I See DEAD People!

The Meeze picked up on those supersonic, suboracular telepathic frequencies and returned.

I am struggling mightily w/various Saturn in the 12th House issues.

It snowed.

I dreamed about Mark last night, which was disquieting. I asked him what it felt like to be dead.

He laughed. "What a question! Why should it feel like anything?"

"Well, you know," I said, "I wrote to your sister. I wanted to go to your memorial. I'd like to visit your grave –"

He shook his head. Bemused…

I spent the summer of my twentieth year picking fruit in the Hood River valley w/Mark, hanging out at a commune in Pe Ell, Washington, making periodic trips into Portland to pick up unemployment checks. This was not my idea of a good time, it was Mark Conly’s; but I was in love with Mark Conly, and Mark Conly was in love with Woody Guthrie, Tom Joad, and their peculiar version of the American dream.

Being lazy and terrified of heights, I was lousy at picking fruit. Also I hated Pe Ell, a ghost town clustered around a long dead mill with a vaguely sinister aspect. I passed my time there smoking dope and walking long distances on the railroad tracks, pretending the single rails were a tightrope and I was balancing 40 feet above the heads of an invisible crowd of admirers and detractors. This allowed me to keep out of the way of the speed freaks in our little hippie collective.

Loved Portland though. Loved, loved, loved it. Being in Portland felt like one long assignation in the lobby of a noir hotel.

Mark moved back to Portland – oh, about ten years ago before he died. Suspect because of Oregon's liberal suicide policy.

The last time I spoke to Mark while he was still alive, he’d told me the same anecdote three times in a row. Something that happened in Ghana when he was in the Peace Corps. Something having to do with corn crops, economic development.

I didn’t complain. A part of him knew he was repeating himself. Finally he said, “My mind is going, Patreetz.”

“Is that part of the disease process?” I asked cautiously.

“I don’t know. I can’t tell. Docs say it shouldn’t be. Docs say I’m depressed.”

“I wonder why,” I said.

Mark still had that braying laugh. “All I want to do is sleep.”

“Sleep? But why?”

“In my dreams, I run,” he said simply.

I called Mark after that from time to time. Infrequently. Busy signals every time – beep, beep, beep, beep. Honestly? I was glad. I didn’t have to have my heart broken but I still got to lie to myself, tell myself I’d made an effort. Sometimes you have to be shallow to survive.

I honestly don't know why bad things happen to good people.

Say. That's a catchy phrase.

Someone should use it for a book title.