I Dreamed of My Father Again Last Night

3/24/2010 12:39 PM – 1:00 PM

I dreamed of my father again last night. Perhaps I’ve been dreaming of him frequently in the last few days, perhaps this is the first time in months. I don’t know. Since the panic attacks, I’ve tried to forget my dreams upon waking. The terror of immortal immolation given unbridled freedom by my unconscious imagination is not something that I like to hold on to.

They’ve been getting better over the last few years. The dreams, I mean. When I do remember a dream, it’s usually the normal dreams that I have had for most of my life. There was no terror in my dream of my father, just sadness. When I do remember a dream that belongs to a series, for a little while, I remember the series. I remembered the progression of my Father Dreams as they have been for a while. Those few that read the first draft of the Desert Novel know that a few years after my father died, I started to have dreams where I discovered that my father hadn’t really died, but had instead been forced to pretend to die because he was a spy and if the Bad Guys discovered that he was alive, they would have used my brother, myself and my mother to blackmail him.

These were fairly simple wish-fulfillment dreams. I understood them on waking and enjoyed them. My father and I would have spy adventures and he would help me find the Girl as well as foiling the Bad Guys. What I remembered upon waking and will hopefully forget again soon, was that the dreams started to change a few years back, even before the panic attacks. It turned out that my father had, in fact, died and by some unknown power, been brought back to life. In the dreams, it seemed that he had been brought back to life unwillingly to do some task. Whatever it was, he did it and now was just waiting to die again, which, for some unspecified reason, was expected to occur very soon. In the dreams, I have discovered that I too am dying and seeking some cure or comfort, I sought my father out. Last night’s dream, I found him again and asked him for help. He didn't. He didn't really refuse, he just didn’t really care. He didn’t want to be bothered. He’d done his part and just wanted to be left alone to die. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t sad. He just couldn’t be bothered as he made his way through a flea market, looking at things that he might want to buy for his apartment. I don’t believe in dream symbolism anymore. As dreaming creatures, I think we’re too dynamic to be put in such plain boxes. I don’t think that it means anything. It was just sad. Somehow, I knew that it was just a dream and so I left in disappointment and disgust. And then tried to seduce a girl on the fifth floor of an antiques store. I ran for eleven minutes straight today. I’m writing the instants. I sat. I’ll go to work in less than an hour. Doing is doing. Living is living. Dreams are just dreams. It's all they can be.

Running, Poo and Meekness

3/19/2010 11:31 AM – 11:52 AM

I went running forty-five minutes after I woke up today. That’s a good way to do it. I wish that I could be getting up earlier but it takes me a long time to fall asleep after I get home from work. One of the people in my department quit last night. Not my crew or shift, but I don’t know how they’re going to work out filling in the gaps.

The down-side of running that soon after I wake up is that I only have the chance to make my initial poo. I have two poo’s in the morning: the initial poo and the substantial poo. On the way back to my house on my run with only a block or so to go, I almost had the second poo. But I didn’t. I made it home and all was well. Hopefully, my body will adjust. I just finished sitting. I haven’t sat for about four days, but I’m up to fifteen minutes. After about ten minutes, the mind starts to calm down. It’s a pleasant feeling. I feel a bit fuzzy though. That’s not the best thing for my job. Whoosh. My job. I’m starting to want a new one real bad. They’ve got me hooked with the medical insurance though. How do I go without it, now that I’ve got it? Even though they’re most likely going to be making a lot more money off of me than I’ll get in return.

If I wasn’t paying for insurance, my second loan would have been paid off by now. Not that I realized that until after I’d started buying insurance. Habituation again. And my strength training is starting to feel drab, despite the fact that I’m still not quite to the solid know-what-I’m-doing level. I’ve started looking at new exercises though. Considering that I can’t even do one real pull-up, I’ve been considering pull-ups. Maybe a whole body-weight routine, but body-weight exercises are limited in some areas. So maybe mix-and-match. According to my scale, I’ve been putting on weight. But there are always those fluctuations in body-weight. That’s why you’re supposed to only weigh yourself once a week at the same time of day. But I’ve got the scale now, why not use it? Because it’s not really informative. I know this. What is meekness? I was talking to my brother about this a long time ago. My brother said that meekness was something like a solider with a BFG treating a crowd with kindness as he passed through it. I said it wasn’t like that. I said it was more like a person without any kind of G passing through a crowd knowing that that crowd could tear him to shreds at any second. But maybe my brother was right. I don’t know. I was just thinking about it while I was supposed to be just counting my breaths.

Running, MFA, Work - That Sort of Stuff

3/10/2010 11:56 AM – 12:16 PM

I ran for the fourth time today. I continue to be amused by the detail that, despite the fact that I’m running intervals, my total pace is about the same as it was when I could run for three miles without stopping. Hopefully, I’ll be back to three straight miles by the end of May. Maybe mid-May. And maybe I’ll be faster than I was.

I think that I’m going to forego the calorie cutting for the most part until my body is used to vigorous daily activity. I’m just too tired by mid-way through my shift at work. Plus, it would be nice to add some muscle mass and that doesn’t really happen if you’re on a restricted calorie diet. One thing at a time. Baby steps. I was looking at MFA writing programs today. If I got into Cornell’s, they would pay me to learn to write. And that would be super-sweet. The last time I wrote an instant, it was Saturday. It was a bad day and I ended up writing for almost three hours about how crappy it is to have my job. It is. The job itself isn’t bad. Professional dishwashing is dishwashing. But it’s horrible how bad management can make a fine job crappy.

