Oz

As always when I was in this shower this morning I had a ton of ideas of what I wanted to write about, then I get on the road, am annoyed at the assholes who insist on tailgating, jumping lines and generally being inconsiderate narcissists, and everything had flown right out of my head.

Lat night I was in the middle of a dream about climbing a mountain when the alarm went off. It was midnight. My partner needed to get up this morning and, since he's a guy and changing the alarm time doesn't require a penis he somehow gets it wrong EVERY time; this time was no exception. So I was taken out of this dream, where I am sure my brain was going to try and repair itself.

The dream comes about, I think, because I've recently discovered Facebook. And I've made contact with people I've not seen or talked to in almost 30 years. When I was about 11 years old (33 years ago) I was hanging out with a much older crowd of teenagers. There was one girl in this group, the younger sister of my boyfriend, who I think was 10. Physically I was a developed teenager & I looked about 14 or 15, but the younger girl was tiny & undeveloped, like a typical 10 year old. It was upstate NY so there were lots of place to hide - in the woods, up a mountain, along a river or lake. This group of about 8 kids ascends a mountain to get drunk & stoned and make out. The little sister of my boyfriend gets alcohol poisoning and ends up in the hospital. The sheriff pays a visit to my house to get me to tell who bought the alcohol & who supplied the pot. Yesterday I made contact via Facebook with the guy who supplied it all to us.

I can't remember if I ever told the sheriffwho it was and I'm unsure if the incident where my mother beat me with a billy club was related or a separate incident. I think, as a result of my noncooperation, my mother raided my room and found my pot stash. She wanted to know where I got it, I refused to tell and then the billy club came out. As she was beating me and screaming at me I simply went away. It was like my brain and body parted ways for a little while so I could endure the beating. My father walked in and when my brain saw the look on his face everything came back into focus and I got the hell out and locked myself in the bathroom. My mother threw both me and my father out of the house that summer.

After I got back to sleep last night I dreamed about tornadoes in California and there was one bearing down upon us but since we don't have basements, there was no place to hide. It was terrifying and I woke back up at 3:30 with my heart racing.

Connecting all of this, when I lived in MN we had tornado warnings all the time, it seemed. I was the only one who took them seriously and when the sirens sounded I grabbed a wineglass, a corkscrew and my cat and would head to the basement for a little comforting vino and shelter. Everyone else was on the back deck looking for the funnel cloud. Since I now haven't had wine for 3 days, I wonder if my brain is asking for the tornado so I can have the wine. Or perhaps it was triggered by the power outage (I really wanted a glass of wine last night during the power outage, but didn't cave to the temptation). Or maybe my life is like that tornado, bearing down upon me with no place to hide and the wine has been my comfort, the thing that helps me forget, just for a little while, all that was.