Topic: An Accident

I was driving south on Route 68 somewhere outside of Xenia in small town southern Ohio on balmy late June afternoon. At the time I was a Regional Director of Clinical Operations for a group of nursing homes and I had been a nurse for over 25 years.  I was on my way to one of my facilities to meet with the management to discuss some new regulations about reducing the use of antipsychotic medications for Alzheimer's patients.  It had been a long time since I had actually done any true patient care. 
I was sipping my Diet Coke and singing along to "Don't Fear the Reaper" on the radio when I saw the oncoming car about a football field away from me veer off the road at 65mph suddenly become airborne.  In an instant the vehicle flipped completely upside down and landed in the shoulder.  I turned off the radio and said aloud, "That just happened.  That car just flipped over.  Oh. my.God."
Funny, of all the things I remember about this accident, I couldn't tell you what type of car it was-just some mid size white 4 door used car. 
There are other details that I will never forget.  No one else was around.  No other cars came by.  I didn't see any nearby houses or businesses.  I was grateful I had phone service.  I ran to the flipped vehicle scared about what I was going to see.  Would there be dead people in the car?  Would there be severely injured people?  Decapitations?  Would the person be in intolerable pain?  Was the car going to go up in flames?  Would I have to pull someone from the wreckage?
As I approached the car a mom in a minivan with a young boy and an infant in car seat stopped behind my car.  The mom told me she was afraid to go over to the car.  I was afraid too, but I confidently told her I was a nurse.  She looked at me with some skepticism as I was sporting a business suit and heels.  I told her to stay put and to call 911. 
I saw a bloody forearm first.  It was hanging out of the driver's window which had been shattered.  And then I heard a young girl screaming hysterically.  I felt relief because I knew that at least she was breathing.  "My name is Bridgid.  I'm a registered nurse.  You're going to be okay.  The paramedics are on their way. "  I had no idea if this was true.  We were out in the middle of nowhere and I didn't know if our phones even worked out here.
Her name was Tonya and she was barely 20.  She had worked a double shift and fallen asleep at the wheel.  Her biggest concern was that her car was totaled and she didn't know how she was going to get to tomorrow.  She kept screaming for me to get her out of the car, but it had flipped into a ditch so there was no way to even open the door.  I couldn't even see her face, which meant she couldn't see me.  I held her bloody hand and told her the best thing she could do was sit tight until the paramedics came.  I sat there crouched by the side of the road for what seemed like five hours trying to reassure this stranger that it was all going to be alright.  In reality it was probably five minutes. 
Once the ambulance and the police showed up, I was shooed away.  The police had me write a statement since I had witnessed the accident.  I was right.  She was going to be okay.  I watched them extricate her from the car.  She was still crying but that was better than what I had imagined I'd find when I'd watched the car flip over.  
It was a surreal 30 minute drive to the nursing home after that.  "That just happened, " I kept saying to myself.  I had blood on my suit jacket and muddy knees as I entered the conference room an hour late for my meeting. 
"What the hell happened to you?" asked the Director of Nursing. 
"I was at the scene of an accident. She's okay.  I didn't really do anything.  I just sat there with her till the ambulance came."  And then I started to cry. 

Topic: Travel

Author: Chris Dunn

I recently got back from a road trip, and already I want to go again. There’s just something about a road trip that calls to me. I think it’s that free untethered feeling, or maybe it’s a lost nostalgia of my youth, or some primal, innate calling to explore the unknown, but whatever it is it pulls me.

This most recent road trip was in answer to a nearly thirty year old seed which was planted in my brain my freshman year of college. I took my degree from Miami University where my father taught. Only a forty minute or so drive up US 27, sat a pile of red bricks which they called a “Public Ivy”. Nothing there ever really interested me, so I spent as many nights as possible back home running my games for the most dedicated group of gamers you’d ever find - ever free with a ride to and fro. We must have tread that trail a thousand times, and somewhere early on, I became aware that this highway - the same highway that had always led to the local mall – continued all the way to Florida. After that realization, I couldn’t help but stare down it and wonder what might happen if I just didn’t turn off. How hard would it be to follow all the way to the ocean? How fun? Thirty years later, I would find out.

My companion on this excursion was my oldest and dearest, Drew. He made the mistake of mentioning a similar bug once when we were eating at a local Skyline along this root, so when time and money came my way, he was roped in to ride shotgun. GPS made short work of my wonder, and the ocean came sooner than expected, still it was a blast just eating up the miles, stopping in at all the greasy spoons and marveling at the amazing lack of traffic you can find on state routes as opposed to interstates.

You’re more alive when you travel. That’s a major element to be sure. I say this because, it’s true. Think about it. Most of us rise in the morning at a set time, prep ourselves to the greet the day, the coffee drops on schedule to fuel our battle and then it’s off to the grind until we come safe home for dinner and our evenings. Weekends provide a brief respite, but most of us simply fall into a slightly different routine – one with the ratio of pleasure to work inverted. But when you travel, when you step off your beaten path, you have to open your eyes. You don’t know what over the next hill. “When’s the turn off?” “What did that sign say?” “Did you see the size of that- Oh, look! Is that a bear?” Our eyes are wide open, sucking in information, categorizing and interpreting for our education and our safety. We’re growing!

