I’m going to heat up some hot water, so that I may have enough for a single cup of tea. That, and I think I’ll dim the lights just a bit, and listen to an internet radio station; I will listen to music without words, for this evening, I have had many dreams about music without words, and I’m inclined to think that I had a much better time because of this. I don’t dream so often, anymore, I don’t know why, but when it does happen, it’s something to talk about, but I wouldn’t dare get into that right now. At times, a  friend will come to me, and they’ll say, “Look, I’ve got to tell you about this dream I just had, just now.” They’ll say it with such conviction that I am to believe them when they say that it wasn’t at all like a dream, and in fact could have happened during waking hours.

And then it’s about a god damned evil entity or something, and really, now. Though I sympathize on the level that I firmly believe that, at times, cartoons do, in fact, become reality, and then what.

Anyway, so I won’t get into my dreams. I don’t necessarily feel like discussing them, if you must know. For three or four years, my dreams centered around the disappointment my father had in me. He didn’t really yell at me whatsoever, although this red mist of something sinister hung over me, and I’d wake up apologizing to the air for not paying my car insurance on time, or not getting my tires rotated. I’d sit up, sweaty drizzling down my chest like tears, gasp, and say aloud: “I’m sorry, really, I’m sorry. I must have forgotten, damn it all, I’m sorry.” Hell, I felt like calling him, a few times. The dreams stopped when I first went to Japan, say, 16 months ago. I wrote about it, once, and didn’t say anything about it. I think I’ll say it now:

“I’ve had the same dream for six months. They’re sparse, my dreams, but I have them every few weeks. I guess I shouldn’t say the “same” dream — the events are simply plug-in, but the scenario is the same. It’s always me and my father, and we’re arguing — usually over something trivial. “You need to pay for your car insurance, Ryan,” he would say in a condescending tone. Not necessarily yelling, but just an air of disappointment. To me this is worse than being yelled out. Yelling at someone is just a matter of the moment; you raise your voice so there is no mistaking whether you’re serious or not. That feeling of disappointment, though . . . it is a silent sort of agony. It is not a matter of clenching one’s teeth or quickening one’s breath — forehead sweltering red and eyes a glossy black. The level-headed, soft-spoken man who shakes his head in disgust, this is what I fear more than anything.

I woke up in Kyoto yesterday after speaking with that level-headed man. He lives in the Middle East, these days, but he visits me in my sleep from time to time, and I couldn’t possibly resent anything more than that. On a break from his ‘duties’ with the Afghanis, he is visiting America right now. I should admit that I am lucky to not be there.

When the neon lights from the city boarding 800-year-old temples lit up in the old capital, I left the hotel in search of a hot spring to get this man out of my head.”

There was half of a sentence more, though I can’t remember what it is I had meant to say, exactly. I might have had intentions to go on and explain that I accidentally took a hot bath with thirty men and, at one point, shared an open-air onsen with a 9-year-old boy for precisely a third of a second, but I might have been tired, and perhaps I’ve said enough already.

So, the hot water has heated up, and I’ve poured it into a cup I received as a gift, one Christmas, and damn it, you know, we’re out of the good tea, though I’m lucky to have any at all, so I’ve gone ahead and taken the necessary steps to ensure that I get my antioxidants for the day — or night, I suppose — and then maybe I’ll do some hammer curls and read a book. There isn’t any wind outside, and there aren’t any leaves to be blown around, yet. All I can hear is the ever-present flock of two-ton bombs rocketing down the highway at some godforsaken hour, and I can’t really think about anything except the trains in Tokyo, and the hair on my head, which, I will have you know, has gotten quite long. Last night, I did something accidental with it, and I ended up looking like I’d just finished signing the “Declaration of Independence”, or something. It’s always amusing, to me, when people think they own the hair that sprouts out my skull — the hair I was born with, thank you very much. Like the dreams I have mentioned, “people” are always excited to throw out commands, assuming you even give a damn in the first place. “Keep it long, I like it!” “You should cut it!”

Man, I will cut my hair — or not cut it at all, actually! — when and if I god damned feel like it. I’ve been putting up with this subtle nonsense ever since I went on a field trip in 8th grade, and I said to myself, “I don’t feel like cutting my hair this summer, so I won’t.” And I didn’t. It got long, and people always told me to cut it, or they’d ask me what I put in it to make it shine like it does, and to the first crowd I would say: no, thank you, I will keep it just as it is. To the second, I would say: look, I don’t know.

You’ll have to forgive me; it has been some time since I have written about my own life.

When we last left me, I might have been in school. Lord. See, I wouldn’t dare say something if I didn’t believe that I wanted to say it. And even then, I would never presume to write an essay about maybe nothing at all and expect anyone to give a quarter of a damn. It’s just that — man, this is damned good tea, and Mozart’s “Quartet for Flute and String Trio No. 2″ is an excellent way to end a Saturday night, and welcome in a Sunday morning, though it is by no means a good way to end a Friday night, and start a Saturday morning.

That, I’m afraid, is reserved for the ceremony of putting on black jeans after a brain-boiling bath, the kind where your skin is wobbly and rubbery and fresh from the womb. If you’ve never seen a baby picture of yourself right after you came crawling out of that insidious gully hole wherein a seed met an egg and a child-creature was formed and lived for all of its nine months up until that point, well, your face was likely a Crayola red, and if the photographer, who was probably a nurse, was worth half her salt with a camera, she knew damn sure to keep her distance so that the first visual documentation of your existence wasn’t a zoomed-in red massacre of an affair, blood vessels showing through your brand new face like bloody earthworms. Lord, I can imagine it now, if she’d gotten up close with a macro — you’d have been a cauterized wound with a mouth and ink dots for eyes, screaming at the flashbulb and not at all aware of the pleasures of hot tea and Mozart, and far removed from the future dreams of red-hot disappointment at the very man who had provided the seed in the two-part equation that formed the hands that would later shake at the ceiling, and the chest for which sweat might drizzle down like it does as you languished in the prison that you shuffled off to when the lights have burned out, and the wind has stopped caring and gone some other place.The traffic continues outside the window, never allowing a break for silence, and always angry. And you’re wearing black jeans in bed because you were never told you couldn’t, and if even if you were, fuck it, it’s time to wear black jeans in a bed that you bought with your own money.

