Lap Dog

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Recently my laptop had to be in the shop a couple of days when a component went bad.  This became a period of discovery for me.  My laptop is my constant companion.  I’m not a big phone user and I have no other devices.  Suddenly I had to live without something I’d come to rely upon.  It was, in a way, a grieving process.  I’ve grown accustomed to being able to check in on the internet when a thought occurs to me.  Flip open the laptop and look.  Or, if I want to watch a movie, streaming it.  Even if it’s a matter of my wife and I wanting to see a “television” series for an evening’s entertainment after work, it has to be done through my laptop.  (No other devices will connect to our television, which is, unfortunately, beginning to show signs of requiring replacement.)  Just ten years ago this wouldn’t have been such an issue.

Getting the time to take the laptop in required advance planning.  This blog, for instance, is dependent on my laptop.  I can’t tap things out with my thumbs on my phone—I don’t text—and my phone isn’t that new either.  I had to pre-load several blog posts before the laptop went away and figure out how to launch (or “drop,” as the terminology goes) them from my phone.  I’m not sure of my neurological diagnosis, but I am a creature of strong habit.  That’s how I get books written while working a 9-2-5 job.  I’m used to waking up, firing up the laptop, and writing for the first hour or so of each day.  I had to figure some other way to do this, without wearing my thumbs down to nubs.  This blog is a daily obsession.

And then there was the emotional part.  The day I dropped the laptop off—it had to be a weekend because, well, work—I was despondent both before and afterward.  Listless, I couldn’t start a new project or even continue work on any because I’d already backed up my hard drive and would risk losing any changes made.  (I don’t trust the cloud.)  Then I thought, how did I ever survive in the before time?  I only became a laptop junkie this millennium, and the majority of my life was in the last one.  I recognize the warning signs of addiction.  During this period I decided to unplug as much as possible and read more print books.  Perhaps that’s the most sane thing I’ve done in quite a long time.

Life’s Work

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Here’s the thing: religion (or philosophy) is my life’s work.  By that I mean that I can’t just casually encounter an important idea that impacts larger life and just let it go without wrestling with it first.  As a professor that was expected.  As a paid seeker of the truth, you dare not ignore new information.  When I found myself unemployed with a doctorate in religious studies, the only jobs I could find were in publishing.  Now, publishing is a business.  And since I was a religion editor (still am), that meant that I had (have) to encounter new and potentially life-changing ideas and simply let them lie.  I assess whether they might make a good book, but I’m not supposed to ponder them deeply and incorporate them into my outlook on life.  Problem is, I can’t not do that.  It’s an occupational hazard.

Some presses, I understand, won’t hire an editor with a doctorate in the area s/he covers.  I think I can see why.  It’s maybe a little too easy to get overly engaged.  I work with other editors with doctorates in their areas.  I don’t know if they have the same troubles I do or not.  The fact is, other than religion/philosophy there aren’t many other fields that qualify as dealing with ultimate questions.  History, for example, may be fascinating, but it’s not generally going to change your outlook on life, the universe, and everything.  And so I find ideas that I need to keep track of since they might have the actual truth.  But that’s not what I’m paid to do.  I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened had I been successful in becoming clergy.  They too are paid to wrestle, but they are expected to always end up on the side of the organization.

There are people cut out for a very specific job.  No matter what else I do, I think about ideas I encounter.  Especially the big ones.  In the academy this was applauded.  Elsewhere, not so much.  The possibility of ending up in the job you’re made for isn’t a sure thing.  It seems we value economics more than dreams.  Or than systems that help people fit in with their natural inclinations.  Then again, should I really be thinking about things like this when work is about to start?  I should be getting my head in the game, shouldn’t I?  But here’s the thing: religion (or philosophy) is my life’s work.

Unexpected Thoughts

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The unexpected changes things.  We in the western world live under the false assumption of permanence.  We build something and it remains.  Well, any homeowner knows that constant maintenance is required, but still.  Then something unexpected happens and everything changes.  And it can be in the middle of a work week.  A death can lead to quick decisions and changes of a usual course of actions.  I wrote some funereal thoughts earlier, but a hastily planned drive all the way across Pennsylvania was organized just as a bomb cyclone hit our area.  We were thankfully spared feet of snow, but I had to deal with shoveling before driving early the next day.  After the funeral, a kind family member had invited us to her home, which we’d never visited before.  My wife and I drove there the night of the funeral.  The next day we had to cross the state of Pennsylvania again.  And then back to work on Thursday.