I’m getting tired of being a low-level worker. Not there’s anything wrong with it, in a moral sense, but the arbitrary whims of bosses is tiresome. It was different at the library. That was a low-level job and was, on the face of it, more stressful than dishwashing. But there I had good management. I had people higher up than me that would help and listen to me if something was going wrong. I could improve. I can’t really get any better at this job and my boss insists that I can. Offering no advice or encouragement, he writes nasty little notes, implying that I’m incompetent. Nothing that he could be forced to back up. If there’s one thing that he’s clever at, it’s his ability to dodge getting in trouble. Mostly. He keeps getting trouble for not working while he hits on the girls at work. The malicious little bastard in me gets to laugh aloud. There is this thing about trying to be a better person that is quite difficult – which parts are the things you can change outside and which are the parts that require you to change your insides. You’d think it would be easy to tell. You’d think it would be easy to do. Ah well. I’ll think more about it. I’ll sit. I’ll pray (in my own weird way). I’ll lift heavy things. I’ll go for a run. I’ll write. I’ll go to work. Someday, I’ll die. Narnia awaits. That’s what I tell myself. I’ve questioned my religion for 18 years. I think doubt has taken me as far as it can. I’ll try faith for a while.

First Run Again

3/3/2010 11:07 AM – 11:27 AM

I went running for the first time today in almost thirteen months. It wasn’t bad. It was a wusses interval training – run for two minutes, walk for two minutes. Still, I did 2.3 miles in 35 minutes, that’s a lot better than I did the first time I went running three years ago. I have discovered, however, that I need to change my morning shake for running days. Running with a fiber-heavy meal in your gut is not so good.

Actually, during the run, it was fine. The trouble arose after I’d gotten back and cooled down. So, I think the running day breakfast shake will be coffee, yogurt and honey. Then have the Fiber 1 in the post-run shake. Experimenting is fun. I’m a little wired. The only muscles that are currently sore are my quads right above the knees. What this will do to my lifting tomorrow, I am curious to see. I found a good exercise plan online – three days of lifting a week, three days of running a week. Two of the running days are interval training, the third is the Long Slow Run. For the next month or so, however, it will be fine to just get out and go. I was getting antsy to start running. Next, quit smoking.

The quitting is the hardest. Not even just the quitting smoking. My personality is to feel guilty for wasting time, so it’s easier to add good things to a schedule. The stopping of doing bad things doesn’t have as much emotional pay-off. And, Lordy, the first cigarette after cool-down is awesome. Perhaps better even than the first cigarette-with-cup-of-coffee. But that will have to go. I was calculating how much weight I need to lose. They recommend that I weigh something like 160 for my height. I don’t think I dipped below 185 in high-school and my body-fat percentage was well within the healthy range. My goal is to drop down to 185 by next March. That’s 51 pounds in 52 weeks. That’s the healthy way to do it. Then I was thinking that my birthday is coming up in a few weeks, and going with that, I realized that I was shooting to weigh 185 on my 35th birthday. Yes. In a year and a few weeks, I will be 35. What this means, I don’t know. I know that the healthier you are, the longer you can remain “youthful.” And, being a dude, I can have babies up until the day I die. Provided everything stays in working order. But this is much older than I thought I would be to be where I am right now. It’s not bad. It’s not what I was expecting. I suppose that it’s like sitting. You do what you think you should do. You’ll get distracted. When you remember, you start again. And you see where that takes you.

The Dishwasher Gets All Political up on Climate Change

3/1/2010 9:20 AM – 9:41 AM

This morning was a day of a very unquiet mind. I spent yesterday doing nothing that was needed. Surprisingly, I didn’t watch any TV. I watched 2012 with Ben-n-Amy last night, but that was it. In regards to that movie, it was stupid but fun. The Arks were cool.

The movie was a general End-of-the-World movie. As opposed to the preachy, If-Only-You-Weren’t-So-Greedy-and-Had-Only-Voted-for-More-Democrats End-of-the-World movie. I hate those. Here’s the thing, I’m not a denier but I’m not an alarmist. I think that Global Climate Change was and is an interesting phenomenon. I do think it’s real. I even think that mankind has had some effect on it. The problem with the freeze-all-economic-progress-or-we’ll-be-sorry Climate Change is one of depth of field. If we were to only judge the state of the climate based on a few of the last few months, we might see a cooling trend.

That’s wrong, of course. More data! More data! That should be the shout of the true scientist. So we pull the camera back and look at the last 100 years. Well, look at that, we’re warming, just as predicted. Pull it back a few thousand years and, oops, we’re still warming, we started long before the industrial revolution. Pull it back 125,000 years and we get a picture of a valley, of which we’re crawling up the further side. Pull the camera back so that we can see the last 500,000 years and we see up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down. Where were the evil polluting factories 300,000 years ago? There weren’t any. Climate Change is still a new science. It doesn’t know why. Or maybe it does, but it doesn't know which. There are several theories as to why our planet has been going up and down, up and down for the last 500,000 years. The Hockey Stick portion of the graph is a very, very, very tiny part of it. If we had never come to be, the Hockey Stick probably wouldn’t be in the data. The global temperatures, however, would probably still be going up. The Centralized Command and Control Oligarchy lost the battle for the commanding heights to the stupid/wise emergent frenzy of the trading crowds. But the Oligarchy will not give up. They will merely seek new reasons to rule. It is their nature. And mine to oppose them. Stopping the End of the World is a pretty good reason. Even if they can’t actually do it.