Dream Journal : Vicodin Dreams, Pt. 4

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This week I’ve been relying heavily on Vicodin to help me sleep while trying to pass a kidney stone, which has resulted in some particularly lucid, albeit still pretty weird dreams…

I had been watching an episode of The Game Chasers when I noticed something that seemed a little familiar.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until we went to visit my Grandpa later on that day and at random, I asked if anyone had been through the neighborhood recently asking about old video games.

I expected a quick dismissal, but instead he admitted that a couple of guys had been by the other day, and he took me into the back room where I quickly recognized the trim on the wall from the same that I’d seen in the video!

Although the guys had gotten an old school NES top-loader, thank god they hadn’t gotten everything because what was left was AMAZING!!!

It seemed like there were just stacks upon stacks of NES games everywhere – on tables and falling out of cupboards.

There were old systems and piles of controllers – where Grandpa had come up with all of this stuff, I had no idea!

My cousins had always been into Sega Game Gear, so at first I thought I’d just found their old handheld system in its case, but upon closer inspection there were three or four other units in this much larger display case like it was some sort of demo unit for a bunch of add-ons that had never even made it to market.

My luckiest find, though, was this unopened cart in a shiny, metallic purple box that I knew just from looking at it had to have been some sort of rare import, however while I fumbled to look it up online, the game box changed into a metallic purple VHS tape box, almost like those hologram cards where you could tilt them at an angle to make a crude animation of sorts.

I struggled with what to tell my Grandpa because it quickly became clear that he wasn’t just going to give all of it to me, but I made sure to mention that he shouldn’t sell anything else without checking with me first and at least he agreed to that! 😉

Dream Journal : Vicodin Dreams, Pt. 3

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This week I’ve been relying heavily on Vicodin to help me sleep while trying to pass a kidney stone, which has resulted in some particularly lucid, albeit still pretty weird dreams…

The day started out in my office, which would’ve been fairly ordinary except that somehow I had an office much bigger than the cubicle that I actually have at work!

It was the size that’s usually reserved for directors and above. I didn’t have a door for some reason, but I had multiple desk areas and lots of room to spread out, to the extent that apparently I very much had because there were dirty clothes all over the floor.

As I was working to clean things up so the cleaning people at night could vacuum, a former co-worker with a fairly high-pitched voice was there chatting … I have no idea about what.

* * * * * * * * * *

I was a senior in high school, or possibly just graduated.

We were going to a party – hosted on a rooftop – and also strangely attending a wedding that one of our parents were hosting at their extremely elaborate home.

The first party was fairly uneventful, except that I noted finding it satisfying to actually be accepted by the popular kids by association with my friend who was more one of them than I was.

The wedding, on the other hand, was amazing namely for the cakes because instead of only having a single wedding cake, one of our other friends who ran a cake company brought her entire company to the wedding, with the couple getting to pick their favorite cake on the spot.

…and being our friend, we got to pick out some treats before even the wedding couple did…

The most notable was the frosting, which was just to die for, and I stalked the various dessert cases for several minutes as the crowds began to gather before finally making my selection(s)!

* * * * * * * * * *

This same weekend there was also a camping trip with the Boy Scouts that I was supposed to go on.

It was my first outing where I was old enough to go as an adult leader, so I wanted to go up after our parties even if it meant being a day late.

Hitching a ride with a semi-truck driver, we drove over a very questionable bridge into the UP that was honestly amazing that we even crossed, considering the end of the bridge had this disconnected incline where the driver almost had to jump the truck up a ramp and then wiggle the rest of the truck behind us across.

I had one or more of the boys with me, so when we reached this small town nearby to the actual campground, we stopped at this tourist shop where we had been told that they were doing customized t-shirts for everyone who attended.

…themed around The Simpsons???

Anyways, we stood in line with quite a few other kids who were also late, but when we finally got up to the front, the clerk just shrugged us away and said that they’d run out. This really bothered me because they knew in advance how many shirts to order and the mistake was clearly on their part, but he didn’t want to admit it. The best he offered was that we could come back in a week and he’d have some more, which was ridiculous because I explained that nobody was going to drive two hours out into the middle of nowhere to get a stupid t-shirt…

When we finally arrived at the campground, we ran into my Dad who told us about everything that the kids had been doing.

I mentioned that two friends of mine were there, and they’d been posting on social media that they’d been having a blast … and also noted that they both happened to be in the middle of transitioning – one from female to male, and the other the opposite.

