Welcome to My Nightmares. Lost, Loster, and Really Damn Lost. Let Me Carry that for You. The Thick Red Line. Sad Eyed Darwin. I Get Blasphemous.

--Last night, my dreams were nightmares and my nightmares were socially oriented:

There is in one the blond girl sharing a slow seduction with me who suddenly confesses that she is forty and suddenly looks it

My friend DG asking me to put the chain back on his bike even though I’m wearing a white dress shirt

Certain exs standing in a circle around me like pretty witches shaking their fingers and telling me I’d been warned

The girl I had dinner with last night laughing uncontrollably at the idea that sometimes I bathe instead of shower.

--Where are you JH, LK, RS?

Where are the women you were? And where is that me that was then and with you? Can we not go backwards? I'm not asking for a time traveler's immortality. I just want my memories validated.

I see in a rear view mirror in a bad dream a thin crack opening in the flesh of my cheekbone.

Can’t you fix that?
Won’t you find me?

--I compare the pros and cons of being single with the pros and cons of being bound to some girl; I make this comparison to determine which life is good.

What I discover after making the lists and thinking over them is that no life is good.

--We always watch the hole.

We always think about not what we have, but what we don’t.

--In that dream with the bicycle chain, everybody, all my friends, gather round. They are carrying things but don’t want them, or least not to carry them. They load them up in my arms, wrapped boxes, mostly, either gifts they have received or gifts they intend to give, though not to one like me. And I’m bitching because my shirt has got chain grease on it and because I don’t really want to carry the packages.

And the friends, they go on ahead, unburdened and laughing.

--This country divided. Where is the middle ground? Where is the gray?
Michael Moore on one side and Rush Limbaugh on the other, with their gangs of you-are- with-us-or-against-us-minded people.

It reminds me of when I lived in Beirut. Over there, I argued with simple minded people all the time about their simple minded misconceptions of the United States.

Over here I argue with simple minded people about their simple minded misconceptions of the Middle East.

And in both places I argued with people about their simple minded narrowly defined visions of their own countries.

This desire to see good and evil, to make sense of chaos by choosing the easiest answers. Nationalismpatriotismfanatacism…

--Just because he was right doesn’t mean Darwin wasn’t sad about what he learned concerning the nature of life on this planet.

--I think how odd it is that professors I know come down on Christian kids who reference Christianity in papers but that these same professors would never dream of coming down on a Native American student who referenced tribal origin of the Earth stories.

None of them should be referencing faith in a paper, or all of them should be allowed.

If one faith is sacred, every faith is sacred.

--It’s all mythology to me.

If there is a God, God is shattered.

This is not God’s world.

Or maybe God is running through the universe toward planetearth the way a parent who has suddenly sensed something wrong runs toward the back yard, wondering if the child has gotten too close to the swimming pool, feeling scared and angry and ready, when he or she finally arrives, to scoop up said child and smother it in benevolence.

If that’s true: God, hurry would you.

--Something a girl said to me recently, “You’ve got to see this movie. It’s a great movie. There’s a woman in there that reminds me of me.”