all my heroes are cowboys.

 the night before last, i had this dream that i was riding around in my old volkswagen with my old dark-haired friend. the world was dark and the roads were empty and he was driving and there was nothing near but blank space. the shape of the world did not matter. the road was a straight line and there was a tremendous blue crescent moon, as enormous as the sun appears to be in the sahara. and we were laughing and he was driving and we ended up at this house in the middle of nowhere. one of those staged houses builders build in the middle of nowhere to get people to dream of space and buy up space and build big empty houses and make a place to be. and we broke into this big show house and laughed and looked at the moon and smoked cigarettes on the roof and when we left in the morning, a big bus full of elderly people were unloading and walking though the front door.


last night i dreamt that i lived in this big wooden room on stilts and there were big windows and big doors and there were lots and lots of people but they were very far down below and i had no ladder to leave the room. so i would look out the windows and out the doors until one day my long-legged friend showed up and asked if he could sleep on my couch and he would tell me stories about all of the things that happened below and all of the people he got to meet and places he got to see. the room was very colorful. this is probably a problem.


when i read murakami, i feel like there are these characters and they are doing things alone all of the time fun things, i think, like throwing rocks into cans in an overgrown garden while waiting for their cat to come back. or taking bus trips to the mountains. or backpacking alone. or swimming or reading the paper on the back porch or making spaghetti. or going on super secret missions. or being a shadow in a world of unicorns.


while i was at the gym the other day i read an article in a women's health magazine about how reading a novel for thirty minutes a day has the same effect on the brain as spanning time with a dear friend. so i did this. mostly because i already do this and partially because it seems that all my good friends live very far away from me, in a different part of space entirely, and most of the time i see them in my dreams. so reenacting the feeling through a novel, especially murakami, cannot be all that bad.


until, in the dead center of all of this, i hit the shell of a flaw in this world i have built. all of this dream reality all of this study on such is really warping my sense of perspective and making things either daydreams of dark tales, rarely finding a balancing line. i used to think i was a good judge of character but i have come to realize that my version of character is rarely ever more than an idea i form from small parts i know. i get stuck on this relation to a person and characters and lines and stories they remind me of and paintings i've seen and songs and things like this. even if i can relate a person to all the villains i have known, there is something very charming in all  of this. something in it i could really press the moon for, really kill myself over. and that this may seem eccentric and close but it is not. this is very black and white. it is those i have known that pulled themselves beyond the box and really moved me, that i feel the closest to. or my friends that came before the box.


which, i suppose, is the next part. i do not know where this box came from.