1. I’m lost. How are you?‌‌‌‌
   
   I have lots of dreams where I am somewhere and I need or want to be somewhere else and I can’t figure out how to get there. This includes the classic I’m at school, work, or late for an appointment and can’t find the room where I’m supposed to be.‌‌‌‌Last night I dreamt I was lost in a bombed out city. Buildings in ruins, rubble blocking streets, a pall of smoke hanging over everything. People were wandering around picking through the shattered flotsam of their former lives. I walked for hours and knew that Elizabeth was somewhere out there in this apocalypse and I had to find her...
2. Trains. Why did it have to be trains?
   
   Something deep inside me is afraid of trains. I personally love riding on them but their rigid and unforgiving schedules and terrifying mass as they roll down tracks are a source of deep anxiety to me. If a train or train tracks show up I get the feeling that something horrible is about to happen.
   
   I crawled through a gap between buildings and found myself on a train platform in a grand old European train station. The roof had been torn off of the vast building and a light dust of snow or ash was falling out of the slate grey sky. I could see fires flickering in the lights of nearby sky scrapers. Trains of every description were pulling in and out of the tracks between the platforms which where overflowing with a mass of humanity desperately trying to get out of this hellscape. I caught sight of Elizabeth on the platform across from me and when I couldn't get her attention started looking for a way to get off this platform and onto another. No stairs or walkways seemed to go the way I wanted to. As I pushed my way down the platform I kept having to step around people by leaning out over the tracks as trains went rumbling by. Eventually I got to the end against the wall but where I expected the turnstiles out I found a mural of a hand raised in the Vulcan salute with an eye on the palm. I rolled my eyes and told myself to shut up and started looking for another way across a dread filling me that Elizabeth had already boarded a train and I would never find her again.
   
   I found a ladder that went down the side of the platform to what looked like a crawlspace under the tracks and hurried down it as another train pulled in toward me...
3. Fight and flight?
   
   I don't have a lot of dreams that feature violence but when I do they are personal and vicious. When I was a kid I was always having dreams about getting attacked by beasts or beat up by bullies. At some point I told myself "enough" and started fighting back. Since then when I have dreams of violence I completely let go of my temper and and become a monster of rage and death. I ask for no quarter and give none.
   
   I came out in a room that wasn't a ruin but the stage of a ruin. The fallen bricks were made of styrofoam, the twisted girders of papier-mâché. Silverware of all kinds were stuck into everything. Before I could get my bearings and find a way back up a bedraggled man, long hair hanging down in greasy ropes around his wild face,  open wounds and sores covering his body, wearing absolutely nothing but a Howard the Duck T-shirt, came hurling out of the gloom, wielding a bejeweled saber and screaming "Sasquatch! Sasquatch! Sasquatch!" attacked me.
   
   (I'd say I don't make this shit up folks but it's my subconscious so I guess I've got no excuse.)
   
   I grabbed a butter knife out of a nearby plastic rock and with a bestial howl I parried his blows furiously until his blade bent and snapped and I punched him in the face repeatedly until he fell down. I stabbed my little blade into his junk and then told myself that I was done. I was going to fucking wake up now...
4. Am I awake?
   
   I have been waking up paralyzed with night terrors for as long as I can remember. I lie there not asleep but not awake, unable to move and terrified that I am trapped in my body forever. I scream but only hear my breathing loud in my ears. The feeling of my heaving lungs reconnects me to my body and I get control of myself. If I'm lucky I can close my eyes to the horror of the outside world and begin to recite the Litany Against Fear and then wake up. But sometimes I don't...
   
   I got up with Herbert's words of power echoing in my head and a squeaking cat at my feet. I rolled out of bed and stumbled in a daze to the kitchen to feed him. As I stood up from pouring kibble into the food bowl I noticed blood on my hands and on my chest. In a daze I walked into bathroom wondering how I could have cut myself so badly and why nothing hurt. Was I in shock?
5. Where are my teeth?
   
   Things are really bad in my head when I dream of my teeth falling out. Most often it's shades of loosing my teeth as a kid when I would twist and wiggle them out and look at the blood and the roots 'cause I was twisted little fuck. Other times they fall out like crumbling chalk.
   
   My face in the bathroom mirror was a mass of bruises and blood. I opened my mouth and more blood flowed. I noticed that one of my canine teeth was very much askew and couldn't resist poking it and it fell out into the sink with a clatter.
6. There are things growing under my skin…
   
   Oh fuck. What is it brain why do you do this to yourself?
   
   I lean in close to look at the gap in my mouth and see a tiny worm crawling out of the hole. It has little cartoon antennae and tiny hands.
   
   I wake up staring at the gap in the blackout curtains next to my bed. The wan morning light leaking through the blinds reminds me of the stormy skies of the ruined train station. The mother of all migraines is threatening. I roll out of bed (again?) and stand making sure I feel my feet on the ground. The bedroom door is open so I was up and feeding cats in my sleep...
   
   I trudged into the bathroom, poured a cup of water, swallowed some ibuprofen, and started my day.

I'm writing this not because I have some great lesson about fear I want to share. I've just been through two years of my own personal hell and I guess it needs to get out and it will keep haunting me unless I give it to an audience.

