What It's Like to Live with Me.

I woke up from a very vivid dream in which I had been encountered by Mother Nature who appeared in various forms. The dream was very vivid. Lots of greens and blues and reds and oranges and yellows and…well, it was colorful.

Nothing to do and no pressing reason to get up. I looked to my left. My wife was awake, too, and peering into her cell phone.

“Hey! You’ve got your cell phone!” She chose not to respond. “Mine’s charging at my desk. I need you to look something up!” I was so lazy I didn’t feel like getting out of bed. “I need you to look up Marion Ross!” Carole gave me a funny look. “I need to know if Marion Ross is still alive!”

"Marion Ross?"

"Yeah. You know. Mrs. C.! Richie Cunningham's mom on HAPPY DAYS! Tom Bosley's wife on the show! Did you know that Tom Bosley was Jewish? I mean--Father Dowling? Fuck! That guy went completely under my Jewdar! Didn't see that coming!"

Carole ignores the raving exposition. "Why would you possibly need to know if Marion Ross is alive?"

“I just had a dream about Mother Nature appearing to me and her voice was Marion Ross’s voice! I vividly recall she sounded exactly like Marion Ross! Look her up. Is she dead?”

“Okay, okay. Give me a second.” Then. “Why does it matter if she’s still alive?”

“Because if they make a movie out of my dream then she’ll have to voice Mother Nature.”

Another funny look (as if 'yeah, that's gonna happen'), but by then she had the information. “Yes, she’s still alive.”

“That’s good,” I say, and sit up. “Hey! They have her picture and one of Erin Moran when she was young! She was really cute! Too bad she croaked.”

More funny looks. “Very sad, yes.”

“Do me a favor. Look up the German word ‘jager’ for me! I think it means ‘hunter’, but I’m not sure. Look it up! J.A. G. E. R. YAY-ger,” I add.

“You’re right, it means ‘hunter’.” I know she’s going to ask me why I needed to know that, so I look at the screen of her cell phone and yell, “DAMN! Why do they have a photo of a cool-ass European travel trailer there? That makes no sense at all! That’s a cool trailer! Click on that and tell me about it!”

“You!” She’s angry, of course. Between me raving and pushing my head between her chest and her cell phone she has had it. “Just…just go somewhere else!”

And my job there was done.

Erin Moran and Marion Ross laugh at me.

In Dreams (Again).

(This was my dream last night. The opening sounds like a joke.)

Three huge Neanderthal men walked into a tipi-village of ancient humans.

The visitors were not pleased. In fact, they were upset about something. The humans had obviously encountered these three guys before and knew them. The three were loud, rude, and were pushing people around. They wanted to see the humans’ chief.

One human—a hunter/warrior—complained about their rudeness and challenged them to cool off. At that, one of the Neanderthals ripped his head off. Twisted it off, actually. There was lots of red blood. Some of it splashed onto their orange ruddy beards.

They insisted on seeing the chief, and they were going to go into his tipi if he didn’t appear. But the chief was very sick. When it looked like the Neanderthals were going to enter his tent, the chief’s personal bodyguards appeared. These guards were a trio of very tiny women about three feet tall dressed in black bear fur and carrying finely carved flint knives.

The leader of the guards looked up at the massive Neaderthal brutes and she said, “Ohshitohshitohshit”. But she was going to do her job and protect the chief. She pulled her big, finely worked flint knife from its sheath. The other two tiny women guards followed suit.

(And this is when it got REALLY weird, as dreams do.)

Just then, someone recalled that a wandering giant had entered the encampment in the night, drunk on his ass, and had passed out on the ground. Someone woke him up and pointed at the Neanderthals who were threatening them. The giant glared at the Neanderthals, sat up (that act alone made him taller than the Neanderthal men) and he grabbed the first one and used him as a bludgeon to beat the other two to the ground. After that, he proceeded to mash their bearded faces into the earth until all three were out cold. The ground shook with each impact.

And then he giant fell back and returned to his drunken stupor.

(And that was my dream.)

"Bring your leader to us."

Dream.

Sometimes I have really weird, brief, vivid dreams. All of my writer pals like to talk about their dreams. I rarely do, but from time to time they're so bright in my mind when I awaken I scribble down my impressions.

Last night's dream. Very brief.

I dreamed a guy I knew died. I went to his house. I don't know why, because his death really didn't mean all that much to me. Finding myself in the kitchen I looked across the room and his wife was standing at the sink, her back to me. She was wearing this brilliant cobalt blue dress. I walked up to her and smacked her on the ass and said, "How's it goin', old woman?"

Then I woke up.

I woke up before this could happen.

Indecision.

The old subconscious works on us in our dreams, for sure.

I don't normally dream about the past, but I did last night.

I dreamed that I was back in high school again, in the midst of a football game. There I was on the field. Someone tipped the ball as the opposing quarterback threw a pass. The misdirected ball fell right into my hands. I hauled it in close to my body and began to run.

And then I suddenly realized that I didn't know which end of the field belonged to my team.

And so it goes...

I have to say...the old Gilmer High alma mater purple and white uniforms look cool, these days.

Flying!

When I was a kid I used to dream of flying. In those dreams I'd just leap up and go flying. I'd be up there in the clouds looking down on the street where I lived, on the school I attended, on the house where I lived. All alone up there above it all.