His response bothered me, as he just chuckled, “I’d like to see the looks on the other boys’ faces when they find out…”

To which I quickly interjected, “…because you’d step in and remind them that they’re all Boy Scouts, right???”

When he didn’t respond, I just added, “That’s ok – that’s why I’m here now…” looking down at the Assistant Scoutmaster badge that I wore on my arm.

The rest of the trip was surprisingly uneventful. I met some of the staff members who were from Canada, and we talked politics and I asked in particular what they thought of our current events, and if they could help us out!

This made them laugh, and we all shared stories of earning our highest rank as youth and what it meant to be leading a new group of boys now.

At one point another leader from our troop showed up with even more late boys in tow, and it was surprising how true to character he was … always strict, yet he’d go well beyond the extra mile for any scout in need, even if it meant driving him two hours into the middle of nowhere on a Saturday night so that he could catch the last few hours of a group outing.

What’s on Scott’s mind???

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Preface: I hope this doesn’t come off as depressive, as it’s meant to be more reflective, but I suppose we’ll just see where it goes…

Head Stuff
For lack of a better term, lately I’ve found myself feeling very lost and disoriented.

Life is, and has been for a while, quite chaotic, but even when I sit down and identify things that I think I could do to improve the quality in general, I can’t seem to actually execute on them. Sometimes it’s because my plans are too complicated, sometimes it’s because I get overwhelmed and other things come up that displace my original plans, and sometimes it’s simply that it’s often easier to sit down and make the plans than it is to actually do the work behind them.

Part of it could be a lack of attention because I have so many different things that I want to do, but all of them require the equivalent of full-time efforts and I just can’t force myself to pick one and thus leave all of the others behind.

And it’s tough because sometimes I have that nagging feeling of what one of them could’ve been if years ago I had just picked one and really focused on it instead of dragging everything out together. I try to tell myself that just because I pick one thing and focus on it now doesn’t mean that years down the road I can’t work on something else.

It also doesn’t help that I’m more inclined than before to lean towards the projects that have money associated with them because our finances keep getting tighter and tighter, and I don’t expect that to necessarily go away until all of these kids are off to college… 😛

Sick Stuff
Since Sunday night I’ve been dealing with another kidney stone, or at least I think it’s a kidney stone … if not, I’m real curious what it is that’s had me popping so much Vicodin over the last couple of days!

That’s on top of a real nasty rash (TMI?) that I’ve been fighting for the last couple of weeks, to the point where I saw multiple doctors and got all sorts of steroids to get it to go away. The specialist also took a biopsy of two hunks of my skin, which is something I’ve never done before and can’t say that I would recommend because I’ve still got the stitches to show for it.

Simply put, I need to be taking a lot better care of my body, but everything else being so chaotic makes it really hard. On a normal workday by the time I go to the office, work a full day, and come home and try to help put the kids to bed, I’m just exhausted and barely have any energy left to do anything at all – be it more work, creative stuff, or god forbid … exercise.

Political Stuff
Trump depresses the shit out of me, in the things that he says and the policies that he’s pushing, but mostly in the numbers of followers that happily agree with every self-centered, arrogant, cruel and crude, bigoted word of it.

Capitalism feels like it’s slowly eroding my respect for brands like Disney who’ve inspired me for decades, but now just seems to take more and more because they can.

I guess I have a hard time understanding where a lot of people allocate their values to be when so much of our world lately is every man for himself, I got mine, and you’re just not working hard enough.

I saw a quote the other day with regards to how airline flights are more cramped than they’ve ever been, and the response was, “Being comfortable on an airplane is not a human right.”

How did we become so jaded when people paying for a service don’t deserve to receive that service in a reasonable manner???

At the end of the day, I guess I’d just like to see people prioritized over profits again because it’s made a lot of aspects of life really ugly and unfulfilling, and it ultimately leads to a lot of people suffering so that a few can flourish, which isn’t right.

Relaxing Stuff
Amid all of this, I’ve been spending more time doing things that I enjoy recreationally, which I suppose is a good thing.

About a week ago I turned on my Super NES Classic and started playing Final Fantasy 3 – a game which I haven’t played since high school – and that’s been a lot of fun revisiting all sorts of memories from what made that game awesome way back in the day.

I’ve also really been enjoying finding random stuff on YouTube and collecting them in Plex – old TV shows, particularly ones that never even made it to DVD because they’re often episodes that somebody encoded off of VHS tapes and whatnot! Even though I might not necessarily watch a lot of them, there’s something oddly fulfilling to organizing these random blips in history into a format that’s more appealing to the eye if I did want to watch them … i.e. what a service like Netflix could look like if perpetually changing licenses and digital rights weren’t a thing.

