necrotic concrete veins

dreams! I have never really chronicled my dreams. Well, by dreams, I mean nightmares, because those are the ones that most frequent me at night. But even now with each second I spend writing this I lose one more scene. And so I'm going to try and write with somewhat in detail and also in somewhat of speed. It's actually a repeat nightmare, though, most of my nightmares are. Not repeat to were every detail is the same, but the general overview and the dis-empowering, degrading, and frightening feeling they leave me with is. so here goes...

This one I've had before. Years before, months before, and even days before. It involves me as a fugitive (hah, imagine that), running on an underground railroad to flee further prosecution. Sometimes the dreams are more cartoon like, and others have a twinge of hilarity, but mostly they are filled with frightening, surreal, and intimidating circumstances.

It starts of with maybe my worst fear, even worst than going back to jail One of my friends gets caught shoplifting and finds themselves in jail. We decide to act quickly to defend those that we love and we start taking action to bail-out our friend. I'm already wanted, but we have to boost to get bond money. It seems like there's a tension between my close friends about this, but we also know of no other way.

So next, we all quite hesitantly make our paired and coupled ways into the commercial gateways of hell incarnate. We take to our teams of two very well dressed thieves, and enter the mall from all sides. For the most part its like stealing the icing off from a cake with a machete, and by that I somehow mean; easy for us camouflaged as Misses and Misters Unsuspectings to get what we need with an end result that becomes significantly disastrous for those corporations unlucky enough to have our crew frequent their shops.

But there's a problem. Duh! There's always a problem. Back when we were drawing-up verbal straws to see who gets what stores, I talked my way into tackling the two hardest ones. This of course goes against any sort of reasonable risk management, but again I find myself falling back into the martyr friendship role. It's a role that I know is unhealthy and even undesired, yet I still continue into the pattern of thinking that I can handle more threats or that I even deserve more risk.

I imagine any of my close friends reading this can think back to at least one time in real life in which I tried to act on this flawed and selfish form of logic.

But on the very last store, by some force unseen (as if there's really any other in this type of dangerous anti-work), another dear friend of mine, and my current crime partner gets slammed down at a store surprisingly standing tall in resemblance of every real world yuppies favorite recreational, sports, and outdoor store. They've been hit by us before. It seems like for decades actually. And almost instantaneously it seems like they began hunting for me. Somehow, in just seeing my friend there collapsed under the weight of many knees and fists on the floor, they knew I was there.

In a very short time -but one that feels like light-speed in overdrive to the tune of some multiple magnitude in the billions (ie. faster than the race between creationism and evolution and then some)- I began my futile seeming leap for safety. Talk about a relative term, who would of ever thought that some of the hiding places we thieves instantaneously devise while being chased is the epitome of safe. But for someone in flight, it's exactly that under the church, teeming with black widows, crawlspace, that becomes heaven. Dumpsters, rooftops, ditches, alleys, sewers, and even backyards with really large dogs become our safe heaven in times like those. Unfortunately for me, it was currently in the middle of a seemingly century long drought of creative and enduring hiding spots. So I continued to run and run and run.

Their forces definitely began to compound. The police were on the hunt, accompanied by -but not limited to- corporate loss prevention, private for-profit military type forces, almost mechanical like hounds, and the never ending, all-encompassing, ominous chain of dime-dropping, god-fearing, good Samaritans, to just name a few. It's a scary place to be, when SWAT Teams and nosey self-righteous Grandma's have as much control over one's ability to flee a crime scene. Of course, no one ever reflects on the scariest place of them all; this world in which we all must, at one point or a thousand other traumatizing points, make again and again the decision to not flee the scene of a crime or to continue on living. This culture has found almost every way to outlaw, ban, and criminalize, not only and true form of substance, but also any and all forms of meaningful sustenance.

As a kid, and confessedly even now, I don't know if I see the difference between the two, sustenance and substance, as both are required for living, and so sometimes I actually will find myself saying, typing, writing, or even just thinking of a word I made up called substanance. I think even in my last year of high school, I somehow was able to pass my English class with a final test in which I answered the cliché question of “What is the biggest goal you want to accomplish in life?” with none other than “a pursuit of substanance” essay.

But back to the nightmare...

It felt a lot like Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451. But even Ray Bradbury's over the top dystopia portrayal can't began to explain the mockery to which this megamachine has made from life. Perhaps to lighten the nightmarish blow of mockery, my mind came up with one mockery to sugarcoat all the rest we are constantly so forced to dream of. Because next thing I know, against my wildest dreams, but still very much within the dream I'm so shakily describing, I find myself obtaining refuge from within a Catholic Church. It's not quite clear, but they seem to all know about my history and I cant help but to notice the revere it.

Of course, I don't know what to make of this. Maybe just humor, or maybe it goes back to falling into the martyr friendship role mistake. A mistake I have so frequently made in real life. But regardless, I found my momentary safe space. In vivid and engrossing detail, an almost completely passed-out drunk, sprawling over a pew, puking out putrid spew priest explains to me a route to get to the outskirts of the city.

Before I know it, I'm in the suburbs of the city which in my dream have turned into the metropolis' worst hood (Now, don't tell me you didn't see that one happening. After all, what do you think gentrification is about?). So of course, my very incredibly white skin sticks out in this very dark neighborhood, increasing the difficulty in trying to remain safe. Not to mention I began the mental battle against racist insecurities, indirectly instilled in me from a youth of admiring the hardships of everything poor, urban, and black at a comfortable white lower middle class distance. It would be intellectually dishonest, colloquially speaking, to not admit to ourselves that imagery painted by the rap industry, the urban clothing monolith, and black film have not become our generations unequivocal equivalent to the once great “noble savage.”

The nightmare gets really bad. People everywhere are out to fuck me, and game theories like tit-for-tat have no relevance in dreams this crazy, nor even in schizo societies that inspire such dreams. I soon start fucking over everyone I can, even those ones out who I truly believe are helping me. Finally, I get out of the city. Finally.

But it doesn't end. Of course not. Not this nightmare. Just like in reality when you leave one city outward among one of the many stretching necrotic concrete veins that feed them, only to find yourself in yet another disgusting city, this nightmare doesn't deviate from the norm. Roads never lead to paradise. So, the nightmare starts over again. A nightmare inside of the existing nightmare. Everything intensifies. The cities become harder, the obstacles taller, and the air ever so thicker to breath.

It goes on like this for three or four cities. The same nightmare. The same bad guys. They are everywhere. And just like the perfect formula for a psychological thriller, the tone settles down. The sky turns from impossible dark, to slightly illuminated in the near distant. It feels like I'm getting away. It's the same exact feeling produced in the realist of real times that I have actually gotten away. It's comforting. Then finally as I'm exiting the dream triumphantly, I feel myself. I feel myself getting pulled back down. It's over and everything I'm feeling turns to dread.

I wake up. I wake up with tears burning through my eyes. I wake up at the highest pitch of a cry. It's myself crying, but it doesn't last much longer after I wake up. Then, the day comes or so it goes.