Plane travel is like a bus. Granted it gets you there so much faster, but after a few cramped coach flights, the shine is off the apple. Often on planes, I wish that they could just knock me out. A brief drop into pitch black, hyper sleep and the awake in the new land, because there’s so little in between. We read. We watch movies. Play games. Anything to pass the time. But a road trip, even one down a never ending redux of Colerain Avenue, is filled with wonders and oddities. I wound up calling it the Highway of Broken Dreams because every fifty miles or so, we came upon the shattered remains of someone’s great idea to sell fruit, curios, miniature golf, snow cones or the like, all boarded up with a faded sign hanging loose by a single chain. No other stands or attractions for miles, but these people all thought they could hunker down and feed off the life zipping by them on its way to anywhere but there.

Now I find myself drifting back to the family road trips to places like South Carolina and Michigan. We’d rent a cottage by some water – ocean, lake or river, it didn’t matter – and pile everyone in the car along with triptiks (that’s an 80s-era, analog version of GPS), bags full of snacks and a cooler full of sodas. The convenience of 24-hour roadside snack vendors had yet to be imagined. I was but a young fool then, and would spend my hours hunkered down behind my mother’s seat reading trashy novels about giant robots (which would later become fodder for those college day campaigns), never taking the time to enjoy the miles that blurred by outside my window. Later on friends would replace family, and a few turns at the wheel were required, but the miles came alive. Even a seemingly endless corn corridor through the whole of Kansas could be broken up searching for billboards declaring the largest ball of twine lay just over the bluff.

Recently, I went on my first cruise from San Francisco to Hawaii. The cruise director and crew worked tirelessly trying to entertain us, but I could’ve told them not to bother. Your dance nights and trivia quizzes hold no candle to the vastness passing by for hours on end outside our balcony. I would spend those hours just sitting marveling at how immense and serene the ocean was, reading a book in the shade with a rum cocktail while the miles rolled by beneath me. Sure we could’ve taken a plane and had more time to spend hopping islands on a tight schedule, but would that have been better, than being teleported to a theme park? I have an appreciation for just how far away our 50^th state truly is, and a respect for how huge the Pacific is, and a wonder for the technology that can carry us safely across it all with our helm tied to a star.

That’s it really. The journey. The journey’s the thing.

Topic: An Accident

Author: Chris Dunn

Do you remember sleeping over at a friend’s house? Apart from vacations and camping with the scouts, it was one of the biggest thrills in my young life. It was freedom on an unprecedented scale. There were strange foods and late nights, unusual bedding – more often than not in a sleeping bag on the floor. Hours after the parents went to sleep, you’d pass out, still buzzed on caffeine and the novel environs, sometimes midsentence as you and your friend talked for hours about everything and nothing.

It was in this spirit of expectant joy, that we set out from Mark’s house on Meis Avenue. We had asked and the parent’s had consented. Everything was set except for one minor hurdle, my flute… You see, I was in the school band. We both were, Mark and I. He played our band’s one and only baritone horn, and I was a flautist - though calling my shrill piping actual flute playing was the type of kindness often afforded to children. A’s for effort and applauses for showing up, kind of stuff. Still, we were in the band, and the band had a concert the next day. If I was going to stay over, I could get a ride with Mark’s family, but I would need my instrument. The answer was clear, we would just ride over to my house, pick up the flute and ride our bikes on back. Transporting my instrument via bicycle was far more feasible than moving Mark’s giant horn.

For those of you not familiar with the topography of my childhood hometown, North College Hill, Meis Ave descends rather sharply down to Hamilton Avenue – one of the town’s two major thoroughfares. Looking at it today, it seems rather tame. Nothing you would GoPro. Hardly an extreme sport venue, but to my ten year old eyes, it was the biggest, baddest, longest, fastest hill I knew outside of an amusement park. The first few times down it, were actually intimidating, but that was nine year old Chris, not the savvy veteran of the slope I’d become. These days I’d let loose the break and ride the coast all the way to the Northside Bank if I caught the light at Galbraith. That was the plan, of course, but this time there was a new wrinkle.

The road had recently been patched with stripes of tar over the winter cracks, turning the simple downhill into an entertaining slalom – a cycling variation on “step on a crack”. Steering my bike in an irregular sin wave, I wended my way through the impromptu labyrinth provided by the city workers. Unaware of the amusing game I had created for myself, Mark had stuck to the original plan and was disappearing down the hill. I needed to catch up! As the realization dawned and my feet engaged the pedals, my eyes beheld an anomaly. Two tar lines in close proximity. The gap in the second line was a mere foot or two to the right of the first. My eyes took in the challenge, my mind did the math and my hands turned the handlebars ninety degrees to my path.

