Early morning thoughts

I apologize, I don’t know where this post is really going, and it is kind of weird to come back to my blog and start with this, so you are warned now to just move on because this is a very rambling post more to get out of my head wha I am thinking then to be a cogent, informative post.

I woke up missing my dad. He wasn’t in the main part of the dream, it was about me being a kid and growing up with the bikers and vets, a lot of mishmash of my childhood, but at the end there was a knock at the door, and I remember as an adult going to the door excited that he was there (somehow I knew it was my dad). Just as I opened the door, I woke up.

Dad 1970 when met mom and running with MC first time

He passed away on 2/11/16, and I guess I have some sort of daddy issues when I say there is something that still feels torn when he left.

That being said, this morning after I woke up I felt sad, but not just about him. I found myself worried about about two dozen guys (and gals), and thinking about a group of Vietnam vets and bikers.

Only picture of dad on his way to Vietnam 1965 where he would be on PBRs in the dual 50 cal pit (aka Apocalypse Now)

Oh friendly warning, Contrary to what you see on tv/movies, they did not like a lot of photos of the group, primarily I assume FBI/police but also I think they may talk tough, they weren’t fond of who they ended up being, they didn’t see themselves like I saw them. They did take a lot of photos me me though, so you get stuck with those.

Then I realized the biggest part of the sadness is that when I pass on, in probably 20ish years, everything they shared with me will pass on from their world.

I grew up surrounded by hardened Vietnam vet bikers (1% Outlaw MC). I lived day to day as a child through all of their problems. Taking care of them when they were low, and being taken care of by them when they weren’t.

Nowadays I see the same groups keep their kids out and don’t seem as close. I’m sure some groups are still that close, and maybe the groups I was with were the ones that were unique.

It is why watching things like Sons of Anarchy annoy the living shit out of me.

The show feels close to what I grew up with, but if it is based on true things now, it is obviously built on current-day advisors, and it results in a weird separation I didn’t see as a kid (and my friends that were kids went through the same thing).

Growing up, the kids were part of the club. Even the meetings would have kids coming in and out, asking for things and during the most tense standoffs, several times one of the kids coming in would defuse it. It was a set point that all of members seemed to have agreed upon. The children were a centering point, maybe they shouldn’t have been, but I suspect it was closer to what old traveling bands were like then what you see in the movies.

I notice now, at least according to media, that kids are kept away, not allowed to know what the club does with a fear the kids might turn them in or somehow don’t know. Trust me, kids know what their families are doing in criminal or outlaw organizations. I absolutely hate the trope in movies that the family has no clue, they all know, and it is normalized.

Somehow watching them it feels like they (the bikers, other militant groups) have lost some of the humanity. That’s not quite the right word, but it comes close to what I’m trying to share.

*Dad, mom and Clyde was on the left, Clyde was a “Tunnel Rat” in Vietnam, I think ’68. This was taken in 1989 Downtown Bellingham.*

I wondered why it was so different back then (70s and 80s), and then I realized: watching Westerns about the last group of hardened gunslingers always had a kid that traveled with them, did things for them, and loved them (think Guns of the Magnificent Seven or others like it). All the cowboys expecting to die, but sharing their time with a kid. That’s how they grew up (the vets, I mean). It was part of the media, the culture, etc. It was just the last real bit of humanity they could share. That is probably one of the reasons the vets and everyone around us thought it was a normal thing.

I realize most would say they shouldn’t be including children in their lives, and maybe that is the healthier way for the kids. But I think it also contributes to the loss of that connection those groups have.

It absolutely did damage to me as a kid. I still have baggage I carry because the vets had no one else to confess things to, to be sober with, and because I was there to take care of them when their broken bits wouldn’t work right.

Now that being said, I wouldn’t recommend confessing how many you killed or how you did it, is good for the child (I still can remember counts and stories but starting to forget which story went with which vet), probably best to just share the overall regret instead. That being said, I don’t regret being there and giving them a small piece of peace at least momentarily.

Of course decades pass, and my life moved on, but sometimes I wake up worried that the vets were alone after I grew up and things changed, and no one was there to take care of them.

I also realize that for the child it probably isn’t the healthiest. I do have additional CPTSD because of being there to care for them. I have a ton of baggage that I will carry with me to the end of my days. Yes I know I have been parentified, and it isn’t good for the kids, but part of me wouldn’t change it either.

The result is, I feel sometimes like I have the same, or close enough to call it the same, baggage and PTSD that a Vietnam vet had without having fought a war. Of course all the other stuff that happened as I became an adult with the club only adds to it.

People have told me it is purely because the vets I grew up with included me in their lives, but I don’t think so. Someone who is broken by what they do brings that baggage no matter what. The family still suffers, the alcoholism is still there, the violence and police issues occur.

