Tuesday, August 3, 2021

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

  On hot summer nights I slept in the yard on a lawn chair. That was when I was eight or nine. One night in the lawn chair I had a dream. A UFO came to rescue me in the middle of the night; I had been left on the earth by mistake and they had come to take me home. They left without me but It felt so real I’ve never forgotten. Over seventy years later that memory is still fixed, real or imagined, it is part of my life story. 
For decades I’ve slept straight through without interruption, waking up recharged like my iPhone. But everything changes so I shouldn’t be surprised. Nowadays, dreams and getting up to pee are the norm. They say (whoever they are) that any lawyer who defends himself in court has a fool for a client. The same said (I would think) for anyone who tries to interpret their own dreams, as if they had access to the ‘what it means’ file. If there is a message or a lesson there it would be, don’t take yourself too seriously. We learn by trial and error, the brain does not have an owners manual. The fact that I remember the dream is probably just a speed bump on the memory disc and certainly not a riddle to be solved. 
With run-amok Conspiracy Theory at every turn, the urge here is to risk being the ‘fool’ thing with another pass at my UFO dream. By their nature, conspiracy theories more than suggest, they dictate that  the greater the odds against any one thing, the more compelling the argument to believe it. Actually, I believe that disciples of conspiracy (feel like) they gain a leg up on experts who have made a career of separating fact from fiction. If you know better than the experts, you must be brilliant and you didn’t need to waste ten years on a PhD. If one out of a hundred proves true then you have proved your point, like a baseball player with a batting average of .001. Out of a thousand times at bat he finally got a hit, proof that he can hit MLB pitching. So I’m flip-flopping, not going with the summer night dream. Still, the dream part was real, it takes me (makes me think about) places and invites ideas I never would have imagined without it. 
Every time I dive down the (self analysis) rabbit hole it just reaffirms what I came away with the first time. I am in a fragile, Love/Hurt relationship with my own kind (Humanity). I am really disappointed with Homo sapiens, the species. For a while I thought is was a mild case of misanthropy (love/hate) but the animosity has never been there. Yes I love people in the same way you love the home team when they lose, even when they lose poorly. But that doesn’t ease the disappointment (the hurt) of the ugly duckling disconnect. Truth is you were right to begin with, we are ugly ducks and all the swan talk is just a lot of denial and vain ego. We are animals with a remarkable brain, hard to control (the brain) but remarkable none the less. Is that what the UFO dream was all about? Maybe I was supposed to go to another world where human emotion informs but it is reason that prevails. Wouldn’t that be something!
I’ve been told that I am overreacting. Sure people do stupid things but we are the captains of our own destiny (Right!). With good judgment and good decisions life is good. Still, you can’t know if the judgment and decision that felt so good at the time were all that good. You have to wait for the judges score you. You can always trust what you were taught (good enough for good old dad) but success and failure are both peopled by folks who went with what they learned. Can you believe: The 30 yr-old guy who went to a Covid-19 party to prove it was a hoax and caught the virus. Just before he died (dead) he told his doctor, Jan Appleby at San Antonio Methodist Hospital “I think I made a mistake.” I’m afraid that ‘Free Will/Destiny’ thing is more Swan/Ugly Duck propaganda. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me, they would have to be crazy. But they were not left behind on a planet full of ugly ducks. They were already here.



No comments:

Post a Comment