Why?

Because it’s time to send something out, but I have no coherent ideas on hand that aren’t political, and who wants to hear that shit right now?

This may be the most convoluted nest of dreams I’ve had in one night. It must have been during the Christmas holidays at my sister-in-law Ginny’s house some years back. (I never think to date my notes; I suppose I should, but that’s the least of my endlessly badgering worries about what I “should” be doing.) Ginny died a couple years ago. It’s now my daughter Morgan’s house.

Elements that likely entered into this dream clump:

• the novel I was reading about a murder trial, with overly detailed examinations of the minds of those involved, especially the accused, a 19-year-old, philosophically astute artist
• the sunlight in the bedroom at Ginny’s, the first sun in many days and a particular light we don’t get at home while in bed
• a talk with Ginny in which I learned that my last remaining cousin, Celeste, had died a month or so back, and my saying how blessed I was by the love and help of my elder brothers, both now dead, which lead me to realize that I, as the last of the siblings and cousins, was now “in charge” of that generation’s continuance
• cleaning my workshop the previous Thursday, sweeping the floor with a wide, inefficient broom before vacuuming
• my Christmas present to Linda, replacement of the doors to the lower cabinets in the main room, a last-minute blast that succeeded in a considered and competent way that’s unusual for my rapid-fire projects.

The first dream segment is vague, a group of people, indoors or moving between places, with young, intense relationships, no details retained.

Next, street and building renovations under a volunteer group along Lancaster Ave. and surrounding areas in Philly, none that I could identify with real places, clearing out dead parts of buildings, cutting street trees, rearranging the local reality as a civic project. I am a junior participant, then somewhat later part of the cleanup team, assigned or self-choosing to rake/broom bits of dead branch along front “yards” or concrete aprons?, alone, looking for help. I insist (to whom or what?) that someone join me. A composite creature comes, an owl-figure who leans on its broom but does nothing while I meticulously rake leaves and tree detritus into a tight pile, though I scold the figure, incensed. I go somewhere, come back and it is gone.

Hiatus. 

Going “home,” possibly from the previous setting, on a trolley, similar to the West Philly subway-surface trolley system, on underground tracks, with someone who changes – possibly sex, definitely attributes and relationship to me – as we travel. It wants to get off at the first stop downtown, east of the river. That stop has a name, not a cross-street number as it would in downtown Philly; I describe how to get there. I plan to exit myself at the last stop before the trolley tunnels under the river, which will most directly take me home (roughly Powelton Village), but somehow get off a stop earlier (roughly 32nd St.). The other passenger, now definitely male, possibly Black (I never see him clearly; he stands partly behind me) gets off with me.

Outside, we are in one of my elaborate dream warrens – tight, short streets converging at all angles, with buildings in various states of decay or renovation, all of reality being rearranged. I recognize this element, and announce it to him, as my dreamworld. For once I feel comfortable with it. This seems not a fully lucid dream, since it is both dreamed and real to me. We talk about what, from my angle, that is, how it works.

Unlike at Lancaster Ave., I am clearly in charge, explaining things to this somewhat important figure who would outrank me in a “real” situation. I suggest different directions to walk to see how to get out of the dream convolutions and find a straight road “home,” though that outlook seems less important than my finding it a duty and/or challenge. The sun is out and brilliant, a good day, one that invigorates me.

We walk into and through small buildings of various types, mostly indistinct (the light intense, but the details not in focus), all being worked on. We don’t talk to the workers. At the entrance to a small, Frank Furness-like museum being ripped apart, I say, “There’s always one of these,” meaning always a museum in my dream, always being reconstructed (in most of those dreams, the museum is based on a specific one, such as the University Museum at Penn, but that’s not so, here). Again, inside details are indistinct, the workers seem bemused by our intrusion.

The attempt to find the road out continues until we reach  a wide flow of water outside one building. The water runs between buildings, through sorts of courtyards. I see this as a pointer to the road out, which I envision as a clear, straight street. I jump in the water and am carried to a small waterfall and washed gently over. The sun is still shining, encouraging. The dream here dissolves into something I can’t recall; it was not important to reach the actual road out, but to find the pointer to it. 

During, slightly before, or possibly after the water interlude, I thank the male figure for collaborating with me on forming the dream, the whole creative process, making it fuller, telling him that my discussions with him (mostly my pontificating) had made the dreamlife and life in general richer, building on my collaborations with daughter Cait (not identified as such in the dream, but female and in retrospect obviously her).