It occurred to me perhaps four months ago, that I have grown weary with having a physical body. I was thinking deeply on how much I enjoy the aforementioned “womb baths”, and the feeling of hot tea sliding down my throat, and Mozart asking, kindly, if he may resonate in my head, and root out the dreams that center around fucking car insurance, and I always say yes, please, by all means. To be sure, this is epicenter of my happiness, and I have asked these things to remain in my life always, if they would be so kind, pending an endless winter at the hands of human trash bags. We — the baths, the tea, and my eternal friend, Mozart — have all agreed to meet up four to five times a week for the rest of my days, however numbered they may be, I don’t know. However, it was a blistering assimilation of facts — that I dislike my physical shell — and the quick equation my mind was able to process lead me to the unfortunate conclusion that I do not like being hot, and sitting in a two-ton mobile bomb in the middle of Maryland, looking at stupid things, feeling stupid emotions, and above all else, having to verbally shoo away a grown man selling flowers at a stop light in the middle of June. Because, for fuck’s sake, I don’t want flowers, and if my iron-rimmed glowering isn’t enough to herd away the saddest entrepreneurs on the ragged interstates of the the world, I don’t know what will. “Flowers? Flowers?” No, god dammit, no! I do not want flowers at two in the afternoon — not now, not ever. And no, I will not pay seven sweaty, bloody American dollars for your wilting paper-mâché.

I was, of course, driving to the grocery store, which required me to leave what it is I do in the afternoons (six hours of microscopically slow masturbation in a room full of circus mirrors), sit in a vehicle without air conditioning (I refuse to have it fixed), drive some odd number of miles, find a parking spot, avoid losing all of my teeth and stumbling over onto hot asphalt by way of the human cockroaches that race shopping carts up and down the parking lot, find a basket that doesn’t have some mysterious human fluid on its handle, pick out food that isn’t stupidly overpriced, goosestep past people who do one “fun” thing a year, and are happy to remind me, a perfect stranger about: “I’m going to Six Flags!!!” Jesus, okay, that’s fucking fantastic news, now please, move your flip-flopping, cut-off jean shorts ass out of the way so I can get to the discounted three cheese marinara sauce.

And that’s just buying the food. Lord, if I went into the process of loading up my plastic money card by earning the money to fuel my vehicle, or purchase the food, we’d be here all night. Even then, I have to prepare it, because my throat does not have teeth, and then there’s the electricity and the water bill to worry about. Really, I ask: What would Jesus do?

Earlier this year, a 64-year-old man in a leather jacket, who loved to tell sex jokes and believes very firmly in the existence of ghosts (who have sex), discussed the theory of the “brain in a vat”, which is essentially a gussied-up retelling of René Descartes‘ “Evil Daemon” (or, “Evil Genius”, if you must) theory. The theory is this (and I sincerely apologize to any philosophy majors, as this is going to be fucking dog food to you): a) we cannot trust our senses, because our sense lie to us — a stick in a stream will appear bent through the refraction of the water, b) we cannot trust our dreams, as the time spent in our head (arguing with our fathers over the matter of petty responsibilities) seems real enough for the time in which we inhabit these visions, as we are to feel pain at times, and cannot be convinced that what we have  felt is anything besides reality, and thus c) we may be controlled by an evil daemon, who has, let us say, created a world inside of our mind, where mathematical truths might be distorted (2 + 2 = 5), and our senses are lies. Wow, hey! That sounds pretty great!

But, let’s take this a step further and say: seriously, hell yeah. Let me have that, except I am my own evil genius. And we can cut the whole evil part out of it! No deception to speak of, because let’s face it, I’d be in charge of my own world. And while we’re at it, I don’t even need to be a daemon or a genius — I can just be a man, or a guy. So, yes, we’ll take this and make it the “Morally Inoffensive Guy” theory. I won’t distort math or senses, I promise. I’ll just pick and chose which stay and which are kicked to the curb. I will hook my brain up to a supercomputer, and allow it to be placed in a vat. This will be in a room sealed away from the world for all eternity, and I will select the senses my brain will receive as computed impulses (hot bath, hot tea, Mozart). We can get rid of “shame from grocery shopping” and “masturbation” right away. It’ll free up my afternoons, and lord knows I need my afternoons. Can I delete people, too? Yes? Splendid! I’ll start with a few I have in mind, and reorganize the neighborhood I live in, just a little bit. Hell, to be on the safe side, let’s just go ahead and delete everyone in my neighborhood. So long, lady-who-speaks-to-her-children-in-a-dialect-reserved-for-the-7th-fucking-circle-of-hell! Get the hell out of here, kids-who-scream-on-the-playground-as-though-the-sky-and-trees-are-lined-in-egg-crates.

Sorry, people-who-tell-me-what-to-do-with-my-hair, I’m going to have to ask you to leave, too. That goes for you, as well, people-who-say-knowingly-awkward-things-at-parties.

Ah, well.

Don’t worry, Dad, you’re not going anywhere. Just, you know, stay out of my dreams.

And, yes, I believe the tea kettle is now empty.