Back at what used to be my haunt. When Starbucks’ prices rose right after Covid, I stopped using their facilities as my office away from home. Too expensive. My recent birthday brought in a couple of gift cards and I am back for a time. Yum, an $8 latte! Thing is, I really enjoy sitting here with my typewriter and watching the folks, thinking about folks and doing no real harm. Hell, the thing is electronic! I am not even using paper! There are rare-earth minerals and inhumane/environmentally damaging mining techniques to consider, on the way to using my electronics, but by and all, no real harm? When the money is once again gone, maybe the powers that run things would let me bring a thermos. Then, I could always sit here, just breathing and living the dream. Gasp! ‘Living the dream’.
Oh, sons and daughters… the dream. I am coming to believe that there is no dream – this current life is always The Dream. It has to be. You, I, the little beasts are living our dream every day. I do, sometimes, imagine being elsewhere, inhabiting some other body, existing in ways that do not contain the present moment, but there is no other moment. Imagined possibility is dream, yes. We can aim ourselves there but we will never get to another place. The other is always ‘down the road’ (says our inner self, Mr. or Ms. Imagination). The other can exist in ways that are not and may never be. Experience tells me that the thing, the dream, turns out not to be as imagined when we get there. No pot o’ gold. The found pot will be just as brown and probably just as shit as the pot we are in, here, now. So, driving the road to ‘other’ might as well be called ‘living the dream’. I digress. I was daydreaming.
Sigh.
Dreaming of a somewhere else and desiring to be there is our biggest difference with the stars, the planets, the asteroids, the other creatures and living things. The little pussycats I used to babysit, accepted what was. They got up, got themselves something to eat or sat quietly, played rambunctiously, slept often and worried not a whit. If tragedy struck, if the mouse got away, the pussycat just kept on about his pussycat business. No big deal. What is, what happens, is and happens. A pussycat can dream, I am certain. It is within their being to do so. I have witnessed the twitching legs and the chattering teeth of a dreaming pussycat. Theirs is a different attitude. While dreaming, they are in the moment. Those little beasts don’t distract themselves from the moment they are in with a dream. There is no longing for somewhere else, no wishing they could fly, no dissatisfaction with the pot o’ brown, that gets found
Ha.
Today, I pronounce myself King of my day! I am not thin, I am not young, I am not rich. I am dreaming of those things. I am on the road toward (away from) those things. I am living the dream. I am in the moment and there is none better. I sure do hope that the $8 doesn’t run out?
Robert On The Air 