Mortality Blog

I don’t remember all of it, but here’s what I do remember: I was on my way up a windind road to a church. There was a residential community situated amongst the hilly area surrounding a higher bluff, and that’s where the church was - very dramatic. Everything was sort of quasi-wild-west, broken down, chipping and fading paint, boards and bricks sort of looking. I don’t know why I was going to the church - and in fact, once I got there, it was time for me to go home. It was getting dark, and it was cold, so I walked hurridly down the sloping lanes, twisting my way through the hills towards the highway below.

Then, in front of me, I noticed a man, standing, staring back behind me. I realized that his face was lit by an orange glow, and as I came closer to him, I glanced back over my shoulder, and saw a gout of flame. The church was on fire! It was on fire, and it was throwing this orange light everywhere. I commented to the stranger that it was weird that it was burning so brightly, and he pointed to the moon - which was huge, and a deep reddish orange as well.

I continued down to the freeway, realizing that it was too late to get home the way I’d planned (whatever that was) and I’d have to choose between walking one direction along the highway back to the city, or across the highway and up to a camping station where I could rent a cabin for the night. However, as I reached the bottom I noticed that the man from before was following me - a little freaked out, I kept me hand on the knife in my pocket as I continued along the highway. Eventually, as I came around a bend I saw red and blue lights flashing - an abulance, and some police cars. Someone had been hurt. I run to see what’s happened, and so does the silent stranger - it’s a heavyset man, soaked in blood, lying on the ground. He looks familiar, but I can’t think where I know him from. The man I met before is inconsolable, however - he obviously knew the victim. He crouches and cradles the man’s head in his hands - and then looks up at me.

Nightmareishly (although in my dream I wasn’t at all scared) his face starts to bleed, red fluid squirting from his eyes, and nose, and mouth, running out of his ears, from underneath his fingernails, and everywhere else, I assume. He dies horribly in front of me, lying in a spreading puddle of blood, draped across the body of the other man.

I don’t know how I get home (to my parents’ house, not the HoytHouse) - but I’m pretty shaken up my the whole experience.

The next day, my family is standing outside their house, watching my brother James ride up and down the street on his little razor scooter - and somehow we’re all holding pistols. Dad has a shoulder holster, and he asks me if I’ve found a good holster for mine yet. I show him my leather hip holster, and he approves. Just then, a female police officer appears, and asks James to see his firearm permit. He doesn’t have one, of course. Next she asks to see mine - I obligingly reach into my back pocket for my wallet, and start flipping through the cards. After I’ve gone through one stack of cards without coming up with it, she gets impatient, grabs my arms, and starts pulling me over towards her car, parked across the street. I protest, trying to pull away, which of course counts as resistance, and she slaps a pair of handcuffs around my wrists. She throws me into the car (into the driver’s seat, for some reason) as I try to explain that if she would just look in my wallet, which is now lying on the sidewalk, she would find the card.

She walks back across the street, but rather then looking at my wallet, she takes my whole family inside, then walks right back to me. She tells me to start the car, but I can’t drive it - the front passanger-side wheel is completely busted. The tread is torn off, the little pole that sticks into the middle of the wheel to turn it isn’t even inserted correctly. The hub cap is lying in front of the car. She’s pissed, and goes back inside my house - I manage to open the car door, and circle around to look at the tire. I try to put the peices back together, when suddenly my mom is there - “Why are you helping her?” she asks. I try to explain that I’m attempting to expediate my release, when the police woman comes back outside - but before she reaches the car, a couple of young black guys skate up on their roller blades.

“Is this po-lice bitch giving you trouble, dog?” asks one, circling around. “This is how you deal with the po-lice.”

Abruptly, he pulls out a huge handgun, with some sort of attachment on the bottom of the grip resembling the battery on a cordless power drill, and plugs the officer with several rounds.

“Yeah, bitch, that’s what you get! You’re free now, dog!” he yells to me, skating past her body and collecting the handcuff keyes, then throwing them, along with the weird gun, into my lap. It goes off and fire a bullet into the dashboard of the police car.