Over the years I would ask other kids if they dreamed of flying. I thought maybe it was because of all of those superhero comics I read. But, no, just about every other kid I asked also had dreams that they could fly, whether they read comics or not.

When I ask women if they had such dreams, they usually look at me funny. "Are you daft?" So I decided to look that up and found that for some reason girls (and women) don't dream that they can fly. It is supposed that it has something to do with self-esteem issues and male-dominated society. That sounds reasonable, but it also may have something to do with the the idea that there are fundamental differences between male and female psyches. I can only shrug. I don't know such stuff.

As I got older I began to dream less and less of flying. I will assume here that as the realities of life are loaded onto adult shoulders one by one, the less likely even the dreaming mind can cut loose enough of those burdens to allow a man to believe he can fly. Not even in dreams. Finally, sometime in my early 20s I stopped having such dreams. They no longer came to me.

However...there are still similar dreams for me. I have them to this very day. Instead of flying, I dream that I can jump. Higher than anyone else. Generally I'll find myself in a building with a vast ceiling twenty or thirty or even one hundred feet high. And I'll brace myself, then bend my knees, and jump high enough to reach up and brush that ceiling with my hands.

No more open skies leading up to space, now. Instead I am greeted by ceilings--but sometimes those ceilings are so high that it's almost like the sky, and I can scrape them with my fingertips. Perhaps there's still hope for me in my old age, I reckon.

Mort Weisnger Superman stories! Every kid's dream!

Light fantasy.


Now it's dark.

Motivators

There are lots of motivators in life. Some people claim sex is the great motivator. Others think that a good beating is a proper motivator. Many feel that a guilt trip does the job. When I was in junior high and high school, I found that returning violence in a greater sum than received was was the way to get it done.

The thing is, there are all kinds of motivators for each situation.

I've found that poverty and fear of poverty were always the motivator that kept me working, or kept me busy looking for work. And, of course, I always had my dreams. A dream can serve that purpose, as long as you don't allow anyone to crush it. There are people who--just as Frank Sinatra said in one of his famous tunes--get a kick out stompin' on a dream. I've always done a fair job of keeping other people from stomping on my particular dreams. Mainly, that meant keeping those people out of my life. I never hesitated to shed unwanted company, no matter who they were.

My biggest dreams were always kind of selfish, I have to admit. These dreams involved my writing and the goals that I had for that side of my artwork. From the first time I wrote a short story at the age of eight I wanted to be good enough to make money creating fiction. From time to time I've done that. Never enough to make it my livelihood, but always enough to keep the dreams fed. Sometimes it was enough for them to have a cookie, and sometimes it was room and board for several months. Enough to keep 'em alive and kickin'.

Today I signed the contracts for a two-book deal with a major New York publisher, Tor Books. This was seeing one of my dreams become reality. I had the help of an excellent agent (Robert Fleck), and the eye of a good editor (Jim Frenkel). They've helped give my dream life.

If that ain't a motivator, I don't know what is.

Signing the Tor Books contracts and doing my best to behave.

Dream

This is a recounting of a dream I had a while back. Dreams are strange. Normally, I don't feel the need to write them down. Most of them are pretty pedestrian.

But:

I dreamed Carole and Andy and I were renting this enormous, fantastic house perched atop a green, grassy mountain in some foreign land. A very friendly man dressed in khaki took us there and pointed out all of the features before he left. The house had a walkway you had to use that crossed a pond in front of the home. The view from the windows of the nearby mountains and an enormous, miles-long lake below were stunning; and all of the mountains were ablaze with rainbow hues of many-colored leaves. There was a mother cat with two tiny little kittens who were playing and swimming in the pond, along with ducks and geese. There was no lock on the front door, but if you felt you must, you could pull up part of the walkway, much as one pulls up a drawbridge, with a series of chains and pulleys. Only one other house was on the mountaintop, and two young women were staying there. We saw them walking in the meadow below our own house. There was but one, mild threat: a cliff that plunged hundreds and hundreds of feet down to the giant lake below; but we just had to be careful of it. And without it, the view would not have been so spectacular. Carole and I were planning to swim, but we couldn’t decide if we should swim in the pond at the house, or hike down to the giant lake and swim there.

And then I woke up.

Grasping at Dreams

All of my young adult life I was looking for the neighborhood that I grew up in. The perfect place to raise my son. Nice neighbors. Peace and quiet. Decent homes. Kids playing safely. Local drugstore with a soda jerk on the job, comic books on the shelf. Hobby shop down the block. Trees.

Occasionally I'd find such a neighborhood. You had to make six figures per year to live in them. The cops would spy me checking the place out and follow me until I left.

Alas.

The '60s of my childhood. Gone, Daddy-O!

My Son, the Smartass

My son, Andy is twenty years old. He has an IQ of 117. I always wanted him to go to college and become a National Park naturalist and live my stillborn dream of working for the Park Service.

Alas, he has no interest in going to college. (Argh!)

He's gainfully employed at a metals shop where he's training to be a welder. Yes, I know that welders often make decent money. And there's nothing wrong with being a laborer. (I am a laborer, too.)

However, I did have my dreams for Andy. But he just didn't share them. So it goes.

At work, there is often scrap metal lying about that is good for odd little projects when he's not working. He brought one home yesterday. Here it is:

My son's first shank. He would have to use that IQ to be a smartass. Oy.