sleep for those who dream

First: New photo gallery. Check out New Year’s Eve at Hoodoo. Relive the sweeping sensation that is sweeping the nation nationwide.

Second: Pardon the mess. Now that I can churn out web designs in a matter of hours, I’ll be constantly experimenting with new layouts and crap until I find something I like for more than ten seconds. I crack my fingers. I flex my muscles. I stretch my joints.

And then I fall asleep.

Brainside Out: All the ambition. None of the commitment. We’re like Coors for the Internet.

Which, speaking of, I’m currently drinking two beers at the same time. Such is the life of a rich man.

It’s been a strange winter, a truly huge winter. Not only is it already February, it’s past mid-February. I feel like I’ve been living the life of ten men, ten midget men that all live in a house together with a video camera crew and they interact to humorous consequences every Wednesday night at eight pm. At the same time, I feel tired, oh so tired, for which the only explanation I can muster is that I’m working a pseudo-infinite workweek. I say ‘pseudo’ because it often finds itself broken up with delightful episodes of things that in no way resemble work. Like today, where from 2:00 to 4:00 I was at the mountain, off the clock, in plainclothes, chewing down every untracked tree run I could find with a foot of fresh pow.

At the same time, given the fragmented nature of my existence, from Mountain to Bend to Lava House to Green Dragon to John Doe’s to Web Design to Taco Stand to Subaru, throughout my day I often feel like I just woke up. My graceful transition from one dream to another is anything but, and the colors from all facets of my being bleed into each other. This is as it should be, really, with everything cross-referential, but my brain seems to have difficulty hardwiring all the connections for consciousness.

There are mornings. When the air is just right you can taste the Pacific, and you know that means a gorgeous day in the mountains. There are other mornings, cold mornings where frost has brushed everything an ethereal hue, that shiver with the chill of a desert spring. You have spent time in the desert, not much time, and these mornings feel familiar. Sleeping out on a tarp you rolled over to see the first rays of sunlight strike the high cliffs in Zion, and through the veil of your breath you saw the valley glistening in crystal.

But these are the mornings that become familiar, while the other mornings remain locked in the mystery of dreams. You wake up after the bus ride to the mountain, do a mental count on the cars already in the parking lot to compute how busy today will be. You wake up again at lunch, and again hours later when the bus pulls into the park-n-ride in Bend. Sometimes you wake up enough in the evening to go out with friends, but usually you are sound asleep when you unlock the door to your house. And each time you fall asleep you enter a new world of dreams, each thick with its own thoughts and challenges and sensations, that is completely disconnected from the other dreams, the other worlds, the other lives.

Yet each dream, each life, shares a common thread; that in each you are seeking a common thread across all dreams, across all lives. You know of one, only one so far, and that is you, but you starve for more. You starve to strengthen the bonds across all worlds so you can make sense of them, twirl them about your fingers and laugh at the obvious.

But for now, all you do is sleep. Sleep and dream.