I was reading something on a local forum I subscribe to. Someone posted an open letter to the community by someone who tried to make a go of a business in the past year or two and couldn't. The business woman was from out of state and moving back home out east to be with her husband. ?. OK, whatever. There was a tone of disgruntledness that Madison wasn't open enough to her supposedly green-friendly business (the letter exuded "damn yokel cheddarheads" without saying as much), and I just sensed this elite east coast snobbery coming through it, on top of resentfulness that her business couldn't make it. Hey, maybe it's just the economy, stupid. Bad time to start a business, not your fault, not our fault, just the stupid economy.
She complained that as her business was losing money, she became homeless and had to live with her sister and sell her quarter million dollar condo. (Ann dons the "oh please!" expression). I'm sorry, living with your sister while you're working on selling your condo for 1/4million is NOT homeless! Cry me a frikkin river. But what REEEALLLY peeesed me off was how she touted her interest in creating a more eco-friendly, sustainable way of life and how she smiled when gas prices went up. (Ann dons the "WTF!!!" expression) How bloody smug is that? Look, I want more green eco friendly sustainable less car blah all those buzzwords too, but you don't see me smiling when gas prices go up! No one should be smiling when gas prices go up! You know who smiles when gas prices go up? Big Limp Dick Cheney, that's who! Dickey and You, that's who's smiling. And the guys who own oil wells. That's who. And that's all. The rest of us are screwed. Even if you don't drive or don't drive much or have the fortune of owning low-mileage/hybrid vehicles, shouldn't you have some empathy for those who HAVE to drive traditional cars, especially those who have to drive a lot because their survival depends on it? The truck drivers who bring your food to your market? The people out west who can only find jobs in tourist places like Aspen or Telluride, but can't afford to live in those communities so they have to commute from Rifle or Delta because that's the only place they can afford to live? People who live in small cities without developed mass transit and have to take a security job on the outskirts of town on 3rd shift when the busses aren't running...yeah, I'm sure they're really happy with the gas prices. Screw anyone who "likes" the fact gas prices are higher. Screw them.
People like that, although they tout all these liberal left ideals are protected by the security of their blue blooded family wealth who helped elect the spawn of George and Babs that got us into this mess.
I never went to her store. It wasn't convenient for me. Now, I'm glad I didn't make the extra effort.
Another really baffling and pointless dream. I was talking to a couple friends from high school since I haven't seen since high school, practically. I could tell we had nothing in common. I was asking one about her job working as some sort of public relations person (IRL, I have no idea what she does). I really did not want to be there.
Then there was another part of the dream where I was trying to do research on feminism (WTF?) at a library that was a cross between the kinda cool groovy 70s-era windowful Fort Collins library and the ghastly bureaucratic windowless UW Library on Library Mall (which I was only in once in my life and I never ever want to go back in...you had to show ID just to enter). I have no idea why I wasn't just doing research on feminism online from the comfort of my own home (and I have no idea why I was doing research on feminism in the first place), but then the whole point of dreams is to torment us with dreaded anxiety-prone situations that we're thankful we don't actually experience in waking life, so sitting on the couch looking up feminism online isn't exactly "dreamworthy." So I'm staring at all these card catalogs, but some of the file trays were out of their drawers and lying around on the floor. There was a woman there who was using them (late 30s, dark hair, glasses, short...no one I know/knew...I assume she was doing research on Feminism too) and she asked me if I needed to use the card catalogs she was using, and which one. I told her I need the one with "Fe". She pointed me to some "Fe" cards that looked like microfiche, and I really couldn't use them. I think I blew off this whole assignment...it was just too difficult and last century. I woke up crying, because on principle I should have been able to use the card catalogs too and shouldn't have been treated like a 2nd class citizen by this mousey little bookish snot.
