Photos flowing across a Bedroom Ceiling

Have you ever lain on your back in bed and stared up at the bedroom ceiling? The other night I was following floaters swimming inside my eye back and forth, up and down, back and forth.  One evening without warning, a strange happening took place. Photos from the past replaced the floaters. I hate looking back at the past. Too many repressed memories are bound to slither into my conscious mind.

 

As a little boy, I had the usual fears of monsters lurking under my bed, phantoms hiding in shadows, and spiders crawling on the wall. One evening my mother told me my father was leaving. “Where’s he going?” “Away.” “When’s he coming back?” “You’re going to have a new daddy!” What was wrong with the old daddy, I wondered. From that moment the vague fear of losing someone I loved embedded itself in my mind.

People ask me whether I would like to relive my life.  No. One life is enough for any human being. I particularly would never go through adolescence again. In junior high school, I was infatuated with a girl named Theresa. Every time I was near her my heart pounded against my chest. We sat next to each other in class. But I didn’t have a chance with her. She was dating Joe, the all-around athlete. He had muscles, he had trophies, he had Theresa. All I had to offer her was a face full of pimples and braces on my teeth.

Oh, Lord! I don’t want to go down that road again! But I alway find myself on that same road whenever I have to make a life changing decision.

My best time for thinking through problems is when I am walking along the hilly streets around my place. Particularly when the moon makes a ghostly appearance in the sky.

Walking in the chilly rain at night braces me for an evening of dreams, and  nightmares. Sometimes I wake up with a start. But then I look out the window at the rain falling on the street and I calm down.

Once in a while when I wake up in the wee hours of the morning, I’m afraid of looking out the window for fear of seeing a sinister person peering into the bedroom. One evening I woke up and found a woman holding a bird standing over me. What is she doing in my room?  Any Freudians in the audience?

I went out shopping for a briefcase the other day. I paid far too much money for it. The darn thing is, I was walking along a shopping mall and discovered an obelisk tree growing outside the museum.  All I had to do was pick a briefcase like an apple from a tree and I could stuff it into my shopping bag. No money required.

I enjoy listening to jazz music when I write. Yokohama was one of the earliest gateways of jazz flowing into Japan over a century ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_jazz

One of my favorite and perhaps most well-know jazz artists is Sadao Watanabe. https://youtu.be/qQnyXVDubSg

But life keeps intruding into my distracting moments. From California, my brothers write about water levels lowering and about the deterioration of air quality. Smoke from the wildfires consuming forests and property in the northwest stretching down into California has flowed into the atmosphere. Each morning I wake up expecting to see plumes of smoke streaking across Yokohama’s skies. That’s all I needed. Another thing to worry about.

Oh, I wish, we could return to a time when everything was designed in an orderly fashion.