Haunted Signs

I pass by a Chevron station every morning on my way in to the hospital. I buy gas there too sometimes, but mostly I just pass by as I am trying to maintain consciousness and suck down my coffee. I think the electronic sign that displays the gas prices is haunted. Because most mornings, probably four out of five of then, the sign goes all wonky, stops displaying the price, and starts showing random shapes (or as random as is possible given the limited conformations of the digital readout)  for about one full second as I approach before reverting to pretending to be a normal, non-haunted, sign and telling me gas is $3.23 today. This happened the first few times without me thinking much beyond it being strange and perhaps wondering if there was a short. It does not happen in the evening or the afternoon if I pass by, only in the morning though.

After the first few times, catching it out of the corner of my eye and thinking it strange, I began to actually watch it. When it still did the weird creepy-movie-dream-sequence non-numbers flash I began to wonder if I was crazy. Was I seeing things? Imagining them? It’s been happening for several months and the rest of my life has continued without someone offering me the choice between any red and blue pills, so I have begun to accept that there is probably something odd going on. If I was crazy, I would hope that it would show in more ways than this one, very limited, less than spectacular way. If I’m gonna be nutso, I want to be batshit, white coat, rubber room crazy, thank you very much.

I can really only think of two possibilities beyond crazy though. The first, more ‘logical’ explaination is that there is a super-bored attendant sitting and waiting for me to pass by in the mornings so he can press a button and freak me out. This seems even less likely than something bizzarre or supernatural for the following reasons: 1. Seriously, how bored would you have to be? 2. It assumes an astounding level of narcissism- why would he select MY pickup to taunt? 3. He would have to watch like a hawk. I do not go by at a consistent time daily. All in all, I consider the actual likelyhood of this being possible to be less than the likeyhood of the supernatural.

Which leaves weirder options. Does my 1995 pickup truck emit some sort of crazy electromagnetic interference that fucks with the sign? If so, how? Or, as I mentioned, either the sign, my pickup, or both are haunted or inhabited by gremlins that think it is either funny to mess with me, or they like talking to each other as I pass by. I don’t know what it means that I have accepted that this may be the most likely possibility.

 

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Cold

I am a cold weenie as it turns out. I just don’t like it, at all. If my nose hairs freeze, it is too cold. If my fingertips get so cold scraping the windshield even though gloves that they hurt like hell as they thaw, it is too cold. I can do rain. I can do grey, overcast dreary skies for months on end. While the sun on the snow can indeed be beautiful, I’m really not a fan of it for more than about two days. When my pickup’s clutch pedal is stiff and feels like I’m shoving it through molasses, it is too fucking cold.

I have decided that I need to move somewhere warm. No idea if it will really pan out, but I am trying. I’ll live there for a couple of years and then decide if I really am a heat person. There is a chance that I’m not. I might really just be a coastal person, someone who likes the middle range forever. If that turns out to be true, I can definitely live with it. As it stands though, I’ve never really lived anywhere where an air conditioner was really useful for more than about three weeks out of each year. We’ll see what I think of it. I know I don’t like mosquitoes, but they can get pretty bad here too when they want to, so I’m not sure any place is really safe on that front.

Only 6 months from now and then I’ll finally be warm again!

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Wherein Reality Becomes a Dream

At what point do reality and dreamland intersect? There are always those moments between wakefulness and sleep, but what about in the remembrance of the past?

I have had a few adventures. One included a long trek in a foreign country with many sights, challenges and people along the way, but sometimes I wonder what was real. I have memories, certainly. I have journal entries as well, though written half in English and half in Japanese as they are, I wonder how well I would decipher them today. But occasionally a memory will strike me. The smell of a cup of tea, when I am rolling a sleeping bag, or even wet socks will bring something drifting up to engulf me.

I remember hiding under the eves of an abandoned business, a car dealer, spreading wet bedrolls on the dusty ground to try to get them even slightly drier as the rain poured down a few feet away. I think I remember anyway. What if that part was actually something I had in a dream once? What if I my mind only categorized it as a memory of that time because the subject matter was consistent with what I saw then, while I was a world away? A sort of miss-filing of the memory. I wonder about this frequently, as with time and distance, true clear memories seem to become as hazy as any dream becomes after morning coffee.

In fact, I’ve had some dreams that still stick more vividly than some actual events. For example, I remember the sheer joy and elation of my first lucid dream better than yesterday’s breakfast. Emotional impact dictates clarity, not ‘reality’ in the sense of observable events. I wonder and think about how much of our past we dream up, either as we sleep, or through the distorted lens of recollection, or even moreso, nostalgia. It seems to me that the weight of things that we re-imagine is likely greater than the things we recollect accurately.

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