ANNIVERSARY Countdown (Count-Up?)

Today is Friday, March 7th, 2014. We were married 986 days ago, on June 25th, 2011.


Saturday, June 15, 2013

On Waking from Nightmares

It seems that there are some neuroscience researchers at Berkeley who are experimenting with a way to video-record your dreams.  Man, I would buy one of those things in a minute.

I have lots of dreams, most of them early in the morning after a good night of sleep.  Especially if I stay in bed too long, like I did this morning.  Between 6 and 9, I had four fully formed dreams, each with a complete storyline and recognizable characters.  I engage in conversations, think about my motives and opportunities, and work amidst people who seem not to recognize how strange all of this is (nor do I, really).

And I'm pop-Freudian enough to believe that my dreams have meaning, that they are visual metaphors for some emotional difficulty I'm experiencing.  So when I'm in the back seat while my ex-mother-in-law is driving at high speed on a complex series of highway ramps that none of us have ever been on before, and she's missing curves and leaving her lane and running over cones and barriers while carrying on a running commentary about how she hopes we won't get lost... I know that's not about driving, it's about last week's meetings.

And when I stumble into a major handball tournament (though of course the game is some unknown hybrid of handball and baseball), and I'm clearly expected to compete though I don't know what team I'm on and I'm playing left-handed because it feels like I'm just supposed to do that... I know that's not about athletics, it's about managing work processes while feeling like I no longer understand either the means or the ends toward which we work, and feeling like I'm unable to use my best abilities.

(The reason why I want this nightmare-recording machine, by the way, is because the physical characteristics and settings of these dreams are so richly portrayed.  The handball tournament was in a gymnasium that was easily 400 feet long, 200 feet across, and ten or more stories tall.  The wood floor was gleaming new, all the walls were white, and we all seemed to know where we should be without the benefit of any striping of the floor or markings on the wall. And the tournament organizer was mid-lunch, her face covered with huge smears of pesto: grainy and glossy and emerald green.)

The last one was the most dense of all.  I was starting a new job (check).  I didn't know what I was doing (check.)  I had a colleague who was inconsolable over her inability to change her circumstances (check).  And I was reminding myself that I had to write a blog post about all of it (et voila).

The part of that episode that my dream-self wanted to write about was my encounter with another failed pool room, which was in my dream a stylized version of The Green Room in Durham NC.  Someone told me it had closed, and I wanted to go peer through the windows, to see it empty and remember all of the wonderful times I'd had there.  Like visiting the funeral home to see the body in the open casket: as memory, as longing, as respect, as the recognition of finality and the start of grieving.  But when I arrived, I discovered that the building had been inhabited by another recreation enterprise, the Sherman Bowl.  They'd jammed ten bowling lanes into that tiny space, and all were well occupied.  Now, the Sherman Bowling Center is a real bowling alley, a 50-lane megacenter I bowled at while growing up in Muskegon, with a full-scale billiard room, a restaurant on one end and a cocktail lounge on the other.  A bowling alley like that (and its parking lot) is equivalent in size to a supermarket, so to see it decline into a neighborhood storefront the size of a Starbucks felt like another sign of the working-class apocalypse.

And that dream comes, I think, from the conditions of Vermont.  Any drive through Rutland or Poultney or even Fair Haven puts you in touch with some truly glorious 19th and 20th Century downtown buildings, most of which are occupied by half-alive businesses — limping, ribs showing, exhausted and resigned to fate.  It's easy to say that the only businesses that make it here are the major chains like Staples, McDonalds, Dunkin, the big grocers.  But that's not entirely true.  There are a small but crucial handful of boutique retailers and excellent restaurants, personalized businesses that rely on obsession and minute care.  What doesn't work is the middle ground.  What doesn't work is coasting, doing what you do because it's what you do.

I'm leaving that middle ground and walking, with Nora, into the boutique world, the world in which your current client receives your full attention and accumulated experience.  I always liked working in retail.  Someone comes in with a small problem and leaves with that problem resolved; comes in with a small desire, and leaves with that desire fulfilled.  There's an aliveness, an attentiveness, to that encounter that is far greater than any ongoing committee meeting in which I know before each person speaks what they're likely to say, just as within that context they also can predict me.

So, although I slept too long, I'm now waking from my nightmare, holding the remnants of lives past but awake to the work of the day.

July 12 marks the transitional moment — more news to come.

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