Prairie Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Part III

It’s time to get to the heart of the matter, my transformational dreaming in the heartland. But first a little more background.

Visiting in Iowa over the years has meant a lot to me, even as the experience let loose things that almost always pushed me over the edge. Other people’s families, real families, have a way of reminding me that I’m an orphan. Not really, but psychically and emotionally, yes. My own family (five children) was dysfunctional in the extreme, a condition only acerbated by constant Air Force relocations (over 40 changes of residence before I graduated from high school), because there was always only us. In their spiraling psychodrama to hell, my parents only got worse and worse, too. I was just recalling some of the worst incidents — imagine both of them in their underwear in the kitchen in Tucson, my father staggering, blubbering drunk, my mother white-hot psycho and brandishing a kitchen knife — and realizing that they did this in their 60s, my current decade! All in all, my understanding of just how bad it really was is still expanding.

(“Holy shit!” is about all I can add…)

People who live like that don’t do a good job of integrating their kids into their respective families, either. To this day, I can’t name all my first cousins on my mother’s side, and forget about knowing anything about their kids and how they live, or which aunts and uncles are still alive. The older I get, the easier this becomes, I suppose, since more of them are dead. But it’s a goddamn dirty rotten shame. A crime, really. Certainly child abuse, because it’s something that my parents took from me by being so insane and self-absorbed. Our relatives were usually far away, we visited less and less, and my siblings and I just never got properly initiated into the extended families.

On my father’s side, there were just two aunts, one uncle, and a cousin, my favorite — her I do know and correspond with every now and then. My father’s family came from the factory with no empathy, however, that being an extra option they never would have paid good money for. Any day now, the last of that generation will be gone, and I can go to Maine and Arizona to clean up, cauterize, and plow it all under. You wouldn’t believe how much I’m looking forward to it. I don’t wish for anyone to shed their mortal coil, but when they do, I fire up the bulldozer and everybody wins. Yowzah!

So that’s where the “orphan” part comes from. It’s like it’s me or nobody, and that’s a terrible state from which to contemplate the ties that bind in families where parents actually love their children because they are their children, and not because they’ve earned it, if you know what I mean. The first confers a sense of inherent worthiness and calm, the latter something else. Drop me into an extended social environment that passes for normal, then, and I am likely to slowly become alienated and “impossible.” It all depends, but some situations make me more acutely aware of what I never had: just when I really need to go sit on a rock somewhere and bawl my guts out, I have to smile and pass the potatoes. “Get a grip!” has never worked, but other insights have, and slowly, slowly, I get better and open up a little more. It’s good to have a hobby, after all, and this is mine.

This time, though, on my last night in Iowa, something utterly unprecedented happened: I went to sleep in a ghastly state, morbidly absorbed in a state of monumental agony as bad as any I have ever felt, and woke up just three hours later after the most astonishing dreams, completely clean and free! I was myself. I had all my parts. I wanted to tell everyone how much I loved them. I was giddy with joy.

The nearly instantaneous transformation was simply incredible, and ferociously exciting! I woke up knowing this had happened through the dreaming, and that I’d rewritten the movie of my life. I felt as if I’d been alchemically altered. It was also something like a visitation, because I realized I’d been given a strategy and a promise, I kid you not.

Yes, a strategy.

I got out of bed — it was a little after midnight — opened my MacBook, and started typing. The five-part dream took 90 minutes to write out, and I went back to bed knowing there’d be more. There was, and that’s where I got the promise.

In the next installment, I’ll lay it all out. In the one after that, we’ll visit darkest Nebraska on the long way back for some much-needed laughs.

(Hell, this trip ain’t over yet.)

Related posts:

1. Prairie Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Part I
2. Prairie Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Part II
3. Prairie Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Part IV
4. Hangin’ Out at Adams State [revised]
5. Morning Observations [Revised]