preoccupations 1: dreams & schemes

& How are we?

            Been thinking? . . . ditto . . . dreams & schemes, ya know . . . — or should it be dreams vs schemes? Actually, I don't know. Uncertainty is a sure bet —/— odds have listing weight.

Let's just jump in like a late-summertide cannonball, break open a foreword nutshell & poke through the pieces:

            Schemes suggest actions — I've concocted plenty of those — this newsletter is the latest . . . They're not necessarily conscious strategies — essential impulses lie dormant. Acted out, they're characterized as pursuits — whereas, choked back, they're considered mere desires. Everything, though, has a lineage to pay — somewhere between a deeply held breath & a blown wish . . .

There've also been schemes of inactions — purposely not-done, or built up then abandoned. I can only guess they're segments of the same. At least, that's the way it's reframed in hindsight — & at most, the schemes live now as dreams, shacked up as enabling drifters will: brief adventures that involve vaguely exact characters, myself included, in a spattered suite of situations, like drops of blood — trailing off, to-&-from various scenes of near-misses, maybe-or-not missed — just remembered, barely or conveniently — a shape-shifting smear — there, then not . . . ~~~  ~~  ~.

For instance:

            At seventeen, the sentence of high school in Gridley Calif ended, finely without the additional judgment of a Scholastic Aptitude Test. A guidance counselor at the rural public school never pushed a college route. Rather, they recommended I follow a nonpublic-type path such as a lookout tower lone park ranger. I agreed with their assessment of my, apparently, apparent talent of circulating outside of the uniformly-inflamed social circles. It made natural sense to both of us. Plus, I thought forest service getups were kinda cool.

So, there was no thought of specifically higher learning, even after enrolling in so-classified college prep courses during senior year — used by myself moreover as a personal supplement to muss the grave effects of mass education, as I saw it, played out on its affected byproducts who appeared to be sold on acceptance letter antes, awarded, in my internal-outsider estimation, like turnstile wagers of blindly bound undertakings.

Either way, gambling itself can also be considered a profession. Anyone can take a seat at the cosmos. Some, however, just can't deal with it.

            The summer after graduation began with a fulfilled aspiration: a job at a record shop. This particular one was wedged in a three-way strip between a Supercuts & a Burger King — a missing link joined to separate from a chain of generic given-choices: a lost mind amidst a feathered bowl cut & a greasy paper crown.

Music — recordings — had always been the pocked complex I truly lived within, whether from radios, tapes or vinyl — some simple stereo, setup alone behind a closed-doored wherever — whichever spot nomads land-in with the speculation that, soon-enough, they'll be pulling up-from again like a fuzzed needle skipping with flighty volition between tracks. I stuck around Gridley for another year, as if living on probation in an over-familiar halfway home, while I cashiered albums in a nearby town. The store also rented out the then-new technology craze of videotapes — initially specified by free-will hazard as VHS or BETA.

Thinking myself an instant expert on the forefront of this young industry, I advised my family to invest in a BETAMAX machine, selling them that, word-had-it, it was the preference of Europeans — misconceived by unworldly taters as fancy-class inhabitants of a singular mythical kingdom of insightful progress, especially by those entrenched with an invalid passport of officially imagined history. Revenge can be sweet in retrospect — even the innocently ill-informed, accidental kind. I assumed my employment as a cashier accredited me a certain applied expertise:

Expertise: the dreamt-up trap of ego set back by evolution. Evolution: the great scheme of nature — a series of individual steps leading anywhere — somewheres that need no expert apprentices as it all moves too fast to catch, inherently either enticing you by way of sidetrack fixations or entitling you to trail along following an aftermath of imitation footprints — entirely led by that universal con, dazzling with fossilized survival as the bait, always just ahead as a foregone impression.

            Do you believe in horizons? Interesting thing about those — horizons — seemingly in the distance, but not defined by dictionary or foresight as, also, a current location. But, whichever side of that fine-line, both are impermanent states simply caught lying in the middle of revelation, innocent by way of aligned non-actuality, which actually means nothing & literally reads as even less.

Memory retranslates per the interpretive dance of unbalanced pretext — i.e., I know as little about myself as anyone else does or doesn't. All this restless witness unsurely recognizes is that fly-by-night existence is about as real as any reoccurring reverie, like now — or should I say, at this writing:

approaching daybreak riding out the transitioning hours with the springing volume of summer birds' flowing orchestra growing like a coming train of song — a beautiful alarm that daylight will arrive just in time. They are my conductive guardians. They sing away the shadow of night — to part the curtains — to see that another day is smoothly dawning like a party-crasher slipping through a back door, unnoticed as just another unknown-yet-expected guest, going right to the bring-yer-own collective to checkout which half-empties to steal before they silently exit the gathering & withdraw into the privacy of the ongoing — heading home, newly illuminated, to the next refreshing scheme.

            Most of my slept dreams are about reclaiming separated belongings & trying to get someplace with them. Neither ever happens; the moments evaporate in the midst of materializing, usually to be forgotten by the time I open my eyes. Sometimes I jot them down when they're finished with me. If I don't write them off, their repossessed stories uncover subterranean rivers roiling over sentimental rocks & defensive sediment. I awaken on the banks & lap at the silt, inducing visions that are already there, yet rushing back towards what has so-far happened.

Do you ever feel that rush? — dreamt beyond the limits . . . unbelievable yet believed . . . misunderstood into personal meaning, or undecipherable as a newsletter purely scheming to survive.

Oh-no, I'm fine — how are you?