I could be wrong, but overall I think the families and groups that stayed fully in each other’s lives and didn’t try to carve away the bad parts ended up a little better. All the children of these families are fucked, but I think there is more possible support when a community of broken people help raise each other (there are exceptions and abuse, not saying there isn’t).

Even so, I don’t regret any of that. Even when I wake up sad with some of the memories, I also remember the love they had for me. I never felt safer than when I was with them, taking care of them. Not once did I ever feel fear about them, even when they had flashbacks and violence.

I guess mostly I am sad that people get so broken, and how unfair it is that it happened to them. And whatever the state of god or not, either way it is so unfair people have to go through that. Then all those experiences get lost, even after having gone through so much.

Last photo I have of one of my family friends who was a vet. Of course you have Mom, Dad, Derek (Brother) with his kids and Dennis who was Army Infantry (I can’t remember the unit, I met him as a teen so the relationship was a little different and wasn’t as close). Taken in August 2015, about 5 months before dad passed.

*Oh and just to give you a flashback, this is Dennis, mom, dad and Dennis’s girlfriend (on and off for a decade) celebrating when all the bikers came over to my house (approximately ’88/89)*

Or… maybe I woke up with anxiety due to the surgery I am getting today. Either way, this is good therapy, and I do feel better rambling.

Not so slow decay of the world (dream)

I have been meaning to post for a few weeks, but work, mental health and physical health have all sucked so I guess now the reason I am posting is because of a dream. Yesterday we bought a new Subaru Forester for the hubby so we didn’t have to rely on his Kia not getting stolen (its one of those that can be broken into easily) and we don’t have to rely on my car which mechanically was just starting to fall apart, I hope to post about that actually later today.

However, it was a stressful event so by 6pm I kept falling asleep and had a horrendous set of nightmares on and off when I did fall back to sleep until I finally got up at 2am. My watch says I got 4 hours sleep in that whole time, I feel like less, but it was the same dream, just continuing the whole time. Below is not the complete dream, most of the individual little things that were horrifyingly banal are already slipping my mind, so here is just the general beats.

START DREAM

The dream was in vignettes and started with the hubby and I coming across a dark roiling cloud like thing on the ground, being near it didn’t seem to cause any problems, but you could feel something in the air had changed, something bad had happened.

I couldn’t tell if it was the atmosphere had a hole poked in it right there and it was leaking the earth’s atmosphere, there was no suction, no rush of air, so while that was the closest fear a lot of people in the dream had, it felt more like a swirling thing that was maybe corrupting things, sort of like the swirling blackness from the old movie with Donald Pleasance and Alice Cooper, “The Prince of Darkness”.

Sort of like the inky blackness, but not confined to a prison.

Flash forward to another vignette and the world was dark, almost like the whole nuclear winter thing except it wasn’t freezing, it was just dark and everything living was dead and barren, and society/cities/government had collapsed. However it had only been a few days, it was more like the world was transformed and not decayed.

Meanwhile most people were already dead or dying, as if the eternal night that was happening was sucking the life from them (maybe Ravensloft style?). The hubby and I were traveling, but it still wasn’t far from where we live. There was some sort of quick rush by humans, seemed like an attempt to “save the world” a very movie like feeling when the exciting climax was going to save us all.

Except it didn’t.

After what felt like the climax failed, there were several small vignettes of seeing things and people that made the world seem to age and fall apart, even though in the dream it was only a few days. The entire time there was a globe we kept looking at (one of those standing world globes) and it had some feature that would show the area of the world still getting daylight, and it was shrinking to a strip around the globe that for me was closes south of Portland. It wasn’t like the sun itself was restricted due to a nuclear winter, rather it was more like marking the strip of the globe still habitable (?), or wasn’t corrupted evil.

The final vignette was sadder and much more low-key horrifying. The world was getting darker and more desolate (but not ice age cold with the no sun), and my hubby wasn’t in the last vignette. I just remember being sad when I thought about him. I had been traveling for a bit with a younger blond girl (younger for me is probably early 30s) when we came across someone dying, and they just had this clear liquid coming out of their mouths as if they had drowned (no water was around).

We saw the strip on the globe had shrunk into very tiny line across the world of what seemed like there could still be light, we were in that strip though and no daylight so obviously we figured out it was measuring something else.

A little time flickered ahead in the dream and I came across that blond woman I had been traveling with. At some point she had raced ahead of me into a building. She was lying there, no physical damage on her body and she was scared. I was consoling her until she passed, with a bunch of clear liquid coming out of her mouth right after she died. There were no obvious wounds, and she was in far better shape than this old girl, so it just made it obvious whatever was happening didn’t care about the health of the individual.

