Tidal Waves
Dec. 26th, 2004 08:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraWhile we were sleeping, the earth shuddered. The resulting tsunami took out a good deal of beachfront property in southeast Asia and left over 7000 dead, a figure that's expected to rise. I'm trying to wrap my mind around this tragedy in the context of post-Christmas sales and the hoards of shoppers poised to descend like jolly raptors upon malls throughout the U.S. today and failing utterly: those dead Tamil weren't going to drop serious bank at Walmart's today anyway so who really cares?
Oddly enough, I dreamed of a tidal wave last night: I was alone at Coney Island, it was all broken down and deserted and trashed, graffiti spray-painted over husks of rusting metal. Only one ride had survived and this was a conveyor belt that took you on this very cheesy ride that was kind of like It's A Small World in Disneyland only the tacky panoramas were all the Rites of Passage: Graduation From High School, First Car, First Job, First Marriage, First Divorce… Well. You get the picture. Away in the distance I could see the ocean, such a far view that I could actually make out the curvature of the earth, and then rising from the glassy surface was this gigantic wave, two hundred feet tall. Of course I knew I was dead in its path. But I couldn't run because I was strapped into the bumper car and the bumper car was bumping inexorably through these vignettes of Grown-Up American Life. I wasn't scared or anything. Just curious about the cross over. Exactly what would happen when the tidal wave hit?
I can't claim any mystic powers here, any underground connection to the deeper spring of all human interconnectedness – mine was such a classic anxiety dream, rooted in the situational distress of my own relatively inconsequential life. Still it was an interesting coincidence.
We had an okay Christmas. Jeanna sent me the rosary she made to showcase Grandma Fiore's Mary medal. Faithful readers of this journal will remember that I found its twin in some dog shit-encrusted snow on the streets of Las Vegas, New Mexico nine months and carried it around with me till my father died. When I heard he was dying, it became very clear to me that Jean Fiore had been trying to reach him. That mother-son thing is the most primal of connections, believe me, I know. So I scanned some snapshots of the two of them together, mother/son; I taped the medal to the scanned photographs, and I left it on his headboard. The medal had become my totem so this was hard to do – I felt like I was giving this wretched excuse for a human being all my luck. It was nice to get it back, encased in silver, seed pearls and amethysts.
Oddly enough, I dreamed of a tidal wave last night: I was alone at Coney Island, it was all broken down and deserted and trashed, graffiti spray-painted over husks of rusting metal. Only one ride had survived and this was a conveyor belt that took you on this very cheesy ride that was kind of like It's A Small World in Disneyland only the tacky panoramas were all the Rites of Passage: Graduation From High School, First Car, First Job, First Marriage, First Divorce… Well. You get the picture. Away in the distance I could see the ocean, such a far view that I could actually make out the curvature of the earth, and then rising from the glassy surface was this gigantic wave, two hundred feet tall. Of course I knew I was dead in its path. But I couldn't run because I was strapped into the bumper car and the bumper car was bumping inexorably through these vignettes of Grown-Up American Life. I wasn't scared or anything. Just curious about the cross over. Exactly what would happen when the tidal wave hit?
I can't claim any mystic powers here, any underground connection to the deeper spring of all human interconnectedness – mine was such a classic anxiety dream, rooted in the situational distress of my own relatively inconsequential life. Still it was an interesting coincidence.
We had an okay Christmas. Jeanna sent me the rosary she made to showcase Grandma Fiore's Mary medal. Faithful readers of this journal will remember that I found its twin in some dog shit-encrusted snow on the streets of Las Vegas, New Mexico nine months and carried it around with me till my father died. When I heard he was dying, it became very clear to me that Jean Fiore had been trying to reach him. That mother-son thing is the most primal of connections, believe me, I know. So I scanned some snapshots of the two of them together, mother/son; I taped the medal to the scanned photographs, and I left it on his headboard. The medal had become my totem so this was hard to do – I felt like I was giving this wretched excuse for a human being all my luck. It was nice to get it back, encased in silver, seed pearls and amethysts.
