fashionable fictions

Last night I dreamed of schizophrenic stalkers, supermodels, philosophy, and psychics. What these things have in common, I have no idea. Let's find out together! 

So my family and I were on a driving tour through Vegas in a convertible that looked like a hot dog bun. For reasons I still cannot remember, the person I hate most in the world was in the bunmobile with us. I thought he would behave himself because my parents and brother were there, but he kept making biting asides that were obviously about me. Then he tried to choke me and force himself on me. Then the scene replayed, but I got to say and do all the things I wanted to do but didn't the first time round ("I get a do-over!").  I kicked him in the groin and dislocated his jaw with my fists of fury, yelling all the while, "you're the most disgusting thing I've ever seen; get your fucking hands off me!" (thanks Mer and Alex Sanderson for that). 

Then we arrived at our destination, which was apparently a press conference being held at  famous runway model Anna Selezneva's new luxury hotel. For the event, she was wearing a different kind of boot on either foot. She declared it a fashion trend, as well as being very practical for her infamously shorter left leg since her left boot had a thicker sole. I applauded her ingenuity and took plenty of pictures. Then I realized that she really looked more like Sasha Pivovarova than Anna Selezneva. During the press conference, a SWAT team broke through the picture windows and declared that Sasha/Anna's family had just been murdered and that she was either the prime suspect or the next target. They couldn't decide whether to arrest her or protect her. The put me in charge of looking after her, but they made the mistake of leaving the dismembered bodies of her family in the room with us. Anna/Sasha started to freak out, and just at that moment Patrick Jane/Simon Baker from CBS's The Mentalist showed up to film the event for the show's upcoming reality episode. I told him I was a big fan and somehow tried to sell him the clothing from ML that I had ordered especially for a jovial Syrian family. I also tried to get him to read my future even though I knew he was just an actor who played a character who had only pretended to be a psychic. 

Then we were at my messy studio apartment in Bristol, trying to protect Anna/Sasha from the murderers we were sure were after her. Ken Nickel, my philosophy professor, showed up to lend his aid, but he said that he had to do some work while keeping watch. He took out a stack of papers that had already been graded and wrote scathing comments all over them just for the hell of it. All the papers were on the same topic: What is a Heidegger, and if so, who are your Kierkegaard? 

Sometimes a Heidegger is just a Heidegger. 

a small anecdote

This was the dominant scene of last night's dreamscape:

I stood in the corner of my kitchen while my father decided what to make for dinner. He told me all the options and I gave my opinions, but he didn't seem to be paying any attention to them. Then he seemed to have made up his mind and reached for a skillet. I knew something wasn't right; I could feel a sense of impending doom mounting in the air. All my fears and misgivings were dead-on, because the next thing I knew dad was reaching into the fridge and pulling out a carton of eggs.

"Omelette for supper! Breakfast as dinner night!"

"Nooooo00000!" I screamed, hearkening back to Anakin Skywalker in Episode 3 and thereby making all living things shudder in sheer horror. But again, dad was deaf to my cries of despair. I racked my brain, trying to force myself to conceive of a way out of this situation that was worse than death. 

Saved by the bell. Thank goodness.

no hook-ups

My other personality has something to say today as well (I'm never upset by just one thing, believe me).

Here is a law that will make everyone's days much brighter if abided by:

If you're in a disgustingly touchy, aren't-we-so-lucky-to-have-found-each-other-and-happenstancially-fallen-in-love, isn't-Christian-school-great-because-of-young-marriage, aren't-other-people-sad-and-incomplete-because-they-haven't-found-what-we've-found-in-each-other couples that litters this world I'm compelled to live in, only act like it if you're alone or around people who are glad that you're together. Don't make strangers suffer the awkwardness of your intimacy, and especially not in enclosed spaces. They might just vom all over you.

Can I get an 'Amen!'?

optimist in pessimist's clothing

I have a lot of difficulty living. I'll admit that freely to any person who has any interest whatsoever in knowing anything about me. And also, apparently, to random internet passersby. I find it hard to persevere through an entire day. There have only been a few isolated periods of time in my life during which this hasn't been the case. I like laughing, and I like eating, and I like drinking, and I like being purposely lazy. There are a lot of other things in life that I like doing as well, and no matter how far-flung they might be from my previously listed likes, they share the common characteristic of being things that society dictates you can only indulge in when you've done your share of soul-sucking, identity-effacing, will-to-life-straining work for the day. Who the hell came up with this system? How did we get to the point where you can only earn happiness by fulfilling a dictated number of unhappiness hours? That is insanity. I don't want to do meaningless work that decreases my belief in the existence of joy. I don't want to live in a world where my fleeting freedoms cannot even be enjoyed because they are always overshadowed by the resentment of captivities to come. I don't want to feel guilty for for thinking, however briefly, 'I'm happy right now.' 

