Somebody from another department, and I wish I’d learned which one, agreed to teach all my classes for a semester while I hung around like a gimp on some kind of alternative assignment. I never found out why, either, but it seemed to be my fault.

I didn’t want to like this person of course, but she turned out to be ravishingly beautiful as well as sharp-tongued, and that’s doubly irresistible. Even beyond, she had the students participating out on the commons in some kind of informal national group hug day, which is where I met her.

I wish group hug day and the whole tableaux existed, but outside of dreams such things are wild fantasies in my culture, even before the covid.

It was nice anyway, meeting her and seeing some of those people again, even the ones I didn’t like.

The whole West Coast, and the Southwest including Nevada, is at least marginally blue now. Except for the vast chunks of mormon Utah outside the Salt Lake City, which will likely remain firmly a part of dumbfuckistan for the rest of my days. So we have that going for us now, plus my little box of edible marijuana recovered from Colorado last year isn’t illegal anymore. We’re even soaking the rich a tiny little bit to pay teachers. I wonder idly in these pre-dawn hours whether I will ever be one again, and the answer echoes back in the negative–not like that, anyway. Those days are done.

There’s always content creation, and the free lance. But that’s not what I was learning to miss in the dream. The missing part was a community, a dysfunctional approximation of family that arises around a Job no matter how shitty the job might be.

Once in a space like that I met a guy who openly loved the ritualistic nature of the work week. He loved dragging himself to work every Monday because the whole world was doing it with him, and he loved getting together for drinks at the Brasserie Montmarte after work on Friday too.

The whispered consensus was that he was a repressed homosexual, but I think the truth was probably a lot more complicated. Pretty boy for sure. Mommy issues definitely. But he was a little bird who was too precious for this world, so he took comfort in this kind of broken community to an extreme degree.

In those days my fierce male demeanor, and happily depraved habit of fucking my way through my female colleagues, quite consensually, heedless of their flaws, was armor against anyone thinking I (of all people) was some kind of closet case.

Armor comes off though, and I gradually simmered down on the life of conquest, and people started quietly speculating about me. Not regarding homosexuality so much, but …

Something’s not quite standard-issue there ennit.

C’est vrai.

Just as with … autumn the equinox, and the solstices.

Moving into cold storms, and the leaves mostly dropped, it begins to feel wintry.

The winter solstice isn’t, formally, the deepest part of winter, but it feels like it to me.

“In the English-speaking world, Autumn traditionally began with Lammas Day and ended around Hallowe’en, the approximate mid-points between Midsummer, the autumnal equinox, and Midwinter.”

Yes more like.

Thanksgiving has a texture of winter about it, but the rules say that season is still a month away from starting when the turkey is served.

Gender; similarly desynchronized.

In a perfect world this would be a poem and not just a dream that flows into thyroid waking, but even so it’s above average for a spilling of the day.