Sandman's Journal

Now I should say these last five days have been an epic journey--and I haven't even yet begun my drive. These mossy walls entrap me here in the Great Northwest. Perhaps a blizzard is flooding the passes. Strange forces that make me wonder if my world is nowhere else but here. Olympia. My heart has continued to swell. It swells and swells. And my eyes see new things beneath new boxes. And I see new people in this place. My heart swells for them, too. I had a dream I still lived here last night and wasn't moving. I was the same man in the same house on the same hill, but I was also a richer, handsomer man in a mansion in Europe or California on the ocean with sun spreading over my vast comforter in the morning on a Sunday with breakfast waiting for me at the deli just around the corner. And my girlfriend was there in her hat and pants w/ coffee and scrambled eggs and flowers and fruit in a wood bowl, and children walked by on their way to gymnastics or dance class and smelled the bagels and held their parent's hands and made up new games in their heads and chewed gum and avoided snails and cracks. My girlfriend sipped tea and told secrets to the lilacs with her hair. And everything was ecstatic like 1976 when Jimmy Carter signs littered the lawns of every funky neighborhood in Cleveland, Oakland, Maryland, Boston, Santa Fe, Atlanta. Cat Stevens traveled in a bus trans-America. Carol King was Queen. Macrame and spider plants and sea horses and pure Hope. I will roll down this grassy hill some more until my dizziness wipes me out and leaves me stoned and banged on the earth odors of Paradise. Goodbye Gardenia, my sudden friends. I'll return soon with polished buckle and a giant hand tattooed with a bear and gold nuggets in my hollow pockets. Maybe tonight.