Those dreams

I was standing on the side of the road waiting to depart with band members to a gig but the minivan they were in pulled away without me. I took this as a joke but was not amused. I caught a ride and rejoined the band at the gig. I let them know I  wasn't happy with being left behind. It was time to play and I couldn't find appropriate clothes to put on nor could I find a guitar cable. I was fumbling through a suitcase getting progressively anxious and frustrated.

The latest from Morpheus World

 ...(by which I mean dream land). After I went back to sleep around 7am, I found myself attending some kind of outdoor festival, sitting casually close to and having a pleasant conversation with long ago ex-girlfriend Ginger A.  I was mindful of the friendly intimacy this implied and thought I would "play it cool" as I did in my youth to enhance her feelings toward me. Mary Lou was sitting close by and I wondered what she was thinking about the situation. It seems like someone was supposed to supply me with an auto but the next thing I recall is I had been abducted by an evil dark-haired perhaps forty something white man with a sort of wavy Afro and a full beard. He was running a criminal operation based in a hair salon where women were situated at little work stations around a large room. The man had given me a drug to subdue or confuse me but it didn't seem to be having a dramatic effect, if any at all. He was telling me something about his schemes in a smug manner while a couple of his thugs stood by. Having some freedom to walk around, I opened a door to a staircase that led to an upper floor only to find a big thug who looked like a surfer dude beating up a skinny kid with a skeletal, wooden prosthetic leg. The sight was appalling. The kid talked back sarcastically to the thug when the beating stopped. The evil guy made a comment that the drug he gave me was wearing off and explained that all this was an experiment to prove something nefarious was going on with AT&T involving how they abused human operators. This didn't make any sense to me. I saw the chance to escape and I fled out the front door, jumping over a turnstile. I started down a highway to my left  hoping to return to the festival but the road seemed to lead elsewhere through a rural landscape toward a resort hotel or apartment complex on a hill. As I approached, I saw people sitting in bleacher chairs like a stadium pointed toward the approaching road. I now was holding a three foot long helium-filled balloon that lifted me gently into the air past the bleacher seats to an upper deck. When I reached a retaining wall in front of that level, I saw numerous people having sex out of sight from ground level. This was disconcerting and I decided to go past them and return to the ground. I made a soft landing in some kind of organic material that stretched around the back and side of the building, then proceeded back down the road. I was looking for a gas station or convenience store with the idea of calling Mary Lou but the ones I saw were closed or abandoned,  Then, I tried calling her on my cell phone but I couldn't get the number pad to come up. I was fumbling through various apps including email but nothing was responding effectively to my efforts. I tried using a voice command "Phone!" and that didn't work either. I was becoming increasingly frustrated and anxious when I woke up. 

I see the dream having elements of Episode 1 of Peaky Blinders we watched last night and a story on the news about a New York Times journalist who was held hostage by the Taliban for many months before escaping over a wall and finding refuge at a Pakistani military outpost. Reading extensively in Jung's Collected Works before I began my professional studies, I learned to view dreams as stories reflecting the complexities of the psyche that led the way to integration of the personality and wholeness. The fundamental argument is a dream is a product of ones own brain, so all the characters must be aspects of the dreamer. (The same argument applies to fiction writing, as well.)  I employed this theory in my clinical practice, using Jung's active imagination technique, and I still think this way although without the enthusiasm I once had long ago. Perhaps I would do well to revisit the idea of integration of the psyche.

I will note that everyone in the dream had white skin. Thinking further, the dream has themes of shady secrets and the general corruption of society. To begin with, I have a hidden agenda to make myself attractive to an ex-girlfriend whom I'm no longer interested in in Real Life except as a Facebook friend. The people  and corporations with power are abusing the vulnerable ones under their control. I'm caught in this matrix of corruption.being used by a criminal genius to disrupt a powerful company he has some issue with. There are festivals and people idly sitting in bleacher chairs while small businesses are closing down. People at high levels are having orgies out of sight of people at lower levels. The technology I depend upon is malfunctioning or maybe it's that I'm impaired cognitively.    What sort of world am I caught up in?

What's going on with me?

It's been raining persistently in Baton Rouge for three days. This morning a titanic outburst of thunder and lightening raged right on top of us around 5am. Mary Lou was sleeping here after staying two nights at Maureen's house to help because Cody was on the road. Her sister Jane Kelley has been hospitalized with kidney and urinary tract infections that became dangerous after she experienced severe abdominal pain and relapsed briefly rather than seeking medical treatment. She got angry when I didn't respond to her need for me to get her apartment key at the hospital and make a run to her apartment and back as quickly as she demanded. I had valid reasons and was ready to do it until she told me via text not to bother. No doubt, her anxiety about being sick and having to pay for the ICU out of pocket made her out of sorts. But I've done many kind things for Jane and I'm not inclined to reach out to smooth the episode over. 