This dream was a shining, active growth process, overt in its implications, not the kind of removed self I normally dream, which includes no discussions of “meaning.” It seemed to indicate a major shift in how I was looking at the world, one I hadn’t been conscious of. I can’t say what, if any, the after-effects were.

I’m old enough to have passed over an internal divide that I didn’t see coming: 

I’m dying.

Not in the sense that I’m about to keel over, but that I can feel that I’m decreasing, becoming less, moving toward an end. The end? 

As a kid I never envisioned death in any conscious way. Odd, too, because on Hastings Ave., when I was about five, the guy across the street died and I watched the hearse pick him up. And I already knew that we were able to rent our house – right after WWII, when almost nothing was available – only because the owner had fallen off a ladder and broken his neck, so that his wife had moved out and rented the place. But I never attached death to myself or to the world. It was a “something,” at best.

In Catholic school (4^th to 12^th grades) I feared the afterlife, not death as  such. Heavy-duty Christians, according to various studies, often have the greatest fear of death – Perhaps they feel they can’t make the grade into Heaven. Whew, I was sure I couldn’t.

But since I first entered college, I’ve never for an instant considered the possibility of anything remaining beyond death. What? My brain turns to soup, while a wispy “self” flits off into the Beyond? I gained a horror of death in my 40s-50s from not being able to picture a world continuing without me there to observe it. Unfair, damn it!

Now, I still want to know what happens next, as observer, much as I wish I’d been around throughout all of history – OK, maybe not the last ice age or the Inquisition. And I still can’t wrap my mind around the idea of not-being, even though I haven’t read Sartre.

But about 30 seconds before death, an “Aha!” will arrive that will make not-being obvious, even enjoyable? Total horse crap.

The altered outlook that led me to this ramble doesn’t feel lugubrious, just a realization that something has changed that I didn’t want to change – but that doesn’t matter now that it has changed.  Things peter out (Peter Out – the last philosopher of the middle ages) in an inevitable way. There’s no glory in it, certainly, but no shame either – shouldn’t even be a reluctance, I suppose, but there it is.

Along the way, I see this evolving in tandem with the wind-down of the country, which, despite its equal inevitability, saddens me. The obvious and predictable end of the American empire was fine by me – we’d bumbled and annoyed the world long enough, imposed on it, taken from it, given back quite a lot, but most of it destabilizing, debilitating. So, no more empire: Good thing. 

But I didn’t think that we’d choose to slit our own national throat in the process. That too is probably inevitable. Our elections, decided by an anomaly of the Constitution rather by than any “will of the people,” show that a massive percentage of the “people” prefer national suicide to a possibly enlightened decline. 

How can decline be enlightened? Through acceptance, through a bit of relaxation. We could sit back in our comfy chairs with a good cocktail or a shot of rotgut and reminisce, laugh over the good times, frown and shrug over the bad. It’s not a nasty way to go when the exit sign’s flashing.

So many of us don’t see our national choice as suicide; we view the invitation to political and social insanity as a form of salvation. Is this a normal approach to death? Any death?

Damned if I know. But I feel a huge sorrow for the country that I don’t feel for myself. And I know it’s misplaced, because when I’m dead, I will be truly and certifiably gone – vanished – whereas our country could conceivably experience resurrection. 

It’s not likely, but possible. The horror that the country and the world will be put through in coming years could be what’s needed to reign in our decline – not of empire, but of human decency. Can we find the best, rather than the worst, in our collective soul?

As for me, I’ll go on dying, and it bothers me far less than I would have thought. As I said, in middle age I didn’t at all like the thought of the vacancy of non-being, the certainty of blankness, the eternity of no-knowledge. But maybe it’s all been enough. Enough of everything. 

*   *   *   *

When I was growing up, it was the age of departments stores. 8th and Market streets in Philly had three: Gimbel’s, Srawbridge and Clothier, and Lit Brothers, all situated at what was rumored to be the busiest single intersection in the country. (Can’t recall who lounged on the southeast corner; can you?)

Lit’s, with its Christmas Village, and Strawbridge’s, to some degree, made the holidays a semi-interactive joy. Lit’s also held smaller gatherings  throughout the year for local kids-show radio hosts, etc.

But he thing I most remember from Strawbridge’s was that, instead of lighted push-buttons to announce whether an elevator was ascending or descending, once the doors opened, you were greeted by a canned female announcement. It was delightful yet startling to hear a purring, sexy voice announce, “Going down!”

