win win whine

Started dreaming again, medication has changed. In a broad sense I suppose I’m neutral, day to day, however, it’s fucking weird. How do you people manage to do stuff? I could suggest my dreams are stranger than yours, but how could I possibly know that? I could suggest that my dreams are kind of like flashbacks to horrible things I’ve witnessed, but that would be patently untrue. I could start a dream journal, but I have hundreds of reasons not to, the one I come back to most is it’s an indulgence so akin to masturbation that the only difference I can think of is ejaculation, and, even that it’s 100 percent true.

I don’t believe dreams are predictive or are something divine encoded and the more medical explanation, that they are some kind of sub-conscious debriefing (a simple summery, but I’m simple) doesn’t quite seem right either. Mine seem more like giving a kindergarten class finger-paints and showing them a cubist painting; inappropriate and confusing. I’m sure a good teacher could use that with the right childish explanation, but there is no teacher in my head.

I don’t feel rested after a night of active dreaming, and, sure, I know that studies show the dreams you wake up with are like thirty seconds before you wake, but I’ve spent so many years without seemingly having dreamed that I know the feeling of waking after a dreamless sleep and after a night of dreaming. I can physically tell the difference. I know I didn’t go dreamless for years, I just didn’t remember dreaming. Again, how the fuck does anyone manage to do shit after a night of looking at cubism with a phantom little hand stained with finger-paints?

My niece from long beach visited us all last week. It was nice. Last time she was here she was high in cycle and talked crazy-paranoid shit. I’m not denigrating her, she knows she’s crazy, I mean diagnosed kind of crazy. The niece who lives here has a lot of prescriptions for crazy but her frequent statements are that she has ‘Severe Mental Health Issues’. Much like her father she’s had every rare disease she’s ever found on the internet and all her doctors are idiots for not recognizing them. It’s not hypochondria or Munchausen’s but something in between. I’m not even sure it’s psychosomatic. What it reminds me the most of is symptoms that some folks got in the office where I was the shop steward; getting-long-term-disability symptoms. I want to qualify my shit talking with it’s only a guess, as to the cause, as to the whinging, whining and wailing, I’m minimizing.

I feel like I woke up in a bathtub in a stranger’s house, equal parts curious and vaguely embarrassed. It’s a dreary day outside. Kind of a relief; the mercury hasn’t spiked over 75 and the T-storms never came. It’s like a win win, Christmas in July, for weather not gifts. I’m not sure what to do with myself, so I wrote this and now I’m getting tired of it. It’s an excuse for an unstated problem, I’m feeling to dull to write fiction. I was thinking about waking up in a bath-tub as the start of a short story or flash and found the door locked to the next sentence. It’s a stupid first line if there isn’t a second. In the Book, The Language Of Cats, Spencer Holst has a section of first lines he really liked but didn’t have a story for. Although I liked that section it has occurred to me that the publisher told him the book was too slim and to beef it up a bit. It’s just a guess.

I’m going to go … do something else, or, you know, not.