Airplane

I dreamt I was on an airplane, walking up and down the aisle, waiting for it to land.  The pilot had announced it a few minutes ago — buckle up, we’re taking this thing down.  I had that bit of disorientation so common in dreams:  Where was I?  on an airplane.  Who was I?  me, I’m me.  What am I doing?

As best I could tell, I was a flight attendant, working the plane, looking at people in their seats, mothers and kids, businessmen, people traveling to see a family member or go on vacation somewhere.  But the plane wasn’t going down.

We’ll be landing in Boston in fifteen minutes, said the pilot.

That’s the same thing she said ten minutes ago, a passenger said to me.  What’s going on?

Everything’s fine, I said.  Probably just some miscalculation.

A minute later, the pilot gives an update.  We’ll be landing in Boston in fifteen minutes.

Now the passengers are grumbling, audibly irritated and confused.  Everyone is asking me what the hell is happening and I don’t know.   Another minute passes and the voice comes on again.    We’ll be landing in Boston in fifteen minutes.

I realize with surprise that it’s the voice of my mother in law, the seventy nine year old woman with Alzheimer’s who peed herself at home yesterday and needed my wife to clean her up.  The woman who woke up on a weekday and put on a dress to go to a party that doesn’t exist.

My sick mother in law is flying this plane, I thought to myself.  This is major league fucked up.

I woke up a second later with a literal start, my head rising from the bed as if I was about to do a stomach crunch.

A few minutes later, downstairs, I am making coffee and toast and putting the brownies that I made last Saturday out on the countertop so my wife Jennie can take them to work — I am running through the set of tasks that I do virtually every morning that I think of as ConstantObligations, Part I.  And I think about the dream.  The message isn’t exactly subtle.  My sick mother in law is flying a plane.  I am working on the plane — working for her.  The inmates are, if not running the asylum, at least telling the doctors when and where and how to work, all the while pretending everything is fine, that the plane will land in fifteen minutes.

This plane is never going to land, I think, while I’m buttering bread.  Fifteen minutes my ass.  This plane is going to be up in the sky for years, and we’re all going to pay — we’re all captive to this shit.  We’re all asking each other what is happening, looking to one another for answers, but we don’t have any.

I’m so distracted by the dream and the general sense of fatigue that I always have in the morning that I put heavy cream into my wife’s coffee instead of half and half and I have to pour most of it out and then I realize I didn’t make enough coffee to re-do her cup so I give her my coffee which is black and now she has coffee to take to work but I don’t have any for myself but at least she isn’t drinking a bunch of heavy cream.

you’re making mistakes Joe, making a lot of mistakes.  you made mistakes at work yesterday, you’re behaving oddly, says my inside voice while I’m putting the cap on the travel mug Jennie uses.  I push the thoughts down and instead try to concentrate on other things I have to do.  Pay a check to the MRI place that did the imaging on my knee.  Start calling up solar companies so we can get a system installed — we got something in the mail yesterday saying our supply costs for electricity were about to rise by 100%, from 11.5 cents a kW to 23.  That’ll increase our electricity bills by 50%.  We average $200 a month, sometimes it’s $350 because of AC in the summer — so now those bills will be $300 and $500 respectively.  I know it’s because our country’s natural gas is being shipped to Europe because of the Ukraine war but this doesn’t make it any easier to stomach.  Once prices go up they never go down again.  So, we’ll go solar, and I need to get started on it right away because everyone in the state is going to have exactly the same idea as me so I need to get right out the fuck in front of everyone else who wants the same thing.

Jennie comes downstairs and I zip the back of her work dress and kiss her neck and tell her I love her and I send her off to the library in the rain.

Then I’m back to thinking about what I need to do next:  physical therapy then take your 10:30 AM work meeting from the car so you don’t have to come home then go to the gym and do your upper body lifting then go to the store and get something for dinner, maybe taco stuff, then come back home and talk to John Hastings so he can cover you while you’re out of the office.

Sounds about right.  I have to end this entry and get going, physical therapy starts in just 20 minutes and the drive takes a while.  I have to fly this plane though the day today.  This plane will not land in fifteen minutes.