Lost Dreams of the PseudoWar

Dexter McThorfan played war games as a kid.  Before the internet, this meant board games, most notably those created by Avalon Hill.  These included:  Third Reich, the Russian Front, Panzer Leader, Panzer Blitz, Squad Leader, Cross of Iron, you get the drift.  Dexter and his other teenage friends would stay up all night playing these games.

As time progressed, the board games disappeared giving way to computer games and later Internet games.    

With all these games going through his mind, it came as no surprise that Dexter had a reoccurring dream that he was a German solider during World War II.   At least once a week.  Well into his middle age.

In his dreams, he was always very brave, but there was always an awareness on his part that he was fighting a losing struggle.   No matter what he did, the end would be the same.   He didn't begrudge the end in any way, because even though he was driving the best tanks of the war, or shooting the best bazookas, he knew that his side could not win because they were monsters.   But he wasn't a monster.   He was just very brave, and very clever in the battlefield.

 In his most recent dream, he was on the front line near Normandy wearing an old-style German helmet with the Kaiser's spike on the top.  He was frustrated with his position because he knew that in the very near future, he would be  overwhelmed by the upcoming Allied invasion.   But he was captured and spent his time as a POW in England.

While he was a POW, he learned to speak English.   Actually, he learned to speak English fluently, because after all, in his waking life, Dexter spoke English and not German.  Then he escaped his camp and was a commando.  Because of his time spent in England, he could infiltrate the Allied positions easily.   He came to a heavily fortified American fort.   It was well defended, but he penetrated its defenses easily.   After all, when he was not dreaming of being a German soldier, he actually was American.   So he blended right in with the Americans.

He developed a fool proof plan to destroy the fort.   It may or may not have been successful.  But we will never know, because he woke up.   Wakefulness puts the end to more interesting stories than we can ever imagine.

I'm sure one day Dexter will realize that his reoccurring dream has some interpretative significance to his waking life.   But until then....Actung Panzer!

I 

Mis-Remembrances of Things Past, Growing Increasingly Funky as Time Progresses

In Dueschelbottom, a small town outside of Munich, Germany, a splinter group of the Catholic faith engaged in various esoteric practices including the worship of a small woodland entity named Roberto.  Roberto's pedigree was ambiguous.  He was rumored to be everything from ancient faerie, to a dryad or sprite.   Some, (most notably the women in Dueschelbottom) thought he was an incubus.   For our purposes, what is important was that devotion to Roberto was claimed to offer various practical benefits including providing protection against enemies and revenge for past wrongs.  The old saying went, "When someboth doth ye wrong, get thee haste to see Roberto."

When certain denizens of Dueschelbottom immigrated to the United States, they took with them their worship and adoration of Roberto.  However, since Roberto did not travel well, Roberto stayed behind while the immigrants took with them a totem which would transfer Roberto's powers to the New World.  This totem took the form of an ancient Cuckoo clock.

Eventually, through many coincidences, my Grandmother Ces acquired the clock.

When we last encountered Ces, she had moved to Helper, Utah, to marry John, my Grandfather. Several years passed and the Great Depression gave way to the Second World War, and with that better jobs and pay for John.   Taking advantage of the opportunity, Ces and John began to populate the earth with children.   They stopped at five.  One of them, Tom, turned out to be my father.  But that is another story.

Still, times were tough.   Ces often wondered how much better life would have been had her father not been killed all those years ago.  Anger and thoughts of revenge inhabited her heart.  For Satoree , the gentleman who had run over her father with a horseless carriage all those years ago was still alive and by all reports doing well back in Altus, Arkansas.   He opened a winery before the war, and now had a contract with the U.S. Army to provide wine and grape juice to the troops.   He supposedly was making money hand over fist.  Ces fumed, then considered what her grandmother had taught her about Roberto and the Cuckoo clock.  So, one dark and stormy night, when the Cuckoo clock struck midnight, Ces prayed to Roberto for justice and revenge against Satoree.

Many years later, when I visited Helper, I stayed in the house my father grew up in on Duchesne Street.  One of the salient features about the house was the basement, which was dark and musty, and for a young boy visiting his grandparents, very scary.  The basement contained a bedroom, storage area, and an old coal furnace with a coal bin next to it.   I always felt uncomfortable in the basement, it gave my the shivers, and I never wanted to stay there long.

After my Grandmother Ces died, my aunt and uncle stayed in the house.   They reported many strange events:  noises, sounds of footsteps with no one present, and above all, a strange shimmering aura near the furnace in the basement.  My aunt, who has a predilection to believe things that cannot be seen or empirically demonstrated brought in her brother to investigate.   The brother claims to be in  touch with things of a supernatural bent.  He went to the basement and ran out of the house, never to return.   Later, he told my aunt the furnace contained the most powerful malevolent entity he had ever seen.  Its name was Santoree and it was trapped by a strange and ancient witchcraft, but was slowly escaping. 

