I had a wild dream just before I got up this morning. As is often the case, the setting was at a church, though outdoors this time, on a sidewalk, and apparently there’s a meeting planned—some sort of church council meeting.

I’m the chairperson, and the committee is made up of way too many people, mostly family members, along with Tiger Woods and Sarah Paulson, for some reason. It’s a crazy, unruly session that never comes to order. People keep coming and going, there are young children present, my sister-in-law has to get up and take phone calls, since she is an actual bishop of a synod. People are tending to other business, while I sit there in no particular hurry, waiting for things to magically calm down and come to order.

There must be 70 or 80 people, maybe more, on this committee—unwieldy at best—and I’ve come to see it as the latest in a series of dreams that are actually commentaries on what’s happening in real life: disorganization, ineffectiveness, no sense of purpose. I’m either unwilling or incapable of bringing things to order, of taking control and actually leading.

In other dreams, I’m totally unprepared for a Sunday morning worship service—no sermon, improperly dressed, a roomful of people milling about, waiting for the service to begin. Meanwhile, I’m just wingin’ it, out to lunch, and the feeling I’m left with as I awaken is one of relief that it’s just a dream. But the questions linger: Why do I keep having such dreams, since I’m four years retired? What am I supposed to be learning? Is there a message in them that I haven’t yet uncovered? Or are they merely commentary on what’s actually unfolding in my waking life?

I think it might be that last thing.

The weather is getting harsher, colder. Winter is coming. So, it’s the perfect time for Putin and his goons to target the electrical grid and other infrastructure, along with civilian targets like apartment buildings in Kyiv.

There are no words. How does one begin to plum the depths of misery and despair, or the level of depravity on display for over three and a half years now? People suffer because a small man with old dreams deems them, or the ground they live on, as rightfully his. No thought for self-determination, or autonomy—those concepts are anathema to such an animal as Vladimir Putin and the war hawks shouting in his ear.

Peace is anathema. War is good for business, keeps the oligarchs happy.

There’s no respect or thought for human life, no heart. Just a return to some former glory where power resides in a handful of people, and citizens are subjects and pawns, left in the cold, out of the loop, at the mercy of the rich and ruthless.

What the hell is the matter with Russia? They have everything they need in their 11-time zone land mass. They could be a great country, a leader in the world. But they seem to only ever squander it, entrenched in the muck and mire of suspicion and paranoia, in the coldness of a Siberian winter. Just corruption and old thinking and a dim view of humanity.

The thing is, more and more people are wising up to Trump’s numerous deficits. As a nation, we’re growing tired of his flippant, often wildly irrelevant rhetoric, his rare attempts at trying to appear engaged.

He’s an old man, nods off in the middle of meetings, either because he’s an old man or he’s bored to death. Either way, he needs to up his game, though an increasing number of us grow unsure he’s capable of such effort.

He’s in it for himself and for the rich bastards who seem willing to continue propping him up.

Now that the Epstein case is front and center again, we all have to be concerned with what the next distractions are going to be. A war with Venezuela? An uptick in law enforcement and military presence, along with a harder line, in Boston or Chicago or Portland? Or Charlotte? Further indictments of those who investigated January 6^th? Taking Seth Meyers off the air? Leveling the West Wing?

What’s it gonna be, Donald? We’re on to you, but you’ll probably figure out ways to keep upping the ante. Instead of governing.

Oh, right. You have no idea how to do that.

I have this image of whole families who harbor anti-Trump sentiments sitting around the RCA Victor, waiting for word about the damning evidence in the Epstein files, but that evidence never comes.

Well, it comes, but it doesn’t make any difference. It’s just another hurdle Orange Jesus somehow manages to negotiate and emerge from unscathed.

You have to figure, though, that something is being hidden, that the efforts to foot drag and avoid release of documents means that there’s something in those documents that Trump and his supporters really don’t want us to see.

You’d think by now they would have had time to redact and disappear the bad stuff, wouldn’t you?

At this point, I don’t feel as though there’s anything that could bring him down, other than his own health and mental acuity, or a well-deserved mutiny.

Daily writing prompt

What part of your routine do you always try to skip if you can?

View all responses

I don’t really have a routine, other than at the Y, and I maintain that with a certain zeal and consistency. I might skip out on certain leg exercises if my knee is bothering me.

Actually, I do have a first-thing-in-the-morning routine that I try not to ever skip: up at 5, coffee, then writing, then breakfast. That much of my day has been happening for eight years now. The rest of it is up for grabs.