Me Time

Ahhh, for the first time in many months, Rob is at work & I am at home. Alone. All alone. Just me & the ghosts, & the feeling around me of a house seething with animosity towards me. It is nice, in a way, being by myself. "Give me my scallop shell of silence..." No hotel worries, no Rob worries. Just me & the unquiet atmosphere that this place is brimming over with. Sometimes I think about that cheesy '80's movie, the supposedly true-story "Entity"... I'm thinking about taking a bath, and it's so easy to drown someone by just grabbing them by their ankles & forcefully pulling them under... the water rushes into their nostrils & usually the shock of being grabbed makes them inhale, gasping inwards... Drowning used to seem a pleasant way to die but lately the pressure in my chest & lungs from the shoulder problems I've been having are making me rethink that whole idea.
But oh fucking well, I can seethe back. See if I clean you for awhile, motherfucker. Hah, take that, filthy dirty house!

I was kind of disappointed in the History Channel's 1st chapter of "Barbarians". I expected at least an unbiased account of the activities of the Vikings, (and I don't know enough about the Goths to know if they were portrayed fairly or not), but instead the History Channel made the Viking people out to be uncouth, dishonorable & greedy. In fact, they outright called them greedy. And sneaky, to boot. My Teutonic blood cries out for vengeance!

Survived the bath...

Intact. Got the sensation there was someone standing in the doorway, their hand on the door, sort of swinging it back & forth. Heard something thump loudly on the roof, rattling shingles. Probably a cat. I am so going to get some cat traps from the humane society in the near future...
I'm starting to feel like the guy in Stephen King's short story that opened "Night Shift". I can't remember the name of the story offhand & I'm not inclined to go into the darkened library to seek it out, but the opening line of it is:
"From the sound of it, there are large rats in the walls." It goes downhill from there, of course, w/the guy spiralling into paranoia & death. The last time I felt this jumpy was when I was coming off the Elavil a doc gave me as a sleep aid. I laid in the condo for a week, watching my bathroom ceiling, just waiting for the body to fall through... I just knew a serial killer had been storing corpses up there & one was rotting away the drywall it was laying on... at the time I knew it was the Elavil withdrawals talking. Now I don't have that drug-based excuse. So I'm just nuts & have to get used to it.
Over the Summer, coming in the house from the garage, right under the intake for the a/c, there was a lingering odor like bad hamburger meat. A part of my mind thinks someone got up into the rafters of the house, like a runaway or transient kid, & died there. I keep catching glimpses from the corners of my eyes of a little, bare-chested brown boy, probably Mexican, wearing footsie pajama bottoms that are too small for him. He stands by the fridge a lot, & I think it was him swinging my bathroom door tonight. It's plausible, to my sick mind, my overtaxed & anxious mind. I mean, this house sat uninhabited for long stretches of time, & the old woman who owned it wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier. Her backyard was such a jungle... anything could have gone unnoticed. I found more dead spiders behind curtains & in closet corners than I care to think about. Big ones. And their sheds, too, & husks of crickets & roaches. You don't have spiders leaving husks all over the place if you pay attention to your surroundings. The scorpions & snails & weevils are proof that her gardening service wasn't very diligent, either. Freakin' ear wigs, pill bugs & snails, i.e. watery bugs, in a desert. Wtf?!

Dreamt about my dad last night, but my brain put Duane's face & voice on the form, probably so as not to traumatize me further. He was looking for the "golden bathroom" & I followed him out into a martian landscape, seeking the "golden key" with which to open said bathroom door. Me & some kid that my mind added from "Holes". I know the bathroom thing was because I had to piss like Seabiscuit... so anyway, we're out wandering the mesas of Mars looking for this key to open the bathroom for Duane, aka my dad, when we end up in a junkyard/trailer park that I've been in before in my dreams. There are these two men, sort of mutated looking, forcing a heavy set, darkhaired girl wearing a net snood to unload their tow truck. She's crying & I know she's basically a slave, but I can't get to her because of the golden key, which is hidden somewhere in the junk yard.
Thank all the Gods of Sleep & Night that my bladder finally screamed loudly enough for me to wake the hell up!
It's funny how certain places end up in your dreams, over & over again. Some of mine:
1) A huge neglected chicken coop. The place scares the crap outta me for some reason. There are dead chickens, obviously starved, their eyes eaten away by ants or other scavengers, feathers blowing off randomly in the breezes & drafts... it's backed onto an old house somehow, but I never get past the chicken coop part. There are some live chickens, but I'm reluctant to let them go...
2) Red sandstone mesas, like the ones I was looking for the bathroom on last night. It's a huge open desert landscape, red as brick, always night, w/moon & stars overhead. There's a prominent, steep ridge w/no obvious pass, mountains on the horizon...
3) The junkyard/trailer park. This is the epitome of trailer trash livin', folks. Run-down mobile homes, motor homes & quonset huts w/trash & junk heaped in the alleys between them. Mutants dwell here, crazies & slave-drivers. I always end up w/my back against a wall of sprung mattresses, bare coils pressed into my kidneys & ass as Southern-Summer sweltering sweat rolls down my spine. It's always overcast, the sky that bizarre color of brushed stainless steel, threatening rain but never offering up more than hot, humid wind. And it reeks. Gods, does it reek. I wish I could summon up tornadoes in my sleep, because this place desperately needs one.
After going so long w/out dreaming, or remembering, now that I'm both dreaming & remembering the dreams, I remember seeing these places before, getting that deja vu' feeling, like "Oh, this place again." I can't really complain about the dreams, no matter how panicked I am when I wake up, no matter how much adrenaline is coursing through me, making my heart do flip-flops, the blood-taste in my mouth, fear covering my flesh w/sweat & stink... because I'm dreaming, & that to me is uncommonly wonderful in & of itself.

Funny thing - they say (whoever those anonymous "they" are) that you can't dream in color, you can't read, give directions, do math, smell, etc. I dream in Techno-color, w/full Dolby Surround Sound & complete w/Smellovision. I can read, tell directions better than I can in real life, count past my fingers, etc & so forth. But if it's something I really need to carry into the waking world, like someone's name or a place, poof! It's gone the minute my eyes flutter open. Or like my soldier life, I can't read nametags - they have a censoring blur over them, & no one around will say it for me... Pisses me off, too.

Oh, huh, a side-note in my life. I have a tiny defect at the top of my heart. A small flaw in the muscle... could be scarring, could be congenital, could be my devoured unborn twin, mwuhahahahah. A shadowy eye-shape crowning that chamber on the left. Only really visible when stress is applied, such as exercise.