Strange thoughts and feelings today

In a very strange -- no, depressed, moody -- mood today. Woke up this morning from a dream in which I had to deal with irate cats or dogs or vermin, in the place where I lived. Having to not only shoo them, but touch them. Something about the idea of it was very disturbing, more disturbing than the acts I had to do and found myself doing, themselves.

And this was after crawling into bed about 8:00 last night, waking up about 11:30, and up til after 3:00.

Talked with G. this morning, and she was telling she had just gotten season 2 of "Life on Mars" on DVD. From what she was saying the Bowie song is the theme song, and fits the show perfectly, at least for her. I am familiar with the song, or course, but not that familiar: I went to Rhapsody and played it this morning, along with some of Bowie's Space Oddity album with its "An Occassional Dream".

"Life on Mars" has haunted me all day. During lunch - although G. was not online - I listened to it again and again, googled the lyrics -- still don't understand it. It creates a world out of whole cloth, the way Leonard Cohen's "First We Take Manhattan" does. I sent G. an admittedly strange offline, telling her how I wondered - deeply wondered - what it meant to her and made her feel; I wanted to empathize with her so much. The beginning is about a young girl who, chided or encouraged by her mother and father I can't tell which, goes to the movies. Alone apparently. Those words and images of course would mean more to her than to me. She had told me about on of the lines or couplets fitting perfectly with something that happened in the series, I think it was the lawman taking down the wrong man.

I will miss her deeply, I think, until she pops up an IM again, hopefully tomorrow morning.


I also was listening to "An Occasional Dream", the soft song with the lilting, almost too dainty flute. A song I had recorded off the radio onto an 8-track. Even that must have been ten years before G. was born.

Even then, that song reminded me that there would be things that I would miss -- that I would never have my own "occasional dream", never lean back on a soft river bank with a women I loved and would spend my life with. (I think that image is in there - at least that is the image that that song brings to my mind.)

Like a lifetime destined for lost opportunities, never lived as fully as I would want or expect.

Like I have spent my life waiting for someone to say, "Now, you can go, take off, live your life". Maybe that a woman, a lover, a soul mate would say that to me. And she would add that she would stay with me.

This is something that I regrettably have to admit I have not found in Buddhism.

Of course, a Christian would read that and say: what I am missing is my relationship with God. But there is not God; as much as my heart, and my mentality, my emotional make-up, wants, craves there to be one, there just is not.


I have listened to Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" a few times on my iPod while working out... It strikes me that a Christian will hear it, and he will hear God speaking those words, that promise; but a Buddhist will hear HIMSELF speaking those words, that promise, to someone he loves.

What I want to do tonight is go to the new Community Center, and do gongyo and chant for half an hour, to BE someone's Bridge over Troubled Waters.