Something has fundamentally changed in my life, but still work expects the same Steve who was somewhat unexpectedly out of the office on Tuesday and Wednesday.  Thursday nothing has fundamentally changed at work, but in my life.  Even my usual morning routine feels off as thoughts constantly wander back to the intense previous two days.  And Monday’s stressful weather.  How the weekend before all plans had to be cancelled to, as the song goes, “let it snow.”  My mind, which operates largely on a routine schedule, has been shaken.  Jarred.  And yet, work persists.  Readjusting on a Thursday is difficult.  It’s as if I’d forgotten how things were usually done.  How did I use to sleep?  How did I use to drink so much water?  How did I jog before sunrise?  It was all routine last Friday.

Last Friday.  It was a work day, but I could jog.  The snow had melted.  We knew the drive was coming, but the weather painted a huge question mark over it.  It seems, this year, just when that illusory normalcy has once again been established, winter rudely intrudes.  Some Good Samaritan plowed all the sidewalks on our block on Monday, relieving a bit of the pressure.  But not the anxiety.  February in Pennsylvania is anything but predictable.  It is the poster child of change.  Back home on Thursday I was remembering how to jog on the streets—my usual trail still hasn’t melted—wishing this winter would finally end.  I reached our house where I noticed something where the snow had melted while we were gone.  The daffodils I transplanted last year were beginning to push through the soil.

Funerals

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Attending the funeral of a teen is a somber experience.  I can’t even begin to imagine what tempests the parents are facing.  After having given my condolences last night, I became reflective.  My thoughts went back to my teenage years.  First of all, there was that disturbing song, “Seasons in the Sun.”  The Terry Jacks rendition was popular during my teen years and it haunted me even then.  Perhaps more influential in my own life was Alice Cooper’s album Welcome to My Nightmare.  And the context.  I was a somewhat sickly child.  Raised in the Fundamentalist camp, I thought about dying quite a lot.  I became comfortable with the idea.  In seventh grade I missed a lot of school, having come down with the flu, then chicken pox, then a flu relapse.  And yet another bout.  Lying at home, feeling sick, having had pneumonia as a kid, I’d listen to Cooper repeatedly and read the Bible.

One of the lines from that concept album that stood out to me was one of the spoken interludes.  “I don’t want to see you die, but if that’s the way that God has planned you…”  God has planned you.  There was a fatalism there that in the context gave me a strange sort of hope.  I listened to it over and over again.  Our teenage years are when we’re just starting to get a sense of what our lives might be.  Most of the time our expectations don’t match reality, and sometimes reality is simply outside of our hands, such as a with an incurable disease.  Back to “Seasons in the Sun.”  I found myself without the words I felt I needed to console the parents.  I realize my view is the odd one out.

Early in my own life, I found myself of a philosophical bent.  I wanted to know what the meaning of life was.  I guess I was looking for instructions.  Probably my senior year in high school I discovered existentialism.  I identified with that school, especially after learning that Søren Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist.  That seemed to mean it was okay.  Existentialists believe “existence precedes essence”—we make our own meaning.  Life has been a lesson in that as I studied and worked in religion, which should be some consolation, for over half a century.  The skies are silent regarding the meaning we attribute to our lives.  The song on Welcome to My Nightmare continues, “You’ve only lived a minute of your life.”  And those words come back to me now.

Individualisms

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As an individual that stands out in the herd, metaphorically (standing out  is always dangerous, I know), I don’t tend to follow trends.  Blending in isn’t my strong suit.  A current, or recent trend, was to be seen carrying a disposable coffee cup when in public.  At least for a while there, everybody was doing it.  Walking down the street, going grocery shopping, at the mall.  It was almost like a fashion statement.  Anybody who was somebody had a cup of warm liquid in their hand.  Perhaps in my case economics and personal choice made the decision not to do this.  Economically, a five-dollar cup of coffee is out of my range; I’m not a hedge-fund manager.  I haven’t gone out for coffee in some years because of the personal choice aspect of it: I gave up caffeine.  This was several years ago.  I didn’t like being addicted to daily coffee, so I stopped, cold turkey.  But I still like the taste of coffee—that was hard earned.

