“Oh you build it up and wreck it down, and you burn your mansion to the ground.” – Tom Waits

When The OA comes, she is incandescent. Incandescent is hard to ignore. Worth losing sleep over. Even going hungry for, if my blood sugar wasn’t flighty as a rabid Raven.

I’d gotten in the habit of ignoring incandescence so often that I practically forgot it was there. Days would go by. Now I seem to see it everywhere, or focused in on one particular bandwidth, and it’s blindingly hot. Hard to look away. I do not think this is just the enhanced brain chemistry talking. It’d be easier if it was.

I had a dream last week, or the week before — the days all kind of blur together now that I sometimes have three of them in each twenty four hour cycle. I was piloting a helicopter around a frozen lake; snowed in pines, rocky crags in the distance; remote, like a mining camp in Alaska or the deep Norwegian interior. (Hence, the habitual turn towards darkness.)

Flying practice runs, endless takeoffs and landings. Drills. Pushing the envelope, squeezing the margins iteration by iteration: closer to that copse of trees, narrower through that gap; nearer the edge of the jagged ice and death. As dreams can, this seemed to go on a long time, completely solitary, no breaks or change of scenery. Just flying and pushing the limits, up, around, back down. [I guess this would be a good time to mention that my only uncle and BioDad flew helo search & rescue missions in Vietnam? Or maybe not. Is there ever a good time to drop that in?]

Anyways, as you probably anticipated, in the dream I came too close to that gargantuan, knotted spruce, where the rock jetty graced the beach; clipped it with my tail rotor (or something; I’m just riffing on the vocabulary here) and crashed into a fireball, instantly extinguished as the whole thing, me and all my stupid Dreams, sunk to the bottom of the frozen lake.

That’s a weird one to wake up to. Sharpens the mind to the question of limits, and prudent navigation; not purposefully steering towards a face that could have the power to rearrange your stars. The OA is gracious, but sometimes vengeful.

“These hands had to let it go free and… This love came back to me.”

Thanks, Muse. Sorry about messing up the cardinal (ordinal?) rules of PB Club earlier. Duh… Of course, the first rule is you don’t talk about PB Club. So just increment the rest down one: wade through garbage is two, etc. Try not to miss six.

“If you live it up, you won’t live it down.”