I had an upsetting dream last night in which the explicit details and all of the mysteries of birth and reproduction (in other words, death and fucking) were revealed to me in a series of nested scenes, scenes such as my good friend casually, nudely inviting me to watch he and his girlfriend get down in the hallway just outside my room in full afternoon daylight slanting through the skylight then going for it (with no input from me, I was mute and glued to the spot), and then pausing at various moments to explain in increasingly technical jargon what was happening in both interior / exterior zones, emotional and physical realms - there were measuring tools and x-ray imaging involved - their getting down becoming more and more baroque and ballet-like, strange contortions, the feeling of "wow, that's definitely not the way I do it, have I been doing it wrong the whole time?" Within this scene a diagram was described, a diagram I saw, a 1950s sex-ed style drawing, almost in a Disney war propaganda style but made of water, the body parts shown there in hyper-realistically jiggling as pieces of anatomy were highlighted with one of these sticks with a rubber tip at the end. The mention of birth as a product of getting down then reiterated, flash to another scene, this one of a former flame's swollen stomach, being exhibited to me in a private moment, released from the bondage of a pair of train conductor overalls and resembling in sound size and texture all the heft of a watermelon but colored as a peach, with stretchmarks (a weird reversal of a time she and I did drugs together once, I had the stretchmarks and a bared stomach in that instance, in the waking world). I was made to understand that the child within was potentially mine, in fact it was half mine, exactly half, as the painful separation that twained us occurred almost exactly 9 months previous. It wasn't anyone's getting down that caused it but rather the quick, in-succession uncoupling and coupling of said former flame. As I was at least semi responsible for the uncoupling that half caused the child to come to be I was half responsible, the child was half mine. This was the logic of the dream, divorced almost entirely from reality but rooted in enough of my experience to dupe me, a logic that stayed with me through my morning ablutions, I washed my face this morning half expecting to become a half father soon until I remembered that it's been years, actually, until I remembered that that's not how any of this works - I have never seen my friend get down with his girlfriend in the soft skylight of the landing of the 2nd floor of my house. And then almost sad? To not be a father (again?). But relieved, also, though I feel that this is a premonition of some sort (check the date, what information do you have now reading this, was the future foretold?).
All part of a normal springtime bafflement, our bodies take over for a while in some areas, there are plants and pistils bursting open, belting a pollen-laden hallelujah - for a short while longer I gloriously have a window near my desk at work, I can hear the buzz of blooming wafting past me over the firetruck sirens and double parked cars (I can also smell a lot of paint when I'm there, thus the headaches?) and I am once again cleft, be-cleaver-ed in all sorts of different ways. Because there is (and always will be? perhaps this is a goal we attain) a strong dissonance between what we want, what we desire (they're different), and what makes us feel good physically, what makes us feel good emotionally (these are also different). My upsetting dream seemed to be trying to tell me to have a child, right now, in fact my dream placed a child of my own making (sort of) square in a lap (literally), belonging to someone I do not wish to be around. This is not what I want currently, as far as I know, but non-conscious machinations - - driven on by the flowers, the buzz, the pistils, etc I mentioned earlier - indicate otherwise, the unreachable rabid dog at the core is growling. There is a deeper me, as there is a deeper you, a biological imperative, vestigial as it may be, to crank out another copy, care for something, bundle up a warm living heart in your arms and coo. As I said, not what I want as of this writing. Or more accurately "not" what "I" "want." What I do want is to be curled up myself, to specifically have a sure hand run its palm along the freshly cut number 0 buzz at the base of my neck. I want to be plucked from my life as it is, to be saved damsel-like from the dense cloud of stress professional and real estate related, to sleep in on a weekday with someone I can relax around. I want to frighten myself with my openness, I want to get weird, really weird, alarmingly so. I want at all times both to run until half of me melts away and to eat until I can't move, I want to fuck my life up and keep it exactly the way it is, I want to do drugs and stay out late but I also deeply wish to finish the book I'm reading and repot some plants. Do you know what I mean? It's all cleft.