Look Backward, Angel, Now

Is this what it feels like for every old man? Judgement Day approaches? You’re your own Public Defender and you secretly think you’re guilty.

“Look backward angel now and melt with ruth” – John Milton, “Paradise Lost”.

I dreamed a vivid dream this morning that I hasten to record. For a long time in recent years my dreams have rushed to hide themselves as I awake. Years ago, before I started writing on social media, I kept a dream diary. During that time I would record my dreams every morning and my dreams rewarded that respectful attitude by presenting me with a vivid story nearly every morning as I drifted awake. Since I have been spending my writing energy writing posts on Facebook my dream production team has denied me. I haven’t been buying a ticket so I don’t get a show, I guess.

Maybe what it is, is that I’ve been fooling around with the outer world. Like the brazen hussy it is, the world dances and flashes her skanky body in front of me and, fool that I am, she dazzles and teases me. I seem to prefer her whore’s charms. Fine and dandy. So I don’t get to discover the nakedness of my real self anymore, Buddy, That’s how it goes, Mack. You takes your choice.

Or maybe it’s like this: I’ve been telling the whole damn world outside every little thing about me that my waking ego can possibly discover. As if I knew it all. As if I thought my innermost soul was totally revealed like some ho-hum-whore. If they, my Dream Team, were to favour me with a dream worth recording I’d tell every Tom, Dick and Tic-Toc Bot about it. Like some sort of an Amsterdam Hoo-er cavorting in a picture window. Maybe that’s why my Dream Team has folded up the production studio. I get to hear noises of rehearsal but that’s it, sucker.

[I should footnote this: in real life I was a pro actor for many years until my agency dropped me and now in my old age I look back and regret. But what exactly am I regretting?]

You quit the team, my friend, you quit acting. You bugged out on the sacred Shakespearian profession. You deserted the gypsy caravan. You’ve been moaning and crying rivers about how wicked you were to run away to join the circus way back then. You wish you hadn’t been an actor. OK. Fine. You bugged out on your own life, sonny. Make up your mind. Man up and decide.

But this morning I got a vivid dream.

In my dream I had been sent a letter of warning by the government. It said in very convincing bold black print that if I had been cheating on my wife I would be liable to a prison term. The proof that I had been cheating would be a round of wood sawn from a tree that I had kept hidden and dry, ready to be chopped into kindling to start a warm and cosy fire. Inspectors would search my home and find it. In this dream my home was – and this has been true of every dream I’ve ever dreamed of “home”, ever – my house was my parental house back in old Saint Catharines where I grew up, but I was now the sole proprietor.

But I was really scared by this letter because I knew I had been tempted to stray from my wife. I had been harbouring that dry old tree-round and thinking fondly of a pretty young thing who had tempted me on-line. I knew I would chop that wood and light that fire because I wanted to, bad man that I am. I had thought I’d been discrete about my illicit desires. But no! The government had found out what I was planning and now they’d bring out that shameful illegal kindling wood – short and dry and dusty though it is it could still burn – and I’d be dead to rights. Into the slammer I’d go.

But then I got mad at it. I started asking the other people in my dream world if they had gotten the same government warning letter. There were two or three police officers – they looked to be maybe 18 years old, in their short sleeved dark blue uniforms, nice guys, one was trying to look older by growing a sparse little moustache, nice young fella – I asked them if they’d also gotten this government mail-out. I was sure that they must have their own secret chunk of wood back in the bedroom.

Hell! Everybody does! Damn it! I was going to start a movement of proud and OUT THERE wood-holders! Fuck the government! We’ve all Got Wood, it’s in the Constitution, assholes!

Then the scene shifted. I was an usher again for the Chan Centre beautiful classic music concert hall on UBC campus where I had been happier than I had realized at the time – in real waking life I worked there happily from 2000 to 2020 when the Government shut down all our jobs and put us all under house arrest like Joseph K in Kafka’s “The Trial”.

What wonderful experiences of beautiful classical music I had had! And friendship with such nice fellow workers! Such a rich privilege I had had, to be an usher there, in those fleeting years of my time! And now it’s all gone.

Anyhow. In this dream they had shut down the Chan pending major renovations amounting to gutting the hall and remaking it. I wandered in at the the old familiiar doors to Dress Circle Left and looked down. They were busy with construction work and didn’t notice me. The work was almost finished. The walls were all covered with flower-patterned wall paper. Cream background with huge pink roses like a preteen girl’s bedroom in some middle class bungalow in suburbia in the 1950s. Only the left wall was still bare drywall. The flowers looked huge, not like wallpaper in real life, huge, a yard across. And it made the hall look small, like a closet theatre, a kid’s theatre in a doll house. It made the Chan hall look like it was a kiddie’s play theatre for Barbie and Ken. The adults who had been our patrons would feel like they were kiddies in this theatre that now seemed so cramped. As if the walls were about to close in even further.

As I drifted awake I began to fantasize. I thought it would be such a funny routine if a beautiful young woman movie star – a real woman with a real vagina like us real Boomer guys used to know, kids – somebody like Taylor Swift, a shining example for the teen girls of today to emulate – wouldn’t it be funny if she were to pretend to be a trans woman? Or is that a trans-man woman? Help me, Cosmo!

Maybe being a real female, girly, womanly, female, feminine dame was no longer cool in high school these days. To be in with the In Crowd during lunch period even being Gay was no longer good enough. You’d have to be some sort of Trans-sex “Identified” person. Then and only then would you get all “A”s in the smart class.

So to be cool again, this Taylor Swiftian type announces that she is finally coming out honestly. She has always secretly identified as a Trans-Man. Disgusted by her feminine birth genitals all her life she has secretly worn false penises and then taped them down like a real closet transsexual boy. But that’s all done now, she announces. She is now out and proud as a self-Identified female, lesbian, man-loving trans-man. She demands that others call her what she identifies as, a Trans-Tranny. She demands that her now out and proud, strap-on cod-piece be accepted as a real penis like any other. Define Female Trans-Woman-Man-Trans … thing, I dare you!

She’s going to create a YouTube channel advising other girls who identify as a trans-man. She’s going to demonstrate how you shave every morning with a good old school double-bladed safety razor to get that lady-smooth cheek. Your beard growth is Virtual, because you were Assigned Female at birth, having been born with labia, a vagina and a uterus, but that’s just Hetero-Normative Oppression, gilrlfriend. You always FELT like a boy who wanted to be a real girl. Feels over Reals, boys! Or girls. Or whatever.