Slowly Quieting Down, Stupid Dreams

Sunday, May 13, 2012—Long Beach, CA

Emerging from the semester. Feeling the workload lessoning, that there’s something to me besides that job. I’m also beginning to think about what I think about and feel when I’m not just buried in work (work that only interests me in certain respects). I’m also feeling a little better ohysically: my digestive problems seem to be less severe (though I’m still fighting what has been a pretty unpleasant sinus infection). I’m beginning to wonder if they’re being exasperated by stress. I know, or am at least nearly sure, that they are physically rooted, but I’m no longer sure if that’s all there is to it. It will be interesting to see how I feel a month or so down the road once I’ve had a chance to de-school a bit. I’m also going to be using this time to really experiment with my diet to see if a food allergy issue might be part of it. Next week I will beginning a cleanse, where all I’m going to be eating are fruits and fruit juices, vegetables, and rice. Hopefully a week or so of that will give me some answers.

Still diving into Jung, as well as trying to delve into my dreams. I’m getting frustrated, though. Crazy gobbledygook is all my subconscious seems capable of churning out. (I’m not going to even attempt to write down what I’ve been dreaming lately—it’s all been so thin and scattershot that I couldn’t even find a starting point.) I’m beginning also to understand how little rest I’m getting when I sleep. My mind’s spinning fast at all times, spinning out the shallow dreams of shallow sleep. What am I so stressed out about? It can’t just be work. I’m feeling so alienated, from most everyone, yes, but also certain aspects of myself, which is far more worrying. I’m feeling as if I simply failing to connect with certain very basics aspects of life. My life is missing something, has been missing something for a very long time. But I’ve hit some sort of end point—I have a need to push past this point. I am not unhappy, just blank and floating. I know I’ve said all this before—just going over old ground from different angles. This may not be bad thing, though—I might find the right angle into something I’m looking for.

Finished Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Very interesting at times. Confusing and a little flakey at others. Like I said, though, perhaps a good starting point for further explorations. Currently reading The Portable Jung (edited by Joseph Campbell). And a big biography of Jung by Deidre Bair. Worked a tiny bit on a Sunshine Seas story I’m calling “Fatu Hiva.” It’s frustrating to have to just pick away at it. Writing needs sustained effort. If a writer can’t commit deeper connections aren’t made and it just becomes about words instead of stories.

Endless Work Ending and A Weird Dream

Sunday, May 6, 2012—Long Beach, CA

I can almost see the light. By tomorrow evening I’ll be down to just having to grade one more big stack of papers and then my finals next week—after that it will be freedom. It’s going to be so weird—and so cool!—to finally not have a million things to do, to not work all week and then all weekend as well. I have so many things I want to do; I’ve been feeling like my life’s been on hold for months and months. I want to finally get out Edgewater, get my new website up, turn all the BSP books into e-books, and hopefully do some readings. And I of course still want to get to Greece (if I ever hear about my schedule for IVC and know if I have a decent income in the fall). Hell, I almost forgot—I want to write! I really want to sink my teeth in Sunshine Seas, plus I have other ideas I’d like to explore. Being able to finally see daylight has got me really straining at the leash, to the point where these last two weeks are going hard to get thru without my going a little nuts.

Still reading Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. I’m not sure what I’m looking for in it. So far it’s interesting, but not earth shattering. It seems like a decent stating point, though—but for what? This turn in my reading coincides with my growing interest in my dreams (I know there are clues there as to what I’m looking for).

Last night I had an odd one. I should have written it down when I got up this morning (but I literally woke up way behind in my work), because a lot of the details have faded. I remember I was with my childhood friends Eric and Steve. I’m not sure how old we were in the dream, but I think we were more or less our age now (though, my age at least seemed to be changing slightly thru the dream’s course). I remember driving down strange dirt roads near some beach in the beginning of the dream, though I don’t think Steve and Eric were there at that point. I can’t remember much about that part of the dream. At some point after that, though, the three of us are wandering thru surf shops. I’m looking to buy a new board, but all the shops have stopped selling decent boards and mostly just sell clothes. Later we’re all at a hotel room Eric rented (he apparently doesn’t live where Steve and I live in the dream). I remember telling him how cool it was that he got a room so close to the beach. Then Steve put peroxide in my hair, as a joke, I think. I remember looking in a mirror and watching my hair lighten. I also remember it curling into a kind of eighties hairdo where it was short on the back and sides and long in the front and on top. Then the hotel room Eric had rented morphed into a house, maybe my house. I remember looking in the backyard and seeing my Ford Ranger truck, which I got rid of in 2009. Then a bit later I looked back there again and saw that someone had stolen all four of its wheels; it was sitting on wood blocks. (I used to have lots of dreams about the truck getting stolen and or stripped the last few years I owned it). A bit later I looked out the window again and the truck had been stripped until there was nothing left but its frame. I vaguely remember going outside (into the backyard?) and confronting someone about it. I don’t remember what came of that.

