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

The irony of life has been quietly killing me lately, like too many blankets on a cold winter night. The weight of it all pushing ever so gently, ever so persistently, producing a tightness in my chest that I know is not angina, heart disease, or those cheese fries I just ate. I almost wish it were.

This, on the heels of an almost heart attack in the extended family and then another almost heart attack right here in my nuclear one. The two sisters six years apart but inside of two weeks they found themselves going through the same motions, one miming the other, jogging along on a treadmill stress-test run, poppinglipitor and adjusting their diets (code for running on a trend mill with less clothes on in front of strangers than you'd prefer, wearing little electric diodes on your body that transfer what small amount of dignity you have left through small electrical wires to a machine which then prints out an uplifting message like 'you can't eat anything more fatty than leaf greens from now till you die or you might.. die. Fatty).

This and the unending internal memos to myself: eat better, sleep better, work harder, work smarter. Er, indeed. I can't figure out in which direction to run and in some respects it leaves me feeling as if I have no direction home, no compass, no trail of breadcrumbs to lead me to where I am supposed to be going. I'm busy pretending to decide things because they are realities: I will never be an Olympic sprinter becomes I don't need - nay, I don't want - to be an Olympic sprinter!

Ho, certainly not. Sprinting is bad for the joints anyway, right? But it's not just the sprinting that I once had little daylight-dreams about. There were more pedestrian things, smaller steps I used to take in my mind that would cause little whispers of thoughts, the ideas of hope and happiness and maybe the possibility of a happy-irony. An irony without sardonic wit, without malice, withoutabjectivity. Like maybe a simple serendipitous irony, like maybe the one person I've been trying to walk to in the forest and echoes and mountains in my mind, the one person I still covet in any real sense, turns up at the end of the same grocery aisle I am going down. Like maybe she, after months of derivative efforts in other places, hadcrystallized feelings for me - what ho, me - a timid wee lass of simple means who he himself had just that same day derived a conclusion of being, to follow that seed of doubt out across the great plains and chase her,unwanting, down down down down to earth, to reality, to simply say "I like you."

The irony so thick, on this day, is that we all like you in your perfect presence, your perceived innocence, your unending flow of flattering glances. We all would like to be an Olympic sprinter, you see. Deeply, it hurts us to realize that we have - in our one opportunity to arrive on time at the end of that grocery aisle - inexplicably stopped near the leafy greens instead. We've noticed another and - truth be told, we may be camels but that does not mean we do not stop to drink - this other, they are friendly and nice and have things to say. They listen and respond in the here and now and we need that sometimes, if only in passing.

But in the ironic scheme of mad scientists in the heavens fighting fire with fire, lightening with thunder and musical harmonies with melodic might, we pronounce our journeys, print our pasts, and fire off our fates with frenetic fanfare onto these phosphor pages. Wet, with sweat, our reality. We write - to ourselves, mostly, for it's solipsistic madness, really - about our day-to-day and when we least expect it, when we are least prepared for it, when we could not possibly know what to do with it if it came.. there they are at the corner by the baking soda, the one and only looking at you - at us - with a blank face that could mean anything and everything from hate to love to fight to flight to whatever you could ever imagine in both your darkest days and fanciful flights. You're busy talking to the hear and now, you and me, both, and for a few awkward moments everybody operates out of the corner of their eyes, too afraid to look away, too afraid to confirm what we already know is already there existing right outside our periphery. you exist and I exist and if two people could stare at one another without lookingeach other straight in the face, well.... sorry, I'm busy with someone else.

A small kid in an arcade, twenty-five cents of his hard earned money blinking away on the video screen, palms sweaty, buttons mashing, too much going on to check who that is standing darkly in the doorway.. but a small petrified part of him knowing intuitively that the lunch money is already gone, they have so much control over him.

There are no apologies. There is no one vegetable we can eat to end all vegetables. There is no single answer that sits in wait for our scholarly minds. On some days we must munch of asparagus, mull overlima beans, brode about our broccoli. We can only hope that the peas will not get mad, and the cucumbers will not feel jealous and the string beans.. oh, the string beans, they are so tearfully sensitive, we can only hope they don't condemn us to our daily dread.

There are no apologies for saying I'm sorry.