walked around my lovely youngish female assistant who held a beach-ball sun.  The lecture was delivered in Mock-Swedish, ala The Swedish Chef.

---

There was a break. I was climbing a mountain with Mark (or at least it started out Mark, but over the course of dream events we changed into other characters).  We got to the top, and it was snowy.  I don't recall why we were there: if it had started out as a regular hike, or if we were exploring a jungle, or if we had crashed on an island or what.  We decided to rest, and spent a lot of time trying to find a comfortable position to sleep (I wonder if I was tossing in my sleep, as the rocks and snowdrifts weren't all that cold, and seemed too easily moved; sort of like pillows).

Presently, there was someone singing "Where Are the Simple Joys of Maidenhood." and the upshot was that I was alternately a disembodied third-person observer or a twenty-something beardless man with longish curly hair.  There were two women climbing the mountain, an older matronly woman and a younger maiden.

I don't recall, but somehow we ended up in the roaring river which was suddenly there.  I guess I must have recalled that we were supposed to be on a mountain, because after flowing through some mountainy-mesa-y valleys, the river plunged over a cataract (one of three) and into a pool.  The matron was swept over the cataract, screaming, and into a clear blue pool in a very deep caldera.  Oddly, she wasn't drowned or smashed to pieces.  The waterfall, it turned out, was pouring over a lava vent, so there was hot lava at the bottom of the pool, and ash collecting on its rim.  Oddly, she didn't boil to death; so the water temperature must have been just right (snow run-off plus hot lava equals ashy hot-tub?)

---

Another break.  The maiden and I (as twenty-something) were in a wooden kind of house built into the side of the cliff next to the waterfall.  We were looking for someone.  I am not sure if the matron was with us, or stuck in the pool, or if we were trying to work our way down the house so we could get to the pool, or if we were trying to find a Dr. Livingston character.

In any case, the twenty-something went downstairs, where jungle natives blew air-darts into him.  (I must have dreamed about blow-darts earlier, because they seemed familiar somehow.)  He passed out and woke up with everyone in an overgrown, bushy, scrub-oak jungle.  There was a voice-over about gentle natives meeting brutal Europeans, the resulting conflict, and now how the gentle natives were angry vindictive natives who shot people.  Cue the parting bushes.  Cue a rifle barrel point out...

And I woke up.

Vacation Report

We're back from a visit to the Stout Redwood Grove, near Crescent City, and the Oregon Caves.

We camped for two nights in the Patrick Creek campground.  One of the attractions was that there was no electricity, so that meant there weren't a whole lot of RV's with stereos and satellite TV surrounding us.  We were right on the river, and surprisingly, I didn't have dreams about waterfalls or tidal waves.  

The first night, Thursday night, was stormy.  I'd just gotten the tent set up when it started to rain in earnest.  There was thunder and lightning, which was cool.  We managed to start a fire -- I liked the grills there:  they had a corkscrew for raising or lowering the grill over the fire.

That night I did have a very long serial dream that was part Pokemon  and part Voltron, with extra vivid colors.  Mark is blaming some chocolate cake we had just before bedtime on that one.  There was a lot of flying in that dream, and I managed to remember enough of it to try to draw some of it.  The second night I slept poorly; I was looking forward to a repeat of the technicolor dreaming, but instead I hung in a kind of flat, dark awareness that didn't feel restful.

Friday we visited the Stout Redwood Grove.  The trees usually remind me of the stars because some time in the 1980's someone used the analogy of the life cycle of trees to illustrate the life cycle of a star.  I'm always inspired by the girth and height of the redwoods, and the old fallen trunks are always fun to scamper on.  It amazes me that some of the trees are 2000 years old -- I can barely believe I have memories ranging thirty years or more and I get lost in the imagining when I wonder what it could be like to be twenty centuries old.  

We stopped for milkshakes at a place called She-She's.  Somewhere Mark has a picture of us sitting in plastic chairs shaped like hands.  

Saturday, after a breakfast at the Patrick Creek Lodge (Food, Booze and Snooze), we left for the Oregon Caves.  Mark made reservations at the Chateau there.  Visiting the Chateau is a little like going back to the 1950's -- or at least the Cafe there is (OK, and our room's bathroom had a 1950's feel, as well).  We ate more hamburgers and milkshakes there in two days than I normally have in about three weeks.  The Chateau was like a smaller version of the Inn at Old Faithful. And... staying there one night was on the spendy side -- but I appreciated being able to get a comfortable night's sleep right (except when a guest was coughing her lungs out at 4AM) next to the caves. 

