The Beach

The past couple of days I spent time on Catalina Island, and in Laguna Beach. Went out there with a friend from work to do some SCUBA diving, and generally relax. Our third dive was on Thursday, and afterwards we sat on the beach in Laguna and waited while our dive master went back in to find one of his integrated weights that had slipped out during the dive. It gave me enough time to get sunburned, and do a little bit of thinking.

The last time I did a similar trip was five years ago. I'd been in Vegas just over a year, and a friend of mine from ships came down for the diving and relaxing. We had a bit of a history. I'd met her on ships, and at the time she wasn't interested because my contract would be up soon. But I left the ship, and we kept in touch by letter (she was on the cruise line's private island, sans internet or phone). We found out we actually did like each other. Quite a bit.

We visited each other a few times, and the relationship she hadn't allowed to happen while we were living and working in the same place did happen, after a fashion, when time and distance allowed. The last time was in California, diving and relaxing in Catalina and Laguna. I drove out with her after work, slept in the car, caught the first ferry and dove all day, then went back to the mainland. Crashed with a friend of hers, then spent the next day wandering around Laguna, doing coupley things. I bought a couple of shirts that she said looked hot on me. I still have them, although time won't allow me to wear one of them any more. I keep it in the hopes that one day someone else will say it looks hot on me. I'm not holding my breath. . .except for when I put that shirt on.

My mind wasn't in the right place at the time. I couldn't give her what she needed or wanted, and I didn't know what I wanted. But a lot has changed in the past five years, both with me and with her. I wouldn't say I exactly know what I want, but I do know what I'm open for now. Back then I'd just bought a condo, and had a five year plan. Now I'm beginning short sale procedures, and I have a different five year plan. Back then she came down to see if things might work between us. Now, she just gave birth to her second child. I actually went to her wedding, and have a terrible feeling that I didn't send her the disc of photos I took.

I posted a few pictures on the social networking site that I will not name, for fear that their privacy policy changes again and any mention of them entitles them to take ownership of any content on said page. But I posted a picture of Avalon Harbour, and she commented on it. So Jealous. I don't take this to mean that she would trade places with me, or she's unhappy in her life-- far from it, she's got two great kids and a bloke who looks after her well. But if she's jealous of my being in Catalina, am I jealous of her having a happy family life?

Juries still out on that one. Had things happened differently, would we have the happy family life and have been in Catalina together this past week? That sort of question's just not worth asking, again cos of crazy. I've lived countless lifetimes in my mind, some with her, some with others I've loved, and some with people I barely know. I've been single for six years, and in that time I've been married a thousand times, had hundreds of children, and been mourned by all those wives and family members. Scary, huh?

But I've been thinking that maybe it's the imagination I'm relying on to help me have a career as an author that's screwing me up in my personal life. If I'm living all those lifetimes in my mind, creating possible and potential scenarios, and thinking too much about what to say or do instead of just letting things happen, I'm stopping myself from actually living. One life lived is better than thousands imagined. So from now on I'm going to stop. The lives I imagine won't be for myself, they'll be for my characters. I won't think about the woulda shoulda couldas. I'll focus on what's going to happen next, and I won't be scared by it any more.

September

Already? I don't know why I'm so surprised every year about this time. Summer is almost over-- although we've got another month or two of weather I would have called summer living in England. I'm on the downward slope to my next birthday. I think about all the things I said I was going to do this year, and try to work out if I can get them done in the next four months.

First and foremost, I had hoped to have an agent by this point. I finished draft one back in December last year, which seems like a lifetime ago. I re-drafted it, and gave it to someone who had offered to give me an outside perspective, a rough edit, before polishing it myself and submitting. She had it for a month. That month has now been five, I've given up hope of her coming through, and someone else has it instead.

Not that I've entirely wasted my time. As of tonight I'm thirty-two thousand words into book two. Starting book two before I'm done with book one is a definite help. It's drawing attention to things I left out, or need to mention in book one. When I get book one back I'm going to have to sit down and plot out on my whiteboard the exact timeline, because if even I am having trouble keeping up with the ages of the characters, what's a reader going to think?

My whiteboard. I have a 3' by 4' whiteboard hanging on my bedroom wall next to my bed, and every day it hangs there, silent and accusatory, reminding me of future book/play/screenplay ideas. I've jotted down a couple of almost-remembered dreams just in case. The problem is that I do a lot of my writing in down time at work. I know the music and the show so well by now, that it almost serves as a quiet place that I can shut myself off from the world. But it's not practical to take the whiteboard to work every day.

