California Closet

Our purpose is to simplify home and life...

I am walking up Voyageur Street, in the home town where my elementary school still sits. It is dark, and the pumpkin man is waiting for me. I am at the tail end of an epic dream that has seemingly been going on all night. So when I see the pumpkin man standing calmly at the front door of my old school, underneath a dim solitary light close to the front entrance, I am fed up with this cat and mouse game that has been going on all night. The pumpkin man is wearing a cheap blue suit, and a fresh pumpkin on his head with no eyes or mouth cut into it. I yell to the figure, that I see him, and he turns slowly towards me, and I quicken my pace towards him, until we are finally both running towards each other. We eventually crash into one another in the empty parking lot where all my teachers used to park. I rip the pumpkin off his head to reveal a plastic mask with a cone like nose and bowler hat. The mask beneath the pumpkin is the old kind held onto the face with a single white string at the back. I rip at the plastic mask, busting it open, only to reveal another just like it. One after the other, the crack of thick painted plastic only reveals another mask below it. Eventually I get down to another kind of mask. It's much more abstract than the plastic one, or the pumpkin. Indescribable, but frightening all the same. I rip and tear through the paper not even bothering to remove it completely, but instead just ripping it until the next layer underneath is exposed. The phantom, the pumpkin man, is long gone. I finally pull the whole mess of plastic and paper above my head stretching it out as far as I can reach, but it is endless. There is no end in sight, and the whole thing is empty and lifeless as I throw it to the pavement of the empty parking lot.

Then I woke up.

There seems to be no end to the drama of this life that I live. I missed another day of work yesterday, and I think they are getting fed up with the crises that I am involved with on an all too regular basis, and really, so am I. If I am not in the hospital on morphine for some freak bout of stomach pain, in court testifying in an attempted murder case, smashing up moving vans, or suffering some other freak incident of illness or misfortune. Well then, I guess I can consider it a good day. But I assure you gentle reader, those are far and few between.

So I have spent a lot of time in bed lately for my latest bout with freakish illness, and there is plenty of time, too much time, to think and dream terrible dreams. I awake between naps and look out at my home from my bed. This place has never seemed like a home, even though I have been here a year. The things that are most precious to me drift further and further from reach, carried away on a current of bad choices and mistrust. The worst has yet to come, this I know.

Yesterday, when I should have been at work, I walked home from the doctors office with the busy downtown lunch crowd in full force all around me. I walked through the crowded avenues like a ghost. I felt as if no one could see me. The beggars didn't even ask me for change.

I did get an affectionate call from Katie though, and I ran through everything that had happened over the past 24hrs. She said that these experiences will eventually allow me to organize my life like a California Closet. She explained that each drama/trauma that I suffer through will eventually resolve itself, and be put away in its own special place. "Just like a California Closet," she said.

I didn't understand what she was talking about until I went to the California Closet website. I found a representation of reality similar to that of the unattainable lifestyle propagated by IKEA. Images of perfection, pristine efficiency, and supreme organization, that a capitalist economy often bates us with, but can never deliver. I couldn't help it though I bought into the whole thing, knowing whole heartily a California Closet will never be possible. Not in this mind anyway. But Katie meant well, and she was right. Currently my closet is a mess, and it needs to be cleaned out, but everything will eventually find its rightful place. And in time it will come to be full of treasures from the past, and hope for the future.