I don’ usually pay no mind to ma dreams or go huntin’ fer meanin’s in ‘em but I will this time…

So, check this out, I dream that I’m a Mormon missionary. This clearly represents my current tee-totalling ways. Then somehow I’m suddenly in a casual backstage/backyard kind of environment with James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich of Metallica fame. Lars is futzing about with something in the back of a Uhaul trailer and James offers me a drink. These kids are the kind of cool, interesting, misunderstood and otherwise unavailable to me kind of people that are crackheads and other drug friends from incredible one-off encounters. I feel a kind of obligation and I-don’t-want-to-miss-this-opportunity compulsion and take the bottle. I note that it’s a funny shape. The label reads “Cagney” and says it’s a scotch made with the grains of a Tennessee sour mash–clearly a reference to my bourbon snobbery especially over whiskeys aged in wine casks outside of Kentucky (ahemJackDaniels). I drink, James is gone, and I’m left somewhere else–in a kitchen (mom’s seeing to it I get three squares these days) and an outside chair (I wear shorts everyday in the Arizona winter)–with a cigarette (one always leads to the other on that slippery slope) and another Mormon missionary (my brother and or brother-in-law? a composite of the boys in the Clean Team? d) all of the above?). Oh, and also a hangover and a feeling of guilt and regret.

Yeahp, it was a guilt-soaked night wrapped in the pink sheets. Whether it was before or after and intertwined with the above episode, who can know, but I dreamt also that I was in a domestic situation in progress. This later (obviously) proved to be my mother’s house to which my father returned (from the dead, though this wasn’t clear in the logic of my dream) and in an afternoon made a flurry of improvements–rearranging, fixing, and remodeling–where I had not involved myself, working instead–as I have been and am at this moment doing–on my own project. No doubt a reflection of my guilt over letting my aging mother paint her own room last week. She ached afterwards. We both knew she would as it has happened that way the last couple times she’s painted a wall or two in her this new home. My father was good at that stuff and a hard-working man as well as devoted husband. He would have put her first. I would like to think I would put her first, too, were I in a better position to do so, i.e. healthy and not struggling to put my life back together, recover from my crack addiction, and make something of myself. But maybe that’s just bullshit I feed myself to soothe my conscience. Who can tell these days?

Anyway, I think the seancing-forth of my father–his being in my mother’s house where I was and he didn’t seem to belong permanently–was catalyzed by my quickly throwing together of ghostinmymothershouse.com last night before bed. It tells–or will as it develops–of a few minor things that happen here from time to time which don’t seem to be caused by either Mom or myself.