Last Night

I dreamt that I was driving to some small city with a lake in the middle, not a small lake, something smaller than Lake Geneva, but like that, a lake circled by houses, and a small town tucked on one side. I was driving with Fred, our neighbor, and Martha, and I asked them to think about how much Fred's house would cost if you dropped it down on the frontage property, and Fred said he didn't know and Martha said 3, maybe four times its current value.

Then I was in a large hotel complex, kind of like the resort we stayed at north of Lake Geneva, and I was sharing a dark room with Fred. There was a shroud of mortality about the room, cloaked in darkness. Fred slept in the bed and I was supposed to simply stay there and watch him. Out in the hall was a parade of yolung people pouring in off buses--they were laughing, sporting, cavorting as they searched for their rooms. I was torn. I was supposed to stay with Fred but the room was so dark annd suffocating. I left.

Outside it was warm and bright, brilliant with sun, and I circled the lake, passing by sunbathers and swimmers and people partying.


Later this morning as I recalled the dream I could seee that it was about death and depression, stasis and life. I need the sun, I need the outdoors, I need the noise of life. It is about age, escap;ing the magnet of getting old.

New Year's Eve 2006

I can't believe that it's the end of 2006 already. Time seems to have seriously warped this year. Somehow, I got lost between April and November. It seems as if summer was completely swallowed, perhaps because I was teaching so much. But it does seem strange--all Fall I've been thinking "What happened to the summer?"

II think there are several other reasons. One, I really lost Mondays due to the 6 hour teaching schedule, which absolutely obliterates a whole day and also destroys the rhythm of the week. I just feel out of kilter the remaining days. Two, it was a cold and wet soccer season, the first in years, so another rhythm was disrupted. Third, it got cold, too cold, too early in November. December has been temperate, but hideously overcast, and so as the days have shrunk down we have had far too little sun. The last six weeks the days have been monotonous, unforgivingly short, and dreary.

BUt I have accepted a new job, it begins in two days, so tomorrow is my last day in the odd interregnum between teaching and administrating. I have spent the last two weeks trying to prepare myself, bolster myself for the transition, but I've done so out of a holistic intellectual sense, downloading tons of ideas about leadership without the burden of discrete goals. All of this prep work ends tomorrow, and I enter my new skin, my new being, my new title, on Tuesday. Tuesday, 9 am. Until then, I am still in the interegnum.

I think the main person I need to convince is myself. It will become a reality on Tuesday.

Odd. Odd to take over in mid year, odd to start the new calendar year which such a vastly different position. Odd to be so isolated from the position, and then to suddenly step into it. I haven't experienced this kind of career shift in over twenty years. The challenge for me is to find a new way to do the job and to grow with it without being consumed, to find a way to do it without being overwhelmed, and to preserve time and energy for myself. I need to read and write for myself, retain my identity as I change my identity.

Who and what do I want to be?

ONE EYE BLIND

Several nights ago I dreamt that I had lost my right eye. I dreamt it early in the night and then pursued a string of dreams, all loosely connected, and in each dream, each shift of scene and context, the only thing that remained constant was that I was myself and I had lost my eye.

It happened almost by accident. I seem to remember being accidentally raked, or scratched, as if in jest, and feeling a terrific stinging sensation in my face, and then a numbness, an emptiness, and as my mind cleared I slowly realized something had happened. I retraced my steps, and sure enough, there, in the gutter (where? Pittsburgh? some foreign city with dingy streets, cinders along the curb), I found a white blob in an oily shallow puddle on the asphalt, misshapened, more like a milky opalesence, like an imperfect white chocoalte caramel one might find in a Whitman Sampler, wrinkled on top like a prune. It seemed clean and otherwise unscathed, with a spray of optic nerve springing out like a from the night street. I admired it, standing over it, admired it with deep wonder, but when I stoped down to pick it up a stranger running by in the night suddenly splashed along the gutter and stepped on it, splat, and in a dull pucker it flattened, and I knew my history as a bifocal man had abruptly ended. It was then that I reached up for the first time to touch my face, gingerly, tenderly seeking its home, and it was sensitive, an almond-shaped pocket, the lid had somehow closed over the socket hole and formed a smooth fleshy bowl foormed by a thumb. I was not bleeding or ooozing puss or black venous bile, there was no gaping hole in my head leading to my brain, it was as if I'd been born to have this stone fall from its place and heal.

All night I moved from scene to scene, explaining to others what had happened, or lamenting the fact that I was now one-eyed, telling them that the life I once knew, the person I once was, was over. I was a one-eyed man, I had lost something terribly important, my soul, and if they would only look and pay attention for one moment they might put together the fact that I was a bit harried and disoriented--after all, I'd just been seriously, egregiously injured, and they seemed not to care a bit, the whole story caught them off-guard yet even son, disinterested.

All night I seeemd to look for my eye, recognize its absence, explain its occurrence, as if it were the most compelling story I could conjure and each time people seemed to stare at me as if in askance, otherwise preoccupied--not unsympathetic, but freed from any emotion. It was my hole, my lack, my pain, my need to account for my missing eye, and despite my best efforts, northing measured up.

The brutal fact was, I had lost an eye and I must now move on as if unconscious of the impact.

And yet I knew this loss was my soul, a dark star cooling, this was a deep psychic wound, a scar, an emptiness I could never fill.

I woke up as I used to wake up from such painless yet traumatic dreams iny late teens: stunned, scared, cold, resigned, angry, unable to expresss my feeling, my loss. As if the very fact of living meant suffering these kinds of psychic losses, that the self beneath the mask was slowly deteriorating, decaying, losing itself to the world or masks and appearances.

