Dichotomy Diagram

Dreams are like the seaweed around your ankles when you wade ashore after swimming out beyond the second wave.

I wake in the night. The premise I am working under is, there are too many categories. To begin, you only need two. I am told this and I say, oh, sure, here goes another newage nostrum.

But then I find, it actually works. It seems so very general, but when I break it down, it isn't, really it isn't.

Everything you do is either to enhance your own pride, or that of someone else. Sometimes you inadvertently do both, as, you write something, perhaps a dopey dream, and it pleases you there on the screen, and someone reads it and thinks, what a dopey dream; I could do better than that. So in this case, everyone is satisfied.

I try and dismiss the notion of separating into two parts, but I cannot. After all, that's how computers work, and also Socrates...when he does.

I went back to sleep.

Wakeful reflection: seconds.
Other dreams: lost at sea

I am a child who has just been fleeced of his patrimony by a judge, who is striding honorably beside me, a detectable smirk on his countenance. We are in a long corridor from the courtroom to the great hall. He thinks I don't know I've been robbed and he's the culprit. I'm just a kid. I am crying into a rag, which hangs before me down almost to my feet. Hidden within its folds is a mace, a chain weapon of the Classic Roman era.

I swing it up and slash the face of the judge.

I gain some authority. I now am able to declare something and have it stick, because I slapped the judge with the mace.

There is a place I call Marrakech, but it may not correspond to the actual geographical Morocco. This one is on the northwest corner of the continent and it splatters into islands, and it is a major trade center.

The traders come from everywhere, and they must scatter like flies when the Arabs issue into the region. They do not want traders to remain more than a few days. They are afraid of losing the section to marauding infidels. The traders flutter away in their windriven dinghys and settle back when the soldiers leave. (It's like an image from Women in Love, the casting of the stone into the puddle where the bright orange moon lies, which quickly scatters, then ebbs back together.)

I can say, the traders may stay. I like infidels; they're my favorite folk, they're better drinking companions and they have a sense of humor. The Muslims and the Catholics accuse one another of belonging to a mistaken sect designed on fallacy, and I'm a good mediator because I think they're both right. And the traders stay. No more do the soldiers come. The infidels build permanent dome structures, and infrequently do they make trading voyages now to other parts.

I can say, so I said. It's much better now, the traders in their strange little round cottages, the moon intact in its puddle.

There is a police wagon of some sort chasing the creature about the grounds. I'm standing with one of the orderlies, and the place is like a huge pennetentiary, but very loosely goverened. The critter is running about; it's like a primate but becomes human as I watch.

I have no particular interest - until the orderly beside me starts firing a high-powered rifle at the creature. I move up after the third shot, call something out to the perp, then pick up the little one and go with him. I'm hurrying but not running, and the critter is now a toddler in my arms. He is defective in some way, I am to understand, and that is how they will rid themselves of him.

I go indoors, which is an expansive plant of untold rooms. It is well lit, and obscure settings like cloth-colored pools litter the rooms.

I wait for someone to challenge me, to realize I am not supposed to be carrying one of their charges. Someone speaks, and I reply, and this one thinks it the funniest remark ever. I go on.

Now I can't find the toddler. I call to him. He is under one of the canvas coverings. I hear his reply. He is in no major distress.

Niki J will not be happy I am bringing home a new little creature, but I don't know what else I can do. I think of my shoes. Where are they? Where is my bike? I must leave this place, with the child, even if I lose all I have brought with me.

WALKING SHOES

I am wandering away from home. There is someone who is nice to me. We disrobe. Then I notice she has other interests. Another guy is with her, and here I am. She slowly casts more and more of her ministrations toward the other one. She smiles at me, wanly, with regret, like a good-hearted blackjack dealer when you draw a queen holding 16.

I will not stand for this. I will leave immediately. But it would be less dignified and dramatic were I to sort around in the apartment for my shoes. That's no way to stage an exit, rummaging for shoes on the floor while your lover has a fling with another.

I just grab a pair and leave.

I notice that one shoe is a small house.

I exchange them. It's all right now.

I am home again. There's company. Hi, company! I sit with my wife and company. I can relax now. I put my feet up.

"Man, I think you could afford a better pair of shoes."

I look at them. My feet are in the light of the TV, crossed at the ankles. My wife knows my shoes, and these ain't them. They are dark and ripped, one of those perforated styles of the twenties.

I try and think of an explanation for why it is I wear strange shoes.

When I was young, I sat in an auto out in front of Bontex Cleaners, owned and operated by my Dad and his brother, Uncle Bush. Voices inside rose. Anger. I sat for some time. I was a patient kid.


Dad came out and drove me home, and later I heard him say to Mom, "...that trick Bush pulled in front of Timmie..." I knew it was about the heated discussion, but I never had understood any of their words.

Sometime not long after, Bush bought Daddy out and there began an adventure in searching up a new career. My Daddy was very bright, and he was easily the greatest sportswriter on the small town paper where he worked for a while, but he had no higher education and we struggled. He entered into a campaign for County Clerk. We festooned our old Packard solid with posters for Hut Bowden, nailed up placards, knocked on doors, and he even went on the radio (gratis, I believe, as he had some sort of in with the owner at KFYN).

He came in last of four, and his confidence was shaken considerably, and he leased Quality Cleaners in a town sixteen miles away, and that's what he was doing when he fell down dead one day.

So two nights ago, I was having two dream at the same time. One had a dual track; I was at once and the same time at home in the Santa Cruz Mountains, dreaming, and also lying in a tent with Niki J at the Bright Angel Campground near the River inside Grand Canyon. I could wake at either location, because I was in both. It's like the instant when you decide whether to commit your weight from the dock into the canoe. I was very confident of this. So I continued my dream.

And it was about the topic debated by Uncle Bush and my Daddy which had set our troubled course all those many years back. I never heard a word back then, but I heard them now.

It was about Mel Ott.

Uncle Bush thought him the greatest outfielder ever, and a true power hitter, and Daddy said he was a lout and a bum. Couldn't hit a cow with a bass fiddle. He was an all-star, raged Bush, and Hut laughed, yeah, in the years when they played with slabs of beef on one hand in cow pastures marked off by barbed wire.

That was it, then. They were arguing about Mel Ott. I don't even know who he played for, and I have no idea who was right, but it sure is a relief to finally know the cause of all our trouble.