disappointment — If Life was a Dream

We all have a narrative. We use that narrative when retelling ourselves stories of what happened. And we all fictionalize reality. Even when it's harmless exaggeration "the fish was this big!"

My guest writer this week made a conscious effort to craft his fictional account of what really happened and this one is complete with an "If Life was a Dream" twist.

And so here is his work that I have titled: A Fictional Account of What Really Happened.

By Jeremy Van Cleave

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough. without ever having felt sorry for itself.

D.H Lawrence

“The position is at risk - it’s going away. You didn’t get it.”

I pushed back from my desk repulsed by the words on my monitor screen.

“You bastard”. I looked around to see if anybody heard me. It was late afternoon on a Friday and the office was empty. Through the window at the far end of the room I could see the desert sun swimming home. I had been waiting to hear about the thing for 8 weeks persisting through 7 interviews, and They said it was definitely going to happen. It felt as if a thousand tapeworms woke-up inside me and cycled through their 25 year life-span in a single moment. I tasted blood. From the copper tinge on my lips I knew I bit my tongue.

“I’m so sorry”

We were a small PR firm located east of Victorville on the corner of Palmdale Rd and Borego, next to Raul's Mexican Food #2. We were handling an ambitious strategy to raise awareness about desert tortoises who habitually cross hwy 395 west of Death Valley. Those damn lizard crabs were getting themselves killed. Some bozo thought "why not just put up a fence" - which they did. Clearly he didn't do his research because desert tortoises are as stubborn as hell, and upon reaching the fence they simply pace back and forth looking for a way through and end up cooking in their shells.

The new gig I was promised was to lead a campaign highlighting the solution: Build culverts in intervals that tunnel below the roads and use the fences to funnel the beasts safely under highway to the other side. Along with man made burrows for temporary relief from the sun, it was a good plan. But nobody cared enough to let us off the leash.

“Are you OK?”

There’s a balance to nature, a structure unseen. Tipped to one side or the other and it throws everything out of whack. In 1995 Wolves were reintroduced to the wild in Yellowstone to curb the effects of overgrazing elk and study what happens when a top predator re-enters an ecosystem. To make a moderately long story short - it worked.

“Don’t get discouraged”

Not only did I not get the job, the job was going away. That was deranged. That means They don’t see. I’m no hippie conservationist necessarily, but I have an inexplicable inclination toward the community of nature and the nature of community, in the same stoic way dolphins have been known to save drowning seals. Lemmings will always want to jump, it’s their nature. I just want to give them parachutes.

“You are still awesome”

Spiraling fast. I had to get out of there and get home. I needed to feel safe. I jumped-up, grabbed my stuff and stalked toward the door. On the way out of the building I ran into a medicine woman that I knew well (they're everywhere here). There was talk that at one time she was a tribal leader for a mad band of performative dreamers who never slept and I believed it.

I told her what happened. After a genuine sanity check, she said it was for the best. She told me nobody should be a part of a tribe that doesn’t collectively understand the symbiotic nature of its own existence. Her advice was solid, but I still needed to be with my people.

“It’ll work out as long as we have each other.”

Home. It was just after dark and I’m a melancholic pile, D.H. Lawrence be damned. Just then, John (6), stumbled out of some jurassic fantasy and into my office with a lilting sidestep. He’s Jim Morrison reincarnated but only the beautiful parts. He looked at me and I broke.

“What’s next?”

I told him everything that happened from the last 6 months to today, stringing together a slippery slope of apocalyptic consequences that will come from not having any awareness about the tortoises, but really just making myself the victim. After I finished my exaggerated diatribe he looked at me for a beat with those big blue eyes, my eyes, my father’s eyes, and he asked “do you want to color daddy?”

I snapped awake and we colored and we made something beautiful, together.

If life was a dream and it was my dream, any time we faced adversity or felt the sudden urge to engage in a bout of self-pity, rather than sit and cook in our shells, we would first have to create something beautiful, and then see what comes next…