That New Self Smell

Last night, I dreamt that I was washing clothes in a sink (after I had killed several bad people, perhaps ninjas). A few whites, including a cotton polo shirt. I was some kind of security personell at an embassy or similar estate. I was suddenly embarrassed, looking at my clothes, realizing how chintzy they and I looked, compared to the people I lived with/was employed by/basically owed my purpose in life to. Not that they held it against me, but why was I being such an asshole to them?

Pretty basic stuff: I long to be as rough and tumble as I idealize my father to be (he's the only person I've ever seen wash clothes in a sink), or even more so, but this causes friction between us, since we differ on what good manners requires of us, and I am ashamed of how I don't feel capable of being someone he can have unalloyed pride in.

The Japanese say that the first dream of the new year is lucky if it contains hawks, eggplants, or mount fuji. The Japanese, apparently, have really fucking boring dreams. Who gives a shit what you see? The interesting thing is always who you get to be. (He said, trying to make an elegant point about his own motivations to have a motile identity, constantly shifting to the better, though he was too tired to allude to the point, and simply stated it flat.)

Yesterday (for it is tomorrow), I said "good bye" and "I'm sorry" to my father, and drove here from Miami. Along the way, I saw a cloud of buzzards so large that I was forced to re-estimate how many buzzards there are in the world. To look into their swirling number was to invite madness. So I did, of course. But I didn't have my camera, of course.

Thanks to a late start, and a relaxed driving pace, I passed the arbitrary turning point of the year-increment standing outside the locked door of an apparently empty hotel lobby, wondering what from my car would be the most polite object to use as a crowbar.

This is the first time in memory I've been alone on New Year's Eve. I would usually be with my mother, who would be with her mother, the whole matrioshka set of us. But they both died this year, so here I am in Waterboro, driving to DC, there to collect all of my worldly possessions that can fit in my Jetta station wagon, then to drive them to San Francisco, because goddammit that's what I decided that I would do.

More to follow, because it's easier to post the illucid details for all the world to see than to send individual emails to all the people who say they want to know about what I'm doing.