These days of dreams: Buried in a dried field of mud, I burst from my adobe prison. Standing naked in the desert I howl, animal like, but then my senses return. I can’t remember how I came to be buried in the mud or where I am. But the empty plain stretches out before me and the mud caked to my skin begins to fall like giant flakes of dead skin. I look at the body shaped indentation that I left in the ground. Slowly water seeps upward and fills the whole. That’s when the rain of the Cheetos begins.

Tangled in sheets. A never ending expanse of fabric. Desperately I search for an exit but each time I crawl forward a tentacle like sheet drags me further back. It goes on like this, symbolizing something sinister I’m sure. Just one man stuck, tangled, entrapped by his own sheets. Sheets can you imagine anything more benign and terrifying? What can this mean? I feel trapped. Sheets represent what? Home? I feel trapped at home or by domestically? Home represents family? Do I feel trapped by my family? Perhaps I just don’t like loose sheets. That sounds more reasonable to me.

I’m climbing a mountain. I near the summit, nearly crawling on my hands and knees. I can’t get over the fact that I’m wearing one of those old external frame packs. In fact I’m obsessing over it. It is the completely wrong kind of pack to be using on this terrain. I can’t stop thinking about the pack as I near the summit. I grab a rock to help hoist myself up to the top when it suddenly comes loose and I tumble backward. Instead of the slope I just climbed there is a cliff. As I fall, I wake.

Running down a mountain road, the road turns from asphalt to gravel to dirt, suddenly it’s not so much a road as a trail. I’m running through the woods now, faster. There’s something chasing me, is it a wolf or a bear, I don’t dare look back afraid to do so would risk me tripping. I’m running faster than ever now I can feel my heart beating hard in my chest, I’m gasping for air. Then I burst out of the woods onto a rocky beach. I run into the sea, diving into the surf only to see a child.

I’m making love to a girl. A girl not a woman. She’s just over half my age. The age I was when I got married. How cliché a sex dream. Who doesn’t dream of sex? She’s a sweet girl and I make her feel really good. It’s a nice dream. Perhaps nicer than the reality. But that is what dreams are; a retreat from the reality, a warping of reality into a more pleasant existence. Dreams of sex, dreams of flying, are they the same. She looks into my eyes and smiles; she dies a little death in my arms.

Sailing on a small boat when suddenly I fall overboard. The boat sails on without me, I look back to shore only to find that I’m now in the open ocean. So I swim after the boat but it continues on without me. So there am in the middle of the ocean, no ship and to be honest I’m not that strong a swimmer. So I start doing the breast stroke because I read somewhere that it conserved the most energy. After a while I tire and begin to sink. From below the surface I see the stars above me.

Warsaw, Chopin plays from loudspeakers as people panic in the street. Someone grabs a handful of potatoes and runs away. I am looking desperately for someone. Planes fly overhead as an old lady is knocked down and trampled. A shot rings out and Isaac the baker holds a gun defending his store. A dog runs loose, it belongs to somebody I know. Then I see her. I run to her and take her in my arms. She says something about milk but it doesn’t matter I have her now and everything will be ok. There’s no tragedy in our future.

The sword fight goes on and on. I jump onto the table deftly avoiding his wild swing. Food flies, the nobles of the court laugh. I am Robin Hood and Zorro wrapped into one. I have no idea who my adversary is, but still we fight. My rapier dances against his accented by the movie clink clink clink. With a twist he is disarmed and at my mercy. But being a gentleman, I hand him his sword and invite him to begin again. A gentleman’s dream divorced from reality. Something about one of the women stays with me. She smiles.

These days of hate: Ass. I hate that word. It grates upon my ears and my soul. Even in its non vulgar usage I hate it. It’s an ancient word. In Sumerian it’s ansu. Latin asinus. Celtic assin. In the now extinct old north Umbrian; assal. Such a distinguished pedigree for such an ugly word. I hate it. It’s a silly thing but true. If the word leaves my lips it is usually only when asked for a list of things I hate. Ass curse your long lineage. Blame it on the Sumerians. They have much to answer for already.

Lifetime: Who came up with Lifetime? They’ll get no Christmas present from me. Ok, occasionally they’ll have something worth watching. I see Fraiser there when I flipping past. Fraiser is a good show. But come on, Golden Girls? Reba? I’ll repeat, Reba. How could I forget those quality Lifetime movies. This week Meridith Baxter-Birney’s daughters, Valerie Bertinelli and Melissa Gilbert are raped, loose their memories and join a cult, only to find out they are really adopted. Lifetime sucks. That’s the long and short of it. So it winds up on my hate list. Lifetime you will not be missed.