I can't go on, I'll go on...

Stay safe out there. I love you.

There is a lot of swearing in this one.

Sorry...

(I limited myself to the word fuck for what it's worth)

You want fucking gun control? I'll give you fucking gun control and the fuckers at the NRA won't have any fucking legitimate argument against it because the fucking Constitution says so.

(... bunch of dumbfucks...)

No, we are not repealing the Second Amendment. Too many old white fuckers think it's how they're going to protect themselves from all the fuckers of color out there so let’s just drop that idea ok? It's not worth your time.

Here's what we do instead. Everyone can own a fucking gun. It's there in the fucking Constitution. Fine. Anyone can take their sorry butt down to Walmart and purchase themselves a nice AR-fuckity-fuck-15. Good on you mother fucker. Now get your ugly fucking butt down to the nearest National Guard office and report for duty. You just fucking joined the army, you fuck.

Yeah, because here's the thing. Congress shall make no law prohibiting gun ownership but there is that fucking clause at the beginning of the amendment that Mr. Wayne "Dipfuck" LaPierre keeps leaving out of his deranged little rants. Congress can regulate the fuck out of militias and they can pass a law that says the National Guard is a fucking militia and everyone who bought themselves any fucking weapon that can shoot faster than a 16th century matchlock has to join the fucking army.

National Guard doesn't want your flabby candyfuck butt? Well, that's not Congress' problem. The Chief of the National Guard Bureau is a proper fucking soldier and he is going to do his fucking job and make the law work if we the people tell him to. You don't want to join the fucking army? Well, fuck you! Congress can make any the fuck law it wants to regulate militias and if you get thrown in jail for not reporting for duty like the fucking law says then it's not because you own a fucking gun. (You unpatriotic fuck.)

You want to own a gun? Have the discipline and honor to go serve your fucking country. And no, running around in the woods or hanging out at the gun range waving your flags with your fucking ignorant buddies doesn’t count. You can do that in your spare time after a proper fucking professional has taught you how to use your weapon.

P.S. Wondering what we do about folks with mental health issues who want guns? We properly fund the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of the Surgeon General and tell them to work on the problem. And you rich people who don’t want to pay taxes so we can afford all this? Contribute something more to your country than just blowing up the economy every decade or so. (You unpatriotic fucks.)

Over the last few years it’s become something of a Christmas tradition for me to rebuild my website. Not for any practical reason. Anyone (of which there has been none) who visited my website would never notice a difference. From the outside it’s always looked just the same, but under the hood I always replaced everything, including the code the builds the whole thing (I’m DevOps. I don’t do things manually if I can get a robot to automate it). I've partaken in this little ritual because I have inevitably gotten bored around the holidays and futzing with computers is something I could do by myself that I enjoy. (I never thought my bliss would be computer programing but I guess it’s time to admit that it is.)

And that, dear friends, is a problem. Do you see it?

I build my own website, a thing which, by its very definition, is a thing for sharing with others, just for myself. It’s a very weird thing to do, in that build a sailboat in one's basement kind of way. That guy is never going to get that boat up the stairs and near any body of water but he builds it anyway because he likes working with his hands. That’s ok and all but if he doesn’t put the boat in the water and catch the wind in its sails and go scudding across the lake he's missing out on the coolest part of building one.

So this year, while futzing, I added a blog to the site. Now, back when blogs were the new hotness I convinced myself that I didn’t want one because I didn’t have anything to say. That, of course, was a lie. For such a shy person I am very much a ham and an attention whore and have plenty to say. I am just very particular about the craft and skill of saying things and very critical of myself when I don’t say them properly (whatever that means).

So over the years I just kept my mouth shut and built websites that were never meant to be seen. Then a few years later I discovered NaNoWriMo. I got excited by writing a novel in a month because it was a practice in committing to getting something out of my head and into a computer that was all about not caring about the propriety of what flowed out of my fingers and onto the page. That practice freed those trapped thoughts in my head from those inner demons that hoard them to keep their ugly little forms warm. But NaNoWriMo really didn’t set me free. So every November while I would make a big deal about the progressive word count of my latest novel on my Facebook page, inevitably, someone would say, “Oooh! When you’re done I’d love to read it!” and my whole body and soul would go “Gaaah!” and I’d hide the awfulness away with every intention of never, ever sharing what I wrote.

So I’m that guy who builds sailboats in his basement and keeps them trapped there.

That ends now. I’ve decided that the next step is to practice sharing my words with people. I am terrified that people are going to hate what those words I have to share are and that they are going to judge me as an awful person for having shared them but I know that doesn’t have to be the case because I know that there is a skill and a craft to sharing words well and here is where I am going to practice that skill until I know how to do it well.

Now I'm not the sort of person to make New Year’s resolutions but since it’s the season to do so I hereby (hereby is the sort of word one uses when resolving isn’t it?). I hereby resolve to post something of interest to this blog with the goal of posting as much as I can, as often as I can, as soon as I can until I get really good at doing it.

I have no idea what that's going to be but I guess figuring that out is part of the practice of having a blog...