I had a dream that I was romantically involved with Sayid from LOST. I can't remember much about it except for some odd details. Sayid was wearing a strange outfit which consisted of business suit, but with shorts...sort of like Bermuda shorts, but made out of business suit material. It looked so odd and it's not as if I ever saw the character wear anything like that on LOST either. We were together in a business building with lots of glass, glass walls, etc. He was sitting next to me and acting quite attracted to me, touching eachothers legs. I caught a glimpse of myself in a glass wall. I didn't look like me. My hair was much ligher because it had a lot of grey in it feathered in with a lighter blonde, with straight full bangs that covered my forehead. Not a good look for me at my age. I looked a little like Geraldine Ferrarro or Camilla Parker Bowles...but not as...um...well, I was prettier except for the silly hairstyle. I was wearing business clothes...nothing like I've ever worn or would ever want to wear. No plot to the dream. None whatsoever.
This Katydid nymph was sitting on one of our cactus plants. To get an idea of the size of this little insect the Opuntia pad it is sitting on is little more than an inch long. It might be living in the cactus as cover while it eats other insects. When it grows into an adult form it will climb up into the trees and live the rest of its live in tree tops.
OK, I'm going to document this because I know Stan won't (I asked him to, he didn't want to). This isn't the exact conversation as I wasn't there. It's just a recounting of what Stan recounted to me. It's just the gist:
Stan is assembling the bikes/bike rack on the back of the van.
Durhey: Wutcha doin' with that bike rack?
Stan: We're going for a bike ride.
Durhey (confused): There's places to bike in town...where are you going?
Stan: There's bike trails in the country that we use, like the one outside of Cottage Grove and one outside of Verona.
Durhey: Oh, you mean the snowmobile trails!
-----
If I wasn't there I would've explained to Durhey that snowmobiles or motorized vehicles of any kind aren't allowed on the bike trails. It's just that ya-hey kind of culture, whether it's ATVs or snowmobiles or dirt bikes that are as foreign to bicycles as I am to them.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a proficient bicyclist. Even when I was young and thin I couldn't go more than a couple miles in town without becoming extremely fatigued, and things haven't changed much. I sold my bike when I moved to Madison and didn't find any reason to get a bike for in-town use (streets are too busy and narrow and there were no bike paths when we moved here). Years ago we found a bike trail outside of town that looked intriguing. It was The Glacial Drumlin Trail, a converted railroad bed. Last year I finally bought a bicycle. It's been hard getting acclimated to it, and even though people led me to think that I'd be biking longer and longer distances, I simply can't. Last week we biked about 5 miles and it debilitated me for the rest of the week. Each time after I bike my face turns red and purple and green and yellow...yes, seriously. I know lots of peoples' faces turn red when they exercise, but mine turns into abstract art. The center of my face is red. The sides of my jaw are purple. And a swatch between my purple jawline and my red cheeks is a greenish-yellow-white stripe. Actually, that area is probably my regular normal skin tone--it just looks greenish-yellow-white because that's what a lighter color will do when placed next to purple and red (go read some color theory). The first time it happened to me was when I was 10, and outside the whole day during a class field trip on 1972 Earth Day. Classmates kept commenting on my red and white striped face. If I had blue eyes with stars in them, I would've looked like the American flag.
So we've been going for small bike rides every other day or three, a mile or two one direction, and then back. Also, there's not that much time to go much further, even if I had the stamina. Plus, even though Stan isn't exhausted like me after the bike ride, later during the day he complains how tired he is, so it's a good thing I'm his governor. We're taking the Glacial Drumlin trail in short increments. I think because it's a gravel trail it's harder for me than if it was paved. We took it from Cambridge to Ridge Rd. Then another day Ridge Rd. to Dvorak Rd. Then Dvorak Rd. almost to Deerfield (that's the ride that almost killed me). Then from Deerfield back to the spot we turned around before, then back through Deerfield to London Rd. Then today we took London Rd. to London. The next day we'll go to back to London and go the other direction.
On the first day we found a little toad on the road, fortunately I didn't run it over. Last week there were lots of wonderful smells coming from unknown wildflowers. Today we saw wild irises growing by the path. Last week we saw lots and lots of flooded fields, a lake where farmland used to be.
