THE NIGHTLY MIRROR

I think I’m most often surprised how little it matters how honest I am, or how well I listen, or any level of neediness or care or attention. This is all rather vague, but I wonder how often this secret message was simply “I don’t love you. I can’t bear to be with you anymore. I don’t want to be with you.” But it’s just so hard to take the step. Hesitation rules everything.

With hindsight, in all possible situations, what’s the difference? What’s the difference between leaving me or hiding from me? Living in some prison I created out of some obligation someone felt to my feelings. That’s so much worse.

I’m too tired to think coherently. I was thinking of one particular situation in which someone asked me a mysterious question and I gave the realest answer possible, like, the “if you are looking for the fullest scope of reality before deciding what you’re about to do, here it is, and I’m sorry it’s bleak, but I will never lie to you”, and they just sort of cried and moved on. Haha. So, a very different story than the one I constructed in the beginning, but still.

I feel like people just barely scratch the surface of what real honesty would be in this life, and it terrifies them. And it’s tragic for me. If I was very rich or handsome, I might not have these problems. But they’d still exist. They’d still be possible for someone. They’d still circumscribe life. But it’s for me to witness, for some reason. I’ve chosen it for some reason.

That’s what keeps me waking up every morning.

I’m on a vacation with my parents, and when I get back to the table, they are sitting with a group of guys listening to Silver Jews. Tony Soprano is my dad. I make a joke about you’d be surprised how many times my parents have listened to the Silver Jews.

Later at the bonfire, there is a random guy with a buzz cut and a fitting polo on talking about the Silver Jews, but the joke is that he is not supposed to be there. He is literally crashing the dream.

The idea is that he is crashing the dream to kill Tony.

The dream moves on to an adaptation of a book about two boys in college trying to impress girls with the books they’ve read. When I go to bed at night, I wake up and there is a laptop playing the Silver Jews. I can tell from the drunk singing that the guy is in the room, lying one of the other beds, and I’m like, honestly man, I think it’s really funny what you’re doing.

Oh I remember what it was, he was a film major, and he got Tony picking up little odds and ends from pipes he would find in the garbage because he thought they were lens adapters. Something like a Barlow lens for a telescope, but he called them Kinos.

The cops are tearing apart the room and pulling the guy out because Tony was accusing him of fraud. Outside, you see a bunch of gangsters storming a castle, and then the dream stow away running out, with white haired elf’s running after him and the castles ghostly hand reaching for him, which causes the building to collapse on everyone.

Later, I am trying to explain this guy to Patrick, who is riding bitch on the back of my motorcycle, and the guy is in a black jumpsuit sprinting after us muttering to himself about the Silver Jews. That’s the guy! My motorcycle can no longer accelerate and slows to a halt on the dark, wet, country road, where the runner comes out of the woods and produces a gun from his jacket pocket to shoot me in the chest.

I don't know if it was a dream or something in real life, but I was at a party (dream, obviously) and someone handed me this little viewfinder, like a binocular for one eye that distorted things in this strange way that there was no distortion.

And years later, I have found that is called a telecentric lens.

In the second one, they are building a new house in Zion. She and her wife are preparing to sell her parents house somewhere near the Wisconsin border. This is not that house. I have terrible pizza from a gas station and some other things in a plastic grocery bag. I stop by Crystal’s new house and it is gigantic. There are so many basements, a large atrium, and many neighbors that have taken up in the ruins of this complex.

Harper is laying about in the piano room and asks if these are my shamrocks on the table. They are not.