THE SCARIEST CREATURE IN THE MONSTER MANUAL

loves, dreams, “friendtropy”

11/29/24

With facial expressions and testy words, released like depth charges into the flow of time only to be detonated later, Aubrey Andromeda, perhaps without even being aware of it, built a series of barriers between yourself and all women, long after she had gone, barriers and fortifications insurmountable by ordinary lusts and desires towards women as a general category. This structure went up in spite of your memories of sex with every woman you’d had, generally and in specific, as well. Love, as it actually takes shape, not according to some script or masterplot you’ve been given all your life, that you’ve been prepared for, pushed into, or, conversely, warned against, a love you very well may end up fearing, hating, resenting the universe for—this is what your dreams of Tony Larry gave you an inkling of, to your despair. To love a man after a long life of loving women was like plummeting into a mineshaft and being unable to call for help from the abyssal network of underground tunnels. You had to distract yourself from the situation and start up an enormous game of make-believe as you went about your life, seeing Tony Larry here and there while avoiding his farm where you’d used to work, and all the locations around town where you’d suspect he would be, giving away nothing, arguing with yourself in your downtime. Talking yourself out of it as you had done with numberless women you couldn’t possess, either, but the argument in those cases was different; perhaps, with a man, it was in a language foreign to your outer precincts, foreign to your public-facing surface, but native to your cortex’s interior, where you didn’t spend so much conscious time, where you didn’t live your deliberate mental life, but a neighborhood more intrinsic to who you were. You tried to speak this confusing tongue and failed. It wasn’t bisexuality, you were sure of that; it was more like a bunker mentality formulated in response to extreme loneliness, a solitude handed off to you by Aubrey Andromeda in her departure.

This misogyny, this distrust and dislike of women—in spite of their physical desirability for you, which persisted, in waking life and in dreams—seemed to derive from the way that they all shared something intrinsic with A.A., some elemental quality even though she was individually damaged by life, the inheritor of her own particular sike-ological problem handed off like a baton. Other metaphors come to mind: of a car’s shocks damaged by miles of potholes, but what about A.A. was the car, in all its exploded parts on a diagram, and what was the road, what was the repeated pothole destroying the vehicle of herself? And what was quintessentially female to the point of fear about this whole way of apprehending her problems, her difficulties, that would transmit itself to all women, and interdict you, cut you off, and introduce this barrier in your mind, this moat? Women in their relationships to you provided a series of ideals, each strengthening or developing the last: marriage to Natasha had been the strongest sexual signal, that was then distorted, warped by your time with A.A., and who knew by what mechanism this distortion set you on another frequency, to the point that the loves that now populated your sexual dreams would be expanded to your own sex? The most frightening page of the monster manual, the notorious creature in the portfolio that strikes the greatest fear, is the girlfriend that turns you gay. You were pushed by women, by the way they took up positions on a sexual gameboard after your decades of relationships with them, into gay contemplations.

The dream life came on, unbidden and startling as a nervous condition which promised to upend normal life, yet, because these encounters took place in the realm of dreams, they could be shoved away without a great deal of thought after a few moments of consciousness upon awakening. It could have been Tony Larry, it could have been any man you happened to see in life. It seemed not to matter, in a random way that was unconcerning, until one particular dream took precedence, asserted itself the way a determined ingenue would, during auditions for a starring role in a nocturnal production, knowing a powerful and consequential critic would be present in the audience on opening night. The dream about Tony Larry that seemed to indicate a change within you was mysterious as all dreams but there was also a deep clarity about it. You were in a massive complex, in a foreign country, on what looked like a corporate campus with impeccable landscaping, and there were many young people in the building milling around, maybe it was a mall, maybe it was an academic building, it wasn’t important, to the sense of profundity, to say one thing or another. You went into a darkened inner room, a bookstore with dark overhead track lighting; the lighting was uneven and the only bulbs that were illuminated were over the straight books in this otherwise gay bookstore. The gay bookshelves were in the shadows and you lingered by the heterosexual books which were in a safe, bright corner, an island of light. Gold figures moved through the dark aisles only illuminated by glistening scallops of light, their expressions were unreadable. They were at most just presences. The dream shifted and you were supposed to meet up with Tony Larry later, at some moment you had agreed on. A bridge outside the complex led to another building, another city, another country. You were waiting there while crowds streamed past. They could have been office workers, students, shoppers, it wasn’t clear, but they were all young people. You thought you saw Tony Larry, someone with his features, his smile, and you called out to him, but he didn’t hear you, just went across the bridge, away from you with the crowd to the foreign place. You couldn’t follow him, you were riveted to the spot by dream logic. The overwhelming feeling before you woke up was that you were being divided from someone you felt ultimate love for, and what set this dream apart from all the other dreams in the night programming you were conscious of, upon reviewing dreams from a position of awakened awareness, was its total rivalry with reality, in that its detail and emotional texture were vivid and credible to an extreme degree; the sadness and aloneness, the feeling of a love that had been sundered, were as poignant as anything you’d felt in other passages of life, dreams, death, afterlife. You felt your participation was some revealed secret, a one-time alignment of moving corridors allowing you a fleeting, penetrating vision into your inner architecture, as if the boulevards of an intellectual Paris had rearranged themselves to lead inexorably to Tony Larry at the center of the spokes’ wheel, an Arc de Triomphe, and then it was gone for all time upon awakening. It was a phantasm of happiness with emotional lineaments that conscious life lacked, to its eternal detriment.

