written perplexedly fast and punny

So much joy this morning, which is astounding after yesterday’s darkness and resultant pain blog. Now that I’ve searched my 47 years of poetry for the word pain, I’ll have to see how often words like joy, laughter, goodness, wonder, happy appear. The joy’s even more amazing because I’m still thrice hurting with yesterday’s physical body pain and will be for awhile.

Haven’t been smoking grass lately. Simply can’t afford it up here in America on my fixed income — what costs $300-$400 an ounce up here was $6 down in Oaxaca. Plus I could buy opium there for $2 a gram which completely stops pain, and that ain’t even an option up here. But my bodymind needed a break anyway, so need and circumstance co-conspired.

When I smoke daily, my short term dream buffers seem emptied when I awake and I can’t remember a darn thing. A few segments have been poking through lately though as the grass wears off, and they weren’t all that nice – more fear and worry warts than bursts of sunshine, so I was a wee bit fearful what my dreams would show.

Yet by not being my normal assholish selfish self, I just had the most joyous dream I’ve ever had and woke the happiest I’ve ever awakened.

This morning Lady woke at 1:15 with anxiety – she has an office workshop to give this morning to potential customers on how to incorporate online social networks into their business model, and the natural stress of speaking and teaching wound her up to such a point that sleep fled. Then the air conditioner was too loud, a bit of nausea crept in, her period made her achy and bloated, she was desperate for sleep, and she just felt bloody awful knowing that in hours she had to perform — or else.

And for once I didn’t make things worse with my selfishness.

Told her her fear and worry were extremely logical, but I knew she knew she knew her subject well. And when she thought maybe she’d drink a beer and try to go back to sleep, Doctor Smith suggested she make a rum and coke instead, and in fact why didn’t she take one of her tranquilizers that help her sleep. She said they’d make her too foggy in the morning and I exclaimed “Not if we cut one in half.”

She sat on the kitchen floor in low kitchen sink light on the Persian carpet she’d hauled back from someone’s trash on one of her runs, drank her drink and popped her half pill while I sat in a chair yawning and saying good things gently. For some reason I felt no resentment about being awakened and no worry about her as we sat and talked and yawned and petted the cat.

Went back to bed and rubbed her back back to sleep and found I was unable to sleep so came out on the couch so my tossing and twitching wouldn’t disturb her and fell into the happiest most wonderful dream of my life.

Of course I can bring little of it back but anyone who has seen the dark grim live-action fairy tale movie The City of Lost Children has a starting point — take all that dark, odd, surreal bleakness and keep the odd and night and surreal but change all the tears and pain to joy and happy outcomes and there you go.

Dream started here in our apartment in real-time – 2:00 in the morning. We had a couple guests who were getting way too loud and boisterous and I tried quieting them because folk in the apartments below would be disturbed.

Suddenly Lady and I are in a mental institution dark and gothic with odd unfunctioning inmates catatonic in the dark halls, yet we weren’t locked up but there to party, and party we did. The crazy folk laughed and played tag with us and we all broke bottles of medicine and made such a raucous noise we attracted the guard who got scared and ran for help so I told us all to run away through the corridors and clean it all up before he could bring the Mind Police down upon us.

We picked up pills and put them back in their broken bottles and laughed and danced and created smoke with our minds to fill the halls to confuse the normals chasing us and even the most catatonic inmate broke out of their shells and helped and talked and laughed and we all ran around in joy and fixed it all so when the fixated normals came there was nothing wrong except the crazies weren’t crazy anymore.

There was so much wonderfulness I awoke amazed, thanked the Universe for this gift and begged to be allowed to bring a little of it back in my memory. Awaking in such wondrous joyful happiness I realized I needed to go back into Lady’s bed and lie next to her so some of the sheer goodness would seep into her as she slept. When I got to the bedroom, our cat was sprawled next to Lady in my place so I stroked her and picked her up in both palms and she just lay there in my hands trusting and unmoving as I laid her at Lady’s feet where she normally sleeps and she purred and I lay next to Lady and went to sleep. When she awoke at 5:15 I hugged her and said good morning gorgeous and she said she dreamed of music, and thanked me for being so nice in the night and helping her get over her anxiety and back to sleep.

The folks in the mental institution weren’t crazy so much as had gotten a bit too close to the Oneness of the Universe and it’s hard to balance having one foot in Heaven while living in Hell so they had to be locked away for lack of functionality in this malfunctioning whorl we call world. And when they were freed from judgment and became our fellow party partners and co-conspirators and accomplices in messing the Fix then fixing the Mess, their real saneness and goodness and impish clownishness burst through and we were all one joyous mass of seductive productive sanity.

If I can keep just a little of this dream with me it will change me and my life for the better. And I believe I was given this dream because for once in my small meager selfish ego-driven life I felt not an iota of any of that when Lady awoke me in anxiety and angst but instead felt calm and helpful and concerned and loving for another who needed exactly that.

There is magic. We just don’t know how to access it and usually fail to understand it when it appears.

It’s not we in the mental institution who are crazy – we’re locked up because we’re not crazy enough to be let loose in this insane world.

True class lies in being clown. True happiness lies in denying the frown. There’s enough goodness and food and water and money for all on this Ball of All. All we need to do is laugh down the frown. Don’t heed the greed. Don’t seed and breed need. Don’t let power flower. Don’t fall for the fake or the failed’s take.

Reality is what we make it consensually – Heisenberg and Quantum Physics say so. One smile can defeat a thousand snarls. Schrodinger’s cat’s life or death is up to us – we just gotta look the right way, see the safe scene, malfunction man’s maiming machine.

We can turn this thing around, run our game on better ground.

~ ~ ~

PS – Lady just returned early from her pre-dawn five-mile run saying “I only did one loop because I had to come back to poop, then I’ll do another.”

“So that’s your strategy huh – loop and poop?”

Maybe that’s our answer – loop the poop and graph the laugh.

May your morning be as merry as mine. And may mine linger.