Anyway, back to the goals for the year. Agent, nope, but book two started? Hells, I'm almost half-way through. I've started work on a bunch of other projects, some literary, some theatrical. I built a set for the show BNTA's opening in less than a week. I came up with a new five year plan. So while I suppose I only had one goal for the year, I haven't achieved it and in the time left I'm not sure whether I can achieve it, there's all these other things that I've managed to do without even having them as goals.

I hate the idea of a bucket list. When I think bucket I think of the galvanized ones my grandfather used to have in his garden. Though there's nothing wrong with them per se, they had a tendency to sit there, year after year, collecting rainwater and mosquito larvae. They never moved. No one cared about the water they had in them, except maybe the mosquitoes. And the list part of that? Making lists is useless for me. If I write out a shopping list, I'll inevitably leave it at home and forget half the crap on it. And if I remember the list, how do I add to it in the store when I don't have a pen? A list is too finite. I've just got things I'm going to do at some point.

Like get an agent, as soon as book one's in the state it needs to be.

Stars

I've always been fascinated by the stars. I remember trying to learn some of the constellations when I was younger, and only got as far as the plough (the big dipper to you in the US) and Orion. I can usually find the North Star, and sometimes the Pleiades, but that's about it. IF pressed, I'll give any number of excuses, from I didn't have a telescope while growing up, to I moved to the US and the star patterns are different here, as to why I don't know more constellations. That's actually almost a valid excuse. The North Star, living in Vegas, is much closer to the horizon than it is in England. Everything shifts as you move further north or south.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped paying attention to the stars. I took them for granted. The bastards were always there, hanging in the night sky above me, so I didn't have to think about them much. I lost sight of them. I still appreciated them when I remembered to look up. I spent most of my time looking out, staying at my level. I lived in cities, on cruise ships, where ll the bright lights are within a couple degrees. I didn't have to crane my head back to look at different worlds, I could see them behind the twinkling in the distance when I looked out over the Willamette river, or on a different deck drifting above the inky black ocean, or as part of a cluster in the newest, shiniest, most-advertised hotel Vegas has to offer. Street, room, head, night lights became my stars, and I looked to them.

Well, fuck that. I miss looking up. I'm done looking at a hotel tower, room lights giving a poor impression of a close-up night sky. Having lived in Vegas for six years, I think I've come to know what to expect from the stories behind the lights, and not much of interests me any more. We've become a culture of instant gratification, of misplaced self-importance, and that's what each and and every one of those lights has become. When our VIPs have become people with handles rather than names, with no discernible skills other than making the rest of us worship/hate/envy/mimic/mock them, then what is the point in looking up at a building and wondering what the stories are behind the lights? They're all the same. It's a bunch of people who saw The Hangover, or Swingers, or any one of a thousand movies or shows about Las Vegas, and decided that they could reproduce that when they came here.

I don't want to spend my time looking at lights, and wondering the stories behind them, when I can give a pretty good guess about them. I want to have no chance to guess. I want the people behind the lights to be original, have dreams and aspirations and stories and pasts that I cannot begin to guess at. I'm done with clones, with media-inspired plebes. I want to be able to look at the lights of a city or cruise ship or collection of humanity and find intelligent life, rather than having to turn my gaze skywards and hope that somewhere out there it exists.

Because we're doing a damned good job of killing it down here. We need new role-models, new leaders, and new selves. We need to stop using other people's drama as entertainment, and go out there and let the world entertain us. If you stop to think for a moment, the stars up above have a much better sparkle than the ones we fixate on down here.

last night

I got married last night. It was a pretty rushed ceremony. And I was surprised by the guest list; there were friends there I haven't seen in years, people I wouldn't have expected to show up, and some people noticeably absent. I wasn't wearing a kilt, like I've always said I'll wear.

I actually helped set up the room for the ceremony. I know that the groom doesn't usually take a part in that, but I think I was doing it to keep myself busy. It's been less than 24 hours, but I don't remember the decor, or the colours my bride picked. We didn't have anyone in the wedding party.

After the ceremony I walked outside, wondering how I had got myself into this situation, and how I could get out of it. I almost spoke up during the ceremony, but a terrible character trait stopped me. I couldn't be the guy who leaves the bride at the altar. For some reason that, to me, is worse than getting divorced at a later date. I felt that it would have been more upsetting for her to leave there and then, stop mid-vow, than to end it after the fact. And even though I went through the ceremony barely there, wanting to be anywhere else, I remember the looks on the faces of my friends, and I'm a little disturbed by them.

To a person, they looked eager to see me married. There was a disturbing hunger to the way they watched the proceedings that didn't make me any happier about what was going on. Even the moment when my bride appeared, and they could see the look of dismay I was unable to hide, it didn't matter to them. They were there for a wedding, damnit, and it was going to go ahead regardless.