Final Thoughts
Is it bad to yearn for what I think my life could be instead of simply embracing the general chaos that it is now?

It would be one thing if there was an end in sight to said chaos, but when I think it’s going to persist for the foreseeable future, particularly when some of those things that I strive for have the possibility to bring along with them great change, it’s hard not to want to run, not walk towards them both for personal satisfaction as well as just to find a bit of relief.

Maybe it’s about pacing, and trying to figure out a progression towards that thing or things that will actually work for you. Or in my case, also learning how to put certain things on the back burner without feeling like you’re all but abandoning them completely.

I feel like the chaos would be easier to deal with if there were some light at the end of the tunnel – something to remind me that all of this struggling isn’t being done in vain.

And that at the end of the day, it’s all going to work out and everything is going to be ok. Whatever that is.

Dream Journal : Vicodin Dreams, Pt. 2

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This week I’ve been relying heavily on Vicodin to help me sleep while trying to pass a kidney stone, which has resulted in some particularly lucid, albeit still pretty weird dreams…

Tonight’s dream sequence focused a lot around moving to Florida in various stages, beginning back in my hometown where I found myself getting ready to rent a uHaul truck to make the big journey down south.

The uHaul dealer that I visited also featured a number of areas aimed at cleaning your old place, so while I was there I decided to run a load of laundry – presumably of random items that I would need on my trip. I also wasn’t exactly sure which size of truck that I needed and was torn between renting one and somehow trying to “borrow” a van from the warehouse where I worked, so I ended up leaving the dealership to ponder this while my laundry continued to run.

* * * * * * * * * *

I ended up acquiring a van from work and was driving it around town when I ran across a couple of people who I follow for doing videos and podcasts about Disney World. I parked my van and rode around with them for a while, talking about Disney trivia until they finally had to get going back to California and me on my way to Florida.

It was pretty early in the morning, so I decided that I wanted donuts before I headed out.

Driving back through town, I was reminded all the more of why I wanted to leave because the city had since been built out in a very bizarre and somewhat confrontational way. With all of the houses at the interior, followed by small businesses, then industrious ones, followed by Walmart and almost a wall of sorts at the city’s edge, it felt very clear that my hometown wasn’t welcoming to new visitors at all. They had even built this elaborate water play area designed like a castle, which would’ve normally been very cool, but for some reason it was blocked at the street level by all sorts of other businesses so you could barely see it, which just seemed very dumb.

Anyways, I pulled up to sort of a makeshift Dunkin Donuts that was setup as a stand outside, but before I was able to order, one of my old scout leaders from my childhood approached me and said hello … which was very disturbing because he’d been dead for many years!

We talked for several minutes in which he attempted to explain what had happened and calm me down, until finally I was pulled aside by one of the Dunkin workers who had gotten a soda for me in a nice, big travel mug.

At least, I thought this was a nice gesture until she tried to ring me up for $14.99 for the mug and soda. And for some reason they didn’t have any donuts, only breakfast sandwiches. We hung around for a sandwich anyways, but ended up leaving about 10 minutes later when they still hadn’t managed to finish making our order…

* * * * * * * * * *

Fast forward to being on the road – I was traveling with Sara and we had just pulled up to my cousins’ house in Ohio to surprise them. We only stayed for a few minutes because it was Christmas morning and they had other guests – also friends that I knew – and all of their kids were getting ready to unwrap their presents underneath the biggest collection of decorated Christmas trees indoors that I had ever seen.

During our stay, there was some talk about our plans once we got to Florida. Somehow we’d left rather sporadically, so much was up in the air regarding places we’d lived and whether our belongings were still there to go back to. It wasn’t clear how long we’d been gone, but it seemed that we left without dealing with our house or the apartment we used to rent, so we both wondered if they were still available or the banks and landlords had put them back on the market again.

Walking back outside, a fresh layer of snow had fallen on the ground and covered the black sports car we had been driving … which was particularly low to the ground and very claustrophobic.

The status of our relationship together was unclear, as I suggested just driving on to Florida instead of turning around and heading home, to which Sara mentioned that her kid might not be too fond of that.

* * * * * * * * * *

I made it to Florida – by myself – and had settled in to my first day on a new job that seemed rather nice and flexible.