I woke up  on the floor of Mark’s family truck. “Are you going to stick around this time?” asked Mark’s mom. Apparently, I had been in and out since my head hit the pavement. By report I had gone head first over the bars, landed hard in the road and skidded a good ten feet before coming to rest with my skull inches from a fire hydrant. I had then risen, my head bleeding, and conversed with several neighborhood do-gooders who had arrived to help. They had called Mark back, and with their help we’d carried my bike back up the hill. The machine was not severely damaged, but it was clear to all that I wouldn’t be riding anymore that day. I had talked, they told me, though the person they had conversed with was not me. To this day, I have only vague flashes of the trip back up the hill. My conscious memory skips from moment of the steering error to the floor of the truck. I did indeed “stick around” from that point as I listen to Mark’s mother explaining to him why this had to mean an end to our plans. Mark fought the good fight, arguing that since I was not dead there was no reason our plans could not go forward, but it was not to be. Adults have this thing about head injuries.

I raised my fingers to touch the bandage near my left temple, as I was haunted by a brief image of sitting in a chair while the compress was applied. There’s a sharp sting of pain as my fingers probe the wound, but honestly the disappointment hurts worse.

Topic: Touching on a Medical Procedure

Sed-a-give

One hundred. Yup. One hundred. Including dry-heaves. I'd reached the stage beyond anything remaining in my stomach. I actually tasted bile. Bile is bitter and viscous; not the best after-dinner flavor. I think that's where I became concerned. After a few days of vomiting with increased frequency, it was the bile that got to my ten-year-old brain.

Not sure if it was the number or the bile, but that night I earned a ride to the hospital. Something was odd. First, I couldn't tell if my parents believed me. For days I got the feeling they just thought I was ducking school. The next came from the intake nurse: she didn't weigh me. Not that I was svelte at 10, but it came to be important later.

Hooked up to IVs. The doctor comes in. I describe pain honestly, in the way I learned. Coming from a family that was half medical, I knew the terminology: "Pain in the right lower quadrant." The doctor's eyes narrowed. Ever see a person blink internally? That's what that was. He didn't believe it. Then came the test. I once knew the name of the response when the lower right quadrant was percussed. Intense pain, right knee comes up fast.  To his credit, I might have simply learned something and decided to lie. But I hadn't.

Blood work came back: high white blood count. The surgeon finally admitted they wanted to go in and see if anything was wrong with my appendix. Surgery scheduled.

All manners of thoughts race and whirl. Death is the most prevalent. My brothers had not been there to see me. They would not come, even after my surgery. I still don't know why. On a bed, being wheeled into pre-op. They gave me the sedative but it was taking time.  My mind focused on one thought: I didn't want to see the instruments. I'd read of the thrill executioners would take in revealing the hooks, knives, and other flencing objects to their quarries. Somehow that did not appeal. 

Shifted over to the table. I feel the doctors' concern over moving so corpulent a child. Maybe they did feel that way. That's not really what matters. I felt it.

Count backwards from...

Now we come to the importance of that weigh-in. Anesthesiologists need exact measurements in order to keep the patient under for enough time. Remove the exact, add in an approximation. Factor in some wonkiness in resistances to drugs, and, well:

Searing pain. The feeling of grogginess. Restraints... no, people holding me down. Being rolled into post op as I struggle. I must have ripped out my IV, I felt someone sticking my hand with a needle. I writhed. Eventually, after more than half a dozen tries, the needle stuck long enough for the plunger to be plunged.

Eventually they moved away from me. 

Is he out yet?

Somewhere a doctor and a nurse conversed. They were concerned or amazed the drugs had not yet kicked in. Eventually they did.

Later the surgeons told my parents that I thought I woke up during surgery. He was sporting a black eye.

For the next half a year I presented with classic PTSD symptoms. I would occasionally dream of see men in blue plastic holding someone down. I feared they were raping a shrieking girl. It was months, probably a year before I realized I was seeing me.

I've never recovered memories of the immediate moments following the sedatives wearing off. I'm pretty certain I don't want to.

Sed-a-give! Give him a sed-a-give!

Whenever Eyegore tries to solve the charades in Young Frankenstein, I'm amused for two reasons. The first is the show, of course. The second is the idea of a team of doctors and nurses trying to hold down a partially gutted 10 year old who came out swinging.

Topic: Being Found

Author: Chris Dunn

“Hello,” he had said, and language burst into her mind coloring all time with its net of meaning and structure. Suddenly, she knew many things that before she hadn’t cared about, or if she had occasion to care, she had lacked the terms to express it. Before language there was only the two: wonder-fear and pain-dislike, but this … man, he was. This man, had brought shape to her time and now she knew many things, things more concrete and certain than ever before. First and foremost in what she now knew, was that this word he had used was a greeting, a greeting that called for a response.

“Hello…”

His faced curled at the sides; a smile it was. He was happy-amused at her response, though her new knowledge of language did not explain why. She had not meant to be funny, nor did she even know how.

