I dreamed I saw my face from various angles. I was bearded in most of the angles, and better looking than in reality. I looked like Robert Creeley in appearance and in substance: Like Creeley I was self-confident and famous for publicly yet sensitively trimming words from stream-of-consciousness effluvia and making them sparkle. In the dream it was interesting to look at myself because in reality I do not know what I look like. Really, I do not. I have never understood that expression "You’ll know it like the back of your hand" because I do not think I would recognize that part of my body in a random lineup.

In the dream my hairline was the same as today, and I looked older but I knew I was seeing myself 15 years ago. I was older and more comfortable in myself than I am today.

I have had dreams of baldness. Bald dreams themselves, baldly obvious, typical, predictable self-obsession, the stuff that bored the only therapists I ever saw and led them to assure me my problems were nothing new, my existential concerns simply quotidian.

I dreamed of Clint Eastwood, that we were friends having a conversation at the Distinguished Wakamba Lounge on 8th Avenue in Manhattan, and that he provoked some men of slight build into a fist fight. Clint Eastwood engaged these men in head-butting and Kung-Fu-like moves that surprised them, and which looked impossible.

As they fought one of the men handed me a couple of books, out of respect and with a knowing nod as if to say "We’ll talk about this later when the boys are done fighting."

My relationship with Clint Eastwood is not clear to me now but without it the men would not have known me or appreciated my interest in the books they gave me.

The fight was efficient, artistically organized, like a mosh pit where West Side Story meets The Wild Bunch. The old man Eastwood surprised his opponents with elegant moves unexpected from a man his age. Not knowing what language Clint Eastwood’s enemy spoke — and because I was expected to return the books — I sent my thoughts into the books that had been handed to me. Through metaphysical miasmatic memory output of sublingual skill I translated the old expression "Know thine enemy" into hundreds of languages and thousands of contexts, sending word to Clint Eastwood’s opponents that they were foolish to think an old man would be an easy hit.

I woke up and typed the previous sentences. This is my first full throttle episode on a new keyboard I received last night. I opened the box and the space bar was not connected. "Cheap plastic," I thought. I lament but accept that my kingdom of nonsense is generated not with artisan tools but disposable junk.

I attached the space bar to its intended location, remembering a day at a summer program during one of the 1980s when I was presented with a diagram of a computer keyboard. The diagram was designed to point out the differences between a standard typewriter and computer keyboard. I do not recall the highlighted differences (function keys, I suppose, and the mysterious Scroll Lock) but I do remember the space bar. I typed prodigiously as a youth but I never learned to type, and I had never seen a pedagogical illustration of a keyboard similar to those at which I had thrashed out so many pages. I did not know QWERTY from SQUIRTY or Hunt and Peck from Toulouse-Lautrec. So when I looked at this diagram of a computer keyboard I was intrigued by the SPACE BAR. Computers were high-tech and advanced technologies and so I imagined the SPACE BAR was a SPACE AGE term, and that computer keyboards, like goggles and freeze-dried food, were invented by NASA. I saw stars and galaxies in the space bar of the computer keyboard, I saw my thumb not hitting the space bar but floating on it, my hands actively sculpting the future of the universe as they hovered over a small window on the galaxy.

I never said anything out loud except to laugh at myself when I made the comparatively dull discovery that the space bar was, as you know, the big thing on the keyboard that one uses to insert spaces between words.

Typing today on this new keyboard, typing full throttle for the first time, I find that I did a poor job of placing the displaced space bar into its nest. I like it, though. The space bar makes a thick racket, far louder than I might expect even from the biggest key on the board that gets smacked by the strongest of my prestidigitational extremities. The space bar roars and snorts while the little keys whimper and cackle. I want a metal computer keyboard but, to quote the Staples Singers, my money ain’t that long. I want a loud metal recalcitrant keyboard that wakes up the neighbors. I want it to loudly announce each letter as I type it, I want it to loudly read each word after I hit the SPACE BAR.

I just opened the windows wide. I raised the blinds as high as they can go, letting the high sky tower over me. It is a nice thing I used to fear, opening the window. I used to imagine hoodlums, hellions, and the guttersnipes would accumulate around the open window, gather to take notes on what to steal and when to plan a robbery. I saw kids doing this on the upper east side one time. They were pointing at wide open windows in apartments and discussing what electronics were in the apartment, trading tips on how to get up the fire escape and how to figure out the comings and goings of the apartment’s occupants so they could engineer an entrance into the place. I open my windows more these days but I still shut the blinds when I am not here, when I am not at this spot, when I am not occupying the helm of this desk and thereby guarding its objects from theft or malevolent contemplation. I shut the blinds in anticipation of entropical attention, an inevitable accumulation as the enemies slowly appear, the enemies that linger behind the thickets of closed curtains in windows across the street, the enemies that rise like full-grown beings from the primordial soup of my absence, sprouting like eyeballs in a children’s book and tapping my windows the way fingers invisibly tap our foreheads into senility. My presence, I imagine, deflects their lurking concentrations, as no one stares while I am working, not even the hoods, the hellions, and the guttersnipes. Not the professionals, at least. I merit only professional attention. Only the most skilled and sophisticated criminal minds mingle with my solipsistic distractions, only they have graduated from raiding unlocked basement apartments and reaching through m
ostly-open windows to steal you.

I dreamed last night I was sleeping in a bed on an airplane that rose to 165,000 feet so as to avoid bad weather at 30,000 feet. I was in First Class (obviously) and was presented with a line graph illustrating how the plane’s ascent moved us close to the firmament and to God. Cabin crew and staff assured us that First Class did not get us access to God or to Heaven. I comfortably chose sleep over worries about scraping against a thin sheet of phlegm that lies between between commercial aviation and the icy stratosphere.

