Trail Mix & Death

Fatback, yellow treat, & yucca blooms - more images from Manchester.

A couple days ago, I unabashedly created what is, in my opinion, the best trail mix ever. The recipe:

* salted peanuts

* cashews

* pine nuts

* golden raisins

* peanut butter chips

Combine in ratios that best suit your predilections. Dorkily, I call this mix "Blonde On Blonde." Consume while reading, blogging, or napping.

Last night I dreamed that I was digging a deep grave in the woods. It wasn't clear, in the dream, for whom (or what) I was digging the grave. But it was rectangular, large in its perimeter, and deep. "This is a deep hole I've dug," I said to myself in the dream.

According to Irv Yalom's tenets of existential psychology, my psyche's occupied with my own existential death-concerns these days. And not just because of Stella's death (which, yeah), but also because I'm a father now. And because I've really sort of done everything I wanted to do in life. The question I sometimes pose myself is "How do you want to live out the remainder of your life, Jon-dog?" Serious business.

Of course, I can't handle too much death-rumination consciously, so it comes out in veiled ways - anxieties, odd tendencies, neurotic behaviors, themes in my writing, and, yes, dreams where I'm digging deep graves for no one in particular. My unconscious is saying to me, "Son, no amount of trail mix is gonna stop the reaper from a-creepin' - for you or anybody else. What you choose to do in the meantime's sort of The Question Royale."