#ROW80 1ST QTR POST 20 – I’M DREAMING ABOUT WHAT EXACTLY?

For as far back as people have put chisel to rock and even earlier I’d wager, we’ve wondered about dreams and what they mean. For millennia, people have spent lots and lots of time and brain power analyzing and trying to interpret the meaning of dreams. The meanings vary from time, civilizations and continents and I wonder if there isn’t just a lot of wheel-spinning going on.

This was before the psychologists got involved and I’m sure there we also have the neuro-psycho spin, guaranteed to be verbose, obtuse and farther removed from day to day conversation, as we get closer to the ivy-covered towers of academia, before losing contact with the every day common sense approach altogether and just call it horse shit.

Of course, everyone now, thinks it’s as easy as looking it up on www.dreammoods.com, and for what it’s worth, maybe that’s just as well. The last I heard, our U.S. Congress wasn’t into slaughtering fatted calves or reading entrails, although our current economic policies, or at least the HuffPo headlines argue against that.

No, I’m talking about these everyday dreams. Of late, I’ve had a few memorable ones, and I’m sure they mean something. Just what that something is, though is arguable. I don’t usually remember my dreams, but earlier in the week, my med was changed and after a few nights of very vivid, incoherent, almost psychedelic and very beautiful dreams, I started having dreams like this:

I am on a beach, in Mexico. How I know this, I do not know, I just do. Several people have been warning me that I must be sure and remember to do this one thing and I must not fail. It is a very complicated task. It involves me going from place to place and making sure my secret assignations are met. There is surreptitious dialing of phones. Men and women in dark glasses and trench coats watch up and down streets, as I complete each not-completely-understood task, complete with coded message (“I am a ham”) at each stop.

There is a growing sense of urgency as this mission progresses and time grows short. The feeling of being watched. I fumble with the phone. It is a cheaply made Soviet-era model phone and plays the old pre-WWII Anthem “The Internationale” when it rings (this odd specificity is something always featured in my dreams.) Anyway, it rings like, every 10 minutes, or so, and it’s horrid. I keep trying to dial out on it, but the numbers are hard to punch and they jump around.  As I miss more and more of my assigned tasks, which I still have no idea of what they are supposed to really be, just pawn-type stuff (“Go to the statue of Zapata. There is a pooping pigeon and a newspaper in a trashcan. Talk to the leetle boy with the kite.) The leetle boy with the kite says (“Bite me, ya got the wrong kid, and that’s not Zapata, that’s Lindbergh. Go across the lago, you old bat.”)

So, I’ve messed that up. Eventually, after getting these phone calls, I keep passing this guy who is sort of Salvador Dali-ish, but not really. He is sitting in one of these chairs that lifeguards sit in. He’s got on his little Dali beret, with his stupid Dali mustache, and he’s laughing up a storm. I’m feeling this horrific sense of dread, one I’ve been feeling throughout this whole thing. Why am I here? I think I recognize some of these people, but am really not sure, but there’s a familiarity about this that is haunting me; the phone dialing for one thing. 

I’ve had that frustrating recurring dream for years, where nothing will sit where it’s supposed to be, coupled with the dread that I've forgotten to do something, or study. Not very long ago, I had that horrible dream where I was supposed to take a test in some kind of higher mathematics. I've forgotten to study, and not just for one night, but the whole semester. Sickest feeling. Ever. The fact that I NEVER did that in real life makes not one bit of difference.

An aside. Interestingly, since dealing with “Parkinson’s Disease or non-Parkinson’s Disease, that is the question,” this kind of thing does not frustrate me in real life any more. Well, for the most part. Dialing the phone, no. Trying to type? A whole ‘nother animal. I can get royally pissed if I have to correct. Typically in Chats and that includes Facebook and Twitter it’s stet.

The other frustrating, no, downright terrifying thing in this dream? I wasn’t able to complete this task. Faux-Dali was happy to tell me so. “You’re a failure. You should have just made the Payment when you had the chance. It’s too late now. What will happen if harm comes to them, hmm?” I stand there, head hung in shame. I am miserable.

“It will go worse for you too, if you do not make the Payment before they return home.” Hope. I lift my head and in that instant, understanding comes. I know what I must do. Only, will I have enough time? Will I have the courage to win the day and complete my mission and buck the odds. There’s just one way to find out! I absolutely must pay Andi-Roo’s car insurance, before the Roo family complete with kids drive home from Atlanta, Georgia! Then, I woke up. Thank God. Per dreammoods.com I feel I have let people down, or fell short of my expectations. Thanks, Einsteins.

❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦  ♆  ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦

This other dream is more like a typical snapshot and I awoke chortling and talking. In this one, I get the impression that I’m back in the Homeless shelter and it feels like it; chaotic and a lot of mouthy people. The usual. I know I’ve mentioned this, but homelessness isn’t exactly going to hone your Charm School manners, if you possessed any prior to finding yourself in that particular predicament. It doesn’t give you leave to be a complete asshole, although assholery does come in handy and I myself, have employed. I know, it is hard to believe I could ever act like that.

Well, it won’t take a soothsayer, dream interpreter, or any of that other babble to figure this one out and believe me this is not how it works in the real world. It would have been a lot calmer if it did in the Homeless shelter, but hey, you can’t have everything. Apparently, we’d all taken the Bus to the same head doctor at the same time and loaded up on our psychotropic meds for the month. Only in my dream, it looked like everyone had gotten at least one backpack’s worth of happy pills.

Back at the shelter, or our shelter, which is really an old converted Victorian-era house, they were all playing “Can You Swap 4 Xantax for 8 Ativans?” in a loud and exuberant fashion. For some reason, everyone was actually getting along! No fighting or anything, just the usual 24-hour, non-stop, par-tay, replete with blunts, malt liquor and I’m sure the crack-doers were there somewhere, along with the other drug-of-choicers. They were getting so loud however, I couldn’t concentrate on the instructions for some new stupid drug I’m supposed to start (something that’s always a problem, with my bipolar and Parkinson’s “features”) so, I hollered out finally, “WOULD YOU ALL SHUT THE HELL UP! IT’S GETTING SO A PERSON CAN’T THINK! Lo and behold, they DID. You could have knocked me over with a feather. This is all sheer fantasy. I don’t need to look at any guide about dreams to know what this represents. 

#ROW80 1ST QTR POST 19 SUNDAY CHECK IN – LAUNDRY & LITTLE MOSQUE

Okay, so I had a somewhat half-assed rant and then I had what must have been a cleansing cry in the shower. Well, more of a squeak, and a few tears, but hey, that counts, doesn’t it? Anyway, I feel better, so I’ll take that. We finally got the laundry done yesterday. This is the most ridiculous thing, ever. To do the laundry, first, thing is call Alex. He says, yeah, he’ll help. He knows JC’s knees are in a bad way, so he’s our “muscle.” Next, bag up the clothes. Of course, I left quite a few socks in the closet, along with a couple of shirts. Deduct 2 points, right there.

Get the giant plastic box with the metal handle that hurts your hand. Transfer the Gain or Sunshine or whatever cheap shit you bought on sale at the Dollar Store and transfer some of it from the 878-ounce bottle to the 48-ounce bottle, which you will proceed to use up at the Laundromat, in a failed attempt to produce suds. This is some really cheap-ass shit and is probably going to make your skin itch and rot, but hey, it’s cheap!

The brightness of this bottle would power all of Central Tampa

Haul your 3 huge bags of clothes, along with your plastic bucket of soap, borax and fabric softener out to the curb and call the cab company. The laundry across the street closed several months ago and I’ll be damned if I’m taking all this shit on a bus. Sit outside, waiting for the cab. Crap, winter has come to Tampa and it’s a bitch. It’s 55 degrees Fahrenheit and the wind is blowing like a mother. Wait inside and stare at the bags, daring one of the homeless guys to steal my shit.

Cab comes. Run outside and jump in cab. Trip over cane and fall and skin hand. Deduct 2 points. Damn. I’m on the minus side on this. Alex won’t left me do anything. Alex and Cab Guy load up bags and box/soap and off we go. It’s a 2-minute ride and plus tip, we spend about 8 bucks. We get all this crap unloaded and roughly sort it into towels, whites and colored/darks. Then, I proceed to put towels, colored/darks in 1 giant washer and whites in smaller washer. Why waste money? We get them all going and race next door to the Dollar Store!

I love the Dollar Store! 2 shirts, underwear for me, some slippers for JC, chocolate for Alex, cat food and cat treats, hair tiebacks I’ve been looking for, for forever and hair detangler, now that my hair is growing out. All for under 35 buckaroos. Yay. No laundry soap; we still have about 700 ounces of that other crap.

Okay, time to see if it’s time to dry. It is. We go to the washer to get the whites. The buggy is Alex’s responsibility. Apparently, my job is to get in the way. I manage to get my head wedged between the buggy, the washer door and the wall. Deduct 2 points. Alex is like, “why don’t you go sit down, Mary?” I persist in trying to “help.” Things don’t go well. At one point, I bonk my head on that metal bar of the buggy; hard enough to see stars, but I didn’t tell Alex. He would have told me to sit down. Deduct 2 points.

I wish I'd thought of this; it would have been a shiny, fun ride!

We got to fold the clothes as they came out of the dryer, so that was good. A couple of the guys who had been in the homeless shelter when I was there were there as well, so we caught up. They’re no longer homeless and they’re doing well. A win. Add 8 points!

