14th Oct - I had a dream. I had a dream while I was toilet-sleeping. And in this dream, I was toilet-sleeping.
Zhuang-Zi eat your frickin' heart out. Dreaming about dreaming butterflies is for sissies. I am taking Taoist existentialism to a new level.
Details now. It was a bigger toilet with windows, a high ceiling, and a marble finish, but it was still a toilet. The sinks, stalls, and my position, however, were arranged in a mirror image of the real thing. Perhaps we're taking on a little Nietzsche here, the abyss staring back into me. (I am the untermensch! Hear me embrace Marxism!) Regardless, I couldn't tell the difference between reality and dream.
Pop quiz: how do you know, after you've eaten the red pill, been flushed by the squidbots, learned kung fu, and become 'The One', that you're not still in the Matrix? Does reality consist of infinite Kabbalesque layers of illusion, each uglier than the one above?
Man, listening to all this classical music is beginning to screw me over. I swear, all those contrapuntal melodies are prodding my left and right brains into synchronous action. I'm perceiving and imagining more. Case in point: the preceding rant.
OK, you listen to Vivaldi, Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven - beautiful shit. Then you read the CD jacket and it casually mentions they became blind, deaf, mad, poor, or all of the above, with death courtesy of some medieval pox that even third world kids don't get anymore. My point is that you've got this ethereal universe of music that's generated by a squalid, shitty reality.
Mum told me off last night for listening to classical music on internet radio. "It costs the organisation money and it's not work related." Hold up there! When did she become my manager? Only in my nightmares! Then she tells me how her network nazis track everyone's bandwidth and muscle them to use less. Let me write down the name of your Dickensian sweatshop, Mum, so I can put it high on the list ... of pits I DON'T want to end up in.
Makes me feel kind of better knowing others are worse off, but doesn't change the fact that I'm still beseiged by ... Rather than try to describe the idiocy, I'll use my new-found resourcefulness to grab it straight from email-land. Get this:
From: Derek's McManagerWe 'must should' stop Derek before his email disclaimer destroys the world! It's even wormed its way onto his WEEKLY, 2-PAGE, activity report! I go out of my way to accommodate a pointless request and I receive nitpicks instead of appreciation. Ungrateful! With your eagle-eye, captain, oh my captain, you could be auditing multinational contracts or legislating to end social injustice. But here you are, pissing over my email disclaimer. Loser.
Got time for another doozy? This is what I get when I ask people to phone me, rather than fling insufficiently detailed emails at me:
From: Georgia, AtlantaWhat the?! Someone who says "I don't think we need to discuss this further" to me in the street better prepare to get beaten like a red-headed stepchild. But I guess it's fine to disrespect people through email. Sheesh! I don't ask people to call unless I MEAN it. Sure, I could fire off a 'give me more information' email. Then fifteen thousand emails later, we'd get somewhere. But rather than thank Derek for trying to avoid all that, let's flame him for trying to bypass our poxy electronic bitch-shield.
Waiting ... waiting ... waiting for my conscience to jump in, like, right about now. My Asian work-ethic should swoop like some Superego-deus-in-machina and whip me back into 'model-employee' mode.
Uh oh. What if it's already tried?
Tell you a funny story: I woke up one morning - after making some decisions regarding work the night before - and this voice was screaming in my ear.
"You must RESOLVE your antagonisms with your colleagues!" The disembodied voice yelled. "You will get into TROUBLE at work! You will NEVER recover your career!"
I was too sleepy to be freaked out. At least I've gotten a reaction from someone, even if it is my split personality. I couldn't place the voice, but it sounded a bit like my Mum's. Admittedly, I ignored it and ended up sleeping in.
Y'know, If only I could sleep through the events in my reality. There are no major milestones on my horizon for at least a year. And it's getting kind of boring watching everyone else's graduations, promotions, marriages, and pregnancies. I could just wake up when I've accumulated some bragging rights.
Life though, must be lived sequentially. We can't skip tracks to the bits we like, nor can we rewind to our favourites. God's ultimate copy protection: time, shits all over what locks down internet classic FM.
I guess I do have limited control over life experience through the mental abstractions I layer over it, like the sliders on an equaliser, like illusions within illusions. And I certainly have fun playing with them. If I can't tell sleep from wakefulness, and successive awakenings bring starker experiences, then let me sleep and dream of dreaming.
Or, just toilet-sleeping will do.
"Asleep at last! Thank God Almighty, I'm asleep at last!"