I wasn't lost. I was looking for a hat. True, I looked for the hat in an industrial complex that had a lot of greasy machines puffing away at producing stuff. I needed the hat to keep from getting some sort of demerits for not toeing the line. What a drag, man. My dream life is truly weird and a little scary. The fact that I wasn't lost in this morning's dream seems encourage. I can't imagine why it was so important to me not to get a demerit. Just before I woke up I found myself borrowing a greasy baseball cap from a rack near these three guys who were so busy working at whatever they were doing, that they barely acknowledged my presence.
It's supposed to be fairly warm for the next week starting today. I've been waiting for this warmer weather to arrive. I went to bed early last night to hurry it up. The weather might not have been the only reason I went to bed early. Yesterday was the first complete day I have used my left hand to operate my computer mouse. It was not business as usual.
Toward the end of the day I wasn't always reaching for the mouse automatically with my right hand first, but most of the day I was. When I remembered that I had changed everything around including the mouse buttons, then I had to switch gears and reach for it with my left hand. Such made me confused for a while, and I had to get used to making the change without letting it worry me. It might take a few more days. I get a bit of a tension headache as the day wears on.
This is not the first or only time I've resorted to using my left hand. I've never had to do it because my right hand was indisposed by some accident or medical problem. I was mostly curious to find out if I had been forced to change to my right hand when I was learning to write as a kid.
To facilitate this experiment I used to copy the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching with my left hand. I did this while I was working as a quality control engineer over at Fort Bragg. The way the deal was set up is that i took some certification tests offered by the Army Corps of Engineers and passed them pretty easy. I was supposed to have a degree in mechanical engineering, but they let me use my work experience in it's stead. Then, I got hired by the prime contractor for a building project because their contract with the Corp of Engineers required them to hire us.
It was a real sweet setup if you had the right personality. It was an in betweener job. The contractor had to pay me, but they had to sign a paper that stated they didn't have any control over my decisions about quality control. The Corp of Engineers couldn't tell me what to do because they didn't pay me, and I knew too much for them to fire me.
I sat around in my office for hours copying the I Ching with my left hand, and eventually, I copied with both hands simultaneously writing from right to left with my left hand, and as I normally would with my right hand. I really wasn't cheating anybody by doing this because the job had a lot of slack time when I didn't need to check up on what the mechanical sub-contractor was doing.
After a couple of years of this I came to allow that I never had been left-handed. I did, as you might expect, become much more facile with using my left hand to do tedious tasks, but never as easily or 'handily' as with my right hand. The practice I did in the past has helped me use the mouse probably quicker than I might have without having done it before. It only slowed my Hearts game down by about 30 seconds.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
