Dreamtime

My pages and pages and endless pages of journal entries, both handwritten and printed-and-pasted, marched through my head. Rows of text and scrawl. And margin notes. But not in my hand. Ah, you'd finally gotten to the point where you could and would take the time to reply to my posts, my rants, my requests.

The only thing I could make out clearly was, "Then just ask me," in a choppy thick black hand, not feminine and not elegant. Did I see anger in the formation of the letters? Should there be a period or an exclamation mark at the end? What was being communicated, declarative or inquisitive? And anyway, I do ask, for all of the things I want. I ask quietly and politely, yet clearly. It's you that chooses not to answer, to refuse and ignore me. So why would you even write something so patently ridiculous as this? Is your denial that deep, that pathological?

Then the rest of the margin notes, lots of them, all up and down the pages. In some kind of strange code, maybe a personal shorthand. Passages like, "Rxx tss tsx xxrss lsrsx." I couldn't make any sense of it, yet it had regular punctuation, an apparent beginning and end, some kind of language, some kind of code, yet no clue how to decipher it. No hint, and given the one sentence that I could read and then deconstructed, I just wasn't interested in investing any time in trying to break this code. Impressive that you took the time to write it all out, but also perplexing that you chose to put it into a code that I couldn't read. Why would you do that? What is the message to me in doing that? In that text, are you being honest and forthright, really opening up, and the code is a way of covering that? Or is it just gibberish, bullshit to cleverly just waste my time? I tended to think the latter.

Leaving the huge government complex, late at night. Breaking code there? I was in the sedan, driving, with a Republican politician next to me. Why a Republican? Congressman or Senator? Did I really care? And where was I going with this guy?

He was trying to tell me about the r's and the s's, and all of those x's. He seemed to have a line on understanding. I couldn't understand what he was saying, a jumble of nonsense words, a wonderfully melifluous trilling, a baritone buzzing, nonsensical yet soothing. None of it made any sense, which pissed me off because I wanted to understand the code (but really didn't want to do any work to sort it out). But then, I remembered, this guy was a Republican, and a fucking politician to boot, a double-whammy of distrust and contempt, so why would I be listening to this guy at all? He could be selling sunblock in the Sahara, and I still wouldn't want to hear anything he'd have to say.

The black road stretched straight in front of us, undulating regularly, an asphalt sine wave as far as I could see. There was a car maybe a quarter of a mile in front of us, the two tiny red lights and the irregular rectangle of the soft white headlight illuminating the scrolling frame of trees and shoulder as it moved, the two red tail lights moving up, then disappearing, then reappearing to do it again, a fascinating view. I didn't want to get any closer, or fall any further back, just wanted to watch the tableau shift and change as the tiny vehicle moved through the space.

We were headed to a major intersection, a knot of interstates and local routes, maybe ten miles down the road. But nothing in between. No homes, no lights, no development at all, just black woods on each side. Then of course, I saw the massive cuts for the widening. It was huge, maybe 300 yards across. I swear, it was going to be 8 lanes wide by the time they were done. Amazing. Just a huge swath through the forest, cuts deep into the hills, the small little valleys all filled up, bare earth and broken trees everywhere. Silent earthmoving equipment sitting in the forest black, waiting for action in the light.

And on to the intersection, where some kind of action awaited.