Later the house morphed into my grandparents old house on Pine Street in Los Alamitos. In the dream, though, the house was empty, no furniture or anything; somehow I had come into possession of the house after they’d died. I remember at some point going out to the front porch and seeing that kids from the neighborhood—between the ages of maybe eight or nine to about fourteen—were stealing plaques, knickknacks, and various other similar type things of my grandparents that for some reason were on the porch, hanging from the outside of the house, or in the drive. I remember confronting them, trying to get them to stop. I think they may have argued a bit, maybe made fun of me. Later one of the kids, a girl of fourteen, was clinging to my back as I rode a bike near some sort of canal or ditch. I remember thinking we shouldn’t be doing that, that she was too young to be going away with me. Other stuff happened but it’s all just shadows and fragments I can’t make much of. I do remember finding a wet suit somewhere near the end of the dream. I picked it up and it was incredibly heavy, like it was partially made out of lead. I remember thinking how dangerous and tiring it would be to surf in it. When I got up this morning I thought how strange it was that I had the wet suit part of the dream long after the part where Eric, Steve, and I were in the surf shops. I don’t remember where Eric and Steve went after the house had morphed into my grandparent’s house. I think Steve might have been around for part of that.

I have little idea what to make of this dream. I think I’ll just live with it for a while and see how I feel about it later. Maybe a future dream will build on it and give me some more insight (parts of my dreams often reappear in other dreams, sometimes quite often, over many years).

Again, other than my weird dream it’s mostly been work. I’m fighting a sinus infection too, which is slowing me down and making my teeth and jaw hurt and sometimes my head too. Went to the Angels game last night. They beat Toronto 6-2, I think. I took my nephew and Vic for my nephew’s birthday. It was fun. I needed to break; I haven’t done anything of note on a weekend in months. Listening to an album called Music of the Crusades at the moment. I picked it up a month or so ago. I’m not sure I like it. I was looking for instrumental stuff from that era and it’s turned out to have a lot of vocal pieces.

Dreaming Jung

Thursday, May 3, 2012—Orange, CA

Sitting here in the library on campus. I should be working, finishing off the last bit of a lecture I have to give early next week. I can’t do it, though. I’m going on about four hours sleep and I just can’t force myself to focus on something right now I don’t really want to do. This means my already busy upcoming weekend will be even busier. That’s OK, though: I’d rather work harder when my mind is functioning properly than try to push something out when I’m so off my game.

Lately things have been a blur of work; there really isn’t much else going on in my life—physically. However, I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking in the moments when my brain isn’t pounding out some school-related crap. My mind has been going in all sorts of directions, but in the end I keep coming back to certain aspects about myself that seem ... offtrack. I’ve been really interested in my dreams lately, mainly because they appear to be revealing a certainly shallowness in my existence. I seem to have hit a place in my life where I keep doubling back on myself, keep ending up in places I’ve already explored and more or less understand. I’m sensing that I’m blocked, that there are parts of me where my answers lie that for some reason I have not been able to reach. As I’ve mentioned, for a long time now—since late 2009—I haven’t been able to write any poetry. I’ve been doing my best to ignore this issue; I’ve been explaining it to myself as some sort of natural fallow period. That of course answers nothing: why I have gone fallow is the question. I mentioned a while back that I’m finding that old saying that one has to be in love to write poetry to be true. Right now I simply cannot love. What I mean by this, I’m now beginning to see, is that I’m disconnected from certain basic parts of myself, which keep me disconnected from important aspects of the world outside myself. Not writing poetry is great flashing red light, an obvious symbol of my fundamental disconnection. Now back to the dreams …

It a cliché, but dreams are really the window into one’s deeper self—and lately my dreams feel very constricted. Basically, I generally can’t move past certain swirling recombinations of the least important aspects of my life; I’m mostly spinning around on the very top of my subconscious. Again, this is just a different manifestation of my general disconnection from certain important, and I would argue, very basics aspects of myself. What it often feels like is that my conscious is in a sense invading my subconscious and directing my dreams away from manifestations that might actually reveal something about where I’m at at the moment; it’s like I’m subverting myself, hiding from certain things. My dreams seem like there might be something going in them worth looking at, but when I do look at them they dissolve into lots almost meaningless movement and color. What I’m hiding from is something that must scare me (otherwise why else would I go to so much trouble to keep it hidden?). What is it that’s so freaking me out?