So now I’m sitting in a beat-up police car with my mom, with a murder weapon in my lap and my own pistol still holstered at my waist, and a dead police office lying in the street. An ambulance pulls up (just like in Grand Theft Auto, they always seem to know when someone is dead) and the attendant walks cautiously up to the window of the car - I hold both my hands high in the air, and tell him to take the gun off of my lap, and out of my hip holster. He looks scared of me.

So that’s how that dream went. Big and long. Totally referencial too - I was recently chased by a slightly unreasonable cop, I’ve fired a gun before, used a power-drill with a battery attachment like that, I’ve dreamt about the landscape around the crumbling town in the hills and the freeway below before (which would’ve eventually linked into my underground open-car mass transit startion and the secret underground enterance / LARPing dungeon that leads into OMSI) - and I have a knife in my pocket. It was like an adventure. Some of my dreams are almost fairly straight forward ‘what if’ senarios, where I sort of put myself in a situation then work out how I’d respond to it. Is that escapist, or something else? When we get truly immersive virtual reality, I hope there’s a ‘lucid dream simulator’ feature.

Blog title is a song reference, see Shiny Toy Guns’ latest album ‘Year of Poisen’, track 1. This is probably one of the first blog posts I’ve written that I’ve (briefly) considered keeping to myself - it’s really just me talking about me, but I figure that you, my friends, are probably nearly as interested in me as I am, and that complete strangers certainly don’t have anything to lose. It’s kind of rambling, as usual.

So - after reading an incredibly good book (Spanking Shakespeare by Jake Wizner) I’m thinking about typical highschool experiences, and how I missed out on some major classics: drinking, drugs, parties, and dating. Or rather, I’m wondering, did I miss out?

Obviously, since highschool, I feel like I’ve more then caught up - and while I rarely regret any past actions, I do wonder a bit about how I might be different if I’d been exposed to some of that stuff before college - or, honestly, before working at CMD, ha ha. I mean, if I’d had a date to the prom, smoked some weed in the parking lot before we went in, spiked the punch or whatever, laughed at whoever was crowed prom king, then drove up to Mt Tabor to fuck around and drink tequila, where would that leave me today? Socially, things never really lined up - I was too nervous about the repercussions of being gay in highschool to ever really persue any romantic interest, and all my friends were straight, anyway. Well, not that a lot has changed since then - my sexual preference is pretty low-key, and my sparse encounters with the ‘gay scene’ have been disapointing. Most of my friends are pretty straight, and I don’t even remember who ‘knows’, ha ha, which might be because I just don’t care, or perhaps because it almost always sounds forced to me - like I’m trying to come out of the closet, when I don’t think that should even be necessary.

But what if I’d had all that stereotypical stuff - maybe not even a boyfriend, just a somewhat gay friend, a fuck buddy, perhaps, who I went to dances with and got super drunk with? It feels like it would’ve been totally out of character - but honestly I’d always wanted to get a taste of that sort of lifestyle, but wasn’t ever really assertive enough to seek it out. Now I wonder if my parent’s hypothetical “you’re not old enough to be doing that” response might’ve been right? I’m egotistical to think that i have a fairly supreme outlook on life and people and things in general - would I have developed it if I’d partied my way through senior year and into college? I don’t know, it’s like there’s a weird parallel universe version of me, who’s probably pretty simliar, but not quite the same as the me that’s writing this. I don’t believe in the theory about alternate universes constantly fractalling out every time a choice is made, but it’s an appealing concept. I’m attracted to that idea of there being more of me, ha ha.

The reason that this has relevance and isn’t just fanciful speculation is that it has bearing on how I make decissions today, and in the future. Should I be more adventurous? (another music reference, whee!) I might just feel this way because of the group of people I hang out with, but getting drunk, high, sleeping with guys, and living in a house with some friends and owning all this stuff just seems like a normal thing to do - it’s not really an accomplishment. All of these things were sort of milestones, in my mind, and yet they’re pedestrian to people a few years older then me. They would’ve been pedestrian to people a few years younger, even. So is that something that I’m concerned about? Reaching sort of cultural milestones, being recgonized for ‘being ahead’ by my peers?

