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

Some people say that the way you ring in the new year is the way you will spend the rest of your year. I don't think they are being literal there, but regardless, I'm not sure if I believe it. On the one hand, I would love to think that my 2005 will be spent in various levels of drunkeness with various personages from acquaintance to best-friend, and yet with very little in the way of stress, anxiety, or responsibility. On the other, I have a liver to think about. And I have actual responsibilities - mostly to myself - and I have stress on occasion.

Curiously, I woke up last night with a pounding chest. In my feeble 4am mind I believed, truly, that my building was compromised - that the three floors below mine were destroyed (at least the part over my bedroom) - and that I could fall crashing down to earth at any moment. At first I was light-footed and scattered brained, tip-toeing out into the kitchen to look around. Everything, as on Christmas Eve, was quiet and so I slunk back into my room. I risked an approach to the windows - clearly an unlucky spot if my bedroom decided to crumble from the side of the building - and I looked out and down towards the parking lot to see if supports had been put up under my room yet. Anything, really, would do. Stilts. Angled braces. Anything. All I saw, however, was a wall. A 4 story wall that climbed all the way from the ground to the bottom of my window sile and then continued on up above me. My heart, still jumpy, notched back the throttle a tad and the real thinking part of my brain took over. I reasoned things out, I made some calculations, and I concluded that yes, I had just had a bad dream.

So clearly I have my fair share of stress and anxiety, as well, wherever it may be stemming from I could not say. Often times, the pure lack of stress somehow manages to cause me stress. A world with no stress, no strain, no need to focus, well.. that is a world this little brain does not know and so it creates it's own versions. Smaller, simpler, more odd perhaps, but stress none-the-less.

Up until very recently this blog was, on occasion, a source of stress for me. I worried about posting enough, I worried about saying something interesting, I worried about talking about certain things or certain people too much, and I worried about the cohesiveness. Now, though, somehow I worry a lot less. I'm coming to terms with certain things, certain people (especially me), and I'm much less concerned about the cohesiveness of anything these days because, quite frankly, there is almost no such thing. The world is a mess of chaos and coincidence and I'm becoming more alright with that as I travel on in years. The world doesn't have a special place for me, as I once foolishly dreamed, but it does have room. We live every day with the static statements of history but our lives - the living ones, the ones that are still going on, the new ones starting everyday - these is nothing static in that. I am in a million places at once. I am with a million people at once. I am seeing a million different things everyday.

Somewhere in all of those millions of things out there maybe the truth lies, unknown, unseen, or perhaps it's there in all of it, spread out for everyone to take in. I dunno, I couldn't say one way or another.

What I do know is that what I talk about on here is certainly only 1/1,000,000th of who I am and what I do.. maybe less. This blog is only a tiny part of me and to see it as the whole of me would be foolish indeed. There are people whom I have never mentioned on here that mean far more to me than some I have. There are people I have mentioned in the past and do so less now in the future yet they mean no less to me now than they did then.

Things change. In the short time I've been back in Montreal I have seen old buildings come down that have stood for more years than I've walked the earth. I've seen new buildings thrown up that will stand the test of time probably longer than any grandchild of mine. Time rolls and with it the landscape of society is metamorphed in a slow melting, cooling, boiling, freezing process.

And yet through it all - the time I've been here - some neurons of mine still fire as they did a long time ago. Some of those neurons remind me of people who've stood the test of time inside my thin and tenious mental mind. What greater being chose those neurons to live and others to die, what act or chance meeting create those memories, I may never know. I may never reach the answers always being asked in the back of my mind like a constant broadcast of questions to the cosmos, like a search for intelligent life on another planet. I just may never know.

But I'm going to try, in 2005, not to worry so much about it and maybe, just maybe, cut down on the stress a little.