I want to break thru all this (finally!—like I said, in one sense or another this has been going on for a long time). I’m not sure how, though. I’ve started reading some Carl Jung, which is a very unusual place for me to be. I’ve always been deeply distrustful of psychiatrists/psychologists: I’ve had a hard time trusting their science. So much of it seems impossible to test empirically. This means that I keep getting the whiff of religion off of it, which to me is a place where one goes to hide from reality not to seek it. But I don’t know where else to go. I’m hoping that by just providing a framework for me to kick against, if nothing else, Jung might help me tap into what I’m hiding from; maybe it will expose the tricks I’m using to hide from myself and therefore make them untenable. I want to slip deep into my subconscious and see what’s there. I want to move deeply thru the world and see what’s there. These are essentially different aspects of the same thing, mutually arising phenomena. To do this I sense I have to make a leap beyond empiricism (while steering clear of religion at all costs). Jung’s a good enough starting point for this, I’d say. Even if I dismiss him I’ll have to be closer to understanding what I truly do need from myself. I guess it’s not surprising that I’d eventually come to Jung. This interest in folktales I’ve developed in recent years must go beyond ecology—there must be some longing to tap into a deeper cultural consciousness (Jung’s collective unconscious?—Oh man, that’s a dark misty road …).I mean, like everyone else I come out of a cultural matrix and going thru that matrix is essential, unavoidable if I want to get to these places in me where I sense the meaning I’m looking for must reside.

Burned Out Bad Dream Joan Didion Semi-Sadness

Sunday, April 29, 2012—Long Beach, California

Deep into my end-of-semester push. By the end of this coming week I will be done with just about everything except grading papers and tests. I’m nearing complete burn out, but now that I can see the finish line I’m getting a little burst of energy that should carry me thru. My main problem is my inability to focus on this work; it takes me forever to get anything done because my mind is relentlessly looking for any other content to fill it. Same old stuff I deal with every semester, especially in the spring. It’s worse this time, though, than I can remember it ever being. I’m not sure why exactly that is. Maybe it’s just because I’ve had to work harder this time out than usual.

Still feeling strange overall, blank. It’s not as bad as before, mainly because some of my blankness has been replaced by a strange bitterness that's begun seeping into the edges of my life. I’m not sure what this means. Perhaps it’s just the frustration of being overworked and unsure of my immediate future. A few days back I was complaining of the facile nature of my dreams. They’ve gotten more substantial lately, as well as more unpleasant. They’ve taken place in strange places. The most interesting of these was a Honolulu that wasn’t quite Honolulu, where some sort of crowded festival was going on, which was in part populated by a perplexing combination of people from my past, most importantly (in regards to the amount of time of their appearances) an old professor, who, for some reason, was entrusting me with getting him a publication deal for his latest book, and an old girlfriend, one who really hurt me, who was there just to open old wounds it seemed. This latter character really disturbed me. For years she’s appeared in my dreams as the cruelest of torturers. But over the last couple years she’s emerged as someone who plays dreamroles that aren’t entirely painful. In some dreams I’ve fully forgiven her (and myself) and feel true affection for her, true compassion for her predicament. In this dream, though, she was back to her old vicious ways (and I was back to my old defeated groveling). I have trouble seeing this as anything other than a backwards step for me, or at least a revelation concerning how far forward I’ve actually come. I really thought I’d moved past all that. When will that wound ever finally be cleaned out so it can fully heal?

A realization: My dreams lately are both wildly disorienting and constricted at the same time. I can’t imagine a worse combination. Dreams are just life turned inward are they not? Recent life turned inwards to be recombined with and filtered thru past moments, past pain and confusion. (And hope?—that must surely be in there too. Though I distrust any joy in my dreaming, out of fear that it's something I’ve developed as a defense mechanism to avoid examining that which has hurt me—paranoia or common sense or both?).

Read Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album over the last couple of weeks. She’s a good writer, original. But she’s bleak, willfully so; I can’t accept most of her conclusions. She seems to be continually hurt and strangely surprised by people’s short comings. She also seems to accept day-to-day American culture as something more than it is, as something in which deeper answers might lie, which of course means she’s always disappointed, bereaved. She never goes very deep in regards to certain very important things, into history, prehistory, ecology—the places where the real answers must lie; she tries to understand the cake by digging no deeper than the frosting. She’s also strangely elitist, in that she spends lots of time in fancy hotels ordering room service. She also seems to always be around the most boring types of rich people, Hollywood types, old-money idiots. More frosting instead of cake. Still I’m enjoying her (though I need a break from her work). There’s something worthwhile going on with her stuff, that I can’t quite yet articulate.

