What a fantastic way to ring out the year 2000: with a half-asleep, frustrated sort-of argument... I guess it's fitting; a large proportion of 2000 has been spent engaged in just such activity.
My email account wants to know: Need a DIPLOMA? Want a NEW CAR? ARE YOU xxxHORNYxxx??? Tired of having bad credit? Need a loan for any purpose?
Can I get you anything other than coffee, ma'am?
No. All I want is to fall asleep. To hell with good credit, a diploma, a new car, and a virtual lay.
I was troubled -- traumatized is more like it -- by nightmares the night before last. Fever dreams, although I didn't have a fever. More likely, nicotine-withdrawal dreams, or exhaustion dreams, or dreams that are the spawn of reading several hundred pages of my new Tom Robbins novel before bed. In the particular dream I remember, I was in a house about a hundred miles from Binghamton. I'm not sure how I knew it was a hundred miles away, but it surely was. My mother had dropped me off at this place -- a sort of party, I think -- with the assumption that I could get my own ride home. Something went awry at the party, though. The house was haunted, or there was something in the air. Whenever any of the party guests -- I recognized a number of my friends -- stepped into the back bedroom, something began to happen in their brains.
"Come on, try it!" beckoned my friend Joey in the dream. "Come here!" He led me by the hand into the back bedroom, then placed my hand on a bedpost, or a chair cushion or something. Immediately, things went out of focus. Something unpleasant -- something demonic -- filled me. I could suddenly see that the world, the room, was made of layers, and the layers began peeling off, then replacing themselves. Joey's face was contorted. The bed was no longer a bed, but a row of windows. The floor was different. I was outside. I was inside. I was filled with such confusion, such delirium, that I panicked and ran out of the room. Joey followed, placed two fingers on my forehead, and said, "is this what you saw?" and there was a terrifying vision of other layers, further evidence that there simply WAS no solid ground. I was going crazy. I didn't know what was what. My friends all thought it was grand. I thought it was horrible. It was the Tommyknockers, come to life, the Black Lodge, the Dark Side of the Looking Glass, the cave in the X-files episode where the kids got the ability to move faster than the speed of light... They followed me, pursued me, persuaded me, hugged me, then proceeded to change into other people. One moment, Aaron was at my side; the next moment, he had turned into a girl I'd gone to middle-school with, who'd tormented me senselessly. The dream just would not end. There was no way of getting out of this house -- no way of getting home. My friends were no longer my friends -- I didn't know who was who. One minute, Aaron might be Aaron, driving me home, the next minute, he might be the evil middle-school girl, I reasoned. I tried to call my mother, but I couldn't understand her voice. I decided to leave and walk home, but I wasn't sure I'd be able to find my way out, much less 100 miles back home. Furthermore, I discovered my cat walking around the house, and could neither bear to take her with me, lest she become some demonic beast -- or a row of windows; nor leave her here where she might be subjected to further experimentation with this strange force in the back bedroom. Who knew what delusions she might be experiencing? I was not about to touch her forehead and try to read her mind, as Joey had done to me.
I woke up, on the verge of screaming. I wasn't sure I was awake. I wasn't sure where I was or what I was doing there. I wasn't sure who Norman was, although I could see his face.
It would be easy to attribute all of this to my altered physical state: I've been ill, I haven't eaten right, a lower concentration of nicotine is coursing through my veins... Hell, I've been reading a Tom Robbins novel written in the SECOND-person, which is enough to make anybody queasy about their identity and surroundings. Still, I won't deny that in the past few weeks, my mental state has been very much in a state of vertigo. My entire being has been in a state of vertigo. Either that or the state of Nevada -- I'm not sure.
My online horoscope for the day says: Feelings of groundlessness, or of discontent with the way your life is structured are quite natural during this transit. This does not mean they should be dismissed. At the same time, there is no need to stay awake trying to solve them. Make a note and think again, when the energy is clearer. Heh. And people don't believe in astrology. The energies are most certainly not clear. Th energies are fucked up, and they're taking me for a drunken, sleep-deprived ride out in the back hills of a movie I think I might have seen when I was ten...
Norman's back from Seattle. It's a toss-up whether he's glad to see me again, or glad that the scenery hasn't changed much on the surface. Personally, my scenery could lift out from under me, flip upside down, re-arrange itself like a Salvadore Dali painting, and I'd never notice. Rather, I'd notice, but it wouldn't make much difference. Norman, arriving home to find me watching "Liebestraum" on his futon, probably didn't sense much change. After all, nothing really HAD changed. He'd gone home, I'd stayed in town, I'd been sort of ill and relatively out-of-commission, and so nothing had happened in his absence.
