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by doug | December 21st, 2008 @ 12:19 am
Last night I thought I was dying. It seemed as if it was happening just after I switched off the bedside lamp and lay my head on the pillow, but it may well have been on into the night. Time gets squirrely. I do not even know if it was an actual physical event or if I was waking from an unremembered night terror. Sometimes my heart will skip a beat, and that is what this felt like except it was greatly magnified. I couldn’t catch my breath. My head clouded. In an instant I was miles beneath the ocean’s surface. The world was just a pinprick glimmer in the darkness. The buzzing began — a wrenching numbness increasing in intensity inside my skull. And I panicked. To continue the nautical metaphor, I clumsily thrashed my way toward the surface, toward the world, toward life. Struggling. My mind was one feverish question: "is this it?". There was no grand replay of precious life events, no white light, no feeling but fear. I reached the surface and my head instantly cleared. My buzzing brain went silent. I lay under the bedsheets panting, relieved, wondering whether I was waking from a dream or had simply experienced another nocturnal palpitation. If that is the case, it was a prolonged and intense version. And, of course, for all I know it was all imaginary. A scary, remembered moment though, whatever it was. I’m glad I’m still around. Today was a nice day.
That was just the beginning of a night brimming with weirdness. The subsequent dreams were scrambled particles of my partitioned life. There was a school audit going on, although I was on vacation at the same time. My wife was there along with all my coworkers, my dog, my parents’ dogs, and at least one ex-girlfriend. The audits were unusually precarious, and for no good reason. There was just a feeling of dread over the whole thing. Then, there was an airplane buzzing a lake while we sat and lunched on the pier. The plane made two circuit loops where it would zoom down over our heads, skim the water, then rocket up into the sky again. The third circuit was fatal. It dove too low, tried to bank and pull up, and dipped its left wing into the lake. The wing was immediately torn off and propelled toward our position at the shoreline. The remainder of the airplane plunged into some marina buildings across the way while the wing bisected an automobile just tens of feet away from us. One of the dogs got loose in the woods behind the mountain cabin where we were staying. We sent helicopters up to look for the dog, which ended up falling off the mountain and finding its way back to the house. When we discovered him under a blanket with a large cut in his side and I was freaking out trying to figure the best way to get him to an animal hospital, my mother’s response (yes, my mother suddenly appeared) was "ah well, we’ll just take him to the vet in morning" as if it was a simple scratch. The next morning my wife and I were searching for something on the mountainside and found ourselves in the middle of a large mud patch in the middle of a rainstorm.
That’s all I’ve got. It is a jumbled mess, I know. The dream notebook has not worked as well as I had hoped. If I could write these things down while they are still fresh in my mind, it would likely be somewhat more coherent if not more logical. The number of lucid dreams has become more frequent over the past couple of weeks. Not sure what I am doing differently, but it definitely makes the nighttime more interesting. Also, it provides me with material when I am otherwise uninspired. I guess even death scares have their bright sides.
by doug | November 20th, 2008 @ 9:06 pm
Early this morning – around 3:30 a.m. – I used my bedside dream notebook for the first time. The results were surprising. I figured that, with just a few written hints, I would be able to recall most of a dream I would have otherwise lost somewhere between waking up and hitting the shower. As it turns out, though, I still do not have the depth of memory I was after. What I do know is this:
The basic dream-plot was that someone had murdered two of my ex-girlfriends (I know… psycho) and was trying to pin it on me. I was, apparently, on assignment in Los Angeles – a city I have never been to before. My boss had sent me there and was checking in on me periodically. Eventually he came to visit me and directed me to the various school buildings where I would be conducting audits. He also showed me to my hotel, which was ludicrously tall and almost entirely glass. The elevator was a hellish ride.