Too much reading. To many harsh or banal dreams. I need sunshine and sweat. I need to get the hell out of here. I need to run thru naked thru the hills for a while—for a good long while: like the rest of my life.

Listening to Sam Cooke’s Nightbeat as I finish this. It’s sounding so good, so on target.

Early Morning Thoughts

Sunday, April 22, 2012—Long Beach, CA

Twelve-thirty in the morning. I’m lying in bed eating a bowl of oatmeal (I’m hungry and there really isn’t much else in the house) and listening to Desert Shore, by Nico. It’s incredibly original and striking music; it’s one of the few albums I never get tired of. Trying to relax after a long day of grading and doing other school work. I really had to fight thru this work. I’ve felt exhausted almost since I got up today. Mind fatigue, mostly, I think, mainly because later when I finally had some time to myself and was able to do a little reading and listen to some music I felt much better. I’m beginning to wonder how much of the deadness I now so regularly feel is due to the fact I spend so much time not doing what really moves me. Soul death as a byproduct of a too much of the wrong kind of work. Of course that must be true—to what point is of course the question.

Thinking about my reading lately, about how all over the map it’s been. I’m wondering if this might too be a symptom of the trapped fatigue that makes up so much of my daily life. What I mean by this is that it could be that my reading lately might be a kind of desperate flailing, a semi-conscious search for a way out … of so many things. Since this view has come to me I can’t come up with any good argument to counter it. Escape fantasies are normal, healthy, in the right doses (and if they’re not mistaken for reality). I’m a reader, so fleeing in that direction would seem to be exactly the route I would and should take.

While I'm on the subject of reading … I read at the IVC Earth Day poetry reading the other day. It wasn’t too exciting. It was mostly just some students and teachers reading works by other poets, very obvious poets—Langston Hughes, Emily Dickenson, Robert Frost … (though the work of Gary Snyder and Ezra Pound popped up). This caught me off guard and disappointed me a bit. I just assumed that the reading would have something to do with Earth Day and would feature more original work. It was nice to read after having be off the stage for so long, though; it made me want to get out there and really do some more serious readings. My friend Steve in Sacramento suggested trying to get something going up there this summer. Thinking seriously about that again.

Mellowed out my reading list my settling into We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, which is a thousand-plus page collection of Joan Didion’s non-fiction. Strangely I see this as a continuation of my Raymond Chandler phase I just went thru. It’s hard to explain what I mean by this. There’s the California baseline, of course. As well as her odd pessimism and general disappointment with what we’ve built in this part of the world. There’s something similar in the prose style too, the clean simple sentences and the small subject matter that turns out to be vehicles into much bigger concerns. Think I’m going to read The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, by Oscar Zeta Acosta (who was the model for Hunter S. Thomson’s Samoan lawyer in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) next, which is a book I’ve been eyeing for a long time.

OK, I’m really out of it now. Time for sleep.

Moving Forward

Tuesday, April 17, 2012—Long Beach, CA

Feeling a little better than yesterday (not that I take back anything I wrote—it’s all quite accurate). My cold’s almost gone and I should be able to get eight hours sleep tonight, which will be nice. Realized I made mistake and the Earth Day poetry reading is tomorrow. Looking forward to that. The main reason I’m feeling better, though, is that I’m now sure that I won’t get the teaching job at IVC. Now I’m free to move past that place and start making more interesting plans. I also found out that I have two classes at Santiago Canyon to teach in the fall (and no 7:00 AM class this time around!). If I can hang on to a class or two at IVC I’ll have the base income I need to begin transferring my life completely into the literary realm, which is of course what I’ve been wanting all along. I think part of the reason I’ve been feeling so out of sorts is that I was attempting to push my life down a road that it shouldn’t be heading. Now that that road has (likely) been blocked I can see this more clearly. What next exactly? I don’t know: the transition could take many forms. I just know that certain big changes that have been a while coming are already starting.

Not much else to say. The next few weeks are going to be stupid busy, tests, lecture writing, etc. Then things will suddenly open up. I can’t wait to make decisions on Greece (I first need to know what my fall status at IVC will be). Really ready to tackle Sunshine Seas. It will be a warm summer book and a warm summer, both artistically and in real life is exactly what I need. Tired of being burned out. I want a week of sleeping in late, hiking, going for long bike rides under sunny skies, and writing. That is my current vision of paradise.

