A Minor Procrastination

OH BOY DO I SUCK RIGHT NOW!
Sitting in an unheated makeshift office in Forest City on Christmas Eve, waiting for a call from my sister to remind me that yes it is christmas, and yes, we are going to make food this afternoon.

I'm having a bad case of holiday-exacerbated can't finish my paperitis, so here. Hopefully by the time christmas finishes, i'll have snuck out enough time to actually finish saying something intelligible, or at least defensible.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Decision Brainstorm Argument Vomit

Alright, so I titled this paper before I started writing it. Weeks, in fact, before I started writing it, I got so tickled by the notion of calling it "A Feeling of Greenness" that I committed my mind to building a paper around this complex of sentiments. The source material that I drew on in proposing this topic, before the title came even, is an article by Alf Hornborg arguing on the ascendancy of processual contextual models in theorizing ecology, ecology being in no insignificant part a system of meanings, a semeiotic in all of its triadic, Peircian madness.

I could write something over, something mostly borrowed, something along the lines of
Cartesians:
Steward - Niches or dialectic of determinism and adaptation or whatever
Rappaport - Neo-functional, cybernetic, balance/harmony, objectifying, energetic, science model

Non-Dualists/Monists:
Descola - Societies of nature, ontological/epistemological disembedding, processual
Hornborg, Ellen, whoever

Okay, so these later guys are smart - combine them with some articles about indigenous practices and ecological studies carried out by like Erickson, and maybe that Kogi Water system study - talk about good models for socializing nature - blah blah blah, hippie drum circle, ox and plow and hunker down on your farm, etc.

And this is pretty much what I believe at this point, and it's a thing. I've fetishized it as some bit of magical provocation that might bear out repetition in the population, but I feel like even though I've never written this down for this professor, or precisely any professor, I talk through it, I think through it, all the time. It needs a rest.

I want to envision something much more horrible and challenging to glimpse. I want to look at what wizardry governs this space. What is going on here? Who are these tree-like figures, engaged with massive structures forged improbably from raw earth and fantasy.

How did we get to this place? Why come so far to maroon ourselves here? How has the vision of this space changed in the imaginaries that festoon it?

How does all this get thought? How does all this get done? What's good about it? From what perspective? What does it take to grow "food"?

It is weird to try to imagine the leapfrog that has taken place in the agroecology of the midwest over the past century, or even half-century. Turn of the century farmer - embedded in corporeal relations to the beasts of the farm, the wider community of like-arrayed beasts who collaborate in applying their instruments to the earth and tickling nature into fruit - gives way to mid-late century farmer - one to whom are available the heavy machines of a causal superstructure that has blown a complete, Taylorized, factory inside-out over a vast landscape at the same time as reduced the black earth to a pile of tailings, mined in the open and washed out.

What is my argument here without being a part of any of this? Can I make any sense of all this meaning? Am I just viciously picking at an aporia that will not close?

yes

Double Dippin'

Until I can produce some original Triad material, I suppose I can stick up the writing of the semester that relates most directly to you fellows:

How to Be a Casual Smoker

Do it only when dark runs deep enough to make the cherry matter, let the glow

look like a funeral for a firefly, like a pyre.

Smoke when the streets are singing love songs to the traffic that won't come, smoke like the

last Marlboro man who doesn't know he's out of time.

Don't stand; sit on steps, or stoops, or stain your white washed denim lime and lie in un-mown

grass, make strangers' yards complicit in all your ploys.

Breathe. Stunt your breathing. Now, drink in the contradiction, see those Kamel Reds burn up

and brighten 3 a.m—barren of all but boys.

Do it even though you've never known addiction, do it like a crossword puzzle:

curled up and cozy, wasting/fighting/killing time.

Flick the ash without aiming, let your dust lie where it settles, say a secret prayer

that it might find the strength to start a minor fire.

Ramble On

I've been wanting to write a triad piece this fall. I'm sopping with language. Sloppy in it. But every time I start to freeze parts of it and just chunk into it with my ice pick, it melts away in a great splash and evaporates with a swirling flourish out into the street. Yeah, I live on a street again. The last time I tried to do this I made gifs instead, they're one post back, and a definite copout with respect to the kind of shit I feel I ought to be reflecting on at the moment. My street is chattery, it's weird to pick apart the sound that leaks in through the windows and the walls into its constituents. As far as I have been able to discern, there's no great bird wakeup overlap point in the early morning where I am, relatively near to central park. I haven't gotten up early enough to go to the park and listen yet, but heavy paper season isn't quite here, and I'm still sleeping a lot.