 My uncle sold the house the next week and moved out of town.  They gave me Ces's old Cuckoo clock.  (It still works by the way).

If you ever visit Altus, make sure you stop by the Santoree winery.  I hear the wine is good, but I know better.

Mis-remembrances of Things Past

In the absence of actual historical information, let me hypothesize as follows:

My father's mother grew up in Altus, Arkansas, the daughter to a prosperous merchant.  He may have been a blacksmith.   He may have owned a store.   Like I said, we are speculating. 

When she neared her sixteenth birthday, her father was killed an unfortunate accident which would have significant ramifications to herself and her family.  In the short term, it meant the end of her comfortable way of life.  Though her father's business was doing well, it still had an unpaid mortgage owing to the bank.   The death of her father meant the end of the business and a foreclosure by the bank.  The home my Grandmother grew up in was repossessed.  Any thought of my Grandma Ces continuing school were quickly abandoned as her mother (my father's grandmother) made contingency plans for the family to continue.  Ces, would stay and help her mother get by.   In the long term, Ces would need to support herself, which meant getting a job.

In several years, Ces and her family learned that one of her cousins had found a job as a housekeeper in Kansas City.  It was decided that Ces would join her cousin and use the money earned to support herself and her family--including her mother whose distraught over the death of her husband ineluctably accumulated to the point where she needed assistance.

Thus, Ces spent several relatively happy and carefree years in Kansas City.   However, in that era, it was expected that young women were to marry young.   No suitable suitor emerged from the Kansas City scene.  Indeed, to her recollection only one boy, a quiet, steady, hardworking man of very few words named John back home in Altus had ever shown an interest.  So, the next vacation that Ces was permitted she took a long bus ride back to Altus to see her mother.  She made inquiries about John to some friends, and before the week was over John had made plans to see her in Kansas City.

Of course, this was the time of the Great Depression and John and the other young men in Altus were hard pressed to find employment.   Many left Arkansas to head to the coal mines out in the American West.  John left with some friends and became established in a company mining town near what is now Helper, Utah.  Soon, after a brief engagement, Ces joined him in Utah and they were married.

The Past is so Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades

Its all about stories.  How else could the brain remember what happened 20 or 30 years ago?  The brain compresses all those electrical impulses constituting memories and fashions them together into a more or less coherent pattern of images, voices, smells (if we are lucky) and emotional sensations. Some stories are complex.  Some are simple.   Some we repeat all the time.   Some stories we just tell ourselves.   The good ones (or at least the ones that make us look good), we tell others.  Some stories stay the same.  Some are ever changing.

Dreams are nothing more than stories.  Except we have less control on how they turn out.  Much less control.  But both memories and dreams constitute the brain trying to establish coherence to a series of events or thoughts.

It gets really interesting when you dream about your past.   More specifically while you are in your dream, you are remembering your past.  Sort of a story within a story.  In this state, you can't tell if the past has any actual historical accuracy.   When you wake up, because the past is nothing but a story, it can be difficult for you to separate the past as dream from the past as story.

Let me give you a "real" example...lol

In my "real" past, I lived in University City, Missouri on Leland Street right off of Delmar in the late 1980s. Currently, its a very cool place to live.  Blueberry Hill, Cicero's, the Pageant, and a ton of other restaurants, bars, and trendy shops.  Even back in the 1980s it was pretty cool, with Blueberry Hill, Cicero's (a much smaller venue with a basement bar across the street from where it is now) and a smattering of bars and restaurants up and down the block.

In my dream, I was in a restaurant in the University City Loop called Bangkok Gardens,   It was a Thai restaurant and I felt I had been there many times before.   The owner was an actor who employed other members of the troupe to serve as the staff.  His name was Wallace Sheen and in my dream he had long waiving white hair--something like Albert Einstein would have sported.  The food was excellent.   I remember commenting to someone sitting in the table next to me that I was so sad to see the restaurant go, but in the future, this place would be a Paneras.  They laughed and didn't seem to mind that the table they were sitting at morphed into the sleekly homogeneous counter at Paneras.

I saw the picture of owner Wallace at the bar change back to what he must have looked like in his younger days with long brown hair, and then the scene changed back from present day gourmet bread peddler back to what Bangkok Gardens must have looked like when it first opened.  My father was there and we were eating on one of his many business trips he used to take while he was in St. Louis.

Then I began to wake up from my dream and there was a lengthy period where I tried to remember if there really was a Bangkok Gardens on Delmar street, or if it was just a story I had imagined.   Of course, there is only one way to be sure, don't you know.....

As if in a Dream, My one and only V.

