Back side of dreamtime

That was a lot of Grenada, wasn't it?

OK; no more Grenada. I promise.

Instead, I'm going to tell you a story.

It's a funny story.

At least I think it's funny, and it's my blog so, there you go...but, I should warn you first; it's a funny SEX story.

So be warned; there are things in here that are not wholesome for impressionable young children. Or naive adults. Or people who are shocked by people talking about carnal matters. Or anyone shocked by nudity, because there's some nudity, too.

Are we clear on all of this?

Good.

Kids all out of the room?

Aunt Sally safely immersed in that Golden Girls re-run?

Alright, then.

First, let me say that I think I am a very lucky man.

I have a bride who I not only like as a person and cherish as a companion but desire as a woman.

I find her delightful and delight in her. For me she walks in beauty like the night; all that's best in dark and bright meets in her aspect and her eyes; thus mellowed to that tender light that Heaven to day denies.

One pleasant side-effect of this is that occasionally I have lovely dreams in which she and I are the principals.

Often these are merely diversions; we revisit places we visited in the light of day, or reenact things we did while waking.

Occasionally, these dreams are more...intimate.

But...and I hope nobody reading is disappointed when I confess this...they wouldn't make very good Penthouse-letter-reading.

(Which reminds me; has anyone even seen a "Penthouse" lately?

Remember when those glossy stroke books were the ultimate in smut, the Nirvana of porn, the K2 of wankerdom? Remember going into...well, almost anywhere there were magazines and seeing them and Playboy and the other heavy-bond paper porno periodicals?

Seen them lately? Yeah, me neither.

Was there anything that the Internet killed deader than those glossy porno rags? If there is I can't think of it.

Sorry. Lost my thread there for a moment.)

Anyway...even in my erotic dreams I'm afraid I'm just hopelessly, boringly conventional.

They are usually nothing more daring than boringly wholesome hetero sorts of dreams, the Hallmark Channel of salacious imagination. Making love to my wife on a white sand beach, romantic trysts before a roaring fire, sex under the Christmas tree (without the annoying pine needles poking me in the ass)...you get the idea.

Nice. But...well, sorta vanilla, right?

No frantic kinks, no forbidden pleasures; no S&M, no sweaty pileups, no her dressing up like Mrs. Claus and swinging from the chandelier with four stalwart lechers pulling at her legs.

Nope. Just plain old boring romantic-ish married sex.

That's just jake with me, but it doesn't make for a thrilling blog post read, now, does it?

But...

About a week ago I had a dream.

It started off fairly typically; the two of us lounging in a huge white bed in this enormous tropical-sort of room; long white bedcurtains, huge windows with venetian blinds screening out the blazing white sunlight.

On the silky sheets my bride's pale skin glowed with the sort of luminosity you only see in photographs or in dreams; her whole body seemed to radiate a sort of lush intensity, a warm and fecund sheen that promised all manner of lubricious delights, as did her slantendicular smile below her lowered lids.

In my mind she looked at me and ran her palms down her thighs in a gesture of pure invitation.

So far, so good - and so far, so standard.

So I was dream-shocked when my dream-bride rolled onto her side, loured at me, and murmured in her best throaty dream-voice:

"I want you to make love to my ass..."

Whoa.

Look. I understand myself as well as I hope I possibly can. And - understanding that - I understand that I will take whatever licentious liberties I am offered.

(We're like that, men, most of us, I'm afraid...)

Like most men, though, I won't take what is not offered.

And so far as my bride is concerned - my real bride, my waking-hours bride - that particular form of congress is most surely not offered.

No fooling around back there. That's a one-way street. No trespassing. Do not enter.

Mi novia finds nothing enticing about the notion of having someone poking about the distal end of her digestive tract.

And that has always applied to my dream-wife as well. We don't cavort inside my head in ways we don't in real life - including that way.

At least, until the other night's dream.

But...even in my dream I couldn't really buy this sudden wifely desire for the entry into the Forbidden Zone. Dream-me was suddenly as still as the bunny when the hawk passes overhead; every nerve-ending jangling with the sense of imminent danger.

"Are you sure about this..?" I asked, motionless.

In answer my dream-bride writhed in what can only be described as an utterly shameless fashion. "Oh, yessss..." she moaned, "I want it. I need it."

I just sat there staring.

"You're kidding me." I said, finally.

