I woke up with a gasp today. As far as I remember, I woke up with a gasp about 40 times since 3am, when I finally fell asleep. There are so many things to write about this morning and I suspect I’ll only remember to touch on a few. I’ll try not to read into the many things that got in my way on my way to the keyboard, including the keyboard itself not working.
I’m still in bed as of 8am this Monday morning, and the excitement I once had to tell my story has faded a bit.
I had dreams. Cool dreams again, and when I have a night like that, it makes me remember how I have not had dreams in a while. A single statement a friend made once pops back into my memory. I don’t dream when I smoke weed. How can that be true, and not be something everyone talks about? If weed suppresses my dreaming, that should be big news. I’ve not had any weed in — oh I never remember the past in actual time. Has it been a week? Has it been two?
It’s also springtime in my neighbourhood. The light that shines through my window in stripes onto the wall does so earlier each day, and brings with it a different feeling, and perhaps even a different smell each day. Monday is a bit more joyous, and the way I wake up also affects my dreams.
Yeah, maybe it’s that.
I also woke up a few times at night, and each time with that new gasp, I remember my dreams.
I’ll tell you about a quick less significant one first. The memory of my hometown main street changing from winter to spring was revisited. I took pictures with the intent to post on Facebook. Look, friends… the planters and trees are being brought back. It is officially a new season.
It does matter that it is a memory that doesn’t actually relate to any reality. I don’t even know if my hometown does that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. I also visited a friend who runs a retail store and he’s from my timeline in Waterloo, not my home town. It did have an interesting tie into my weedless dreaming, however. He’d closed up his weed head shop and turned it into a store full of bolts and screws and random garage junk not unlike a hardware/surplus/electronics store. I was flying around my hometown revisiting memories that don’t quite relate to reality, but I was happy to be doing so.
The main dream, however, was a continuing story about how my personality and very being might be —
Let me start again. It’s a hard concept for me to explain. In my dream, I always start the same way. I ask the listener; Do you know someone, or perhaps a few people you’ve met in your life that just seem to be good at everything? I’ve known a few and it’s something I discovered a long time ago. Some people are just naturally well tuned in to the universe. They can pick up a golf club and hit a ball correctly and straight first time. THey pick up a pool cue and know the angles to sink a complex shot without practice. They beat me at anything we try, even if they’ve never done it before?
Even my early memories contain a few of these people. My Grandfather was one such man. A few school friends were as well.
As I tell this to others, virtually everyone broadens a smile of recognition and remembers a few people they know. Not only sports but many things. They are usually fit, reasonably good looking and just successful and pretty much anything and everything they try.
I propose to them that our world is full of variety and that I think there exist people who are equally bad at everything. The opposite extreme. Through no fault specifically detectable, there are people who can’t hit that gold ball, even if they are standing on the driving range next to Tiger Woods or Arnold Palmer getting lessons for 12 weeks straight. (The only two golfers I can name).
In my dream, I am explaining this to a couple of friends much like I have recently in my real life. They seem to understand my premise and agree it seems conceivable. I then continue, and the bombshell is that I believe I am such a person. I am not good at anything.
In real life, and in dreams, they are my friends and they rush to find fault with my logic. Together we examine aspects of my life that fit the hypothesis. A list quickly forms and the friends are suddenly in University and decide to make this a thesis. Could it be that the world produces winners and losers in an absolute identifiable way? Could I actually be right?
In my real life, I have a hard time convincing anyone because everyone wants to comfort a depressed person. “Don’t be ridiculous” is the phrase that comes to their lips, followed by other cliches, however in my dream, I was able to describe all my examples without interruptions.
I have never been good at sports. I have never been good at board games. I have never been good at — well, really anything but conversation. I search through my fragmented memory but with this biased filter, I am unable to really bring any memories to the front that are not of failure, or at least – far away from the winners. Not good in school. Not good at hobbies.
My friends in the dream are fascinated. We start to look for things that would be signs to identify people like me. Obvious ones first. I was always the last picked in schoolyard games. Check.
They go off and start their research. I am not at University of course. I was always awful at reading and spelling and finishing.
I went back into the other portion of my dream which was much stranger and not worth recalling, except to say that all through it I would stop, and realize another distinct way in which I was the worst. I’d text back my buddies; “Oh yeah, and I do this too, or that”.
They had just started on watching the live feeds of Big Brother to see if they could use my examples and spot the losers in advance based on the traits from our compiled list. To see if the world really does have an obvious system of winner vs loser that spans across all genres of existence from sports and games to romance and work and everything.
I woke up. Gasp.
Thie gasping is new. I hope it passes, but my drug use is definitely having an effect over time. I can feel my chest isn’t normal like it used to be, and by that I mean, not feeling anything in my chest was the old norm. The gasp reminds me of the breathing issues people have just before the doctor assigns them one of those masks to breath at night because they try to convince people they’re actually experiencing mini-deaths at night as they stop breathing. I’m not believing they’re really a requirement. People seemed to have lived a long time before we had to pay for huge monster face masks to help us remember to breathe.
I’ll see if it passes. That is my way. I ignore things and they go away, or they don’t and I adapt… but I’m not buying a face mask.
In any case, I am awake, and it was a cool dream and I’m happy to be having them again. I’m happy to be alive, and working and getting things done. I’m happy it’s Spring.
I am – oddly enough happy because I seem able to ignore the impending doom I keep tossing over that wall for somebody else to worry about. I have bounced my rent cheque the second month in a row, and deceptively not told my landlord yet. I will e bouncing other debts this week and I only made it through last month because magic save money arrived from heaven, or at least from the estate of someone in heaven.
This month I have to earn it, and perhaps my dream was an attempt to blame the universe for my failings rather than myself. To blame my A.DD for my problems. My attempt to have a university declare my failure is part of nature. Chris March wins. Jeff Goebel loses.
That’s just a name I pulled as the first person I met that won at everything he picked up from tennis to ping pong to billiards. He was the first person that seems naturally un-natural, like the Bruce Willis to my Samual L. Jackson in unbreakable. Not a foe so much or advisory, but rather the scientific opposite.
I woke up feeling tired, had my pee break, and then downed my morning medication after which I returned to bed to write this piece. It’s Monday
The start of a whole new day. Let us see what I can fail at today – and ironically, it was the blog itself. They keyboard. It wasn’t working. I replaced the batteries.. two dollar store AAA’s that had a Panasonic brand on them, although dollar stores are known for counterfeits. It still didn’t work. I took them out and put them in the other way. It still didn’t work. Quick! I’m forgetting the whole story about the teams of over 300 people playing a game in my universe that I wasn’t playing. They were in my house. They were everywhere and always asking; come join us. Come play.
I lied. I made up false excuses not to join, and fail in public. I had such anxiety that I started having those horrid dream scenes where my mouth would fill with loose teeth. I’ll spit them out into my hands in large groups and more would come. I hated those dreams. They went away after I had all my natural teeth replaced with a denture, but the game players pestering me to participate brought them back.
It was then I decided that my failures in life might be so grand that I could reframe them as special. I don’t just fail in life, I fail so gloriously well that it’s noteworthy. My failures have hidden pride behind them because I am made to fail, and yet – here I am at age 54 writing a blog about it like a badge of honour. I have made a life that wasn’t defined by failure.
And then my fucking keyboard stops me from this.
“Story of my life” as they say. I say; when life sucks, make sure it’s a good story.
When all else fails, a good story can still make it a win.
Almost 9am. Time to start my day. Happy Monday.
