Who (or What) Is Next?

      Dungeons and dragons.  Never played it.  The other night's dream had me looking out a window in a large gathering and telling everyone that something unusual was coming...and fast.  It was a dragon, one as red as Dorothy's shoes in The Wizard of Oz, and it swooped in and grabbed me even as I hid under a table; but somehow I held onto the legs of the table and used it to continuously flay at the dragon's feet, whacking away as if the table was little more than a pie plate and me strong enough to lift it over and over.  And somehow, it worked.  The dragon dropped me in a corner as it flew out the other side.  It was then that I found myself holding a tall rod, a "magical" spear of some sort and one which I knew nothing about other than I had to blindly sit up and heave the spear out the window and with force, which I did.  Bulls eye, I heard someone say, which puzzled me because I knew that I had simply thrown it out the window, aiming at nothing and, since it was dark, not seeing anything out there anyway.  But I got up quickly, closed the extremely-large window and rushed to the other large window which was still open.  I need another spear, I yelled.  Hurry!  But few knew what I was asking, including me.  What was going to happen?  Was it the dragon that I hit, and was it going to come back?  And what sort of "spear" was I looking for and was there even such a thing since I didn't know how I even got the first one.  Jump to the next night's dream and I got shot, as in gun shot, all after trying to hide from two knife-wielding ruffians getting overly angry at a guy caught with their girlfriend.  Was I supposed to be a coward or a hero?  And was that how I would really act if the situation were in real life?  Or, was all of it merely a regular nightly clearing of my daily conscious intake?

     Maybe it was simply having read a piece in The Sun that talked about mercy.  Wrote part of the article: We all exist, most unwittingly, in a world of illusions with all too-real consequences.  Too often we exist, as Ralph Ellison's narrator in Invisible Man, as "phantom[s] in other people's minds."...It seems to me that part of my reason for writing this --for revealing my own fear and sorrow, my own paranoia and self-incrimination and shame-- is to say, Look how I've been made by this.  To have, perhaps, mercy on myself.  When we have mercy, deep and abiding change might happen.  The corrupt imagination might become visible.  Inequalities might become visible.  Violence might become visible.  Terror might become visible.  And the things we've been doing to each other, despite the fact that we don't want to do such things to each other, might become visible.  If we don't, we will all remain phantoms -- and, it turns out, it's hard for phantoms to care for one another, let alone love one another.

     Those phantoms.  They lurk in our heads when we look from the edge of a cliff; they wait in the shadows when we're alone in a strange place and out of our comfort zone; they hide in those cavities and recesses of our minds.  But then those are the dark, almost negative images.  What of the phantoms that tell us not to get on that flight, or not to meet that person around the corner, the "voices" that guide us away from danger, knowingly (to us) or not?  Maybe we should simply call the past, present and future, phantoms.  Okay, some of these thoughts came about because of seeing both the older film, Solace, and the newer one, The Portable Door.  One dealt with a psychic of sorts, a person who could touch something and quickly "absorb" its life cycle, both what had happened and what was going to happen in the near future...only he soon realizes that he is merely a novice compared to another, a person so far ahead of him in those abilities that he wants to simply admit defeat as if a chess player suddenly recognizing that his opponent is dozens of moves ahead of him (only here they're "playing" with lives).  The other film is a fantasy, a "door" which allows anyone who finds it to go anywhere (and return) at will; after landing on private beaches and mountain tops and remote cities day after day, the question became "where would you like to go next?"  So combine those thoughts and imagine that your genie/phantom grants you those abilities, that you could "see" and "go" anywhere, anytime, any direction: time, people, places, dimensions.  Would you go?  And if so, where?  And if you went, would you do so cautiously or with open abandon?  The answer of course, if limited to that "phantom" we call our imagination...

     But what about the future, as in the one when we near our last breath.  The afterlife, as so many call it.  None other than former Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings used his intellect to explore that field in his book, 100 Places to See After You Die.  A review in Kirkus summed up Jennings' book this way: For many cultures, death leads to a literal kind of travel to the afterlife, a journey, often across water.  Certain figures recur in these otherworldly voyages, including all manner of ghosts and "psychopomps," or “immortal guides.”  In the origins of Haitian Voodoo, death is a journey back in time to the “Mother Continent” of the enslaved population.  In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, one must "clear customs," a series of floating stations, on the way to heaven.  Jennings also explores Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, Marvel and DC Comics, Disneyland rides, Twin Peaks, the network comedy The Good Place, video games, and Dungeons and Dragons.  The most resonant "No-Frills Accommodations" may be found in Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit, where "each room has a door, but it usually won't open," and "Hell is—other people."   It's the old Oscar Wilde saying: I don't want to go to Heaven.  None of my friends are there.  Mark Twain had a different take in his short story, Captain Stormfield; as Wikipedia summed up: All sentient life-forms travel to Heaven, often through interplanetary or interstellar space, and land at a particular gate (which are without number), which is reserved for people from that originating planet.  Each newcomer must then give his name and planet of origin to a gatekeeper, who sends him in to Heaven...The story follows Captain Elias Stormfield on his decades long cosmic journey to Heaven; his accidental misplacement after racing a comet; his short-lived interest in singing and playing the harp (generated by his preconceptions of heaven); and the general obsession of souls with the celebrities of Heaven such as Adam, Moses, and Elijah, who according to Twain become as distant to most people in Heaven as living celebrities are on Earth.  More and more, I tend to feel that my arrival at the Pearly Gates will be met with a "closed for repairs" sign...

