2012

I should be biking to the 9:30 a.m. class I teach (the hungover undergrads) right now. But I'm not. I'm all sick in my throat and head - body aching, too tired to even stagger. So instead I'll blog, read some stories, and try and rest before workshop tonight. The three photos above illustrate how my soul feels right now, if you wanna talk about soul.

Why did I dream of drug deals in the viaducts last night? Perhaps it was because of a student paper I read shortly before bedtime. She was describing her first experience getting high. Here's an excerpt:

We were very suspicious and uneasy about it, but I told myself to be cool and just try some. Sam handed over the joints, lit them for us, and Alex and I inhaled the joint simultaneously. We both threw a coughing fit but regained our cool and begun smoking it again. We both felt cool, rebellious, and sophisticated. We loved this, maybe a little too much. Sam told us just to sit back and relax in order to feel the effects almost instantly. We surely did feel the effects! Alex and I were swaying back and forth to the reggae music playing in Sam’s store. I felt completely calm and free of worries; that was a first for me! I believed that I was on a beach in Jamaica, jamming to Bob Marley’s song, “Jammin.” I was basking in the hot Jamaican sun while watching and enjoying the soothing sounds of the waves as they rolled in. The smells of salt water and authentic Jamaican food permeated the warm air. I slowly began to drift back into reality. Marley’s music was now faint, and I began to recognize my surroundings again.  The smell of ganja became consciously noticeable.

She's not really a stoner. That's sort of obvious ("Sam handed over the joints" & "We surely did feel the effects!"). For their last paper, I asked my students to lie to me. "Tell me lies!" I said, "Tell me lies about your life. Make it different, make it new. Fool me good," etc. I get tired of reading the same student papers about the "three things I'll be discussing in this paper," and/or how "through it all, I've changed and grown as a person." I gave them an excerpt from Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, which they roundly hated, and told them to take Chuck Barris' example. And so the soccer champ has been transmogrified - on paper - into a stoner. And my dreams have responded accordingly.

I reckon "What does your soul look like?" is one of the more important/interesting questions a friend could ask a friend. Like the Cherokee ask each other "How deep is your well?" and the rain falls and the winds surge from the west, through all that nuclear corn safe in its fields of green, and I cancel my class and read Steve's story about the end of the Mayan calendar:

You don’t have to be a member of the Young Einstein Society to know that time and space are funny things. In the night sky we see light from stars that have been dead for billions of years. And we wish upon this light. We draw pictures with our fingers, connecting this dot and that, until the light becomes a fish, a bull, an archer, a reflection of us. The sunlight in our sky is eleven seconds younger than the sun itself—a mere echo of something that has come and gone and will never return again. Upon this echo we map out our days and weeks and months and years. On our bedside calendars we cross off time that was never there to begin with. The sun might have already aligned with the center of the galaxy, expanded and consumed this planet in one red wave and we wouldn’t know it for another eleven, silent seconds.