Are you us?

I'm happy just to sit here, wait for the bite of the fog outside to be excised as the door closes and the people mover whisks us on its way.

Happy to scan a few pages before el soporifico hits like a pacific front. Warm, unrelenting; washes over me and blankets me in a soft sheath of stupor, taking me to

..eh

what's that?

Odd conversation happening next to me.

I drift nonetheless

To the sweet spot, glassed between two layers of consciousness, almost dreaming but with the slightest of grips on the top pane of glass and then

plunk

there.

Plates above and below have fogged in, but there's light coming through, suggests not a very long trip down here and I must be hungry because it's all about ribs.

This is isn't id here, this is the little brain talking. GI juices must be rumbling back on the other side of the glass because all I can think about is

..how long to boil these puppies. And the juxtapositions begin. Geometry of dreams; shapes and shadows overlapping and contraindicating and challenging and diffusing together. And there, being pushed out of the wall in a perfect wife-size profile she comes and now we're

talking

How long again? Wouldn't it be easier to braise these in the oven or even barbecue them...boiling seems so Dahmner like and the smell. I love meat dear, you know that, but sometimes the smell can

But dreams have geometry, they also have their own linguistics so it comes out something like

thought word thought thought word

and ultimately comes out as something like "purple", which somehow captures the meaning, intent, undercurrents and fluorescence of the whole dialogue

Which now segues without a pause to the new family member. How long should we keep her separate in her room ("red"); is she eating enough "yokel" wonder if she has had her shots (thought).

Dreams are at once unilateral and non-hierarchical, another paradox for another day. But it comes to bear in THIS dream as it our relationship transferred to the subtle realm, so there's collaboration and back and forth but utlimately I pull the shots here - nobody else can except maybe for that lady looking down from the glass plate she has a cord she's somehow dangled through, odd, solid through solid, but this is sopor land and the next things blur into continuity, the subtle realm and the gross realm destroying opposites as they couple and twist as I pull the chord and

eyes are opening. Nice train. Warm train. fog gone. But she is still talking to her other half, who sounds a lot like mine, given the context of the conversation. She's finishing up with their new pet now, about to say cloistered goodbye without a lot of vociferous love-yous, a lot like me, pointing me again the to ultimate impersonal nature of most of our very human transactions.

Cohen, for all the edges I can't seem to get over, does have that one NAILED. Fear, anger, depression, love, they're the same between all of us - just different degrees of intensity.

And with that thought threading and wrapping around the mists her conversation wound around me, I'm off to nappy land again

shuka.

is back from SLee-ing and is now working with a Sharepoint tool has a lot of letters in its name.

has just emailed 44 megs and is now on his way to see SLee at the place that sells fat-sponges and caffeinated beverages.

Separation Papers

My concept of death has passed through many topical gates of inquiry; past the millstone of "why"; passed the emotional moors of nihilism, travelled to and from (or through) the barren yet exhausting existentialist wastelands. Got snowblind in those, almost lost my way, on the way to finding it.

So I've matured in my concept of death somewhat.

Now, when I look at it, and this is in the light of several deaths in my life - grandparents, friends, friends of friends - natural, premature, or otherwise - now when I look at it the closest feeling I can associate it with is a separation profound and unbreakable.

My sense is that those who have passed enter into an impersonal state, where they can 'see' or 'be' with family, friends, their past - but are not attached the way to it the way they were prior to death. That, plus an absolute barrier where communication - at least in the way we think of it - cannot take place. I believe that almost all rules in life can be broken, often need to be broken, but this one - here's a way to think of it - it does not seem relative. It seems absolute. The ultimate separation papers, from who you were to what you now are.

And the sense that it is not nearly as hard for those who have passed as it is for those who are left behind.

And that is the koan that I'm wrestling with right now on some level. As well as what happens in deep sleep, and the answer there that confirms awareness as non-corporeal.

I've seen through my spiritual travels and travails that happiness is wed to sadness; anger to joy; suffering to pleasure; in the world of not-two, they are two sides of the same coin.

What then, with this feeling, this vague abstract that paints death as profoundly one-sided?