The girlfriends in question: one I remember clearly, the other I’m not sure if it was a fictitious girlfriend or one who actually existed in real, waking life. The second one murdered – the one based on a real live person – is the one I remember. I think there was some sort of church connection with both of them, though. I got a call – from my father, I think – telling me about it. I was in LA, all the way across the country at the time, but somehow I knew that someone was trying to pin the killings on me. Sadly (and disturbingly) I was more concerned about being blamed than I was about the actual death. I couldn’t get my wife to understand why I was so panicked about the whole thing.
What brutal murder – the second girl was killed with a screwdriver, if memory serves me right – and accounting have to do with one another I have no idea. The whole dream ended in a chase through the hotel and out onto the Los Angeles freeways. Barack Obama and a couple of new cabinet members also made an appearance, but I have no explanation as to that connection either.
The notebook scrawl reads something like this:
someone framing me for killing
ex girlfriends [name redacted] & ? fm church
also –> wife
california interstate & LA
Halloween?
obama whitehouse
in officials girlfriend
—————————-||—-
[boss’s name redacted]
ass frethsih LA hawling out
electrons bul digg glass
What do you want from me? I was half-asleep and writing in total darkness.
The process needs some practice, I admit, but the premise is still plenty entertaining, if nothing else.
by doug | November 14th, 2008 @ 11:19 pm
As it turns out, there are not that many thoughts to dump today – which I consider a good thing. The purpose of penning a weekly smattering of half-formed ideas was to give a forum to those subjects I had not had time to flesh out as stand-alone blog posts. So not feeling like I have unfleshed topics rolling around in my head must mean I have successfully purged via my daily postings. Works for me. But, since I did promise a dump, here are my random thoughts as of right now:
The reward for having to get up at the crack of dawn for the past two days to drive out to an audit in St. Clair County was that, after finishing up at the high school around 12:30 today, we got to go home. I spent the afternoon raking leaves into gigantic piles in the front and back yards. Tomorrow – the bagging begins.
And now I sit, relaxed, washed, rested, waiting for the wife to come home so we can go out to my favorite casual restaurant in Birmingham – Taj India. I think I could eat Indian cuisine every night of the week and never get tired of it. Tonight I want the curry to burn the eyes out of my skull.
There are what I hope are interesting blog posts to come – a new dream journal from this morning’s episode involving tea bags and old houses, a new recipe (with pictures) of a fish dish I am very excited about, a daily diary of what I will be doing with myself when my wife is in Phoenix all next week, more death, more religion, more poetry, more photography, and more politics.
Tomorrow is football day. Roll Tide!
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UPDATE: Taj was frigging amazing, as usual. Alas, my eyes are unscorched. Maybe next time.
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UPDATE: We just broke down and watched Little Miss Sunshine – the NetFlix movie we’ve had at our house for at least two months. I am happy to report that it was very funny. I feel bad that we waited so long to watch the damn thing. Now the fun part is seeing what the heck the next movie in our queue is.
I’m a consumer whore. Yay!
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UPDATE: I took the dog out a few minutes ago, and the wind and rain have combined to form some kind of unstoppable tree-de-leafing force. I am looking out the window. It is raining leaves. F#*k.
by doug | October 23rd, 2008 @ 7:16 pm
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, audit season has begun. Today I was out in the middle of nowhere – which is located, surprisingly, about 45 minutes by car from downtown Birmingham. The school was seriously outdated. The library, where we set up, was the size of a regular classroom, and the shelves were around the perimeter of the room only. Also, this one school encompassed all grades, K-12. There were two separate buildings though, and we were stationed in the 7th-12th grade section.
My first observation is that the level of a school district’s hick-ness is not necessarily a key indicator of how clean their bookkeeping is. The internal controls seemed to work well, especially compared to some of the other schools I’ve seen (some in much more affluent areas than this one). My conclusion: the accounting and secretarial staff were definitely more competent than I expected them to be, which means I need to check my pre-conceived assumptions at the door next time.