"You really want me to have anal sex with you. Butt sex. Up the ol' dirt road. Drive the Hershey Highway. Bloop you up the doody chute. You're one hundred percent dead solid no-kidding abso-lutely sure you want this?"

My dream-spouse responded by rolling onto her elbows and knees into a position that in the higher primates would be called "presenting".

The sane part of my dream-brain was shrieking like an air raid siren (Warning! Warning! Danger, Doctor Smith, danger! Warning!) but my little dream-head was doing most of the thinking by this time and that thinking was "Well, OK then...".

I got to my knees and shuffled across the sheets. "You're absolutely sure you want this?" I said as I reached for the delicious fundament waggling before me.

In return I received a lascivious moan and a tremor-inducing whole-body wriggle.

Well.

Okay then.

I leaned forward in anticipation, and...

...with the blinding speed and vicious intensity of a striking gaboon viper my inamorata whipped around and instead of the view of her enticing nether regions I was confronted with a face of righteous wrath and an accusatory finger aimed directly at my nose.

"You were gonna fuck me up the butt, weren't you?!" snarled my dream-lover.

"Weren't you!?!"

"A-HA! You WERE!" my dream-bride crowed, pushing me over backwards with an extended palm and climbing decisively off the big round bed.

"And you know I don't go for that stuff, too."

"You...you...pervert!"

And with that she wrapped the robe that appeared in her hands around her body, wagged her finger at me one last time and stalked away, her bare heels beating out a martial rhythm on the shining wood floor.

I lay there dreaming aimlessly a long, long time.

Until my night-wanderings transmuted into something about cleaning the kitchen counters and unloading the dishwasher.

Burnt Offering

Last night I had a dream.

-- --

The sky was low and gray; it should have been late February or, as it is now, early March when Oregon wears all the colors of the rainbow from steel gray through dark gray to gray-green.

Though the rain had stopped the mournful firs were still dripping from the drizzle that had ended in promise of more rain to come.

Entropy had split the little group that was leaving the cemetary, dividing into ones and threes, talking quietly among themselves as they looked to find their cars for the wet ride home.

But the young woman who remained was still and silent, looking down at the wet grass.She was of a very middling sort; medium height, medium build, the hair escaping her dark headband a sort of midtone brown, her eyes a quiet hazel. Her face in repose was an unremarkable sort of oval, pointed chin small, brow smooth, her best feature that clear gaze now hooded with thought.

But when she spoke her voice was anything but midrange, instead, a startlingly deep contralto that cut through the distant street noise with a hint of brass.

"When I was a girl I never understood what you meant." she said to the ground before her feet. "And then when I grew up I didn't want to hear about it." She reached into her pocket as she continued. "But when you got sick last spring I remembered what you'd asked for. So. Here."

She bent a knee and laid the shallow brass bowl down next to the ash-spot on the grass. And, still genuflecting, placed several small items in the bowl; a spring of holly, and one of juniper, and four short hair-clippings.

"That's from Mom, and Shea, and one from me. And that sad little one is yours, what you had left after the chemo. It was the best I could do."

She removed a small vial from the same pocket and poured the contents into the bowl. Then struck a match and dropped it into the oil, which flared up in a smoke twining with the scents of juniper and hollyberry mixed with the acrid reek of human hair."You did the best you could, too. I miss you already, Dad. Thanks. Goodbye."

And my daughter Bryn straightened up and waited for the flame to burn down to ash.

And nodded her head once and walked away into the misting rain.

-- --

Of course, in life my oldest daughter never lived to burn a momento mori for me; instead ten years ago today I held her tiny body and felt her heart run ticking down and stop. Felt her little arms and legs grow cold. Held her and hugged her and wept over her.

And when I think of that day now, I can only weep again and remember why Heroditus said that only a great fool desires war more than peace, for in peace sons bury their fathers, while in war fathers bury their sons.

I cannot describe the loss of your child,except to say that there is as yet no nepenthe for fathers who bury their daughters.

꿈꾸는 무슨이 오더라도 좋다

I am the last one awake and the only sounds in the little house in North Portland are the mechanical whirr of the laptop fan and, rather irkingly, the faint crunching noise the cable TV receiver makes. I have no idea why; there doesn't seem to be a need for anything mechanical within a cable TV receiver to make crunching noises.

But when you turn the television off and leave the cable on, the cable tuner makes this odd crunching noise.

I really wanted to say something to you tonight. I wanted to charm, or beguile, or rant. I wanted to write something that you'd read tomorrow morning - assuming anyone really DOES read this damn thing outside the small group of friends that meets here, and you know who you are - and spend the remainder of the day recalling at odd moments and turning over in your mind like a smooth-washed pebble in your hand because of the intriguing heft of it, the clean, cool feel of it under your fingers.I wanted to sit and really distill my thoughts and provide you with some object for thought, or moment of humor, or charm, that you could savor.

But I'm afraid I've got nothing.

Most of my thoughts are on my son's lost tooth, and my daughter's homework, and my wife's new exercise routine. On the coming two days without school at the end of the week, and how I'm going to get the locates called in for next week's drilling even though I don't have paint on the ground at this moment.

There's nothing in the news, or ABOUT the news, I really have any more intelligent comment to provide than Krugman does, or jim over at Ranger Against War, or Greenwald, or Doghouse Riley or a dozen other, better bloggers.

And because I'm still trying to lose weight right now I'm thinking about the fucking cinnamon graham crackers in the cupboard behind me and realizing that I'd practically KILL for a fucking cinnamon graham cracker and yet I won't get up and get one because I'm finally down to almost 205 from over 235 this past winter and want to get down to 200 by the New Year. But this ginormous part of my mind is taken up with thinking about fucking cinnamon graham crackers rather than coming up with witty and epigrammatic blog posts.

Have you ever had times, or moments, or even days like that? Where you have the feeling that you just want to do some great thing, something utterly brilliant, that you're a fraction of an inch, a flicker of a synaptic leap, a pennysworth of bread away from this immense deal of intellectual sack...and yet, you just can't seem to get there from here?Well, that's where I am.

And the odd thing is, I don't feel frantic or manic about it. I had a moment of panic, a moment of...whatthehelldoIdonow!...but that passed, and now I'm just jotting down random thoughts and readying myself for sleep.

The only thing of real oddity and interest that has occurred to me lately - at least odd and of interest to ME - is this odd series of dreams in which my wife and my in-laws are Korean.I have no idea where I'm coming up with this stuff.

My dream-wife looks very like herself except with Asian features; black hair, dark eyes, epicanthic fold. But she's recognizably "her" in both physical shape and personality

My dream-father-in-law is actually perfect as this gruff little hard-ass Seoul auto mechanic who never says anything except to cuss at me in Hangul. He even has his gray beard and with it looks like a mean ol' retired ROK master sergeant or something. He's kinda scary, but otherwise not THAT much different from his "real" self.

But my dream-mother-in-law looks and sounds like Maggie Cho's gramma ("Magare! What is aaaassss-maaastas? Is it maaastas of aaassss?") and keeps nagging at her daughter in ways that her very diffident real mother would be horrified by ("Dabbeeee! Why you eat SO much? You too faaaat! Look size you boobies, they big like zeppelins!" - I swear, this is actual dream-dialogue and I have no freaking idea where I'm coming up with this. My actual mother-in-law would cut her tongue out before ever mentioning breasts, let alone comparing them to ragtime-era German airships).

I've had something like four of these Korean-family dreams. In one of them my mother-in-law made us Korean pancakes - jeonya (저냐) and bullied the kids when they said they were "yucky".

In another she kept coming out in the back where my wife and I were in the hot tub (we don't have a hot tub IRL...) getting all tender and twining (which is where she made the breast-zeppelin comments) and kept making smartass comments about making another baby.

And in yet another they sat on the porch and spat sunflower seeds at the cats and made grousing comments about our house in Korean.

And now just talking about this makes me want some freaking bulgogi and pajeon. Fuck, dieting SUCKS!

Which reminds me - one of my favorite little webcomics, "K and J" seems to have gone dark. Worth a visit there even so, to enjoy the back issues where the artist tells the tales of his wife's Korean childhood-and-young adulthood. Sadly, I suspect that something bad has happened - marriage fell apart, guy was hit by a bus. Who knows? Destined to be another of those weird abandoned websites visited only by the electronic ghosts of former readers?

Here's a bit of bloggage for you; a group of WW2 enthusiasts trying to restore an old RAF command and control bunker near Newcastle. Just the sort of oddity that makes for good reading on a random sort of Tuesday night.And so to bed.

(Oh. The title of this post? You mean you don't read Hangul? Oh, sorry. Roughly translated, it means "What Dreams May Come". How could you not know that? Really, 당신의 유방은 zeppelins 같이 이다!)