Its definately mostly due to a lack of something special in my life. All the smoking. Last week I only smoked socially. Then would come home and write and read and listen to music and sleep. Last night I wanted to catch a buzz so bad Anthony and I drove to New York to beat the Connecticut beer curfew. Get smashed and splatter the panda was our plan. The Panda is a three-foot tall framed photo of a giant panda that my headlights splashed the other night coming home from I Heart Huckabees. It was propped against a garbage can on the side of Highway 1. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

So Christian and Anthony and I were going to get our drink on and then doodle and paint and write all over this panda. Of course I only got two beers in me before I accepted that I'm no drinker. That the queasy, nauseous, filling, buzz of beer is a poor substitute to the relaxing, mind-bending, buzz of weed. Which is in itself, a poor substitute to the heart-pumping, goosebumping buzz of a lover.

My fingers were black with tar time I was done furiously heating bowls and scraping resin with the bent pin of my old Papa John's nametag. Rolling up THC concentrate into a little bitty ball and re-smoking it, I managed to catch enough of a high to scrawl some obscure Thoreau quote onto the panda and then enjoy the chicken & corn chowder I stole from work. I got high enough I could sleep without Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind droning in the background, keeping me company. Misery loves it.

Then I dreamed one of my recurring dreams. This one I've had countless times, where I am half Jeremy, half Louis from Interview with the Vampire. The dream seems to last hours and hours and its all running. I'm running Natalie through the city, ducking into random shops and markets and apartments, keeping one step ahead of a maniacal Lestat. This time there were conrontations on a rooftop, snarls and evil laughter and superhuman jumping. Flashes of teeth. We cat-and-moused in someone's cluttered apartment that I slipped into from a fire escape. The dream always seems its going to build to some final showdown, that that is where all the running leads. I always inevitably lose Nat in the fray, and then spend the second half of the dream desperately trying to get her back. In the dream I really believe that I'll reach this showdown, where she'll be, and he'll be, seductive and evil; and we'll battle, zipping up into the sky, fighting in the air, and I'll win and rescue the girl. But the dream never ever goes that far. If I sleep 20 hours I'll just be running and searching and chasing and being chased for all of it. And then I just wake up. Nothing resolved. No battle, no rescue, nothing. It seems to me now, that the point of the dream is all the running. That there is never intended to be any closure. That I'm supposed to just keep chasing.

Oh why the mind picks the dreams it picks?


"I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house." --Thoreau