Question: When you wake up in the morning, how do you know if it's rained? My first clue comes before my eyes open, wet paved traffic squelch/sffffft.

Wait, so, yeah, I live on television. Television?! Television. Two blocks down is the Seinfeld diner. I'm plagued by people talking about their Ivy-Leaguedness, as though this particular corner of the beehive/anthill/macroprocessor were clearly peopled by enlightened souls, reeking of destiny and floating gently above the slippery, gritty surface of the earth.

Someone outside is at this moment screaming: "HEEEEYYYY, HEY HEY, HEYYYYYYYYY! I'm NOT IT! WHY YOU CALLIN ME A IT!" She's barely audible over the sound of police and ambulance sirens, and a barbershop chorus of sadistic leaf blowers revving over and over and over at medieval trip stair intervals.

So yeah, it's a television show about …? Not important at this point. Probably not even possible to pin down.

----------------------TWELVEHOURPAUSE------------------------
Last Night: Screaming/Slapping match; Pimp/Ho?; Husband/Wife?
Reading, I heard some commotion, but didn't immediately focus on the loud voices issuing from the sidewalk. The tone rippled my torso from taint to deep guts.
Him: (gravel) … Bitch! You betta gi me what I needa get off, NOW!
Her: whimper, Awright Awright
(presumably she hands him something)
Him: Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?! Thas all you got for me!?
(pauses, then she starts making noise as though being searched/groped)
Her: GET OFFAME! GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF OF ME! AHHHHH! HELLLLLLLLP HEEEEEEEEELLLLLPPPP
(Fades off into indecipherable speech)
Him: (interrupting) OH YOU CALLIN FA HELP NOW? GIMME DAT HIT, BITCH!
(he must be squeezing or menacing or something sinister, because she's freaking the fuck out by this point, hyperventilating)
Her: PLEEEASE OKAY OKAY OKAY, OKAY
(a big pause in the dialogue and i hear her kind of panting, can't see them out the window, tucked under the cafe awning. can't smell crack, suspect he's ingesting somehow)
Him: (almost persecuted) THAT AINT GONNA WORK, SLUT! HOW-MY SPOSA GET OFF LIKE AT? THA WUN'T NO ROCK AT ALL!
(abrupt change, voices under diesel, fading, conciliatory)


So, I was rambling about TV, and how I get the privilege of waltzing around bleeding money into these fancy sets and their nights of heavily creamed blackness. That shit is boring. Yesterday, in Central Park, I saw a group of Native Americans, presumably, playing drums, dancing and having a fire while the sun went down behind the buildings. I was so jealous; couldn't stop looking around at the sunset colors splashing through gaps and into this municipal courtyard.


I want snow - I want the world wrought in bleak potential, wind-scoured and sun-flashed and its soft and malleable bits clinging together for warmth and feeling. How are you guys? I can only hope better than me, as I rack-up vague credentials, tangible debts and monstrously radical theoretical that too often seem hopelessly irreconcilable with, well, seriously? capitalism. How is the future-vision morphing for you both?

Thinking about semeiosis and what it suggests about the capacities of appreciation, mimesis, and memory is something that always loops me back to you guys. Last summer, in terms of what we did together, albeit as mere dyads, was frankly transcendent. Modes of appreciation reembodied, grammars resumed, interpretive chains plumbed, memories re-narrativized. We need to get the rings together - bind ourselves in the swirling grayness, really summon captain planet.

If Rico ever calls me I'll make definite plans for travel - hope to see you both there!

MORE SUMMER GIF TIME

Can't Stop

LAKE AND BAKE

The Art of Dialing Drunk

he had a bad habit of revisiting the past

(cruising in her parents' van and fucking on the overpass)

three strong whiskey gingers and he's calling up ghosts

sayin' thought about that summer

how's your mother?