But I awoke the morning after he'd arrived home, not knowing WHO he was. It took me probably close to thirty seconds to register his name and relationship to me.
"I had a bad dream, baby... There were all these people, and when they went in this bedroom, they got, like, fucked-up or something, and they wanted me to do it, they said it was like a real rush or something, and they were gonna make me do it, but it was gonna make me crazy..." (In explaining, Helena managed to make herself sound like a zealous anti-drug fanatic; but how DOES one explain that the world is made of layers and you don't really know which layers are real? That would have made Helena sound like a zealous DRUG fanatic...)
Things are not right.
For the past several days, I have been plagued by recurring thoughts of Nevada. I don't know why. After all, my expedition THERE was in October of 1998, and nothing, save the receipt of a Christmas card from Brian, has reminded me in any logical way of that day. Sometimes, I feel as though I'm sitting on my butt in Binghamton, New York, on the wes'side, listening to music, or watching movies, or reading, or writing, or looking at another hundred bills I haven't paid; other times, I feel as though I'm hurtling down a dark highway at 130 miles an hour, Brian in the front seat with his tank top glowing green and red in the light of the dashboard; and occasionally, I feel as though I'm in a city that looks just a little bit like Binghamton, only I'm walking through a tunnel whispering to myself, "blue car... it was a little blue car..." and humming some nasty Toni Braxton song.
Baby, it was JUST a dream...
Am I going nuts?
No, I'm not going nuts. I'm not going nuts at all. I've been sick, and there's been a fog around me. For gahd sakes, I cried during "JFK." I cried when I couldn't read the freaking German thermometer in Norman's medicine cabinet. I cried when I had to call in to work. I NEARLY cried at the drugstore when the guy behind the counter didn't wish to engage in friendly conversation with someone buying antacid products. Obviously, the energies around my emotions have been a bit tangled, due to my physical state. If that's not so difficult to accept, then why is it so difficult to deal with a few days' worth of fucked-up dreams, panic attacks, and near-hallucinations. As my horoscope says, just wait for the energy to clear, and work through it. Solid ground shalt return, hopefully.
Got very angry at Norman this morning. Left without saying goodbye. Sort of slammed the door on the way out. I am horribly tempted to go back to his apartment, crawl back into bed with him, cover him with kisses, and apologize for being a bitch. I wasn't TRYING to be a bitch. As a matter of fact, I was trying NOT to be a bitch. Unfortunately, it didn't work. I was just tired. I was just a little miserable. I'm just on shaky ground.
I miss my friend Brian. I haven't seen him in nearly two years, but occasionally, something points a little gun at my psyche and says, "miss Brian or else." This movie, "All the Pretty Horses" is playing now in theaters. It was filmed at our college. Brian and I bitched a couple of times about all the freaking RACKET they made filming that movie -- they only filmed in the middle of the night, it seemed. You could hear shouts and machinery and trucks driving around at four in the morning from my dorm hall. Once, when the noise got pretty bad, I ended up chatting with Brian all night in someone else's room and eventually drinking myself to sleep. He was telling me about picking up some hitch-hiker who was telling him about intersecting lines of energy in the Santa Fe area: something about Santa Fe being some cosmic center of the universe. Brian wasn't very shaken by the idea. Brian would make a grand character in a Tom Robbins novel; makes sense that he ended up moving to Seattle. He seems to thrive on just a little bit of chaos and unheaval. I wonder what he'd make of my current state of being.
The lines of energy in the universe seem to be swarming around me. They also seem to be gently, gradually untangling and pulling away, reorganizing themselves, swimming gracefully back to their rightful times and places unstead of embedding themselves permanently in the pools of my subconsciousness in a dense school of fishy, watery, dreamy vertigo.
Whatever happened, whatever fucked me up, whatever caused the nightmares the other night, is subsiding. The energies are clearing.
Now, I've made a note of it. I can think again.
I have to go back to Norman's house. I owe him an apology.
Love,
~Helena*
"At some eschatological moment, having at last absorbed the values that the Nommo, liertally or figuratively, came here to impart, we may ride the currents to the stars, where, in the dimension of the overmind, we'll experience closure with the godhead, eventually to embark on even higher tides to even stranger destinations requiring even more unimaginable transformations. ...Meanwhile, at our present level of development, largely oblivious to our origins and our destinations, we are half-asleep in frog pajamas." --Tom Robbins, "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas."