That stubborn autumnal storm system has passed, thankfully, but now I’ve settled into a gentle stupor. As the slacker once said, these days I’m sleepwalking through my waking life, wakewalking through my dreams. (I’m paraphrasing. Different slacker in that scene, same dream.)
At dawn, my brain registers the blare of NPR on OPB and, rather than rousing me to a rational, leisurely, and productive morning routine, feeds the news straight into the dream machine. So I see a man at a high ledge imitate Saddam Hussein with the posture of Mussolini. I watch a priest scurry nervously across a sloping field, shells whistling and booming nearby. He’s in Iraq, but it looks like cinematic central Italy, and when he arrives to town, it’s more (U.S.) Midwest than Middle East. And on the homefront, it’s my dead sister home from college—finally!—but she was reluctant to come, and she is cool, aloof, vaguely critical.
Days, I expend my energy trying to organize other people’s lives, and evenings, I sputter about on fumes never managing to organize my own. I miss birthdays, don’t write or call, barely read, stumble through chores. I’m stunned by the novelties in my world—the mortgages, flowers, nieces, adult acne, ex-husbands in another state. I know I should write some letters, pick up the phone, make some art, fold the laundry, read a novel, build a Web site, practice dancing, play with the dogs, tune up my bike, plot the vegetable garden… but instead I curl up on the sofa with a beer, watch another episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, giggle at the surrealities, wonder at how much is just over my head… and then pass out until NPR wakes me into another dream.