Ariana Grande and A New Improved Daylight Savings

I’d hoped to commune with nature, but got stuck in traffic instead.

By the time I reached home it was nap time.

I looked at the clock: the clock read 1 pm so I closed the blinds and lay down on my bed.

Right then, the dogs started barking from their backyards. The dogs seemed to be all fucked up, and just when I wanted to nap. Que lastima! (trans: what a pity!).

I’d hoped to commune with nature, but I live in San Francisco and San Francisco is a real city. I should have simply accepted the consequence—dogs barking in their backyards, the # 6 bus going up and down 10th Ave. etc.…

I’d hoped to sleep for at least a few minutes as a free man. Freedom though is such a poor excuse for a word; freedom, the word, gets tossed around too often, so often that it has no meaning, or means something to people who seem to be simple-minded, even idiotic. For what constitutes freedom? A certain reasonableness it seems, at least to me, that I tolerate dog-owners and their offspring as the liberal humanist I am.

Freedom: reasonableness as opposed to insanity? And how does the one (the reasonable) regard the other (the insane)?

At last, the dogs in their backyards stopped barking. I closed my eyes for The Big Dream I was about to have, not The Big Lie.

In my dream I saw my late father swim up to the shore. Reaching the shore, he flopped around like a fish and then stopped flopping. My father seemed content to lie on the shore, finally content to do nothing, to just lie there instead, dormant, a man of Scottish origin who never much liked the beach or the sun.

When I woke an hour later, I looked at the clock. It seemed to me that I’d only taken a catnap. But two hours had passed instead of only one, without my awareness that they had passed—it was already that much later than I’d previously thought!

What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking; I was sleeping!

It seems that I’m now at an age that when a bad idea occurs to me I like to think I can at least apply some common sense to an old wound.

Ariana Grande sings at The Oscars, March 10, 2024. The author approves of Ariana’s ethereal singularity and looks forward to hearing more of her music as she progresses in her career.