playing the hand you are dealt

i went deep into my graveyards,
found my ghosts there...
at least ghosts are good company.
-bishop allen

G. 1: I am attempting to organize a Euchre club with co-workers.
G. 2: I have started playing online chess again.
G. 3: I’ve started sneaking McDonalds breakfasts again.

My dreams are really fucking bothering me of recent. I am not someone who remembers dreams; & for good reason, this. As I child I dreamed vividly, always wolves (both the real type which ran circles around my bed, forcing me to curl into a tight fetal position, & the Looney Tunes Red Riding Hood Wolf type, with plaid newsboy, a literal pack, gang, of them who would throw me into dumpsters) & HUGE spiders & massive dragons who slept in gigantic, open rooms with pink walls & who only awoke once I entered the room & then only to consume me, alive & screaming. & I had these recurring dreams for years. I quit dreaming.

Since then there are only four dreams which I can remember. One is just an essence of a dream, an unknown girl’s face, a languid stream. The other three are etched into my memory. Two I had when I lived in the midwest. They were both acutely surreal. One ended with my mother, face painted as a clown, weeping in a steep stairwell, as I was at the bottom of the stairs, in a room full of pianos like sarcophagi, going from piano to piano, striking the minors softly. The other from Madison was striking enough that I wrote an entire ‘zine centered around the premise, incorporating the dream itself into the material. The final of the four I had in Eugene & the Freudian elements of that dream still frighten me.

Within the past two weeks I’ve started to remember my dreams again, & as I said, they are really bothering me. I’ve recently been reading a Zadie Smith novel. I picked it up for three reasons, one: it is Zadie Smith; two: I noticed while flipping through it at the book store that, interpolated with the typical whistles & bells of modern novels, were many Jewish elements; & three: it starts off with a Franz Kafka quote. Though it is demanding of its own blog entry, I’ll briefly mention here how a few months ago I smoked some psychotropic marijuana, & while failing miserably at attempting to fall asleep, I decided it was up to me to rewrite Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, but not just that, no, my rewrite of “The Trial” would also heavily incorporate elements of “Moby Dick” in it.

Not long afterwards (either the pot or the book, I don’t quite recall) I started to have really disturbing dreams. Paranoid dreams. But not just paranoid dreams, also dreams which are bringing up ghosts from my past.

& now I’ve begun haunting my graveyards in my waking life as well.