We are created to experience joy and to delve into those things that remind us of our infinitely complex, indestructible identities. We are created for creativity and for understanding. We are created with the capacity for overwhelming, mystified wonder. I physically ache with the thought that some people do not realize these things. For what is the purpose of living if not to experience as much as you can, as deeply as you can? I fear that our world is being run by people who have lost the ability to love life. But then that begs the question, how do those people get out of bed in the morning if I can barely manage it? Worrisome thought indeed. 

poop toaster

Having now discovered the perfect cocktail of medications to make me sleep without dreaming crazy person acid flashback dreams, I must recount to you not the dream I had last night but excerpts from a dream I had a few nights ago. Forgive me for not having made proper use of the instantaneous nature of the internet. 

I decided to pay a visit to my newlywed friends Maddie and Jesse. In my dreamland they were living on the top floor of a house converted into apartments. They got a great deal on the flat because it included no bedrooms or kitchen, only a bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a hallway with hardwood floors. Bargain! They were having a house-warming party, but I had a bad feeling about it. I knew that the old lady who lived in the house with them would go all apeshit if we disturbed her. Luckily, for the first half of the party she was gone to McGill for her class Sexuality & Finance. For the duration of the shindig I had a strange nagging feeling that I was forgetting something, something terrible, something much bigger than a ticked off neighbour. Then I looked out the window and noticed that the sunset was emanating a deeper red tone than usual, and I remembered that our world had been taken over by Kryptonians bent on harnessing the powers of our Yellow Sun, and that we had only a few hours left to appease them with sacrifices before they would turn our Sun permanently from yellow to red, making human life on Earth impossible. This is where it got acidic.

Maddie said that she wanted to show me her back yard. Apparently the big apartment house was home to horses as well as people, because there were stables in the yard. But this scene transformed into a Middle Eastern reserve where Syrian men ordered the women around and smiled innocently like little toddlers. One such man welcomed me to the compound and offered to give me a tour. They had converted the stables into a gigantic bathroom divided into stalls. Each stall housed two devices: one toilet for women and one toilet for men.  The women's toilet was just a bathtub full of water and seaweed, while the men's toilet resembled a urinal/massage table/recumbent bike hybrid. He told me that every time a man needed to 'void his indiscreet regions', he had the right to request the company of a woman to do the same simultaneously. If the woman was unable to void in the time given to her, she could be sacrificed to the Red Sun. I realized then that the Syrians were actually Kryptonians. I also discovered that I would not be allowed to leave the compound until I had offered a self-demeaning sacrifice to a Syrian man. ("Those toilet men are freedom haters!")

I will spare you the gory-yet-hilarious details of what transpired next. Suffice it to say that I was glad to discover upon waking that I hadn't pooped the bed, and still possessed the freedom to eat a toasted bagel by the light of the Yellow Sun. Ah, simple pleasures.

looking at feet

It occurred to me this morning that some people might be hesitant about sharing their dreams with the internet because it reveals secret truths about them. I fully acknowledge the power of dreams to instruct us and bring us a deeper understanding of ourselves than waking life can offer. However, today I bring before you a dream offering than has no power to tell you anything more about me than a passing glance at Wayne Gretzky's left foot would do. 

I think I've been experiencing some less-than-favourable drug interactions, which is how I explain the outpouring of nonsensicality that was my never-ending dream from two nights ago. I still maintain that when I awoke in the wee hours of the morning to discover that I had kicked off four of my six layers of blankets and wrapped one of the remaining blankets around my neck, I kept dreaming while awake. And not lucid dreaming, where I am aware of my dreaming state and can control the events of my dream. Just straight-up dreaming while awake (I always wished my life could be more like a Judy Blume novel). 

Here are some highlights:

I arrived at Chinook Station, which was of course nothing at all like Chinook Station. It was a huge complex surrounded by rolling hills covered in snow. On one of said hills was gathered a crowd of geeky teens all glued (not a figure of speech) to their personal gaming systems, participating in a virtual reality together. A sign on the opposite hill indicated that the site was the only naturally-occurring Wi-Fi hotspot in the world. As I climbed the next hill, I noticed a group of children gathered behind a metal railing, overlooking the train tracks a few meters below. One of the children was a minor character from the British TV serial Skins, and as I approached him, he pushed a boy down the hill toward the train, or at least tried to and was foiled by my fine-tuned reflexes and caring heart. My bravery earned me the attention of a boy I had known back in Regina. 