Flat As A Board

Monday, April 16, 2012—Irvine, CA

I’m back again. Feeling compelled to write here regularly all of a sudden. Maybe I just need to write and due to time constraints this is all that’s available to me now (at the moment I’m sitting at my desk in class waiting to give a test). I think there's more to it than that. Feeling a little odd recently, like I often do at the close of a semester only more so. That I’m burnt out is a given. But it seems to be more than that this time around. I’m feeling very out of touch with myself, like I need some extended time for contemplation. There’s something not right in me. I’m going in a million directions at once and all of them interest me up to a point, but none seem to give me much satisfaction (look at my reading list lately—everything and everywhere).

Looking back at that last sentence. Realizing that it of course means that I’m looking for something, in a very scattershot manner (which is of course what one does when one senses that something is missing but really isn’t sure what it might be). The best way I can describe the problem it to say that I feel really flat inside. (Really, Rob—that’s the best way you can describe it?) OK, let me try that again. For a while now I’ve felt kind of soulless. Or at least that I’ve lost touch with certain basic aspects of myself. Perhaps that’s not quite it. For so many years I was driven by certain problems that no longer exist for me. Maybe I’ve never been in touch with certain aspects of myself. Maybe I mistook those problems for the person who existed beneath them. Not sure how this is connected to the bigger picture, but lately I’ve found myself very annoyed by how pedestrian my dreams are; they seem to just skitter across the surface of my subconscious like a rock skipped across the surface of cold winter pond. A ten-year old could interpret my dreams these days: all I do bat around petty concerns from my day-to-day life (traffic on the way to work, deadlines to meet, etc.) in the most facile way. My dreams are so dull and pointless that a few times recently I’ve woken up disgusted with myself. “Is that all you’ve got in there, Rob,” I might as well have said. “Is that all there is to you?”

There’s an old saying that goes in order to write poetry a person needs to be in love. Lately I’ve had the faintest stirrings of poetic expression surfacing in me. I’m wondering if this means I’m entering a new phase or if I’m just dealing with the final fumes from something past. I’m not in love with anyone or anything—that would involve a kind of connection that I’m incapable of participating in right now (though I do love in a more agape sense). I spend most of my time dealing with a been-there-done-that feeling; nothing really excites me. This goes into the realm of sex too. Whereas I used to look at (certain) women and feel desire, sometimes to the point where it was all consuming, now I simply see trouble, hassles, the boring prospect of having to wade thru their issues (it took so much out of me to move past certain problems of my own that I simply have no energy left to do the same with others, which makes me feel kind of shitty about myself). Wondering if there’s something "wrong" with me or if this is just a natural outgrowth from the way my life has evolved. Or maybe this is just what getting old is all about—the dissipation of passion and urgency. (It’s hard to accept that being in one’s forties is old, especially since there’s a pretty good chance that I could be around for another forty-plus years. Then again, during most of our biological evolution we rarely lived out our potential lifespans, so perhaps there was little in the way of selective pressures pushing vibrancy after one’s thirties—from a reproductive point of view, which is the only point of view that matters in a Darwinian sense, we now live longer, in some cases much longer, than we have any reason to).

Or maybe all this has to do with my lack of time to create. That is what I do, who I am. So when I’m stuck spending my days and nights doing that which is not me I in a sense don’t exist. That’s part of it for sure—but I can’t deny all the other stuff I’ve just written about. What it comes down to, I guess, is do I need to break thru to some new understandings to regain my passion, my love of life, or do I just have to accept all this and somehow learn to love living a life that rises much above a low simmer and on many days is all but turned off. (Or I suppose I could land somewhere in between, where I do make some breakthroughs to new passions, but never really feel things to the degree I once did.) A pointless life is pointless. A very Gertrude Stein-like conclusion, but of course perfectly accurate. It’s also where I’m at, or nearly at, at the moment.

One other point for me to consider. Several years ago, when I first started re-grounding myself after coming thru the worst of all my days I felt pretty much what I’m feeling now, only more intensely. I did a little research then and saw that I was suffering a lot of the symptoms of post-traumatic-stress disorder. Maybe that’s still what I’m dealing with; I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve just gotten so used to those feelings that I’m not recognizing them anymore as being something other than just me, than just what life is. I’m still alienated from most people. I’m bored and feel (know?) that nothing I do will relieve that feeling to any real degree. It all seems pretty much the same as it was then, just at a lessor level. Maybe I haven’t moved beyond that. Maybe I’ve just learned to manage my personal and social dislocation.

What a drag.