Odd Thoughts and Mild Insanity

I had a dream once my dog turned into a giant snake. I looked down and what was once my cute miniature schnauzer was a python. He crawled up my body and started licking my face like he would often do in his salt and pepper terrier form. That was it. No more dream. I woke up and forgot about the dream for years until recently when it found its way back into my head for some strange reason.

I would often have dreams about the neighborhood I live in now, except it was always slightly different than waking life. You see, I grew up in the neighborhood that I live in now with my wife and children. I think this creates a weird emotional tectonic shift in my memory. Things get switched and replaced in my head when I fall in that deep R.E.M. sleep state. It’s quite fascinating, really. I often have dreams about the woods we live in where it’s a mix of both the past and present. Walking through the woods behind my parents house when I was kid was like a trip into some prehistoric forest. A mile worth of nothing but dense pine trees where you could get lost for hours. As the years went on a road was created in the woods, giving this strip of light between two dense plots of trees. Pretty soon neighbor kids were making bike trails with jumps and dips. Trails cutting through the middle of the second plot of trees made it possible to cut your friend off at the pass -as it were- when chasing them on your dirt bike. It was a childhood where you always had somewhere to venture off to. Now the neighborhood has been filled up with homes. The road was paved, and there’s very little evidence that there was ever any sort of dense, prehistoric woods that you could get lost in. In dreams there’s a mix of past and present. Giant, gothic homes mixed with two-story Cape Cods, surrounded by motes and huge open fields of green that are surrounded by what look like 200 foot Redwoods. In the fields there’s always these enormous swing sets where you can swing up to what looks like 50 ft in the air. I’ve actually swung on these swing sets in dreams. It’s terrifying. Many a dream I jumped out of as I was falling from an accidental spill out of said swing.

For Father’s Day my wife bought me a guitar. It’s a Takamine EG630SWL to be exact. I’ve had this Epiphone acoustic for a few years now and while I’ve done lots of recording with it I’ve struggled with its playability from the beginning. It has a very high action(the height of the strings above the fret board). This makes it kind of hard to be a versatile player on the thing unless I’m playing in all open tuning and using a slide. Not really my thing. Well this little parlor acoustic is perfect for me. I can play with ease and I feel like writing on this guitar will be so much fun. Since Saturday I’ve already come up with some great ideas. It’s also got a preamp built in so I can plug it in to a board and record directly if I so desire. I don’t really record that way, but it’s a nice option to have.

Speaking of my wife, she’s currently in North Carolina for sales training. She was hired a couple months ago by a company called Strawbridge Studios based out of North Carolina that do school pictures. She knew the gal that was the territory manager in our neck of the woods through my wife’s old job. Anyways, this gal and her husband wanted to move to North Carolina and seeked my wife out for the job. This was last summer. Unfortunately it didn’t work out at that time, but this past March they called my wife back and said that the moron guy they hired last summer flaked out and gave his two weeks notice. They wanted her for the territory manager position. Great pay, great benefits, a big company that still feels like a family run business. She’s been training since April and had her first solo shoot a couple weeks ago doing graduation photos at a local high school(I went along and helped…if sweating through my shorts and feeling panic grow in my gut like a balloon is helping.) This company has shooters all over the country. My wife is a territory manager/shooter. If she signs more schools they will hire another shooter to work under her. Typing that out it sounds like a pyramid scheme, but it’s really not. So a couple times a year they fly all these folks to the headquarters in North Carolina for sales training. She left on Monday and we will be picking her up from the airport on Sunday afternoon. The house has remained intact. Our kids are smart and resourceful. They clean up the house while I’m at work and take care of things till I get home, no questions asked. Plus, bribery helps too. Legos, frappuccinos, donuts, subs, and video rentals all have helped to lessen the sting of mom not being home.

Hey, we do what we can to get by. All of this leads up to one thing: we miss you dear. Can’t wait for your return!