weirdNano because I felt like it.

The Original Pearl.

Written @ 0730 on Tuesday 15 Sept 2009

Transcribed from paper notes:

this is the true story as I remember it:

Looking @ nice jeans on football themed advertising wall display. Man from rock gym asked if 'these are any good?' I advised to him that they had a gusseted inseam, and so they were ideal for climbing. I didn't mention that they were incredibly short shorts, and he should perhaps reconsider for that reason. The jeans that I observed were familiar, perhaps from a different dream because I don't think that I've ever seen them in the real world. No belt loops, because they were some sort of denim/silicon mix, molded to make a perfect flexible waistline. Of course, the manufacturer sold a belt with them, and the belt looked awesome too.

Walking away from this display, it occurred to me that all the cubby-holes were interspersed with pictures of football pants. strange that I would have been looking @ this display. As I walked away, I ran into Ryan Calvert and several other friends from my freshman year of college. As I hadn't seen him in many years, I was quite excited. There was a girl named Cindy, too... and we had never gotten along tremendously well.  She interrupted my brief discussion with him... she was excited like a yapping dog... and her goal was to interject to share some evidently hugely important and unsequesterable news.

"Guess what! Guess what!" she yipped. With almost no pause, I let loose the most intentionally bored and uninterested voice I could muster, dead-pan that would make even Steven Wright churn in agony "...you're pregnant?"

She knew immediately that I was mocking her excitement out of distaste for her character... it was worse that I was dead-on, then she began to sniffle and cry. It felt good to hurt her feelings. Somebody tried to cover for me, and came up with an ill-formed cover story.  Something that sounded as if I hadn't intended the remark to seem snide. Between Cindy & I, however, there was no confusion.  Then I walked past the group...

Some segue to a shootout:

There's a bomb on top of this compact car, and I am shooting at it from the passenger-side door. Piss-poor aim and now I seem to have shot somebody with whom I had been previously collaborating on crimefighting work.  It was my fault entirely, but still I feel like he was standing on the other side of the car and should have known he'd wind up getting shot if I began busting errant caps in every direction. Now I'm inside the vehicle, and wrestling with one of the bomber-guys... I've twisted the hand that holds his gun so that the barrel is pressed into his rib-cage... I pull the trigger and shoot him in the chest @ very close range. His partner tries to flee, so he gets shot as well... though perhaps by my backup, and not by me.  (editor's note: I'm Dave V. and I get respect... your cash and you're credit cards are what I expect)

Another segue.

I've been taken prisoner by the criminal Boss:

The scene is inside a tractor trailer, that's the back of a semi-truck if you're not familiar with the lingo... or if, perhaps, I'm not familiar with the lingo. I've been packed in to this trailer, it's filled to the top with old wooden cigar boxes, but somehow there is light. Each box has a small amount of food inside... cheese-flavored orange-colored popcorn, a few flakes of oatmeal, some dried pasta. I have to shuffle the boxes around... like one of the picture puzzles that has 9 available spaces, but only 8 frames of picture. I can hear the wife and two sons of the Boss, also packed into the trailer. They are bickering with each other, and are unaware of my presence.

Still in the trailer, there's more room available now to move around. I can walk from one end of the room to the other. Sunlight bleeds through the plastic roof... ambient white/yellow light. There are still cigar boxes, but they've been stacked on the walls and there's a path down the middle of the trailer... somehow it seems like a bookstore. Now i can see a cheap, gray, metal-frame shelf stacked with boxes, and an antique sort of desk. The desk is dark, reddish wood... elaborately carved.

The shelf/desk/bureau is fixed to the side of the trailer... so that it doesn't shift during transit, I'm sure. As I smoke a cigar and rummage through the contents of the desk, I slide open a small panel door and see some elaborate chopsticks. They are made of a cold, darkish, bluish stone... maybe it has hints of green and white, but it's not jade. At the end of each chopstick there's a fancy dragon's head design, with bright orange highlights in the dragon's long beard-hair, like a sea-slug... hyper-color orange. And this carved design gives a lot of heft to the sticks. The elaborate design is what drew me to pick them up and examine them further. They are heavy, thick chop-sticks. One of the sticks is two or three times as long as the other, and has a sort of post sticking out of the end to fit into the crook of an elbow. The longer stick is designed to sit along the forearm and give leverage from the elbow-post when it's held in a proper way. These chopsticks were made to be used by royalty, I'm quite certain. Now they are simply a collector's item in a shelf, in a trailer, in a strange dream, on Tuesday morning.

As I look up into the desk's mirror to see the strange faces I'm making while learning to utilize these bizarre chopsticks, I am interrupted by Boss and two thugs. They are carrying a picture with them, and toss it onto the bureau with dramatic emphasis, as if to ask without speaking:

"What do you know?"

