Basement Chronicles

Between Songs

"I wake alone, pretend that I am finally home."

Images and their captions brought to us by Alex Ramuglia and The Laurances.

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I've been having strange dreams lately. Ones that I haven't wanted to submit to idkfa. My previous dreams have been varied and random, maintaining a good distance from each other. However, these latest all share a strange similarities between them. In them I play myself, and not just a character I dream up for myself. I see and regard things much as I would normal life, given a few exceptions. They are also very episodic, taking bits and pieces from what I feel is the same storyline.

They start in my small apartment. The two small front windows barely light the main room, making everything look like photograph with the exposure all wrong. It is almost abandoned except for somebody in the shadows who ignores me as much as I ignore him. I shower and get ready for work, completing my daily routine and step out of my door. I'm thirty or so stories up in the middle of a run down industrial area where the buildings are colored brown either by design or neglect. I can't tell which. Normally, the view out of my door would make me dizzy considering all that seperates me from an exhilarating plummet to my doom is a thin black railing spiraling down towards ground level. Instead I barely notice, turn around, lock up my door, and walk down the steps to my car.

Depending on your time frame, then I am called down to a computer electronics store to investigate what they tell me is an 'emergency'. I'm not surprised at all.

"Sir, we believe that there may have been a problem with a purchase you made a few days ago," the customer service representative explains.
"I haven't bought anything for a while," I say, or think in reply.
"It appears that when you bought these you were over your credit limit," she continues. The purchase was only a few days ago.
"I haven't used that card in a month, and I haven't been here for weeks." Another clerk catches my glance and then looks down and hurries away.
"Sir, allow me to remind you that credit card fraud is a serious federal offense, including years of jail time and heavy fines," she says with a chirpy bite to her voice that can only be gained through years of customer service. Maybe they picked me up on the cameras, or maybe she just remembered me being there that day.
"Let me go to my car and get it."

I bring in what looks like a video card, a wireless router of some sort, and some other expensive looking hardware. Apparently I'm into credit card fraud these days, making considerable purchases with shady credit cards and then claiming that my identity is stolen soon afterwards. The only reason the woman at the counter hasn't called the police is that she knows me and is taking pity on me.

"I guess I'll be returning these then." As I place the items on the counter everything gets dim like in my apartment, and I just calmly walk out the door.

Then, whenever 'then' is, is the loft. Actually, it is more like an attic, that is, if somebody built an attic on top of a skyscraper. There are no windows and a single door, and, consistent with my other dreams, it is poorly lit but for a large stone fireplace. Don't get me wrong, though, the place has a misplaced elegance about it. Somebody put a lot of money and effort into redoing something that was forgotten shortly after its construction. And judging by what's going on up here, they also probably paid a lot of money to keep it a secret as well. I guess you could call it a brothel. Except instead of your desperate and destitute you find the most powerful people in the world. Which makes me wonder why I am there.

The dream stops conveniently and abruptly as I walk upstairs. There may have been more. I get the impression that I was talking to someone. Past that it is all abstract imagery and dead ends in my memory.

I could read into the theme, the poor lighting, or my short conversation. However, I find something else more interesting and at the same time disturbing. Throughout the dreams, despite what I was seeing and doing, I was complacent, completely indifferent toward my environment and the people inhabiting it, even the ones closest to me. It was as if all of it was a routine that I performed while I was waiting for something else. My job, my house, my toys, all distractions for whatever I was waiting for. Whatever I found at the top of those stairs, I guess.

This is a lifestyle I fear, and one that I fear for me is far too imminent. The day in, week out repetition, counting my vacation days until I can take a week off to spend at home doing what I'd do anyways if I had work the next day. The constant struggle and worry over a single decimal field in a single row among millions in some bank's database. The guilt and shame of not being in a relationship, or the insanity of being in one. Waiting for when the bills show up. Waiting for when the work gets easier. When things all of a sudden get better and life springs into full bloom and...whatever else. Distractions for my mind for a life that may never come.

Is that a legitimate life? Is this what I'm going to college for? Is it what I'm waiting for? What I have to do?

Asking myself these questions is like turning on the radio to the silence between songs. I expect there to be something, an answer, a wish, a thought, or maybe even just static, but nothing comes to mind, and I just keep waiting for the next song to come on.

All my life I've been told how lucky I am that I know what I want to do. That I never had to go through the confusion of choosing a major, or feeling like what I'm doing is stupid or boring or wrong for me. That I'm good at what I do and I'm lucky I have such a marketable skill and I'll be making so much money after college. That I won't have to worry about things like they did and I'll always be interested in what I'm doing because the field will constantly be changing and I'll get to change with it. That I've always been the perfect child, and will continue to be, and they shall continue to compare me to everyone else.

Maybe that's not what I want. I don't want to be good at just one thing, especially once education and experience has sucked all of the magic it once held for me and instead becomes just a job. I want to have spent half an hour writing this Chronicle and three hours spent installing the MySQL JDBC Connector on Linux instead of the other way around. I want to be able to hold a normal conversation with somebody without me having to pause and stutter whenever I want to use a big word, or them asking me to repeat myself. And I don't want to be perfect at all.

As for my dreams, they don't predict the future. They just express a fear of it. When we dream I think our conscious mind takes a break for self-repairs. We remove ourselves from our usual neurological locations and hide somewhere we can make up our own reality, and are free to think of it what we please. And there we just live for the time being.

My reality is poorly lit and scarcely populated. In dreams or otherwise. I choose to make that different.