I return, sans moonrocks

Greetings, all. I'm back from a lovely little mini-vacation. Steph and I took a few days to ourselves to chill in Atlantic City, and I had a mighty fine time. It was the usual mix of lounging and eating, basically. I know Atlantic City isn't exactly a vacation vacation, especially when I spend all my time there anyway, but it's oftentimes just enough to get away from things for a while, never mind how far you actually go or don't go. We caught V for Vendetta on the IMAX down here, so that was pretty sweet. If loud. I did a deal where I play a certain amount of poker at a casino for a dicount hotel rate, so I got a taste of what was pretty much a purely poker-fueled existence. Pretty nice! I know also that that doesn't diverge that much from my overall life these days, really, but I did start to entertain ideas about just what it would be like to actually live in a casino. Seems pretty doable to me, frankly.

I stayed occupied for the remainder of the weekend pretty much, and I'm just taking today off to try to catch up and whatever...the usual day off nonsense. Nothing substantial to report, really, except for a bizarre dream I had last night that I'll report under separate cover. So...things are trucking along, as they usually are. I've been cogitating a bit more than usual lately on the state of things in my life...well, more the state of my life as it interacts with other lives, which is generally not a thing I guess I spend a lot of time on. My people are out there, somewhere, running around and doing stuff, and I'm no longer really a part of it. Which is...you know, fine...that's what happens when you go away to do your thing. There's nothing really new there. Just once in a while, and it seems more frequent these days, I think about the old days and how things are different now. I get a little wistful, I suppose, and I've got no apologies for that. When I start wondering where this is all headed, well...I guess my brain pretty much shuts down at that point. Things are a-changin', and I guess they always will be. Nothing to do but takes it as it comes.

So there ya go. There's a nice little non-entry. :) I'm just marking the spot where I'm back from break, I guess. Feeling a mite disconnected, but nothing severe and certainly nothing that's not of my own doing. Just waiting to see what lies ahead. More news as it develops. Peace!

Dream

I am living, literally instead of figuratively, in my mother's basement. It's the current house, the house in SoJo, except the basement has been converted into quite the living space...dorm-like almost, really, apparently to accomodate the apparently large number of siblings I suddenly have and that are also living here. Also...the house isn't actually in SoJo. It's in New York, I think, but nowhere I've actually lived in the waking world. For some reason I think it's Staten Island. Anyway, it's late at night and Momz is already in bed. The kids are all up, though, and I have to try and keep the slowly rising volume of the mass conversation to a minimum so that we don't wake anyone up. We're not all talking in a group; we've pretty much split off into pairs. I'm talking to one of my much younger sisters, giving her some sage older-brotherly advice, but I don't know about what.

At some point later, things have cleared out a bit, and my (real) sister is there...I think she's just recently moving back in or something. Also present is some friend of hers, a lanky, bisexual, Japanese-American boy named Hatsuo dressed in baggy raver kid clothes and a Gareth hat. (This is a dream character, by the way; I know of no such person.) He's mildly grating...he's got that extroverted theater person energy that clashes with mine. Still, he's an okay guy, and we're all just chatting. I really think there was another person there...a girl, but I can't remember anything about her. Eventually we start to look for something to eat. I had thoughtlessly polished off the last of some cookies we had laying around, and the only thing we could find were some old loaves of bread that were laying around. They were old-fashioned, home-baked loaves on a shelf, not anything pre-sliced in a bag. Anyway, that proving not to be a suitable foodstuff, we decide we should take things out of the house.

We go out into the night and meet up with another of my sister's work friends, a girl named Alexis. (This one's real; I met her in Vegas.) She offers to give the group of us a ride to McD's so we can grab a bite and chat. I feel like I want to go, but I also don't because I feel like I'd be intruding on my sister's time with her friends. She says she wants me along, though, so we all pile into the car. I get the feeling that Hatsuo is trying to score with both my sister and myself.

At some point later we're seated around a table, enjoying our meal...some really bizarre arrangement of five dollops of sweetish green goop arranged symmetrically on a platter shaped like a five-pointed star. The goop is like...chutney. Anyway, the mystery person...the girl...has now somehow become a sweet old man. He's dispensing some words of wisdom to us with the confidence of someone who has seen a lot of life, and is also currently mildly drunk. He has trouble completing his sentences, so I'm filling in a lot of the latter parts of his wisdom. He's extolling the virtues of someone in the party. I don't remember exactly who, but it was one of the girls. He starts out, "She's someone who really takes..." I supply, "...life as it comes?" He seems to find this acceptable.

It's later, and we're driving somewhere else. We've reached a stretch of road where we're hitting the stoplights with perfect timing and they turn green right as we reach them. I get a handle on the timing, and I pretend to change each stoplight by snapping my fingers as we approach. I get a cheer each time, and we never have to slow the car down. Then one of the stoplights fails to change and we run the red light. I blame myself for snapping my fingers with the wrong hand. Things start to fade to black. The last things I can see before my vision fades completely is each stoplight as we come toward them, changing from red to green to let us pass. We're all having a good time in the car. Finally everything goes black. I wake up.

* * *

I don't know why, but I awoke with the impression that I was actually living someone else's life in that dream. That doesn't make sense to me at all, since there were mostly people and things there from my life. But the feeling was that, even though I didn't experience it in the dream, the life I was living died when I woke up...that what I was seeing was the preface to a terrible accident; the car got in a wreck, probably to do with the stoplight tomfoolery. I awoke from this dream earlier than I like to get up, but I really didn't feel like going back to sleep, so I just read in bed for a while. Strange feeling to wake up to.

Almost forgot

My sister sent me this news story. I recommend it to all. Ninja Beware!