The picture is of the two burly thugs that got shot in the car. Both wearing exactly what they wore when we last met, one in a gray turtle-neck... the other in yellow-ish orange turtle-neck. It seemed appropriate at the time, I suspect. And when I look away from the picture to tell them "I know nothing," we're standing near in a dark, wood paneled room. Still next to the antique bureau through which I had so recently been rummaging, but the Boss is now interrogating me about how his employees caught the Death.

He's terribly mad and suspects that I have killed his operatives, perhaps also foiled some unmentioned plans. But I think perhaps he didn't know it was me who was responsible. He interrogates me and I feign surprise and empathize that somebody he works with has died, and so insensitive of their murderer to have laid waste without first begging the Boss's permission. A clever ruse, and he buys it hook line and sinker... I didn't do the killing. Still he suspects that I know more and decides that it would be best to torture me in the living room.

This uncreative nonsense that he calls torture begins boringly. A long, wide, canvas belt with a heavy buckle on one end. That's the end that he swings around his head wildly... flailingly even. Somehow reminiscent of the Star Wars Kid whose life was so completely ruined by the INTERNET. Eventually though he does hit me with the belt... a glancing blow, and I had to practically walk into it... but it's a swinging metal weight on the end of a belt, and that will always hurt.

Bored with the belt, he upgrades implements to a sort of lasso, like the men from the city pound might use to rope a stray dog or some angry errant mountain lion, trapped between encroaching subdivisions. He's slightly more adept with this weapon, chasing me around the room. There are obstacles that I must jump over and avoid... and I can't let him get my foot in the loop, or I'll certainly be done for. All of this is taking place in a room I know to be the living room of his large home, but somehow it still makes sense. Again he upgrades implements, one or perhaps two more times... and I come to realize that the Boss is very similar to my old roommate, Josh Newton. Not only is this my old roomate, but he's totally clueless about how to go about torturing a person... so I distract him with discussion about video games and armor packs... Quake 3 maybe. He's very concerned to let me know how great he is a tournaments.

Distraction gives way to another segue.

Now there's a party in the backyard and I'm outdoors. It's a cool evening to be mingling with the guests. Although I'm mingling, it's clear that I'm not there by invitation. And though there are no chains or collars, it's understood that I'm still held against my will or perhaps that I've embedded myself deep undercover, looking for 'evidence' while I wait patiently for rescue.

The outside views are all like the "Weeds" t.v. show, and they all look just the same. Beautiful red lighting, like dusk or a forest fire... and hills and houses line the horizon.

I'm sitting on a sort of wall overlooking a pool when some woman asks me if I will make Mayonnaise. Confused, I answer that I would gladly make Mayonnaise, but I don't know how. She consults with the other woman who stands next to her comes to some sort of agreement whereby her friend can explain how to make mayo to me, but I'll definitely have to find the proper ingredients... she can't have anything to do with that sort of servant's work. So the agreement is reached between us, and I've learned that she actually wants me to mix guacamole with mayo. In the dream it doesn't seem so gross, I agree to get the process started, and hop of the wall to walk inside.

Now wandering the house in search of the kitchen I interrupt an couple of thirty-somethings who are arguing loudly while they fold laundry. On the floor near them, there are white buckets... similar to a 5-gallon paint bucket, but slightly smaller, perhaps 3-gallons. The buckets have no paper labels, but somebody has scribbled on each of them with a black marker. It seems clear that the contents are nutritional supplements. The man is angry and embarrassed to have been interrupted, he gets ready to berate me, but sees that my hands are full with something and cools off. What did I have my hands full with? Perhaps ingredients from the fridge. He was an older Asian looking guy. They were arguing about sexual performance.

There's some sort of escape sequence...but I can't remember it now.

Then there's this... a closing scene:

The old guy and young guy are sitting near the top of the hill... and it's still dusk. The older guy may be the Mayor from "Weeds" and perhaps the young guy is Anakin Skywalker circa the second Prequel... God, I loath that whiney brat. The two are sitting on a wall, under a ramada... there's some conversation about life's meaning... deep thinking.

Anakin's look-alike relates the parable of the beetle whose intention is to climb a mountain:

"The beetle begins his journey just before daybreak, and climbs and climbs, ever so steady. The day progresses through morning to a hot afternoon and the moist air brings clouds... the beetle knows there will be rain soon, but is persistent. After much arduous travel over perilous terrain the storm clouds have gathered and as the beetle approaches the summit they let loose the rain. The beetle is knocked from his path by the raging flood. He falls down the mountain, bouncing of rocks and tumbling through space. Finally he lands on his back at the bottom of the mountain, quickly the beetle rights himself and without searching for the easiest path... he simply begins walking up the mountain again."

This, says the young man, is a powerful metaphor about the Technique that makes the beetle's way of life such a good example of how we should live our lives. He says that we can all learn about how to deal with adversity by examining the beetle's behavior.