*   *   *   *

Tune: “There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Lisa, dear Lisa”

There’s a hole in your logic, Lord Berkeley, Lord Berkeley,

There’s a hole in your logic, Lord Berkeley, a hole.

With Hume shall I fill it, dear David, dear David,

With Hume shall I fill it, dear David, with Hume?

*   *   *   *

Dream #13

I ‘m taking a part-time job with the FBI, and my boss introduces himself as J. Edgar Hoover. He is a kindly, bumbling old man, like the one in Being John Malkovich. His office has no files, just a cramped space with a couple pieces of furniture.

I’m sure that Hoover died years before – “under Nixon,” I suddenly remember. I’m talking to a friend who’s a level of hierarchy above me: “Maybe it’s J. Edgar Hoover, Jr.,” I say, but we finally decide that it is the original Hoover, preserved or somehow resurrected, which makes me uncomfortable, not quite believing and wondering if there’s some other boss figure around.

But the most ludicrous aspect is that all the office records are slices of bread collected in 3 or 4 wrapped commercial loaves tossed on the floor in a corner. The slices aren’t encoded, they are the records themselves. Whenever you want to find something – and Hoover is continually asking me to check for things – you have to rummage through them.

My partner/higher-up is trying to convince Hoover that searching through the bread is not efficient and to establish a reasonable filing system – short wall shelves with little boxes on their sides, about the size of DVD cases. Hoover seems confused but not averse to the change. 

That’s all that remained of this dream.

*   *   *   *

While in my late teens, working one summer as an Ordinary Seaman on a Sun Oil tanker, I was told by a fellow Ordinary (not Smitty), in part-drunken seriousness:

“There’s only two things in the world that smell like fish, and one of them is fish.”

Another fellow worker (Bell, as I recall) was the first to alert me to the six categories of farts: fizz, fuzz, fizz-fuzz, poo, tearass and rattler. 

You may have picked up a similar but slightly different hierarchy, but you probably weren’t listening carefully.

When we added two rooms to the house, close to 20 years ago, we had our incoming electric line moved from the south side to the new north-side mud-room, but I never thought to block up the two-inch hole leading to the original breaker panel (which I had removed and wall-boarded over).
Several years later, we noticed bees flitting in an out of the outside hole. They’d set up a hive inside the partition between the bedroom and the old bathroom. Lying in bed, it sounded like a motor running in the wall. By this time, we were ready to tear out the partition so we could expand the bedroom and move the bathroom from its tiny, skinky, pink-plastic-tiled alcove to a Real Bathroom with the a clawfoot tub.
Anyway, we called a local beekeeper, I think his name was Kaufmann, to come by to see about removing the bees safely and taking them with him. Thing was, if he broke down the interior partition, we’d have the entire unhappy swarm throughout the house, and the exterior cinderblock wall was resistant to simple tinkering.
So Mr. Kaufmann decided he would attach one of his small hives, housing young bees (he called them “babies”), to the exterior siding and fit a narrowing cone over the existing hole that would let “our” bees out but prevent them from returning. They should then colonize the new hive, and gradually the whole troop should transfer; the old queen would either tell the remaining bees to swarm and scram – or die of neglect, which wouldn’t hurt the rest of the new hive.
He saw that the bees had also found their way behind the aluminum siding by pulling out the caulk around the bathroom window. He put duct tape over it. “If that doesn’t work, I’ll come rip off some of the siding” – we’d told him we intended to remove it anyway – “and attach the cone right to the cinderblock.”
It could take 3-4 months to complete the transfer before we knocked out the partition. Ideally, we could video the stages of the attachment and transfer, but somehow we didn’t. Too bad. I did keep running notes, because I found the whole process fascinating, and Kaufmann said he’d never encountered a situation quite like ours – and had never personally attempted this kind of hive transfer, only heard about it.
As he set up, he shared some interesting facts and ideas about the continuing die-off of bee colonies. For himself, he now only raised “wild” bees: He had bought some commercial swarms from Georgia and “they were the laziest bees I ever saw.” He seemed quite disgusted with these slacker insects. He theorized –“ but what do I know, I’m only a milkman,” his day job – that most commercial bees have been so coddled by humans that they can’t look after themselves.
As a f’rinstance, they get mites on their backs, as do the wild bees, but the commercial bees can’t remove them. The wild bees have longer legs and can reach back and kick the little bastards off.
Since the mites otherwise slip off fairly easily, the commercial growers dust the bees with powdered sugar or the like that causes the mites to fall on their butts. It’s said, in studies of evolution, that any trait that requires extra energy or resources – but that with time or circumstance becomes no longer useful – tends to die out. So maybe long legs have become a useless trait in commercial bees? One theory for why humans don’t produce our own vitamin C is that we developed in a part of Africa where it was plentiful, so we lost the “unnecessary” mechanism for its production.
Kaufmann also noted that the almond growers in California, who produce something like 70% of the world’s almond crop, set up thousands of hives – I read, somewhere, about 800,000. “You get one infected hive, and they’ll spread it around to all the others. You just need one bee from each of the other hives to pick up the infection and bring it back and poof those hives are gone.
“I never put any medicine in my hives. Nothing. If the state bee inspector comes by and says I have to put medicine in my hives, I’ll just burn the hives.” He paid $10 to register his hives. “No matter how many you have – you have 10,000 hives – it’s $10 to the state.” The state requires access to the hives to deal with mites, etc. “I don’t mind, if it will keep the bees healthy. But I paid my $10 and in two years I’ve never seen an inspector.”
What else did I learn? Bears, he said, aren’t looking for honey as such. They hear the buzzing as they amble along, find the hive, and go after the bees. ”100% protein. Sure, they’ll eat the honey, but that’s not what they’re after.”

