Bridges

The Meezer woke me up in the middle of the night, yowling.

I’m told old cats are prone to yowling for no reason at odd moments.

She’s 15 now. The one actual constant – besides my own always unreliable memory – that connects my old life in California with the life I’m living now. A bridge.

I suppose she’s gonna die soon. She doesn’t hunt anymore although she still goes out most mornings to patrol the surrounding acreage. Sleeps a lot more than she used to.

Anyway, the Meezer woke me up; I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I watched Amish documentaries well into dawn. Well. Not made by the Amish. Made about the Amish.

The Amish documentaries blended with my own weird hypnagogic musings. The Amish and similar cults represent collectivism at its most rarified, one might say. Certainly, if Homo Sapiens is to stay viable upon this planet, collectivism is the way to go. And yet, I personally loathe collectivism with every fiber of my conscious neurons.

Collectivism, individualism – neither has any innate moral value. Both are biologically determined drives. The Amish aren’t all that innately different from baboon clans in Kenya, except somehow they’ve learned nonviolence. I suspect their rigidly enforced social order is a behavioral infrastructure that evolved for the express purpose of enforcing nonviolence.

My penchant for individualism isn’t all that different from the behavioral preferences of cannibal orangutans living in the Sumatran rainforest. There are far fewer orangutans than baboons these days, which might make one imagine that individualism is a less viable evolutionary strategy than collectivism (except that orangutan extinction is mostly due to habitat erosion, which primate behavioralism plays no part in determining.)

Anyway, at 4 o’clock in the morning, while the Amish are discussing “shunning” via video-on-demand, it was impossible for me to find any real me in the scattered assemblage of thoughts, memories, preferences, desires that define me when the sun is higher in the sky.

I fell back to sleep and had one of those long, labyrinthine dreams with billions of kaleidoscopic details that I can no longer remember. Marybeth was in it, and her husband Kim, and we were on a huge estate that belonged to them – inherited money, I remember thinking. But at the very end of the dream, I stumbled upon the corpse of a very old man with glaucous blue eyes that were still open. He smelled really putrid. A bunch of little kids were dancing around him, making fun of him.

“Get away!” I said. I was mad that they were desecrating the dead. I thought the guy deserved some dignity.

Though as George Lass reminds us: Put them in a marble temple, stick them in a coffee can, either way, they don’t care. They’re dead.

I called 911. “I’d like to report a dead man –“

And then the corpse began to move. And I thought, Oh, shit. The guy is still alive. 911 is gonna be so pissed off at me…

Which when I woke up, I thought was a really weird reaction. I mean, it’s better to call 911 when someone is still alive, right?

Fuckin’ dream logic.