Durhey doesn't care about the flooded fields or the wild irises. As long as he can ride his snowmobile and whoop and hollar and shoot off his 'tater gun, life's good for Durhey.
This morning as I was taking the dogs out, there was a squirrel, one squirrel, rattling around on our clematis trellis. No big deal. I heard a strange noise close by, and looked across the alley to see the neighbor's oak tree trunk virtually covered with squirrels. I have never seen so many squirrels in such a concentrated area, ever. There must have been over one to two dozen squirrels chasing each other around the tree trunk, and there were other squirrels running down the alley. Imagine Hitchcock's "The Birds" with the bush-tailed rodent instead. It freaked me a bit. It was not a cute squirrel munching a peanut on your steps anymore, or even one squirrel deviously digging up your tulip bulb. It was a squirrel mob.
It was evocative of memories of tent caterpillars as a kid. You'd find one caterpillar, which for a bug-loving kid was rather cool. It was soft, although not furry, and colored brown and blue with intricate body patterning like some exotic fabric. It was very "friendly" and never bit. You'd find a couple more and put them in a jar. But then you'd discover the motherload...the 'pillar hive. It was a web in tree branches, crawling with 'pillars, catching 'pillar residue like 'pillar poop and the occasional dead 'pillar.
After that, those caterpillars were no longer that cute and lovable. It was no longer that lone gem, semi-anthropormorphised in your young mind that you found happily chewing on a leaf. It was part of a colony of destructive robotic clones.
I had an experience like that several years ago. We found some small caterpillars alongside the Monarch caterpillars we would raise. Unlike the Monarchs which exist independently of eachother (Eggs are laid singly, usually one per leaf), these caterpillars seemed to act like one organism, all raising their bodies in unison when "it" felt threatened. It gave me one big freakout, and although we were attempting to raise them too, we aborted that mission. These caterpillars of the Tussock moth are destructive defoliators. We drowned them. I felt guilty about that, but maybe we saved a tree. It was that unitary organism response that the Tussock moth caterpillars had that was a red flag to me that they were up to no good.
As I watched the squirrel spectacle this morning, it got me thinking that concentrated colonies of animals, be they caterpillars, birds, squirrels, maggots, mice or whatever, elicit the "huzzzzzzz" freakout response from most humans, whereas one of those--with the exception of the maggot-- might even elicit a "cute!" response. We are hardwired to be repulsed by groupings.
But why should our own kind not elicit the same response? I know in my case it does. I see a large gathering of people and I know I don't want to go there. I am drawn to quiet, human-less places. I do like big cities, but only for the architecture, not for the large population. When I used to go to parties, I'd opt to be alone with my friends in a room away from others. I shop at Shopko now because it's always empty instead of Target which has quadrupled its customer base within the last two years, even though I prefer Target's offerings. I never go to malls, except for one that has a bead store, and that mall is not very busy, and I head directly to the bead store (or the restroom if need be) and then immediately leave after beads are purchased, not wander around the rest of the place. I won't go to the Boerner gardens in Milwaukee anymore not just because they charge too much and they took away any food source, but because of the constant stream of obnoxious wedding parties. I don't go to theatres or arenas or fests (unless forced to by people you're visiting) or events. I really don't like concentrated humanity. Remember when humans started flying in planes and all the cliches about how they looked like ants from above? Why would you want to be among a bunch of ants? Don't hives freak you out?
I'll leave with something I said a few years ago which is Stan's favorite quote of mine:
"We're going where? Down there? Where all those people are?"