I think it’s one of those rare occasions where peer pressure, societal pressure, cultural expectations, and maybe even basic animal instinct slip through my otherwise expertly maintained self-confidence - not even to the point where it degrades the trust I have for myself, but at least to the point where I occasionally question it. Why don’t I have a boyfriend? Why didn’t I try harder to stay at CMD? When I think about stuff like that, I can’t help thinking back to being younger, to a few of my brief often nerve-wracking encounters with girls, and my petty little spats with teachers - I’ve always been mulish about submitting to authority, especially if doing so would make me uncomfortable, or if I perceive that I’m being coerced into a decision. I’ve always second-guessed myself like crazy when it comes to starting and maintaining relationships - my ideals, my hunches, and vauge notions of cultural expectations all collide and leave me fumbling for the right thing to say, or the right move to make. And yet, despite all that, it doesn’t really bother me. I mean, thinking about it at this moment, it certainly seems like a big systemic problem in my life, but an hour from now it’ll be completely gone from my mind - I won’t lose any sleep over it.

Actually, the swing between not caring and caring, frank examination and frank indeference, is probably worth thinking about as well. Am I not interested in striking up a romantic relationship because I already lead a fulfilling life, or have I convinced myself that my life is fulfilling because I never had what I would consider a real ‘going out on dates’ relationship, and I’m 22? That sounds like the sort of thing that cultural expectations would interject into my thought process, and there is the overwhelming evidence that the subject only rarely surfaces in my near-nightly introspective pondering (again, is it because I have trouble sleeping, or a cause of my trouble sleeping?) and if I hardly ever devote much thought to it, can it really be that important to me? I think more about dying then I do about dating, and I try to think about dying as little as possible due to my fear of mortality (which this mortality blog refers to.)

… after writing all this, I kind of wonder what my motivation is. Do I have a somewhat compulsive desire to inform my fellow members of humanity that I’m gay, haven’t had a real date in forever, didn’t drink or smoke at all until I started working at CMD, and et cetera? Are these really all important factors that contribute to Matt Lohkamp? They must be - I mean, they seem kind of tame, but I’ve pretty explicitly identified them as important to me, what with all this thought I’m putting into them. My guess would be that it’s cathartic more then anything else - that was such a freaking good book I just read, and the main character sort of got his whole screwed up life together at the end, and now I kind of wonder if I’m in the process of doing that too. Well, my life isn’t exactly screwed up, though. Actually, it’s probably a sort of preliminary life story telling - I would’ve discussed any of this with anyone, if that conversation had happened, but if it does now, it’ll be easier because I’ve essentially already talked it out pretty thoroughly. I actually do that quite a bit - carry on long hypothetical conversations with myself, or play out hypothetical events, all in my head, and I’m honestly not sure if doing that ahead of time helps me any when the situations or conversation actually occurs - it’s more likely that it just calms me down if I’m nervous about something.

To end, I’m going to tell a story about one of my first almost-girlfriends, one of the crazy ones. We walked down the dark path to the beach, where the ocean crashed invisibly against the sand, and we huddled together next to a driftwood log. In between french kissing, she told me that she saw ghosts, and spirits, and angels, and devils. I felt incredibly akward, because I didn’t believe in any of that stuff (despite the fact that we were both currently attending a christian church camp.) She went on about how demons had come after her while she was talking to her counselor, and they had held hands and prayed, and a white sheet had fallen around them that protected them from their supernatural assailents. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to kiss more, or maybe try having sex (I might’ve been a virgin at that point, I don’t remember), or if I wanted to seriously debate the existence of angels. I wasn’t brave enough to make any sort of sexual moves, or to do the conversation thing (she was a cool person to hang out with, appart from the semi-girlfriend thing, and this new supernatural revelation) so I opted for more kissing. A year or two later I told her I was gay, and she told me that she was bi.

Good story. The character in that book I just finished was supposed to write his memoirs as a senior highschool assignment - and I for sure would like to give that a try. I wonder - would I change the names to protect the innocent?

So I woke up from a dream, early this morning, and after a bit of thought (and not being able to fall back asleep), here’s what I realized: in the dream, one of the people told me about something that I had forgotten - and after they told me, I remembered it. This is weird to start out with, since the person in the dream was obviously in my own head to begin with - and if they remembered it, why didn’t I? But it was even weirder because this person is a real person that I know, and the even they were referring to involved other people I know, but the actual even itself happened in a different dream that I had a month or so ago! So not only did this person in my head remember more then me, but they remembered my own dreams better then me. What’s up with that?

