This morning we discussed the fight last night between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul. Why did Mike feel the need to fight someone 31 years younger than him? I imagined Mike Tyson, who’s career had peaked when I was barely 7 years old, happily hanging out in a garden or something. Apparently he really loves pigeons. Who knew!? Maybe the fight did its job: relevancy. I am now googling Mike Tyson memoirs.
After discussing Mike Tyson, I started to think about the nightmare I had last night. It had made its way back to me and at a few points in my life had been recurring. I wondered why it came back after so long.
The nightmare was related to a retail job I have had where the culture was to stay until the work was done. In the nightmare, I am trapped in a store and typically there are unusual circumstances that arise. This time, I knew my ride home was waiting and I could not leave until I found my shoes and coat, but there were endless piles of shoes and coats. There were also the side quests of talking to customers about banal things while knowing that these conversations weren’t helping with the search or the task. There were also the self imposed distractions: finding something interesting and wandering around a large warehouse with it. In this case, it was a mask-I am betting this had some psychological significance but maybe that is a different musing for a different time. Shelves were high. Messes were abundant. Confusion was imminent. It is possible to become tired, mentally and physically, as I wandered in this demanding stress-dreamscape. Escaping meant that I was letting go of the political capital that I might have gained by staying and helping, or that I might not have a job to come back to. At some point my dream-self resorted to stealing shoes in order to go home. Stealing is something I am deeply opposed to in real life so I think that helped to wake me up.
This is not the typical scary-monster nightmare. I am not a person who watches scary movies, so my monsters are reality based. People who create monsters use these fear-based realities to fuel their metaphors. The metaphors can get lost and you’re just left with dissociative absorption. Someday I might ruminate about how I feel that dissociative absorption and imaginative involvement are different, but today I am focused on Mike Tyson.
If you are a child of the 90’s you might recall an overarching ideal to fight aging. This has never stopped. This is not commentary on a general optimization of diet and exercise. Fighting age has inevitably mutated into a how to guide on preservation of power, leaving a generation of wrinkled patriarchs wandering around, desperately grasping the life preserver of political capital. Maybe they’ve not had enough nightmares.
In the book, The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline, [spoiler warning] we learn about how some have lost the ability to dream. I love that this book, although dystopian, seems so close to reality. With the focus on elders as valuable community members, it’s no surprise that an indigenous writer has depicted in great detail the dystopia that follows after dreams disappear. The word dream could indicate that there was a loss of the happy ones, but this is maybe just where I personally gravitated to. After further thought, Dimaline was commenting on the critical thinking skills that are necessary to see the warning in a dream about grasping a metaphorical life preserver.
Walter Hobbs, Logan Roy and Lord Business (aka: The Man Upstairs) all held furiously to those life preservers. Will Farrell (& probably other folks within his creative sphere) created this legacy of characters who epitomize the social climate of anti-retirement as objects of derision. We experience the fallout and fallacy of their successes but will these tragicomedies move the needle enough to cause a paradigm shift?
In the age of networking and nepotism and working outside of the standard 40 hours to achieve even a crumb of success those of us who have these nightmares are often living them in real time as well. The average person is the fallout and fallacies in the real life versions of Mr. Roy, Mr. Hobbs and the almighty and obvious, Lord Business. In The Neverending Story, Bastian, a boy lost in (surprise!) a dream after a fight with dear old dad about what else but (you guessed it!) dreaming, is called out from The Nothing to give the Child-like Empress a name. Maybe it is my age, but The Nothing is now basically everything and giving her a name is anything we are doing to save ourselves from destruction.
At present, futures hinge on the confrontation of childhood mental health. Comparisons of how we either hold on to a life preserver or fight for the holistic societal path to peaceful retirement are valued. Dreaming of warnings or dreaming of how we wish to spend our small amount of precious time on this planet are valued. The balance of eating the crumbs but also unfinished…
In the middle of writing this morning, I left. I had planned to take our kid somewhere but I wanted to keep writing. The irony of writing this and ending on a sentence about unfinished balance while also wanting to bring my kid somewhere that is fulfilling for both of us does not escape me. The timing was impeccable, but my personal hygiene may have been the opposite. I threw on some clothes, noticed the dirty dish by my bed and badly wanted to deal with it which would have led to dealing with all of the dishes, then the laundry and… you get the picture. I am fortunate that there are people in my life to let me know, “The work will be there when you get back.” …and it is.
So about balance. Remember the mask in the second paragraph? It’s ok if you don’t. It’s a description of a dream and really a paragraph that long deserves all of the respect of an email written in novel form. I later envisioned this mask as a tragic/comedy mask. If there was data about most modern storytelling it would probably reveal that we’ve improved on this mixture. The social paradigm shifts from the inceptions of these precariously balanced tragicomedies will be studied, but not before we fight for the pigeons.