I need “prospect.” When I look out my window this morning, I see a misty rain so thick it obscures the horizon line and rubs out into a uniform gray the bit of ocean visible from my perch. The trash maples (actually, I realized they are oaks) make a spindly, bare-branched pattern against this gray. The trash maples (I prefer to continue slandering them), now leafless, don’t obscure my view; but the gentler, more diffused atmospheric obstruction reminds me of the summer months, when each increase in the trees’ height and breadth made me furious. It’s not necessarily easy to cut down your neighbor’s trees (even if they’re trash maples within six inches of your property, even if you sorta-kinda have a verbal okay to go ahead), but I should have moved heaven and earth to do so.
Today’s veiling rain reminds me how much I hate not having prospect(s). Today, incidentally, the first SLY post will go up. I still need to fiddle with the site template; if I recall correctly, I set it to show the “About” page on the front. That obviously has to go. I should write a new About – I was thinking about this yesterday, all the weird paying jobs I’ve had, and the not-s0-directly remunerated ones, which took over once I had kids. It’s interesting.
Also of interest to me, psychologically: my SLY “project” is set to end on this day, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, next year. So I’m writing the end right now, writing the future in this, the past. But of real interest is that I don’t have to worry or censor myself both going forward and going back insofar as publication of these pages won’t affect what I write now, going forward. I won’t be thinking, Oh, how will this look when it goes on my site? Is it clever? – because it won’t be going on my site. Today is the end. I rather like that. And since I didn’t decide on the SLY project until very recently, the entries that will go up also aren’t affected by that kind of second-guessing.
Some odd dreams just before waking: I was naked in public (yeah, that’s always interesting – and not surprising to dream of, given the SLY “launch”), but I didn’t exactly care. I had been shopping for clothes, but found nothing I wanted. I began exercising in a playing field (still naked), and two things happened: a group of clothed silly people also arrived to exercise, separately from me; and a dark greyhound came to join me in exercising. I tried to check for a collar, but he had none. No ID on the dog; but for some reason one of the sillies about twenty feet away in his group, which was giving me the side-eye because, naked, had a computer along. He accessed a database, which told him there was a reward for finding this dog. But there was a precondition or restriction: the dog must not be returned, he must be allowed to roam free, and he must never be collared. This dog, in fact, will refuse (and escape from) any collar anyone puts on him. (It just occurred to me that greyhounds, as dogs, look about as naked as people, naked…) The sillies made a perfunctory attempt to catch the dog (maybe for the reward?), but he kept coming back to me, joining me in my exercises. I petted him and let him run around. The woman who had failed to sell me a flowery blouse earlier in the dream when I was shopping for clothes, and who now was with the sillies, didn’t seem pleased, but not angry, either. Confused, perhaps…
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