You want all the lovely music to save your life

All day I've felt greedy for more and more in the way of hearing from people. As luck would have it several NY pals and Syracuse pals and Oregonians even have dropped lines in the last few days or hours. I feel unwilling or unable to reply to them in kind, however, because I'm not doing very well. When I'm not doing well it seems counterproductive if not indulgent to share any facts about how I am. It's a real paradox: I want to hear more from my friends and feel seen, feel as though I am somewhere existing, but in order to participate in that conversation I need to contribute.

I'm a little bit afraid of my thinking process recently. Thoughts that basically suggest that a) nothing worth reporting is happening to me and b) the things that are happening to me don't deserve airing or publication, because they're indulgent or because they create the very conditions they would seem to be caused by. As a result I feel as though participating in these dialogues - with good friends of mine! - would validate some pessimistic feeling or would reveal how, well, down I am.

And I realize that there's an irony in confessing to an unwillingness or an inability to communicate in the form of an online journal any old body can look up and read.

The ideal would be to receive notices constantly from any and everyone - communiques from everyone I've ever met.

That's a very selfish thing to want if I'm not going to keep up my end of that bargain.

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NUMBER 1 DREAM

Apologies to J., whose morning email features an abridged, unedited version of this account: I had a dream this morning between 6 and 6:50 AM in which I was a senior at a vaguely Vassarish college. I was tooling about through the upper garret-like chambers of the gothic stylings of the library, saying hey to friends but mainly working on something creative, Good Ground probably - which didn't exist when I was there. And then so I was working away, happily typing, and now and again getting up to find and chat up friends, when one of the characters of the dream, an 11-year-old girl with red hair, died. I don't remember how or why. But pretty instantly there I was at her wake, which was held in what now that I think of it was like the Vassar Chapel only with more natural light, and the girl (dressed in something like a First Communion dress, all lace and billows) was lucky enough to have an open casket service with everyone able to reach in and touch her a last time. And even though the dream me couldn't and I certainly can't now figure out who this girl exactly was I was still very conscious in the dream of being unable and unwilling to take my hand away from her shoulder because, and I was pretty self-aware on this point, I wasn't able to see what Jon looked like as he lay in his casket because his face had been unrepairable. Reparable? Repairable? So I cried in the dream and this is what woke me up.

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NUMBER 2 DREAM

There was another dream recently that I haven't shared yet because it was the more profound of the two Jon dreams. In the dream, I was in what's now the weight room. As I recall the room was set up as it had been when we first moved here in late '94: there was a wooden entertainment center along one wall, which was faced by an overstuffed brown couch which I believe is still in the care of one David Eldridge. This is where we played all of our video games. I have vivid memories of playing Donkey Kong Country here. Unfortunately, the remainder of the dream is somewhat hazy; I knew I should have written down sooner. But the critical moment in the dream came when I was either wrapping up a game of something on the SNES or else just took a break and looked around, and lying there on the brown couch was Jon, stretched out in a tight-fitting t-shirt and athletic shorts, hands pillowed behind his head, and his mien all like, "Are you done yet? When's it my turn?" And I knew, in the dream, that he was dead. I think it was as a result of this dream-knowledge that Jon's physical substance began to change; he was suddenly less corporeal than he had been and the couch he was stretched out on began to be visible beneath and through him. Standard dream-ghost stuff, I guess. But the kicker came when I woke up gasping. Literally breathless with sobs. This really was like drowning; I suspect it's a cliche when discussing nightmares, but that's what it felt like: as though my knowledge of Jon's being dead equalled this sort of vivid, colorful, transparent weight which was very difficult to come up through. It wasn't precisely like water. It was the visual equivalent of not being able to breathe. The best way to put it is that I felt as though I was at the bottom of a gigantic black V and desperately trying to climb up from it even as I knew I wouldn't be back down there any time soon and therefore I sort of wanted to remain down there a while longer. Even though the dream-room was still well-lit, and even though Jon was still there - not talking to me, not signalling to me or looking worried because I was leaving / waking up - the feel of those few moments was that of a dark V I lay at the bottom of.

That's it. I don't have any conjecture or hope for what all that might mean. But it was and it remains of the most true-to-Jon pictures I have now. It's been automatically entered into my fund of Jon-related memories; the dream felt that accurate. There's a hard-to-define aspect of aura or presence. It was him. Not a dream-him; not a him that was him because it looked like him. Just him.

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THE FOLLOWING SONG HAS BEEN DESTROYING ME / MAKING ME DANCE IN MY CHAIR

Broken Social Scene, Broken Social Scene, "It's All Gonna Break." Track 14. Like a Beethoven's 5th of indie rock. Horns, fuzzed out guitars, transitions from allegro to pianissimo to allegretto, and lyrics about (of course) wanting all the lovely music to save your life. Turn this one up to 11.