With all this happening, I've been at home except for having dinner each evening at Maureen's. My state of mind has been very detached bordering on apathetic. I don't have a set routine and I spend my days doing whatever I wish to- which isn't much. I get up early, anywhere from 3am to 5:30am depending on when I wake up and feel alert and hungry. After eating a bowl of cereal with half a banana, I go back to bed, clear my mind with my little meditation technique and sleep some more, shooting for at least 8 hours total and sometimes hitting as much as 9 and a half! I like to sleep and I tend to remember dreams during the second sleep. 

This morning I was once again dreaming about my mother being very old and cognitively impaired. She was saying something about what would be done with her ashes when she was gone and I reminded her there was a burial plot for her next to Daddy. I was wondering if she would want to visit it with me when I woke up but she made a bizarre and nonsensical statement and didn't seem to remember Daddy. Elements of the dream reflected certain events toward the end of Mom's life, visiting Daddy's grave with Mom and Scottie, Mom no longer remembering birthdays, driving past our house on Milledge Terrace with Mom and Mary Lou the summer before she died and Mom saying she didn't want to go in because it would be like visiting a stranger's house. Keep in mind she lived there for around 60 years before moving to assisted living for the last few. Mom was still sharp until the first bout with pneumonia, the one she managed to survive.  

Typically when I awaken again I feel dull-headed no matter how long I've slept. At last I will reluctantly get up and have coffee and something to eat from a small menu of options- multigrain toast, turkey sausage, a bagel. a Jimmy Dean breakfast bowl. Often there's cold coffee from the night before in the refrigerator. I consume these sitting in the den facing the TV which I never watch in the mornings except CBS Sunday Morning. Within an hour or so I feel reasonably alert. I usually skim through the news online and check Facebook and Instagram, maybe posting an article in Owen's Geopolitical Analysis Group or a Memory and liking or commenting on my friends' posts to let them know I care. Lately, though, I'm just burned out on news, thanks to the Trump years. Derek Chauvin is on trial for murdering George (I'm blanking on his last name! That happens to me frequently. I remember it's George Floyd on my final editorial pass.) and I can't bear to watch any of it. I watch NBA games as a distraction from real life. Of course, as I like to tell people, I'm not worried about me. I'm one of the winners.

A month ago I made the momentous decision to stop taking Adderall after 20 years of relying on it to make it through the day. I had been taking a reduced dose and doctors are reluctant to prescribe it to old people. My long time primary care physician, Dr. Harold Brandt, who is retiring in July, prescribed modafinil (Provigil) for my excessive daytime drowsiness (EDD). I'm doing ok on 100mg once a day and the amphetamines weren't working as well as they used to anyway. The standard dose for EDD is 200mg once a day so I will message Harold and ask about going to that level for my first refill.

We're still in pandemic times so I spend almost all my days at home, occasionally going to the grocery store, a doctor's appointment or out to eat with my bubble people (Mary Lou, Maureen, Cody and Jane). I may sit in this chair for hours or I may get up and water the flowers and shrubs. Puttering in the yard is one of the few activities I find engaging. I've developed a fascination with the vines that grow aggressively amid the trees and bushes on the edges of our yard. They come in a wide variety of sizes and forms, ranging from slender tendrils to thick, hairy ones that attach themselves tenaciously to the trunks of trees and wrap themselves snake-like around the branches, creating an intricate tangle all the way to the top of their tallest  reaches. Those require extensive work to undo. I can spend hours painstakingly removing them, cutting and sawing them into pieces, pulling them away from their hosts, dragging them to a metal table on the back patio, cutting and sawing them into manageable segments and burning them in the outdoor fireplace. (All of this is documented on my Instagram feed.) I like to burn them and the smoke discourages the prosperous local squirrels from building a nest in the chimney as they once did, requiring us to hire men with a long ladder to remove it. I've thought for years about buying a long ladder without acting on the thought, typical me.

