2000-11-13 - 16:35:15

A couple of days ago my dream was that a friend of mine, an aquaintance really, a very nice gay man named Mike who works with me but I never hang out with him, he came over to my house for drinks. After we'd had a few cocktails he drove home in a truck and was killed. In my dream Leslie rushed to my house to tell me and I felt as though i had sent him to his death.

A few days ago my dream was that a tragedy befell my mother's cousin Debbie who lives on a farm and breeds dogs for a living -- I dreamt something happened to her and her mother Pinky and I woke and reached for the phone to call them and warn them before I remembered that Pink blew her head off in her bathtub with a shotgun following my grandmother's death last summer.

Why have I been having dreams of death lately? One possibility is that with Larissa and Jim living in California now and me being all alone here, that I am experienceing loss and dreaming of death. I guess that's it. I wonder why in my dreams I am repeatedly climbing scaffolding or buildings or climbing buildings or furtniture high above ground? Maybe these represent obstacles I have to overcome in life, but I wish I was more clear as to what those obstacles could be. I often wonder what other people dream about and if they dream like me or not. I remember earlier this year when I was dreaming of waterfalls and a forrested dream-land and I wish those dreams would come back. I'm tired of the dreams I've been having lately, I wake up exhausted and sad.

I was watching this program the other day on tv and Val Kilmer was being interviewed. I really think he is the most magnificent person and I could tell even over the television that he's on the road to enlightenment, he's really seeking out the spiritual nature of things. He said that he dreamed once that he arrived in heaven and God was a woman and she reached out and hugged him and told him she loved him. He almost got teary as he described it. Someone in the audience asked him to talk about the importance of dreams and he said that he thought your dreamlife was just as real and as important as your waking life. For the last year or so I've been paying more attention to my dreams and I have thought them to be a key to my being -- but the idea that dreamlife is AS REAL and AS IMPORTANT as waking life? Wow - that's a real concept. I've been digging on this thought all week.

My waking life is depressing me lately. I'm doing great at my job, I'm a supervisor and I manage a team of people and they're really responding to me and the job is very rewarding, but it isn't everything to me and I don't want to get lost in this concept of myself as my job. Outside of my job I'm more depressed than I've been in a very long time. I hate living alone. I was really looking forward to it, to having time to write and play guitar, but I'm so lonely and sad that all I really seem to do lately is sleep. I miss Jim and Larissa terribly terribly.

When I lived in Vancouver and it was raining and I was lonely and I didn't have a car I still took the buss to the bottom of the hill and I could go to the Londsdale Quay where there was a market with fresh fruit and fresh flowers and hot coffee and I could stand on the dock and look out over the bay and over the city -- In Vancouver no matter where you're standing pretty much you can look out and see either the mountains or the ocean and the air smells fresh with pine and ocean salt. Somehow this cheered me and my diaries from the time reflect that - Even at my lowest points I was warmed by the thought of my appreciation of the beauty of the place and of life.

But here in Atlanta it is just cold and pavement. I wish Larissa hadn't let me stay. She warned me about how lonely the winter was in Atlanta for her last year and she refused to do it again. But I thought for some reason I would experience it differently and be ok. But no, I'm just really depressed.

I'll be 25 in a few months. I thought that by 25 I'd either be famous or I would have died in some fabulous tragic live-fast die young accident -- but instead i just scribble pointlessly in my little notebooks and live in a dead city.

I saw on TV this morning this book written by an actress who had had an affair with James Dean. The tile of the book was "Lizzie and Jimmie: My life with James Dean" or something like that. And then I saw the woman who wrote it -she's positively hideous looking. Old. Wrinkled. Flabby. Like a horned frog. She was young once, wasn't she? She had to have been beautiful to have been James Dean's lover. And me, I'm going to be old too and I will look at old pictures of myself at this age and think "I was more beautiful at that age than at any other time of my life".

And what am I doing with my youth? And who is here to appreciate or witness this time in my life? Just me. Someday I'll publish all my books about everything that has happened to me and that will be good, but still, the book will be written about someone young, someone I will no longer be. Right now the world is my oyster - Right now every opportunity in the world is available to someone my age, every advertisement and movie and magazine and job is geared for someone my age -- and yet something inside me isn't fully developed - some part of me isn't taking advantage of this - some part of me is a recluse and every day I'm shrinking from the world and wearing blankets as shawls and smoking too many cigarettes and scribbling in my notebooks.

Seeing the program on James Dean was good in another way though - because it reminded me of the time that Jim and I went to Fairburn, Indiana - James Dean's birthplace. We went to the James Dean Musuem and saw a shrine dedicated to him, we went to the county courthouse and saw his motorcycle, we stole a brick from the building he went to school at and we went to his grave in the rain. I remember how excited Jim was that day and what a wonderful road trip it was - it was one of the best dates me and Jim ever had.

Larissa put the thought in my head the other day that maybe me and Jim will get together again one day? When she said that, the thought honestly hadn't crossed my mind. I don't think Jim and I are meant to be lovers, I don't think we're meant to be together, I don't think Jim would ever feel that way about me again. But I do treasure him as family to me and I know we will always know each other. I'm happy that she and Jim are living together on their own, because later in their life they will both look back on this time the way I do about when me and Jim lived together, tenderly - and I am glad they will have that history with each other. I miss them and I'm sad.