5:26 a.m. (drinking coffee) It was all a dream. The type I haven't had much since Hot Fisher, Texas nearly 20 years ago, but they still appear in my sleep sometimes. When I wake up, I'm not unsettled as I was circa 1998. I take it for what it was -- just a dumb dream. Although I have a friend who may not be so dismissive. She has books on Jungian symbolism and I just know she has Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. And she talks a lot about the struggle between the id and superego, cooled by that distillation method, the ego.
Anyhow, I dreamt I had two choices. It was a night when I could enter one of two houses as the end of the world drew near. "Right down to the wire," an old man told me. ("My family expects me to be a famous writer, but that won't happen?" I asked another old man who got a few fingers blown off by the Germans in World War II. "I'm afraid not," he said.) I was younger in the dream, not a teenager, but perhaps a twenty-something around the quarter of life. I could enter the safety of the house with the old men and perhaps be spared the death and destruction that would plague the world in ways never seen before, nor ever to be seen again.
Then, there was the other house. They would be drinking beer, cranking up loud rock music. A few people would be smoking cigarettes and if I wanted to get laid that night, I could get it. House was enticing. "Won't be a party till you show up," the guy with the '70s hair told me. We might get drunk, fight and throw our arms around one another's soldiers. "C'mon, I'll buy you a beer."
She was Jake and Cal's favorite aunt -- and everybody's
cool favorite aunt, for that matter. As music would play from the karaoke machine, she would sing every lyric without missing a word, mic loose in her hand -- "That's right it starts with an earthquake, Birds and snakes and aeroplanes and Lenny Bruce is not afraid." She would trudge on effortlessly as the lyrics got tougher:Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs, Birthday party, cheesecake, jellybean, boom, you symbiotic, patriotic, slam but neck, right, right."
"What the fuck," I said. "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints."
the sinners are much more fun
And entered Animal House.
Death of me.
Apocalypse.
While I was partying.
Next morning I awoke at my old childhood home, which isn't there anymore. Only, it was there in my dream. The side streets outside my house were flooded with muddy water and I saw, floating on the water, the dead bodies of people I'd known all my life. Old men. Teenagers. Like refuse. And I knew I'd done it, this one for the last time. My doom awaited me. There might be a few storefronts downtown selling fake religion, but the temporary nature of it all in the cloudy air only underscored the realization that this world was finished.
It's after 6 a.m. now. Coffee ain't as warm. I'll take pills with a glass of milk. Walk around the lake before the sun emerges in the clouds. Dawn breaking through and the world, the living thing going on years from today. Long after I die of old age.