These days the personal water bottle industry must be a good one to be into.  I recently visited friends and I noticed everyone had their personal water bottle.  I tend to leave mine at home.  Yes, I have one for the basic reason that running downstairs to refill a glass with water multiple times a day would mean that I’d miss an awful lot of work.  I drink quite a bit of water in a day.  About a gallon when I’m not traveling.  In my regimented life, I have a water bottle that I fill four times a day.  I know its capacity and, trying to stay healthy, I drink it down whether I feel like it or not.  I tend to leave it at home, however, as I mentioned.  At this gathering of friends (which was at somebody’s house) everyone who didn’t live there had their personal water bottle.  I was just using a glass from the kitchen.

There seems to be a trend of being seen with your water bottle.  I recently had to buy a new one because I’d been using an old stainless steel bottle well over a decade old.  It’d been put in the freezer with water in it before a hike and the bottom had, naturally enough, convexed to the pressure.  Being the thrifty sort, I pulled out a hammer and rendered it unlikely to tip over again.  It worked for years, but had become unstable again. Since it sits next to a computer all day, I couldn’t risk it.  The first thing I discovered is that water bottles meeting my exact specs were very expensive.  It’s a trend.  So at our friends’ house one of them offered to buy me a cup of coffee.  We live in a day when you can get a decaf latte with oat milk, so I indulged in an old habit.  As we walked down the chilly street, coffee cups in hand, I realized that I’m just like everybody else.

Free Parking

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Okay, so I don’t live on my phone.  I use it rarely.  I don’t text.  I don’t watch videos on my phone.  I don’t use it for listening to music.  One place, however, that I’m more or less forced to use it is travel.  Parking is one of the biggest offenders.  I was okay with ParkMobile.  I downloaded the app and began to use it.  It seemed that everywhere around the Lehigh Valley had agreed that this app was pretty nifty and that was the way to go.  Then other apps began to compete.  I had a presentation at the Easton Book Festival back in October.  At a meeting of local writers, I learned that one of the two parking garages in Easton had switched to Park Smarter.  So I downloaded the app so that I could park and do my presentation.  So downloading and registering for a new app.

Photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash

Then I had to travel for business.  This involved crossing state lines and parking.  The parking garage in which I was to park had changed its “how to park and pay” website just about a week before I left.  I went to the new page and found out that they now use NexPass for parking.  Another app to download.  Another registration to fill out.  I hoped I’d be able to login once I got there.  Even with the familiar—and in my mind original—ParkMobile, that’d sometimes be a problem.  I’d get to the parking lot and my phone seemed to forget how to login.  It asked for my password, which was obscure and unique and forgotten, written down somewhere at home.  So I sat in my car, with an unreliable two bars, and reset my password, which involved checking my email and entering an authentication code they’d texted me.  All to park for an hour.

I’m glad not to have to walk around with a pocket full of change all the time, but all this tech only opens the door for scammers.  Already some of them use stickers that they place over legit QR codes on parking signs.  You scan the false code, enter your credit card number and voila!  You’ve been scammed!  Doesn’t it seem better to have one system that we all agree to use?  Or maybe at most, two?  Whose signs are regularly checked and maintained.  I know that there was a fourth parking app at one time because I had to use one whose name I can’t remember, once upon a time.  For those of us who don’t live on our phones, maybe they should reserve an exit lane for those paying with dimes.

The Dismal Science

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I kind of resent it.  I was was having a conversation with a friend about retirement.  He knows our circumstances (my middling and muddling career) and suggested that we might retire, noting we’d need to ask ourselves “do we really need this?” before buying everything.  I don’t resent what my friend said, but rather the fact that economists get the final word on when we rest our weary bones.  Why do we insist on measuring an individual’s worth based on the amount of money they have?  There’s no denying that’s what we do.  And there’s no denying that we age the longer we maintain this mortal coil.  We are all slaves to capitalism.  We are owned by our jobs, and since corporations are legally people in this country, that means we are owned by a person.  Oh, we can quit, but there goes your food, shelter, and medical care.  Is it really a choice?