A few days later he brought the new brood in a cooler, but the cooler got too hot, so some of the workers died in the honey at the bottom. He talked to the bees and seemed genuinely upset when he accidentally killed a couple while attaching the new frame.
He was very reticent and concerned we would be upset if his experiment didn’t work, but he was doing a great job. “Seems to be working, seems to be working.”
His daughter, Brittany, helped him out. He calls her Bert, so the conversations sounded something like an old Piels Beer commercial, with Bob and Ray as brothers Bert and Harry Piel.. She’d been working with him for years and only been stung once. She helped me put on bee gear, and he showed me a drone, pointing out that it has no stinger. A queen mates only once, he explained. “She can lay 3,000 eggs a day for four years.” (My grandmother was one of 13, and I thought that was mind-blowing.)
“I gotta warn you. If a bear goes after the hive, don’t go out there. Those bees will be really mad and that can go on for days or weeks. Don’t go out there. I had a bear got seven hives, put them all in a pile.” That cost him around $6,000. “You never make any money from this, I lose a bundle.”
He loves to talk about bees – endlessly. (He’s another of the typical non-laconic Sullivan Countians, always leaning in a little, even when they aren’t leaning against something… just an incipient lean.) I think he takes his bees more seriously than he takes himself. He’s the keeper/observer of his “people” who do the actual work and he admires them immensely.
He became apologetic for not having foreknowledge of everything that might go wrong with this unusual set-up. Here is a man, honest to the core, humble without broadcasting humility, speaking the truth as he knows it while imparting his enthusiasm: libertarian and environmentalist in the best sense.

* * *
Headline of the week: “Woman rescued from Welsh mountain after fall while scattering father’s ashes”
She was found on a narrow ledge above a 300-foot drop. Rescuer’s quote in article: “This was someone properly worrying for their own life. It wouldn’t have turned out well for her if she’d slipped further down.”
Ya think so?

* * *
My choice for the next Belgian superhero: AntTwerp

Pardon me, but I want to request a bit of equanimity for Elon Musk.

He’s getting dumped on a lot lately, and for mostly good reasons: anti-semitic comments and not policing the fat, rotten side of Twitter (now X). But earlier he had been lauded as an entrepreneurial visionary, or something of the sort.

What gets me is that, in both instances, he has not been treated as a full human being. I mean, yes, he regularly comes across as larger than life because of his money, the multiple companies he controls, and his unrestrained ability to make a damned fool of himself. But shrink him down to normal size and he’s a human being, with the standard range of good, bad and indifferent points that we all share, to one extent or another.

I’ve never joined Twitter/X (and never will), so can’t comment on his extended range of views posted there. But from the numerous examples that do escape its confines, he seems complex, comical, confused and confounding: someone for everyone to hate and enjoy hating.