The only way I could imagine that working is if some portion of my mind was filtering everything else going on and sort of ‘managing’ what showed up in my dream - so that inconsistencies didn’t arrise. In this case, I ‘remembed’ the event, but my dream self hadn’t yet, so it had to be related by the dream version of this other person, and then the ‘manager’ part of my brain allowed my ‘dream self’ to remember it.

Anyway, it was striking and weird and worth relating. And now it’s like 8, and my eyes hurt, and I can’t fall back asleep. I’ve decided to listen to some old ‘classical’ music - Beethoven, Mozart, and Vivaldi to start with.

• I’m glad I have a nice house to live in, and cool housemates to share it with.
• It’s cool to have so many good friends.
• I like my school, and most of the people who attend/teach there.
• I’ve got a cool family, full of people that I actually look forward to seeing.
• I’ve got a good career that I enjoy and tends to pay the bills, albeit in a somewhat inconsistent manner at the moment.
• We recently had one of the coolest elections ever - sex and race made great strides, race moreso then sex, but now that the precedent has been set, I have no doubt that we’ll continue to see non-white people and female people be represented in higher positions of politics and business.
• Even if my car is fairly shitty, I still really like it.

I wish I had someone to be thankful to - but since God and I aren’t speaking to each other (He started it) I guess I’m just glad in general for all this stuff. Happy Thanksgiving!

Last night I was adrift in a flood of vivid dreams. I didn’t know that they were dreams, but I had complete control over myself - they were a lot like real life. In one, I was sitting at a computer in the public library, along with some friends from CMD - in the ‘conference room’ adjacent, there was a speaker giving a lecture.

We heard him say, “Sometimes little jack and jill have to be told that there just isn’t any money for college, and they’re just going to have to deal with it!”

Thorin, my boss when I was at the agency, objected - “So basicly you’re saying that my upwardly-mobile daughter has no opportunity for vertical growth?”

After their argument somehow got carried out of the conference room and into the main section of the library, everyone was paying attention. After several rounds of accusations and defense, the man said indignantly, “I suppose you want everything to be however you want it, don’t you?”

Before Thorin could answer I jumped up and declared, “We want a life full of comfortabilitity [sic], or none at all!”

Not quite sure what to make of the statement, everyone looked on bemusedly.

Later that day, we went to a party at a huge house - somehow, I found my way back into an unused room, which turned out to be where you had to fight the boss (not Thorin, this was a boss in the video game sense). I don’t remember how I beat him, but I managed it, and then somehow won the right to use that room as my bed room. I moved all my stuff in, set up my bed, then lay down to sleep - but I couldn’t fall asleep. I knew that if I rolled over and looked at the outlet next to my bed, I would see something scary.

Unable to take the suspense, I looked - and there was the boss’ face, instead of the outlet, with cords stuffed in his mouth. As I stared, its eyes suddenly flipped open and stared back at me. Suddenly I was caught by a sort of air-current, like there was a strong win blowing me closer and closer to the face, which was shifting to resemble my own! My vision blurred, there was a roar in my ears, and just before I got too close, I woke up (in my dream), thrashing around in a tangle of sheets. It had only been a dream… within a dream.

So - faces of people I defeated which suck me in, and ‘an uncomfortable life is not worth living’. Weird. The experience with the face felt similar to when I tried Salvia, especially the weird air current / invisible force pushing against me, which was nearly identical. It also felt a little like that Call of Cthulu computer game, the way my vision distorted and sort of pulsated as my attention was fixated on the face.

The computers in the library are probably a childhood throw back of some kind, as I definitly spent time on the library computers when I was a kid, waiting for mom to get off work, or there with my classmates on a school trip. Thorin has a daughter - I guess he would be defensive of her given the opportunity, but I can’t think of anything in particular this relates to. My mispoken sentiment (’comfortabilitity’ is not a word) isn’t even a true one - I would rather live any life then no life at all, rather be uncomfortable for the rest of my life then lose it. So not sure what that’s about.

Dreams are so much fun.

Last night I dreamt that I was living in a weird little village - mostly basic shacks, quasi-colonial-style houses, lots of dirt and gravel roads, but there were a lot of industrial infrastructure elements too - big pipe junctions, areas where the air was thick with power cables, a field of solar panels outside the village, et cetera.