The problem is that many people, far smarter than yours truly, have proposed much better, more humane systems.  Universal living income, universal health care, fair use of tax money we pay.  Since governments have been suborned by the wealthy—both capitalist and communist—such fairness measures are unlikely to ever take place.  Why do we allow this to happen?  Sometimes such situations lead to revolutions, a new system that will be equitable takes hold.  Only to be taken over by those who have access to more resources and who hope to aggrandize themselves.  The other day when I was checking out from a department store, the person at the register had to be in her late seventies or early eighties.  Instead of enjoying retirement, she was scanning overpriced items for people who also wouldn’t likely retire.  Our system is broken.

Photo by Blogging Guide on Unsplash

More than a mere economic readjustment, we need a philosophical one.  Years ago the United States went off the gold standard.  Our system of values changed.  On the surface it stayed the same, but the slow eroding of services the government used to offer has led to the phenomenon of people who should be enjoying a rest from many decades of working continuing to work so that they can survive.  Should such a person’s ship come in, they’ll soon forget their concern, I’m guessing.  They may feel sorry for others, but they aren’t likely to be activists for change.  The friend I was talking with was retired.  He was younger than me.  And should he want to buy anything he doesn’t have to ask if he really needs it.  Some of us tire and others retire.

Whose Smile?

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Amazon’s smile logo is a mask.  I use Amazon when I need something specific and I don’t have time to run around to six or seven stores to see if I can find it (I usually can’t).  This means that many of the items come from other vendors and Amazon takes a cut.  Taking a cut, by the way, may be the best way to make a living.  In any case, I seldom write reviews of such orders.  Most of them are books and generally they arrive in the condition in which they’re described.  I did, however, receive a non-book item which did not work.  I tried contacting the seller and their email didn’t work.  I decided to alert the world.  So I took some of my precious time and wrote a review on Amazon.  The prompt promised me that if I wrote seven reviews they’d tell me a joke.  What can I say?  I’m easy.

So I reviewed books, etc. until I reached seven reviews.  The next screen simply said “Awesome! Thank you for helping other shoppers!”  Is this meant to be a joke?  What about that Amazon smile?  I just gave them ten minutes of my time for a promised joke that never materialized.  Now I’m grumpy.  By the way, I started the review process with the most altruistic of motives; I don’t want anyone else to waste money on a product that doesn’t work, and you can’t contact the seller.  To make matters worse, it was a Christmas gift, so that by the time it was open and tried out, it was too late to return it.  Is this supposed to make me happy?  I was looking forward to at least a dad joke.  None at all.  This happened a few months after I fell for a scam, so I’m not feeling especially generous to the internet today.

It’s a little thing, a joke.  I’m not good at making them up myself (although I’ve been told now and again that I can be witty).  Ten minutes easy labor, feeding the beast and the best they can come up with is “Awesome!”?  An overused word at that!  Don’t promise me a joke if you don’t intend to deliver one.  Probably some AI trick, if you ask me.  They lure you in with promises and when it’s all over you’re left with nothing.  (Kind of like the product I bought as a gift).  In the end, the joke’s on me.

Optimistic Moves

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I’ve been thinking about moving lately.  No, not planning to move, but just thinking about the process.  A family member recently moved, and we have new neighbors in the house next to ours that sat empty for a few months.  In both these cases the people moving are young and, I sincerely hope, optimistic.  Settling into a new place takes quite a lot of energy and pondering my own life, a serious motivation.  It wasn’t so hard when I was young and all I had acquired were books and records.  After moving to college I ended up shifting around quite a bit, each time looking for a better fit.  I moved five times in my three years in Boston.  When I moved to Ann Arbor to be with my betrothed, and then wife, I moved twice in a year.  Then in Scotland, three times within three years.  Each move was optimistic.

Back in the States, we moved four times in three years until we ended up in the house Nashotah, well, House provided.  That was our home for a decade or so and the move was optimistic.  Something happened after that, however.  The move from Nashotah was a step down.  And the move from the first apartment to the second was another step down.  Neither were optimistic moves.  They were middle-of-life, disrupted-life moves.  The perspective was hoping nothing tragic would happen.  The move to New Jersey was quasi-optimistic.  It was very difficult for me to give up my dream of a teaching career—something I had, and then lost.  Still, our place, a floor of a two-family house, was good enough for a dozen years.  Our last move, to our own house, was optimistic but fraught.

