39
I found a dog in the rain. The dog had been run over a car, but was still alive. I picked up the dog and carried it through the rain, through the hole in the fence. It acted like it wanted to bite me, but just lay its open mouth against my arm, panting. I cleaned his wound with water, bandaged and splint it. The dog had no tags, it was black and white, ungroomed, like it’d been outside for quite a long time. The dog had once been loved, I could tell, by the way he leaned against me on the couch, wagging his tail and looking up at me even though he was in pain.
Then I realized I was transferring my pain onto the dog, and he was trying to comfort me.
“Fucking dog, I don’t need your goddamn pity,” I whispered.
I was outside of the coffee shop when I ran into a young homeless man. I almost never talked to homeless people, because most of them were insane and demanded cigarettes, but this man had a gentle smile underneath his unwashed face. He’d been an engineer when he lost his job during the 2008 recession, and decided to hit the road.
I handed him $20, but he refused to take it. “You look like you need it more than me. I hope you have a good day.”
“Fucking fuck, I don’t need your goddamn pity,” I whispered as I walked away, clutching the $20 bill like an incendiary bomb.
I went home, where the dog was waiting for me by the door. He had hurt eyes, gaping eyes, like a black cache, eyes that reflected me more than himself. He didn’t appear to be a dog in those moments, more like a shadow with eyes.
“There’s no hiding what I am from others, is there?” I asked.
The dog wagged his tail. And I dropped to my knees and held him.
“Fuck you,” I whispered.
Sillage (from French) in perfumery - a veil of scent that a person leaves behind when walking or when you enter a lift and smell that someone has been there before you; perfume can either have soft or heavy sillage depending on the type.
40
In lieu of my question about whether or not it’s moral for other people to interpret your dreams in the Sigmund Freud section is morally reprehensible or not, I’ve asked a bunch of friends to interpret one of my dreams. The dream is as follows:
I was dead,
in a huge home
I steal golden things and filter them down, the house mistress is furious with me.
I dove to the end of the pool.
At the end of the pool, everything is glittering, there's a waterfall underneath a concrete wall. It's the way out.
I ask him, "and if I don't go now, the way closes?"
He said, "No, the way is always there. Time doesn't exist, but did you remember when you first came here you had fantastical powers. Now you're losing them, because you're becoming attached to the reality of this place. The longer you stay here, the more your inner glow will fade."
Here are the interpretations from 4 of my friends.
Ayden: So you're becoming too attached to material things, relationships and worrying how people perceive you, and interactions with the outside world. The pool is limbo and the way out is whatever you've been looking for. You have to let go of your current perceptions of reality and open your mind to infinite possibilities.
Preferably with shrooms.
Jeremy: Well, a literalist could interpret it as a sign to get out of Texas, but I'm not a literalist. I believe dreams are very symbol and metaphor heavy.
Maybe you're secretly worried about having returned to the place you grew up, that you might lose some of the gifts you learned abroad in Seattle.
Maybe you're worried about regressing, going backward in your state of mind instead of forward.
You're obviously blocked off from something right now.
Hence the waterfall/concrete blockade
water gives life, restores vitality
concrete fortifies something, reinforces it, holds something in or back.
Greg:
You're too focused on the hunt for gold. Hustling. Trying to get ahead in some worldly sense, and letting life waste you away. That's why you're filtering down gold things. That's why you're dead. Your inner glow is fading because you're neglecting your fantastical powers. The powers to do all the things you've ever wanted with your life, but if you get too attached to the reality of the house and its gold, you can forget that there was something else you wanted. Your mind wants to go another direction. You can let it do that at any time, but that glow, that motivation, that thirst for more will shrink as the days drag on.
Sincerely,
Sigmund fucking Freud
William:
Permanancy erodes magic.
Who is the house mistress? Is it " better" judgement. The one who keeps sociatal norms.
Huge home? the space of possibilities? of personal possibilities?
"I was dead" no longer functioning? no longer responding?
gold things = glowing?
filter them down: some kind of refinement. Perhaps an unrecognizable result.
Is it the stealing or the filtering that enrages the mistress?
House = Body?
"Dove to the end of the pool" Is it the pool that was doven into. Or something else to get to the pool?
Glittering at the end of the pool. Does immersion hold some aesthetic promise?
Concrete wall: barrier, uniform composition.
Water falls in. Clearly a difficult proposition for egress. Effort.
"I ask HIM"? Who him? The house? the wall? the waterfall? the pool?
What are the definitions of "him"? Clearly believed to have answers.
Asked what are the temporal boundries. (of the waterfall as egress?) or something other.
Concern about missed window of opportunity (literally and figuratively)
"No, the way is always there." Reassurance? Is there relief?
"Time doesn't exist" (Just now? or ever?)
"but did you" vs ("but do you") Is this a question of current recollection or past recollection? (interesting after the words "time doesn't exist")
"when you first came here" (wasn't always here) (where was before?) sequence when time doesn't exist makes me thing time did exist at one point but not now. Or is it just linearity that doesn't exist.
"had fantastical powers" are they removed or lost or forgotten? Wasn't always in the house. Are the powers defined by being from someplace else?
"Now you're losing them, because you're becoming attached to the reality of this place." Attached = affixed or emotionally. (Internal/external)
"reality of this place", what does this have as the measure of reality?
"The longer you stay here, the more your inner glow will fade" Is the place the cause of the fade or is the fade a side effect of something else?
Identity? Are we:
- What we have?
- What we do?
- Who we show?
41
An explanation for why I am a literary coward, #2
Autumn Christian: It's like.. you know when you see a cloud, and your brain starts coming up with images? Because the cloud is amorphous and doesn't have a definite shape?
Robert Freeling: yep
Autumn Christian: It's like that in the sense I wanted to create these amorphous shapes that sort of came up out of the dark and didn't complete connect. Like.. two synapses that were firing off but not quite sure where the other one was, so the reader could create mental associations that may or
may not exist without being guided down a direct path.
Autumn Christian: In that way I thought, it'd become their story and they'd make their own associations that weren't force fed to them.
Robert Freeling: Right, so you were trying to create a user driven experience in short rather than an author guided tour
Autumn Christian: Yeah, and I think I write the majority of my stuff like that now.
Autumn Christian: A lot of that can probably be traced back to absurdism or surrealism, but I didn't want it to be so amorphous it completely lost all shape and was difficult to read.
Autumn Christian: But I think of how absurd real life is and how things don't connect, and then we create these connections, this narrative... by grabbing different parts and forcing them into their own timeline.
Autumn Christian: But then you get something that kind of bubbles out of the dark and you're like "What the fuck was that, that doesn't make any sense," so a lot of times your brain forces you to forget it or shove it into context.
Autumn Christian: When I think of some of my favorite stories, a lot of them do have a lot of absurdism or don't fit neatly into a plot. Because it's easy to just.. create a mediocre story with mediocre characters on some mediocre path, and it all fits, and it'll get 5 star reviews, because it's a good story. But I noticed I always enjoyed the asides the most, the things that showed me the hallway just left of the main narrative.
Autumn Christian: I also hate insulting the intelligence of the reader, which also translates into how I prefer to do game design. Like a good example of how intelligent people are is the game WarioWare, in which you'r given a contextual image for instruction and not much at all, then like.. 5 seconds to complete a task?
Autumn Christian: Did the player need a ham-fisted, arrows pointed at every thing NUX?
Autumn Christian: No, they don't, because people understand context.
Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.
You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, and my website. You can also buy one of my books here.