I propose a toast

to doomed flings and ill-advised plots

groping in the parks

naming body parts

fall asleep

woken up by rent-a-cops

to minor car crashes on gravel roads

to getting one hand up that swimsuit that you wore instead of underclothes

to drive-in movies

sneaking friends through in the trunk

back when your dad wasn't sick yet

wasn't dying

took us sailing and the sailboat fucking sunk

to staying friends with exes once you've given up on love

to having drunken conversations with the people who remind you of the past you never think about until you're past your limit and you're drunk

Bibliography

Oh, and I almost forgot to nod to my sources. Courtesy of a Moleskine notebook of many years past, the original lists:

list

-today we will begin our prepwork for the coming day of enlightenment

1 tranquilizer gun for large animals and/or ty
laffy taffy
exciting water device
baloons (baloon juice not included)
chewing gum
bubbles
fizzy lifting drinks
munchies kidz mix
salt and vinegar chips
my watch
flashlight batteries
muzak
orange juice
boats
elton john
random silly things
ice cream
jello

activities

croquet
foxtail
bike rides
sprinkler
wiffle bat time
lego time
diablo 2
hackey
frazbee
kites
sit on asses, look at shit
walkie talkie games
lotr
corn starch
sex with women
jello
cut green island in half with metal heavier
expose ourselves to multimedia
masks
painting/art
whooping
fire
build fort/create society

kits and general attire stipulations

shoes, socks discouraged
short pants
sunglasses
writing/recording utensils
hats/headwear
uniform emblem/icon for purposes of continuity
quantities of liquid, cigs, gum, and tool
shirt
jacket *a must*

I don't know what it is, just look at it

As promised, a recollection submitted to the collective memory, albeit with some cringe-worthy sentimental BS abruptly edited out (and a little abruptly left in). Petros and I were just discussing the lawn mowing in the dark, but I did not remember it being on this day. Is this true, or have I completely conflated several different occasions? You know I rely on you guys to keep my past and childhood in order, so I will defer to the rest of the Triad on this point. Regardless, I give you a mostly accurate and true except for where I probably made shit up if I felt like it account of the trip heard round Leland:


