Please Forgive Me

Warning: If You Hate Bugs Do Not Read This

Oct 09, 2024

For not writing something to mark the first year anniversary of October 7th. I have too many things to say and they’re all crowding for attention, like impatient toddlers. They’ll just have to pipe down.

For making it all about me — I know that I’m very small potatoes… but the person who writes this inhabits a physical body and that body underwent a shock on October 7 and the days following October 7, 2023 — a shock so deep I can’t explain it. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t and can’t in this case can’t means can’t, not doesn’t want to. And since this physical body is what produces these words I’ll just have to leave it at that and hope you understand.

Again: Do not read further if you hate bugs.

I have never had a nightmare. I’ve had unpleasant dreams, embarrassing dreams: in fact, most of my dreams have been bizarre and uncomfortable but, like bad trips, they’re entertaining in retrospect. They make for great storytelling. Not this.

But I’ve never had an actual nightmare — something out of Edgar Allan Poe, something so horrifying and real you think it happened, something on a fundamental level so disgusting that you scream and run out of the bedroom.

I dreamt that a water bug was in the bed with me. No further elaboration.

I woke up screaming (another first and yes, I’m trying to laugh at this) and got ready to have a cardiac CT scan.1

Everything is a learning experience. When I read the scene in 1984 about Winston Smith and the rats I was unmoved. C’mon Winston, this is not real, I thought.

Lesson learned. The rats were real to Smith. The mind is the greatest trickster.

We dream every night but don’t remember most of them. I am positive that having my first ever nightmare on the anniversary of October 7 was no accident.

That day aroused something primal in me.

That’s all I have to say about October 7 for now.

Mind cleanse I

The sun rising over the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.