Kaleidoscopic Radio Dreaming

Before I ever got up this morning, before I was even really awake, NPR had already fed my morning dreamscape by poking a number of dormant brain cells.    Laura Veirs  talked about Carol Kaye the rocking 60's bassist I 'met' last year in the movie "The Wrecking Crew" that played in the 2008 Anchorage International Film Festival.  Plus Veirs, who has studied Chinese, mirrored my experience of learning and losing many characters.  Damn, they must be in there somewhere. Her music was soft and soothing, but it was when she said,"Wow, there are a lot of songs in this guitar" that I slid somewhat into consciousness.  My MacBook has a lot of stories in it and I need to set them free.  And my pillow claimed me once again.  But then there was Elizabeth Gilbert talking about "Eat, Pray, Love" and her new book "Committed" and how she and her Brazilian lover had committed to live together forever, but not to marry.  Both had had bad divorces.  But then the INS stepped in and marriage became the only practical solution if they wanted to live together and be in the US at all.  My 39th wedding anniversary is coming up this month and we've managed to stay together by never stopping too long,  moving on to next another stage of love. As things become routine, comfortable, and even stale, we start that scary task of pushing into unexplored and risky interpersonal territory, until we get to the exhilarating other side and new understandings of ourselves and how we are together.  We've been edging towards another such crossing and Gilbert's words about marriage poked those cells where I've been working on what I need to do.  I drifted back into sleep with scattered brain cells glowing in shades of peach which somehow I need to convey to J.  My dreams wandered on until I was in a classroom hearing anthropologist Paula Holmes-Eber lecturing marines about how when they blow up a bridge in an Afghan village, it means the farmers on the other side can no longer bring their vegetables to market and no longer earn a living and a whole tribe becomes impoverished.  And the parts of my brain that handle the differences between short term and long term impacts of what we do lit up before I dozed off only to become hazily aware of a discussion of committing Facebook suicide.   That pulled me into consciousness abruptly as I heard (not necessarily what they said) about wiping out friends and shutting down accounts and their being blocked by Facebook.  Fortunately, Facebook is a minor distraction in my life as I've never quite taken enough time to figure out how to make it work for me.  It's there, I see my wall when I get an email message saying someone has contacted me, and I even updated my profile the other day, but while Facebook suicide seemed extreme, I was reassured. 

And so I now face another day, my brain bombarded with ideas and directions and I have to focus on those I can actively pursue and let go of the others until another time when they are ripe and I am ready to take them on.

CS, in answer to your question about how do I manage to find new ideas to write about everyday, perhaps this is a partial answer.  A lifetime of ideas is buried in the grey matter and each day asteroids strike parts of my brain, reigniting dormant thoughts, only a few of which ever get captured.  Of course, this is true of everyone.  You just have to make room in the rush of life's demands to pay attention.