My bride. Someone I've known for years, since freshman year of college I think. I'm not sure why her, but there she was, clutching her bouquet, looking completely ambivalent about the prospect of marrying me. I've never thought of her in that way, I doubt she's ever thought of me in that way, yet there we were, binding ourselves to each other forever until I could find a reason to get unmarried.

I think it's probably a good thing I don't remember my dreams more often. If they're all as bizarre and disconcerting as last night's dream was, I'm going to start being afraid of sleep.

Potential

I sat for an hour with my Nephew, Aiden, napping in my arms this evening. He stirred a couple of times, twitching in his sleep, eyes darting back and forth behind closed lids. It's my first Nephew, and it's the most exposure to a baby I've had. A few times he raised his head and muzzily looked around before flopping back down, and for being only twelve days old I'm told that's pretty good process. So what do babies dream of? If dreams are how we process the events of the days, then it makes sense that babies dream. Everything is new to them, so there's a lot to process. And being out of the womb and in the real world must be one of the most bizarre changes of scenery imaginable, if they had the experience or vocabulary to talk about it. How are they even able to dream, given that I still don't have the ability to put in words some of my dreams, and I've had thirty years of abusing the English language.

Maybe there's some sort of different level they function on, where thoughts aren't words. After all, there are so many instances in our lives where we don't need to use words to communicate: a loving glance, the memory of a smell, the brush of a hand, different colours, music, almost everything about our lives is given to communicating, and very little of it, when you stop to think, is done with words. Maybe when we're born we think in colours, and every sound we hear, unmuffled by our mother's belly for the first time, is perceived as a colour, and this gives us the ability to dream from the first breath. Or maybe it's smell. After all, smell is more linked to memory than any other sense. Maybe the connection of smell to memory is linked to how we first learnt to dream, cradled in our parents arms, associating smells with new sensations.

Either way, what to babies dream of?

Impossible question to answer, so this is what I decided, sitting back with Aiden in my arms, what I want babies to think and dream of.

There is so much potential that you hold in your arms when you cradle a baby, it's incredible. There is the potential to change the world, to impact the entire population of the planet, for good or bad. You could hold the next Leonardo Da Vinci in your arms, or the next Joseph Stalin. They might create something that it remembered for generations to come, or they might destroy what others have done. They could be remembered for generations to come, or become part of human history without impacting it in the slightest. Potential seems to me very similar to miracles. A miraculous event can be as bad as it can be good due to a series of coincidences. In the same way there's no way to measure how good or bad a child's potential is. What I like to think that a baby dreams about, in those first months of life, before language exists and there's just the senses, is their own potential. Their own potential to change the world, dreams about how they're going to accomplish those changes, and hopes for the future. Maybe in those first days, when life is a chaotic scramble and every sense is tested for the first time, those tiny eyes are flickering behind closed lids and plotting a course in life, in dreamful sleep, that is no more explainable to them as it is to us.

Whatever they are dreaming about, as Aiden's uncle I'll do my best to help him get there.

dreams

Last night, I had a dream that I remembered upon waking. This doesn't happen all that often, but it was the nature of it that made me want to write about it here. It was a nightmare. But not like the ones you'd have when young. The ones where you're being chased my someone or something, or you're lost and can't find your way home, and so on.

I'd been sentenced to death. It happened by default- I was involved in something, I'm not sure what, that led me to get sentenced. I wasn't even on trial, or in jail, it was just a judgement that was passed on a group, and it ended up on me too. Really don't know much about the details, cos it was a dream and I only remember some. It was the feeling of helplessness to do anything about the situation that stuck with me when I woke up. The feeling of injustice (cos of course I didn't deserve it. . .), and not knowing how to get out of the situation.

I never had the dream about falling. I don't think it ever worried me. But I had dreams about being pursued by all manner of baddies. After seeing the Tutenkhamen exhibit when I was younger, my 'favourite' nightmare was that I was being chased. . .not by the embalmed corpse, but by the men who had died in mysterious circumstances that some attributed to the curse of the Pharoahs (incidentally, did you know there was a mummified priestess from the time of Tut on the Titanic?). Visiting Wooky Hole in Somerset, England, we were told the legend of the Wooky Hole Witch, so for a while she tried to catch me.

When I was younger, I never got caught.

Now, my dreams have changed. It's not about the fantastical any more. My dreams are much more based in reality, and more and more often they seem to be about one of my biggest fears. . .inevitability. The inability to escape what might come after me. It makes me want to remember more of my dreams, see what's going on in my head- not cos I enjoy the masochism of it, but to see what else I'm worried about that I'm refusing to admit to. Or is this what happens when you get old? The everyday worries take the place of childhood fears. The tax man is the egyptologist, the prosecutor is the witch. And cos I'm getting older, I'm not as fit as I used to be, I can't run away.