Secondly, returning to a school setting has a not-unexpected tendency to take me back to my own schoolboy days – in this case my old junior high and high school days. Not my favorite era, but there were glimmers of joy. Mostly, though, I remember not fitting in very well. I am still uncomfortable in social situations, and I tend to be hyper-focused on what people think of me. So you can imagine how much worse I was back then, when I had no conception of any coping skills and no perspective on the importance of popularity, etcetera, etcetera.
Well, nowadays, over a decade removed from the high school experience, I experience a weird mental transformation when I walk into one of these schools. I immediately become much more self-aware. If we are working in a space where students are coming and going (as they were today), I have a real need for them to think I’m cool. Retarded, huh?
Thirdly… well, I have to remind myself not to ogle the girls. Old habits die hard. What can I say?
by doug | October 22nd, 2008 @ 9:48 am
This will be a fairly transparent attempt to make up for not posting anything yesterday. I tried. The MSG in my thrice-warmed-over Chinese take-out finally caught up with me last night, and I ended up lounging, eyes bleary and half-closed, heart beating erratically, sleeping wife and dog and cat beside me, listlessly browsing through my RSS feeds for something, anything to blog about. I was unsuccessful. My apologies. It is disheartening to watch my readership plummet, Palin-favorability-rating-like, from a better-than-I-can-hope-for 37 to a meager 14. [insert wah-wah-wah sound here]
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Brief Interlude:
I just overheard a visitor in the lobby talking to the partners about the upcoming Presidential election. This redneck was spewing the “Barack Obama is not an American citizen” bullshit. Because I value my employment and the income it provides, I chose not to stride down the hall and take part in the conversation. But here, for the record, is the truth – provided now in the off chance that a visitor to this page might base their vote on the ravings of lying right-wing scumbag scaremongers.
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Anyway, before that ugly intrusion, my purpose with this post was to briefly reflect on a subject I have not yet expounded upon here – my job. Despite having to work with people who may disagree with me politically (see above), I truly love my job. Odd to say, since it seemed when I first chose this career path – accounting – that it would not be a good fit with the more artistic, free-thinking elements of my personality. It is a boring job, don’t get me wrong. It is repetitive and governed by strict regulations. I wear a tie and sit in my little fluorescent-lit office and fill spreadsheets and ledgers all day. People who know me well might find that hard to reconcile with the person who has, at times, been spontaneous to a fault, who adores the bohemian lifestyle, and whose interests range from literature and art to general aviation and bush flying to politics and philosophy. Why would I go into the business and finance field?
The answer is that this job grounds me. It is a vacation from my otherwise racing mind. In my personal life, my thoughts bound from one focus to another – and none are remotely related. Here I, by necessity, must follow the rules to the letter. I must focus on the task at hand. Quite the contrast, since I normally abhor the idea of rules and am generally juggling several pet projects at a time.
I did not arrange my life this way intentionally, but this is how it has turned out. It runs counter to all the choose-a-career-to-fit-your-personality (or your interests or strengths or whatever) advice that you hear in high school and college. This job is not who I am at all – and I have never felt more satisfied with my life than I do right at this moment.
Now, as autumn settles in, we are getting into my favorite part of this job – the auditing. The past few months have been more about taxes, report prep, and tying up loose ends. But now, after the close of the school systems’ financial year (the majority of my job involves auditing several local boards of education), it is finally time to get out of the office and do some fieldwork. While I am out at the various schools, I get a chance to meet and observe a great variety of personalities, which makes my work much more fascinating than you would think. I also get to be “the authority” – I am, in essence, checking their work; passing judgment on it, even. It’s a bit of a power trip – bookkeepers quaking in their boots at my approach.
So, what I hope to do in the coming months is to use this blog space as a journal in which to record and examine the quirks of the people I meet and the systems I visit (preserving client anonymity, of course). It will be a kind of sociology experiment – my observations from the audit trail (pun intended). I know – it should make for a riveting internet browsing experience.
[And my readership drops lower, and lower, and lower.]
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