Velocity, now there's a harsh mistress.   We travel on the third orbiter around the sun at 30 km/sec which is 66,000 miles per hour.  Of course we don't really feel that V unless we close our eyes and imagine it.  But who would ever want to do that?

The sun of course is also not stationary. Our Sun and Earth are moving at 43,000 miles per hour in the direction of the bright star Vega in the constellation of Lyra.  Of course, we really don't feel that V unless we close our eyes and imagine it.   But who would ever want to do that?

In addition to the individual motions of the stars within it, the entire Galaxy is rotating like an enormous pinwheel.   The sun makes a trip through the Galaxy in a "galactic year."  The Sun completes this huge circle at a velocity of 483,000 miles per hour.  The Earth is anchored by gravity to the Sun and follows at the same speed.   Of course, we don't really feel that V unless we close our eyes and imagine it.   But who would ever want to do that?

And of course, V controls not only our body but our mind.  Stop for a moment and take a few breaths.  The mind can move from where you are sitting to the wall in your abode with amazing speed.  For example, in a 2011 study conducted by Fudpucker et. al, in in the "Journal of Applied Velocity" calculated that the human perception at rest can move from various objects in our immediate surroundings at a velocity of 569 cm/sec which is almost a quarter of the speed of light.   Of course, we don't really feel that unless we close our eyes and imagine it.   But who would ever want to do that?

Lets assume now that we overcome our inhibitions and we do close our eyes and imagine V.  (I wonder what was holding us back in the first place?).  That's the premise that Dildoo et. al started with in their groundbreaking 2008 study published in their peer reviewed article in the "Velocity Quarterly."  Dildoo and his cohorts determined that when the eyes are closed and V is imagined, V actually increases to the point of infinity.  Hence, the fantastic fantastical speeds achieved during lucid dreaming.   Lucid dreaming allows the passenger to travel from the Earth to the outskirts of our Solar System, to the boundaries of the Milky Way galaxy and beyond in a matter of seconds. 

Fasten your seatbelts and close your eyes, you're going to get a big surprise!

How old was that Jesus Lizard?

Way back before the dawn of recorded time, I used to venture from my humble abode in St. Louis to the big city of Chicago to hang with my friend R.

R lived with a bunch of Jesus Lizards-- well actually only two of them. Given that there were only two, I won't engage at this time in a lengthy discourse about the proper nomenclature for a group of lizards.  However, suffice it to say that their small number negates their group being referred to as a "flock" or a "pride." The squalor of their abode suggested the moniker of a "den" of lizards, so lets just leave it at that.

Of the two Jesus Lizards, one played guitar, one played bass.   R. lived in the "den" with the two Jesus Lizards in a flat near Humboldt Park and California Street.   As I recall, they were the only people of similar ethnicity to myself for blocks and blocks around.  That was back then.   In this current millennium, the Humboldt Park neighborhood (being in close proximity to the Wicker Park "revitalization") has all sorts of people that probably look like me.  Except they are younger and likely have more hair.  Whether they act like me is an open question.   But that's always an open question. 

When I stayed in the den, it was the closest to communal life I have ever experienced.  Except perhaps when I'm at a music festival.  People coming and going at all hours of the night.   Random women.  After all, the Jesus Lizards were rock stars of sorts. DS, the lizard who played bass maintained a little informal shrine when you entered the flat dedicated to what were probably the last vestiges of his childhood including action figure miniatures, comics,  and Wheaties boxes embossed with his childhood photo.

But this little vignette is more about DD, the guitar player.  DD also taught guitar lessons on the side. The students for his lessons were invariably attractive co-eds.  Except that one time that he taught me how to play an Everly Brothers song for the Masked Minstrels.  R. regularly commented that DD acted the way he did because he was "old."   By old, R. meant that DD was 34.   Like I said, this was a long time ago.

Given that DD was "old" way back then, it was reasonable to assume that he would still be old even now--that is, if he were still alive.   So I Googled him and found to my surprise that not only is he still alive, but that the Jesus Lizard is even playing reunion concerts after a long hiatus.  Not only that, but DD was voted one of Spin magazine's top 100 guitarists of all time.  It seems that not only was DD classically trained (unusual for a punk rocker), but that the Jesus Lizard was "avant garde," "influential," and that DD's career spanned playing in such diverse bands as Hank Williams III, to giving online guitar lessons in Guitar World Magazine.  Shit, DD is even in a touring band now called the Legendary Shack Shakers or something like that.  They have a gig at Donnies Homespun later this month in Springfield.

Though DD is still kicking, the Rainbow Room, Crash Palace, Lounge Ax, Duck's, and Big Alice's have disappeared from the landscape.   I wonder where all the tragic chicks hang out in the windy city this century?