“Are you okay?” he asked. The thing they called a hand extended slowly towards her. She took it noting that his fingers – a part of the hand – were sheathed in steel while hers were not. In fact, his whole body was armored, a gold helmet sitting atop his gilded plate. In contrast, her diaphanous garments were insubstantial. Reflexively she stiffened her fingers as she took the offered appendage. She had fingers too! And hands, of course followed. She did not recall choosing this form or this place, and panic rose for a moment. Panic was new. It was like pain-dislike that she could not run from. Was this man a creator? Was she held within his spell? No, she knew that wasn’t correct, but he was important to her. Her mother had wanted her here, for him, and the others…

“Yes,” she said. Again the amused smile. She held his gaze trying to reason out why her answers were in some form inadequate, while at the same time searching through the dreamlike wandering that had led her here. So much to see, to take in, to comprehend. The swirling oneness of her home did not have these solid structures, these moving things which she now knew were life, separate living creatures, as she was now too. That was new too. She was solid, immutable. Though her skin could stiffen to protect itself from pain-dislike, she had lacked so much as she wandered this strange world. It was slow, hard, unyielding, full of spikes and sharp edges.

“Okay… I’ll try again.” He helped her to her feet. Though she hadn’t chose to stand, he was strong, and conforming made the most sense. She had legs too! He was controlling her, but not in the way of a creator. “What are you doing here? Are you lost?”

“No,” she said, but she saw this direct response would also be inadequate and continued. “I was walking in the woods. I like the trees.” Now he openly laughed. This stung, a bit, and she snatched her hand back.

“Easy now. I’m not going to hurt you.” It was her turn to scoff. He couldn’t hurt her. If he was not the creator of this space - as he clearly wasn’t - he was as much a subject as she was. And… something less. She knew him! From long before, when she had been so much older, she had found him lost, crying in the woods. A different woods, far away, but the same man though in a younger, smaller form. That was why she was here. To find him and the others, to learn them and then steer them. Her mother, Nyrissa commanded it. She was the creator and her name was never to be said aloud.

“You cried,” she told him. “I saw you crying in the garden when you were small.”

“What?” The man seemed a mixture of incredulous and insulted. “I don’t think that was me, lady. My name is Kelvin. I’m on an adventure with some friends. Would you like to meet them? Come on. They’re right over here.”

He reached to grab her again, but did not press the issue when she withdrew from his hands. She nodded for him to lead on, and he did. Moving to follow, she was reminded that here she could not fly. Here, she was stuck in this single form. Here, she was shut off from her true power.

“That’s it,” he coaxed. “Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid.” There was no need to be scared. This was where she was supposed to be. Her mother had placed her here to be found by just these people. In her mind she could already see the others, so familiar…

“Good, good. Do you have a name?”

That was a good question. Here in the static realm of the living, things – people – had names. It came to her in a flash, “Belleria.”

Topic: Gods & Monsters

I’m a Christian.

I worship Jesus.

Jesus rose from the dead.

Zombies are monsters.

Zombies rose from the dead.

So is Jesus...I mean, do I worship...oh, never mind.

Dreams

Thom Dunn

We lucked out a lot in my childhood: like that time Joel Curran chopped a substantial tree down in Hinkley Woods. Instead of falling over it shot straight down into the ground in am instant, shot down luckily where none of us had been standing.

But luck had always been with Joel.....and skill also: I watched him toss seven magnets straight into the goal, a bike tire hung in front of my refrigerator. With that of course the refrigerator shot straight into the kitchen floor, harming no one but scaring the bejeezus out of us all. With that we began to exclaim how lucky we had been and how we couldn't depend much longer on luck much longer to save our youthful hides.

No, we had to take action or "Third time's a charm" we said. Jim Dunphy suggested we take down the tall pine in the back yard. Jan Elliott rigged a chain  saw and we retired behind the tall stump across the yard. This time the tree didn't stamp the ground---it fell and I, cowering, woke, remarking the irony. My friends of course disappeared altogether, to live now only in my memory.

Topic: Easter

Jerusalem, Sunday. 32 AD

“What do you mean it’s empty?”
Bruticus looked up from his dormice and hummus lunch, his desk strewn with papyrus.
“Like, totally empty,” responded Benicius, standing stiffly at attention and desperately trying to avoid his superiors gaze.
“We closed the tomb up on Friday, rolled a big ass rock in front of it and everything.”
“And you set watch?”
“Of course! That Joseph guy is a known sympathizer. I don’t trust an Arimethean as far as I can throw him… sir!”
Bruticus waved for his officer to relax. This was the last thing he needed, what with Barrabas on the loose again.
“There was no sign of tampering?”
“None sir.”
“Why were you even checking it?”
“It was his mother, she and that other Mary, the looker? They wanted to anoint the body with oils or some sort of Hebrew stuff.”
Bruticus motioned for him to continue around a bite of lunch.
“So we rolled the stone aside, figuring it couldn’t do any harm, y’know? And inside there’s nothing. Just the leftover shrouds all empty. So while me and Sammicus are scratching our heads, the ladies start up a wailing.”
“Like frightened?”
“Nah! Like happy? They were crying and yelling ‘he is risen’ and then ran into town! And we’re getting reports of sightings all over the place.”
Bruticus sighed…
“No keeping a lid on it now. Not your fault Ben, who would expect something like this? Probably that guys gang snuck past you overnight and stole it. Round some of them up.”
“Won’t do no good sir, we already talked to that Peter guy. He said the same thing he did Thursday, three times even, says he never heard of him.”
Bruticus wondered if it was too early in the morning for wine.
“Are we sure this guy was dead?”
“Oh definitely sir, stabbed him in the side myself just to make sure. Dead as a dormouse sir!”
“Crap, Pilate is going to be pissed.”
Bruticus fished thru the scrolls on his desk until he found what he was looking for. He scribbled a quick order and handed it to Benicious.
“Well the higher ups are gonna want this nipped in the bud. Start a program to persecute his followers. Put that Saul of Tarsus kid on it. Tell him I might need him to go to Damascus.”
“Yes sir!”
Bruticus looked down at his lunch, his appetite fled. He had a sinking feeling.

