fishing Cicero reel, scar, throw back too fat reel, scar, throw back too weak reel, scar, throw back keep the fish on the pole use the net examine, size, throw back wave to the hikers reel, scar, throw back 030429 ... belly fire with insults for something better makes him a fisherman 030430 ... PeeT Stories come out from where we live and what we hear and see and feel, so I don’t know what will come next. It’s like fishing: You just wait . . . It’s like I always say, “The chef cooks the fish, the chef doesn’t make the fish.” Desire is the bait, the fish is caught, and then the chef cooks it. Ideas are like fish. They just come to you sometimes, and when you’re really lucky, you fall in love with them and know exactly what to do. 120126 ... tender_square i was watching a show on television, sprawled out on the couch, liable to sink into sleep. on screen, there was a group of men, medics perhaps, and they piled into a car, a delray edition like 70s cops drove, and headed to a friend’s house, a man they hadn’t seen or worked with in many years. they surveyed the property from the vehicle, a derelict and rusting junkyard. one of the men remarked that they didn’t realize their friend had lived off a lake. another man chimed in that their friend had fished from it for many years; it became bountiful when the friend discovered a net at the bottom of the lake, a net he then used to capture fish, upwards of twenty per day. and a silence swept the car. it was understood that the net had been submerged in the depths of the lake for a reason—it was cursed. this is why their friend lived the way he did now, alone and decomposing. in the show, a montage occurred showing the friend who did not speak. he was a man with dark skin and the lake slowly changed as the years fell away, becoming murky and polluted. in the dream, i was drifting off to sleep on the couch. i was hearing an aggressive buzzing, i mistook for an alarm when it was a doorbell. i tried to ignore it. eventually the buzzing returned, and i was alone in the darkness, and i grabbed my pillow and trudged upstairs to bed to sleep beside my spouse. when i lay beside him, the buzzing continued, and he rose from bed, checking a back door and noticed a delivery that had been left for me, a series of water jugs, a dolly of ewers the driver had left behind when i didn’t answer. i awoke in darkness, the overlap of dream becoming reality. i was alone in the basement, having moved there a couple hours prior when my spouse was snoring. i could distinctly hear the alarm from my dream though i suspected it was auditory_hallucinations on my part. i grabbed my pillow and trudged upstairs to bed to sleep beside my spouse. when i lay beside him, he awoke, disoriented and checking the clock. i told him about my dream, spilling the details, and then i rolled over and found the embrace of sleep. in the morning, i struggled to understand what the dream was conveying. why was i watching this show and what lesson was it attempting to impart? whenever i see a dark figure or character in my unconscious movies, i think of it as a stand-in for shadow. but the friend who lived on the lake felt different. he was blessed and then he was cursed. and i wondered about the negredo, the process of putrefaction in alchemy, the dark night of the soul where the ego surrenders to the new sense of self. why did the fisherman become cursed? was the source of the imbalance from the net, or was it from the act of over-fishing in the depths of unconscious waters? the importance of a net, it seems, is to capture some elements while letting others pass through the diamond holes, back into the abyss. if one aims to catch all the secrets of the psyche, one can become imbalanced. the new way, the albedo, the whitening, is a washing away of the impurities--could the washing away be a letting go of what has died? or perhaps from a different angle, if one allows an abundance of spirit (jesus-as-fish) to enter the net and not enough matter (say, submerged garbage like work boots, or a cup and saucer—physical, tangible things that ground us to life as living beings), an imbalance will also occur. the dark man does not fish when his net no longer captures the riches he seeks and, in a way, the decomposition doesn’t end. this is what his friends remark upon from afar, they do not engage with him in his time of strife and suffering. in “pregnant darkness,” monika wikman writes at length about the font, the waters of life the process of alchemy and transformation lead us to, so we can seek renewal and replenishment, so we can receive a life force that sustains us. in the dream as i watch the program, the doorbell rings, an aggressive one that sounds like alarm (“there’s no need for alarm”), and i ignore it, afraid of what is calling for my attention. and what has been left for me is jugs of life, cylindric containers with gallons upon gallons of pure water. the jugs are for an office water cooler. and i am struck by the way in which returning to work has returned me to a part of self i thought i’d lost or blunted—the scrappy and capable worker who can support herself, the woman who needs to make it on her own. “so much of our life feels routinized, like boxes we are ticking off each day,” he remarked as he drove me to my shift several days ago. “the vocational stuff comes second,” he explained. “what’s foundational is us.” i didn’t remark upon it because i didn’t agree. 220311 ... tender_square there’s another bit wikman mentions in her book, that tugs at me as a possible interpretation for this dream. she writes, “renewal and sacrifice—the release of an old way and the discovery of a new way—go together. with wisdom, we learn to notice which specific beliefs and values are outdated and of no use to us…sometimes the growth…in our inner or outer life is not dead. we may be asked to cut what is still alive. this theme is often evident, for example, when someone needs to leave a form of love relationship, such as marriage, when love is still present or when someone needs to leave a career that could continue to limp along with some signs of life” (p. 208.) the fisherman in my dream becomes cursed, supposedly, when he takes too much from the life-force lake behind his home. he doesn’t make a sacrifice—he wants to keep fishing at the rate he’s grown accustomed to, the rate he was only able to achieve with his golden net. perhaps the lesson is that the fisherman needed to let what is not dead, what has not yet died, go. the fish needed to continue swimming in the waters rather than suffocate in the hull of his boat. in other words, he needed to catch and release. staying comfortable is a form of atrophy, a slow death. i’m not submitting myself to chaos so much as allowing myself to know the sacrifice needed in order to individuate. 220311 what's it to you? who go blather from