I make the bed sooner or later, this being a vestige of one of my few household duties in childhood. Sooner may be right after I eat breakfast while later may be late in the afternoon. Making the bed is a gesture toward not becoming completely disengaged and indifferent to still being alive. But these days I procrastinate at great length about taking care of business that isn't extremely pressing which very little is. I lack initiative to work on my few remaining goals- working on creating best quality recordings of my original songs, organizing and storing the family archives and using my knowledge and skills to write. I still maintain daily engagement with Facebook and Instagram where much of my best writing occurs, sharing my thoughts and dispensing doses of quality support to friends in need (and we're all in need) and where I post lovely photos of flowers and vines and trees and cute animals and the LSU Lakes but my enthusiasm is low since Biden won (thank God!) and there's once more hope for America and the world, though the problems are deep and thorny. I'm happy we have a granddaughter- she's very beautiful and appears to be extremely intelligent at age three months. I didn't want my genetic line to die out entirely- the human race can certainly use some talented people reared by good parents. Maureen and Cody are definitely that. My loyalty is to our entire species. I wonder if we'll become extinct via our own dysfunction or natural catastrophe of some sort and I do feel both desire and duty to do what I can to move us in the right direction. Writing about what I know in case someone in the future can benefit from it is the most important thing I can think of to do and I'm not doing nearly as much of it as I believe I should. I do put a lot of good thinking into posts and comments on Facebook, for what it's worth and perhaps it is worth something. 

Eventually, I get around to shaving and taking a shower. This could take place any time after I eat all the way through the late afternoon but never before I work in the yard. I've always been compulsive about shaving- I like my face to be perfectly smooth afterwards.  This is impossible but I'll spend half an hour or more scraping multiple times with two different razors, one of which has two types of blades, trying to get as close to perfectly smooth as possible. I do love taking a shower and I wash my hair at least every other day.  I've been growing a pony tail since the pandemic struck. My hair has turned gray on the way to being completely white. It grows pretty quickly and I haven't lost much of it. After over a year, it's almost long enough to get all of it into one bunch. It's approaching the longest it's ever been, perhaps even a little longer than the longest I let it grow back when I was a long-haired kid in the late '60s and early '70s. If it isn't now, it will be soon. I like it the pony tail look although it probably makes me look older than wearing it short or down. Mary Lou and Maureen don't care for it even though it looks rather neat and dashing.  Many people like me with the pony tail and a black eye patch, something I only wear because the patchy light and dark visual field on my left side interferes with the clear field on the right. It also covers the disfigurement of my surgically battered left eye, but the patches I've tried are awkward to wear. I need new glasses and sunglasses and haven't gotten around to getting them, typical me, again. I also need to see a dermatologist about age spots and skin tags. Yep, I've not gotten around to that, either. But I will. 

My passion for music has waned sadly at present. Henry Turner, Jr. has reopened his Listening Room for Thursday evenings and I have no desire to go and play. I did perform at livestream events Henry put on for two consecutive Friday and Saturday afternoon sessions (also documented on social media). I played short sets and they went pretty well. But I'm not feeling it much since then. I've messed around with my special open D tuning (D-A-D-A-A-D, for you guitarists) and recorded a little jam on a cool riff I came up with years ago and used to insert into renditions of Superstition. I went through my Open D blues tunes a day or so ago and I was in pretty good form. That's it for music right now but I want to get motivated again and work on my demos. I did agree just now to play in the acoustic evening at the Listening Room this Saturday at 8pm.  Then, I'll be gone the following two weeks as note further down. 

The only other thing that comes to mind I've had a flicker of interest in is my advanced collection of postally used stamps and related items from the pre-independent French colonies in Africa. There's also my American Presbyterian Mission collection and accumulations from a few other areas of interest. At times I also think maybe I should donate the APM materials and just sell everything else. It's worth quite a bit, at least $10,000 retail value, I would guess, maybe a good bit more. But I'm not ready to get rid of any of it, yet.

I've had two shots of the Moderna vaccine making me safe from severe covid for at least the next 5 months. I've got a trip to Athens in the works, leaving by auto Friday April 23 and driving back on Sunday May 2. I want to visit as many Athens friends as possible. As I think about it, it feels like a farewell visit but perhaps I'm being dramatic in my thoughts. How long has it been, well over a year, maybe two years?  But aging and death are in my thoughts daily. I've accepted being blind in my left eye and I could well live another 20 years or so, but who knows? "The future's uncertain, the end is always near."

I've been writing this entry off and on since 9am or so. It's now 3:30pm and I have to say it's been a pretty good day. I went to lunch at La Madeleine with Mary Lou, bought a gift certificate at Sunglasses Hut for Cody whose birthday is tomorrow, picked up my bike that was being repaired at Capitol Cyclery, and stopped by Albertson's for a few groceries and a birthday card before returning home and finishing this piece. Then I messaged Harold about the modafinil. I'm planning to get way overdue blood work and a shingles vaccine at the Baton Rouge Clinic tomorrow morning. Pretty impressive for me, haha.

And for whom do I write this? Will anyone ever read it? There's no one I want to or feel it would be appropriate to share it with although it's in plain sight and anyone who wanted to could find it here and read it. Perhaps someone some day will stumble across this blog and wonder who I was, what I thought about, what I felt was worth recording in prose. Whatever the case, I'm glad I wrote it all down.