I took an architectural tour of the chateau, which turned out to be more historical than architectural.  

And then there were the caves.  I remember visiting them sometime around 2002, only I had mixed some of the vaults up in my memory.  I think my favorite features are the creek coming out of the caves, the soda-straw stalactites hanging in the Ghost Gallery, and the feature called Paradise Lost.  

We were lucky enough to take more than one tour (Mark took the candlelight tour).  What was interesting to us was how each ranger told different versions of the same story.  It was like the folk-process meets the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.  In some stories, the bear featured in the cave's discovery is a brown bear, in others its a grizzly.  In some stories, a devastating mudslide happens in 1964, in others 1954.  In some versions of the ghost story, the hapless groom brings a pistol; in others, a riffle.  The first tour of the caves I took, the focus was on the people who had interactions with the cave during the Taft presidency.  The second tour of the caves I took was focused more on the spleliogenesis of the caves.  

Sunday, I was prowling the chateau's top floor and I managed to get some ghost stories out of the maid.  She was cleaning "Elizabeth's Room."  Elizabeth was a bride who in some stories hung herself and in others jumped out her window (roughly sixty feet up).  I heard the story about the guest who kept finding his clothes repacked in his suitcase and who was woken up by a ball of light at 2AM (he checked out right then).  I heard about the four ghost children, who alternately giggle in the night, or cry in the cleaning closet, or who tuck in other children (or maybe Elizabeth does the tucking...).  There wasn't a story about the maintenance man who apparently liked working at the chateau so much he decided to stay.

I asked the maid if she had ever seen any of the ghosts (she'd been working there for ten years) but she said that she hadn't.

And then it was time to come home.  Mark did all the driving, for which I was grateful.  

It's at a Chateau

We were lucky enough to stay at the Chateau at Oregon Caves.  I was humming the opening to "A Weekend in the Country" during our stay ("just think of it Petra / it's at a chateau..").  It's a small hotel with about twenty rooms.  The Chateau was constructed in the 1930's by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). 


The instide reminded me a little bit of the Inn at Old Faithful.  It was dark, which encouraged looking out the large windows at the forrest outside.  There used to be a short balcony running along the west side of the building, but the snow load was too great in the winters and they were removed.  The interior was a kind of mix of Arts-and-Crafts and pioneer. 
What was amazing to me was that the hotel was in the middle of a steep ravine.  The lobby was on the street level on one of the hotel, but on the other side it was on the forth floor.  The stream from the Oregon Caves was mostly diverted around the hotel except for the bit collected in a reflecting pool uphill from the building.

In December 1964, there was a huge mudslide caused by a pinapple express melting all the snow uphill.  A seventeen foot high wall of debris barrelled down the ravine and through the hotel.  It knocked the hotel off its foundation and they had to use hydraulic jacks and chains to put it back.  As a result, there are places where the doors are not square with their jams, and if you look at some of the support beams in the gift shop, you can see they aren't square.

I think I'll live with the clay ground making our house foundation move a little.

Red Snail

 Sunday we took a hike through the Douglas firs and madrone growing near the Oregon Caves--and this is one of the snails we found.  It's endemic to the area, about a quarter size of my fist, and bright red.  I heard a park ranger say that the snail eats the moss growing around here.  Since the mountain the caves are in is made up of a lot of marble, the moss has a high concentration of calcium in it.  The snail gets so much calcium its shell is extra thick and sturdy.

Cool Dragonfly

 We're back from a trip to the Redwoods and the Oregon Caves.  While we were near the Stout Memorial Redwood Grove, I managed to get a close-up photograph of this dragonfly.  I'm not sure if it had just molted or what.  It didn't fly away when I walked up to it, although it did flap its wings like crazy for long enough for me to get about three macro shots of it.  This one came out the best.

It's Worse Than That, It's Physics, Jim

I've just finished watching Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos."  I want to be able to write science fiction based on recent science, so I'd placed a hold on the DVDs at the library--nine months of waiting and voila!

The four-part series was cool, although I think they overplayed the Big Bang sequence.  Mark watched a little, too; he thought they jumped back and forth betwee scientists too much.

Anyway, as a science fiction writer, the most interesting aspect was how the space-time continuum can be thought of as a snapshot slice of "Now", and how that slice can appaear to angle through different parts of the space-time fabric depending on the observer's motion.  The theoretical upshot is that you can do a kind of red- or blue-shift on "Now" for places that are vastly distant from each other.  It's that whole relative observational frame thing.