Stan and I were having to move into a new house. Again, I think we were renters like in similar dreams with this theme. We were sizing up the house and trying to figure out if it had enough windows for our plants (there are never enough windows for our plants). The house was very simple, similar to Grant Street with the corner window styles in the bedrooms, but I think it had more room. The weird part was that Bill was the landlord, so he seemed to be looking out for our best interests. I think this house was actually part of Bill's house...it was a flat and he lived on a different level. The house did seem to have enough windows, so Stan and I were going to take it. The kitchen had an ugly greenish-blue low-pile patterned carpet from late mid-century and was in the back of the house. There was a few steps down to it, which I liked. I told Bill that all homes should have levels, so I was pleased with this place. There was also something odd about the house, and it had a bump in the living room, which was like bumps they had in old cars where the gas tanks were. I frequently have dreams where the living room floor isn't level, there's usually a slope to it which makes vacuuming difficult. I have no idea why the sloping floor is a reoccurring theme. It's a very surreal image for a home. Our kitchen floor slopes, but that has more to do with bad construction planning when they incorporated the back porch into the interior, back in the middle of the last century. But it's a minor slope...the slopes in my dreams are usually more severe, often carpeted. The gas tank bulge is a new one.
Frequently, LOST episodes start with a closeup of someone's eye. There's got to be a connection somehow. But is it symbolic for something we haven't figured out yet, or just a reoccurring motif?
Cat Owners: This Ever Happen to You? Potential Gross-out Factor...use Caution.
It's early in the morning, dark, and you're half asleep. You feel a cat next to you so you reach over to pet and tickle it. You're coochying its underbelly and you come across something that doesn't feel right. The fur has some crusty substance around a place that seems to be without fur. Since this cat had a mast cell tumor three years ago, you worry it might be another one, although you wonder why you didn't notice this on your cat sooner since it feels rather large. You continue to feel this area trying to figure out whether the crusty substance is dried blood and pus from an infected area or tumor or if the cat got into some dirty substance like messy human food or just what is going on. And then you realize...for the last minute you've been feeling the cat's anus.
GAAAAH!!!!!
You're no longer half asleep but frantically washing your hands in the bathroom.
As I was lying in bed last night unable to sleep due to the thunderstorms, I realized something peculiar about the LOST season finale.
The show's creators either did this as a device to keep us in suspense until the final last moments when we see John Locke in the coffin, and then we know that Jeremy Bentham is Locke, but the characters in the Flash Forwards only use the name Jeremy Bentham to refer to Locke. They never call him by his old/original name.
So it got me thinking...is Jeremy Bentham indeed the same John Locke that we knew that crashed on the island, who is just going by a different alias when he's back in society for whatever reason? Or is he some sort of doppelganger (like the two #15 bunnies)? Is he a Locke twin that was created by altering some time space continuum, maybe via the device Ben was using that you're not supposed to put metal in? I think there's something going on here with "Jeremy" other than just being an alias Locke was using back in the states.
Here's a little gem I came across on an ebay discussion forum:
"My weirdest request was a customer who wanted me to pack dolls with their arms outstretched like a T and without wrapping them in any sort of plastic. She said she did not want them to suffocate, and that with their arms like a T, their arms would not get as tired."
Eeeeewwwww....
It's an inanimate piece of plastic, FFS!
Yep...musta bin one-a dem rebornin' doll folk.
OK, I'm not going to include a link for this, it is just too frightening, but if you want a good fright, click any web page brought up by this Google Link.
Strange dream. Stan and I are driving around one of the lakes in town. It doesn't really look like any actual lake, although one part of the dream did remind me of Sherman Ave. around Tenney Park near the old minimansions, not near where Tim lives. One area reminded me of Fort Collins, either City Park or The Oval. Stan wanted me to let him off in this area...he had to go to work...or class (?). I saw someone walking around who looked familiar. It was Hurley from LOST. I headed home, but then decided to find Hurley. It was like I wasn't driving at this point. I saw Hurley, and there were a bunch of other people around. Hurley says "Hi Ann" to me, and we start talking about life after LOST and and how that time of our life is over now, we don't have to be worried about numbers anymore, like the number 4, or 23, for instance (actually, this was Hurley's problem). It was as if I had been a part of LOST, like it had been real and I had been there and Hurley knew me from the plane crash or something.
Then I wake up, ponder the dream a bit, go back to sleep and dream that I was talking to Stan and telling him about my Hurley dream.
