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| My teeth |
I had a dream the other night. It was a scary, freakish dream. One I’ve had before, and one I know others have had.
I was
going about my life in the dream world, when suddenly my teeth shattered like a
lightbulb. There was no reason for it. None that I could remember anyway. One moment
my teeth were just fine, and the next, they were little shards of brittle glass
floating in my mouth.
I rarely
remember my dreams, and even this one, the only part I remember is about the
teeth. Broken like so many dreams, to
become nightmares upon waking.
I’ve
heard dreaming about broken teeth means you are suffering from stress. Depending on when you ask me, sometimes I believe
dreams have meaning, and sometimes I don’t.
They’re just synapses firing off in our brain while we’re trying to sleep. Shooting off micro worlds of thoughts and memories. Excising gas and waste produced by our minds
throughout the day.
They
have no more meaning than onion sandwiches.
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| This means something! |
Onion
sandwiches are good. A few slices of
onion on white bread. Maybe some
mustard. Maybe some cheese. Whatever you happen to have. It doesn’t sound that good, but trust me,
they are. I don’t blame you for squenching
up your face at the thought of biting into an onion sandwich, and I myself never
would have tried one if I hadn’t read a Hemingway story, Big Two-Hearted River (I think) where his protagonist Nick Adams
has some onion sandwiches packed for his fishing trip. If you haven’t read any Hemingway, or despise
his work, as a lot of people do these days, I recommend The Nick Adam’s
Stories. It’s a collection of short
stories that spans decades, all about the Nick Adams, from his boyhood growing up
in rural Michigan (ex. Ten Indians)
to his life after World War One (ex. Fathers
and Sons). I’m not going to get to
much into it, but it’s a great work that spans Hemingway’s own literary career. It inspired me to try an onion sandwich.
What do
onion sandwiches have to do about stress-related dreams? I’ll tell you.
Writing
these articles have been great for me.
They allow me to write about things that I would never put into my
fiction. Maybe things I would want to,
but never get around to, inserting into some story I’m working on. The flip-side of that is that I promised
myself a deadline. I haven’t had to work
with a deadline in many a moon. That unto
itself is one of the reasons for these articles. To push myself to write when nothing else is
pushing me. To find the motivation, even
when catching it is like holding your hand beneath the water spout. In the end, I think it will make me a better
writer.
At the
same time, the stress of writing something that might interest a reader,
something that is non-fiction, is somewhat of a strange and foreign concept to
a person who has only ever written about made up characters and places. Even the most honest fiction, to me, comes
from some ethereal place where facts are changed, and the names are replaced to
protect the innocent. Throw in a few murders and calamitous adventures, and maybe,
if you dig deep enough, you’ll find some truth buried in there somewhere. But here, in this blog, I’ve given myself some
reign to divulge a little about what makes me tick. Not a lot, maybe, but some. And as the week draws to a close, with my
deadline lingering at the end, the pressure of figuring out what I’m going to
say, or divulge, becomes somewhat stressful.
Not enough to make my teeth shatter like a lightbulb, I don’t think, but
maybe its there in my subconscious (if you believe in such a thing).
So,
this morning, with my self-imposed deadline a day or two past due, I look on my
refrigerator and see a note I left to myself.
Onion sandwiches.
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| Eureka! |
I don’t
know why I left that note. I suppose I
was going to incorporate it into a story but never got around to it. Hemingway had already done it for me. Hell, the note would never have been there if
it wasn’t for Papa. But it gave me a starting
point. Something to latch onto as I
thought about my shattered teeth and my past due article. It gave me that little extra push I needed to
jump right in and start typing.
Sometimes,
you need to take a bite into an onion sandwich to see how good it is. Despite your shattered teeth.
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