I wonder if you would get a time-viewer if you could quantum-entangle a very distant particle, place it into a telescope focus or other detector, and then move it forward or backward to red- or blue-shift the "Now" slice.   Or, to put it another way, if one can have spooky interaction at a distance, why not have spooky interaction over time?

I am not sure the how adequately explained the shifting of the "now" slice of space-time, because one would think with the increase in universal aexcelleration, we'd see a spherical boundary where the "Now" slice would appear to make very very distant galaxies  move backward in time as our perception of the "Now" slice swept "backward" toward the Big Bang.  

Hmm.  Maybe I'm going to have to read the book....

Oh; I can hear....  It must be the Eugene Celebration or seomthing because I'm hearing muted Funky Jazz fusion from very far away drifting through my open window... apparently, downtown Eugene has been time-shifted to the 1960's.

And now, to sleep.

A Brief Cleaning Break....

Whoes muddy feet in Summer time

Did track o'er these wooden floors?

And did the shedding household cat

bring dead beasts in from out of doors?

Bring me my Broom of burning gold;
Bring me my Dustpan of desire:
Bring me my Mop: O clouds unfold!
Bring my Vacuum Cleaner of fire!

Hit the Deck

We're getting ready to actually build a deck.  The deck has been a bit of a travail for us.  We were going to have a contractor do it, but that didn't go so well.  The first contractor came out once, then never returned our messages.  The second contractor came out, and each successive estimate for a simple twelve-foot-by-sixteen-foot deck became progressively larger.  The third contractor seemed cool; we put down half the bid so he could buy materials, and then we got an e-mail saying that he had fled the state for the safety of his family and that we could sue his bond.

So, we're gearing up for a week-long project that would take a professional somethnig like two days to do.  I think we'll have to call the deck "Swamp Castle."  

---

On the writing front, there've been a few cases of life intervening -- whenever there's a change in schedule, my writing routine gets thrown for a loop.  I've been doing some editing, but not much creative writing.  I've been making up for that by getting back into the swing of submitting stories.   

---

Speaking of routines, on the excercise front, I need to start a routine.  I've got the equipment, so I don't have that excuse.  

End of July Post

Whew.  I haven't posted for a while.  This morning I'm having a lazyish morning at Café John, reading news with some tea and a blackberry muffin Mark made.  About a half hour ago a green hummingbird came and sampled the dianthis and morning glories.  It sat on a power line and then flew away.  Luckily Smokey wasn't in the yard.  I'm hoping the hummingbird comes back.  Mark and I weren't sure if it was good at being a hummingbird or not, since the canna lillies threw it for a loop.

A friend interviewed me for her blog and wants a picture.  Mark supplied some "non-goofy" pictures from a recent hike, but the one I like the most is a little out of focus.  I tried to take some self-portraits, but they were taken at night with the sole illumination coming from a computer monitor.  I was hoping they'd come out techno-geeky, but they came out sleezy-leery.   I suppose there's always the photo with the forks.

In other news, I got some exercise equipment -- a jump rope and some stretchy band things you stick in a door frame -- so now all I need is a techno soundtrack with random grunting and I can pretend the living-room is a gym.  This is all part of my plan to be ripped by the time I turn 50, I figure a year and a half should give me enough time.

And now... more tea and muffins.  Oh.  Wait.

Addendum:  As I was closing up this post, two more hummingbirds came by to inspect the canna lilies. I've never seen them actually drink from the canna lilies, so I'm not sure there's nectar to be had. I guess they like red flowers.

PHP and Story Submission

Some computer issues here meant that the PHP compiler on our computer got updated.  It was probably eight years old, at least.  

When I fired up my local story submission tracker, it created an empty report.  Luckily, I had Duotrope to fall back on.  I love Duotrope, but one feature it doesn't have is a market suggestion feature, which my home-grown PHP script does have.  Not to mention, it's always nice to have a back-up of what I'm doing that's not in the cloud.

It turned out that there were changes to several PHP calls.  The first one was how files were read into arrays.  I have three files--stories, mailcall, and markets--which I use to track which finished stories have been sent to which markets.  The second changes were to how the mktime and date functions worked.  Luckily, using a set time zone function fixed those; and then I had to fiddle with a how a market close date was trimmed (or in this case, how it shouldn't be trimmed anymore).  

