An Explanation as to Why I Don't Blog More Often

You spend your last two hours in bed half-sleeping, flitting from dream to dream and in and out of them.  You go from a movie filmed in an old screen star's house in the Tri-Cities (of all places) to a play in a diner to a series of vignettes starring you and your colleagues at work trying on brightly colored silicone shoes.  Each scene is brief and possesses for you an eerie sense of belonging -- which isn't supposed to and doesn't make sense.  As you wake, you remember that last week you dreamed of someone comparing your writing to the voice of angels (wishful thinking on the subconscious's part), and once, years ago, you dreamed of snakes that sprang at you from tree branches.  Then your mother showed you, in the dream, how by catching the snakes in paper bags and twisting the bag and snake together until they evaporated you could kill them.  You turned that dream into two poems.  Or was it one poem used for two classes?

On rising from your bed, you find yourself feeling like a metaphysical abstraction -- keeping with your dreams -- but a slice of reality cuts through your bedroom curtains, and you realize it is later than you thought.  In the bathroom, leaning on the counter, you stare at yourself staring at yourself. You think about how months ago before the New Year people started talking end-of-the-world scenarios, climate change,
natural disasters, mass killings.  You turn on the shower.

Funny how all this coincides with your upcoming 30th birthday -- a date you dread, not so much the number as the fact that people will go from saying, "I loved that age" to "Oh that was a tough birthday for me." Even if 30 is the new 20.  Even if is 50 is the new 30 and 65 the new late middle age. Right.  Tell it to the space invaders or the sea monsters or whatever harbingers of destruction will appear on December 21.

Once in the shower, reality settles down more firmly around you.  Your shampoo smell like coconut but makes your hair limp.You keep forgetting to buy new body wash.  And razor blades.  And conditioner. Fortunately (fortunately!), you have the whole day ahead and to yourself.  You have the bright, sunny morning which will unfold into either a bright, sunny afternoon, perfect for walks, or a suddenly dark, stormy afternoon, perfect for books, and both options perfect for plotting the future or overeating or watching too much t.v.  Even now there is breakfast just ahead and two months left of being in your twenties.

Even now you realize that all along you've been saying "you" when you meant "I" or "me", but you won't revise as it would disrupt the narrative flow of your mental dithering.  Things come together more quickly now: the outfit (or what passes for one), the hair (such as it is), the make-up (wait -- scratch that; it's your day off).  You remind yourself to bookmark your morning insanity, to make physical note of at least some of it, to be divided and researched and expanded upon and, somehow, uniquely illuminated.

Writing them down is low priority though, and you go out and meet faces and carry on conversations. And the next time you come face to face with your computer, you've forgotten what you were going to say.