A decent sleep of five consecutive hours finally, and lush vivid dreaming.
Two images in particular I want to share.
***
Out in the rolling part of the Midwest somewhere, maybe Missouri or Western Nebraska, there’s an older couple living a land poor life, which is to say they have a lot of acres, a single modest angle, each other and not much else.
The angle is this. They get paid a little bit for letting water from somewhere else, alkaline water, rush down over a part of their land that is covered in small trees called Arkansas cedar or something like that, maybe four or six times a day.
This process purifies and enhances the water in some unspecified way. It’s then pumped back uphill and collected and carted off to be used in some other unspecified place. They get a stipend for controlling the flow and maintaining the pumps and the like. They also get their water table refreshed by the excess to some small degree.
The moment of water release is a spectacle to behold. The rest of the image is conversational.
This angle and the associated modus vivendi is not for me, but it’s exciting anyway because it’s a beautiful life and they are good people on some fundamental level.
In this dream the whole family is around, so it’s about the past and community.
***
In the second one I begin alone so it’s about potential futures.
Still searching out the angle that is right for me, I go to that sweet town where I really do own a scrap of land outright now in the alleged Reality.
I find a week’s worth of temp work building trails or some such and it’s for the Feds, in the Park Service.
On the last day it switches gears. It’s raining and I’m doing clean-up and maintenance on a tiny downtown warehouse with a bunch of useless records in it that have to be kept anyway.
As that Friday ends, I meet the boss lady. The work has been both satisfying, and in her eyes satisfactory, so she tells me I can come back next week. I’ll be her “projects guy”.
I don’t have any idea what that means and maybe she doesn’t either. The pay isn’t discussed, nor benefits, but everyone present believes it’s going to work out fine, on an interpersonal handshake kind of basis that barely exists in the modern world.
An honest week’s work, maybe the first one in twenty years, more on the way, and I go up to the public library.
If I’m going to be living here at last I need to understand what I can recycle and how that works in this town. Especially about the glass. Do we do glass here?
So I go in and strangely there’s no hint of looking for an angle here. I don’t know why, but although this is a natural and historic place for me to be employed gainfully, that’s not who I am anymore. I’m not a young digital reference librarian. I’m an aged junior ranger. I’m the Projects Guy now.
I’m the patron. I ask my question. But it’s not that simple. I don’t think it ever gets answered.
Instead I find myself in a lively smart conversation with a small posse of people who are, currently, young digital reference librarians.
I build to a point in the conversation in which I aver that I’m a romantic and not a rationalist. I explain why.
My soliloquy is met with quiet approval and maybe even an addictive taste of admiring awe.
These people will be friends someday.
The recycling glass will find another way home.
***
I don’t have any good reason for being this far behind for the first time ever.
I don’t need one, except maybe for myself.
This is Friday in Reality too and on this Friday I’ll settle that issue. Satisfactorily if not satisfyingly. I’ll clean the warehouse, backfilling from copious notes.
In about two weeks I’ll be back there on another Friday for the Written Word fest, the fifth one ever, my fourth one, and the place where this all began in 2015. By ‘this’ I mean the whole concept of Spilling daily.
This whole business of becoming not-a-prof, and instead the projects guy. As an angle.