Gary Busey was exceptionally helpful.

I had moved in with my mom, into her new faux-townhouse condo, where are the row houses are across from the elementary school in Swan River. While she was outside being ditzy, the place caught on fire. I lost pretty close to everything, and freaked out. I walked away, holding my head, yelling out loud "how could this happen to me, after everything else?"

I walked downtown, and reached the hotel with a bar and diner (the name of which I can't recall).  Gary Busey was there, and was about to drive his truck and trailer north to Nunavut with a delivery.  He offered me a ride, and I was glad for the chance to get the hell out of town.

It was a long trip, I guess, but it didn't seem so long.  At one point we came across some airplane debris -- a large wing fragment and a tailpiece from a commercial airliner.  We got out and took pictures of us posing with the wreckage.

I drove for a while, despite having no license, until it looked like a cop was behind us; we switched seats while driving.

Finally we got to our destination.  I don't know the name of the town, but the road forked gently to create a downtown area shaped like the Flatiron building (with the left branch going gently uphill).  There were a few restaurants, a surprisingly well-appointed arcade, and (I think) a remote college campus nearby.  Seemed like a nice place to stay.

As soon as we parked in the garage and got out, a Spanish man ran up to us and delivered a black notebook.  It was mine, and apparently not lost in the fire; it was his task to give it to me, but he didn't know it had belonged to me.  "Remarkable penmanship", he said as he handed it over.

On intuitive leaps.

Once again, I worked through fear of a wrong step and followed the intuition of the moment -- it's said that intuition and instinct remain distinct, but sometimes the Venn overlap is almost all you can see -- and it led me shortly afterward to a positive place, while the choice to hold back would have left me nowhere, still lacking a necessary action.

Moral:  be willing to fail more often in order to make room for more successes.

Before noon on a weekend. Is this normal?

Thanks to a friend texting me for breakfast, and then having to cancel, the day stretches out before me.  Do I go out and do some holiday shopping, or get presents for all the incoming babies (five in my social circle between early November and March)?  Do I prepare material for my next week of work?  Shovel my walk?  Get some packages ready to mail?  Clean the kitchen?  Get some groceries?  Pick up a proper winter coat?  Do some outdoor photography of the freshly-snowy streets, or maybe head down to Habitat to take those pics I promised someone?

Or do I go back to bed for two hours, order a pizza, and play videogames all day?

Compromise:  nap for 30 minutes, install myself at Shaika, and spend the whole day drinking coffee and writing.  Enjoyable, social, constructive, doesn't require cleaning anything.

Tales of the Golden City

For quite a few years I transcribed my dreams.  I kept a notebook and pen at bedside to be ready upon any wakening, in case my just-interrupted dream was still reclaimable.  Many of these records are in high detail, and go on for pages.  In general, the sooner I wrote it down the more detail was accessible, but practice did increase my longer-term recall as well.

I don't do it anymore, and for much of my thirties I didn't seem to be dreaming at all (or at least not in any memorable way).  But lately as I've been considering some major life questions, dreams have been forcing their way back in.

A couple of weeks ago, I dreamt that I should tell my boss to take some time to reflect and think about his future.  I didn't, but two days later his boss lost his job, and my boss was thrown into a tornado that has had a noticable impact on him.

Last night, I dreamt -- without TMI-ing -- that my next move in life was in fact the beginning of an initiation of sorts.  This view seems designed to help me gather strength for my return to an important place in my life.

A recurring theme in my adult dream life has been the Golden City (as I've come to call it).  While many of my dreams seem to take place in urban environments, some of these have a particular kind of vividness that sets them apart, and I know even as I'm dreaming them that they take place in this City.  (Take what HDR does for an image, and extend that into the dimension of an entire experience, and that's kinda the idea.)

I associate this Golden City with one real city, although many parts of other cities belong to it.  That real city is where I thought I would be moving every year for the last four, and it's there that I would expect the full breadth of this initiation to present itself, if it exists.

But I think I'm going somewhere else instead, because geniuses don't rely on mere logic for fundamental life decisions.

That was sarcasm.

"I remember when my life was not constantly on shuffle."

There are certain lessons life teaches that I must really love, because I seem to insist upon learning them over and over again. One of these that I'm thinking about right now has been phrased many ways; its essence: the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.

And so it was that the last line of Bernard Perusse's article on recreating albums verbatim in concert reached out and demanded my attention.

The last album I listened to in full -- from start to finish, as out-of-date as those terms might be at present when it comes to modern music packaging and delivery -- was Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation. (To complete the circle of irony, it was because I had been reminded of their recent tour playing the album.)

My relationship with music was built in two key ways. One was listening to commercial radio, which gradually shifted over into watching music video shows and stations. The other was intensive listening sessions to certain albums.

The first activity kept me exposed to new ideas. The second allowed me to understand in depth those to which I had already been introduced.

I still listen to songs intently, but even with a band like Radiohead who provide high payoff for however much attention is invested, album listening is rare.

One reason is that music has become an urban survival tool, making the daily dayjob commute less personal and more bearable. Another is that internet culture has turned up my ADD meter, such that it's more difficult to not get restless when asked to sit still and listen to one musical act for an hour or so.

Regardness, shuffle is now the norm -- my new way of maintaining one of my most important relationships. Is it any wonder that every other aspect of my life becomes equally chaotic?