What do you know about that?
I knew it was a strange place, when the water tasted like the air smelled. The heat is thick in its stench, hitting me in the face when I walked out the door. It’s one thing to visit a place and not want to live there but quite another living and working there because it’s somewhere else. These thoughts bounced from synapse to synapse, as I lay half-nude in my one bedroom apartment. The mid-July humidity banging down my door, after chasing me up the stairs only to find it had seeped through the screens of my windows.
This place to hand my hat without a coat rack in sight and the shirt torn off my back. I lay awake many nights and think about the cottage. There I would look out over the water as flat as glass. Then, I take notice of the moon, for which I am grateful, without which I could not see the deer walk across the pebbled New England beach without a care in the world or fear of being sought out or followed.
I would sit for hours if the no-see-ums would just let me be. Another reason to light up a secret cigarette, some may claim. Even when the tide has gone out and the mucky sands are exposed, the smell of the air off the salt pond is fresh as if it were protected by the surrounding trees. I’ve often despised the smell of accompanied by a sycamore tree and at the cottage there are none. Perhaps this is just another comparative ideal for me to separate this from that, here from there, foreign to familiar. Comfort and peace of mind are found in our own ways. And for many who find themselves somewhere other than that ideal attempt to create a space, “a room of one’s one.”
Tonight, I saw an outstretched slug,
for the first time in my life.
It had a peculiar beauty that was quite appealing—
peppered with black and white spots like a bratwurst—
the hot black pavement its coals.
It moved slowly and sizzled in the summer sun.
That reminds me:
the last slug burned into my memory
turned colors and shriveled up
when my brother sprinkled salt all over it.
But that was years ago
and now it makes me wonder
what an unsalted slug tastes like.
"Failure's hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever." Po Bronson
How often do we find ourselves sacrificing and putting off our own dreams to make others’ possible? Why must our passions remain hobbies while others’ are dustless and well-oiled realities? These thoughts I entertain often, for I am a dreamer. I, certainly, do not subscribe to the group who says there are two types of people, however. These two groups, of course, are made up of doers and dreamers. Dreamers would not be dreamers without doers and so forth. But who’s to say where to draw the line, that is, if one must create yet another construct, classification, or division.
My siding (there we go again) is that many often dream while doing and do while dreaming. This, of course, would include the many individuals who have “fallen into” something or feel they have otherwise “settled,” at least that is how they feel inside—a dialogue with their repression, angst, and denial. Self is important in this respect but not to the extent where we are unable to step outside ourselves to consider the reality we may, or may not, feel a part of. Many focus on asking themselves, “What about me?” instead of promoting the search for self and identity in questioning, “Who am I?”
In any case, if one group was to consider the other group as, say, “dreamers” than would that group be labeled, by default, the doers? And, would these dreamers be considered selfish because they feel they are more in tune with their self and identity? Are doers, then, worried about themselves and thereby take certain paths of actions that enable them to do instead of dream? Who knows where the sure route leads. Who’s to say that one is correct and the other flawed.
Peering into contemporary times with a careful perspective, I would not necessarily assert that celebrities and media sensations have replaced the bards, artists, and thespians of the past. Nor would I assume that the gladiators of great Roman times are now the professional athletes of today’s stadiums. But, if either were true, it would not be hard to see that the doers of history were very much dreamers. They say that the annals of history rarely record the lives and works of so-called dreamers and those who chose to stand-by—but I wouldn’t be too sure of that.
