Loosely related

Cities on the Hill
In a certain sense I dream a lot--I'm the kind of person who can get a decent REM sleep going in an hour's nap. But a lot of my dreams barely scratch the surface of my unconscious. Seriously, I had a dream the other night about updating the dates on my syllabus at Erstwhile Teaching College, then had to wake up at 4 a.m. to remind myself that it's only June and I'm not even teaching that class in the fall. Fun stuff, but not exactly the kind of thing where one needs to call in the Freudians. When I have actual dreams (this strikes me as a stupid construction, but go with me), they are frequently about travel--I have entire genres of recurring dreams about airplanes (usually, though, with weird routes like going from JFK to LaGuardia), about subway/train travel (possibly one of the reasons I find the real-life MTA so godawfully depressing by comparison), and so on. Mostly, though, I dream about the margin areas we never get to--almost Brigadoon-like places always on the outskirts of the possible, where apartment buildings give way to single family homes and where the landscaping gets better. And often I find myself on hillsides, where the streets are kind of terraced into cliffs. The real-life place that comes to mind as a source for some of this is where my college boyfriend grew up in Palos Verdes, California, but I don't dream about California so much. There are several New Yorks that function this way, but also other places, ones that are less easily placeable. Sometimes these are small hill-dwelling communities where you can't even get cars there. Often there are forests. Last week I felt like I was one the outskirts of some German town. And last night it was Sydney--where I've never been, though Australia figures in my dreams a lot too (incidentally, that's the one element in all this that does have at least a rough correlative that I can trace)--and we could look down and see the Opera House. It was all very green--so many of my cityscapes, my cities on the hills, are heavy on the foliage.

I don't know why I'm relating this right now; possibly it's a placeholder for something I haven't figured out yet; it's been sort of existing in my head all morning.

The Black Box
I've been feeling like I need to start abstracting myself from the descriptions of my own psychotic / depressive episodes. Suffice it to say it was a difficult weekend--in some ways darker than anything I've experienced in years, for not-entirely discernable reasons, which only makes things worse. Also making things worse was the fact that I didn't get an air conditioner until Monday (a story in itself that I won't relate here, in part because I'm not sure it makes me look all that good) and that my not-getting an air conditioner until Monday was part of a longer chain of events that started off the general panic that led to the breakdown. Perhaps the less said about that, the better. I'm trying to remain functional and non-alienating, also trying to keep up the being-disciplined thing--especially while The Poet is out of town. (For about two weeks, but given the way it intersects with our schedule of seeing each other, it's effectively three for me.) I have been to the gym twice this week, which is as many times as I went to the gym last week and today is only Wednesday.

When I'm too depressed or tired to work lately, I've been watching St Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues. They're actually kind of fascinating--if I didn't have to think about things like Tennyson and live burial and the sublime and all that, it would be fun to write up some of my longer meditations, especially comparing the first season of St Elsewhere to that of Grey's Anatomy, and so on. But I have to think about all those other things, so I'll just make the incredibly shallow comment that, at least as far as the first season of Hill Street Blues goes, Daniel Travanti is incredibly hot. (He's about 40 in these episodes--perfect for me, actually.) I mean, damn. He actually reminds me a bit of E., who I'm allegedly meeting for drinks next week.

This isn't, of course, what the black box would tell us if we played it back after the crash. I can't bring myself to listen to it--better, perhaps, to find the rest of this in the rubble.

Didn't I read this in a New Yorker fiction piece?
"I'm loyal to the people I sleep with, baby, I'm so loyal, I'll always be loyal to you, you have to know that, okay?"

On Monday morning, he didn't remember calling me for the second time on Sunday night. I had predicted that it would be so, in the course of the conversation he doesn't remember, around the point in the conversation when his slurring changed from, "I could really love you, you know that?" to "I love you, baby, do you love me?" And somewhere along the line when I was telling him that I didn't, he fell asleep and I could hear him snoring until he dropped the phone. And I decided that at least I couldn't stay mad about his having forgotten he'd had plans with the people he was with until after he'd made plans with me that he had to cancel.

But still, all this caring, suddenly. "You're having sex with someone who makes you happy," said my occasionally quite clearheaded friend yesterday, over happy hour frozen margaritas, and yes, but...no, this is what I should try to keep in my head.

But I told him I needed to know why he does what he does. He manages to be so many different things--some of them, clearly, more publicly than others. I told him (knowing he wouldn't remember) that I can't love him until I know why he takes on so much. Sometimes it's hard not to see the abyss every time I blink.

"I've been staying out drinking in late night establishments telling strangers personal things..." (Undedicated: Regina Spektor's "Summer in the City")



As she says somewhere in here: "Don't get me wrong dear, in general I'm doing quite fine."