The wit and wisdom of Friedrich Engels

Sometimes I spend my lunch break reading books online at a site called Project Gutenberg. Everything is out of copyright, but this doesn't bother me; there's plenty of classic stuff for liberal arts majors to pore over.

Recently I began reading Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.  For those who tend to lump Engels and his buddy Marx together, spending an hour or two reading Engels illuminates how different they were.

This doesn't mean that they don't have their own strange little prejudices. Although Engels first appears to feel all proletariat are treated equally unfairly, he has this to say about my ancestors:

True, the Irish character, which under some circumstances, is comfortable only in the dirt, has some share in this; but as we find thousands of Irish in every great city in England and Scotland, and as every poor population must gradually sink into the same uncleanliness, the wretchedness of Dublin is nothing specific, nothing peculiar to Dublin, but something common to all great towns.

Comfortable only in the dirt? One could take this as a mild insult I suppose, although I prefer to think of it as describing bogtrotters as a race that prefers to live off the grid. Futuristic thinking bunch, we are.

While I'm not off the grid yet, I'm giving it some serious thought. One needs to wean themselves off of modern addictions gradually, so I'm going to break AT&T's heart next week and have them switch off my television and home phone.

Why Facebook is the scourge of the Internet

People send me embarrassing photos from elementary school. Like this one (I'm in the poncho).

The shame of it...

Reading through this self-indulgent journal, I've just noticed there are several typos lurking. I'm so ashamed.

And even worse, whoever fills up the junk food machine here at the Snoopy Borg has put in some Brown Sugar Pop-Tarts. So far I've avoided them, but I don't know how long I can hold out.

Are we there yet?

NB: I decided to post those two odd dreams mentioned yesterday. Here's the first one.

Sleeping late is something I do without guilt on weekends, as I generally don’t get enough sleep on weeknights. But last weekend I overdid it a bit. Smallish interruptions like ringing phones and barking dogs kept waking me up, and I would think “just a few more minutes”. Then doze for another two hours.

I finally crawled out of bed and stayed out of bed just before 3:00 pm on Sunday.

Having cut down on my anti-anxiety medication, my REM sleep and dreams have returned. Two longish dreams, both confusing, stand out.

In the first one, I am with my father. He is driving a school bus full of children, and although I appear as being the same age as when he was alive – 19 – I have a new cell phone with me. I'm sitting near the back of the bus, next to a window. My father’s head shows no trauma; usually, he appears in my dreams wounded but unaware of it.

He isn't talking to me, but he seems to be in a cheerful mood. This is where you can say dream on. In real life, my father would have been driven mad if he drove a school bus for more than 5 minutes.

My father is having trouble dropping off the children. We’re on a rural blacktop road, it’s pouring with rain, and the roads are flooding up to three feet in places. But somehow we end up at a casino in Oklahoma. (Another weird detail. In real life, my father never gambled.)

My father disappears and I don’t want to gamble, so I go have a manicure. The manicurist, who’s quite cute, tries to talk me into some additional, semi-legal services. But I feel I need to get back to the bus and I don’t find her sexually attractive.

We set out again and the children are hours late. It's getting dark. Parents begin to call me on the cell, wanting to know where their children are.  I tell them outrageous lies, including a story about a forced detour through San Marcos.  (I think San Marcos appeared in the dream, as Ryan* called me Saturday afternoon and discussed an unhappy trip there.) Finally we start delivering kids to their homes.

The last two children live at a very expensive ranch. We have get permission to come through the gates and enter an area that’s designed like the arrivals platform of a train station, with the addition of life-size bronze statues of horses. I get out to look at the statues.

The father of the last two approaches me; he’s attractive, yet a bit too country for my taste. He confronts me directly for lying to him about the San Marcos detour, but after a short conversation I realize he’s interested in me. He begins to kiss me, and I kiss him back. This is where this dream ended. 

* See Key to Characters at right.

What's it all about, Carl?

Over the course of the long weekend, I had a couple of especially interesting dreams. Carl Jung would probably describe them as significant because of their length and detail.

Upon awakening, I wrote them out as I usually do. But now I'm beginning to wonder if I should keep them to myself instead of publishing here. Occasionally someone emails me an interesting comment (almost always anonymously), but it doesn't happen often.

Sometimes I share complex dreams with my therapist. She's good at deciphering them, although if I go back and review them a few days later, I can do this myself. But the last time I saw her, we agreed that there was no reason for me to continue seeing her, at least not for the foreseeable future. (She suggested I visit her in three months.)

I suppose I could e-mail the narrative to her. She admits to a fascination with dreams although she is no Jungian. She's more of a cognitive, Aaron Beck type.

But back to the dreams. They weren't particularly perverse, but  both had disturbing elements. For example, my father appeared in one of them. These almost always disturb me, although in the recent one, he did not appear as he usually does: oblivious to the head wound that killed him, although it's visible to everyone else. Instead, he looked like he did when I was younger.

The only theme I can spot in the dreams - which showed up in both - is that I am initially treated badly, then suddenly treated very well.

I think I'll give it another day or two. My face is hurting and I am drowning in FHA Reform.