Your Source for 'Ff'lo

I had a tornado dream replay last night, after earlier having a "oh shit I've endangered myself" dream in which someone who might likely harm me was outside my place, manacing, and I was responsible for it, I don't know how exactly, but for more than having the light on, which I was wishing I hadn't, but somehow knew I couldn't turn off without signaling more about where I was, and increasing my vulnerability.  I was frozen in a doorway, only partially dressed, no good place to be safe.  I had let my guard down with the person before, and that was part of it.  The menacing thing had its roots in that history.

The tornado replay was a re-experiencing of a tornado I'd dreamed about earlier, I think earlier this week, but that's pretty fuzzy.  Same tornado, another experience of it, including knowing it was that same tornado, replaying.  A few days ago, between these dreams (I think), I had one awake-life evening watching TV coverage I'd stumbled onto of a tornado making its persistent (hour-plus on the ground) way across northcentral to northeastern Kansas, my part of the state.  There's so much more to watch with this kind of TV coverage than there used to be, even a few years ago.  It was wild.  And 'tis the season.

Tornadoes are, for me, both tornadoes and representations of external dangers.  I've written here before of how, years ago, I thought I might have nightmares after a late-night screening of Hope and Glory, which was about growing up during the Blitz in London, and then that night I dreamed not of bombs but of tornadoes, something else scary that comes from the sky, makes you hide and hunker down in some shelter, and might kill ya.  And I had a tornado dream earlier this Spring that ended in my being torn apart physically by it---by flying wood bits, actually---while still on the first floor of a house that isn't mine, trying to turn my attention to pets that are mine, after being on the phone with someone and seeing the tornado in the distance.

This is a lot of tornado dreaming.

It's hot and humid, and fronts are moving around, melding and clashing, not far away.

Looks like so far a lot of it's missing us to the south, the 5-to-8 incher the weather pixies called for. Either way, I'm in, and ready to be in. I was in a lot this week, sick. Hard to enjoy in, sick.

I didn't sit at the computer once while I was out sick, for some reason. That choice did fit with my feeling out of touch with everything, with the world. I'm pretty out of touch.

I'm guessing that the tailing off of caffeine consumption that went along with my stomach flu experience might have been responsible for my having such a long, vivid dream last night, during the regular night, that I remembered lusciously well when I awoke, gently, before 7. It was the kind of dreaming I usually recall only after a sleeping-in kind of back-to-sleep lazy lollygag extension of the night well into the day. Such a doozy, too, this one, this series of scenes. Lots of sex. The presence of dear departed ones. Surreal walking through representations of the past projected into a now. It was in color, too. It left me in a state of such receptiveness to its wisdom that I even understoood---as if by osmosis, it was so relaxed---what could be made of the TV, just submerged below the surface in the Chesapeake Bay, next to the goofy fish, and playing, as someone I loved and I rode by, a flashback to a Nixon-era talking head referring to his colleague Mr. Brinkley, who was also currently starring in [some silly-sounding drama whose name I didn't really catch, but chuckled at, even in the dream].

Lots of water, bridges, swimming, the urge to submerge, city streets, alleys and water and gutters and ditching the evidence, bars, water, women, sex, water, swimming, another woman, sex, windows, radical architectural renovation, a woman on the phone, the old basement grocery that's now a buffet, a woman on the street, another woman with her, stairs, the cobbler's, evidence of burning, ladders. How we're gonna fuck next, why this position is untenable for much longer, that's funny yet not diverting us from the action, wish people would stop watching us, how do I close these curtains, you've swum up to me by these big rocks and I'm moving this piece of your wet curly hair off to the side of your forehead with one finger and in this close-up right here in front of my face you are every bit as beautiful as I ever saw you be.

There was loss through and through, and no balance, too, and neither hurt.

It's enough to make a girl want to give up the caffeine for real, for just a shot at a little more such magical sumptuousness.