12/13/24

You’re losing the signal. Which is frustrating because you know the signal’s origin is from within, within yourself, within the labyrinth. “Don’t make me elaborate,” you say to anyone who will listen. It’s almost Christmas time. You hope it will be a time of reflection, of compilation, of compression rather, compression of the different levels of your sensibility.

You tweeted yesterday: “I just had breakfast w/ a rich man. I went into it thinking: ‘I want to sell him a painting I haven’t even painted yet, I want to get some $$ from him.’ But I just couldn’t do it. I lack the art-shark instincts. I just make cathedrals on deserted islands only I can see.” It’s stressful, but in a specific way, where the stress over writing or painting and creation comes from the same sector as “the signal you often lose” comes from: inside. As if the writing urge is an inner boss, a supervisor wanting to know “Where’s that paperwork you were assigned?” It should have been on his (your) desk by the end of the day. Inner deadlines feel like more of a crucial betrayal when they’re not met as do the ones laid down by an external job, an employer, a paycheck. Is this true though? You don’t know but you want it to be true “for your story.”

Screen Time in Your Dreams is as valuable as art is in your waking life. You feel excited by the things you get accomplished in the hypnogogue, you feel a desire, to look forward to checking to see if there was a reply, if someone checked in with you. A ripple signifying that your pebble was dropped into the pond of other people in the form of a response, a shimmer of digital objekts, a communication. Then you see that no such thing happened, the people do not exist. Is this the lesson: that to privilege the dream life too much is a mistake, or that the unconscious is the home of your true friends, your truest of all…? Imaginary friends are the truest, the stoutest companions. But even in the dream they are concealed behind a cyberwall: epistolary relationships in the dream world. The laws of “friendtropy,” the state of dissolving affairs occurring in waking life, with ex-girlfriends and then with Tony Larry becoming distant, unreachable via text messaging, doesn’t pertain there, perhaps. You hope so, as you devote more and more time to going to sleep. Time invested in the dream space is time devoted to developing your dream rolodex. Dream networking, dream dating. Fixing a dream mirror.

You’ve eaten nothing today. It’s like you don’t even care about yourself. You’ve figured out none of life’s lessons. You absorbed those messages from childhood about how reading is fundamental so you try to disappear into books, into fictional worlds, as scary as that sounds. That’s like the one value you have soaked up and made integral to your personality. You haven’t made your bed in several seasons. What is wrong with you? Your house is like a rat’s nest. You’re a bullet that many women have dodged, and the best among them know it, and say so to their girlfriends and family members. You being an objekt lesson for women, a cluster of red flags, a dodged bullet—take your pick of cliches from the glossary of online dating which all women carry around with them in their handbags. Or is it in an app they all have on their phones, something sponsored by a magazine? It’s the media relied upon by women, arranged and organized against you, a conspiracy of women, and the orders from HQ are given out at the meetings held every two weeks. Your ex-wife Natasha is a lead functionary of this shadowy group. Aubrey Andromeda is a foot-soldier. Stop right there. There is no conspiracy. It wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be able to keep itself together. Alliances don’t work that way, as beleaguered as the ostensible target feels. The women in your life do not talk to each other, at least not verbally. They are part of an ambience, an environment, a mass haunting. A subverbal, unconscious agreement, that the parties themselves do not even have full awareness they’ve made. And it’s not against you specifically, it’s more a question of types of men, categories which you fall into, that constitute objects of fear, things to be warned against. Don’t get into this diagnosis of women too far. You don’t know what you’re talking about. This is why it’s best to leave it up to the dream personnel, the dream crew who design the sets of your unconscious theatre productions. The glowing naked women who resemble Natasha, lit by spotlights, who you must leave in your bed as you run strange dream-errands, who are taken away from you just like Tony Larry gets taken away. Retrieving loved ones in waking life feels out of the question when the divergence, the distance, the breach among dream-figures is so definite, until the dream situation feels like it has been given priority, the right of way even when you see the real people while awake at the farm stand, the nightclubs, the basement parties. In passing cars on the streets of Oylesburg. The lack of requital is in you. The heart, paralyzed by inner forces, is disempowered from claiming the physical and emotional objekts of the outer world.