Now the programs are working, and I don't have to think too hard about if I've sent a story to a market previously, or which new story might be a good fit (is within word counts, is the right genre) for a particular market.  

And... submit!

Summer Stations

One of my friends recently asked me for a book list for Qyeer NeoPagan books.  I came to the conclusion that there wasn't really a list so much as there was an anti-list.  And that I like sarcasm.  I've yet to find a book for queer men which addresses using ritual for transformation, celebration and communion; that uses ritual to balance mind, body, heart, and spirit; that blends influx, maintenance, and distribution with the previous elements in a Graceful way.

Oh well.

---

It's after the Summer Solstice.  I have been thinking about how this is supposed to be the time of Enchantment and Transformation--a time to try to reframe how to see the world.  Or, at least, that's how I frame the Summer Solstice.  When I'm not sneezing from pollen and sweating to death from the heat.  (Luckily, this year the 90F heat waited a week to come.)

In terms of Transformation.... I've been looking at how I write in terms of my career and life.  It bothers me that I'm almost 50 and not more published.  (And, yes; I have some time management problems I need to deal with.). If I want to write and have it contribute to my household, I need to think about writing more like a job.  Bleah--which means I have to think in terms of annoying things like retirement, and healthcare, and taxes.  (Pause for an indulgent fantasy about a writer shrine to John where he sits and writes while grateful readers bring chocolate, tea, and massages (and little prosessions with fans and banners during writing breaks) and a business manager handles the workman's comp issues for the litter-bearers.).  

After the Solstice Enchanter comes the Hunter of the Ides of Summer.  The Hunter is the goal he wishes to reach... And  I've got some move work to do before I reach the Hunter state.  Or, to put it a different way, before the goal I'm aiming at is something I'm being mindful about instead of a default consequence of undisciplined choices.

Solstice Song

Under the solstice sun I sit

iPad on my lap

Blogging ritual

Backyard altar flames.

Orpheus Wreath

 I used InkScape to make laurel leaf shapes.  I made a line of about six in addition to single ones.  Then I used a plotter-cutter to cut them out.






 I thought I'd be able to spiral the linked leaves into a wreath.  I probably could have, but it was much easier to use the metal tiara as a form.







 I hadn't realized it at the time, but the cut-out vein made it easy to lock the leaf strings together.





 And then I was ready to dress as if I were Orpheus.








 Tra-la!

Busy Week / Bear Dream

Lots of manuscripts to critique and things have been somewhat busy on the family end here, so I haven't blogged much in the last week.  

I was kind of in a bad place the other day writing wise.  A story got rejected.  Very likely because the market was swamped and the story wasn't what they were looking for.  Yes, I know I'm not the editor, but I thought the story had a chance of selling (or at least garnering a "it was _this_ close" rejection.  But instead it got a form rejection.  

Form rejections are the worst.  I know I should shrug them off.  But I went back and forth fretting with the "I'm just too stupid to be writing" and "Did gay protagonist kissing his boyfriend at the end have anything to do with it?"  

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I had the Bear Dream last night.  In the Bear Dream, I'm usually going onto the north end of the hill where I grew up.  In real life, there's a gravel road and lots of forest... or at least, last I checked several decades ago--it may be more developed by now.  Usually, there's a bear of some sort.  One Bear Dream many years ago, I was shoving Fiestawear plates into snowbanks and the Bear was a Polar Bear.

In this dream, I was travelling by rowboat (or maybe a small sail boat) to a small, rocky island.  It was the middle of the day, and the sun was out.  I think I had a candle or a lamp or something... possibly a glowing quartz crystal.  I got out of the boat and onto the gravelly beach.  The island was mostly bassalt cliffs with many narrow channels.  I knew that somewhere on the island was a Gaurdian Bear, and I needed to be cautious.  As I walked up a slope between two canyon walls, there were lots of lateral shelves in the rocky cliffs.  People had left memorials--silver plates, candels, lamps--within the shelves.  

I think I placed the light I was carying onto the shelf.  There was a break of some kind, and the smallish boat I'd come in had turned into a three-masted ship... and the dream went onto other things.

When I woke up, I couldn't help but notice the similarietesbetween the rocky shelves and the snow banks.  I'm guessing this dream has something to do with personal or family history... or "shelving" things not actively needed.  I'm not sure why the Bear is the guardian, though.

...and now, the Day Jobbe.