Living The Dream

Living the dream

What does it mean to “Live the dream?”

I’ve had many jobs, in several different trades. I’ve been a gas station clerk, a furnace repair man, a warehouse slave, a music store geek, a dishwasher, a telemarketer, a freelance writer, a cook, a film and television background performer, an audio video/home theater technician, student, dating coach, and a pot dealer.

Guess what, I still haven’t figured out what to do with my life. I suppose at some point in space-time, during a moment of blinding clarity it will all come together and my uber career will materialize. Or not.

This is what I’ve come to realize about dreams…they are fluid, changing, and strange. In your sleep you journey from abstraction to oddity, bouncing wherever your subconscious moves to venture.

“I have a dream!” Yelled a famous man. He’s dead.

Imagine striving your entire life for material possessions: going to the same school, the same job, married to the same spouse, for the rest of your life. If you’re lucky enough to have a decent paying gig, you might get two weeks, or a month vacation a year to adventure and pretend you don’t despise your boring existence.

Society needs hard working, unquestioning types. If the whole of society consisted of free spirited, artistic vagabonds, the system would collapse. Look what happened in the 60’s. Well, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know anything but what the books, cinema and TV shows tell me.

Being guilt free and lazy, is that a dream come true? A Utopia of leisurely pleasure, where we can indulge our senses on whim, surrounded by beauty and art and love.

Or what if a computer system scanned your genetic code, maybe even your soul, and realized for you, your ultimate place of productivity within society. A position that would bring out the best of your prolific and passionate personality. Your drive to succeed. Things would get done.

The thing about dreams; they can morph into nightmares. Go live your dream, and make it a good one.

Success is easy for us rich westerners

It’s hard to find creativity when you work at a dead end job, selling diabetic test strips over the telephone. When I get home from work, I’m fucking exhausted. I keep telling myself at work that I’m going to write more songs, write more stories, work on a book, get into photography, find a new girlfriend, and so forth. Instead, I play on the Internet, send a few emails, watch a few videos, eat some food, and fall asleep with my dick in my hand.

In our rich society, upward movement isn’t limited by war, poverty, disease, famine, politics. Well, not so much. Then the only thing stopping you from becoming rich, powerful, famous, in love, or whatever else you desire, is your own ability to get up and DO IT.

People are moved by action. Like this blog, writing it makes me feel accomplished. The thought that someone might read it, and enjoy the crazy shit that comes out of my head…that makes me feel happy.

Doing things….do it.

Yes, I had a psychic ufo experience...so what?

My story is somewhat unique in being not just an unexplained sighting; but a paranormal experience.

It was the summer of 1995 in Penticton BC, Canada; a quiet tourist town just north of the Washington border. I had just finished my dishwashing shift around 11 pm, and was heading out for a fun night with three friends.

In order to understand the uniqueness of my story, you should get to know Kris. Kris is the charismatic older brother of my good friend Ricky. Earlier that year Kris, following a nervous breakdown, slipped into a coma and was hospitalized for several months.

Kris awoke to a new reality; he wasn’t the same person. He’d tell stories about being lost in his dreams, and his ability to see ghosts, aliens, ufo’s, and all other nonsense. We took our time talking with him, comforting and reassuring his normalcy; it was sad to see how for he had slipped towards madness.

One lazy summer evening I watched him through our window as he leapt madly around the yard, thrusting his finger to the sky and yelping this and that about ufo’s and other jibberish. We would look, see nothing, and laugh it off --Crazy Kris.

Then we saw them. This is the weird part of my story. Believe what you will, I don’t really care--this happened.

The sky was starry, the night warm and silent. I was chatting with Kris as he went on about his usual random spiritual nonsense that was so out of character for him, when he froze, stopped walking and stared at me blankly. “What?” I asked.

“I feel like somebody’s watching me.” He replied. Without looking, he swung his finger to the sky and said, “There!”

I looked up and saw three distinct lights, traveling together in formation. They looked like really bright white stars. But then they stopped, and began to spin in arcing circles, change direction, shoot and dart quickly, hover and basically float around silently. From my experience as an amateur pilot in the air cadets, I would say they were at least 20 or more thousand feet up, but it’s hard to say. They were not conventional aircraft.

Kris started freaking out yelling, “Kris is crazy! Kris sees aliens! That ain’t no f@^#ing satellite!”

No they weren’t satellites.

Our jaws were on the floor. There were four of us witnessing this event, one of which is my best friend to this day and corroborates my story. I called him a few months ago, just to make sure I wasn’t making this memory up.

The story gets better. When we arrived home, I ran into the living room where a large group of friends were having a party. There was a lot of noise about the ufo sighting. Apparently that night, a group of about thirty were at a bush party and had seen more than a dozen of these dancing lights.

After awhile, I ceased to think on the event. That was ten years ago. It’s only recently with the waves of sightings around the world, that I decided to write down the story that I’ve told friends and lovers so many times.

For me the amazing part of my story is not seeing the ufos myself, but the manner in which I was shown the phenomenon. Sure Kris could have spotted the ufo and then pretended to have a psychic connection, but I remember distinctly how he said, “There!” and swung his hand towards the sky, without averting his eyes from mine. I’ll never forget that.

Could they have been military? Maybe…but I doubt it. Is Kris a psychic? Who knows, anything is possible.

Well, suppose they are psychic. Maybe the insane are really just in-tune with something we aren’t. Our society’s unwillingness to seek the truth is the real insanity.

Most people don’t want to know that we aren’t alone in the universe. Our ego would hardly allow the concept of a beta existence, under god that is. Our entire notion of “God” would be put into question.

Yes. We are clueless.