Derik Badman's Journal

I think I had an actual nightmare last night. I don't recall the last time that happened, but I woke up from this dream in a start and was freaked out until my brain acclimated to reality. The dream was like this weird jack and the beanstalk thing where I was me but I felt like a smaller creature/person and I was hiding from some larger person/monster in what amounted to four pretty small rooms. The person/monster was mostly in the kitchen. I was sneaking around, scared to be seen but also knowing it knew I was there. I remember at the end being in the kitchen and it had a large ax and I suddenly had some kind of weapon. When it attacked me I willed myself to not be hurt and it was like I was sort of controlling the dream retroactively by visualizing effects contrary to what I was seeing. The monster and I were fighting. I awoke.

I'm not sure I'm ready to try to analyze what that's all about. Yesterday wasn't a particularly stressful day for me. Work is often stressful lately (lately being a few years now), but I managed to accomplish what I was working on yesterday without excessive hair pulling and gnashing of teeth.

I finished up Walden x 40 last night. I wish I had something to say about what I got out of it other than a desire to reread Walden, which will have to wait until I finish a few other recent acquisitions (like the two volume The Book of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe that showed up in the mail yesterday). One thing that Ray mentions a few times in the book is how there is apparently no record of Emerson, Thoreau's mentor and the man who owned the land at Walden Pond where he had his hut, writing anything about Walden. He doesn't mention it in his voluminous journals nor in his eulogy for Thoreau. That seems like a glaring omission, and one wonders what words they might have exchanged about the book that are forever lost.

I should retract my other statement, I know what I got out of reading Ray's book: this nascent project. Reading about Thoreau and his journals again, made me decide to try this again. I've kept journals in the past at various times for various periods, many of them now destroyed. (Sidenote: I am super annoyed by the autocorrect that keeps changing one word for another as I type.) I've been wanting to take up a project and my recent attempts to revive my blog have not been as successful as I would have hoped. Partly this is due to a confusion about audience and purpose. Is my blog writing for myself? For others? (Some vague barely existent audience.) I think I've often ended in some middle ground that hasn't quite worked. I hold back some things as too personal, but also am not going fully into adding all the context someone other than me might want.

At least if I am just writing for myself I am writing and practicing putting words together and expressing thoughts. I'm also, I find, consciously considering thoughts as fodder for words during the day. And I'm not discounting putting these entries online (with some edited omissions), rather I'm most likely planning to put them online at some new subdomain and letting my old blog be statically archived.

One of those consciously considered thoughts from yesterday was about browser history as a kind of daily journal. As somehow who spends a lot of time in front of my computer, my browser history is a version of my day: news stories, rpg blog posts, articles about comics, programming problems I look for solutions to, programming documentation I used to check my memory of how a function worked, emails read, emails written, social media viewed, actors I looked up because I saw them in whatever I was watching in the evening and recognized them from some other show/movie, etc. I guess Google and Verizon already have quite the journal of my life.

A hotter, sunnier day today, but my morning walk was pleasant enough as the air is still cool from yesterday. Apparently there was a bomb scare this morning in town right in front of the bakery. A suitcase left behind on the sidewalk. It was just a suitcase. Are people getting paranoid? I don't think I'd see a suitcase on the ground and the first place I'd go is "bomb". More likely I'd assume it was accidentally dropped off a vehicle or it was purposefully dumped as litter.