I still wasn’t sure where I was staying that night, but at lunchtime I ventured out to find something to eat and ended up at a HoneyBaked Ham store only a few blocks from my new office. Looking forward to a sandwich that I’d grown accustomed to getting elsewhere, I quickly found that their menu was completely different and I ended up trying a thai salad instead.

A particularly intriguing part of ordering was when the cashier asked if I had a Disney MagicBand with me because instead of using their loyalty cards, a lot of customers just got their points added right to the band so that they could spend them over at Disney World instead, which seemed very cool to me!

I sat eating my salad and thinking about how I was going to blog about my first day in my new city until eventually I had to get up to use the restroom. When I returned, I strangely found that my salad bowl had been emptied, but left on the table, and when I asked the guy at the next table what had happened, he told me to talk to the girl behind the counter who admitted that the manager had told her to clean my table.

I got mad because I wasn’t finished eating, so I demanded to speak to the manager who was very rude and explained that I’d been there too long and other customers needed my table, so it was time for me to go. I asked for a refund, which I was quickly given, but was more disturbed by how unconcerned they were about upsetting a new customer. The guy I had been sitting next to had been told he had to finish up and leave, too, but because he stayed at his table and hadn’t gone to the restroom, they otherwise just left him be.

I left vowing to write a letter to their district manager, however what happened next somewhat distracted me from that mission…

* * * * * * * * * *

After parking my car, on my walk back into the office I managed to get my pants unsalvageably dirty. Despite having all of my belongings there in my car, I didn’t have a second pair of pants, so I ran over to a nearby clothing store to see about finding a replacement.

They didn’t have much to offer, as they sold mostly women’s clothes, but as I left I found the saleswomen pushing dresses and jewelry on me nonetheless. As I tried to walk out the door, I suddenly found myself being dressed in their clothes just the same, with the clothes having some sort of witchcraft in their labels that proceeded to sew themselves into my skin so that they couldn’t be removed … a shiny, blue dress, some dangly jewelry, and even a long, brown wig.

I was speechless as I walked back into the office, yet my female boss gave me a look over with a raised eyebrow, then just shrugged and pointed me to my desk, as they were getting ready to begin a presentation. Looking around the room, a couple of other men had also fallen victim to the same clothing shop across the street, and nobody said a word about it.

* * * * * * * * * *

After work I ended up going home with the same guy from the salad place, whose wife said it was ok for me to crash with them for a few days until I figured out my bearings. They had some pinball machines in their basement which were a fun release after kind of a weird day, although eventually I just went to bed after I realized that my playing was keeping them awake upstairs.

Dream Journal : Vicodin Dreams, Pt. 1

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This week I’ve been relying heavily on Vicodin to help me sleep while trying to pass a kidney stone, which has resulted in some particularly lucid, albeit still pretty weird dreams…

I was a member of Aerosmith!!!

…sort of…

I was visiting a group of friends at college and trying to find someplace where I could take a shower. They had these big, community locker rooms / showers, so I waited until everyone had left, borrowed someone else’s towel and shampoo that were left there, and did what I needed to do.

Later on that night when we were front and center for a show, somebody with the band pulled me aside and told me that I could be a big help to them, on account of how much I resembled lead guitarist Joe Perry with my long hair and all.

I stood out on the stage for a few minutes with one of Joe’s guitars while they adjusted lighting and whatnot, and when they were done the same guy asked if I wanted to work with them full time!

It felt like I’d been picked to be a part of the band, and for the next six months I toured with the group and stood in for Mr. Perry whenever he was too busy to be bothered with setting up shots and whatnot himself. It was amazing and I felt like a rockstar … even though I never actually played a note myself, despite standing in the shadows of giants seemingly every single night.

Eventually, though, I realized that my dream wasn’t really to be Joe Perry, but to be a famous musician like Joe Perry, and so reluctantly I handed my mantle down to another fan who sort of looked like the star to instead focus on actually making music myself.

If it turned out that I still sort of looked like Joe Perry doing it, then that would just be a bonus.

Understanding the N-Word

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Reading through comments about the Papa Johns guy getting blow back for saying the n-word … it makes me sad that people still don’t understand the power of that word.

I really like this video of Ice Cube schooling Bill Maher when he said it last year because he spells out why it’s ok for black people to say it, but not white people…

I think it’s the least we can do as white people to remove this word from our lexicon out of respect for the history it bears.

And I’ll be the first to admit that, much like Bill Maher, I know that I’ve said it a couple of times myself in jokes. Looking back, I’m not proud of those moments or those jokes, I know it was wrong, and I’ve learned from it.

