February 16, 2006

• I’m writing tonight. My mind is buzzing with something but after a hairy day at work I’m feeling less than coherent. Plus I’ve eaten too many snacks. Yuck. My teeth are rotting. Once I brush my chops it will be like the snacks never happened. Bushing gives you a clean slate. But still I implore: why does peach ice cream addict me so? Why do I need the juicy explosion of a Minneola orange segment in order to craft a sentence? Why must I chase that juicy explosion with creamy hot chocolate? Diabetes is settling in: my blood is granulated with sugar.

  My deadline for a finished first draft of my short story is Monday night. I am distributing it to my writers group on Tuesday for a critique the following week. For the past few weeks I have been working on it for roughly 10-15 hours a week and I am now nearly 3/4 of the way up the story arch. This little stream of consciousness blog is to let my mind take a break from my writing and stretch a bit. Afterwards I am going to see if I’m limbered up enough to continue on with my real writing.

  Read on for an unadulterated glimpse inside my head.

  Stream of Consciousness from a Non-Robotic Mind

  “Meow, meow, meow,” my boss says instead of “blah, blah, blah.” Her hair is fluffy like a poodle: a fluffy poodle that you want to push your face into its fluff and laugh. I call my cat sweetums when I’m not calling him Giles Alejandro Scimitar. My new friend says it is a name of literary proportions. I think I am falling in love with her. Not love love. But she is not a trial friend. She is not a robot. Or a werewolf. Shaun and I are the only people I know who’ve had the following dream (according to my most recent survey), which proves not only that we are a perfectly matched pair, but it also helps explain why I say that my new friend is not a robot or a werewolf.

  Here is the dream.

  You are hanging out around the house, doing whatever. If you are Shaun, perhaps you are going into the basement fridge for a coke. If you are me, perhaps you are hunting around the house looking for the scissors that you are chronically loosing in the midst of your art endeavors. But the point is that you are doing something. Something mundane.

  You round the corner of a room while doing this mundane thing and you are horrified to see your mom either shifting into a werewolf or with a panel of her open, like a machine, exposing a nest of wiring. She sees you. She knows you know. You are terrified. You peel out of there and run to the neighbors to tell them something horrible has happened. You realize that they are also robots or werewolves. As you run, seeking sanctuary, it dawns on you that everyone in the whole world is a robot or a werewolf except for you.

  The physiology of the dream is obvious. But like Shaun, my new friend is not a robot or a werewolf. My faith in the collective consciousness would be complete if we all would have met in one of these dreams prior to meeting in waking life.

  We could have hid from the robots and werewolves together and built a fortress out of sarcasm. We would fight werewolves to the death with witty banter and eat egg salad sandwiches, except for Shaun, because he stopped liking eggs after his mom overdosed him on cheesy-eggies when he was five. For Shaun we will acquire ham and cheese sandwiches. When we eventually run out of eggs and ham and cheese, we would find that werewolf meat tastes like chicken. We always knew this would be true.

  I had a boss once who I got along with famously. He was a non-robot. Like all non-robots, he was quick to share of himself: he had no secret identities to hide. He would casually bring stories of his life into conversation, none that I can remember the specifics of, but all of which left me with a strong impression of him at every stage of his life that I never knew him in.

  I can close my eyes and see him as a seven year-old boy in a olive green ski jacket with a cotton ribbed collar. He is standing on the edge of a dreary city park, exhausted from pulling a sled by himself and dejected to see that after trekking all this way, no one is out playing anyhow. I see him as teenager, in a flannel shirt, stoned and alone in his basement painting model cars. I see him as a young man, scuffing his feet through his first autumn of college, throwing papers on lawns from a blue bike: getting hit by a car. He has a scar. Sometimes you can see it on his neck and it makes you sad but softened to know that he is another human like you.

  I’m getting all the details wrong, but I know that accuracy is not what is important. Fidelity to truth is no way to tell a good story. Everything must bend and shift and take a new shape, making life better, transformed, bearable.
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  Have you ever had the robot/werewolf dream?

  • 10:36 pm
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