walking a lonesome highway

It was one of my Highway 101 in Marin County dreams again... after I had been dreaming I was at a drive-in theater that turned into a gated community and race track after the movie. Young girls were manning the combination ticket booths, guard kiosks, starting gates. They all loved me. I tried to tour the community after the movie but the cars were too intrusive. No resolution because then I was walking beside 101 with a man, someone I was teaching things, somewhere down around about Strawberry or so, and the road was filled with stopped cars that would advance an inch every few minutes. You know. Commute traffic.

The walking was excellent. No weight and no aches. Just effortless progress. I said, "See? We're making better time than these cars. This is much better." Somewhere past Terra Linda and nearing Ignacio, the cars were left behind and the highway was completely empty. There were some little cubicles set up beside it. There were compartments in them, one had a bed with vivid American flag themed bedclothes... actually all of them were tricked out with this theme, with items like vividly flag-themed emergency blankets, and indeed I finally grabbed one for a wrap.

My father popped up at one of these roadside compartments, and the never very distinct man student I had with me became even less distinct. It hit me that I had still been looking for him, even while trying to teach this fellow who'd walked along with me. I was very concerned to see Poppa out with no one and stuck in a little cubicle by the highway, and started to ask him things, expecting to have to listen with way more than my ears to catch the essence of what he'd be trying to say, perhaps even thinking he was saying, but not coming out of his mouth that way, but he answered me in completely well-formed and pertinent phrases. He'd been just napping in one of the compartments, but to show me his freedom and that he sometimes got to stay with Mom now, he began leading me up the street that went to the house I grew up in. We were suddenly at the junction of Sleepy Hollow Drive and Martling Drive, very close to home.

No resolution because then a baby born attached to some sort of object and me trying to decide how I was going to fool with that image, how to crop it, change the levels, blur it or sharpen it... and then it turned from doing that with the image to doing that with the baby... and back to the image of the baby and then into meta ways to link into much better information than just linking as we do to plain information... a way to make your clicks here take you to real insight instead of just a sort of fuel for a vast machine... information that is like jet fuel... just feeding something huge, stupid and dangerous. Somewhere in all this creative mental work, I realized I was not asleep anymore.

And I realized I had not been allowed to stay with my father again... that maybe he was only trying to reassure me and I had not leapt at a chance to do this cellularly important thing....