4.12.02 – you’ve been warned
good god: Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age. not recommended for type-As or anyone who feels at all insecure about what they’ve done with the first 2x years of their lives. it’s good for a few laughs, tho. my favorite is age 72.
last night i sat down at midnight to eat a late dinner. the heavy, sleeping silence of the house was temporarily broken by a plane or helicopter nearby; it flew so low that the whole house vibrated and buzzed. for a moment, i was able to imagine in a real, not abstract, sort of way what it would be like to live during wartime, wondering if that plane cruising overhead would be followed by an explosion…i let my overactive imagination wander off this subject for a moment, and then came to my usual conclusion, which is that words cannot express how thankful i am that i’ve grown up in a time and place of peace. it’s one thing to see a newspaper filled with gore and destruction that’s happening far away from here, but i’ve never had to wonder on a day-to-day and moment-to-moment basis whether my whole world could just go up in smoke. i’m too young to remember much of the cold war, altho the psychological ramifications of that time period have always fascinated me. i think that before sept 11, this country had finally stopped waiting for the bomb and begun taking our sense of safety for granted again. while new york is a city focused raising positive energy in order to heal itself, the rest of the country is holding its breath and waiting for the other shoe to fall, hiding the fear behind patriotism and warmongering. musing on such topics, i went to bed.
this morning, just before dawn, i dreamt about biological warfare, in which there was this gelatinous, fluorescent orange goo flowing like lava all over the place. it was called Agent Orange, only this stuff wasn’t design to kill vegetation, it was something that would eat right through your skin. i had to climb over this rocky field filled with this stuff, and even tho i was being really really careful not to touch it, a trace of it got on my hands. the stuff just seemed to keep spreading. i went home and washed it off, but it was too late. i brushed away the charcoal that had been my skin to see actual holes that went most of the way through my hand. none of it hurt, so i was just looking at it with the sort detached horror that one gets in dreams.
so goes the curse of a vivid imagination.
