You would think that I would remember that, but no, each time life sucks again, it comes as a terrible surprise.

Perhaps I am being a trifle melodramatic. Forgive me. It’s been one of Those Days, the ones with the deep sleep and the last time and the sweaty and incoherent awakenings and such, and so I am all kinds of under the weather right now, and feeling a little gloomy as a result.

Speaking of weather, it’s been dark and rainy all day, which I think has heavily contributed to my feeling of a vast deficit in my reserves of whack. I hate these dark, cold, rainy days where even at noon it’s not really bright enough to feel like day and so it leaves me feeling drowsy and lethargic and oppressed.

In fact, the day left me so whack deficient that I ended up having all my meals about two hours later than I usually have them. Between brutally transcendental sleep and a profound feeling of temporal majadjustment, quite often today, I felt disoriented on a nearly disassociative level.

Who am I? What am I doing? Where am I? What time is it? Is it day or night? Is this real now, or another dream?

The dream harvest proved interesting, at least. I had two separate dreams in which I volunteered to help someone with something. One was very short, or at least, the part I remember is brief.

In it, someone was making mashed potatoes for some large dinner I would also be attending. The person was female and the whole thing definitely had a holiday family dinner vibe to it.

I saw that she was struggling with the task, and offered to do it for her. It occurs to me now, in the waking state, that mashing things might be one of the only kitchen tasks in which a man’s superior upper body strength might actually make a difference.

Anyhow, I did what I usually do to mash potatoes, which is to first use the edge of a spatula to chop up cooked potato as fine as I can that way, and only then apply the masher. If you try mashing right from the get-go, you end up having to put a hell of a lot more energy into it. Chopping first is far more efficient.

So perhaps it had nothing to do with upper body strength and more to do with superior technique.

Once the potatoes were mashed, the dream ended, because honestly, after a dramatic and spine-tingling climax like that, all you can do is roll credits.

The other dream was stranger and more interesting. (More interesting than mashing potatoes? Impossible!)

Somehow, I came across this particular corner store from the neighborhood where I grew up, I knew it was closed down now, as the guy who ran it had retired. (True in the waking world too. )

But I heard sounds from inside, and so I looked in, and the place was a wreck, garbage and debris everywhere. And there was someone, a little kid sort of(sometimes he seemed older), behind the counter, which now sported a grill like one would expect in a bank in a rough neighborhood. The sort of thing that is supposed to protect the cashier from the public. A sort of cage.

Also in the dream, I somehow knew that this kid hated me, although I didn’t know why. I asked him when the cage was put in, but I don’t remember his reply. But I remember thinking “Well, I have always wanted to be involved in a small business like this, so I should offer to help out. ”

So I did. I asked him if if I could help. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously at me and asked me “What for?” I shrugged and replied “Something to do. ” I suppose I figured a long explanation of wanting to be involved in rebuilding a small business and hoping to maybe get a job there was not my best tack.

So he thought about it a second, and then said, rather haughtily, that he supposed I could pick up the snacks left around the place. I looked around and there was various bits of junk food half-eaten here and there. I asked him what he wanted me to do with it, and he airily replied “oh, whatever. ”

So I cleaned up, throwing most of it out, but helping myself to a powdered donut for my troubles. (NOrmally, I really don’t care for the ones covered in powdered sugar. It doesn’t add much to the flavour, and makes the donut far messier to eat. But what the hell, it’s a dream.)

When I was done, he said to me “OK…. you can come back tomorrow and I will see what there is to do. But I still hate you! ”

I asked him why he hated me, because as far as I could recall, I had never done anything to hurt him. He said something about my stupid eighties hair. I said “Well, I’m a child of the eighties!”

I don’t recall what happened after that. Looking back on the dream now, the kid was clearly the younger brother of Keanu Reeves’ character in The River’s Edge, a movie I watched with Felicity less than twelve hours before the dream.

Truth be told, I really would like to be involved in a small business. I would love to have my own small business, honestly, that I build up myself. A small bookstore (hard to make those work, though) or a little cafe or restaurant, or something along those lines. Something big enough to employ me and a couple of other people, and afford us all a decent, comfortable living.

I would love, in fact, to have the old-fashioned deal where you live above your store. Imagine your commute being walking down a staircase! That would be amazing. Plus, I would want my business to have a homey, comfortable feel. That is something you just can’t get from a big box chain store.

Well, enough blather. Back to sleep I go, like a shell-shocked solider returning to the front.