DH The designated hitter rule is stupid. Where’s the strategy? It makes American League managing a pale imitation of the Nationals. So the DH makes the hate list. Let’s face it baseball can be a bit dull. It’s heyday was in the radio days when it’s slow pace made it easy to follow. But the DH it takes one of the key decisions a manager has to make and throws it out the window. It’s a stupid rule in a great league. I hate the designated hitter rule. As emperor of the world and baseball I will abolish the DH.

Deliberate unkindness. There have been a few times in my life where I have been deliberately cruel. For that I am truly sorry. Some people deal out cruelty with ease. The bum on the street, their friends, family, coworkers, it can be anyone. The feed off pain they cause. I don’t know how they can do it. Perhaps I’m becoming soft in my old age. Perhaps I’m becoming wise. But I’m never deliberately unkind or cruel anymore. Now sometimes I am stupid and do something hurtful, but I think we are all guilty of that. That’s what apologies are for.

Days of disappointment: I respect the writers of the Simpsons. I really do. But for the past several years they’ve allowed out more than their fair share of clunkers. Still I’m sure some of the episodes that I’m currently critical of will appear better with age. I panned Simple Simpson when it first came out but it has grown on me. But I doubt that time will cure what ills G.I. Doh. Perhaps they will rebound back to their former greatness. Perhaps there will be another Homer’s Enemy. It’s hard to believe my favorites are more than 10 years old.

I am forty; more or less. Once I was a golden boy, a whiz kid, the man of tomorrow. I could have done anything. Instead I did little or nothing. I finished the screenplay which went nowhere. None of the novels were completed. Short stories piled up, never sold, never planted like a seed to grow a bigger and better story. Never finished the Appalachian Trail, never biked across America, never sailed around the world, never went into space, never dug in the Syrian desert, never cured cancer, or created the next big thing. It’s my life, mine to claim.

Is there anything worse than ordering food at a supposedly good restaurant? Or going out on a blind date and finding you have nothing in common with the girl? Reaching into a candy jar to find the last piece is gone. Dropping your cookie. Watching your ice cream melt faster than you can eat it on a hot summers day. Buying an expensive set of sheets only to find them scratchy. Watching as your child makes the same stupid mistakes you did. Buying a new TV only to see it go on sale the next week. Falling out of love.

Days of Plenty: I’m fatter now than I’ve ever been. Of course by most peoples I’m not fat at all. But once I had a lithe and supple runners body. 5 miles a day, everyday. Back then there was plenty of time. An over abundance of it. I would never use it all up, so I wasted it in fruitless efforts. If only I had known. The well of time has dried up. Those long summer days of my youth, endless afternoons, nights that lasted forever. It seemed like it would never end. Of course in the end, it did.

There’s just so much of everything. I can’t even put myself into the mindset of someone who isn’t surrounded by so much stuff. My phone has more computing power than an Apollo spacecraft. My car has 3 times the horsepower of my old Volkswagen. My home computer is something that was literally unimaginable to me when I first learned to program on an Apple II. TV shows things now that would have loved to seen as a teenager. As I said there’s just so much of everything. It’s something I couldn’t have foreseen so much but so little of substance.

Suburbs stretch farther than the eye can see. From atop the once lonely mountain the rooftops create new little peaks across the rolling hills. Traffic backs up onto roads clogging them. The cars lineup for miles not moving. They create long metal snakes lying across the landscape. Cars contain people, usually one, sometimes two, rarely more. People headed to work or school, so many people, more than I can ever remember. People everywhere. On the roads, in the neighborhoods, on the mountain, in the woods. They’re hard to avoid. Which is a problem since I really don’t care for people.

These days of want: There’s less love now. It’s only natural. I have a wife who loves me. And a dog, the dog loves me a lot. To me there’s just not enough love to go around. I love being loved. To be smothered with love. That feeling of new love. Loving someone long enough that you don’t even think about it anymore. Looking at your love while they sleep. But it seems there’s just less of it to go around. People walk down the street not noticing the dearth of love, why can’t they feel it like I do?

Very few Americans have been truly hungry. Not the I just skipped a meal hungry but the I haven’t eaten in days, and by god chewing on bark is the only thing keeping me from going crazy, hungry. Starving people with their sunken faces, that hollowed out look that famine brings. Weakness, real hunger makes you appreciate plenty. Being able to walk into a grocery and be surrounded by food. In a nation of such plenty how could anyone imagine want? But it exists, we sit idly by with our huge plates of fried chicken, and wonder who is hungry.