“It’s Jerusalem chief, it’s a weird place.”

Topic: Dreams

Author: Chris Dunn

I wake! Not to a sound, not to movement, just to a growing sense of presence in the room. Moments before I had slumbered soundly in the shadow of the upper bunk cast by the moonlight coming in from the window, now something else is here. Not my brother who sleeps above me, this is something dark and sinister. It’s power and malevolence flow through me paralyzing me in terror. And I know this because, though I am the perceiver in this place, I am also the perceived. Dual perspectives war with one another for dominance, and the beast hides in the space between, always just out of sight. I would strain harder to see, but fear the vision would be madness to behold. So instead, I cringe in fear choosing to watch the dread pull across my face using the monster’s eyes.

Finally a noise breaks the silence and my heart beats again. The rush of car tires on pavement announce the brief play of light across the room. Not a bright life, more simply a lighter-shaded shadow that flows across the blackness from right to left as a car passes outside in the night. In that moment my room is safe to view. The path of egress to the door is clearly outlined through the toys and laundry. There are only my eyes, only my perspective and no interstitial spaces for a nothing-beast to hide. I take the moment to breath before being plunged once again into a darkness somehow blacker than black.

With the return of the night comes the monster. More real now that it has shown it cannot exist in the light. The light switch is by the door. The door is on the far side of the room. And even to look for it, I have to risk seeing through my own eyes, and I have already done so. Though I look away back to that mirrored perspective where I see only me, it only serves to show the realization and horror spreads across my face as the knowledge blooms in my mind as to what I saw. There is more to the beast now, more than the shadow watching me from behind the universe, it has a friend. Somehow in the passing moments when the car’s light had decreed it did not exist, it had pushed something of itself into my reality, a piece which now stands vaguely humanoid in form against the far wall, its shadow in impossible contrast to the angle of the window’s light. It too observes, translating reality across the barrier to its master, together they hold me pinioned in their regard.

I confess, no thought occurred for the safety of my infant brother above. But in my defense – though I have no idea how I came to possess this understanding – I knew that he was safe, at least for the moment. The terrible focus was on me. If the beast had come for him, he would not be able to slumber so. This hostile glare would wake him like a sudden bucket of chilling water. This was my demon to face.

From the bed to switch, I count the steps in my mind, seven maybe eight, and that servant between me and salvation. I would not make it. I could cry out, cry for my mother just a room away. She would come, someone would come to reach the light from the other side. Outside the beast’s focus they could move and if they broke the night, then—

Another car breaks my dreams with its light. This time I am too transfixed to hear its approach and the brief salvation seizes my frozen form and pushes it to action. In the safe interlude of shadow, I rise in my footy pajamas. Abrasive soles against carpet? Just maybe I can make it to safety, but the interruption is far too brief. The room returns to darkness before I even fully rise, and now the servant is upon me, slipping forward in the space between. I cannot behold it directly. I know its features from interpreting the wrinkles vanishing across my stretched skin, limbs too long, a featureless skull, eyes only present as a deeper, hungry darkness that is horribly aware.

Paralyzed again, I can only force my eyes to shut, though still I can see through its perspective. See myself cringe and shrink as it reaches for me with needle like fingers and hook like hands. From a space behind my focus I hear the master’s dread command. “Bring that child’s face to me.” Fear almost tricks me into spinning on the voice, tearing back the blind to see what lies in wait, see what stalks us in the night, but the merest glimpse is too much to contain, and my “eyes” fall back on me. The light of the third car now shows the bereft state of my visage, as smooth and clean as the servant’s with even the eyes entombed in flesh.

I awake screaming, and my mother is there. “It’s just a dream she tells me.” And I feel a better, though I notice, as I relate this ‘just a dream’ to her,  she holds me a little tighter than before.

Topic: Dreams

Dream Geography – Jill Jackson

I realized that I had already been to the bar long before I’d ever set foot in it in real life. Except, in the dream, it was a bar and grill that served hipster hotdogs and overpriced bourbon.

But the layout was the same:

A large, square, central bar surrounded by tables, and the bathrooms down a short hallway to the back. The dream bar was also unfinished, with the vintage bathrooms under construction.

Despite those minor differences, it was the same place, down to the hipster clientele and bearded bartenders.

I had an odd sense of, not déjà vu, but familiarity with the place that actually made me uncomfortable. As if I had constructed the place myself, out of dream stuff, and it had gotten away from me.

This is not the first time that I have dreamt of places that exist, but it’s the first time that I have done so before ever seeing it.

Usually I dream of places I’ve been. And although they are often skewed in size, location, and purpose, they are still recognizable as Fountain Square, or my grandmother’s old house in Avon View.