“Naaawat?” Tyler asked, as a stream of saliva overflowed his bottom lip.
“Kee ih on yo tongue,” Peter said. The three of us were sitting in Peter’s living room, relaxing with our feet up in reclining chairs as if we were enjoying an ABC family movie, rather than holding small squares of paper on our tongues, trying to make sure we absorbed all the acid from them before swallowing.
Several factors had contributed to us finding ourselves in this situation. One was that Peter lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere, with the nearest neighbors being miles away. Another was that my parents and Peter’s parents had driven to Wisconsin for the weekend to watch Shakespearean plays. We had been invited to go along, but the third factor was that we had reasoned that, while Shakespeare was great, we could watch plays when we were 92, while taking acid and running around in cornfields was an activity that would get less feasible with each passing year.
And so began what our “hallucinogenic farm party.” We were dressed for the occasion. Tyler wore tight blue jeans, brown cowboy boots, and a child’s sized tie-dyed t-shirt. Peter was dressed in a pink button-up shirt and gray Goodwill sports jacket, ripped jeans, and a cowboy hat pushed down over his long blond hair. I wore shorts and a used youth soccer jersey with the words, “I’m the space invader, I’ll be a rock n’ rollin’ bitch for you,” stenciled on with black paint. I had a a plaid Scottish cap with a fuzzy blue ball on top, and aviators as accessories.
We swallowed the squares of paper and decided to have art time while we waited for something to happen. We sat around the dining room table and scribbled with colorful ink pens on a huge roll of white butcher paper, something I hadn’t done since elementary school. I began doodling and drawing terrible stick figures, which was all that my artistic ability generally allowed for. The three of us drew uneventfully for 15 minutes or so, until I suddenly started grasping at the pens frantically.
I knew exactly what I had to draw and I started sketching in quick, purposeful strokes. I drew an elaborate blue and orange monster with swirly eyes and a square face in the upper right hand corner. Next I drew a series of very simple, yet elegant, triangular trees, and finally a small purple bird on one of the branches. I drew a caption bubble for my bird, and began writing him some dialog. Finally, I looked up and found Peter and Tyler staring at me with their jaws hanging open. They looked like wooden puppets, and I could almost see the metal hinges at the corners of their mouths.
“I think it might have started,” Tyler said.
“Why?” I asked. Peter pulled my edge of the paper towards him and studied it.
“You, my friend,” he said, “are officially tripping balls.” He grinned like a Disney character, reached across the table and shook my hand, while tipping his hat to me.
“What is the bird saying?” Tyler asked. Peter picked up my drawing and cleared his throat dramatically, then began reading from my caption bubble.
“I have lived in many places,” he said, “but never in a shoe.”
We walked back to the living room to begin our adventure. We gathered around the table where we had assembled our supplies, and tried to decide what to do next. The table was covered in a ridiculous assortment of items. We had made several lists the day before, in preparation for this event, one of them being a shopping list.
It had been nice to pick up our shopping list and find, instead of things like eggs and milk, items such as silly string, Laffy Taffy, and small American flags (for burning). Our shopping expedition had taken us back to our youth, when our mothers would take us to the store and we would toss Oreos into the cart whenever we thought she wasn’t looking, only to have her discover them and put them back on the shelf. This time we were three orphan children, tossing in anything and everything that caught our eye, with nobody there to veto it.
The result was that we now had balloons and Munchies Kids Mix and assorted party favors at our disposal. I ripped open the Laffy Taffy and stuffed as many pieces into my pockets as I could. I picked one up and read the joke. It was embarrassingly awful. We decided that it might be more fun to read the punch lines and try to guess what the jokes were supposed to be.
“Beef jerky,” I said.
“Umm, what do you call a cow that masturbates a lot,” Tyler blurted out.
“He didn’t say beef jerkoff, dumbass,” Peter pointed out.
“It’s ‘what do you call a twitchy cow,’” I explained. “What should we do now?”
“Let’s consult the list,” Peter said. He opened his little notebook and looked at the list of activities we had compiled. “We could play croquet,” he said. “Or cut green island in half with a metal heavier, or set things on fire, or sit on our asses/look at shit.”
We walked outside for the first time, and it became immediately apparent that we hadn’t needed to make a list. We would clearly be spending most of our trip sitting on our asses and looking at shit. Outside was incredible. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard explores the phenomenon of seeing. She describes the documented experiences of the only generation of blind people to be given sight for the first time after cataract surgery was invented by Western surgeons, and I imagine what I saw must have been a little like that—like suddenly having sight after years of relying solely on your other senses.
There were colors I’d never seen before, and everything seemed to be shining brilliantly, so that the whole world was full of glint and glare. I lost my sense of depth, so that all was two dimensions, like very detailed and beautiful cardboard cutouts. Peter walked in front of me and he looked like a paper doll, sliding fast past a flat backdrop attached to a popsicle stick.
