Which Is Where We Are Now

Back at Pizza Hut.

I’m helping out with a lady doing prep work. In my helping, I disturb some personal items she had laying on the table. I move on to the cut table.

This theme of helping only to be overwhelmed and hurting the people I try to help repeats a number of times; I forget the details.

At the cut table, the pizzas are stacking up at the oven belt’s end. I’m not cutting them fast enough. Nazer is there, with his professional no-nonsense, completely above the game and in control.

Then, dairy items start protruding out. A whole long rack of milk bottles, cakes, breads stand in a cool refrigerated room which was pushing out a crowd of molten pizza a second ago. It takes some time for me to investigate the items and to grasp the totality of the change.

I’m in the library. I look for something to checkout; eventually, I decide against checking out anything.

As I leave and turn a corner, I see two teenagers, a white and black boy, steal books from behind the librarians as they help patrons checkout their books. The stealing is going inside to outside, back and forth; it’s all visible because the library has lots of glass in their walls.

Why steal from a public library??

Should I call the police? Yes. I call the police.

They go up the street. I chase after them. A policeman drives up; he knows I made the call.

Two older guys — thin, white, intelligent, college-age men — are walking around the park where the land is level. The are the brains behind the operation. Also involved are a group of small children, innocents.

I confront the black kid. He pulls out a gun. Somehow I manage to get the gun away from him. It turns out the gun is just a bee-bee gun.

Cut to in the school room, perhaps in a church. I talk about the stealing to the students, who are children of various ages.

I explain the two men arraigned it as a social protest of some sort. As I say this, I’m reminded of my own youthful demonstrations and I feel a pang of embarrassed regret at myself.

The black and white kid are in the class! It’s a strange, subtle confrontation with them here.

It’s hard to keep the students’ attentions; so, as much I want to explain the details completely, I try to wrap it up to preserve some semblance of effective communication.

I go to an adjacent interior room to get some object. I find something like a white orb in a small cubby area; I turn off the lights. Wait, there are teachers there, especially an older black lady. Lights back on.

I wake up thinking the Arthurian legend about the sword in the stone is referring to one’s true, scrawny self calling the shots, despite the seeming inappropriateness.

I’m flying in a fighter jet, trying to shoot down the enemy planes.

It’s hard going. I get closer and closer to the ground — hard to pull up.

Eventually, I quit.

Cut to a lady in a red pickup truck talking into a CB transponder: “What am I going to do with these CDs?” she asks.

Passing and getting open, all the way to the goal and getting pushed out.

Still, I huff it back towards midfield. Why?

Just then a forward approaches; I’m now onside; he passes to me; I pass back; I’m open for a pass to take the shot.

I’m hanging out after school with my junior high algebra teacher. It’s a vaguely flirting conversation we have.

I’m working on an test question, an essay question. The page is labeled 10/10 for page 10 of 10. I take the whole hour of our time to work on the essay.

Now the regular class fills in; the classroom is my high school physics classroom, though the subject is humanities.

Students fill in the class. They are completely at ease. They all took the test at home: not just page 10, but pages 1 through 9.

I beg to do the entire test; my classmates laugh.

I receive pages 1 through 9. There are multiple choice questions with unfamiliar diagrams. The essay was tough going; this is even worse: I can’t wrestle down these multiple choice questions.

The teacher leaves momentarily and the students, without fear and in casual progress, exchange tests, improving each others answers.

A girl at the back of the room is so bored she has a relaxed spontaneous orgasm.

In an attempt to concentrate better, I move up to the front of the class on the right-hand side, but it’s no use. Frustrated, I stand up and approach the teachers desk. In an honest confession I quit the test and turn it in.

After this dream, two other dreams follow with the same tension and then quiting of a test or trial; I forget the dramatic contents.

I walk into my professor’s large office. My professor is my therapist, but not in body for she is older and with small frame. We sit at a large cherry desk, discussing a paper of mine. The paper is all marked up. There are lines through many a sentence; its pock-marked with comments. The paper is due more work.

I talk about the paper: I’m nervous; I feel there much to redeem in it. I go over some of the points. Something about how even Goethe did some soldiering in youth.

Abruptly, she says, “I want to talk about your thesis: heritage.”

I’m stunned, first at being cut off from my earnest discussion, then from the word heritage, for I don’t take it’s import.  The thesis she mentions refers not to the current paper, but to a paper for the class finale.

She expounds on heritage: “Patterns passed down generation after generation, until the pattern is broken.”

I look around; there are two young students — lovers — waiting for their turn with the professor.

PS: A day or two later, in happenstance, decided to listen to The Way of All Flesh, whose main thesis was on the inheritance of disposition.

I’m in a bar. Sublime is singing, belting out songs. He is an Italian opera singer, looks like Inigo Montoya.

He is dejected. He says he has nothing left.

“I bet you have something left” I say.

I walk home, as if walking home after school in the comfort of fall. My therapist is just across the road walking in the same direction. I realize I’m bumping into her because I hung around at the bar and delayed my regular departure time.

It starts to snow; it’s a happy snow.

I start to float, laughing.

I go higher and higher. At first it was a fun thrill of levitation; now, I speed up and move through the air with speed, whisked through the air by unseen angels.

I land softly on the large branch of a tree and fall onto the street of a quiet suburb.

I have a iPad like device; I try to run a maps app; the screen flicks, revealing that it’s a Microsoft offering. I see in some vision or video a way to remote into another computer and use maps in a machine within a machine, but my dislike for the original operating system is too great and I throw out my device entirely.

A little boy across the street says hello.