The old guy thinks about the story, and lets the silence linger only long enough to let the kid's words sink in. It doesn't take long, shortly he breaks the silence to respond:

"As a kid I tried to study the Tao of a lot of things. I always thought that I would be able to have understanding of life's meaning only when I finally came to master the best Technique of living. I thought I had learned from study of the Tao that I needed to know how to live a good life in order to really achieve a humble greatness through the mastery of my practice. After many years, I had lived a hard life, with some success and plenty of metaphoric and legitimate failure.  I was too old when I came to realize that rather than actually getting something done, Technique is just a word that we use to describe how you fuck someone."

The man then turned to Me... the dreamer, who had been observing this dialogue from what I thought was an omniscient perspective... and said:

"This is your Original Pearl, everything else is metaphor. I hope you can make use of it."

He wasn't speaking to Me within the dream, he was speaking to me as I watched the dream... and that was quite strange.

As things of a Tao-ish nature go, perhaps I'll ruin the point of the story by simply trying to state it... but there may be some who aren't familiar with stories of the Tao, so perhaps it would behoove me to attempt. As I have interpreted it, the moral of this old bastard's wise-ass remark is this:

Understanding how something is done is well and good.  But actually attempting something is fundamentally more important than prior knowledge of how to do something.  Riding a bike?  Loving?  Experiencing the brutal pain of a near-death experience? Nobody could have described these experiences to me.  And all the technical information in the world wouldn't have told me how to remember an experience.  In the end, only the memory of the life experience matters... everything else is metaphor.

Maybe all of this was just my brain's twisted derivation of some 'Old Bull, Young Bull' joke. Or, maybe it's truly a moment of gnosis and I would have been better off leaving it all unsaid. The phrase "Original Pearl" has been used by characters in my dreams before, always to signify some sort of gnostic realization. I suspect that it's a not-so-well-disguised reference to a Pearl of Wisdom... but again it was code, and I woke up just in time to write down his message before it slipped my mind permanently. As you might expect, given the gnostic origin of this final message, there was a twist. I awoke quickly, and immediately wrote the message in its entirety, only to get the whole thing written down and realize when I tried to reread what I'd just written, that I was still dreaming.

As soon as I was able to comprehend the twist, I jolted myself awake and sat bolt upright on the couch... and, in the real waking life this time, I grabbed the nearest dry-erase board to scribble as much of the message as I could remember. Some significant part of the final message was certainly lost I'm afraid... but the rest of the dream sequence is fairly accurate and complete, if not compelling.

Perhaps the next Original Pearl won't be lost to the seas of sleep so quickly.

Catharsis! (or perhaps: A list of things I shouldn’t do)

Inre: curveballs... just strange places i seem to put myself in when I quit my job & don't learn the ropes as fast as I should. My recent projects list looks something like this:

• Marketing & sales for Aaron's Laundromat
  • all the info will eventually wind up @ www.revolutionlaundry.com
• Longbars.com
  • Force-feed all the nutrition bar manufacturing & sales information into my head as fast as possible
  • So that I can get longbars.com up and running (even if it's only a rough-draft website)
  • find a manufacturer who will produce less than 125,000 bars on first run (harder than it might seem)
  • find a web-designer who will work for pennies (surprisingly easy... but these pigs are hard to pin down. Suppose i should expect to get what i pay for)
  • force myself to wake up in the morning and make it happen (this is not as easy as it seemed 2 months ago!)
• weirdano.com
  • brazen head-smashing-into-wall frustration as i try to overcome the inertia of all these things.
• Art/Photog Rep
  • This is the curve-ball. A strange opportunity to flex my marketing/sales skills for 25% of the income I generate for the photog.

On this day, i find it strange how these sorts of life-changing-events come about... i was under-the-super-duper-psychological-weather last week. So much so, that I started looking for any job that I would/could possibly consider doing instead of the learn-to-be-an-entrepreneur-in-one-month game... I wound up scavenging craigslist & came up with an interesting opportunity in the Photog. Rep. thing... sent an e-mail, and we'll see how that turns out.

So the top of that list should have been started with "Git'er done!" or some sort of folksy self-nudge-colloquialism. But, it's stream of consciousness... and fortunately for you it's only brief... what else can I say?

The answer to all my problems is right under my nose, I suspect; quit crying, man-up, and start doing constructive work instead of feeling sheepish and aghast at the joys of growing up without a father figure for so much of my life (did you hear that? that was the sound of nobody caring). Well, for what it's worth, I have manned up... and so far as I can tell, i'm beginning to get a callous on my scrotum from being so manly about the whole thing. But it's still important to cover my ass. Gotta make sure that there's no crazy running-out-of-money in a pinch sort of troubles.

I've let this blog-o-carp serve as a distraction and a spout for my personal rants while I should instead put the nose on the grindstone for longbars, and i've made some significant progress on it. Today's list of shit to do includes attempting a website design by myself... just enough so that I can start harvesting contact info with AdWords plugs & then going forward from there. The nice thing about having a market-niche as small as mine is that the advertising budget doesn't need to be as large in niche-market-keywords.

Well, that's about it for my rant... i'll let you get back to living the American dream.