I was friends with three other kids there, and one day while we were exploring the various buildings of the village, we ran across some sort of huge machine, with knobs and levels and dials and blinking lights, which we decided to play with. We changed the settings to see what would happen - and it started to heat up, setting off alarms, threatening to explode. We quickly changed everything back, and it was okay again.

Then, for some reason, we made it into a game - over the next few days, we would return, and see how close we could let the thing get to overloading without it actually happening. We had no idea what would actually happen if we messed up. We let it get closer and closer, but never too close.

Until the night that I snuck in by myself. I turned everything up to full, then stood watching all the readouts go up, flash red, and the alarms go off. I watched the impending overload entranced - until I snapped out of it as I suddenly realized that it had gone too far, and was past the point of no return!

I ran, taking dark hallways down under the ground, closing big heavy steel-and-concrete doors behind me as I went, trying to find a place to hide, not only from the blast, but from what I’d done. Finally, I hit a dead end - it was a damp room, with loose plastic covering the floor and walls, which were dirt. The room was rocked by what seemed like an earthquake, and I heard a roar as the machine exploded - a tiny puff of smoke woofed out from the crack between the floor and the door.

Everything was quiet. After several minutes, I started retracing my steps, opening door after door, avoiding hanging wires and pipes venting steam, until I reached a door that was melted shut. I found a ladder to crawl up, leading to an access hatch in the solar power field. As I stepped outside, I realized I had come out too soon - towering above me was a growing mushroom cloud, and a fog bank of smoke was climbing the hill towards me. I knew it was too late for me too - I already had radiation poisening, I felt my skin start to itch…

What is this one - fear of natural disasters? Repressed guilt? I don’t think I feel guilty about anything right now… hmm. Well, other then the things I always feel guilty about, and I think I’ve more or less dismissed them over the years - oh well.

Last night, I dreamt I was wandering aroud the basement level of the art institute - but like most dreams, it was a sort of amalgamation of all the things I associate with the non-school-areas of AIPD: industrial decor, twisting pipes and hanging wires, valves with little luggage tags on them, scuffed poured concrete floors.

I was taking a shortcut to get outside after class, when this security guard found me. He told me I wasn’t supposed to be there - then immediatly started shouting at me to get down on the ground or he would shoot me. He was holding a gun on me, and I really thought he was going to shoot me no matter what - I was crying, I was so scared. He took my cellphone and my camera, and I tried to protetest, but he had that gun. Finally he asked for my wallet, and I tried to really slowly pull it out of my pocket in a completely non-theatening way. He pulled out my ID and looked at it.

Meanwhile, class had let out, and there were at least a couple dozen students walking past - but they weren’t doing anything to help me. Most people pretended to ignore me, like nothing was happening.

Finally, the guard accepted the fact that I was a student, and let me go, but refused to apologize or admit that he’d done anything wrong.

I guess the dream touched on a few key elements - my school, the cool industrial decor, my aversion to authority, fear of guns, and recent upswing in reports of abuse of power by people in positions of authority.

10:38 PM 3/20/03

Me, now.

War on terrorism, war on Iraq. Yesterday war was officialy declared on the country of Iraq. George Bush decided that we had to go in and take over the country. Here’s some reasons that he did it…

-Weapons. He claims that the Iraqi governent/military has weapons of ‘mass destruction’, possibly chemical or biological weapons. Which dosn’t seem too horrible, ’cause it’s not like _we_ don’t have any weapons like that… in fact, we’ve probably got way better stuff then they do anyway, so… and anyway, if they ever tried to _use_ the weapons, they would die. It’s a fact. The retaliation would be instant, and deadly. They wouldn’t survive. I would hate that.

-Oppression. I think the whole war propoganda thing has made a mistake in not promoting the ‘freeing Iraq’s oppressed people’ angle. I would be more inclined to go to war over human rights violations, oppression, or persecution then over weapons or trade policies.

-Oil. Let’s face it, there’s a whole bunch of oil in the middle east, and we’re a nation that consumes more oil then could ever be good for us. Other countries have oil trade going on with Iraq, and those countries, consequently, arn’t supporting our dumb little war. France, for instance. Everyone’s getting mad at France.

