I got distracted in my own library this morning. I wasn’t even looking for anything in particular; I just had one of those gadfly memory moments, in which I was somewhere between putting on deodorant and trying to remember the trail of a dream.
Being back on a more or less regular sleeping schedule, I’ve fallen back into the casual habit of directed dreaming. Sometimes I visit the same places over and over in my dreams, and when there is a place where it feels unfinished, I try to go back. Actual directed dreaming — actively taking control within a dream — takes a lot of practice. Mostly I just try to get back and wander. The trail of the dream doesn’t matter so much as the attempt. I do it for the same reason I’ve casually started working on simple Sudoku puzzles. That reminds me of my grandmother, my mother’s mother. I remember her sitting at the kitchen table, working the word puzzles in the paper. They are both mind-focusing distractions.
dream,
like Borges
of an endless
library
I moved some books around yesterday. I do this sometimes. And while I was looking again to verify that I was still satisfied with what I’d done, I noticed a few items I hadn’t looked at in a while. I still have two single copies of the first and second issues of a literary journal I spearheaded, Sticky Kitchen. That was back when I tried the small press route, a journey called One-Legged Cow Press. This was more than 20 years ago. Another life. I flipped through, looking at the names. Some of them I still know. A few I haven’t thought about in decades. I remember trying to convince Melissa, my wife then, of the higher cause of the project: the small press, the journal. She was never quite convinced. In the end, she didn’t find me all that convincing.
the most basic
demonstration
of humanity
Before walking into the kitchen and filling my coffee thermos to come downstairs to the desk (at the merled dog’s insistence), I went back and applied more deodorant.
Just in case.
