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For anyone who has recently discovered lessthanthis.com, a quick note on the archives: When I moved over from Moveable Type to WordPress, hundreds of my old posts got messed up. I estimated that it would take me about 100 hours to go through and fix them all, so I haven’t even started yet. I apologize. Maybe I’ll get to it later. But if you bother to look through the years of archives and find posts that stop unexpectedly, that’s why. Also, I need to reprogram part of CommentPress so that comments will display properly for posts whose comments are closed, so that’s not even on the horizon right now. Thus, you can’t read the comments on any old posts, right now. I apologize. I’m spending my time on creative projects and on living my life, instead.

It’s raining outside.

But that’s not what I wanted to post about. I had this dream…

I don’t want to say something as simple as “I dreamed about her,” because I’m not sure that’s true, though she certainly happened to be in the dream.  But I suppose that is how it is said.  I was woken from sleep a little after One AM, and found myself trying way too hard to get back into the dream, because easalle was there.  As dreams do, the details are fading, but the basics I can remember are this:  I was on a sort of walking tour with a group of people, going to see various people give presentations / speeches / readings in their homes, all on a common theme.  I had the distinct impression that it was somehow related to NaNoWriMo, perhaps that it was, in fact, part of National Novel Writing Month’s activities that year.  The “theme” or idea that everyone was supposed to have been presenting on -perhaps that they were supposed to have written their novel about, and were supposed to be presenting re: their novels- was “airplanes” or air travel or some such.. that detail has faded, but not enough to be gone, just … smudged.  And the entire time I was following along with the group, taking one presentation after another, I was dreading that our tour guide would announce the next location was hers.  And then, of course, he announced the next address and I leaned over to the only person in the group I knew -I have no recollection of who this was supposed to be; someone familiar with the situation, involved in NaNoWriMo, who doesn’t hate me and then apparently someone larger than I am, physically, both in height and moreso in girth- and said “that’s her.”  It wasn’t the address she lived at when I knew her, three and a half years ago, but it was a valid address (now faded to incomprehensibility – 422 something’th place or somesuch) and I knew immediately that it was hers.  My companion and I had a hushed argument on the way over about it (something along these lines, though the exact words are lost to the Dreaming: “you don’t have to go in, I’ll stay outside with you,” “you shouldn’t have to stay outside on account of me,” “you shouldn’t have to stay out either,” “I don’t want to cause any problems…”) and when we arrived, we were with the last of the group, hanging back, outside a classroom where she was presenting.  There were a few other people outside the room; apparently all the desks had filled up already, but even as I tried to convince my companion to go in without me, not to hold back for my sake, I slipped into the back of the room and set in a desk at the back of the room in the corner by the open door.  There she was, at the front of the class, and I don’t know if she saw me, and I was somewhat hoping she wouldn’t, and before long she crossed the room and sat down facing the same direction as the class so she could work a projector for her presentation.  It was weird, because I thought she was using an overhead projector -the kind you use with transparencies- but she was showing photos from some sort of road trip, but the images were actually short videos, the sort you would take with a digital still camera, and I can’t remember hearing her presentation but I remember thinking it wasn’t about airplanes or air travel, and whose little blue convertible sports car is that, and who is that guy she’s with, that’s not her husband -it was some blond guy that looked like a celebrity I recognized but can’t think of the name of now- and so I was sitting in the back, in the dark, in the corner watching her give this sort of video/photo slide show and talk to this whole group of people about this thing and all these shots of her and this guy having a great time in this little blue convertible sports car on a road trip someplace nice, with trees and water and small towns, and I don’t know if it was the weather or my wife rolled over or what, but suddenly I was awakened.  And I couldn’t get back into the dream, let alone sleep – I didn’t know what time it was, but it turned out I’d already had about 8hrs sleep.

And the curtain was a little open, so there was light coming in from outside, painted across the wall in front of me.  The light was pink, which means weather to me, since I live in the desert, and then it strobed for a second or two – literally like someone nearby was using a strobe light, though it must have been lightning.  I crawled over to where I could peek directly out the window at the sky, and yes- it did look like weather, a uniform pink sky -and I whispered to the cat who sleeps at the foot of the bed and was now inches from my head “what interesting weather we’re having…”

But I couldn’t get back to sleep, and I couldn’t stop thinking about her, about the dream, and my iPhone wasn’t in the room because I’d only just laid down for a nap, not “gone to bed” at 6PM, so I couldn’t just sit in bed and look her up.  Got up, relieved myself, came out to the living room, went out the front door for a bit to look at the sky – looked like moments from rain, and it was.  Came in, set down with my iPhone and googled easalle for a bit.  Not a lot to see.  Looks like she’s still alive, though, so maybe my irregular prayers for her safety are helping (admittedly, she is one “her” in a long list whose health and safety I pray for once in a while, but she has not been left off the list since I first loved her).  And maybe she dreamt the same dream tonight, and maybe she saw me there, and maybe this is some other sort of sign, some other sort of reason, some other sort of omen, and maybe it’s nothing.  Maybe [name removed] is reminding me about what happened between her and [different name removed] after the exorcism, so I don’t make the same mistake with the demons I’m confronting right now.  Maybe the dreaming mind is random, full of happenstance, and ought not to be thought long on by the conscious mind.  I’ll try to put this behind me; putting it down into words helps.  Now it’s here, instead of in me.

The rain seems to have passed.

Time to get to work.

And that’s just the new stuff this month.  That doesn’t include costs like canvas, paint, ink, and other supplies that made the art, the cost of having books published, printed, and shipped to me so I can offer them, or the roughly $600 (off the top of my head) I’ve spent on creating the audiobook version of Dragons’ Truth (which I forgot to take any copies of with me tonight). Some of those costs I don’t have to pay again; the printer for printing audiobook packaging & disc labels, the portable wall, the setup costs for books, the audio equipment for recording audio books, et cetera. Still, there has been quite an outlay of money to get things up and running, and the bulleted list above only represents the obvious, new, and direct costs of doing the Art Walk since doing it last month.  There’s just one more bullet to add:

F_ck.

I like the idea of video games. I like having them available. I like feeling as though, if I had the time and decided to, I could be playing an awesome and fun game. I like having Super Mario Galaxy on my shelf, though admittedly I haven’t played it more than twice. I like having Assassin’s Creed, though I know I’ll disappear into it for several hours if I start it up at all… So i don’t. There are several other games out there I want. The Darkness. Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Rock Band. et cetera. But mostly what I want is the potential to play them. To know they’re available. Now. Or later, if I want. Or if I had a friend, to play with or show them to. And it’s very similar with all these DVDs, and to a more … Virtual extent, all these books. I like them available. I don’t want to wait hours or days or more and to spend silly amounts of money renting them for brief use, or waiting for netflix… Because when I want to watch something all of a sudden, waiting 4+ days isn’t satisfactory.

Well, I’m off to see a movie in theatre.