Home ownership is a shock to the system best absorbed by the young.  To make matters more interesting, I recently talked to somebody who knows about finance who said buying property isn’t always the best investment.  He urged us to go back to renting.  I have a hard time imagining that now.  Landlords are their own species of problem.  Yes, we’re responsible for repairs and insurance, and lately lots of snow shoveling, but we don’t have an owner telling us what we can’t do.  (Having finances tell us what we can’t do is another matter.)  I always look fondly on the young who move, trying to tap into their optimism.  This place, I very much hope, is better than the last one was.  There is no perfect place to live, I know, but when you start thinking about it, it should be a matter of hope.  And hope should be in greater supply these days.

In Praise of DVDs

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Streaming has made movies very widely available, which makes my life easier.  Since I’ve been writing books about horror movies and such, being able to see them now that video rental stores have disappeared, helps.  (At least when they’re available.)  But I’m not ready to stop singing the praises of the DVD just yet.  (Or Blu-ray, if you roll that way.)  They definitely have their advantages, at least until the disc goes bad.  When you watch a movie as a form of research, and you haven’t been taking adequate notes, you might need to stop afterwards and watch a scene again.  What I’ve noticed with streaming services that include commercials is that if you rewatch you have to be subjected to two minutes of commercials first.  And if you only vaguely remember where the scene was you may need to sit through four or six minutes of advertising.  Maybe more.

The humble DVD had the chapter menu.  And no commercials that you couldn’t skip.  My books have involved using DVDs whenever possible for that reason.  Quite a few of the movies discussed in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth had to be viewed via streaming.  Going back and finding that exact scene where the question mark lingers can be quite time consuming.  There’s a reason you can only write a limited number of such books!  The DVD was, naturally, an improvement over the VHS tape with its endless rewinding.  Of course, streaming has reintroduced having to scan back through a movie to find a spot instead of picking a chapter close to where you remember the scene.  First world problems, I know, but no less annoying for being so.  It’s the world in which I live.

Then there’s the bonus of extras.  I know some streaming services offer side menus with additional information, but those of us who are focus-challenged need to watch the story.  Extras were for afterwards.  Does anybody else feel old for having grown up with the only way to see movies being either the theater or a grainy black-and-white small rendition on television several years later?  Now movies are whipping past me through the ether all the time.  Landing on devices and beginning to play if your cursor hovers too long on the spot.  I used to avoid going to movies alone—they were a social occasion as well as an entertainment one.  Now I stream alone, often at the price of commercials, and during those interludes I’m thinking of DVDs, and how they were made for research.  A strange thing to say for a guy who used to trust only books.

Literalism

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I struggle with literalism.  It may be naïveté.  I’m not sure there’s a difference.  I grew up being unsure of anything.  This isn’t unusual among those in an alcoholic family.  It’s probably the reason I spent my teenage years, praying as fervently as John Wesley for certainty with my faith.  My gray matter simply wouldn’t allow it.  I’m skeptical, with advanced training in critical thinking, but still terribly naive.  A family member recently told me something that sent me into a mini-panic.  It was only when I realized that he was being ironic that my ruffled feathers began to smooth out into flight readiness.  And that’s just one instance.  I used to tell my students, when we pick up something to read the first question in our minds is one of genre.  What is this?  Is it fact or fiction?  Serious or satire?  With interpersonal interactions it’s not always so clear.

People are natural actors.  They have to be.  Family time is quite different from alone time.  At least it is for me.  I try to shelter those I love from the darkness, but sometimes it surfaces.  I literally don’t know who I am.  There’s a certain continuity to the “Steveness” of my everyday existence, and that essence, for lack of a better word, accepts many things literally.  I trust people I know.  For the most part, I trust those I meet in their professional capacities—the store clerk, the mechanic, the professor.  I realize that they have inner lives as well, and they may or may not be unfurling the banner for all to see.  We all have filters.  Some use them more regularly than others.

