Soul Suckers and Ford Trucks

I seem to have an obsession for my new computer. It’s a lot easier to talk to than most people I know, and it has the tendency of responding exactly the way I expect it to. That being said, I want it known that this is only true for my leg warmer, and not for the cold calculating machine found on the desktop of a little place I like to call “Work.” It likes to refer to itself that way, so I don’t mind using the word to describe it. That machine located in the basement of a three story building is slowly sucking my soul away. I am dreadfully serious about this. My computer at work is sucking my soul away. I’m not sure I can last much longer

Do you think divinity has a sense of humor? I think it does, because if you think about it, how often do ironic things happen to people? For instance, a little while ago I wrote a blog about BHF’s.; those wonderful things that help us through those times when most we feel abandoned. I wrote about those, and now I strangely find myself in a situation where I feel the need to find one, and don’t like the implications of having one. I’m worried that my computer is beginning to be a bhf, because I switch it on with the intention of not having to deal with the hollow sound of my pattering feet in my house. I admit, my feet no longer really patter, and in the carpeted regions of my house the patter is pretty quieted, but the image of the only son living at home being upset by the hollow echo of his own feet is a tragic one.

My point is that I feel a void. Because of missions, rare opportunities of teaching in the far east (as in, Taiwan), new commitments, and similar things, I feel like my close friends are gone. I don’t mean to say that I don’t have friends, because I do, but I’m talking about ones that feel like they can drop by any time that they want to, or that you can call without any reason, when you just want to talk. I have lots of friends that I wish were that way, but at the moment they aren’t. And so it is that I find myself in the situation where I feel a void, but at the same time feel that it wouldn’t be right to try and make a friendship much closer. Why do I feel that way? Because I worry that by so doing I create a bhf friend who I only seek out because I’m hurting. That’s no way to start a friendship.

It’s kind of silly to worry about starting friendships, though. I’m not sure that I believe in dreams being a reflection of anything more than our own subconscious way of dealing things, but this morning I had a dream that I think reflects something of my own psyche. I’ll share this dream, and feel free to psycho analyse it all you want. I have, and I have determined that the majority of my friends are right. I am crazy.

To start off, I should tell you that none of my dreams have real visual clarity, excepting the ones that are really important, or really unimportant. The ambiguous ones are never clear. Is that redundant? For me, dreams are more the emotion associated with any one image, and the emotion has the tendency of creating in my mind a scene that reflects the emotion. In other words, I do not dream, I emote. But, because my highly sophisticated brain is able to turn those emotions into images, I will try to explain the story of this illuminating dream. It was a short one.

I found myself on a horse, a brown one that emoted strength, steadiness, and exhilaration. Along for the ride (on a different horse) was an important friend of mine, a very dear friend that I have no idea who he was, just that he was important. He was a close friend, someone that I wished the good opinion of. Thus far is what my emotions told me. I could tell that riding the horse was vitally important to my friend, and that wherever we were headed, he was impatient to arrive. In that freakily fitting way that dreams have of making the ridiculous become reality, I was in an old western type place, wide open rolling hills, no fences, no sign of civilization, and I’m pretty sure that the time was before the automobile was invented. However, of a sudden, I found myself located next to an old ford truck. It looked squared, like a really old truck does. I don’t know why in that scene where a truck should definitely not have been there was a truck, but there it was.

The truck wasn’t nearly as important as what was inside. Inside was a faceless person, a beautiful woman whom I emoted to be my love, the person who I wanted to spend as much time as possible with. I say she was faceless because there was never the impression made of any particular features. I mean, I knew she had a face (nose, eyes, everything), but they were without definition in my head. I knew she was beautiful, knew that she had blond hair, and that she was who I loved.

This is where my psyche comes into play. For me, there was at that moment of opening the car door, and kissing the girl’s hand, a decision to be made, around which the whole dream pivoted. Do I get in and shut the car door, leaving my friend outside, to go along his path, or do I leave my love’s side to pursue a friend so important to me, whose opinion I value? In that moment of angst, I awoke.

It made me think of many times I’ve stopped at the crossroads of a decision and been torn between two opinions, two people that I saw as being exclusive, either one or the other. I’m afraid that that’s a train of thought that I revert to all too often. I thought about it for a long time, and realized that in the dream I was being foolish. The best thing to have done would have been to take the girl, and put her on the horse, and then sat up on it with her. That’s more romantic than an old ford truck anyway, and we could have gone together in pursuit of my friend.

So often I leave an idea out, just because I think it excludes another, when really I should be looking to see how both ideas can make the world (and my life) something better. If I could do that, maybe I could stop having angst. Or maybe I just like to say angst.

And that entire blog was to only to say that I ought to not worry about strengthening friendships. Aren’t you glad you read it? Don’t you want to be my friend now?