A happier kind of post – Three Positive Things!

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Better Kid Days
I’ve written before about how it was kind of tough for me to bond with Christopher when he was younger, so I’m happy to say that recently I’ve been doing a little better in that regard. I took the day off from work on Thursday to give Sara a parenting break, so I had the kids ALL DAY and aside from a few expected hiccups, we had a lot of fun and they didn’t manage to stress me out as much as they sometimes do. It’s neat seeing David and Matthew each developing their own unique personalities because it gives me a way to relate to them one-on-one, which was a big part of how my relationship improved with Christopher.

Relics & Espers
The last couple of days I’ve really been yearning for some video games, so last night after I got all of the kids to bed instead of doing anything productive, I curled up in bed and fired up the SNES Classic and blew about three hours playing games! Specifically I landed on Final Fantasy 3 (VI in Japan) which was probably my second favorite behind FF2 (IV), and even though I knew it wasn’t the kind of game that I could just play a little and then walk away, it was fun to revisit because I couldn’t even tell you the last time I played it!

Plus, unlike FF2 that I could likely beat with my eyes closed, I don’t remember a lot of the nuances from FF3 so I’m getting to relive those all over again, which is cool. I finally turned it off around 3am at the part where you play through the three mini-quests after Sabin disappears in the river on your way back to Narshe … should be interesting to see how much of a time sink it ends up being in the weeks to come… 😛

Coding Revisited
Right now I’m working on kind of a unique task at work in that I’m basically rewriting a bunch of scripts that I originally wrote ten years ago. I mentioned this briefly the other day on my micro-blog – it’s really weird to look at code that I wrote in PHP and MySQL because at the time they were all that I knew, and now I’m porting them into Visual Studio to use the Microsoft tools that the system I currently develop on is based around. None of it was necessarily wrong the way I did it a decade ago – it’s just different because I literally wrote everything in Notepad whereas now I have much better tools and an actual framework to do the job under!

Case in point – I’m sure that I spent weeks writing the first version, whereas I maybe spent six hours total this week and I’m about half done already? I suppose that’s what experience will do for you. 😀

Fighting Cynicism

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I honestly don’t want to be negative all of the time, but sometimes when I look around at the things that affect me the most, it’s hard not to be at least a little cynical.

My therapist and I had a good conversation yesterday talking about this and she suggested that in some aspects as I’ve gotten older it’s almost like I’ve opened my eyes to some parts of reality that were easier to gloss over when I was a little younger, a little less informed, and probably a little more naive…

A couple of examples:

  • Work has me increasingly frustrated because I’ve been up for a promotion for months that I was told has to wait until this fall due to new HR policies, yet the company has been hiring like crazy and promoting executive positions that apparently don’t have to adhere to the same policies that a peon like me does.
  • And frankly, I’m more worried than ever that one day the company is just going to dissolve altogether and I’m going to be screwed because I didn’t read enough of the warning signs and look for better opportunities like so many of my friends and other co-workers have done over the years.
  • Disney has had me surprisingly frustrated – a lot I think because our finances have been incredibly tight – because right now all of the revenue chasing and greed feels like it’s overshadowing “the Disney magic” that I’ve come to love after all of these years. Plus, it pains me to think that as my own family gets larger, they might actually be pricing us out of their market as they continue to press the limits of what they’re able to charge for a trip to Disney World.

In a way, capitalism in general has really kind of got me down lately because I see more and more scenarios where companies disregard their own workers to squeeze out a little more value for their shareholders. Last week Disney had a global computer outage that killed the apps that drive reservations, FastPasses, and a bunch of other features at all of the parks and resorts, and even on their cruise ships. This was a few years after they outsourced most of their infrastructure support in Orlando to a company in India, with modest severance packages dependent on training their replacements.

Or in reading into the demise of Toys ‘R Us to learn that despite some 30,000 retail workers being denied severance packages, the CEO was approved to receive a $3 million “retention bonus” in order for him to stay on through the liquidations.

There’s got to be a balance between corporate profitability and just excessive greed while so many people on the other end of the spectrum are struggling. I can’t roll my eyes hard enough every time someone insists that companies like Walmart and McDonald’s that make billions in profits each year can’t afford to pay their workers a living wage because I feel that if you can’t afford to pay your employees a living wage, you don’t deserve to be in business.

