A Different Drum

Cardinal Rule Number 1 about any sort of social interaction: never tell anyone about your dreams. They're nonlinear, you don't remember all of it anyway, they skew into the absurd and, ultimately, they mean either nothing at all or something hyper-specific to your experience alone. The paradox is, of course, because they are of you and for only you, it's almost impossible for you, a prisoner of your own subjectivity, to find them anything but endlessly fascinating. So it seems like it would stand to reason that the conjurations of your recalibrating, processing, recuperating, subconscious mind would be humanly interesting as the expressions of the super-sensory super-ego in repose strings together light and sound like a little narcissist auteur, a homunculus Francis Ford Coppola projecting impressionist images against the inside of your snoring skull, when really what you're doing is describing what happens to your brain when it's on screensaver mode. It's not that people don't care,* it's that they're convinced their own dreams are the exception to the rule, not your stupid brain seizures.

Cardinal Rules Number 2 through 30 all have to do with fantasy football and sports betting, but those should be so glaringly obvious they don't need underlining. I say should be because my children are all GenZ straight young adult men and somehow, these are the things that come at you, projectile, like vomit, but less welcome.

All that said, and I'm not sure what number this gets, but there's only so many times you can complain about the same thing before you become the nuisance. Every group has its Diego Downer, just dying for someone to make the mistake of delivering the unforgivable prompt "How's it goin'?" Then comes the big wind-up sigh and the heavy "Well..." before you get regaled with the regalia. It's almost always about romantic misadventure, with the same ill-matched person over a completely unjustifiable period of time, over and over again, and all you want to do is scream "dude, I don't care what she told you, Bumble is not the appropriate place for her to meet a new mixed doubles pickleball partner," but the safer thing to do is just slowly be more and more "busy" when Diego wants to hang out, hopefully before you have to think of a good excuse to RSVP in the negative for the inevitable destination wedding.

That's not what I want this space to become between myself and my bordering-on-half-dozen readership, but goddammit, I've got this version of Diego's girlfriend and he's the richest person in the whole stupid world. And he's OBSESSED WITH ME. I would break up with him right now and never think about him again, but he keeps following me around and won't stop talking about me to all his friends (the international news media). So I guess I'll keep complaining about the same thing over and over again until one of us is finally rid of the other.

But paradoxically, I'm sort of OK with the idea of drawing it out too. In the meantime, I'll just have to pretend I'm not listening to him and keep my health insurance. It'll be exhausting though, I know. He doesn't seem to know Cardinal Rule 31 which has to do with trying to talk to people while infused with enough ketamine to kill a friend.

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*It is.