Musings...

Ever wonder who's reading?

While checking to see who's been visiting lately, I noticed somebody found this site searching for my father's name. It's odd to think, but even though I know my father is dead, it doesn't feel that way sometimes. He's been absent from my life for so long, sometimes it feels as if he never was really and he's just a mythic figure that lives in my memory, or comes to mind whenever I see a gun or a Bible. Maybe it's the way memory functions when you get older, that some memories become more foggy and hazy with time. These past 11 months of unemployment have added a lot to the "fog" too... when you sleep the days away, it can be a bit disorienting.

A few weeks ago, I wrote this entry after having a surreal dream. Basically the plot of the dream goes like this:

I'm at home when I suddenly meet an old man from the future with "time machine watch" (yeah, pretty hokey but this is dream logic) strapped to his wrist. It's my friend Chris, except he's like 100 years old and he tells me that my entire life so far is a mistake that he and I myself (from the future) made while messing with the time machine - an alternate reality that wasn't supposed to happen. He dies, but not before giving me the time machine and showing me how to use it. I use the watch to travel to the alternate reality and as soon as I enter it, my mind is suddenly filled with all the memories of this "timeline" - my father never passed away, I graduated UW with the same degrees, only I'm in China on a mission trip... so I go find myself in Beijing, and kill myself from this time to take his place. Yeah, you read that right... I killed my ownself. Is that murder or suicide?

I fly home from China to find a grand welcome home party - my entire family, Shiv, friends from church and school. I then live an entire week in this perfect world - I start work at a private company that does advocacy for charitable causes, I go to the shooting range with my father, I take Siobhan out to dinner at nice restaurant. Finally, I go to church on Sunday... CBC is filled with people, all the old pastors are still there, and of course, my father is still Senior Pastor. He preaches a fantastic message, and afterwards, I'm walking down an empty hallway when this pillar of light appears in front of me. It's an angel that tells me that I'm not supposed to be in this world... that I don't belong to this reality. I scream, I beg and plead to stay... but *poof*...

...I wake up in my bed. Back to the "real world". Talk about having a dream that's a rehash of bad 80's movies and TV sitcoms.

They say dreams are sometimes the echoes of your deepest longings. Given a choice between a reality filled with disappointment and pain, and a reality filled with everything you ever wanted and loved, wouldn't you choose the latter instead of the former, no matter how fanciful it was? Human lives dangle upon strange threads, woven into a design nobody can forsee, only know in hindsight. But living through something hardly means you appreciate how it shaped your identity as a person - sometimes you despise it. Hence the strong reaction that produced this entry.

Maybe if I understood more why and what everything has been for, I'd feel better about the life I've lived so far - but I know I could scream to God and high heaven for days on end, and he still wouldn't answer me, at least not in the way I want. God does not conform to merely to justify my selfish desire for an audible explanation of my life, an indepth, play-by-play analysis of why everything went down the way it has.

Instead, the reality is that only when it's all said and done, at the end of day, when my breathless body is lying 6 feet under in the dirt, will it all make sense. In all likelihood, I'll have to wait until then to understand, because it's not my place to know why now. Reality dictates that I should put AND shut up... but I don't have to like it.

Tangents.

In any case, my father... I think he's probably my fatal flaw. I was watching Kingpin on Tuesday, and in one part, they were talking about "everyone has a weakness". In the plot of that episode, they're trying to trap this corrupt Mexican colonel into an ambush. They know he has weakness for women, so they send this beautiful girl to seduce him and get him alone in a car - where she electrocutes him with a taser and drives him off to a warehouse to be tortured by the drug cartel, "La Corporaci�n". In my case, it'd be a lookalike of my dad or some guy claiming to have information about "the truth about your father" that'd lure me to some deserted alley and *bam*... Garrett gets wacked.

OK, now I know I should be going to sleep... I'm imagining ways people are going to kill me. One other thing... my past has a picture. Very bottom, lefthand corner. Last row, far left.

It's approaching March again... not a month filled with good memories.
posted by G at 2:54 AM   |

in?scrip?tion (n-skrip-shun)n.
1. The act or an instance of inscribing.
2. Something, such as the wording on a coin, medal, monument, or seal, that is inscribed.
3. A short, signed message in a book or on a photograph given as a gift.
4. The usually informal dedication of an artistic work.
5. Jeremiah 31:33