In my dreams, Tower Place Mall is completely abandoned and boarded up, but it still used as a throughway for people travelling to the other side of Carew Tower. Sometimes there’s a guerilla food stand, usually a shawarma cart, trying valiantly to maintain business as usual amongst the decay.

My grandmother’s house is almost always the way it was in real life, but it’s full of boxes and drawers full of knick knacks that have to be packed and sorted before we put the house on the market.

Although, one time, it was the scene of a semi-illegal, beer-tasting house party filled with underworld types and revolutionaries.

There’s the theater downtown, that could be the Aronoff or the Taft, that’s part amphitheater and part traditional theater. That place also has concession stands where you make your own cookies during intermission. Benedict Cumberbatch performed in a play there while his wife acted as stage manager.

 For a while, I used to visit this diner in Over-the-Rhine. It was set into the side of a hill and was all glass and chrome. I would always find myself going there in the wee hours of the morning, when the sun was still a promise on the horizon. Sometimes I’d order food, and sometimes I would stage clandestine meetings with shadowy figures.

I haven’t been back there in some time.

The weirdest dreams are the ones where I get lost trying to travel from one place to another. I’m always downtown, and I always end up way on the other side of town from where I need to be. I have to find my way back through winding alleys, flanked by decaying buildings. I can always see my destination in the distance, but I can never seem to get there.

There are also the ones where I am driving and I somehow end up crossing the river, or driving right into the river, even though I try very carefully to choose the correct route to my destination.

Conversely, somewhere, in the hills of Kentucky, there is a house that I would drive to several times a week. During the drive I would always feel uneasy, like I was on the verge of getting lost, but I would always find my way there. All the possible roads would stretch out before me, but I somehow always managed to choose the right one.

I haven’t been there in a long time either, and I’m not even sure what that house symbolized.

The first couple of years in this house I would dream that the doors wouldn’t stay closed and the cats were always in danger of getting out. I would also dream about walking through north side and down side streets that ran through office buildings.

Lately my dreams have been of a college campus with a huge arts building. I’m usually walking through the building to the cafeteria to get something to eat before one of my classes.

The cafeteria is vast and made up of multiple large rooms with steam tables set up everywhere. There are also vending machines that you can program to dispense any imaginable beverage, cold food stations, kiosks with premade sandwiches, a salad bar the size of a football field that starts off cold, and ends with a Chinese buffet. This cafeteria has everything.

But sometimes it has almost nothing at all. During those times it’s the cafeteria at Antioch. One large room with a food line in the back. The food line usually has weird things that no one in their right mind would eat, or premade box lunches filled with nutrient paste and flavorless food cubes.

I still haven’t figured out why there is such a stark contrast between the two places, or what my subconscious is trying to tell me.

But I have been spending a lot of dream time at school, taking math, and science, and language classes – of all things. Usually I’m either acing the classes, without having studied a thing, or I’m in danger of failing and need a Hail Mary to pull myself out of the wringer.

Often I find that it’s the middle of the semester, and that I haven’t attended class once, and there’s an exam due. Sometimes I’m trying to find the registrar’s office so I can drop a class before it starts counting against me.

During those dreams I’m either at Antioch, and living on campus, or I’m at Walnut Hills.

Maybe my dreams are telling me that I need to go back to school. Or maybe they are telling me that I have embarked on an educational journey.

Or maybe I just never outgrew my formative years.

Who knows?

Gods and Monsters/Film/Easter

Gods and Monsters/Easter/Film 

"Our fathers were our models for God"  Chuck Palahniuk 

"At the heart of the human condition is daddy issues" 

              - Mike V ( a good friend of mine)

When I watched the film, Fight Club, at the age of thirteen, something in me changed. A new awareness opened up inside of me. It broke all the rules of films I'd grown up watching; mostly action flicks like Die Hard, Men In Black, The Mummy, Godzilla (1999 remake), James Bond movies, and Anything with Jackie Chan. The protagonists in all these films were more or less, level-headed, masculine heroes and often had a comic element to them. But in Fight Club, the protagonists is tragic and mentally unstable. His adversary turns out to be himself. This "self" spends his time trying to cause chaos and disorder in society and to liberate a "generation of men raised by women". 

     The idea that my teenage anger was something being repressed and that I had a right to act  on it, appealed to me. While I find that concept laughable at this point in my life, the line "Our fathers were our models for God" stays with me and continues to evolve and change in its depth of meaning. Tyler (Brad Pitt's character) elaborates further: "you have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen" to which a terrified Edward Norton replies, "it isn't?". In this instance Tyler seems to be speaking of God as a metaphor for ones father or maybe they're one in the same. We see our parents as being God-like because as infants our parents were God. They moved about gracefully, catching our small clumsy bodies as we adjusted to the reality of gravity, sustained our lives with food and nourishment. We were completely helpless and they were our only solace from the trauma of being born. Thus when we feel rejected by our parents, it's as if we are being rejected by God. 

     I've come to believe that part of the human condition is this deeply innate fear of abandonment and rejection from the masculine parent. We all our bonded to our mothers at the very least because of the time spent living in their body as a fetus but our fathers' are this strange counterpart. Somehow it hurts more if they don't approve. Even Jesus had issues with his "father", crying out in the cross, "my god why have you forsaken me?". In that moment he was hurt, that his heavenly father had abandoned him and left him to die. 

