and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

You know sometimes the world doesn't make sense to me in any way shape or form and those are the days that I probably feel the most lost. There is comfort in understanding. Comfort in predictable situations. Comfort in the mediocre routine of everyday life. But there are times when the understanding and the routine just isn't there. There are times when nothing seems predictable, at least not with the cheap and inefficient modelling tool called my brain.

So I look for comfort, somewhere, in all that sadness.

Masochism at it's best: Running is my weapon and my body is my prey and I stick that knife in like I'm trying to kill. Running as an escape. Running as payment for feeling sorry for myself. It works, too. Running is an activity I hate and to do it means I'm throwing my ante in, I'm in the game, I'm willing to gamble. Running means I'm willing to pay the price, willing to risk things.. because I know when I stop running, when I just don't want to do it anymore, when I can't get out of bed, can't put my shoes on, can't stumble out the door, I know that's it - I know I don't even want to pay my dues anymore.

Which means I'll have given up on this membership club called life.

One of the earliest memories I have in life - a memory so real and vivid it appears in my mind as if a photograph, as if I could search through my drawers of pictures and actually find this one in there even though it never existed on celluloid - is that of my favourite cat at the time, dead, lying in the middle of the road as a tractor towing a thresher ran over it. I was standing at the end of our driveway, a wide dirt path, waiting for the school bus and looking up the road, up the hill, at the sun coming up over the trees. I could see my cat, almost at the top of the rise, and there was a bright red slash across it's body. If it hadn't been for the sharp redness of the bloody gash you'd think it was just taking a catnap, all curled up head in towards it's belly and it's tail wrapped around it's legs. The tractor rumbled along slowly, no faster than 10 mph, and it rolled right up that hill over my cat and as it's front wheels hit the peak I could see my cat come out the other side and then the thresher rolled over it as the tractor itself headed down the backside of the hill and disappeared out of site.

I'm not sure I really understood that, either. I think I thought the tractor killed it. I think I knew the tractor didn't but since I saw the tractor roll over my cat, my big double-pawed Maine coon with the sweetest disposition of any cat you've ever known, I think I knew it wasn't the tractor really and I didn't blame the tractor really, or even the farmer atop it. It was more just this inanimate object that moved through space and time in some linear fashion, unable to make judgements about speed or direction, unable to stop on the account of a little creature like the cat. No hard feelings.

The moment struck me as very very sad but I don't think I ever did have any bad feelings towards the tractor and I just sort of accepted that these things happen, but like I said, in a sort of unable to understand sort of way.

And through the years I've thought more and more about these things, these moments of intense sadness - not true emotion really, not a personal experience per se, but a real deep down misunderstanding of the world where the compassion is taken out of it and things are all just inanimate objects moving linearly through this universe with unending velocity, just crashing into eachother smashing things into smithereens with no regard, no regard whatsoever, for the preservation of existence, like a cat gone loose on your table has no regard for your nice cup of tea and then..

*crash*

Now now, don't cry over spilt milk. Nor tea. Nor dead cats or lost causes or anything really. Don't cry, so I run and I cough some - spit up some nasty coloured shit from smoking shisha the night before and I press hard into my side right below my ribs as I lean sideways trying to will away the cramps and maybe I don't cry but there are tears of sweat streaming down my body regardless and I look up, the trees around me, and I look up, the sun the sky the stars the moon, and I look up and there nothing but the sound of my pounding feet grinding into the dirt path and the *swish* *swish* *swish* of my shorts rubbing together and the pound pound pound of my little, tiny, insignificant heart - like a jailed bum, his hands wrapped around the bars of his cell shaking shaking at them, crying out to the guard, "I need to go. You have to let me out of here! Hello? Anybody. Help me".

No, I don't cry but I think the feeling is in there somewhere regardless. I'm no stalwart, I'm no feelingless monument. I am flesh and blood as the rest of you and I to think of old and dead pets fondly. I too think about things that were once and are now lost and I, too, sometimes get lonely, sometimes get lost - lost in the echoing empty caverns of my own mind so much so that I stare off into the distance as if the wall in front of me were miles away and the floor were sand of a beach and sometimes, I fear, I almost never come back. The sound of my brain saves me, brings me back to reality, the clickity-clack of gears and whistles blowing, the tiny men in there moving the different scenery around for me to enjoy, like a big tiny play inside my head.

God bless those tiny stagemen, their quick and speedy work, their sunsets dropping into view right as the stage director calls the que and the moon showing up, perfectly hung mere inches below the top of the curtain. God bless them for their tireless acts, but God bless them, too their pattering feet, which is just enough to bring me back from my revery, just enough to keep me remembering it is all just a play, just enough to keep me in this world and not some other one contained in a padded white room under a coat with arms wrapped about me.

And so I go running sometimes as if heading to the theatre to watch another of the classics, another greek tragedy, another romeo and juliet, another sad sad story. At first I'm never sure how far I might run - I always want to quit - but when the lights come down and the stage opens up I feel the sweat begin to pour like tears down my face, down my back, and in that there is living. There is a sense of it anyway. I am laughing inside, laughing out loud, tears of joy, tears of pain. And in those hours, running along down some dirt road thinking to myself how lost I quite truly may be I am as found as I'll ever be.