Dreams, §1

I am in training. What for, I’m not sure. But I have a mission, and it will prove my worth.

I am to break into this grocery store and procure a number of items, and bring them back to the woman in charge. The first thing I notice is that the store is physically located in the space occupied by the library at Eberwhite Elementary School, my alma mater. Good, I think. I know the terrain.

I get inside the doors, and the lights are out. I have a hunch that it can’t be this simple, and so I throw a handful of dust into the room and see the crisscrossed pattern of laser-line sensors like they have in the movies. The dust slowly falls, and I can no longer see the lasers. I have a small black-light flashlight in my pocket, and I discover that for some reason it will show me where the lasers are, but only within its diminutive scope. I realize that this will not do, and I begin to worry.

So then I’m walking along, and I run into a friend from college. I ask him if he’s finished the training, and he says he has. I ask him how he managed the grocery store mission, and he tells me that the secret is to crawl, and to grab items that are close to floor. But this solution strikes me as impracticable. I then tell him that I got a gun for Christmas, and we exchange a high-five.

Minutes later, I run into another friend from college, and ask him how his training is going. He says he’s finished. I ask him too how he managed the grocery store element of the training, and he shrugs and says that it didn’t really present much of a problem. I think that his attitude is admirably phlegmatic, and just nod. I decide to give it another shot.

But I figure I need to either deactivate the security system or devise a method for evading the beams. And neither of these seems possible. I examine the security system’s control panel, and try to figure out how to work it. No dice. There is an anxiety building in me, gathering steam as I fumble with the plastic and rubber number pad.

And then I catch sight of the woman in charge. I approach her, and tell her of my troubles. But she seems perplexed. She points out that the store is, in fact, open. The lights are on, and there are customers all over, picking over the produce and lining up for the cashiers. I realize that I have been walking around freely, that my encounters with my friends had in fact occurred while walking from one side of the store to the other.

I ask the woman if the whole point of the mission, then, was really only to find all the groceries on the list. She says, Yes, it is. I say something to the effect of, That’s lame. And she just gives me a That’s Life! sort of shrug.

I’m in here.

My attempts at blogging have been desultory at best. But the wonderful thing about the Internet is that it’s largely forgiving (even if that Wayback Machine has the persistence of childhood trauma). It offers the hope of eternal becoming, of convincing automythology and the transcendence of past.

Of course, it also has Facebook.

Nevertheless! I remain undaunted by my own sporadic history in the medium. I will write, and I hope that you will read.

I’ll probably mess around with the look and layout of the site quite a bit over the next week or so. I have this growing frustration with the available crop of WordPress themes out there, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably going to have to do some custom tinkering. Which sucks, because I have a low tolerance for HTML/CSS-related anxiety. But I refuse to lose.

So let’s give it a go.