If anything is killing the American spirit right now, it’s greed because in no reality should the richest country on earth be home to both the wealthiest people and those who can’t find a meal and a warm place to sleep at night. We have a federal government right now whose god is money to the point that regulations are passed to protect corporate interests instead of the people, and they pit the peasants against each other to distract them from what’s really going on…

Quite literally – “Watch out – that guy’s trying to steal your cookie!” while wolfing down the other eleven that were on the plate.

I guess I didn’t realize just how important something as simple as loyalty is to me because it’s such a basic, ingrained part of my own life. Just like being loyal in a romantic relationship, to me that same level of respect should exist in all relationships including those between employers and employees. If someone is willing to dedicate their time and efforts toward executing your dream, whether they’re writing code or animating pictures or flipping burgers, not only do they deserve to get paid well for the job, but if they’re good at it they should be able to sleep at night knowing that their job is still going to be there tomorrow, too.

I’d much rather see a company that operates lean and hires conservatively, but doesn’t fire people every year when it comes time to announce their annual profits only to rehire at lower wages the following quarter.

One theory I have as to why this is all bothering me so much right now is because it feels like everything is kind of crashing down right now, whereas when a few things are going wrong but more are going right it’s easier to look on the sunny side of life. The worst part is, it’s hard to make positive changes in your life when everything feels negative, making it feel all the more impossible to try to wriggle my way out of this funk, and even with cynicism aside I think it’s safe to say that most of these societal problems aren’t going to fix themselves on their own anytime soon!

How does one steer an entire culture away from excess and greed to something more kind and supportive, anyways???

I get that you can’t just cap profits or salaries, and even if you did the powers that be would no doubt carve out loopholes for themselves anyways (i.e. “My salary was only $1 million – the other $20 was an incentive package!”).

I want people to be rewarded for the work that they contribute to society – right now it just feels like 99% of that reward is stagnant amongst the very rich and the rest are left grabbing for scraps, and then they’re villainized for it, and then the very rich make a new proposal about how they’d like to squeeze just a little more.

That’s what I’m bitter about right now, and I don’t know how to make it better.

No Parking, Please?

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Am I being petty that I don’t like people parking in front of my house?

And to be clear, I’m not talking about overflow when someone is having a party and their driveway is already full.

With my neighbor, their driveway can be completely empty and people will pull up and just park in front of my house, even though they’re visiting the house next door. It just feels weird to look outside and see a car sitting out there, only to look to the house they actually went to and see plenty of space either in the driveway or even in front of that house.

Side note – the current car out front has literally been there for three days now … like they parked here and then went on vacation or something…

The thing is, it bugs the hell out of me every time I walk out the door, and I know it’s a pain for our mailman because they’re only parked a few feet from our mailbox, so she can’t just zip by. And yet I don’t want to complain and be forever after labeled as The Cranky Parking Neighbor.

Plus, it’s technically a public street, although there’s a sign out front that says No Parking at Any Time.

If I was a different person, I’d love to have the mystery car towed but then heaven forbid any of my guests ever actually park there … which people do on occasion … when there’s room, anyways. 😛

P.S. A few months ago, I actually got a complaint from our HOA about parking in front of the house when it wasn’t my car! I tried to tell them that I had no control over strangers parking in front of my house, but they didn’t really care. So I guess let’s hope it doesn’t devolve to that again?

Dream Journal : I Was Supposed to Die Today…

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It wasn’t clear exactly how I knew, but somehow doctors had pinpointed that my heart was going to give up and I was going to die that day.

My mood, I suppose, could be best described as quiet and nervous.

I walked around mostly in a stupor, trying my best to interact with all of the people I saw on a daily basis who didn’t know, yet with this sunken feeling that any moment … any footstep or spoken word … could easily be my last.

I hadn’t told anyone because I didn’t want them to worry, and yet myself I was completely petrified at my fate. I wanted to tell the people that I loved, but how does a conversation like that even start?

As the day grew on and I grew wearier, I began to mention my results to a few people, who walked around announcing it more like an interesting factoid than something so personal.

“You know, Scott was supposed to die today, but he hasn’t yet.”

Though at first I just went about my day, eventually I slipped away and just quietly walked around, with each step almost feeling my heart rate increase and being deathly aware of not wanting to provoke it in any way.

Then I began to wonder how my life would change if it didn’t happen like it was supposed to.

I wanted to talk to my doctor for answers, and I wanted to talk to my wife.

At one point I ran into a guy who was like a knock off version of one of my old supervisors at work, which was kind of weird. He made a joke that wasn’t really funny, but was almost immediately forgotten.

I didn’t end up dying, and yet by the end of the dream it didn’t really feel like I was alive anymore, either.