Quite possibly a dense tangle

I spent most of yesterday setting up the office. The purple walls were a softer hue than I'd remembered, and the room was narrower. Also dustier. And the ceilings are sufficiently high that I don't know how I'm going to dig the cobwebs out of their corners without a step ladder. The kids came down with me the second time. Jeremiah played frozen bubble on the computer and curled up in the somewhat musty papasan chair (stored too long in the basement). Sophia walked around with her journal and took notes, reminding me, as she so often does, of a rural Harriet the Spy.

Anyway, I woke up at quarter to five, and am now waiting for enough light to walk the dogs by. Maybe another fifteen minutes. And writing, of course, this writing. My dreams were unusually vivid and easy to return to after those moments when I drifted out of them, briefly awake. Basil and peppermint in a drink named after Hawaii (where Jonas and Liz are going on Thursday), the father of two brothers I knew in high school walking around with no feet, a skateboard I bought for myself (thinking, "I wish I had nothing to do all day but ride around on a skateboard") and realized I would have to give to Jeremiah as I do have other things to do (and was awkward at best on the board, knocking things over in the department store where I tried it out), me alone at a table, white cloth, two drinks (one wine, one that basil/peppermint thing), and a clock ticking down from 99. As ever I remember Hillman - "Don't interpret your dreams, let your dreams interpret you."

There are dreams and then there is the way we tell them. Two narratives with shared imagery. The dream narrative primary and maybe primal, too, the one that even though it originates with us, seems to be constructed/told independent of us. While the second - the one we tell after, the recollection - is full of its own ambiguity, owing to poor memory, the politics of selection (what image have I withheld) and then the skewed agenda inherent in any storytelling (not only what am I keeping out but how am I shading what's left in, where am I accenting, what interpretation(s) do I favor, which ones do I fear, and what do I want from you, my audience, and why do I want it, and why is this story this way the vehicle by which I am going to try and get it).

C visits to "congratulate me on a good night's sleep," and to sync our schedules. When I re-read this entry, and count the sentences, and arrive here (a new paragraph, and the eighteenth or nineteenth sentence) I am thinking about the inclination to record (to tell) as a kind of witnessing - Sophia's journal, this blog - just as the Tanner's rooster crows, and the first blue light appears between the maple trees. Storytelling (or witnessing, any necessary sharing of the thing after the thing occurs, say) requires a remove somehow, a step back (or am I wrong and the act of comprising the story is itself a new present equally vital as the events which gave rise to it) that I find both alluring and intimidating.

A dense tangle - quite possibly bullshit - that I am only to happy to leave in favor of walking the dogs.