I flopped down onto the ground out of confusion and exhaustion, and pressed my left cheek into the grass and dirt. I felt as if I stayed there for several hours, but I had lost all grasp of time by then, so there was no real way to know. The world started peeling away, layer by layer. I saw everything in my field of vision, and I watched it all intently—the base of a nearby tree, the grass, dandelions, a few fallen leaves and twigs. Then suddenly all I could see were a few blades of grass, as if there had been a zoom. They loomed up in my vision and I saw the tiny wedges where they had been nibbled, the different shades of green and yellow, and the individual grains. And then I was looking beyond the grass, and I saw an ant walking along the dirt beneath, navigating between the obstacles in his path. He began climbing up one blade, then paused halfway and seemed to think better of it, turning himself around and heading back to where he’d come from. I watched him, and wondered if he would turn into a man-eating sloth-toed cheetah, or grow spines, or turn yellow, but he just stayed an ant, walking around on grass. It was fucking fascinating.
When I eventually remembered that I wasn’t alone, I sat up to look around and my face was numb from the hard ground. I saw that my friends had been occupied the same way I had. Tyler was petting a tree branch and Peter was investigating a dandelion. We gathered our wits about us, grabbed a pair of binoculars and set off into the woods. I brought the binoculars up to my eyes as we walked, and let out a yelp.
“Look at that!” I shouted.
“What is it?” Tyler asked.
“I don’t know what the hell it is, just look at it!”
After looking through the binoculars they understood my comment. You couldn’t always tell what you were seeing, but anything you pointed the binoculars at was amazing. It became a kind of mantra for us over the course of the rest of the day. It never really mattered what the hell it was, as long as we always looked at it.
We spent the rest of the day checking a variety of things off the activity list we had made—we rode bikes around the yard, sprinted down the gravel lane, watched Fantasia, climbed into an old deer stand to watch cars pass by on the highway, and made jello. At about 10:00 that night, Peter suddenly remembered that he was supposed to mow the lawn before his parents returned. We quickly realized that the only solution was to mow the lawn. In the dark. On acid. We set up some small floodlights, which barely lit even a portion of the yard, and prepared for our most challenging adventure yet.
Peter gave me his Ipod and clamped his noise canceling headphones around my head. Some kind of dramatic, classical march to hell seeped into my ear canal and rampaged around inside my skull. There was thundering percussion and the brass sounded as if it was trying to win an argument with someone. It was the kind of music that you would hear at the opening of an epic battle scene in a movie like “Braveheart” or “The Lord of the Rings.”
My task was to use the little push mower to do some of the smaller areas, and Peter began to give me instructions as to where exactly I should mow, but I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. I could see his lips moving, and the music in my head made it seem like he should be explaining the importance of the upcoming battle—a fearless leader motivating his troops to victory—but instead he was grinning and making gestures that were supposed to indicate the act of pushing a mower. When I finally stopped laughing long enough to realize that I’d be able to hear him if I removed the headphones, I caught the tail end of his last sentence.
“. . . and try not to mow over those fucking flowers over there, or the extension cord for these lights, or your foot, or those cats,” he said. It was less inspiring than I’d hoped, but I nodded solemnly, slipped the headphones back on, and we walked out onto the porch to a soundtrack of war songs, as I glanced left, right, and left again, on the lookout for Orcs or Scottish warriors.
We accomplished the task without injury or property damage, although in the light of the next morning we would see that the yard looked as if drunken toddlers had romped through it with machetes, and we would have to do the entire job over again. But for then we were proud and satisfied, and we retreated to the basement to watch television and fall asleep as the effects of the acid wore off.
The next morning we engaged on a massive cleanup mission. We discovered Laffy Taffy wrappers everywhere we went. I had apparently left a trail—most every room in the house, the fields, the lawn, the woods, in the trees. We picked everything up, stashed the leftover supplies in Tyler’s car and plopped down in the recliners where it had all started a day before.
I remembered the sunset of the day before, and I thought about how we’d watched the clouds and talked for over an hour.
The three of us had laid down like parallel lines in an open field, flat on our backs. The clouds moved horizontally across the sky faster than planes, and it looked like time-lapse photography. But we tracked them as they moved, and found faces and mythical animals and construction equipment in them.
“That one looks like a really old woman eating a cupcake,” Peter said, tracing the outline of her cheekbone with his index finger.
“I can’t even believe that I could agree with you,” I said, “but it kind of does.”
“I haven’t seen images in the clouds since I was in elementary school,” Tyler said. “Do you think we’re hallucinating these things, or are we just remembering how to be creative, and reverting back to a younger age?”
“I kind of think that everything we’ve seen today was real,” I said. “Like it’s always there, and we just never look. Old women and cupcakes must always be in the clouds. Maybe we can do this whenever we want, without drugs.”
“Dude,” Peter said, “if you can ever manage to catch a frisbee one-handed while riding a bike and looking through binoculars again without drugs, I will be impressed, but predominantly frightened.”
“We should not do this often,” Tyler said.
“But we should do this again,” Peter said.
The front door opened, snapping me out of my daydream, and bringing me back to my position in the recliner. Peter’s parents were home. They told us that the lawn looked nice, and all about Shakespeare, and that we really should have come with.
“You have to come next year,” they said.
“Maybe when I’m older,” Peter told them.