I have no idea why this entered my mind, but this afternoon I suddenly realized that there were no married people on the Andy Griffith Show. The setting, downhome smalltown Americana...yet not one character that is married. Andy? single (widowed?). Aunt Bea? single. Opie? single...he was a child. Barney? single. Floyd? ok, unless I'm mistaken, single. Howard Sprague? Mama's boy...single. Helen Crump? single. Clara Edwards? single. Thelma Lou? single. Goober? single...and with good reason. I mean in a way it was really ahead of its time, because despite the rest of the sitcoms of that era that were heavily nuclear-family oriented, this one broke the mold and showed you could have a family consisting of a single father, his aunt and his son. I'd like to think it was progressive, but I can't. Instead I think it was just...odd...and off. And creepy. Especially the men on the show. No wonder why everyone was single...no one had any sex appeal. Ever see one of the episodes where Andy and Barney go on a double date with Helen and Thelma Lou? They are out in a car necking...like high school kids! These people are supposedly in their 30s or 40s? And they're dating like high school kids? Strange arrested development. Strange bit of TV history.
Stan and I were discussing a situation out of our past in the early 90s. I couldn't remember it at all. As he discussed it more and more, I had a vague, but only vague notion that it had happened, but couldn't remember one of the people involved, whom I had only met that one time. Lately this has been a fairly common occurrence regarding that time in my life. Although I unfortunately remember too much of it, much of it is also completely gone from my memory as if it never occurred.
We framed it in a LOST philosophy context. Perhaps the universe course-corrected itself, and those things never did happen. Of course if that were the case, why would Stan still remember them?
A couple people I met back then I/we became friends with. They seemed familiar to me, like I'd known them from somewhere else before (I never told them this). I did not stay friends with them for different reasons. Looking back on it now, Stan and I were never supposed to befriend these people. Maybe the reason why they seemed familiar back in 1990 is because I'd become unstuck in time and was able to access being friends with them in my future, yet I wasn't able to access the reasons not to remain friends at that point. Maybe in 1990 I was only able to access 1992, not 1995.
When I was 6 I knew certain things about the man I would marry. I knew he'd be blond and Jewish. I told this to my mom, that I had a blond Jewish (imaginary) boyfriend. She said he's not Jewish. There was confusion about this, just as there was confusion about Stan having a Jewish biological father which was put on his birth certificate (this is a crazy story that I won't go into right now). Stan went for about 17 years in his life, from the time he was around 23 or so until 40 until he actually found his biological father, thinking he was Jewish. My 6-year-old imaginary boyfriend's name was Bobby. Bobby is the name of Stan's half-brother, his biological mother's first son after Stan (She gave up Stan for adoption).
How did I know this as a 6-year-old unless I had become unstuck in time and could access certain things from my future?
I've been thinking a lot about time, the 4th dimension, and how we "parse" the 4th dimension as linear time in the same way those in 2D "flatland" parse a 3D object entering their 2D world as a series of changing line thicknesses. Further clicking: Nova, The Elegant Universe and Carl Sagan explains Flatland (You Tube Video)
Everything that we have knowingly "yet" to experience has already happened, we just haven't parsed it yet. It all happens in an instant, and some have the ability to perceive it more instantaneously than others, which may appear to be psychic ability in seeing the future, but it's just an ability to "see" in 4 dimensions.
For the life of me I wouldn't be able to understand this based on mathematical equations, yet I can grasp it intuitively. It's not like it's from a previous life, it's happening, now. It's happened, it's yet to happen. There is no past or future. There's just the present. And it's all happening NOW. Like a movie recorded on film. Each film frame is one instance--play them in sequence and you have a time sequence, a timeline. But if you were to take the film reel and slice it up into individual frames and stack them like papers in a filing cabinet, then compress them to lose any artificial thickness the celluloid has, you would have a 2D representation of the movie, where all the events happen simultaneously. Then compress the artificial height to give you just 1 dimension, a line, and then compress the line to give you 0 dimensions, a point. That is where everything that ever is, was, and will be is. That's it. It's all there. There's nothing else. Don't worry about missing it. It's already done.
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