Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance.

moby-dick of course

Lately I have been swimming a lot. It has been hot and so the community pool near my house is warm even in the middle of the night. The pool is closed but the fence is not very high and you can jump over it pretty easily. I have been a number of times now and there are usually at least a dozen other people there, which makes me feel better about the whole thing. A few weeks ago I saw one of my coworkers there. She was naked. She swam over to me with a cigarette in her mouth and a beer in her hand and I thought that was real cool. We talked for a little while and then she went back over to her friends. Her friends are jerks so I didn’t go with her.

Anyway: I’ll swim around with everyone for an hour and then I’ll get out. Usually I go off to Reed College after that.

Matt and I find a good place to park across the street from the campus and then we’ll walk around with crap wine and talk to people. We went last night. I guess it was freshmen orientation weekend or something. There were babyfaced kids walking all over the place and many of them approached us and asked us what it was like to go to Reed. I told them Matt was a senior and I was a junior and that we liked it all right. They asked if our ilk would pick on them for being new and we said we couldn’t account for everyone, but as for us, we would be friendly to them. And, I told them, if someone gives you grief, it just means they’re an asshole and you can dismiss these people.

There are many unlocked doors on college campuses. Sometimes you’ll find a building with a pool table or free food or something. We’ve found a lot of places like this. If you look like you know where you’re going, no one bothers you. Maybe no one cares anyway. I have never had anyone care or ever pretend to care that I was inside the building of a college I did not attend.

We found a good tree near the dorms and climbed to the top. We talked about how dumb it was that people seem to grow out of the things we had been doing. Which is to say: hopping fences to night swim, walking around college campuses, drinking crap wine, climbing trees, befriending strangers, and so on. These are things I have always enjoyed and I don’t see why I would ever stop feeling that way. It’s cheap and nice and often you end up in strange places with strange people.

Hell, dude. I just like walking around and talking to people. I like talking to people on land and in water. I like making friends. I guess I’m just going to keep doing those things forever. I don’t see why not. I don’t know what the hell else I would do.

Oh, god. My friend Jenn (cool hair / glasses / white shirt) sent this to me today. This is from a few years ago in Texas, at a bar called Cheer Up Charlie’s, which was a real cool place that no longer exists.

As for me: I was such a weird dumb stupid creep back then.

In my dream I was at a party in a 1960s ski lodge. There were a dozen of us in the sunken living room drinking champagne. For some reason I knew the house was mine. I also knew I was dreaming. I was walking around talking to everyone. One of my favorite things to do in a dream is to talk to people, because even though my mind has created them, I don’t know what they’re going to say to me. Sometimes they tell me things I didn’t know before. Sometimes they tell jokes and they’re good jokes. They’re better than any jokes I could possibly come up with.

Tonight I was near the couch talking to a girl named Hardy. She was thin and had blonde hair. Dante was running around and I picked him up. I said: “Dante is real. He’s here now, in this dream, but he’ll be waiting for me back in the real world when I wake up.”

Hardy made a face and said: “What do you mean by wake up?

“I’m dreaming right now. I dreamed all this up. I dreamed you up, too. But maybe I didn’t. Or maybe you’re my dream, and I’m your dream too. You could be out there dreaming me right now. Maybe we met here in this dream.”

“I still don’t understand.”

I handed Dante to Hardy and told her I had to wake my father and my sister. They were napping on the second floor.

I went upstairs and found my father asleep in the master bedroom. I shook him and he woke up. He was in his mid-forties. He was wearing overalls. I told him he should come down to the party and he said he would. We walked across the hall to my little sister’s room and woke her up too. She was six or seven years old. My dad was talking to her and I was looking at the pictures on her walls. There were pictures of all of us. There were pictures of people I hadn’t seen in a long time, and maybe would never see again.

My dad and my sister said they were going to get ready for the party and so I went back downstairs. There were only a few people left. I figured most everyone had gone home and it made me sad. I couldn’t find Hardy. Dante was still racing around the house.

I thought about my greatest fear in dreams, which is that when I leave the room the people who were in there would disappear. I thought about how difficult it was for my brain to continue to generate a fictional universe, especially when I was aware that I was dreaming. Every time I opened a door or turned a corner, my brain had to create what came next. Sometimes I would revisit a room I had already been in and the room had changed into a different room. My brain had forgotten what the original room looked like. And worst of all, the people I had created would look slightly different. Their faces would have changed. Sometimes they were different people altogether. This is always a huge bummer.

I didn’t recognize anyone at the party anymore. They were different people. I didn’t like them as much and they didn’t seem to like me. They ignored me and went on talking.

I grabbed Dante and ran back upstairs. My dad and my sister were brushing their teeth in the bathroom. I told them we should just stay upstairs. The party was over and there was no use being around those people anymore. I sat on the edge of the sink holding Dante and we talked until I woke up.