Overthunk

It seemed like New York, but on Dream, it could've been any other grotty conclave of run down shops and restaurants and tenement houses, dirty, with big windows, swirling painted letterforms of old, damp, grimy streets, but the sun was shining. I walked along, seemingly lost, past one window and another, until I reached a bike shop. From the front, it looked closed , so I continued walking, around a round corner. The back was open and inside stood a bald man, Gandhi-esque but gruff, in a dingy white shirt, white Van Dyke bristling slightly, skin like creased umber leather, maybe a cigarette burning somewhere in the background.  Somehow I convinced him (though it was closed? I don't really know) to let me clean the tires of a red bicycle. He let me borrow it, take it for a spin. I rode, freedom on wheels, through the dingy alleys, wind fanning my hair out behind me, lost in the fun of it, the remembrance of being a kid and doing just this thing, but in some suburban settin...

Tears streamed down my face this morning. "You could've let me say five more words, you know, just five more words." In my head, I was complaining to Dream. Outside, I was sobbing quietly. In the previous scene, I was on other business, with some somehow familiar friends, when I had a feeling my mother was about to go, and I'd better get over there to see her. I left where I was, and went somewhere else. I thought she might be gone, as if she were very ill somehow, but she was there, on a low bed, in an odd situation, bunking up with someone, as I'd never allow her to be in real life. As I opened the door, she woke up, and I felt relief she was there. She was sleepy, but alert, in her right mind, as she sometimes wasn't during our lives in this realm, looked better than she did at the actual end. Her hair was in her usual updo, messy from sleep, blonde and wild like mine, wearing a bright fuschsia gown with colorful piping at the sleeves.  I knelt down to ...

The dream realm, which I sometimes refer to as The Marches , has produced some interesting storylines lately. Last night, I returned (Yes, returned.... do you ever go back to particular worlds, scenarios or lands in your nightly travels? 'Cause I do.) to some kind of a building with a staircase that went up probably nine or ten floors. The interesting thing about the staircase though, was that it had branches that went in different directions, dead ends, and switchbacks of a sort, so you never really knew, even if you traipsed up and down, exactly where you would end up. Unlike most stairways - lonely, drafty, and used only as a last resort when the elevator's broken or calories grudgingly need to be burned - this stairway was packed with people. If you took a random sampling of hundreds of people at some kind of huge celebratory event, like a St. Patrick's Day parade in Boston, or Mardi Gras, and put them on this stairway, that's what it would be: mostly young hipster ...

If you take one of those big ol' rubber bands and swallow it in an attempt to engineer a cut-rate lap band surgery... you might be a redneck. Or you might just be that fat-addled and lacking of insurance. ----------------- p.s. Did you know that tapirs , even though they look like pigs with mini-elephant-trunks, are odd-toed ungulates, related to horses and rhinoceroses? They are said to eat dreams in some Asian countries, which could help me, because I've been having bad dreams lately. In specific, I awoke from a nap this afternoon with a fading remembrance of a big tray of deviled eggs, which I had apparently made. I hate deviled eggs. Conclusion: I need a pet tapir.