Strange dreams involving flight and escapes, busy roads, rivers (large bodies of water, anyway), bridges, pedestrian overpasses (and maybe some underpasses?)… Other people. At one weirdly salient point, I was sneaking past my long-dead father’s back. He was leaning on a bridge railing, looking over the large body of water, and I ran past him before he could see me. It was particularly weird because 1) he’s dead (but it’s a dream, right?), and 2) the bridge wasn’t really crossing this body of water, so I’m not sure where I was going in the first place. I think it somehow connected to a set of stairs or some other conveyance which allowed me to cross a busy road running alongside this river / ocean / lake shore.
I don’t like dreaming about my parents, but it’s usually always only about my father. Maybe because he expressed affection for me a lot more than my mother did? There was some kind of intellectual kinship there, regardless. <– What a funny word to put there: “regard” and “less.” I’m not entirely sure either of my parents ever really saw me (“regarded” me), but I suppose my father did so more than my mother. So it should say “regardmore,” not “regardless.” It’s in my mother’s eyes that I draw a blank, a cipher unclothed by flesh and bones, desire and will, imagination and affection. This is disturbing to me, obviously, but it is what it is.
I would like to think that my older sisters had an at least somewhat more fulfilling, normal relationship with our mother, and that my rather barren relationship with her was on account of her having been worn down over the previous twenty years prior to my birth by circumstances – a World War, too many children, want and poverty (which she wasn’t used to), migration / emigration, etc. She was, perhaps, a spent force, the final or penultimate blow (for her) being emigration to Winnipeg (that was tough…), then (via Victoria and even Vancouver) finally back to her beloved hometown. But spent. Unable to reattach elsewhere, to make a life. I am still plagued by my inability to identify with certainty where I want to live. No doubt I want too much. The mark of a “boomer”? Perhaps… Desires get stoked, unrealistic desires. Zillow sent me an email about a “fabulous” Manhattan townhouse restoration on iirc W.12th. Or was it E.12th? Anyway. I clicked through on this bit of real estate porn …it’s on the market: nearly $24 million. Seriously. It’s a world of billionaires and little people. Lots and lots of little people.
Today it might snow again. We were expecting a snow storm, but now it’s downgraded to just a possibility of snow. Good. I feel “done” with winter …although, I always dread the Three Hs of summer: heat, humidity, haze.
I’ve had this idea for a while now, that fiction (story) is a better vehicle for social commentary and analysis and such than actual commentary and analysis are these days. You can get through with stories in a way you can’t with straight-up critique. Yesterday on New Yorker Radio Hour (WGBH) I listened to an interview with the woman who created Amazon’s “TransParent” (which I’ve never watched). She described a conversation with Jeff Bezos, who believes the same thing. This, I found disturbing. It’s a more sophisticated (or subtle) form of propaganda, I suppose.