Jesus

Christ it snowed a lot last night.

A foot of snow.

BURIED

Lately....

So lately I've been pretty stable knock on wood.

No real rollercoaster swings or screaming dives just even steven every day just waking up going about my business not rushing or hurrying getting things done and maintaining a steady eddy pace

I'm just getting over some brutish flu that morphed into bronchitis slept on the TV sofa head upright but barely slept I think I've spent 5 nights of the last 8 ensconced on the paralyzing sofa racking my skull my head and neck bones aching coughing fits that last 20 minutes

been sick 8 days

today is the first day I've felt fairly normal woke up at 9 well-rested and no head full of crap and the windows glowed white overnight it had snowed a foot and bigod that meant a day of shoveling and running the snowblower and tonight I hope to get on the bike and ride for a while and get some exercise jesus I haven't been able to do anything for over a week

so now it's winter the world is covered in snow snow heaps everywhere and tonight it's below 20 and it's not supposed to get above 30 for a week so we're gonna be socked in walled in by snow for a while but it's nice to have a spate of cold it kills off some of the vile germs spreading around and it gives you a chance to wear sweaters and sweatshirts

Gotta use the light box everyday now we've been visited by a maelstrom of dark turbid days and the sun's down by four if it's ever out but the last two weeks have been awful dark and penetratingly oppressive

Lost my red gloves on the fucking bus yesterday meaning I've lost 2 pair in the past month

So far away from what used to be

I am so far away from who I was a week ago, a month ago...

How the hell does that happen? Not only the slippery formation of self, the daily construction and reconstruction, as well as the daily dissipation and erasure, but the whole memory thing?

How is it that we forget so much of what was just so recently so damned important? Life shaping?

How is it that we are so willing to let go of our personae?

A few weeks back I was so absolutely riveted by Michael Ventura and now, without the visual reminder, and archive, I am almost wholly oblivious to that.

I feel like a bird, flitting from branch to branch. I am never the same bird, in the same moment. A new branch, a new bird,
with only the insistence to live in the moment pressing on to the next. I don't fly backwards, I don't retrace my steps, or hops...

I mean, even the fucking laundry remains the same. A shirt is a shirt--it doesn't remake itself or forget its shirtness if you wash it or if it sits ignored in the closet for years. It remains relatively stable.

Teenaged Opossum

So this morning, riding the Oak Leaf Trail, I encountered 6 deer and a teenaged opossum.

The deer appeared in 3 pairs.

I saw the first pair running along the parkway, parallel to the road, just ahead of me, for about 300 yards. Then they slowed and crossed the road in front of me and ran parallel to the road on my left for another 100 yards until they sped off into the woods. They were frolicking, running joyfully, playfully, maneuvering around the comstruction snow fences.

The second pair darted into the woods near Rainbow Field. They had just shown themselves briefly before startling.

The third pair ran in full tilt across the bike path, appearing almost to be flying, or springing, into the air just south of the railroad ttrestle near Bluemounmd Road. At full stride they appeared strong and imposing. Clearly there is a deer run there, as i have seen many deer in precisely that spot.

So, on the way home, I spotted a small animal crouched just outside the brush line along the road near the freeway viaduct. At first I thought it might be a large rat or a small raccoon--it was greyish and stolid. On second glance, as I cruised by, I saw it was a teenaged opossum perched on his haunches, patient, unstartled, snacking on something, his pink grey jaws slowly smacking as if he'd gotten carmel stuck in his tiny teeth.

I quickly slowed and circled back, surprised that he did not dash off.

I slowed to a stop directly beside him, no more than 7-8 feet away, as he chewed. Comically. As iif the task of chhewing and finishing whatever hhe was eating was too important and necessarily prevented him from any other simultaneous task. He looked at me with disinterest, turned his head slightly sideways, and then in one cumbersome move lollygagged back into the brush, a lopsided lumbering, delicate and yet awkward.

YeeeHaaaaaa! Nine Hours Leads to New Project #3

Woke up this morning, the second straight night of 9+ hours of sleep. I have not had this experience in years. Perhaps 25-30 years. I cannot recall two consecutive nights of even 8 hour sleep.

Last night I did awake from several disturbing dreams, which I don't wholly recall right now, although the last few nights I know have awakened from dreams that I found disturbing, but the content of the dreams was not shocking. It was the feeling tones, or some clearly subconscious and deep feeling beneath the dream, some feeling tone that was powerful, almost overwhelming, but not clearly evident, as if there were some deeper language that I was not fluent in yet carried its freight. Odd. So I wake up relieved. With a bit of dread.

But the newe thing is, I can return to sleep. In the past, once I awoke, I would have been awake for the rest of the night.

I woke up in the middle of the night from a really absurb dream and after being unable to return to sleep I turned on the TV and found Bono on a taped Larry King Live episode. I was intrigued by Bono's "Project Red" and "Conscious Consumerism." Both are ideas I can carry intro the classroom.

I also had an interesting thought yesterday. What if, in the service course, instead of asking students to serve at various agencies in the community, we identified one or several projects that we would like to enact in the school, to transform the school, and the course was about identifying and then putting that consciousness in action.

For example, what if our idea was to raise the institution's awareness about consumerism? Or sustainability? How might we make our ideas visible and somehow reshape the institution? Bring this up to the students next week.

Maybe that could be an action plan option for Projec t #3?

By the way, waking up after a second night of 9+ hours of sleep? I feel calm, assured, centered, quiet, confident, not edgy, not self-conscious. Not necessarily full of go-get-em, but alert.