On the Other Side

Foreword

In my other blog, Morals - By A Twenty-Something Year Old, I try my best to leave myself out of the content. If it is absolutely necessary, I will include a personal story, but I try to avoid it. Because I'm highly insecure, I don't want to seem like my writings on morality are an attempt to place myself above the rest of civilization, and so here I will share my writings which explore my various character flaws. You need a format for this kind of a thing, so I decided to use dreams as a kicking-off point for each flaw I demonstrate. Enjoy.

My Life is Better Than I Think It Is

The worst nightmare I ever had was a tableau involving a mouse chewing on a wrench, a flashing grid of multicolored lights, and my father screaming into the night sky. I would wake up with my hearing intensified. Everything sounded like an airplane engine. My vision was effected as well. Objects greater than one nice in front of my face would appear miles and miles in the distance. My father would walk into my room with me, six years old, staring intensely into my palm. I would run up to him and apologize for whatever had offended him in the dream, and when he tried to comfort me, my hands would slap over my ears and I would crumble to the ground in pain. I thought he had started screaming again. This perceptual distortion, my softball way of saying I hallucinated a lot as a kid, subsided with age.

I enjoy sleep more than almost anything. I'm a nervous person, and its hard to be too nervous when you are nodding off, or just waking up. You can't do your nervous tics when your body is paralyzed and unconscious. All your breaths are long, slow and deep. I'm pretty sure all yoga and meditation practices are aimed at achieving the physiological benefits of being asleep whilst still being awake. A yogi once told me that the confidence yoga can instill in an individual will help that person take control of their life. Turning an alarm clock off and going back to bed -that is you beating the world and every one of her needy requests.

Once upon a time, someone said that happy people with good lives have lots of bad dreams because by relativity, their waking life is much better than their dream life. I look at that scenario a little differently. Dreams are chaotic. They don't involve the rational areas of the brain. Studies suggest that they are a mechanism for resolving inner emotional conflicts - bakers for your gut feeling.This world of dreaming differs slightly from that of the waking life we take part in. In waking society, we are governed by mildly arbitrary rules, simulating chaos. If one's happiness and good life is dependent on the positioning of an arbitrary rule, then their surrender to genuine chaos in their dreams must be unnerving.

I count myself lucky. My dreams are mostly bland. They're even in black and white (which I recently discovered many psychopaths do). My worst nightmare is described in by a French word - hardly terrifying once described.
I find the real world much more terrifying and surreal than what my imagination can conjure, and I once called myself a poet.

For instance, today the last person I saw before retiring to my lodgings was a woman wearing a mini-skirt, a puffy vest, fuzzy boots and a shirt that read, "blah blah blah, I don't care." As I pondered why anyone would wear such a thing, she extinguished her half-smoked cigarette on a part of the sidewalk I happen to know my dog urinates, and then stored the remaining half in a mini M&M's tube. I wanted to say any number of things, but was stopped by the wisdom of the shirt.

At what point does doing hard drugs shrink your teeth and make your lower jaw rise up as if one is perpetually checking the undersize of their face for spots they missed shaving? When does continual heroine use destroy one's reservations for shooting up in a fast food bathroom? Is there a number of highs one has to obtain before they decide to convert a Pakistani family's minivan bumper into a make-shift toilet? All of these questions, I asked myself while eating a chili cheeseburger in San Francisco last weekend. Having just been bailed on by a mutual friend, Tim and I split a pitcher of light beer over burgers, fries and all you can eat pickles; possibly the greatest marketing scheme that has ever been devised in a predominately Asian community.

I love San Francisco because people are more accepting of certain Asian behavioral patterns. I'm not talking about the spitting and snorting into plastic bags - that's gross everywhere. But if I went to certain parts of the East Bay and had a mild physical confrontation with Tim over paying the bill, we might attract some looks.

The attendant at the burger joint was not at all taken aback by our routine quarrel. She in fact had probably handled something like this before. In her infinite wisdom, she put the whole matter to chance; putting each of our cards in a red plastic french fry tray, shaking it up and pulling a card at random. I lost that exchange.

She was overtly pleasant, which one would hardly expect from a minimum-ish wage worker on a Saturday night. Her main concern seemed to be who would be given the bathroom key. It was a legitimate concern.

I wonder if there is any admiration to be had in a person whose complete lack of shame allows her to urinate in public. I remember the first time I watched a man pee on a car. Again, it was a minivan - obviously the most toilet like automobile design available. I was about twelve then, and I remember it feeling like a milestone in my life. I was no longer young enough to have an adult cover my eyes for me, or have an adult say something, or for the urinating man to think, "Oh I better not whip it out here. There are kids." Now that I'm twenty-four and finished with an undergraduate program, I am no stranger to public urination. College is where kids learn that for the most part, public urination is more or less okay. Its the time in your life when you realize that when you walk down the street and you smell hot, evaporating urine that there is a fifty-fifty chance that it is either a homeless person, or someone just like you - a twenty-something year old out for a night on the town.

When I watched this woman pee on the bumper of the minivan, I thought two things. The first thing I thought was how I am always disappointed by onion-rings. They come apart way too easily. The second thing was how relieved she looked just to be sitting down. I moved to San Francisco from Eugene, Oregon. It is another town who sympathetically takes up the homeless plight. There are fantastic food kitchens, that I've actually eaten at with an old friend who wanted to show me what it was like. I did feel bad about eating a free meal I could afford, so I did volunteer at a similar shelter later on. However, despite some of the best programs in the nation, the homeless community were no stranger to the words, "move along."

It is a hard existence being told that no matter where you go, someone will be so utterly offended and frightened by your mere presence that they will summon for armed civil servants. If in the course of one day, a cop told me three or more times that a person, with a home, two blocks down didn't like looking at me sitting on the curb and that I had to move to appease the person who couldn't be bothered to close their blinds, I'd probably want a drink. I'd probably want to pee on their car too.

Yet, even though I can logically think my way into sympathy, it doesn't stop my initial reaction - "Dear God. Your jaw is being eaten by the rest of your face." I'm ashamed to admit it, but when I see those tiny-toothed, coaster-chinned vagabonds, I do cross the street. I give money to homeless people, but I can't say I've ever given to one with a contracted mandible.

Its like they're continually, mentally coordinating the best way to lick their own nose.