I slept what is a fairly normal working week shift, from three in the morning on the first weekend night until nine; a short six. I was up a couple hours and then shifts like that caught up with me. I crashed again about noon, and I dreamed really hard and deep and vividly.

I remember a lot of detail, but I’m not going to bore you with all of it. There were though at least three vignettes that all took place in one setting. I walked across a closed and constructing freeway into an existing complex of buildings made very remote and relatively uninhabited, by the exit being shut down. Most of it was a hotel, but none of the doors were locked. The people who were there were a random lot. Many of them seemed to be workers who didn’t go home, but just grabbed a random bed and shower when working hours were over. Others seemed to be otherwise homeless, drawn by the strange opportunity. Some of them acted like they had every right to be there, and others, including me, seemed to feel they were potentially trespassing, squatting, illicit visitors.

As for why I was there, I would have to say because this arrangement says something profound about the way I see the world I live in, in that seeming-to and dreamlike way.

One time I was walking down an enclosed space between two rows of rooms alone, and a tiny puppy started barking at me. I walked to it. By the time I got there I was suddenly back in a room again, and the puppy was not a puppy, but a goldfish trapped inside a small hotel-room bottle of shampoo, barking because it was dying. I ran water into the bottle until the shampoo all ran out and the environment was clear. The fish coughed up suds and I had to do it again.

Translation: I have a very deep need to protect and serve the life of the not-only-innocent, but even meaninglessly living and hopeless. I need to be the knight who very competently does the right thing, even if and perhaps especially when the stakes are small and when no one else even knows the stakes exist.

That hasn’t ever been a job they pay you for, and it won’t be in the future either.

This is connected up in my mind with an interview I listened to right before my dreamsleep. It’s inconvenient to link to, but here’s a tangential taste:

‘You’re going to work for a company, you’re going to get benefits, you’re going to be able to retire, even though we’ve totally eviscerated any retirement benefits, but somehow you’re going to retire,’” Yang said. “Young people look up at this and be like, ‘This does not seem to work.’ And we’re like, ‘Oh, it’s all right.’ It’s not all right. We do have to grow up. I couldn’t agree more.”

I couldn’t agree more. The Yang is Andrew Yang, the presidential candidate that transcends old ideas about capitalism and socialism, and even optimism/pessimism. Speaking of hopeless bottled-fish causes.

When I woke up from the supplemental sleep and the vivid dreams it seemed far too dark outside. Close to twilight. Checking the chronometers, yes, it was only four in the afternoon, but very monsoonal. It’s five now as I write this sentence and the dim light hasn’t shifted. The sky looks the same as the place I found the puppy, and in this fact I find a weird serenity.

Bloody tangents.

I want to tell you more about my take on Yang. I want to tie this in to another half-hour of recent podcasting from my never-met friend Scott Carrier, who made sixty thousand last year (twenty of it from small donations, forty of it from 5 wealthy donors), but who nevertheless is eight grand in the hole and finds himself with no means to embark on another quixotic and lovely project. So instead of art, we got from him this week a bit of fund drive, alongside a repeat of one of the first pieces I ever heard him do more than 30 years ago. It’s as beautiful as it ever was, but the train is stalled again and the engineer sounds tired.

Far be it from me to engage in hypocritically criticizing that, fresh from my holy four-hour nap.

This was all supposed to be setup for a new real piece of my own.

It was intended to begin like this:

Let’s dredge up that second footnote. It was brief, and it was the most honest piece of writing I’ve done in a long time.

“At one time I aspired to do the kind of work they do, or something like it; the kind of journalism that Charles Bowden also practiced … ”

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.