PMA

  

What terrors grip you in the night?  We all have our demons, right?  Doubts?  Regrets?  Paranoid fears?  What do you do to quell the horror?  

O.K.  I'm being melodramatic for effect.  But I have had more bad dreams in the last few months than I have had in the previous. . . oh, I don't know. . . ever?  When I wake in the night, I can't escape the thing I've been dreaming.  The atmosphere blankets me in the dark.  Sometimes getting up, drinking water, passing water, and getting back into bed helps, but not always, and less and less as the months have passed.  It is Covid dreaming, they say.  It is a new phenomenon.  

Someone is going to make a buck.  

I would imagine that older people are haunted more.  What does a young kid fear?  Spooky monsters?  Those, as I remember, were almost fun.  The dreams of old men are rooted in some past reality or some future certainty.  They are not the wild chasing and escape dreams of youth.  Oh, god, for a few of those again.  No, they are commonplace horrors so real you can taste them.  

Perhaps it is no wonder I would look back into some beautifully failed past.  

I try to take sweet thoughts to bed with me, of course.  I don't lie down with thoughts of failure and doom. But somewhere in the night, I hear a voice like this.  

Not really.  What disturbs my sleep is much more quotidian and mundane.  Mundane horrors are more terrifying and real than the drama of our lives.  Drama fades.  The inevitable commonplace stays with us.  

Or so it seems to me. 

My dead ex-friend Brando used to say that the interstate was only a few miles away.  He meant that when things get bad, you can always leave.  He did.  After he cheated my friends and me and stole from his own girl, when everything finally got really bad, he moved to Greece.  That is where he died.  I don't plan on moving to Greece and dying--not now, anyway--but there are things I can change.  I should quit drinking, of course.  I could change my entire diet.  I will fast today, and maybe tomorrow, too.  I've thought of eating only lentils and brown jasmine rice every other day. The rest of the time, I can eat normally (whatever that means).  Starvation has never hurt anyone.  Skinny people live much longer.  Q wrote to tell me of his incredible weight loss.  It was either that or he lost his small dog, I can't really tell.  The poundage seems about the same either way.  His communiques are always obscure and incomplete.  I must forget on Tuesday what he told me on Monday.  It is his way.  

The world has changed, and not for the better.  I will attempt to counteract that in my own paltry way.  PMA, the hippies used to say--Positive Mental Attitude.  

If only.