Counting Blessings and Bullets

That dream was much too strange to ignore.

As with any dream,

but with this one, I woke up with hostility to an absolute zero. As if the unveiling of reality was personally undertaken by an angel today. An alarm from my phone that I'd never woken up to before accompanied the awakening. I read a text sent sometime during the night, from a man I'd never met in person before. Chris. He says he's visiting the East Coast. I study a palm sized desk model of a globe and spin it on its axis while I relieve myself on the toilet. My package is waiting for me in the living room. It's a book I probably won't read for a while because I drag my feet until they're buried in cement before I can ever accomplish anything. 120 Days of Sodom. I'm not excited to read it, I just want to have lots of books in case I ever decide to really care. In case time ever seems spare, which it never does for me, always dense with debris and ghosts and birth. In my dream, a man lead me into a church insistent that I sit down and drink water for the sacrament, strongly insistent in fact, to the point of force. Once I drank the water, he had a gun to my head as planned. I was ready to be shot, as he had planned, and for two seconds I thought I already had been. When I realized I hadn't, it somewhat occurred to me that I was dreaming and was in control, so I immediately placed my hand in front of the gun, covering the part of my head where the wound would have been. This dream occurred a few hours ago and I was unfazed until now, where I sit crying and shaking. I'm afraid to go anywhere today. The other parts of the dream involved a giant courtyard of an Oxford-like preparatory school filled with dirty, sickly, rabid dogs, sniffing defensively for food and territory on a fresh cut grassy terrain that may have been a graveyard if it weren't for the convention of stray dogs; unruly black girls trawling through the stairwells, one holding a small silver gun in her hand, large German Shepherds being sent after them to no avail, nobody listening to me when in passing I discreetly warn them of her loaded weapon, a young man caught on a big screen stealing from a distinguished artist and later claiming he doesn't know why he did it, a funeral for a man who looked like the man who was dancing with his mourning daughter. I read her mind and she was planning to have sex with the man, who was seducing her lecherously in tight spandex American flag underwear, because he looked just like her father.

It was easy to explain the sequence of the dream. This is one of those mornings where I am afflicted, and the sun is too bright, almost like New York City is trying to tell me something. The media is hyper, the anchors are anxious for some reason yet excited with all the recent activity they have the scintillic pleasure to report to all of us rabid, spoiled drones. The daughter of a politician is shoplifting, a musician is running for office, a man shot ten people at his job; we are at a point where things are repeating themselves because I know I've heard all of this news before. If only I knew how to play cards, if only I took the time to read between the lines and focus on the grand strategy. I am prey to the diversions however, selfish and sick, feeling like I have purpose even though we're all alike, "just" going to go about what we have agreed to do for sustenance. I can't dote on this any further, although I am shaking in my seat and I can't picture myself at this point stabbing myself with hygiene products to shed dead cells. Constantly morphing back into the same person. Smooth skin by the age, sticky with nature's wax. Boring.

"Just." Clean up and go. There's no time for anything else.