Dreams of Ordinary Men

I love dreams.  Even when they’re bad, they can tell us so much if we listen. Oh, sure you should never read too much into dreams, but if you listen, you can  glean little lights from your psyche: who you are, who you think you are and who you think you should be—All available to those who look.

Take my dream last night.  Last night I lived in my old house and opened the front door when I heard a knock. The door stuck like it always did, and crack-poped when it released the jamb, just like I remembered it. Even the dirty aluminum security screen door was there, protecting me from whoever was outside.

In this dream, the people outside were five Scotsmen, of varying degrees of maturity.  How do I know they were Scots? They work kilts and spoke in brogues.

“You stole what’s ours,” the leader spoke in the aforementioned brogue.
“Uh, what?”  I said in my nondescript American English.
“Our birthright. You stole in. Now you pay.” He said, “you,” but “you” sounded like “yee” on his lips. Then as an expression of displeasure, all five spat on my door. It was dream, so real-life physics carried the phlegm no further than the aluminum mesh. It stopped, and dripped, turning brown, mingling with the dirt and dust that already settled there.

I was as grateful as could be expected.

They were as courteous as could be expected: the Scots spat and left.

In the mists of dream magic, and Scottish curses, my dream jumped forward.  I’m no longer standing in my living room staring at a spit screen. I’m standing in the street, staring at a foreclosure sign. The shift to the future hasn’t unsettled me, but the recent dream turn of events are a little too close to home. My house has been foreclosed, everything I own is missing, including all my unpublished fiction, and even my dog is gone.  It’s like a bad country song.

I’m dream-ported to a dark wood paneled one room apartment. It’s bare. Dream knowledge reveals that it’s where I live now.  I’m alone, because that’s how this dream has me. There is a knock at the door, so at least I have visitors.

I open the door. It’s the Scots. They’ve come to gloat. See, these bad things didn’t just happen, The Scots did it to me. They forced the foreclosure, they stole my stories and, as the little old short Scot holding a leash proves, they took my dog. Cosmo licks the old Scot and sits at his feet.

I explain to them that I don’t know why they’ve done this: I don’t have their heirloom, or birthright, or whatever they call it. They’ve taken everything, so, as they can see, I don’t have it.

“We can’t see that,” one said.

“What do you mean? You’ve left me with nothing!”

“We can’t see it. It’s invisible. You still hide it.”

“Uh…” dream me doesn’t know how to argue that logic.

“No matter. We’re not here for the birthright. We’re here for the revenge.”

They leave, taking my dog with them. There’s also a book on a shelf that I’ve been reading.  One of them grabs it as he leaves. No one spits.

The dream rushes forward again. I’m watching an entertainment show. The host is interviewing a family of five Scots who’ve written several books that are all now best sellers.  Sure enough, I recognize the Scots as quickly as I dream recognize the books. They’re my Scots and my books. The Scots edited the books, found agents and publishers and are now the next big Scottish thing since Fat Bastard, all because of what I wrote.

After raking in millions of dollars and riding the fame train as far as they can on what I’ve written, the Scots stop by again. They’re not sorry, but it was never their plan to become so rich off of my stuff. To make things even, they give me back my dog. And to remind me of what I stole from them, they give me a ghost, who hates me. Who puts me down whenever he can.

After this, I decide to find the Scotts’ invisible heirloom. I’ve got nothing else to do. After an epic dream quest with my dog and antagonist ghost, I find the thing.  I don’t know what it is: it’s invisible, but when I find it, I know that I have in fact had it all along—whatever it is. It’s magic. It gives a little bit of luck to it’s holder. Not great amounts, just little blessings, if you will. And like any other kind of magic heirloom, there is a always a side effect. The side effect of this invisible thing? The possessor is doomed to write unsellable stories.

After the revelation, I woke up. I was happy. Sure the dream was vague, but never read too much into vague dreams. Stick to the obvious. There, on the discernible surface, I found a meaning worth clutching to my heart: I’m gonna get my dog back.

I love dreams and I really love happy endings.

Obstruction of Traffic

“License and registration please.”

I don’t know about you, but that’s my least favorite phrase in the world, other than “Bend over and grab your ankles.”  Not that I have any experience with the latter. It just seems like something I don’t want to hear.

The former, I heard this morning, much to my chagrin.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to put that chagrin away. We don’t allow that in this state.”

