☯
It happens just about every time something gets me to thinking about what use is dreaming. In the recent past there has been a Science:Now documentary on PBS about dreams. It shows the results of lots of scientific research, and all that jazz, but it's really another government-sponsored plea for the youth of America to aim their goals toward being the government's fool for their entire life. Worse fates than being the government's dupe can happen. They could drop the baby talk...
It was my deliberate attempt to influence my dreamtime during my last vestiges of consciousness. That's what the program suggested. To state the direction you want your dream to go just previous to sleep out loud. Unfortunately, that interfered with my going to sleep so much that the dreamtime only consciously appeared in bits and snatches. I got up around 4:30 in the morning and puttered around. I simply couldn't let go of my ongoing in order "to sleep, perchance to dream".
Part of the problem with my sleeping last night was that the humidity is soaring. The temperature doesn't have to be all that high to sweat. It's like there is so much water in the air around me that my skin can't breathe. My body sticks to the sheets when I roll over from one side to the other. Getting temporarily stuck to the bed like that has it's own implications that appears to require conscious intervention to resolve.
The resolution for me always seems to be to somehow wake up and realize I'm laying in my own sticky bed in my own humid house, and instead of being eaten by monsters (like I was just dreaming), that I'm only stuck in the sheets, and need to relax.
It's all happening because I am is a pathetic miser who is too cheap to keep the air-conditioner running so it can sleep soundly and participate in my dreams as if it's the only integrating way to fly.
There is another reason I turned my new air-conditioner off (and with a remote now, don't you know?) besides snugly lying in bed scoffing at the little people who don't have air conditioning. The other reason was that my new air-conditioner, just like the old air-conditioner it replaced, is loud. I can barely turn the volume up on my TV to hear it while the A/C is electrified.
It works. If I keep it running, the new air-conditioner keeps the room cool. The infernal noise it makes while it's keeping the room cool obviates all the sounds that occur outside the room it keeps cool. This mechanical sound buffer that isolates me from the living world around me, makes me a man of constant sorrow.
To me, not hearing the nature sounds of my immediate environment is stressful. For years I slept out in it with no place to call home, temporarily, and it was as if I was a part of the nature and it's sounds instead of being insulated from it by modern conveniences. I was skinny then. Ready to bolt at the sound of a trod-upon stick breaking. Air-conditioners have fattened me up, and I sleep behind locked doors. What need nature? I'm only threatened by abstractions.
To me, not hearing the nature sounds of my immediate environment is stressful. For years I slept out in it with no place to call home, temporarily, and it was as if I was a part of the nature and it's sounds instead of being insulated from it by modern conveniences. I was skinny then. Ready to bolt at the sound of a trod-upon stick breaking. Air-conditioners have fattened me up, and I sleep behind locked doors. What need nature? I'm only threatened by abstractions.
It wasn't long after I got up the second time that I turned the TV on in order to catch the latest weather reports. The reason I turned the air-conditioner off was to be able to hear the sounds of rain and thunder. We were finally supposed to get some real, measurable rainfall such that when it sunk in it would meet the moisture level of the ground.
The TV program that was already playing when I booted the set up was about Key West, Florida. As soon as I recognized the sights and sounds, even over the TV, I was entranced. I lived there off and on for seven years, and spent the winter there as a homeless bum for several other years. I recognized all the images shown as if it were merely yesterday. It wasn't yesterday, but forty years ago. I was in my early thirties, and not even a kid back then.
What impressed me about this documentary was that it was about the efforts of the federal Secretary of the Interior during the Great Depression took a personal interest in Key West's fate, and intervened to make it a tropical resort rather than a hippie-of-that-day hangout.
I'm not exactly a history buff, but formerly, I thought I had a vague idea of what had gone on in Key West during the Depression. I was wrong. I haven't realized until watching this documentary, just how deeply involved the federal government was in trying to make Key West a Caribbean resort. Like Cuba, but rather, a "mainland equivalent of Bermuda".
It's a little embarrassing to sit here all these years later and realize that I went for what the government promoted line, hook, and sinker. I was there when their efforts to make Key West a tropical resort finally came to fruition. It did that though, probably because the government left the island, and abandoned it to the drifters, grifters, and queers. I guess I am is a little bit of all those types, but mostly drifty.
I became aware of Key West by being sent there by the Navy to study how to maintain torpedo rockets. The school lasted less than six months, but I became intrigued with this "island in the sun" long after I got out of the Navy. I had traveled to or through most of the places in the continental United States except for Florida. For some reason I only went when I did under orders from the Navy.
One of the main reasons Key West captivated me after I got out of the Navy was that I could drive or hitch-hike there from anywhere in North America. All I had to do (usually by hitch-hiking) to be warm all winter without an inside place to be. Winter in the northern climes is no time to be a bum. It did my heart good to know of a warm place to be I could retreat to and survive by begging spare change. Later, I did better by reading palms.
All that romanticism happened in "the good ol' days" when Key West was just another military town where the huge U.S. Navy Station was the largest employer of the residents there. The Navy took over Key West during World War Two to guard the Florida Straits, and that pretty much ended the Department of Interior's efforts to make Key West a tropical resort. After the war and the influx of Defense money, things got funky. Key West went back to being poor as a church mouse. I liked it that way. I was just another bum living among people who were not much better off than me. For a long time I slept in a deserted mansion with the other bums. The natives were not restless.
Many, if not most of the commercial buildings on Duval Street, the whole time I was there, were closed for lack of business. Most of the bars located at the lower end of Duval Street stayed in business because of the shrimping trade. The various shrimp boat crews would declare their favorite bar as their own, and frequently pay for everybody's drinks who came to the bar while they were in town.
Some "bars" were nothing less than whore houses, and all the cops were on the take. Cheap, if you had any sense, pure evil if you didn't. I seem to have always had good sense around cops, dirty or no. What possible difference could their morals make to a bum on the street?
I don't know the particulars. I wasn't around when it happened. I ended up marrying a woman I met there and we had a couple of children together. She was a school teacher and had a secure job, but bringing home the bacon wasn't so easy for me in a tourist economy. I didn't feel manly in marriage in Key West, and yet my family expected it of me.
My wife was the boss because she had a good job. She came to Key West to take that job. She liked being there. For her, it was just gravy. Contrarily, I had returned to Key West over and over in order to be a bum. I came there to continue to live off wit and grit like I had everywhere else.
My fate was sealed in Key West by my personal history and my lackadaisical reputation for being drifty and comfortable while yielding to power. It is still a small town with an island mentality. Machismo rules the roost there. Arrogance or confrontation can lead to becoming shark bait one night in the oceans surrounding Key West. Nobody who knew me there believed me as a husband and father. No blame.
A father and a husband gotta show some gumption and be able to hustle. I made my bed a long time ago before any of these people became a part of my life. I got my own rules of conscience that were deliberately designed to give me lots of options and wiggle room. Unfortunately, the domestic lifestyle of married-with-children is not what I'm here for this time.
☯