Gentlemen: The Future

First:
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070521175721AAsT339

Poop My Dad Utters

Today, on a visit to the office to inspect my progress in walling-up a basement door, my dad offered me the tasty option of a lunch at SUBWAY. Being both cheap (like my father, thanks dad) and hard-up for social interaction, I initially forgot about and afterward worked to ignore the fact that I looked like a very muddy, unkempt person, and walked with my dad toward the green and yellow glow.

The room was full of Forest Citizens, and I immediately felt highly self-conscious about my dirty clothes and lack of a smart phone to stare at. The people at Subway in Forest City are a peculiar bunch, and I always think about the politics of lunch here. The Subwayers, as opposed to the Hardeeans, the Sum Hingers and the mad one percent of the town who eat lunch at Shooters or Bills or Pizza Hut or even Taco Jerry's (A&W is still closed for the season), are a mixture of the wannabe health-fashionable consumers of GMO compost and the obedient, fetishist, accountants/mystics of calories and nutrients. While there might be laudable ideas here and there in the mixture, the overall act of eating at Subway pretty much always feels like an act of bad faith on my part.

I was thinking about my Subway angst as I watched one of the women preparing what seemed like a very tiny sandwich. Why was this sandwich so tiny? I looked down and saw the corresponding child dawdling while her mother attempted to interview her with respect to the design of the sandwich in progress. And then it dawned on me: in this bizarro future there was no longer a deli roll sandwich, just a three inch. By the time I'd made it past this heavy paradigm shift, it was time to order. My dad requisitioned a tuna melt, speaking to the robotic, forest-green, assembler women in curt bursts that anticipated the scripted back and forth that would have otherwise played out. This drove me nuts, first, because it made my dad seem like some kind of brusque robot himself and then more-so because the women at Subway were nowhere near tuned-in enough to the process of sandwiching to parse dad's uninterrupted string of commands, and everything had to be repeated, slowly.

We got the sandwiches, paid, sat, chewed for two or three minutes. Somehow we happened onto a fragment of conversation about British squatting laws and the fact that the police in the UK treat such disputes as civil matters, that is to say they ignore them. Then my dad pipes up with "I have this recurring dream..." [nom nom nom tuna nom]. I stopped chewing and began laughing rather uneasily through my most recent hunk of bready, compost with assorted cured meats so homogeneous as to be quite sinister. My dad leaned back from the very end of his sandwich and looked up, scratching his chin, exceedingly obviously preparing some recollection to share with me. I guess I felt ready, but somehow not expecting this sort of lunchtime revelation from my father.

"I have this dream where I realize that I own this building that I totally forgot about... in Mason City"

At this point my eyes are completely bugged out and I have no idea anymore how to deal with what he's explaining. I know that he's brought this up because we were talking about squatters and property, does he dream about having to deal with squatters? Regularly??

"Dad, wait, you're saying that you have a dream about discovering you own additional property that you dream over and over?"

"Yep. I think it started around five or six years ago." I mentally subtract; this date would place the headwaters of this dream right around my father's 50th birthday.

"Have you ever like researched this at all? Googled it?"

"No."

"Dad, this is the whitest guy dream, let alone recurring dream I've ever heard of." He lauged at that. I directed the conversation back at the dream. I wanted to compare it to the sorts of formal similarities that I've noticed in my comparison of my own dreams. I've never really had a dream that I remember repeat more than once, though my dreams often contained warped elements of each other, like a communal bunch of props and sets.

"Woah, okay, so how do you actually perceive this? What're the shots and the stage directions of the dream?"

"Well, I don't really remember that too well..."

"I mean, where does it happen? How does your realization occur?"

"Well, I'm just doing stuff and all of a sudden I remember that I've got this property in Mason Cit-"

"Doing stuff? Doing what stuff? Like anything specific?"

"No, not that I remember. Just anything. But then as soon as I realize that I've got this building, I'm really stressed out, cause how do you forget about a building? And then I go to Mason City and it's always a huge hassle..." He trails off, presumably picturing the squatters or the meth cooks or the stray animals or the neighborhood gang of kids or any manner of interlopers who might upset his building. Now I am doing the laughing.

"Dad, you're telling me this is a nightmare, or like a stress dream, about property about very specific pain of dealing with the bureaucratic hassle of removing people from your fallow property?"

"Yeah, it's always something. The building is usually different, but it's kinda industrial, maybe a warehouse or somethin'."

"Is it always in Mason City?"

"Yeah."

"Like, where in Mason City? Do you have to actually travel there once you've had your epiphany?

He thinks about this for a minute. "I don't know. I think it's usually like I realize and then the dream changes and I'm standing in front of the building, whatever it looks like, and I just know it's Mason City."

"Wow," I say. "That has got to be one of the strangest dream descriptions I have ever heard." Dad seems pleased with this and smiles.

At this point in the conversation I tried to explain the one form of dream that I have experienced occasionally for years that is (usually, with rare exceptions in which it seems downright prophetic) tantamount to his dream's opposite.

First, let's review briefly. In dad's dream, he discovers something he'd forgotten and is overwhelmed by the impenetrable mystery of its omission from his memory. When my dad wakes up, he feels better, though with perhaps a little more paranoia that he might be buying and forgetting giant objects in the world (something that it is just inherently weird for people to be able to do in this crowded a world).

My dream, on the other hand, occurs when I've actually lost something in the real world, something that I seldom do, and therefore obsess about when it occurs. Again the issue is memory error, but this time I go through the triumphant experience of seeking out and actually finding the object that I've lost, only to awake disappointed, frustrated, enraged at still having a lost whatever.

I wish I could say that I had looked up this dream and had a snappy wrap-up to this anecdote. I do not. However, I can say that I really like chatting with my dad when things go well. His banter is WEIRD, no doubt, and not just because I'm talking to the previous version of my brain.

Thunk!

Woah!