I often am lost in my dreams, in penumbral light usually, though sometimes it’s daylight and the neighborhood is good, in which case I stop and talk with people, asking them if they know where the house in which I’m to have my Spanish class is. They direct me, but I never get there, nor much care that I don’t, stopping along the way to talk with more people, as I do in real life.
When I wake from these kinds of dreams, brought on, perhaps, by the comfort of the bed in the early morning, I feel quite peaceful, like the way I felt after my last colonoscopy, blissful in the recovery room, until the nurse slapped me awake, her blow breaking one of my hearing aids. I was good to go, I wouldn’t have to come back, the doctor said — music to my ears, to the one that could still hear, at any rate.
I was vouchsafed pretty much the same news this afternoon, the results of bloodwork I had done this morning having been found unexceptional save for the fact that I am deficient in vitamin D. “That’s it?” I said to the nurse who had called. “Can you imagine me announcing on social media that I have a vitamin D deficiency? It lacks gravitas. I’ll announce instead that I have terminal alliteration. How else can I expect people to take me seriously, as they do Trump when he compares himself to Christ and Al Capone.”
I can hear him now. “Christ said outlandish things, I say outlandish things . . . you get my drift, you see the comparison. You get persecuted for doing that. Deep State wants to stifle self-expression, wants to crush creativity, the freedom to be you and me promised us in our beautiful founding documents, which you beautiful people can have for free if you buy my Bible for $60. And don’t worry, I’ve signed them. Al Capone was persecuted too, a beautiful human being who gave the people what they wanted when the government didn’t want them to have it. His outfit was based in Cicero, you know. How wonderful is that when you’re talking about defending our Republic?”
Do I wake or sleep?