Jumping Ahead: Catching you up with the present

6/ 5/10
A few days ago the gentle prodding of the alarm tore me from my first anxiety dream about the subway. In the dream I was sunk deep in a book, supposedly allotting just a portion of the conscious brain to keeping track of the other mammals and ticking off the stops. The story must have been good because I looked up just in time to realize the doors were closing, separating me from where I wanted to get off. I bolted for the door and due to the cruel timing of dreams, the doors shut just before I could leave the metal sausage of human misery. Just as the disappointment washed over me and the train was beginning to jolt forward, the alarm broke the stream of potentials. The dream was so close to reality, I attentively attended to my subway ride into work that morning.

Speaking of sleep, I’ve noticed a new habit to sprawl across any flat surface and often find myself stretched from corner to opposite corner, as if defying the rigid rectangle shape attempting to define how and where I sleep. Everything in the city whispers “STAY INSIDE THE BOX!”….the rectangular cubicles inside rectangular buildings….riding in long rectangular cubes down rectangular tunnels, walking along rectangular paths, clearly laid out…looking at a rectangular river confined to a rigid path with rectangular boxes segmenting the bedrock…a fractal universe of boxes. The bed, the shower, the apartment, the block of apartment buildings. Everything is constrained by parallel lines, right angles and rigid confines of simple geometry. The subway trains squeal with an insatiable, ear splintering, protest whenever the lines curve. Even the noble, aged ginko and sycamore trees are tamed and trained into appropriate boxes of ‘nature’. It seems my sleep patterns are a quiet protest to the reinforced message to do as I’m told, color within the lines.