More on that subject. War makes people a little crazy. Sean said something wise and worth remembering today, something that I agree with. “It’s not the war that I’m scared of, it’s the way people act while we’re at war.” Stupid, childish stuff, like renaming french fries and french toast to freedom fries and freedom toast. Stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. The French are doing the right thing by distancing themselves from this conflict… it’s really just _our_ war, no the rest of the world’s. We’ve already got Great Britain aiding us with troops. We can’t just have everybody ganging up on Iraq…

So, it started out with some missiles being launched. Apparently, they thought they knew where Saddam Hussien was, and tried to take out the target of opportunity. Did it work? That’s a problem. Saddam has given several tv speeches since that bombing run, but it could be a look alike, or a pre-recorded message made for this purpose. Now, since then, there’s been several bombing runs by aircraft and Marines begining to invade. At several points they’ve been hindered by Iraqi retaliation, but it seems like most of the soldiers are just simply waiting to see our army so that they can surrender. British artillery is helping to cover the Marine ground troups on their way into Iraq. They’re moving towards Bahgdad.

While I certainly don’t support the war, now that it’s started, I can’t not be supportive of those fighting it. Now that they’re in the thick of it, or thin at this point, I guess, I really hope that we win. I hope that it’s over quickly, and there’s a bare minimum of casualties for both sides, military and civilian. Saddam certainly dosn’t deserve to die… just to be removed from power and from any influence he might have. Maybe put him in Alcatraz. I don’t know. Death isn’t a good thing, for any reason.

Well, the days are marching on. Spring break starts in two to four days, depending on how you count it… on saturday I’m going to a creative arts imposium with uncle steve, put on by the Portland Art Institute, where I’m thinking of attending college. I hope I get to. I really want to go to a good college for something I like to do and have fun getting my degree for whatever. Then, go on to get a job that I’ll be happy with. Make enough money to support myself, buy a cool house, get stuff, eat stuff, make stuff, sell music and a book, retire, and then just relax. Do what ever I want, and be able to because the working part of my life is over. Eventually, I’ll die.

…

That’s the thing I’m most scared about. Dying.

I can’t really even think about it too hard… it just scares me. I get all hung up on it, go over and over things in my head, keep thinking and thinking to that one moment where everything stops, and how it’s all temporary ’cause it’ll all end, and you don’t know when…

Death. Yuk. I hate it. Why would you die? It’s the whole law of nature thing. Of course, there’s stuff after death. My beliefs tell me that.

Heaven. Hell. One or the other, after you die. Sure, I belive that, but how does it work? Does your consiousness transfer to a different plane of existence? Are you still aware, able to think? Do you just get stuck in memories without any external input? I think that, at they end, when everyone’s being judged and thrown into Hell for eternity, I’m going to ask God to spare them. All of them. It’ll be over, he’ll have won. No point in damning all those people, they realize that you’re the winner. You’re the most powerfull. The creator. After death, everyone will realize what’s gonig on. Everyone will pay, or will be payed, for the things they did in life.

I could use assurance, I suppose, that everything’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to turn out alright. The war, I dont’ care about too much, it dosn’t directly effect me, at least not yet, not as far as I can tell. However, death does. God, I hope that no one dies. I won’t…

I was going to type that I won’t be able to take it, but I know I will. It’ll just be so hard… so weird… I hate thinking about this. No one should leave me.

Do you know how lucky you are, Matt? You’ve got a decent body, pretty good friends, a good school, top-notch parents who encourage and are good to you, live in a cool city, in a cool country, have enough money to be able to have fun mostly whenever you want to… You’ve got a lap top, a keyboard, a dreamcast… you’re taking two periods of computer classes with Mr. Farris. Matt, you’re having a great life. Don’t hesitate to take advantage of it.

11:05 PM 3/20/03

It’s weird, having sexual dreams about people that I wouldn’t normally be especially attracted to - in particular, right after waking, because I almost feel like if the door busted open and there they were, I would be in to it. So is the dream a reflection of an attraction that exists, but that I don’t allow myself to explore? Because I wasn’t just, you know, going along in the dream, I was having a really good time.

So now the question is - do I feel a little more flexible sexually towards those two because of the dream, or have I always and now I’m allowing myself to acknowledge it?