Blown dreams?

July 12, 1980

I dreamed I was walking down Main Street in Passaic and reached into my pockets and found them empty.

This is one of those gentle nightmares that crept up on me.

I start thinking I’ve blown it.

In that Easy Rider sense of having had my chance and let it slip by.

It’s mostly money I’m worried about. I keep thinking about all the chances I’ve had with money and jobs, I’m still living in this rat hole in Passaic.

Maybe it’s even more than that.

Last night, my girlfriend and I drove over the mountain from Sterling Forest to Greenwood Lake to visit my uncle, only he wasn’t there. Some stranger was, someone I didn’t know and who didn’t know me, and someone I didn’t care to know either.

He was a dark man with a dark aura of grief around him, and we had made the trip there for nothing, and had to turn back.

Perhaps that’s why I had the dream.

Or perhaps because I’d been thinking earlier in the day about money, past, present and future.

Needless to say, I woke up in a sweat, my head reeling with panic like it had in LA, or Vegas or Phoenix or Portland, or even New York.
I find myself thinking of Louise and wondering where exactly she is and how she might be doing, and how kind the years might have been in her search for fame, fortune and importance she was never able to achieve while we were together, and I was never able to provide her, and now, here, in this place and time, not able to get for myself.

But how she might find it where she has gone, I can’t imagine, trading the slick, hip streets of Hollywood for the mountains and cornfields of Oregon, while I struggle to escape a ghetto so close to the one I grew up in I might as well have never left.

Of course, I don’t need to dream to find my pockets empty – that’s a condition I get each week after I’ve paid what bills I could.

Blown dreams? No way. But I might starve before they come true.