Thoughts on Hemingway

I just listened to "The old man and the sea" read by Donald Sutherland. I'm struck by how sophisticated literary criticism is a very subjective undertaking (or perhaps "autopsy" is a better descriptor of what they do to an author's story). In the Ken Burns documentary, distinguished Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa praised it while distinguished Irish novelist Edna O'Brien (who commented favorably on other of Hemingway's works) panned it. Is either of them or anyone right or wrong? One finds it beautiful , interesting, entertaining and/or meaningful or one finds it some other way. At best, we have our reasons for our opinions... but they're still just opinions. And all of this is just mine. Me? As an aging man struggling with whether I've accomplished enough, I found it beautiful, interesting and meaningful.

Belief in God

The fact that anything exists at all is an incomprehensible mystery to me. Having been raised going to a sedate, middle class Methodist church by a mother who set an exemplary Christian example of cheerful humility, kindness, generosity and caring, my approach to life has been shaped by institutional Christianity. I've studied the Bible, I find wisdom, inspiration and guidance in what's written about Jesus and in other beautiful passages, and I can't see how the vast and magnificent Universe sprang itself into being out of nothingness; but, I haven't been part of a church since my children came of age. I don't think the emphasis should be on believing exactly the right thing so you get rewarded rather than set on fire in the afterlife (I'm with John Lee Hooker on this). I don't think anyone has the credentials to speak for God. I believe in seeking wisdom rather than money and power and admire Christians and people of all faiths who strive to live this life with mindful humility and who trust that God will sort things out with compassion and justice. If I'm wrong about any of this, I'm sincerely wrong and will have to rely on God being the ultimate forgiving parent.

Finding the treasure

Yesterday, I went to our storage unit behind FedEx on College Drive to look for an old chart Mary Lou needed. Digging through multiple plastic bins full of patient files didn't turn up the one I sought; but, I decided while I was in there to revisit the contents of the other bins.

At one time a number of furniture items were stored in our space on the ground floor. Now most of what's left are more plastic bins containing philatelic materials or a jumble of family mementos and documents in need of scrutiny and discernment. My mother's raw Candlewick research archives are a major category. 

Opening one bin of family mementos I brought back from Athens after Mom's death, I noted a small metal lock box. Inside were an assortment of little boxes of the sort that typically come with single pieces of jewelry. Could this be, I wondered, the place I put Grandmama's exquisite pocket watch, the one I'd put somewhere I'd then forgotten and subsequently had looked for repeatedly in this same collection of bins over the ensuing years? Surely, I've already gone through the metal box three or four times. I opened the box and there it was in a velveteen bag. How did I miss it before? No matter, what was lost is now found. And the metal box also contained, among other treasures, my Dad's gold wedding band and a bag of 1921 silver dollars! My gold band, which was too loose on my ring finger, disappeared a few years ago. probably going down the drain of the studio shower. I've thought about replacing it and recently was getting close to acting on the thought. I slipped the band onto the bare finger and it fit comfortably! So there it will remain. This moment, at 3:55am, it won't go past the joint. I believe it's safe from following its predecessor down the drain.

As for Grandmamas watch, it's put away securely in the studio in William Owen Nixon Scott's massive Victorian-era desk that also has passed its way down the years to me.

Note to Laura T.

 Hi, Laura,

Glad you enjoyed my song- in the world of music, I think songwriting is my best talent. I've felt like an outsider my entire life even after I got to a point that I had a handle on having realistic expectations for other people and how I wanted to relate to them. 

I've got a saying that artists are people who nail themselves naked to a wall in public. I was thinking about painters but it applies to anyone who puts their work out there. I believe we should write what we're inspired to write. It's not that other people's opinions don't matter but your own opinion is the most important one. As W. S. Merwin wrote in his poem Berryman:

I asked how can you ever be sure

that what you write is really

any good at all and he said you can't

 

you can't you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don't write

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58530/berryman

Back when I was trying to publish the novel I wrote, I was going to hire an old 'friend' from high school who had done a lot of science fiction writing and editing to go through the ms to assist with editing. This was someone who was a bit odd and was never a close friend but part of my high school gang (short version of long story  ). Anyway, he was down on his luck and clearly needed the money. I sent it to him and waited for him to get back to me. Finally I managed to contact him and he told me the story was "too cliched." This particular guy probably has some degree of autism spectrum disorder (what used to be called Asperger's). My feelings were kind of hurt and I took the criticism under consideration... but, I believe he just didn't get it. Although I eventually put my ms to the side, I still believe it has considerable merit. Maybe I'll return to it some day.

So, it's important for you to press on. I'm so impressed with how productive you've been and I absolutely believe you have much worth saying and the ability to say it well. You're one of my very favorite people and my standards are rather exacting.

Owen