Maintaining that Positive Altitude

I cut my foot playing volleyball in the sand last week, and it became a small sore. God knows I’ve experienced worse things in my life, but when I took my sock off after a long day I thought I saw, for just a moment, a tiny spider scurry out of the cut. There really wasn’t one there, but for just a second there was. Maybe I’ve been looking at too much Dali, but these small illusions aren’t to be dismissed so easily. I don’t know what it means.

That next morning I had an unsettling dream. The tone of the dream was fine, calm, while I was experiencing it, but afterwards was the worse part. I dreamt I was in a moonlit woods with a group of strangers, knowing we were to do the devil’s work. The ground was level and clear of brush, but thick with tall trees. We came to a place in the woods and began to cut down the trees. All I had to do was grasp the trunk, and my hands burned through the wood. The trees fell to the ground and became a pool of red embers. Eventually we cleared a large rectangular shape with another smaller rectangle on one of the broader sides, like this:

The others all submerged themselves in the embers as if to bathe in them. I knew that I shouldn’t and stepped back into the forest. I saw a house nearby and as I moved closer a light shined at me from the main window. A man came out, and I knew he was to trade places with me. I took him to the clearing and he eased himself into the embers with the rest of them. Then I woke up. Again, I don’t know what it means, but I have a bad feeling about the whole thing. I

don’t want to be doing the Devil’s work.

The days have gone by quickly, but at the same time, now that I think of it, the days have been very long. Many people have since left the Magic, and new ones have come. The arrangements of people has become a complicated issue. They’ve issued Citizen Retainment Centres in Florida, Texas, and Hawaii. Our ship now collects Americans from around the Caribbean and deposits them at these Centres. I’ve been given archival duties; keeping names, possessions, and documents for “the American Collection.” I have this art in my locker and I’m not sure what to do with it. I think it might be an important thing to keep this collection. We have many American artworks which might be important to the world in only a couple of years.

When we stopped in St. Thomas, we picked up many families that had been on vacation. St. Thomas is still part of the United States, which still do exist, but not to anyone there anymore. Being on St. Thomas for the first time was surreal. I was on U.S. land, but it’s a strange island in the Caribbean, different, always, that the U.S. I’m used to. It’s beautiful, Paradise, and might be my future home now. We’re still not sure if we will even have a choice on the matter, but if I did, it wouldn’t be a bad choice. It’s a wonderful place, and its beauty took me away on a dream. Florida is still there, which is still a very nice place to live, but who knows. It too had always been looked on as Paradise. Of course Paradise would survive that and just a bit of Texas. I don’t know what type of Paradise Texas might be, and I don’t think I want to guess.

Life on the ship has picked up again. We still wear our nametags, which was something that struck me a senseless. They have our names and country on them. United States means something else now. I’m Coleman, from the land of the lost. Ghost World. Everyone smiles in this strange new way when you say hello. It’s natural to say hello, look at the nametag and then back at the face. Now, when I follow their eyes down to my nametag, their eyes come back up to meet my own with a different knowing behind them, and a new, pursed smile.

I have a new friend named Madeline, and she likes how I say her name. She says I say it unlike anyone else, but I honestly say it how I think it should be said, and no different. I wasn’t surprised when she told me she was named after the character Madeline in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. There’s an old American Classic, I tell her, and then I think that they’re all going to be old American Classics from now on. What happens to civilizations when they disappear? Will the future look back on the U.S. as a sort of Modern Roman period, or will we become a silhouette in the annals of mythology like Atlantis or Troy? The Aztecs…The Garden of Eden…The United States of America.

I get reminded of home, and, like any man, these things are kept inside. Slowly I let them leak out of me during the night. I lay in bed thinking about people, places, and things (nouns) and slowly they turn into dreams. When I wake up I do feel a bit better. Although I have the sneaking suspicion that there’s still quite a bit of emotion left that wouldn’t be there had I just let it out earlier. Still, that’s probably what men are known for, and I might as well be one.

The character actors still play their dress up with the mice, ducks, and dogs. It’s about trying to stay positive is all, but I’ve made friends with a lot of them. I joke that they’ve all caught cold, because they lost their voices. They’ll say no, we’re saving the voices for the shows, but they just can’t talk in character. So, we’ve developed sign language to communicate, which can be fun, but especially when its nonsense. “I’m dreaming of a Chocolate Grandpa,” is a popular one, but we’ve also evolved into more complex nonsense. “I’m dreaming of chocolate harmony on Earth for all diamond Helicopters, Brother…Eternally.” I suppose its vaguely epic, but these have become epic times.

I started thinking about my dog, Dodo. Oona had just died recently, but Dodo was still there as a consolation. What consolation was there now? My life. I suppose life is a consolation. Instead of praying to find meaning, I pray to give thanks. Why else would I be alive? Thoughts (and some doubts) creep into me about God, and I find, more than ever, my faith regained. It brings a great joy unlike any that I’d known before, and for that I cry more than I do from sorrow.

Trying to be positive has become such an entertaining game. I never thought it would have worked, and not so soon. I suppose humans are resilient as a species, when they need to be. We move forward to survive.

On Key West I went on solo adventure and found a unique mangrove swamp tucked away in some small haphazard nature reserve. There was a single walkway out into the middle of it and there I found a pair of characters taking a break. They were smoking something and at first I startled them but eventually we went to talking. As they were still strangers there wasn’t a whole lot to talk about, but it still meant something to me to happen upon something new and welcomingly unexpected. I doubt they’ll remember me, but for me it was an unusual five minutes. There are stark realities separate from everything else waiting to be uncovered, like lifting a log and finding a thriving underbelly of creatures. I hope to always find these places in the world, but I must always be aware of the danger in these explorations. You never know which creatures might bite. Perhaps that danger adds the essential component to any adventure. Perhaps I shouldn’t be going solo in this new world I’ve become a part of.

That night we had our open deck night on the front of the ship. It was a bit windy, but the sky was beautiful with a huge moon and fast moving clouds. I saw some shooting stars, which is always a lucky treat. I was reminded of a night back in Chicago years ago when I had been driving home late at night from a date in Naperville. I was driving past a field and the whole sky lit up bright suddenly. It scared me, and when I went home I went online to see if anyone else had seen it. It ended up being a meteor that had crashed in somewhere North of me. My friend from Eastern Illinois told me to stop making fun of her, as she had been scared by it too in the same way. What was really a giant shooting star, the largest I’ve ever seen, we had both thought at first to be an atomic bomb.

I don’t want to talk about Christmas.