     Joyce Carol Oates gave an interview about life (in a sense) to the New York Times: Everything that you think is solid is actually fleeting and ephemeral.  The only thing that is quasi-permanent would be a book or work of art or photographs or something.  Anything you create that transcends time is in some ways more real than the actual reality of your life...There’s lots of reasons that people have for not doing things.  Then the cats are gone, the children move away, the marriage breaks up or somebody dies, and you’re sort of there, like, “I don’t have anything.”  A lot of things that had meaning are gone, and you have to start anew.  But if you read Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Ovid writes about how, if you’re reading this, I’m immortal.  You see that theme in Shakespeare’s sonnets.  Paul Ford took this to heart when he promised his writing father that he would "save" all of his writings and put them online.  As Ford noted in WIRED: My father’s last decade was one of relentless downsizing, from apartment to assisted living to nursing home, shedding belongings, throwing away clothes and furniture.  And at the end: Two boxes and a tiny green urn.  The ultimate zip file.  After I parsed and processed and batched his digital legacy, it came to 7,382 files and around 7 gigabytes...My father needed a great deal of space, but now he takes up almost none.  Almost.  Death is a lossy process, but something always remains.

     Then the same magazine did a story about Brandon Sanderson.  Who, you ask?  It was the same question that the writer doing the assignment asked.  The guy has written how many books, you ask (30+); the guy made how much last year from his writing, you ask ($12 million); the guy raised how much on Kickstarter for his own publishing company, you ask ($42 million in a month, a record); and the guy writes what sort of stuff, you ask (fantasy, topping best-seller lists for most of the  past few decades).  So how come you've never heard of him?  I mean, other fantasy writers include Harry Potter's J.K. Rowling and Game of Thrones' George R. R. Martin (no relation, dang it).  WIRED and dozens of other similar magazine editors had never heard of him either.  The author of the piece concluded, unimpressed with his writing, to just ask Sanderson directly: Maybe nobody writes about you because you don't write very well.  Sanderson paused briefly, then agreed (what??).  Sanderson has a condition called graphomania, basically an inability to not write...and write and write and write.  As the article noted: During the Covid lockdowns, he wrote and/or edited seven (books), two for his regular publisher, a graphic novel, and four more in secret (some have more than 400,000 words).  So he clearly can and does write; but can he really write?

     Kiaundra Jackson told INC. that "roughly 84% of founders report battling impostor syndrome" (according to a 2020 study).  I was able to trace my bout of impostor syndrome to grad school, where a professor once told me I'd never be a good therapist.  Those words had lodged in my subconscious, and, at some level, I'd come to believe them.  They'd crept into my business and my relationships with family and friends.  I didn't apply for opportunities because I didn't think I'd get them.  Before a television interview, her inner voice told her: "Who do you think you are, going on national television as an expert?"  "Nobody wants to hear what you have to say."  "They got you because no one else was available."  "You're a fraud and the whole world will find out."  She made it through the interview and added: If there's something in your past that's blocking your future success, don't delay dealing with it.  You owe yourself more than that.  After all, you ­deserve this.  You're worthy.  As Deepak Chopra told the same magazine: You need some degree of wealth for comfort.  But if you have wealth and generosity of spirit, that's an amazing combination.  The data on happiness shows about 10 to 12 percent of your daily happiness experience comes from money; 40 percent comes from choices you make, and choices for personal pleasure.  But 50 percent comes from attitude: Is your life a problem or is it an opportunity?

     So those phantoms?  Are they good or bad?  Are they even real (or are they simply as real as you make them).  We watched My Happy Ending with Andie MacDowell who played a once-famous movie star who now has to face her harshest and unemotional critic, cancer.  I couldn't help but think of my brother, or anyone who gets such an unexpected diagnosis.  How much time?  Can I make the remaining time more valuable?  Do I even have time to do that (my brother did not)?  We are all told to live in the moment, to treasure our life and to treasure life in general (here's where my Africa trip comes back in, the reality of seeing a trio of giraffes walk gracefully away from the seven of us gawking at this Jurassic Park-like setting), but it's difficult.  Are those our phantoms?  Our demons?  Our temptations?  Our "voices" guiding us...or controlling us?*  Be kind, my wife always tells others (and me); that is the only purpose in this world.  Hers is a voice I like to hear; it pulls me back...back to this life, back to this planet, back to this moment.  And I like the words of another best-selling author, Og Mandino: Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight.  Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward.  Your life will never be the same again.

*As depicted in the comedy series, Up Here...