monkeyplus1

I went swimming yesterday before going home, mostly floating on my back and lazily kicking my way up and down the lane. That weightless feeling does weird things, fills me with a sparkling kind of happiness, leaves me smiling to myself. Kind of like that dragon that likes to squirm its way out of my spine and lick on my brains. Kundalini style, ya know? Slurp, slurp, gush? No? I drew a picture for you.

If I were in the habit of naming my pictures, I’d call this one “happily disarmed”. See me dropping my guns?

Maybe that was what broke the recent spate of nightmarish dreams I’ve been having. Last night, I dreamed of doing acrobatics in an F-4 Phantom II, which is an enormous, hulking Cold-War and Vietnam-era fighter jet. If you’ve ever seen one up close, you’d find it hard to believe that they could even get off the ground, let alone go twice the speed of sound or do acrobatics!

Until I was about 12 years old, my parents lived almost underneath the path of jets landing at Bergstrom Air Force Base right outside Austin, Texas (the base was closed in the 1990s, and rennovated, and now serves as Austin’s commercial airport). When the F-4s flew overhead, you might as well pause any conversation, you weren’t going to hear a thing, even when they weren’t using their afterburners.

In my dreams, I was also a great musician. Fantastic, even. There was some band playing, and I took a sip of some Hennessy, sat down at a keyboard, and just blasted off into space, improvising something amazing. I was shit hot!

I even woke up with a smile on my face, and not just because of better dreams. As I was dozing off last night, I had a flash of inspiration on what to do for my next “mix tape”.

It’s all hush-hush. I know something that Gritty doesn’t, and that is the more you talk about what you’re GOING to do, the less likely it is you’re actually going to do it. stay tuned.

Tomorrow is my birthday, but the celebration starts tonight, and ends on Sunday night.