My knee-jerk literalism generally lasts only a second or two.  My brain catches up and says, “this is where your critical thinking should kick in.”  Often that works, but it’s tied in with emotion as well.  The human thought process is certainly not all logic or reason.  Even the most Spock-like among us have emotion constantly feeding into our thoughts.  That’s one reason that artificial intelligence isn’t possible.  Those who think they can logic their way through falling in love are sadly mistaken.  We can’t explain it because we don’t understand it.  And we’re nowhere near being able to.  For business dealings we expect literalism.  But then there’s always the fine print.  I’m not that naive.  I do struggle with my literalism.  It’s set me on the wrong path before.  But certainty still eludes me.

Winter Jogging

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Keeping healthy can be hazardous to your health.  We recently had a rainstorm, followed by a snowstorm with several days not getting above freezing.  All of this made my usual jogging route impassible—ice under snow all on top of pea-gravel is a recipe for twisted ankles or broken arms.  I’ve had my fair share of spills while jogging but I’m at an age where my doctor asks me if I’ve had any falls in the past year, so I guessing it’s a bit more serious now.  But getting out to jog is difficult in such conditions.  A treadmill might be a solution.  We used to have one and I pretty much ran it into the ground.  I used it in inclement weather, but it was too much to move from New Jersey and besides, there’s nowhere in our house to put it.  Our basement ceiling is so low you have to stoop, and that doesn’t work for jogging.

After a few days of feeling dumpy, and when the weather got back up into the twenties, I decided to jog on the streets.  That’s one of the advantages to living in a smaller municipality.  There are a few cars out at first light, but not many.  And the streets are (mostly) cleared off.  I wasn’t sure this was the smartest thing to do, but when I greeted another jogger out doing the same thing, I felt validated.  The weather is still in charge.  I’ve been interested in the way the weather affects just about everything.  For example, this past summer I wanted to do a couple outdoors projects.  It rained nearly every weekend and then turned so hot that people my age were warned off of outdoor activity.  So much for mortal plans.

When autumn rolled around it turned cold rather quickly, forestalling any bigger projects beyond a massive amount of weeding.  And this is just on a personal level.  Deliveries are slowed.  Sometimes transportation hubs are shut down.  Bad weather for crops necessitates cooperative trading between nations (ahem).  We are at the mercy of the weather.  Tech giants are planning to go to Mars but they can only launch their rockets if the weather cooperates.  We’ve been messing with it because of global warming, and pretty much anyone who’s non-delusional knows climate change is real.  The sky is, after all, bigger than the earth.  So little problems, such as having to jog in the streets, seem less of an issue.  As long as it keeps us healthy.

Welcome 2026

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I put great stock in holidays, but I’ve never felt a deep connection to New Year’s Day.  I’m more of a morning person than the stay up late sort, and the New Year also seems cold after the coziness of Christmas.  But here we are in 2026 nevertheless.  We’re encouraged to look ahead.  I’m not much of a corporate person and I don’t see much wisdom in devising five year plans in an unpredictable world or any such nonsense.  The way things have been going in the news, it’s hard to have a five-day plan that bears any resemblance to reality.  But New Year’s Day does seem an appropriate season for optimism.  Hope stands here, anticipating better days ahead.  I am, despite appearances, an optimist.  I do believe in progress and the calendar keeps on ticking over regardless.  What will 2026 hold?  Who knows.  Best to take it one day at a time.

For me personally, I’ve got a couple books nearly complete and I do hope to find publishers this year.  And I’ve got many others started as well.  Writing is an act of optimism.  I’m always touched when someone lets me know they’ve found my work interesting, or even helpful.  Someone once contacted me to let me know Holy Horror had helped them through a difficult time.  This made me happy; writing books is a form of connection.  When I read books—a major planned activity for 2026—I’m connecting with people I don’t know (usually).  Writing to me feels like giving back.  The funny thing about it is the tension of having little time to do it seems to make it better.  I always look forward to the break at the end of the year but I find myself using the time to recover rather than for the intensive writing I always plan to do.

I have spent the last several days doing a lot of reading.  That too is a coping technique.  I’ve got some good books that I’m looking forward to finishing in 2026.  And the blog bibliography continues to grow.  Looking ahead I see reading and writing.  That to me is a vision of hope.  I didn’t stay up to midnight last night—that only makes me start out the new year grumpy.  No, instead I woke up early to start the year by writing.  And reading.  What does 2026 hold?  I have no idea.  I’d rather not speculate.  I do believe that as time stretches on some improvements will begin to take place.  I do believe holidays are important, both looking back and looking ahead.

