11.28.01 - 7:50 p.m.

soooo... i just woke up from a lenthy (3-hour +) nap necessitated by the grinding migraine i had this afternoon. by the time i was home, i was already questioning my decision to leave work. the worst of the visual symptoms were over within ten minutes of leaving, and clearly i could've slogged through to 5 p.m. important, considering my lamentable lack of paid leave until january and the doctor's appointments i have coming up in december.

nevertheless...

...by 4:30 i was just feeling ragged. the headache was bad, and the sick feeling in my stomach was worse (stomache. ::smirks::), and it was all i could do was crash into bed and read a few pages before the merciful veil of sleep finally took me.

it's tough to know what to eat in those situations, but somehow i always feel like some bit of food is gonna help me get over the sick headache. so, i stopped and bought a package of peanut butter crackers and a candy bar on my way home. if nothing else, it meant that i didn't wake up ravanous.

though i woke up not-too-late all things considered, i had the strange and strangely certain feeling that it was morning and i needed to get dressed, that i was already late and something important was happening and i just needed to do something (anything) to get myself going, but that whatever i did would be a disaster.

i think the phone rang, but then i heard the stereo that i had left on while sleeping, and knew what was going on. fragments of a rather vivid dream were swirling around my mind. there was a long, cohesive and coherent story there, but i couldn't stop the chaos and put the facts together in a way that makes sense. the narrative seemed nigh-epic, or at least more coherent than it will. i have the urgent sort of dream-insistence that it all made a strange, grand sense, but of course, i am incapable of translating the cohesive feel of that arc of story into words, and it all ends up seeming desperately fragmented.

there were ads in the paper. i was living in a semi-high-rise apartment building. i was going somewhere, and needed to pack. all my things were in the front room, which was lit by a pair of sixty watt bulbs in the fixture which pointed to the door. in fact, the whole apartment was lit like the set of the movie, and i knew i was being watched, not in a paranoid way, but the way gorgeous people and actors and actresses know they are being watched and prepare for it.

it was dark outside, a sort of clear, velvetydeep night allowing brilliant views of the pockets of manmade light shining through this singularly sharp air. there was another apartment building, a block away in the identical position, with squares of lights demarcating each floor and balconies symmetrical and regular, and a roof where people could walk. i had to avoid this place. i was sneaking out and it wasn't clear where i was going. someone there had clipped the information out of my paper, and i was careful not to be seen by the individuals on the roof looking out for their fleeing neighbors.

i drove and drove through the night. i drove south, and the night was like an ocean. there were islands of lights and vast uncharted waters of dark, and then i stopped at Wal-Mart. and went shopping.

i don't know what i was looking for, exactly. it was late and the store was mostly deserted, but i still had to ask for help. the woman who helped me asked me if i knew what it takes to become a department manager at Wal-Mart. she said you had to be smart, particularly smart. other people were there too, and they said the same thing. that you need to be as bright and willing and educated as a doctor or lawyer or teacher, because you had to be ready and able to respond to anything. you had to know everything and anticipate people's needs. they kept going on at length about this, and i was seized by the ambition to become a Wal-Mart department manager. but i left, because i had someplace to go.

it wasn't clear where i was going yet, and there was another unrelated (apparently) story going on in my dream about some kids going to an honors band or some such thing. i saw one of the kids in my dream, but i was also semi-experiencing their narrative while experiencing my own. one of them was the daughter of the department manager.

she had eaten dinner at shoney's and used all the coupons. there were two sets, one normal, one christmas-edition. the normal ones that i wanted were cut out, but the christmas ones were intact. i couldn't use the christmas ones, or i wouldn't use them. i'm not sure if i went to shoney's anyway. i might've, and i had the feeling i did, and i saw the inside of the restaurant, but i didn't see me inside so i think i skipped dinner because i didn't have the coupons i wanted.

the girl (who was the daughter of the department manager) told me about the honor band. that's where she was going, but it was a little drive. she left, and i left, and then to my surprise i was walking across the parking lot to the honors band place.

of course, i was surprised. i didn't tell the girl i was going there. i hadn't realized before that i was going there, but there i was. i had agreed to it, apparently and i was even excited. i went running across the dark bowl of the parking lot in a night so dark it seemed luminous. there was a translucent, buoyant quality to the darkness that seems possible only on film.

half-way across this darkness, i realized that i had forgotten my clarinet. even though i hadn't seen anyone else, i knew they were all carrying instruments and i would be turned away - humiliated - if i didn't have mine. but it was elsewhere, a day's drive away.

suddenly, a tracy - a friend of mine from 8th-9th grade - came up and handed me a clarinet complete with reed. now it seemed like i had had mine, but it was broken, or missing the mouthpiece. i asked her where she got the extra one, and she said that she had snuck into the instrument locker and taken it for me. i was concerned about the reed, i didn't know whether it was fresh or broken, so i didn't know how the clarinet would sound when i tried to play it. but i went in anyway.

i don't remember the practice. i was suddenly convinced that i could easily learn the trumpet, and become a world-class trumpet player in a year. seeing a cascade of notes before, i was practicing the fingerings, pleased that there are only so many combinations on the trumpet and thinking that - since i already know how to play and read music and would not be hindered by a bunch of kids who need these basic instructions - it would take me no time at all.

and then i woke up.