“I love sports, especially hockey”, she gushed.
“Yep, sports are so raw, so passionate, an onslaught of the primitive on the conscious”, I dutifully replied.
“Onsla-what?”
“I love sports too”, I yelled and flashed the ivories, over the deafening alien rhythms that have now irrevocably changed the neural pathways in the chemistry of my aural processing centres.
And so it goes.
It is a terrifying prospect indeed, to walk 10 steps and be drenched in sweat. Such is my experience with the beginning stages of bronchitis. What a month this has been. From calculating the demise of my meagre funds to being struck by this wretched ailment. The doctors seem to think it’s not too serious and should clear up in a week. I should certainly hope so. Wheezing around the world like a geriatric is no fun for someone who’s far from one.
This is doubly worse, considering this is the height of allergy season. So far I’m on three sprays, one inhaler and an assortment of multi-coloured pills designed to wreak germicide on any malignant bacteria that should reside in my system. It’s singularly depressing, considering nary a year ago, I had none of these respiratory ailments. Where did that fabled immune system of an ox go? At least the disease is doing a good job of keeping my hubris down. Humility is good for the ego.
Dream analysis is a sketchy art, at best. So make of this what you will, the abridged version:
I travelled for many hours on an airplane to a foreign land. I knew it was just for a weekend, knowing I’d have to return within 48 hours. I got off at the destination airport, reached for some food, was greeted by the lady at the airport, who spoke a tongue sufficiently like English for me to understand her. She gave me gritty cookies, which I ate, but could not swallow. I took a taxicab to 4881 R_r Street, which disgorged me right at the front door. Before I could ring the door bell, I vomited the cookies all over the doorstep, while waiting for the matron of the house to open the door. The person who opened the door was an amalgam of three girls I knew, with striking features of all three. Though tremendously excited to see me, she would not let me in until all the gritty cookie bits were out of my mouth. Once this was accomplished, I went in, only to see she lived with her mom, who was adamantly opposed to letting any of her daughter’s lovers reside with them, even for the weekend. There was one other occupant in that house, a shadowy figure who remains faceless, perhaps her current lover.
At this point, the sun woke me up and I saw that it was 8.12. I went back to sleep and the dream continued.
We travelled all over the city, just me and her. We ate and drank from the goblets of Bacchus, we danced in the grove of Pan himself. The revelry came to an end as the weekend drew to a close, and I took a flight back home. However, this was not until we had consummated the act of love at least once, maybe more often. The details remain hazy.
The one striking thing about this dream is that it all took place at night, which is inconceivable if it spanned an entire weekend. What was I doing during the day? Additionally, all the parts of the dream that required interacting with people, the airport, the taxicab driver and so on played out in my mind in striking detail. I had actual conversations with all the ‘clerical’ staff in the dream. Again, the details remain hazy, but everything was intricate enough for the dream to have lasted a long time, maybe seven or more hours of slumber.
The Fog Horn blew.
And the monster answered.
A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. The Fog Horn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound.
“Now,” whispered McDunn, “do you know why it comes here?”
I nodded.
“All year long, Johnny, that poor monster there lying far out, a thousand miles at sea, and twenty miles deep maybe, biding its time, perhaps a million years old, this one creature. Think of it, waiting a million years; could you wait that long? Maybe it’s the last of its kind. I sort of think that’s true. Anyway, here come men on land and build this lighthouse, five years agao. And set up their Fog Horn and sound it and sound it out towards the place where you bury yourself in sleep and sea memories of a world where there were thousands like yourself, but now you’re alone, all alone in a world that’s not made for you, a world where you have to hide.
“But the sound of the Fog Horn comes and goes, comes and goes, and you stir from the muddy bottom of the Deeps, and your eyes open like the lenses of two-foot cameras and you move, slow, slow, for you have the ocean sea on your shoulders, heavy. But that Fog Horn comes through a thousand miles of water, faint and familiar, and the furnace in your belly stokes up, and you begin to rise, slow, slow. You feed yourself on minnows, on rivers of jellyfish, and you rise slow through the autumn months, through September when the fogs started, through October with more fog and the horn still calling you on, and then, late in November, after pressurizing yourself day by day, a few feet higher every hour, you are near the surface and still alive. You’ve got to go slow; if you surfaced all at once you’d explode. So it takes you all of three months to surface, and then a number of days to swim through the cold waters to the lighthouse. And there you are, out there, in the night, Johnny, the biggest damned monster in creation. And here’s the lighthouse calling to you, with a long neck like your neck sticking way up out of the water, and a body like your body, and most important of all, a voice like your voice. Do you understand now, Johnny, do you understand?”
The Fog Horn blew.
The monster answered.
I saw it all, I knew it all-the million years of waiting alone, for someone to come back who never came back. The million years of isolation at the bottom of the sea, the insanity of time there, while the skies cleared of reptile-birds, the swamps fried on the continental lands, the sloths and sabre-tooths had their day and sank in tar pits, and men ran like white ants upon the hills.
- The Fog Horn, Ray Bradbury
There comes a time in every man’s life when he must pack up all his worldly chattels, say a fond goodbye to his current abode and move into new quarters. This may occur with depressing regularity for some, but it usually happens once every two years for me. I just moved on Apr 30th, and have been busy setting up the new place. It’s all coming together now. Being much closer to university should cut the dreaded commute in half.
The new place reminds me a lot of the hovel I used to live in around 3 years ago. It’s almost as if I’d stepped back in time to that era, the curtains, the carpet, the walls, the fixtures are all eerily similar. That being said, it’s a definite upgrade from the old place. So far, the place looks promising enough, but only time will uncover the true merits or demerits, as the case may be, of the new home.