        My issues with my father stem from a broken familial structure caused by a nasty divorce in which my sister and I were helpless victims. My father didn't attend my wedding, he's been absent for most of my music gigs, and tends to really not put in an effort to reach out. He can't seem to shake his resentments of the past and that I am 50% of the DNA of a person he hates. But there is another layer to this all. Let me back up. I had very religious upbringing mostly in the Catholic Church but partially in the apostolic church. My father was the music director therefore I never missed a Sunday mass, in fact I might even catch a few in a week. We were quizzed on the gospel afterwards to make sure we paying attention. We had to participate in service work which for me meant being an altar boy. I was baptized, received my first communion, the sacrament of reconciliation, and confirmation. We had family prayer at night.  For many years I hated God and anything associated with religion. I didn't want to hear anything else about God because the God I knew was the one in which my father believed. God himself was personified by my father. It took me many years to come to my own understanding of God and untangle it from that of my father's. I realized that my resentments toward christianity and the religious people of this world were misdirected. I used to gloat at the hypocrisy of some religious people and thought of them as weak. As I've grown older though my heart has softened and I've become much more open to other beliefs and to the idea of God. And strangely enough it seems to have correlated with forgiving my dad and letting go of my anger toward him. With that being said, my father was my model for God. And his rejection was a burden I carried around until I replaced him with another kind of father, a God of my own understanding. 

Topic: Easter

Thom Dunn

          An Easter Rising

Whenever Bob Stanhope and I were home from college, home for Easter for example, we showed up at Parkway Community Methodist Church to sing in the choir. It was quite the usual thing. Come home. Show up Sunday. Put on blue choir robes and process down the aisle to take our places in the choir loft and sing, sing, sing.

      Halfway down the aisle, one season, I thought of our Minister, Doctor Pierce, a kindly older gentleman who well represented Methodism Lite: preaching peace, never raising his voice. That said, he had fought in World War II (Or was it the Great War ?) getting into the army by cheating on his hearing test: Deaf in his left ear, he judged the time it took for the tested to click two quarters together before saying "There !" And so he made it into The War.

       Now we knew him to be processing behind us as we made our way to the choir lofts, men on one side, women on the other. Then it was I thought of a choir I was in long ago: same church but I was
 considerably younger: 3 or 4, I think, and singing:

        "Jesus loves me , this I know,
          For the Bible tells me so,
         Little ones to him belong,
         They are weak but he is strong

          Yes, Jesus loves me,
          Yes, Jesus loves me,
          Yes, Jeses loves me,

          The Bible tells me so.

Our choir robes then were virginal white, with a blue bow (for boys), pink for girls.

It was an "Awww" moment for the congregation....and we knew it even then.

Easter

Easter

The Easter Vigil Mass is to Roman Catholics as the Superbowl is to American football fans.  It’s about four hours long and is held the Saturday night before Easter Sunday.  It’s shrouded in mystery and ritual but people usually don’t bet on the outcome of the Easter Vigil like they do the Superbowl game, except that one year where we did.  My mom and I had made a wager sometime in 1971 or so regarding my father’s eternal salvation.  Like all good Catholic kids I had somehow gleaned that if you wanted to go to heaven when you died you had to be Catholic. 

So I was really worried about my dad.  He acted more like Jesus than anyone I had ever met, but alas he was a “protestant”, and a Methodist at that.  Mom explained to me when I was six years old how she and dad had not been permitted to get married in the big fancy sanctuary of St. Clement’s Church, because dad was not Catholic.  They had to get married in the grotto, whatever the heck that was.  I looked it up in my dictionary and it was defined loosely as a “cave like structure.”   It sounded to me like the Church didn’t want my parents to get married in the first place!  This stressed out my devout six year old mind.  My parents had to get married in a dungeon all because dad was a Methodist—this didn’t sound promising.  Mom assured me that the priest agreed to marry them because dad had agreed that me and my two younger brothers would be raised Catholic. 

And we were Catholic alright, as far as I could see.  I wore a plaid jumper to school.  I was taught by nuns.  We never ate meat on Friday.  We were taught that if we didn’t go to mass it was a SIN and I didn’t want any black marks against me so I willingly went to mass every Sunday and also during the week when they took us during school.  I read about the lives of the saints and contemplated that maybe I’d become a saint when I grew up.  I really liked the idea of having miraculous signs and wonders attributed to me. 

Every Sunday we’d trek out to weekly mass with mom while dad sat at the dining room table reading the paper or some scholarly text.  My dad was a brilliant man, a professor of English literature at a local college so it particularly worried me that he wasn’t Catholic like us.  It made me question my religion, as much as one can question your religion at age 6.  As we’d leave mom would address dad by his last name, hollering, “Dunn, we’ll get the blessing for you!”  At the end of every Mass the priest would offer a blessing to the congregation, and we’d all say, “Thanks be to God!”  When we’d get back I’d proudly tell my dad that I had gotten the blessing for him.  He’d thank me, and I’d smile, but deep inside I wanted him to convert and become Catholic like the rest of us.  The fact that he accepted the “blessing” gave me hope.  Maybe he would become Catholic one day.  I mean I didn’t think I wanted to go to heaven if my dad couldn’t come. 

