The Zone

[mallorys_camera]

Dreamed I couldn’t find the car I’d parked on a street that was half Bancroft Avenue on the south side of the U.C. Berkeley campus and half a familiar street in a hilly city that I think I’ve dreamed many times before, but, of course, you never know with dreams; they have this way of implanting the thought, You have dreamed this many times before! in your sleeping brain.

Should I call the cops? I wondered. Surely, other people have had this problem before! How have they dealt with it?

I was also babysitting for a chubby little kid, maybe six years old.

We were supposed to be in constant contact with his mother, but the kid’s smartphone was lost.

So, I rigged up a substitute—oh, the cleverness of dream me!—involving a magenta crystal about the size of a thumbnail. If you scratched a phone number on the crystal, then you could call that number.

It was very hard scratching a phone number on a crystal that tiny, even in a dream.

###

True Autumn may finally be breaking here:



There is actually color in the trees along the Hudson’s western banks. At least the two-thirds of the trees that didn’t lose their leaves a month ago.

###

Neighbor Ed wrote me a kind of whiny email, complaining that the Chicago Art Institute had shut down one of its volunteer programs.

What are not so old overeducated older people supposed to do who probably will be retired as many years as they worked and want to contribute to their community? Neighbor Ed ranted.

I wrote back that he could always create his own volunteer opportunities!

Like, for example, for years, I have been wanting to start some kind of nonprofit that would make financial counseling services easily available to people who can't or don't want to pay the Big Buck$ to financial advisors. Only, I don’t have a clue how someone goes about setting up a nonprofit. Maybe he would like to brainstorm…?

Man, listen to you, Neighbor Ed wrote back. You can always make your own opportunities. New age capitalist porn.

“Capitalist porn?”

How does taking some kind of initiative translate into “capitalist porn”?

I don’t see you out there tilling the collective garden patch with night soil primed from the Comrades’ own collective assholes, Neighbor Ed.

Fuck you, Neighbor Ed!

###

Neighbor Ed must have known he’d overstepped some boundary because all evening long, he kept texting me, and all evening long, I ignored him.

This was very easy to do because I seem to have flipped into the Zone a/k/a what the Australian aboriginees call "Dreamtime", which is the very best headspace for any creative endeavor.

The only downside to the Zone is that you don’t want to talk to anyone.

But maybe that’s not a downside?