I agree that the dark mood could be attributed to deepening winter. The absolute darkest time of year. Well, solstice is just around the corner. And tonight I will be attending a solstice celebration! So that will be good, I think.

I've been looking forward to it all week. It's at A's house, with all his huge Persian family. When he invited me, he told me it was the Persian/Zoroastrian tradition, called (and I have no idea how to spell this) shabbeh ao'dah. That's what it sounded like. Basically, all the family and loved ones spend the solstice together, and everybody brings something to share that they've created--songs, art, writing, anything at all to amuse each other and party. A's extended family and neighborhood are awesome (you can read this for a little background), and I look forward to sharing some of my poetry, etc.

---

I've been having weird, vivid dreams of late.

1.
I come to my house (a strange, colorful, small house that I think I just recently inherited) to see it on fire. Some corners of the house have sizable, but not unstoppable flames. I grab a fire extinguisher (very handy, no?) and start battling the fire. I think at some point I pause to call 911. I have it pretty much under control when they arrive, but they extinguish the ground around my house to make sure (?). I am a little shaken, but more annoyed and bewildered. Why the fuck was my house on fire? Anyways. So after the whole fire episode this guy comes up to me and admits he's been stalking me. He's skinny, caucasian, short brown hair and glasses, probably nearing thirty. Pretty unremarkable overall. He's nervous and apologetic. It's not as though anyone caught him, he just realized he shouldn't do it. I'm bemused, only slightly weirded out, not at all angry. I chat with him for a while, he gives me his copies of the key to my house. I just accept it all with an air of "Whatever, Thanks dude, glad to hear you're not stalking me any more."

So my house is really interesting inside and I haven't really explored it. There's also a garage to the right of it. I go into the garage, and a whole lot of my friends are there, kind of for housewarming. They're all sitting on the floor talking; they were kind of waiting while I talked with the stalker. We continue talking for a little while. Howard is sitting there with his shirt off. I put my hands on his shoulders, and sort of ran them down and around his torso, like holding him from behind; but under my hands his chest and sides felt like J's.

We went inside and started looking around. House has a lot of half-levels and small rooms, and they're all interestingly painted. The further up we go, the more interesting it is. As I crawled up into the next room, I said to my friend there, "This house is awesome, but it would suck to be old in here," referring to how hard it would be to get around. There was a little dog in there. Kind of like the slinky dog from Toy Story, but alive, and covered with a loose velour-cloth-like kind of skin. He was little about a foot long and a wrist wide, and moved like a snake. Very soft and timid. My friend was playing with him, and I started playing with him, like Awwww, and I said, "Is he mine?" and she said, Yup. We moved up into the topmost room, and everybody followed. There was a whole bunch of stuff in there, and it all looked like valuable antiques. Oriental rugs, beautiful carved wood chairs, paintings, all sort of laying around, like that was just where they were put. People were picking stuff up and looking at it, and I was like, "I should get an appraiser in here." There was a painting on the wall, and I took it down, I guess to look at it more closely, and there was another painting behind it, and I took that down, and there were two smaller drawing/sketches behind that, and behind those were a bunch of my old school papers. I was like, What are those doing here?, and then I thought, oh, it must have been the stalker, he had old stuff of mine and was keeping it in here. [Now that I think about it, it's kinda like an uncovering of the creative process--the final valuable painting, then a practice painting behind that, then visualization sketches, then the raw mental ideas that gave rise to the creation.]

2.
I'm in some sort of afterlife. I'm a kid with a bunch of kids. The afterlife is really weird, and repetitive. I'm a little boy. I have friends there, and we all feel the same way about it. We're not so sure if we like it, wonder what else we can do. The afterlife is supposed to be amusing or something; I mean, there are things for us to do, like see movies, other stuff; but it's also kind of disturbing, like nothing ever really changes, and a lot of the other kids are sort of zombie-ish. There are angels that sort of take care of all of us, zipping through every now and then.

At one point, I stop one, and ask how I can get out of here. It tells me to be at a certain place at a certain time. Somehow I let all my friends know, and we all go there. It is a small movie theatre, and it is filled with kids like me, all watching the movie, but my friends and I are waiting, wondering what's going to happen. Suddenly an angel zips through and grabs me up, carries me faster than anything through walls and dumps me into a stationary mine cart at the mouth of a tunnel, pointing out. I am alone, and I wonder for a second if the same thing is happening to my friends, when another angels zips up from behind and grabs me, lifting me up and out into the sky.

Then there is a journey that is fast fast fast, all in the sky; angels are flying all over the place, criss-crossing, exchanging me from one to another. Not long am I carried by one when another snatches me up, taking me in a different direction. The sky is bending around us, multi-colored and thick; and even though I can barely feel the motion, I can't even begin to say how fast these angels are. They are a half-second in flight and I have no idea how far we've gone, what time we're in. Finally, one swoops me down towards earth, and drops me off at the base of a statue.

I wake up as a little boy, as though I've been napping; I am young, a little younger than in the afterlife. It's twilight, a little cloudy. I look up--the statue is a large, David-esque stone angel, looking down at me with one hand up. I am aware that I've been reincarnated in some way--I mean, I'm not a baby, but I'm in a different body. I sit up and see nearby some African-American kids in a family playing basketball against a hoop on the side of their house. I recognize a few of them as my friends from the afterlife. They know I'm there, but they're playing basketball. We're all younger now. There is a newspaper beside me on the base of the statue, and I pick it up. I'm thinking of my friend V, who was sort of younger than me, an especially close friend from the afterlife, sort of a sister-lover; I pick up the newspaper and I know right away that I should check the birth notices, that I'll know her when I see her. The newspaper is all one section, and I flip past the death notices, to the birth notices which are closer to the front. I just about open it up to look when the mother of the African-American family comes out onto the porch to call her kids in for dinner. She is pregnant. I know she is pregnant with V, and I feel a spreading warmth inside, and I smile. We're all in the same family, the same neighborhood. We're all here.

8:21 p.m. 2003-12-19