Great, I can’t even get grumpy.  I’ve been pulled over by Andy Taylor. Andy’s not exactly happy either. He’s caught me speeding, but I’m going to be more trouble than I’m worth.  I’ve got an out of state drivers license and my proof of insurance is only available electronically today. Yesterday was the last day the paper copy was valid.

“Sigh.”  That’s not me. That’s Andy.  “I’ll be right back.” Yeah, that’s Andy at his surly worst. He needs practice.

Andy’s more of a passive aggressive peace officer.  He’s gonna make me wait while he sits in his SUV and sips coffee.  That’s ok. It gives me time to think about today’s blog. If only I had something to write about.

I love talking about myself, but most of my blogs lately have been about other people and their other news. My days are fairly boring. I work out. I blog. I write my young adult novel. I work out again. I go to bed. I get up. I shower, lather, rinse, repeat.  I can make a blog of that, but by if I stretch it across a blog week, it starts sounding like a season of Three’s Company.

“Jack!”

“Janet!”

“Mr. Furley!”

Don Knotts isn’t the guy writing me my ticket.  Deputy Fife would be done now.

Another cop car pulls beside Andy’s SUV. His car is black. His doors are white. If you don’t see these colors correctly then you probably shouldn’t be driving.  The other cop has a yell conversation through car windows with Andy and his partner.  I thought that was what the radio was for.  Maybe they’re yelling because Andy’s radio is tied up running my License. 

Great. Another reason for Andy to hate me.

I watch and wait.  The other car doesn’t move. I’m a little concerned. I don’t have anything in my car, and I’m pretty sure I’m not a wanted fugitive, but still. The more police who congregate, the more chance there is for some misinterpretation.  I reach for my gum.

“He’s got Dentine!”

See what I mean? I said gum.  But boy that would be something to blog about.

Don’t get me wrong.  I appreciate law enforcement and everything they do—even if it’s pulling me over. They put their lives on the line everyday, and every day with budget cuts and lay offs there are fewer and fewer of them on the road. Even ticket writing Andy never knows who’s behind the wheel of the car he’s approaching. So I understand if Andy’s a little twitchy. My goal is not to give them reason to twitch.

The other cop car pulls away and slowly rolls past my car.  Actually it’s not that slow. He’s going the speed limit. That miscalculation is why Andy pulled me over in the first place.

Huh. Despite the ticket, I’m happy to have something new happening.  Is that weird? A little something new to break the monotony, and I get a character study. Other writers pay more money for conferences, and don’t get the same one on one time.

And like that, the fun is over. Andy walks up, gives me back my license and registration with a lecture about Michigan laws concerning out of state driver’s licenses. I smile and nod.  He hands me my ticket. It doesn’t have a dollar amount on it, butAndy says I can call the courts about that. He also tells me to try and have a good day.

I will. I’ve got today’s blog finished.

Tomorrow, I’ll be back, Andy. We can write a new blog called “Reckless Endangerment.”

The Great White Caboose

Today’s blog, begins with an excerpt:

I am the caboose of the great white American locomotive.

Whoo! Whoo!

Here, take my hand. Climb aboard. I’ll give you the tour.

Let’s start with engine.  That’s where the power is. You’re looking at history’s generator. Feel your thighs rattle like you’re straddling a jackhammer set to “thrill?” That’s 200 years plus of phallic power thrusting this sleek beast into greatness. George Washington, Tom Edison, Bill Gates, they’re the coal and steam, the insatiable hunger and the lust lunging the great white head toward the Eve of manifest destiny.

That’s one monster dynamo of locomotion! It has to be! That’s what it takes; hauling all these bloated white cargo cars at immeasurable speeds.  Don’t stand in its way! The full weight of white wrath will knock you back like a tribe of Indians—but that’s another history stop along the way.

Let’s go to the next group of cars. Here you’ll find the robber baron boxcars. They supply fuel to the white machine. They only take up a few cars, but these are the primo luxury cabins, so slip on your white gloves, and don’t even knock without donning a day coat.

The other cars? Oh, they’re loaded with the apathetic, lazy and voyeuristic masses, yearning to be carried for free by the steam of other’s greatness.

Step quickly to the caboose! The languor here is contagious!

Woah!  

