rain Lady - foto by Smith

One of my newly harvested news headlines is “WOW! Monkeys Can Recognize Their Pals In Photos”.

This reminded me of a study I read 30 years ago in which the scientists taught a monkey to sort a stack of fotos of apes and people into human and monkey piles. Later the scientists added the monkey’s own foto and when the monkey came to it, he added it to the human pile.

Another legendary study was a group of monkeys were put into a room, then a scientist looked through the keyhole to see what the monkeys were doing without any humans in the room. When he looked through the keyhole, he saw a monkey’s eye looking out at him.

I wonder what they’d do with mutant monkey me.

I stopped toking a week ago because daily sips of ganja makes me forget my nightly dreams and I wanted a dream status update to see how my head is doing.

Tonight I awoke at 1 a.m. with dream shock. In the dream, Lady and I and others were in a hostage situation with the bad guys getting badder. The leader was threatening to hurt me unless the authorities caved in, and I told him he’d best back off and let us go. He laughed, said he was going to hurt me and just what was I going to do about it. So I shoved a pencil through his neck and watched him die, both of us in shock at my totally unexpected action. And then I snapped awake. It wasn’t a nightmare - I felt no fear - it was more an “I don’t have to put up with this-shit” feeling. There wasn’t any premeditation or if-he-does-this-I’ll-do-that sort of thing; it was simply instantaneous call and response. Lady’s and my life was endangered, so I saved us.

Went back to sleep, but then Lady awoke at 2:30, got up, made her coffee and breakfast and started working (she creates web sites for her mother’s company).

I lay in bed 30 minutes smelling the coffee, trying to get back to sleep while my mind raced over our evolving style of life until I finally gave up and got up with 4 hours of sleep. Came out, had my own cup of coffee and talked awhile; then she said she was going back to bed - after she’d had two cups of strong pan coffee. So here I am at 4 in the morning with a cup of serious caffeine running through my veins, tired as hell, and unable to go back to sleep.

Our life is getting odder. Lady starts thinking of going to bed around 6:30 at night. Last night she lasted until 7. I go to bed at 11 or midnight. She gets up anywhere between 2:30 and 4 while I wake at 7. Some nights there’s 12-13 hours between when she goes to sleep and I wake. The other 11-12 hours of our day together, she basically works, Facebooks, surfs the web, or we do chores. I can’t talk to her while she’s web designing because she concentrates so completely she doesn’t hear me; and if I do get through, it’s obvious I’m interrupting her work flow and she’s torn between work thought and me.

It’s getting to be like living alone, only with another person I have to work around.

So I shut down into alone node inside my head, and sometimes when she’s ready to interact, I’m in screen-saver mode and no longer quite interactive.

I’m an anti-social natural-born hermit who has become hooked on a her who is frequently elsewhere in cyberland even though she’s physically here. Sounds like a techno country & western song.

Now I wonder if these early morning hours are her private time and she went back to bed because I interrupted them. I remember my father used to get up at 5 in the morning so he could sit in silence in the pre-dawn darkness and sip his coffee and be alone before he went off to lay brick, block or stone. A few mornings I got up to spend time with him until I realized this was his time and stopped (he was polite those few mornings, talked to me and all, but I could see his heart wasn’t in it).

Things are changing for me. my body hurts more up here in the cold and humidity, I’ve lost enough teeth lately that I can no longer casually eat, my first winter in 4 years is shocking my system, I no longer have enough of my own money coming in to live in America, I’ve lost 7 pounds in the past 8 days, even my Google searches have stopped working and freeze up my computer, etc. I wonder if I’m caterpillar in cocoon becoming butterfly, or life form being slowly wrapped in shroud.

Whatever. Life is process. My job is to finish our book, get it published, make more art, write more poems, take more fotos, blog as near daily as possible, support Lady anyway I can, somehow get more money coming in than goes out, and see what flows down the line.

I have no doubt Lady loves me (though don’t know if she actually likes me anymore, especially since her absence and life back in America are making me crankier and harder to be around), but she’s going through her own changes and has her own growth needs which I need to support. I’m thinking some of this is the inevitable cost of the 27 year age difference in our May-December romance marriage. Different folks flail different strokes.

Life’s a beach twixt wet and dry
leaving me to ask what’s next, and why

life - foto by Smith