I have not remembered very many dreams lately. I connect this one to a Ronnie Hawkins line I’ve been thinking about lately: "I turned 41, I don’t mind dyin’!"

I just woke from a dream and I want to write it down before I forget it.

My father called to complain about some mundane matter regarding his apartment.

I studied his voice, authenticated it, made sure it was real. I listened for his unique southern drawls and hillbilly flourishes.

I said little as he submitted to what he felt was the unique privilige of family that lets the dead call to chat with their living.

My mood on hearing his voice was not unlike those times he called toward the end of his life, drunk as a cowboy, hollering down the line at me about the good times.

I interrupted him to say "I can’t understand anything you’re saying." His phone was a 50¢ piece of cardboard through which his voice sounded like a stiff wind trying to ram itself through a tiny hole.

I told him I would stop by to see him. Before ending the call I announced "I just gotta say, this is a little weird that you’re calling me." He understood. He knew his disadvantage.

When I saw him my mind returned to the circumstances of his death, and to the funeral. Closed casket. The funeral home swore they could dress him up so he’d look good for open casket but we said no. Only in the dream did I regret that decision.

We spoke in his kitchen and I tried to find where, where in your head did you shoot yourself? I couldn’t find it. I looked at the back of his head and I studied his face, looking for the bullet holes. The coffin was on his porch but I did not look at it.

At the funeral (the real funeral, not anything in this dream) I felt like that coffin was smiling, smiling in that flat way a container grins when it is completely, soundly shut.

Talk revolved around everyday concerns. He knew most of his things were gone but specifically wanted to know what I did with his phone and answering machine.

He had been away for a while and wanted to get back on track with his apartment and the life he took away.

I dreamed I was at a concert hall where a pianist was scheduled to perform Sorabji’s complete Opus Clavicembalisticum.

I was unaware of the pianist’s name or identity, but I assumed it was going to be Jonathan Powell, whose performance of the O.C. I attended on June 20, 2004, at Merkin Hall.

The dream was amusing. None of the ushers knew what was going on. This was not so much because they were unfamiliar with Sorabji. It went beyond that. Somehow the impenetrability of Sorabji’s music extended into the social and material aspects of the evening, causing the very place to become wracked with obscurities.

The sign for Merkin Hall became an unreadable sprawl of incoherent letters, looking something like one of those squiggly-lined CAPTCHA forms you see on some web pages.

The program notes were written in some kind of hybrid language that combined near-nonsense words and symbols.

The opening "Introito" movement was called "Œrntr__tð", and the "Preludio-Corale" and "Fuga I" were called "Preilig Ļ Fug."

In fact the middle word from "Preilig Ļ Fug" used a character I can not seem to find. It looked something like a British pound sign (£) without the cross in the middle and with less of a hook on the top.

The concert hall was empty when I arrived, but I noticed it was far larger then Merkin Hall. That seemed like a good thing, as I assumed this meant a larger crowd was expected than what turned out at Merkin.

Unfortunately the seats were about an inch high, making it more likely that concert-goers would trip over them and not sit. The ceiling of the hall was tremendously high — hundreds of feet up — with thousands of wind chimes blowing in the atmosphere.

There was no piano. There was a modest-sized pipe organ that a stagehand found in the basement. I remember thinking the pianist was going to be rather surprised by this.

The ushers looked at me and laughed. They seemed drunk.  One of them held the program notes in her hand and chuckled, unable to make sense of the language used on the pages. She started trying to hum the opening notes of the Opus Clavicembalisticum but her singing wandered off into that dreamland sort of thing that only made sense while I was asleep. When I woke up I still heard that usher singing. It sounded to me like sounds from some kind of science project involving wind tunnels and high-powered fans.

During the dream this all seemed just about right. It was not funny until I woke up.

A repeat dream I’ve had for years, but which I never wrote down until this morning, is simple:

I receive a Christmas/holiday greeting card from a couple of old friends. The nature of their relationship is unclear, but the card bears a picture of both of them. In the picture they are standing and waving from an open space, maybe their front yard.

The words "BI-PILLAR TOWERS OF CONNECT!" appear over their heads, in large print.

While I am dreaming I know what the phrase means, but when I awake I do not know what it means. This couple, however, proudly trumpets their relationship as two people who are "Bi-Pillar Towers of Connect!"

I am not aware that the phrase has any explicit meaning. A quick web search find nothing, but what else is new.

Without trying to analyze too hard I do assume I meant to dream something about bi-polar disorder, with the subjects of the dream proudly reminding their friends that they are bi-polar, functional, and happy together.

A stream-of-consciousness association with the Twin Towers comes to mind, along with the Towers of Light which we saw a few weeks ago.

I am not aware that any sharp-witted wags referred to the World Trade Center as "bi-pillar" but if I am the first to describe the Twin Towers as pillars and the Trade Center site as bi-pillar, well then hooray for me.

Maybe it is a coded message from the ghosts of the Twin Towers…. Nah.

Maybe it is a reference to the fact that I was diagnosed as bipolar a couple of years ago, but that I fail to care because bipolarity seems to be the diagnosis du jour among today’s therapists. Instead of using the real term maybe I couch it in silliness, and look forward to another 10 years between attempts at finding insight through therapy.

Something else I just realized as I walked from one side of this apartment to the other: The word "connect" (and, indirectly, the exclamation point that follows) might come from The One Connect. The One Connect is one of several pieces of religious-type screed/propaganda stuck to telephone poles and other places near Hamner Tower in Tampa. Another one (which has the exclamation point I remember being common to these posters) is called Let Us Get Some Weight!