The small group I was with looked at the globe we were carrying in the night, the strip of light was completely gone on the globe and we just looked at each other. We knew it was over, no heroes were saving anyone and all I could do was miss my husband, and my family that had already passed before all of this, and wonder if it was going to hurt. The worst part is I knew the world was dead, and I was just sad at the loss of everything about humans, all because something stupid happened that none of us knew about, but we could feel it.

STOP DREAM

I woke and sat up, and for whatever reason was sad, and just sobbed for a while. Tally came over and laid against me until I got up. I wish I could remember more of the details, that always feels important but I can never quite do it. I will remember bits of it later, but even now it’s more unclear, so I will leave this dream recounting where we stand.

Can’t Help Falling in Love

I have always had nightmares and trauma dreams, pretty much as far back as I can remember. Sometimes they are filled with with violence, assault, terror and running or fighting. Sometimes there is nothing but a glimpse of something that just makes me sad.

Last night I had one of those dreams that just lasts all night. I woke up briefly but couldn’t get up around midnight, then again at 1am then 2am, finally was able to get up. The same dream the entire time.

START DREAM

I was laying there in the dark in the bed I share with my hubby of 30 years, gardenrat. He wasn’t moving and it didn’t take too long in the start of the dream to identify he had passed away and I just held him against me in the bed crying. I knew when morning came that I would have to let go of him, and I couldn’t do it.

There was a huge anxiety too as time passed in the dream and I could see the dawn starting to appear in the windows and my anxiety just got worse.

The entire time in the background, Elvis Presley was singing “Can’t Help Falling in Love” in the darkness, from some radio in the distance.

STOP DREAM

The dream never ended or changed except for me to occasionally wake up. Probably didn’t help that I got to see the best gay representation episode I ever saw on TV today (episode 3 of Last of Us) after the dream.

The way the episode ended in their bedroom was probably even rougher than it would have been without the dream. Don’t regret watching the episode, but it means I have been crying on and off all day.

Dreams x 2: “Cat Scare” and “I am Sorry”.

Last two nights ended up with the next two mornings from horrendous dreams. I find sometimes I can get rid of the after effect of dreams if I post and talk about it. So I am talking here again. Probably not nearly as in depth as I wanted to write about it this morning, but maybe its good it is partially slipping away.

The first dream from a couple of nights ago was just plain bad. It was a rough 4th of July and our cat was on high alert.So around 3am she crawled up under the blankets with me and I promptly fell asleep.

“The first thing I noticed was the sound of a cat far off making weird strangled cries. I got up, followed out of the kitchen like room I was in and into a long hallway. At the end of the hallway a large black cat was hissing. I tried to give them good words but that wasn’t going well. Then I heard the cat’s tone changed and I immediately turned and went to run.

I got a few feet before claws of fire dug into me and the cat actually began trying to take me down for real. I don’t know if it was rabid or just crazy but I ended up picking it up and throwing it off. It kept launching itself back at me until finally I grabbed him and slammed him into the ground multiple times. All I remember was it kept moving and trying to bite and I couldn’t get away so I kept slamming the cat down.”

I promptly woke up and immediately panicked thinking I grabbed Tally in my sleep and hurt her. I am pretty sure I was sobbing at this point as I pulled the blanket up and there Tally was, fully asleep, and when she noticed the blanket had pulled up she just opened her one eye lovingly, blinked softly, then sighed heavily like I had just interrupted her sleep.

The second dream was last night and is the one I am having a hard time moving past. Because of that you just get a very cut down version because evidently if I think about it I start crying again.

I was sitting next to my wonderful husband gardenrat. He was taking care of a patient much like he did 12+ years ago before either of us transitioned. It was some little hospital like room. The patient had just passed and he was cleaning them up.

I kept asking when he shift was over and he shrugged me off and grunted. I couldn’t get his focus off of the patient and on to me. I felt al little bad in the dream, but I was even more annoyed. “You know there is a reason you quit this job the first time right? Can we please go to dinner soon? The next shift can clean up the person.”

Even in the dream I knew that was a shitty thing to say so I was quiet and just sat FOREVER… Eventually I was super annoyed and I kept tapping him and he kept grumbling. I finally stood up and started yelling at him when I looked over and saw the person on the bed. It was me.

The only thing I felt right then was sad. Not scared, no screaming, not angry.

I turned to the hubby and all I could say was “I am so sorry I left you, I love you so much. I am so sorry.”

I wasn’t scared or worried about me, but I was screamingly terrified of what would happen with gardenrat and if he would be ok.

I woke up and laid on top of the covers and found I was crying. The hubby got up beside me in the dark and wandered out to use the bathroom, which enabled me to pull my shit together and get up for the morning. It put me into a weird headspace this morning. Not worried about myself, but. worried how the hubby was going to be (if it works out, some other boy/girl/them shows up and takes care of him, but even joking I get waves of worry for him, and it makes me sad.