Watch your step! A history hic-up, has uncoupled my great white caboose from the great white train. Quick! Wave to the baby boomers as they hurtle into the pasty sunset.  See them smile? They made the train.

The rest of us on the caboose? Take a look over my shoulder, to the barren tracks stretching to the American wasteland. That’s my future. That’s the white train legacy: a trailing generation birthed in the last car of a runaway train and raised on the promise that the tracks of the manifest blessing of the great pale birthright would go on forever.

And so it does, even if we’ve stopped.

It’s a history that was good enough for generations before, and damn-it, it would be good enough for me. If only I had made the train. If only I wasn’t the uncoupled caboose in a generation sitting dead on the tracks. Left behind to be a white dot on a statistical map.

You are here.

            Our choice is to walk the rails and hope to catch up, or strike out on our own, setting our own destiny. We chose neither of these. We chose a different path; a road less traveled by the on-the-go generations that came before. We chose to wait for another train to come along while whining about our horrible mistreatment by fate.

———

And ends with a whimper:

That caboose ending is how a happy go lucky book I began writing a few years ago started. It was good. It was true. It was exceptionally whiney.  Nobody needs that, not even the great white caboose. We need a call to action, and when I started that book, I didn’t have one. Which, seemed to prove the point I was making by writing the book, really.

But I’m a hopeful guy. I wanted a better ending, so I shelved the effort.

I was told that somebody else has since written the book, using different words. Good for him. I hope he caught the train. Me, I eventually struck out across the wasteland forging my own path.

Funny thing is that along my path I tried becoming a cog in the great machine, and the machine has found me wanting. Not because I’m some mal-shaped malcontent Robcog, but because the machine looked at my gifted teeth and said, “No, we don’t need you.”

Luckily the machine loves MyQueen more than it loves me. Still, life would be a lot easier for us if, for my part, we didn’t have to wait for the occasional writing job that paid, like desert wanderers waiting for rain.

“Oh, look, the vultures are leading us to prosperity!”

I could go back to retail and such, but MyQueen has already said, “no,” and I breathed a sigh of relief when she said it. I hate that work, but I would do it.

The pill that gags me is the big oval one that’s supposed to relieve the angst I get from failing to use the skills and training I’ve been given. 

My skills? I’ve got a face for radio, and a voice for mime. No, that’s not true. Well, not the voice part, anyway…

Back in my high school fast food days, I worked the drive through. A simple, but high pressure task for a fast food place, because there’s one row of hungry drivers needing to get back on the road before they realize the food they’ve waited for is a flat bun beef-puck and a soft drink, sans straw.  Me, I had a great voice. I worked it. Seriously, ask the ladies, they loved me, until they drove to the window and saw Opie-boy Robby. Then they felt like dirty old ladies.

“Oh my gosh, you’re young!”

“Oh yah, baby.” I’d say in my Barry White best, flipping my mullet through the windy air. Oh, ya, those women were butter baby.

I had a gift. After high school I thought I’d use it for good, in radio. I loved music; it seemed like a perfect fit. One year of broadcasting school, and four years later to complete my BA in Mass Communications, I was a trained communicator.

Then life transmitted something else.

If one excuse is a train leaving Chicago at 150 mph, and another excuse is a super-train fast thingy leaving L.A. in one flash per second, they’ll explode into nothingness somewhere around Omaha. But the bottom line is I took a different track. I used my skills in a non-traditional sense and that train hummed along pretty good until all tracks vanished.

Which left me with ten-year-old non-traditional experience baggage filled with my traditional communication skill set. So now I’m walking a wasteland trying to MacGyver my collective media skills into a career.

“I can take this microphone, switch it through a TV mixer, and take the “CNTL” key from a computer, a Photoshop image, some HTML code, and wrap it all together with three strips of duct tape…and there ya go: a career.”

I continue my free writing, which I enjoy immensely, but my years of riding the great white rails are deeply ingrained; I feel the guilt that my skills are not providing for my family. So I continue looking to other work to pay the bills. Other work that uses the skills I’ve learned over 44 years of life experience. Except when employers see my non-traditional experience baggage, and compare it to the traditional baggage they’re looking for, it doesn’t match. Funny, the baggage and experience always worked for me.

They got me here.

Wherever here is, I’m there, with MyQueen, and my great white caboose, snuggling together in my hand woven American Dream blanket.