i can dream

[click images]

.



.




I had gone to a church basement to hear Auster and Arriaga talk. That was odd because to me church basements are where antiwar protests and freedom movements are born, but this time it was to listen to these great authors talk about novels and screenplays and liking directing because you can look at the beautiful women. It's a very, very engaging discussion and I'm having a fine time.

When they are done and the lights come up in the audience, Robin is sitting about two seats from me, and even though he is smiling, I can't tell if he recognizes me. I get him to move to the seat next to me. Now HE seems shy. Yes, yes, he remembers. "You would write and write and write and then face-to-face... fwoosh." He made a hand motion of a young girl disappearing swiftly and smoothly into the pages of time. I said something about how crazy it was to run into him like this, clear out here in the boondocks. He cracked a half smile. He looked genuinely pleased, but also a little distracted with little winces of discomfort so I left him to himself.

Auster and Arriaga were jumping off the stage and talking happily with everyone in their path. We all went out into the parking lot to make for our various cars. I said good-bye to Robin as he hurried to his car. The other two stuck near me, and I got a chance to tell them how I enjoyed their talk so much that now I really had to read their books, telling Auster that a friend had heavily recommended at least half his books to me. He was very pleased about this. I thought this was going to be the end of it, but, no, we were going back in for another.

Inside now there were about ten of us and the church basement was now in Jenner instead of Smith River. [I so love that about dreams. Easiest trip between those two points ever not even conceivable.] Now it wasn't just authors and people coming to listen to a literary discussion. Now it wasn't set up for an audience facing the stage. It was set up like a meeting was to take place and the people doing the staff work keep flipping back and forth between church member volunteers and hotel staff and back. There was a wife there for one or the other of them, and Auster had been showing a great deal of interest in me, but suddenly it was Arriaga who was engaging me in the very friendliest exchanges, and it seemed to be his wife with him, but not taking any of our banter in any way awry... letting us start turning into close friends completely unimpeded by wife energy.

I saw a desk with a mound of cards and papers on it. Right on top was something clearly with my handwriting on it. It had been a card to Bradley Manning wherein I had enclosed some paltry sum toward his defense. I was going to become alarmed, but noticed that there was a note attached to it that they were sorry but they couldn't deliver the donation and had to return it. Things were very busy in preparation for something, and the whole energy stayed a big roiling leaving from the former situation and planning for another one and setting up to do something right now. The energy was seamlessly leaving / staying / returning / conspiring / planning and all of it in an extremely satisfyingly friendly... no... essentially loving atmosphere. Arriaga was saying very wonderful things to me. He made The Connection.

This couldn't have anything to do with my mp3 player continuing to replay until I get up and turn it off, or the fact that my crazy tiredness and need to get back in bed eighty times today was all about me needing to have one of those bouts where I do all my Phase Four and REM for the month at once. My sinuses are taking their turn being the part with the ice picks in them. It moves around my head. It sometimes is my ears, one or the other, and sometimes my EYES, and sometimes my sinuses, with varying participation in the little necklace of lymph nodes at the top of my neck. Anyway, when it is my sinuses all inflamed, I snore so loudly I keep waking myself up... which was what I kept doing every time I tried to succumb to a nap all day. It was just the gods of dreaming finally grabbing me by the throat and slamming me down on my bed that let me get the dreaming in before the snores could prevent it.

So. Now I'm going to pretend I am back at the monastery, getting my coffee and puffing my carcinogens before hitting the Zendo at five. I'm going to—in honor of this pleasant dreaming—pretend that I have finally trained my haywire circadian rhythms to go to sleep at nine and be up by five. The IDEAL schedule for anyone like me.

IS there anyone like that?

.
love, 99
.