When I shared my vision of dad’s possible conversion she laughed and told me it wouldn’t happen.  “I’ll bet it will.  I’ll bet you a dollar!”  She laughed some more.  The next year I made my first communion which made me feel very grown up.  Before my first communion going to mass had been kind of like being invited to a dinner party but not getting to sit at the table and instead having to watch everyone else eat. 

The best Easter Vigil Mass ever though was a year after my first communion.  It was now 1973 and I was eight.  One of the highpoints of the Easter Vigil Mass was that it was the one time of year when new members were welcomed into the church.  They got baptized, made their first communion and got confirmed all in one night.  It was the trifecta for adult converts to the faith.  They had to go through a year of classes and had to have a sponsor who was a member of the church-- to vouch for them I guessed. 

Easter Vigil Mass at St. Margaret Mary Church in 1973 was the one when my Methodist dad joined the Catholic Church.  It was a long service with lots of standing, kneeling, standing, singing, burning of incense, the litany of saints, a sermon, and more standing, kneeling, standing that went on for hours.  It was usually brutal but I breezed through this one.  I had prayed about something big and it had actually happened!  As I sat in the pew with my mom watching my dad receive the sacraments, she nudged me and slipped a crisp one dollar bill into my hand.  “You were right,” she smiled.   It was the closest I’ve ever coming to having my team win the Superbowl. 

Topic: Easter

Author: Chris Dunn

I’ve been told I’m very competitive. I’ve been told this by people who’ve known me less than 10 minutes. I’ve been told this by people who’ve never met me face to face. I guess it’s true. A fire blazes inside me when the flag drops and the race is on. My heart races and I scramble for purchase, hoping, running, striving. There is no reward for second place, even when there is. Consolation prizes are for losers who need a poultice to ease their suffering. I blame this drive, this undeniable push to be first, soundly at the feet of Easter – particularly the Easter Egg Hunt.

Think about it! For forty catholic days you’ve slogged through lent, eating fish on Fridays and pretending to give up something you love, all for the promise that your piety and virtue will be rewarded by a rain of chocolate and sugar come Easter Sunday. But, no! Not yet. Not in the Dunn house. You would come down in the morning with happy, thundering feet rivaled only by those of Christmas, and you could see your basket huddled with the others off to one side of the living room, but you couldn’t touch it. You weren’t even allowed near it. Not yet. First, the hunt!

A few days earlier, we gathered around the dining table with all manner of paints, dyes and markers, each assigned our allotment of hard-boiled eggs to decorate. This too was a competition, but since there was no reward other than praise, I didn’t sweat my lack of artistic talent. My siblings eggs were always brighter, more varied and colorful, sometimes even bound together by a theme. “Look each one is modeled a different super-hero. This one is the Hulk!” I’d nod as I put blue spots on a red dyed egg and called it a day. None of this mattered. This was all prologue. Who cared what they looked like? Better would be to find a way to affix some sort of tracking devices to each one.

Come Easter Sunday, these eggs would be scattered around the house. The Easter Bunny (later just called, Dad) had come in the night and taken the eggs from the fridge and hidden them. Why? No one was ever able to adequately explain to me, but we had to find them – and find ALL of them – before anybody got any candy.

I would sit and listen as the rules of the hunt were ritualistically recited, splitting my time between straining to see what I could of my basket’s contents and trying to spot the low hanging eggs. The rules were always the same.

1.     The eggs are only on the first floor

2.     No egg is completely obscured from view at some angle

3.     There are no eggs in the kitchen or the bathroom

4.     No running

5.     No fighting

By the time the rules concluded we were frothing at the mouth, straining at the start. I think my mother actually enjoyed winding us up. And then, go! Bridgid always won. She was older, faster, bigger and 3 years more knowledgeable about my father’s hiding habits. It sucked always coming in second.

The worst was when the count would come up short, and we stand like hapless capos before the Don. “I don’t know boss, those are all the eggs that were out there. Can we maybe have some chocolate now?” Eventually we’d find them all, sometimes days later. Eggs couldn’t hide forever.

Then there were the public Easter egg hunts! Those were horrible. No manner of sibling civility. No parents looming to maintain decorum. Once the flag was dropped, they were a mad dash, and this time not for a pathetic stand-in for chocolate, this was for the real deal! Plastic eggs filled with jelly beans, Reece’s Peanut Butter Eggs (the old-fashioned big ones), cash money! No amount of sugar was enough in such events. Someone else always had more. There was always that one egg you just missed out on because another kid was just hair faster, or a tad bit stronger. I can’t recall even one of these events that didn’t end in tears. It wasn’t long before we opted to avoid the open melee and celebrate the holiday solely indoors.

But what do you expect, dangle a fix in front of room full of junkies, and you’re going to see motivated hunters. Fifty years later, I’m still chasing that dragon. Though now the game is who can get to the grocery store Easter Monday the earliest when all those prizes I once raced so hard to find go on sale for 50% off!