Dreamscape

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I remember them but imperfectly, my dreams.   This can be frustrating when, for example, I dream up a story, complete with an ideal ending, then wake up with only fragments left.  I suppose I’m like most people in that I go through phases when I remember dreams and other periods when I don’t.  Lately my sleep patterns have me recollecting much of the strangeness in my sleeping head, but not enough to get it all written down into the story that was playing out so perfectly upstairs.  Dreams are one reason that we don’t understand consciousness.  We’re not 100% rational creatures.  And we know that other animals dream.  Our minds stay active when we’re asleep and they seem to have no limitations.  The stories we tell ourselves when our eyes are closed!

I have some recurring dreams.  The details always differ, but I regularly dream that I’m teaching once again.  The offending institution apologizes for having dismissed me.  Would I please come back?  Of course, one-off dreams are more common.  Sometimes I have the presence of mind to write them down, but I’m at an age when waking up is often in the service of finding the bathroom and that really breaks the mood and sometimes makes me forget.  From my childhood I’ve been told that you don’t die in your dreams, and indeed, usually you wake up before you hit the ground, or whatever.  I have, like Maggie Evans in Dark Shadows, dreamed of myself as dead.  That’s generally not one of the more pleasant of the species, but the mind ranges widely across the dreamscape.  I have a deep sense that we should pay attention to dreams, but being a 9-2-5 worker, getting the morning routine underway has to take precedence.

Lately my dreams seem to be working out fictional stories deliberately.  It’s as if my subconscious is saying, “You have unpublished stories sitting on your hard disc, why aren’t you doing something about it?”  I sometimes wake up feeling guilty that I’ve been writing nonfiction books when I have several weird stories scrawled out that could use a little more attention.  And some other writers I’ve met on social media have been encouraging me to self-publish those stories.  So far I’ve resisted, but the temptation is growing.  I work in publishing and I can say that the industry is quite difficult to navigate and finding an editor who “gets you” is almost impossible.  Maybe I should be basing more of my stories on dreams.  At least in the dream world, they’d find a publisher.

Quiet Christmas

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It has been a busy Christmas season this year.  Busy from my perspective, that is.  Introverts like to spend time alone, recharging.  Those with my kind of neurology, though, crave being with others when we crave it.  Even on a budget we’ve been able to anticipate the peace of Christmas Day.  For me, the rush began with attending my usual conference in November.  It always meets the weekend before Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving was late this year.  The weekend before the conference we attended the Lehigh Valley Vegan s’MAC Down on Sunday afternoon.  Friday I was on a train to Boston.  I returned and spent Thanksgiving with some good friends in New Jersey and December came with the following Monday.  Since work fills in the interstices between weekends I really didn’t have time to catch my introvert breath.

That first December weekend we attended the Lehigh University Christmas Vespers.  This free concert is a gift to the community and was a quiet way to enter the season.  We used to attend a similar event at Princeton University, but Lehigh’s much closer.  Living near Bethlehem (Christmas City), we like to spend a day in the historic downtown, looking for stocking stuffers mostly.  This was the next weekend.  We followed this up with our annual visit to Christkindlmarkt.  By the time I was done counting on my fingers, there was one weekend left before Christmas.  Friends had invited us to dinner that Sunday night, a day after the Lehigh Valley Vegan cookie exchange.  This level of activity is more than I’m accustomed to, although it did remind me of how socially busy the Christmas season was in Britain, even for post-grads.  My wife and I came home from dinner, lit our Yule log, and quietly acknowledged the winter solstice.

So now it’s Christmas Day.  I’m awake at 3 a.m., like a kid.  It is a day when I don’t have to go anywhere.  And, most of all, it’s quiet.  The only sound is a great horned owl hooting in the woods across the street.  I value this day for the opportunity to be still.  A day for recharging.  Before anybody else is awake, I listen.  There will be music later this morning and it will be fine.  And I’m thankful for all the activities that led up to this point.  Tomorrow, it seems, I’ll be out shoveling as yet another winter weather system makes it way here.  But for now it’s quiet.  And a Christmas owl agrees to cease hooting after letting me know I’m not alone.