When I reached Chinook, I discovered that it was a shopping complex, my university, and an abandoned-hotel-turned-apartment-complex where squatters' rights were the only rights. I met up with Rebs and D-rock in Aldo, where I realized that I had half an hour to get to work and open the store. We learned a quick sociology lesson based on sole depth and then Rebs offered to drive me to work in her 'killer truck', which is how she referred to her Neon. Then I spied some Germans giving away free leather purses in the hallway and decided to prioritize. I tried to catch the attention of Prince Goebels and his bedazzled satchels, but was unsuccessful. So I followed him for a while. Eventually I found him crying in a corner because his business plan of giving a way the merchandise wasn't panning out as he'd expected, and his home country was going to disown him. 

Then I found myself walking up some stairs with a friend of mine from high school. He said, "My room's just up here. When we get there, we shall finally make love for the first time." I thought, "Uh, sure, that sounds okay. But maybe just some heavy petting." When we got to his room, a Vietnamese woman was making the beds. There were seven beds in the room, all with identical bedspreads of pale orange and blue plaid. There were two sets of bunk beds. It was like a low-income ski chalet from the '70s. Excited as I was to 'finally make love' with this boy who had appeared out of thin air, I realized that I had five minutes to get to work. I ransacked the room in search of my phone so that I could alert my manager, but I couldn't find it. I also couldn't locate my remote cell phone starter/beeper. But the boy located my remote cell phone starter's starter and hit the locater button. We followed the beeps to another squatter's room. She threw my beeper at me, furious that I was using such outdated technology. 

I knew I needed to get out of Chinook, so I ran to the closest set of stairs. The stairs were like Jacob's Ladder, with streams of figures moving up and down on the stairs. I ran into Taylor Lautner, who handed me a long stick and recommended pole vaulting up the stairs to avoid the crowds. Then when I had vaulted a few flights, Taylor Lautner apparently realized that I was an intruder and could not be allowed to escape. He and his stairwell lacrosse team confronted me and I had to defeat them. We fought each other with oversized spatulas until it was just me against Lautner. I hit him in the face a few times to weaken him, but apparently I just killed him. Uh-oh. With all of Chinook out for my blood, I ran full-tilt until I reached the surface. There I met my mother in her friend's Chevette, loaded full of blankets to shield me from the view of my lynch mob. 

Maybe it was the nachos I ate before bed.

twilight, de-fanged

I wish the word twilight hadn't been annexed by the enemy. Enemy of culture, that is. Because it's a good word, and it holds many great song connotations: Twilight by Elliott Smith, Living in Twilight by The Weepies, Civil Twilight by The Weakerthans... also, for some reason every time I say "masochism" people think I'm making a Stephenie Meyer reference, which- clue in!- I'm obviously not, because it was a word before she kidnapped it for her purposes, a word that I used frequently and for good reason.
Anyway, that wasn't supposed to be my point. I get caught up sometimes- sincerest apologies, gentle viewers (Buffy references FTW, btw).

What I am thinking about is the clarity of twilight. As the day is diffused into the sky, maybe it all clarifies in the dimming light. Yesterday, I was consumed in something; I was teetering. Then I reached a place of unexpected relief. It was like a breaking point, but the good kind. A rock avalanche that reveals fresh ground underneath and doesn't kill anyone in the process. New skin. Or like that wonderful empty feeling you get after you throw up and it's like you vomited up your every impulse to sickness. Mine came about in a compulsion to tears that manifested itself when I least expected it. The kind of tears that make it impossible to speak. The kind that get worse the more you try to clumsily apologize for their existence. Anyway, they were happy tears where I expected to find tears of exasperation. Tears of relief instead of fear.
Hope is a strange place if you've been wandering around in a desolate world whose corners hide only bad surprises. But I take comfort wherever I can these days. I take comfort in the distilled wisdom of the day. I take joy in the presence of friends whom I can now appreciate, and the surprising grace of strangers. I delight in the twilight diffusion of a day's closing parenthesis. I treasure the days when I can reach my bed feeling content and not frightened of night, even though sleep takes so long to reach me nevertheless. I dream the twilight till morning, and I carry it with me into the next day, and the next.