Somehow the abundance of time that plagued my youth has evaporated. Those long hot summer days that seemed to drag on forever have been replaced by these things that rush by all too fast. Nights of passion that must have lasted a year, have been replaced by stolen minutes here and there. That infinite second when I held a newborn child was replaced by two decades that passed in an instant. Now out of the corner of my eye I catch the tick-tock men taking apart the present and replacing it with the future. And I hate them for it.

Days of remembrance: January 28, 1986. Why I wasn’t at school on that day? I think it might have been a teacher workday. I woke up and reached over to the TV that I kept on a small stand at head level near my bed. Through sleepy eyes I watched the shuttle countdown, listening to announcers talk about Christa McAuliffe. Then on schedule it lifted off, flew into the air, rolled over, and blew up. Roger go at throttle up. I sat up in bed and watched as the booster rockets flew on in circles sure all aboard were dead.

Sometime in the 70’s. I used to sneak into the living room to stay up late and watch Soap. There was something about the absurd premises that seemed to occur regularly on that show, it was intoxicating. Chuck and Bob, Jodie, Burt, and of course Burt’s alien duplicate. They were almost like a second family to me. The great thing about Soap was that everyone’s flaws were exposed. You knew Jessica was dim and Chester was a philanderer, so unlike real life were people are careful to hide their foibles. Sometimes TV is better than reality, sometimes it is not.

Days of Adventure: Once I was hiking in the mountains, it doesn’t matter which mountains as their height location and terrain aren’t important to the story. I was hiking in these mountains when I realized I was lost. Somehow I had missed the trail, so I doubled back the way I came until reached the edge of a small lake. I had missed the trail again. So I sat beside the lake and thought of my predicament. The sun began to set, and I saw a great number of shooting stars. Then I realized that I wasn’t lost at all.

I was on a sinking boat once. It was an old boat suffering from a lot of dry rot; I should have known that it would leak, but by the time I saw water in the bilge it was too late. I was too far from shore, the winds were light, and the boat growing heavier from her intake of water was moving too slowly. I began to bail and started the engine, the engine smoked heavily after years of disuse but it worked well enough. I steered the boat directly on shore where it rolled over saved from sinking.

It was summer, sometime in the mid-80’s I walked out into the Great Sand Dunes in the cool morning air. We made love in the sand, it wasn’t romantic, in fact it was quite uncomfortable. Imagine sex on a beach with no ocean. The sun rose and the sand got hot. Really hot. Are feet started to burn as we walked back toward the lot. The sand was so hot I had to carry her on my back. I closed my eyes ignoring the tiny burning grains. She said no one had ever taken care of her like that before.

Camping once in the high desert north of Flagstaff, I heard rustling from outside my tent. I assumed it was a coyote sniffing around for scraps from my dinner, but the rustling grew louder there were sounds of more and more feet pounding the dirt. So I peered outside and saw them, dozens if not hundreds of jackrabbits. I exited my tent and stood naked among there mass. Then I looked up and saw that the stars were legion and the moon was so bright. I stared at the moon and the rabbits stared with me, transfixed by its beauty.

Days of pain: I have an unusually high tolerance for pain. It’s gotten me in trouble occasionally, making me ignore serious illnesses and broken bones. Pain has a physical and mental component. And I’ve made it my mission to conquer both. Pain is a sign of weakness and I’ve sworn never to be weak again. Silly stuff. Pain is to help protect us from more serious injury but some people are too stubborn to listen to their bodies. Maybe I’m one of them. Pain is part of life but a part I could live without. I prefer sunshine and buttercups.

I have a distinct memory of sliding across the pavement. My skin was being shredded. My helmet skidded across the ground saving my head. When I stopped, I jumped up and got out of the street collapsing on the sidewalk my bike still lying in the street. Then I knew my ribs were broken. I tried to relax as I gasped for breath. Then I noticed my arm hanging limply by my side. It and my shoulder were shattered. Rehabilitation took weeks. And it hurt when I laughed, or coughed or did anything. Pain came to be my constant companion.

She said no. I remember biting my lip trying hard to mask the pain. I thought I loved her. In hindsight it was just youthful infatuation, forbidden fruit you know how that is. It hurt for a long time, but then I moved on. Still I remember that pain. The kind that cuts to the core of your being. She was saying that somehow I wasn’t good enough, questioning my worth as a man. At the time I had an ego, now not so much. I’ve let go of that part of my life. I hope I’m a better man.

Another month another 3000 words. No filler all original material here. Some good, some bad, some typos, but you know how it goes. Next month is National Write a Novel Month so they’ll be no 100 words but who knows, maybe I’ll give up halfway through like last year. Maybe not. I’ve got a good idea but who knows if it will go the distance. Maybe I have two ideas, I guess I have to figure out which is better. Perhaps I can combine the two, perhaps not. You can never tell what the future brings, you can only wait.