Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

 

A dream discovered in fresh water waves Under the surface with billowing ochre weeds A deep, green curtain hiding the flutter of perch Perhaps, a tiny bluegill or larger pumpkinseed Safe under covers, hiding from the wolfish fish Predator and prey in endless dashes Never upsetting the murk I lay amidships over the side of the canoe staring for hours My father's strong arms casting and casting Nary a fish made it over its sheltering sides Glittering water on the belly in rivulets  The bright orange sun beating from behind cumulus clouds On the shimmering surface of the shrinking lake. I shielded my eyes and kept watching for fish Taking a break to read my Hardy Boys book The Mummy Case , I think it was, its lurid cover as natural as the fish below on my young imagination My father handed me a bottle of Coke, cold in styrofoam wrap I remember that first drink, cold and tickling Traveling home in his red 1984 Ford F-150  I turned the last pages of my mystery book  looking fo...

I have only experienced recurring dreams once. When I was a kid, and remembered my dreams with more frequency, and in greater detail, I had a dream that kept coming back for a few weeks. It was very detailed, and in hindsight, I'm not sure if it was exactly the same, but it had many of the same features. I  remember being confused that I kept having it because it never had before. One funny thing about memory is that you believe something happened in a specific way, and it might not have. Remembering a dream is even more challenging because nobody but you remembers it, so you cannot ask them if it really happened that way.  Visually, the dream was striking, memorable, and very strange. It was like I was trapped in a Scooby-Doo episode, except the animation was crisper and more bizarre than the Hanna-Barbera cartoon. There were two witches that looked like they had escaped from The Wizard of Oz that flitted in and out and a sled race that led me back to the beginning of the dr...

Over the past few years, I feel like I have begun to slowly unravel. I feel like I lost part of myself that I might not be able to reclaim. I am far more tired than I feel I have the right to be. But I also have never learned how not to be hard on myself. A colleague told me recently that "you are always so hard on yourself. You have to learn your self worth." Nothing could be truer, but it is hard to rediscover my value because of my own negative thoughts and self-deprecation. All the stress from my PhD studies is finally catching up with me. When I was working on my dissertation, I never had that much time to worry because I was so busy trying to get it done. Now I feel even busier. I teach five classes and have five tutoring sessions on top of it. I am working on an article that does not seem to be gelling quite like I want it to, and I hope that I can eventually catch up on sleep. My stress management seems to be failing me. I get home after a busy day at work and pre...

In my darkest days I tend to sleep a lot. Nap after nap comes in quick succession when turning off the world is as easy as clicking the light switch and settling into a light snooze. I have become reckless in my pursuit of sleep, searching for one long forgotten dream. Perhaps, I long for anything that will shut out the light. When I was a kid, I had a recurring dream filled with creepy witches and small children, rendered in cartoon detail. This brain animation came weekly for a period, then just stopped. I've never had it again. Could this be the dreamworld I seek? Or, perhaps, there is another world buried deep in my psyche, asking to be explored? I've never had another dream that beat on the doors so often as this one. Most dreams come once and never return. Dreams are always peopled with the strangest or most unexpected characters, random places from the past, and enough chicanery to make election year look like a triumph. Random classmates from grade school appear alo...

The buzzing of far away tools run roughshod over my static mind as the waxing of Lou Reed relates the modern state of "viciousness." Another day in the intellectual rat race of love, shattered by promises of work and relaxation, mugging for some far off camera Will you be the true prospect, or clear delineation and demarkation, of a confident future, nay past, clowning like a businessman? The terminus of this period of stagnation ends in three bangs, like celebrity deaths or folkloristic tropes or statistics -- the year is clearly marked as 2014, the jigsaw puzzle of being bailed out is consistently cut from my parent's best wishes. The lines of a Catholic school girlhood are marked clearly on your face; lines of my pagan youth mark mine like the aged face of a forgotten prom queen. Tell me again of your hopes and dreams. No rest is all that matters. We run. We fall. We continue on and on. The fuzzy cat with a scepter knocks us down like pawns. The leaves...

There are dreams and then, there are those dreams, shiny opalescent, glittery baubles bursting on the seashore of shattered horizons, the clattering of teeth in the cold dark, imaginary fingertips under blankets, stretched over my childhood bed. Recurring transactions with sandmen unknown, standing tall and imposing in darkened doorways, shuffling on flat feet, fidgeting in the early morning breeze, silvery frying pan in hand that turns slowly into a gold plated Ruger. Please mom, make it stop. I can't go on -- but I must, screaming with tattered voice, as the large visitor hovers, pointing its amorphous weapon. Paralyzed nightly, I see its slick face and fear that I might die, blanketed in a real cold sweat, trapped under the weight of lumbering fear. Is the door closed or open? Movement isn't an option anymore,  whether it ever was, trapped in stasis, awake or asleep, the gun or the knife. I can't see it, except in the periphery, behind my line of sight, yet clearly in my...

I woke up this morning with the lyrics to Helmet's "Unsung" in my head. At first, I couldn't place it -- images and lyrics are sometimes like a repository for past memories. Listening to a record album can remind you that it once served as a soundtrack for a whole summer, reading a novel can lead to memories of one summer, for example, recalling an afternoon shortly after you turned sixteen, watching an old tv show can dish up old memories of distant relatives you haven't seen for years. Like dreams, sensory experiences often dredge up the past, reminders of forgotten friends or people that were not thought of in a decade, the color of the wallpaper at your grandmother's house, or other small instances lost forever in the memory banks. Song snippets and lyrics are especially prime vehicles of uncommon remembrance, at least for me. Periods of my life are categorized through soundtracks. I sometimes can even tell you what I was listening to during a ...

I haven't been sleeping much at night lately. My mind has been racing while I lie in bed. Christmas break is like that. There are many so many places the mind can go. I kept thinking of the names of zines I created, band names for long lost bands, the names of never conceived, or loosely conceived novels or short stories. I started thinking about revisiting my zines, Teriyaki Linguine and Asthmatic Cough Syrup. I pictured revisiting the embarrassing moments or reworking some of the short stories. All were indicators of my frame of mind at the time. For example, "Somerset's Dream" is indicative of what I was reading at the time. Band names run the gamut -- Gangrenous Limbs,  Wood Tick Races,  Orc Castration,  Dexter Holland's Left Nut,  or Chuck Klosterman's Left Nut, if you prefer.  The musical genres are fairly evident. Somewhere, some time, some place, these dreams are in use. Beyond the dream veil, behind the can't of regrets, the stories are writ...