November 13, 2000
In The Synch
  


 
David and I both had drinking dreams last night.

In his dream, David says, he stopped by his former brother-in-law's house and somebody handed him a Heineken. It was only after he'd automatically glugged down half the bottle that he stopped and thought, "Oh shit! What am I doing? Secra is going to smell beer on my breath, and she'll kill me totally dead!" *

End of dream.

In my dream, I was at a family get-together where everybody was drinking red wine. I desperately wanted some, but I didn't want anybody to catch me drinking it ... so I waited until my mother was in the bathroom (and all of my other relatives had just sort of magically *disappeared* for a minute), and then I snuck across the room and snatched a half-full glass of cabernet off the table. It was only after I'd automatically glugged down half the glass that I stopped and thought, "Oh shit! What am I doing? David is going to smell wine on my breath, and he'll kill me totally dead!" *

End of amazingly similar dream.

Weird, isn't it? Even in our dreams, we're *in the synch.*

* [Editor's Note: This is merely dreamspeak, of course.
We would not, in fact, 'kill each other totally dead.'
If one of us were to accidentally fall off the wagon,
we would lovingly and supportively haul each others' big stoopid ass
right back ONTO the wagon.]


As usual, the best part of our weekend was all the stuff we didn't do.

We didn't stay up too late. We didn't get up too early. We didn't skip our three-hour Saturday afternoon nap.

We didn't overeat or overindulge or overspend or overcompensate.

We didn't overwork. David didn't go into his office and catch up on paperwork for a few hours on Saturday, even though that was something we'd both expected him to have to do. (His assistant is off on her honeymoon ... ::ahem:: ... for a couple of weeks, and he is buried in not-so-groovy managerial crap as a result.)

I certainly didn't check my office voicemail from home.

We didn't waste a lot of *time and attention molecules* watching "up-to-the-minute election coverage" on TV. (We rented "High Fidelity" instead.)

We didn't read the message boards. We didn't check our e-mail (much). We didn't download The Dubya Dance. We didn't go online much at all, in fact.

We didn't fight. (Although our noisy drunken neighbors did. At one point yesterday afternoon I had the phone in my hand, poised to dial 911 again, but then the battle seemed to sort of wind down, all by itself.)  We didn't call each other "Cunt" or "Asswipe" or "Rectal-Thermometer-For-Brains," or throw loaded ashtrays at each other, or make each other bleed or cry or throw up or go to jail.

(We did, however, make each other scream. But that's another story for another day.)

We didn't forget to say "I love you" before we fell asleep at night ... and again when we woke up in the morning ... and again at regular nauseating fifteen-minute intervals throughout the weekend.

And of course the best "didn't" of all: we didn't drink.

(Dream about it? Yeah, maybe. But we didn't drink.)


 
The drinking dreams don't seem to be getting to me, the way they used to.

I'm not talking about almost-drinking dreams: the dreams where I open the refrigerator and see the tap-dancing box of Mountain Chablis on the top shelf, cheerfully urging me to get drunk and go online and order $4,000 worth of living room furniture and exercise equipment from Fingerhut (but then I wake up before anything bad happens -- to either my credit or my liver).  I'm talking about the dreams where the box gets opened, the glass gets filled and the cheap chab goes down the hatch. The dreams where I actually drink, in other words.

Like the one I had last night.

When they first started -- last spring -- I was horrified. I would wake up from a drinking dream and lay there in bed, totally rattled. Whut the fudk was THAT all about? The dream would follow me around for the rest of the day,  like a pesky CNN reporter, while I busily tried to analyze it: Why did I dream that? What prompted it? What does it mean? Was it prophetic? Is my resolve eroding, and I just don't know it yet?

Should I tell David about my dream? Or just write about it here on my website, where he'll get around to reading about it sometime next Easter?

But the more time that goes by -- the further I move through the recovery process -- the more I recognize the drinking dreams for what they are: blips on the radar screen of my subconscious. Me, processing the flotsam and jetsam from my day.

Sleeping brain farts.

(Frankly, I am much more *disturbed* by dreams about Franz trying to have sex with me in my great-grandmother's wheelbarrow than I am by a garden variety drinking dream ....)


Special Note to FootNotes Readers
and to Cranky *I Hate You But I Read You Anyway (Sometimes Four or Five Times a Day)* Denver Lady ...


I expect the rest of this month -- and next month -- to be fairly IRL-intensive. *

* translation for the groovy-cyber-acronym-challenged:
i've got a buttload of stuff to do
AWAY from the computer.

Jaymi arrives on Wednesday to binge on a few days' worth of Asiago cheese and maternal attention. Next week is the four-day Thanksgiving holiday (and the requisite Dinner At David's Parents' House: my smile muscles are aching already). Then there is all of this furtive, frantic, behind-the-scenes job-hunting stuff going on.

Don't even get me started on Christmas.

Dump that on top of my usual Franz worries and financial worries and Tot worries and website worries and hormonal worries and worry-worries ... and it all adds up to S-T-R-E-S-S.

(Thank god for St. John's Wort and dreams: Nature's mental laxatives.)

I don't know how all of this is going to impact my journal-writing schedule. I suspect that it might, though. I suspect that I might need to pull away for a little bit, or to at least scale back the journal entries ... from my usual bazillion megabytes of daily blither-blather, to a more manageable perfect paragraph or two, every other day or so. But then again maybe just the opposite will happen: maybe I'll be so energized and inspired by all of the exciting changes going on in my life, I'll just want to come home every evening and write, write, write my brains out!

Although I doubt it.

For that reason, then -- because the next few weeks are likely to be such a rollercoaster ride -- I'm going to break down and give the notify list idea another try.

Those of you who have been around long enough to remember my first disastrous, do-it-yourself attempt may also remember my snooty declaration that I was never ever ever going to have another notify list ever again.  ("I don't want anything to interfere with the *writing process,* I said. Translation: I have absolutely no idea whut I'm doing, so I'm not going to *do* it anymore.)  I still don't know what I'm doing ... but at least they've automated the process somewhat since those long-ago days of yore, when I used to have to trudge barefoot eighty miles in the snow every morning to send e-mail to my notify list people.  I figure that if ten or more of you sign up for the damn thing ... I'll give it another go. At the very least, it'll give me one more interesting thing to screw up every night when I'm trying to post my temporarily-abbreviated journal stuff.

Plus it'll help keep us all *in the synch* until the holidays are over.


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