Armageddon.

A letter to someone who was once a friend:

I had this really disturbing dream last night. We (I'm not sure who all was there) were in Delta, standing in the meadow in front of the house. We had taken the maypole out of the ground, and it was lying on its side, and this was all part of us preparing for winter.

There were other people in the woods, I think, somewhere nearby.

Dad pulled me to the side, and we walked toward the cabin, leaving from behind the picnic table at the corner of the meadow. It was that sort of blue time in the evening, just after dusk.

He said,"What can we do with the teapots and things that we want to keep? I was thinking that we should put them all in boxes and bury them in the ground, but then I think the boxes might deteriorate, and everything might be ruined." He was asking this, because very soon there would be people going through our houses, taking and destroying things, and when this was all over, he wanted to make sure we still had some things to retrieve; things they hadn't found because we had buried them in the ground.

I suggested that we get some visqueen (how do you spell that?) and line the hole with it, place waterproof boxes inside, and then wrap it all up in the visqueen before covering it with dirt.

Dad said, "The believers are complacent, but something is going to happen within four weeks from this coming Thursday, and they will not be able to be complacent after that. I know that I've been saying for a long time that something was coming, but now I'm telling you that it will be very soon; within four weeks of this coming Thursday."

I got the impression that he might be talking about months instead of weeks. Whatever this thing was, he didn't know the exact date, but the latest it would happen was four weeks from this coming Thursday.

Whatever he was referring to was something like...I don't know, like the Russian invasion of Israel, or something bad happening to the Dome of the Rock. Something earth-shattering like that. I got the impression, though, that it was something that would affect people here in America, because of him talking about the effect on "believers." So it seems that it would either involve a crisis of conscience on a large scale, or a major setback to civil rights and personal freedom. It was very unsettling.

Then I woke up, because the telephone was ringing. It was my sister, calling me in the middle of the night to make sure I was all right.

...end of letter.

I'm feeling a little...thoughtful, I guess. I had this dream about a week ago, and now tomorrow is September 11, and Yom Kippur starts on Sunday night. Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement. The time between Rosh Hashana (Feast of Trumpets--it started Friday night) and Yom Kippur is supposed to be a time of self-examination and reflection, and then Yom Kippur is the day set aside to acknowledge one's faults, experience remorse, make amends, and resolve to do better. The idea is to do this before God, who sees all, and from whom there is no hiding, and to whom there is no possibility of lying.

There's been so much death, so much ending, and so much sorrow. It's more than just the deaths of my parents and friends and those around me. Sometimes I wonder what this life is for.

People say that if you live a good life that you get rewards at the end of it. I don't care. I don't want rewards. I want my friends to live. I want the people I love to make the right choices.

I want people to be able to change. I don't want to believe that this world started out in a perfect garden and is headed inexorably toward Armageddon and that nothing can stop it. I don't want to believe that peace can never be achieved in the Middle East, in Northern Ireland, or in Bosnia.

I want to believe that just one person I love has decided to live his life differently, to care more about being kind than about being comfortable, to live for more than the moment, and to place more value on the content of a person's character than on their physical appearance.

If I live my whole life in a futile attempt to convince just one person to choose that path, I don't care if there are rewards at the end of my life; I don't want them. I don't want anyone to say, "You've done well, you worked hard in the face of obstacles, he didn't change and yet you didn't give up and didn't become bitter," or whatever version of "you did the right thing" might be said. I don't care, I don't want that.

No reward I could get at the end of my life could be anything but emptiness. No reward could take the place of the redemption of someone I love.

SPIDERS

I know I haven't been updating this regularly, but the reason is a combination of things, including not really spending much time online. So I guess I should catch up a bit, although first I think I'll tell you about the spider.

I'm staying with my friends Michael and Andy in Oakland until Saturday. I know approximately 500 Michaels, but this is the one who obviously lives with Andy, so enough explanation already. This is my third trip to Oakland in the last month, for business-related reasons.

Anyway, on my first night here, I decided to retrieve my contact lens case and glasses from my bag while getting ready for bed. So I unzipped the front just a little bit, and reached my arm inside, and felt around for the glasses. At some point during this exercise, I saw an incredibly enormous spider inside the case, and although I don't actually remember screaming and running across the room, I am assured that I did.

I casually mentioned the bug, (read: hysterically pointed and said "bug") and Andy went over to the case, peered inside, and affirmed that there was a spider inside and it was really quite big.

I'm not exaggerating about the spider, by the way. Its body was over an inch in length and a half-inch wide, and the legs were quite long as well. Most of the spiders I've seen at Natalie's are of the variety with the tiny body and long, spindly legs. This one was different. It was brown, and its body was so big that at first glance I thought it was some sort of beetle. In my own defence, Andy did actually mention several times that it was a very sizeable spider.

So Michael, Andy, Carrie (another friend who was over) and I spent some time discussing what exactly should be done about the spider. Eventually it was treated as a HazMat case. We dragged the closed suitcase out to the back porch, and Andy and Michael put on gloves (I'm telling you, it was a really huge spider), opened the case, and lured the spider out to his death.

Under normal circumstances, if I were to find a spider in the house, I might try to put it outside without killing it, because just because I find something disgusting doesn't mean it is worthy of death. (Except for men. Let's face it, they are.) But I feel very strongly about not introducing non-indigenous species to an area, so we did agree to kill this one. Michael was the ultimate hero in this case. He destroyed the spider with a section of newspaper I'd been keeping because it had an advertisement for High Holy Day celebrations at a local synagogue that I've been wanting to attend.

Anyway, the next day we were all curious about this enormous arachnid, so we searched Internet until we found photos identifying said spider. It turns out to be quite poisonous. It's called a "Hobo Spider," which is hilarious when you consider the fact that it stowed away in my suitcase. I know nothing about spiders, but its venom is most often compared to the Brown Recluse, whatever that means. Er, I guess what it means is that it's a very good thing that none of us were bitten, and it was probably not such a bad idea to kill it either.

At any rate, here I go, catching up. Natalie and Charity are still in Alaska, and I've been completely alone in Spokane for quite a long time as a result. It's been pretty difficult, especially since I've been dreadfully ill for a lot of the time, although I haven't fainted in nearly a week, so I think I'm getting better. There was a rough week there in which I couldn't sit up for more than a few minutes at a time without passing out, and that seems to have gone, which is a relief.

I've interviewed for a couple of jobs (one in Spokane), and mostly have found that people aren't all that excited about the notion of hiring someone for whom they have to sponsor a work permit. On the bright side, contract work is picking up, and if everything continues as it has been, I'll have enough work coming in for the next six months that freelance will be a full-time job for me. Considering the fact that I make literally twice as much hourly as a freelancer than I do at a "real" job, this is no great tragedy. If I manage to get a normal job, I'll have to finish up all of the other work in the evenings and on weekends, which is again not a great tragedy.

Well, that's enough of an update for now. I'm afraid my typing is waking everyone else up.

More later.

Really.

I mean it this time.