Dark Dreams on Repeat

Some dreams stick around all day. Some of them make you question reality. You wake up and think, "where did I bury that body?" or "somebody's gonna find them and think I killed them".

Your whole day turns into one of those creepy fugue states where you start to question reality, wondering if you're another one of those creepy rural serial killers/grave robbers until about five o'clock in the afternoon before you come back to what you're pretty sure is your reality.

I used to live in a big, ugly ranch house on Highway 45 up in northern Wisconsin, and for a few months when my two house mates were gone off to rehab, it got creepy at night, the rumble of cars and trucks keeping my brain stirred up enough that I'd drift in and out of a deep dream state, often waking up just enough to start the same dream cycle over again, the creepifying and morbid dreams picking up all over again.

Sometimes I'd get up and move around the house, read a while and try and shake off the dreams, but too often they'd start right up again, my brain rebooting the near nightmare until I let it run all the way through.

I'm pretty sure that's why the dreams were so vivid, and why they made the day seem so disjointed. I still sometimes get anxious dreams that I have to let run out to the end, but they're not about hiding bodies anymore.

I think it's because it's so much easier being different these days than it was back in the ugly 1980's. I think hiding a part of yourself to a lot of the world makes you feel like you are hiding a body, one's own.It's just easier being one's queer self now, in spite of all the frothing right wingers screaming about how dangerous us queers are.

Oddly enough, me and Sweetie are dangerous in a sort of a "don't fuck with us, because we're a combined 400 pounds of strong and easily angered mammals". We're the sort of pacifist who shoots back, the kind of folks who don't start a fight but usually make sure that it's finished one way or another.

Now I write songs about hiding bodies, getting pushed down wells or junkyard lovers instead of dreaming about them. It's more fun than dreaming about it.

More Cyclops Head Carvings

Got a show coming up at EVP coffee soon. Here's some of what's going up later this week.

Pain in Maine

It seems the majority of Maine voters are much like the majority of Wisconsin voters, thick minded homophobes who talk about freedom and how great we are as a country, but can't stand the idea of icky folks like Kori and I having equal rights.

To that 52 percent of Maine voters, I say, in the words of Dick Cheney, Go Fuck Yourself. But I'd add, please do it with a shovel handle wrapped in barb wire.
To the folks who actually believe everybody deserves to be equal and who got out and voted, thanks, and sooner or later the pig headed creeps who voted against us will lose, die off or give up.
I read somewhere on the web that the college age voters on Maine's biggest campus voted over 80 percent in favor of us queers being equal. It's just a matter of time until the American Taliban, the Mormons and the professional soul suckers and child abusers known as The Catholic church become a tiny, shrieking minority that give up and die off.
I never expected we'd be as far as we are in this country with LBGT rights. Thirty or forty years ago they still would have locked up folks for being queer in a mental institute. Now we're arguing over gay marriage.
That's an amazing amount of progress in just my lifetime, considering that most of humanity seems obtuse, dumb or distracted, or in the case of the 30 percent of this country that has teabagger/hard right rethuglican brain pans, many of whom are barking mad, violent jerks.
Things are getting better in some ways, for sure. I know I've gone from having an uneasy and creepy feeling about most of humanity to feeling like only about half of the earthlings around me are dumb as a box of hammers and just plain mean spirited.

HyVee Vs. Woodman's

This is not a photo of the meat department at Woodman's.

I went to the new HyVee grocery store today. I was out to shave some big monkeys at Menard's, the home of obnoxious ads, cheap crappy lumber and odd semi-worthless crap and decided to hang a right into the giant parking lot in front of the new store that used to be K-Mart.

It's impressive. But sort of the way a beached whale is the first few days it's on the beach. In a year or so, if the economy keeps going the way it has been, it's going to be more like a whale that's been on the beach in the hot sun for a few weeks.

The store has giant aisles, huge bright lights everywhere, incredibly tall ceilings, the joint reminds me of an over lit NFL stadium with grocery aisles in it.

It's jammed with premade everything, from chopped up fresh fruit to a deli counter that wraps around half the store along the outside wall. All of it pretty spendy compared to Costco or Woodman's.

Four bucks for a chicken salad sandwich, though? I know they were two for one today, but damn, it wasn't a four dollar sandwich, and it looked a lot better than it tasted.

Everybody there was big smiles, helpful to the point of irritating. I didn't even make eye contact, because after the third or fourth person gave me a big smile and a "may I help you", I wanted to run screaming from the store. I think they were pumping aerosol Prozac into the joint, or maybe spiking the staff coffee with meth and lorazapam.

Or maybe everybody there was grimly happy to have a job. Not a lot of them going around in this jobless recovery.

And it was jammed packed, sort of like opening day at an amusement park, full of people shuffling around like freshly dead zombies, picking up 8 dollar a pound cheese, scarfing up samples of stuff like hungry dogs.

I hated it. It was pretentious, too big, and too full of crap. Since when to Kettle Chips belong in the freakin' health food section? And damn, I don't know many folks who can afford the high priced deli and salad bar. At 6 bucks a pound, no less.

In short, it was the kind of joint that makes my low rent, cook from scratch/eat less processed food mentality weep for the future. Who the hell buys pre-popped popcorn? Not my income bracket.

I prefer Woodman's dingy, crowded under lit mosh pit. They sell weirder brands of food, offer stuff in bulk, everybody on staff but the deli and checkout folks ignore you, a plus when you're not in the mood for happy face clerks, and the whole vibe makes me feel like I'm in the first Resident Evil movie, the one where it's filmed in the basement of Raccoon City and you have to fight off hordes of angry fast zombies. It's a giant freak show with low ceilings, a multi ethnic crew working the joint, and a much cheaper bill at the end of it. And nobody beats Woodman's liquor store for sheer entertainment and cheap prices.

In the long run, both Woodman's and HyVee are still stores selling tons of crap, unsustainable stores that would be 1/4 the size they are if people actually started cooking most of their food instead of eating processed food products. I bet if you took the corn syrup and corn products and salt and additives from the food in either joint and piled them up, you'd have about two thirds of the contents of both places. There's something to be said for cool ranch Doritos and a bottle of Jolt, but the levels of sheer junk in both places are a stupidly high, and it's no wonder we have a fucked up society when you look at the garbage we shove down out gullets that didn't even exist in my grandparent's diets.

52 Vs. 32

Random Thought of the day:

The difference between reading apocalyptic fiction when you're fifty two and when you're 32 is that you realize that you've gotten old enough to be one of those geezers who croaks off from some unexpected stroke or heart attack, or you're just too old and physically worn out to do as much work as it would take to survive.

But I think I'd want to stick around as long as it was a societal collapse and not an asteroid/nuke war/nanotech accident, at least as long as the booze, bullets, beans,bong hits and ibuprofen lasted.

Do we get to choose what messy end we get? I vote for something less messy than a zombie war or mushroom clouds if we do.

Elly with Flower

If I wasn't already grown up, I'd want to be this amazing when I grew up.

Ellyn with flower, on her parent's land near Sparta in September.