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childhood home dreamage
Friday, October 2 1998
The dark green marijuana had been spread out in the hot Virginia sun to dry, and now it was time to rake it into windrows, fork it into a wheelbarrow and transport it to the family barn for storage. We were all out there as usual for such a summer chore: me doing most the skilled labour, my brother Don doing most of the grunt work, and Dad ordering us both around. He had no idea how this marijuana had found its way to the base of Pileated Peak (the half of our property across the road from our house), and he had no idea what use we could possibly have for it, but he thought it best that we collect it and put it away. We worked fast; people in the airplanes circling above us might be able to tell what crop we were harvesting. Suddenly I saw a police helicopter coming in low and belligerent.
But that was just a dream.
I've been having a number of dreams like this. They're usually set at my childhood home in Virginia and they're either profoundly tragic or they're full of foreboding. I'm the kind of guy who likes to leave my parents and my stuff behind as if I've frozen and sealed them up against worry and aging, like a time capsule, so I can come back later and thaw them out and my relationship with them can continue exactly where I left off. These troubling dreams are probably a manifestation of my subconscious awareness that this cannot be.
Another dream I had not very long ago had me returning to my childhood home and finding that absolutely every square foot of property adjacent to my parents' land had been developed and filled with suburban houses. It wasn't just developed, mind you, it was leveled to flatland and then developed; my parents' parcel was sticking out of this landmoving hell like a solitary irregular stump, or (more accurately) like the only remaining puzzle piece in a puzzle map of the United States.
I hear from Jessika's mother Teri that Jessika, Deya and Wacky Jen are all living together in a house and their phone number is 1-804-CHINESE. I'm sure they have an entertaining answering machine message, but I haven't called to find out.
One day I'll tell the story of exactly what it was like during the 18 months I worked as overnight tech support at the now-defunct Comet.net. It was a wonderful job; the nights were uneventful and there was no one else there except me. I learned an enormous quantity of stuff and single-handedly built one of the largest personal websites on the web. But there were also the bad things:
- August, 1996: The bitchy girlfriend of the grand pooh-bah. Her name was Diane and this Type-A female thought she ran the place. The few times she saw me (and my friends Nellie and Jessika), I don't think she liked what she saw. She spread malicious gossip about me and made my life employment hell for awhile until she found someone else she could hate even more. Lucky for me that was only in a matter of days, but not before I'd scratched "DIE DI" on the men's urinal privacy divider.
- January 1997: The time the grand pooh-bah put off paying the phone bill for so long that the phone company turned off all the lines. A real public relations disaster, you might say.
- January 1997: The several times the grand pooh-bah couldn't find enough money for payrole and told us not to cash our paychecks for a few days. Lucky for me, I was never desperate for money.
- Fall 1997: The morning the janitor let in the guy from Virginia Power and he snuck back to the meter room and turned off the power. The grand pooh bah hadn't had enough money to cover the electric bill.
It was no surprise when the place filed for bankruptcy. But for me it was a sad day; those were some of the most fulfilling months of my life.
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