I had a whole bunch of socks that matched nothing. Orphans, divorced, migrants; who knows? When I got home, oh lookie! Here they are stuffed down in the back of the closet, as if they were playing some weird sock hide-and-go-seek. Deduct 2 points. It's a draw.

Maybe it's some kind of sock Gulag.

Alex and I wheeled the stuff outside where it was like Siberia, still with the wind a-howling. We had already called the cab and talked to JC a couple of times. The damned Chinese restaurant across the street must have just cooked up a batch of their superb dumplings. We were just about to ditch the cab and get food to take home for the 3 of us, when it showed up. Boo! Deduct 0 points. It’s my game. This cab driver didn’t seem to know right from left but was friendly enough. Thank God our old laundry is opening under new management soon. This is a chore and an expensive one.  

The Mercy Curling Team

Just very quickly, because I’ll write more about this later, but on Hulu+ there’s an original series called “Little Mosque” that is in it’s 6^th season. I believe I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating; I lived among a Muslim community in Dearborn, Michigan, by happy circumstance. This people on this show are very much like the people who were my neighbors. They were welcoming and friendly and curious about the ways of westerners, much as I was curious about their ways. If you ever get a chance to watch this show, I encourage you to do so. It’s very funny and revealing regarding relationships and friendships between Muslims, Christians and Jews.

#ROW80 1ST QTR POST 18 – PARKINSON’S DISEASE OR NON-PARKINSON’S DISEASE, OR WHATEVER NOMENCLATURE YOU WANT TO GIVE IT, IS FLAT OUT A BITCH

I’ve been keeping my chin up about this. I’ve been on the sunny side of the street and I’ve been being nice to everyone who deserves being nice to, but oh, sweet Jesus, if you haven’t been nice, I have been the wrath of God and then some. My already vituperative, waspish and extremely verbally-crossing-over-to-the physical side has been sorely tempted. I’ve worked damned hard to not give in. Yeah, I know I'm bipolar. Yeah, I know I have Asperger. I piss most people off, so what. 

I am just so damned tired of being on the verge of crying. Not once in a while. Not just at the sad parts. All the damned time. What the hell is this? I don’t really think that the fact that 3 Blind Mice were running around London during the Restoration is cause for tears, but there you have it. And if I do start crying, Holy Mother of God! My tremors and all of that other bullshit gets worse! What the Hell?

I'm not gonna cry over a bunch of damned blind mice 

Is this some new facet of PD blah blah blah of which I’m unaware, like with the twitching underside of just my tongue, which I still get, or is this part of some other weird condition? I suspect it’s my PD blah blah blah, because I had this briefly when I first manifested overt PD blah blah blah symptoms. But still, how ridic, you know? I like the laughing part better.

Last night I almost busted my spleen over this cat who was working as an Elmo character. I guess he got cranky towards the end of his shift, because he started running around telling people he "worked for John Gotti." The jokers on The Smoking Gun said “today’s episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the letters “W,” “T,” and “F.” That’s way better than blubbering over 3 Blind Mice.

Who knew Elmo was a made guy in the Gambino family?

Honestly, this PD blah blah blah is like the joke from God. I can understand the losing shit and putting the paper towels in the refrigerator and following myself on my blog, and flinging food around the kitchen. The legal blindness just makes it extra-special. I insist on trying to wear make-up because I look like a walking, talking onion with out it, so I put it on and tend to wander around with some interesting effects. Actually, I put it on between tremors and have always worn it lightly.

My hair is what it’s always been, a mess, so no changes there. Clothes, the same. But for god’s sake the one thing I can’t do is take stuff out of the oven, or put it in if it’s hot. I burnt myself twice in one week on the synovial side of my hand. The carpal side hollered as if it had been burnt. I can deal with all of that, and the weird twitches, tics, pain, ear hooting, sundowning and all of the other crap. I can deal with all of it, but one thing.

I cannot deal with the crying. If it's this pseudobulbar affect I've heard affects people with PD blah blah blah, I'm going to have to learn to deal with it. some how. I hate crying; I couldn’t when I was a kid, because my mother wouldn’t let me. It was a sign of weakness. So, here I am, fighting this stupid fucked-up autonomic response to I know not what and I won’t let myself do it. No wonder I’m bipolar. No wonder I never played well with others. 

No wonder I have no self-esteem and just feel horrible. I realize that that is probably not true, but our minds work with our rotten little demons and tell us this shit and make us feel more unworthy, if such a thing is possible. Trying to work through this is hard. It’s almost a year since I was Baker Acted. I know anniversaries cast their own spells and I’m wondering if a little visit back to the Laughing Academy isn’t in order. But I hate the thought of doing all of that and JC hasn’t been well, either. So, we shall see. I feel better just talking about this; sometimes, that’s all it takes.