What I like best in these off-hand, off-mind memos is his sense of humor. He can’t seem to take himself or anything he’s doing fully seriously (remember The Boring Company!?), That’s something that definitely can’t be said of his righteous detractors. Yeah, his humor is juvenile often enough, but what a relief from the mock seriousness of the corporate heads, social mahoffs, and commentators who shake their knowing fingers but don’t give a royal fuck about any of us.

Some of his ideas, ballooned into companies, are brilliant, at least as starter-concepts – Tesla, Space X, Starlink, Neuralink – yet he’s an amazing wacko who doesn’t seem to care much what anyone thinks of him. Loathing him for his Scrooge McDuckian piles of money (which, based largely on investments, doesn’t really exist) is beside the point – though I wish he’d just give it away, especially if he did so with the same unpredictable shrug.

Speaking of money, how could he ask his directors, straight-faced, for an obscene payout of $56 billion? Ummm, I haven’t heard anyone say this directly, but maybe it’s to pay him back for buying Twitter – which I recall cost him about $45 billion. (I’m convinced he bought Twitter to deliberately destroy it – the only explanation for his first year’s behavior as owner; if so, bless him).

Each of his companies (except The Boring Company, which, really, had to be a  joke – it’s never produced anything) has a solid, well-developed idea behind it. And each has major downsides.

Tesla has captured the electric-car market, but it’s based on lithium batteries, which are far from being an end-product in battery design – heavy, expensive, short-lived and environmentally brutal. To make the world electric, it needs a real battery which doesn’t yet exist.

Space X will likely become a viable alternative to total government control of space exploration through NASA, but so far it’s shown wild failures during launching (though early failure has been true of every technological advance throughout history), and Musk’s idea of polluting the rest of the solar system with humanity gags me.

Starlink is a major advance in non-terrestrial communication, but it is fouling the outer atmosphere with crap and astronomy with light pollution.

Neuralink looks like it will allow paralyzed humans to form links with computers. Good stuff, that, but likely just as much or more bad by promoting even greater destruction of privacy.

Here’s the thing I’m getting at: More than at any other time in recent history, we as a society demand that everyone be firmly this or that, that they fully confirm (or deny) what we each believe in. So I’m just trying to present Musk as either god’s right hand or the devil’s bosom buddy.

And please remember: Leonardo was gay and wrote backwards, but he still did some pretty neat art (though not Salvador Mundi for Christ sake – I mean, look at the Lord’s dead eyes and silly, twisted fingers – Leonardo, who was a master of hands).

*    *    *    *

Two ghosts were walking down the road. On had substance, the other did not. The one who had substance asked the one who did not: “Why do you not have substance?” The other replied: “The Saints’ Commission on Ghostly Well-Being has stated that the purer the thoughts, the more ephemeral the state of attenuation, culminating in gradual absorption of all mundane matter into the All-Encompassing Spirit of Nirvana, much as sugar is slowly dissolved into a bowl of oatmeal. This argument has subsidiary ramifications, which may best be summed up in the phrase, ‘Somebody up there likes me.'” 

The ghost who had substance found this to be a snide and absurd explanation and attempted to kick the other ghost in his keister. But since the other had no substance, the first ghost merely stubbed his toe on a solemnity. The second ghost went contentedly on his way until he chanced to step in a bowl of oatmeal and was slowly absorbed into an aged Scotsman’s breakfast.

*    *    *    *

Dream #17

Around 6 am. I have a spotted wild cat [we’d been to the zoo that day], about the size of a small puma to start with, that tries to swallow one of our house cats, I pull that one out of its throat, let the wildcat loose, it swallows my favorite cat, Cali. I know I can cut the wildcat open, which means several minutes of trying to knock the thing out by swinging it by its tail and slamming its head on the floor. But every time I grab it and try to operate with a little Xacto knife, it wakes up and wiggles. Lots of people around, don’t seem too interested, hand me the knife if it falls but won’t help. Finally hold the wildcat down with one hand on its throat and cut it open, no blood, pull Cali out, but the gastric juices have dissolved her hair and she looks like a lumpy football. I’m in a vet’s office and he takes her and hangs her to dry, now orange and green and dried out, a cross between a wicker hot-pad and a potholder. I wake up without finding out if Cali will make it.

*    *    *    *

Two updated spirituals:

Ezekiel copped a feel,

Way down in the middle of the hair…

If I could, I surely would

Crap on the rock where Moses stood…

Oh Harry don’t you weep, don’t you moan,

Oh Harry don’t you weep, don’t you moan,

Pharaoh’s air force got grounded,

Oh Harry don’t you weep.