Freckles & Doubt

Whew, one of those half-year blogging hiatuses again, funny how they creep up on me. I think remote working, and the concomitant ability to not leave the house or speak to actual humans for days at a time, is actively reducing my general communication skills. Or, in other words, the pointer on the Isolate-O-Tron has dipped from "Hedgehoggy Hermit" to "Homicidally Misanthropic", a considerable drop from its pre-COVID standard levels of "Awkward at Parties/Disinclined To Leave the House". I always did have to arm-wrestle myself, best of two falls out of three, to force my own attendance at any given social gathering. Now I've apparently kiboshed the wrestle at the outset by stealing my own elbows. Metaphorically speaking. Physically they are still more or less attached. I mean, I can still type, so have no real excuse.

All of the above, incidentally, not to cast any aspersions on the generally much-appreciated virtual presence of anyone who still does drive by this venue occasionally to see if I'm burbling. Virtually you are all lovely and much less likely to make the Isolate-O-Tron's needle quiver, and I really have no excuse for abandoning you.

I am driven to resume blogging, characteristically enough, by the burning need to record for posterity a particular dream I just had. My sleep patterns are a mess again, mostly because I've just had a month-long run-in with a particularly epic case of 'flu, and went off both the antibiotics and the decongestants only a couple of days ago. Since the combination of meds was making me sleep 9-hour nights like a particularly coshed dormouse, going off them has led to those happy evenings lying in bed for hours at a time with eyes wide open like the millstone eyes of the tinder-box dogs in the fairy tale, feeling the sleepless seconds drip by with equal parts horror and despair. Insomnia is a bitch. And when I do actually sleep, it's lightly, and with interruptions, and I wake up earlier. Hating the universe in general and everything in it in particular, see "Homicidal Misanthropy", above. But I do, in all that disruption, remember far more of my dreams.

Said dreams characterised themselves, a few days ago, by degenerating into actual nightmare, with far more gore than I am wont to experience, dream-wise. I blame the Queen, for dying. Because the generally sad and laudatory nature of the media and social media responses are giving me ingrowing postcolonial irritation and the tendency to mutter darkly about hypocrisy and jingoism and denialism about the current parlous state of the British economy, culture, political landscape and royal family (racism, sex scandals, legislative meddling and black-market cash deals, oh lord). Which is all filtering into my dreams, causing me to dream the following:

• a darkly threatening forest setting at night, occupied by:
  
• several small/innocent children, and;
  
• a team of servants, tasked with nobbling the above for the consumption of:
  
• the Queen, characterised for these purposes as:
  
• a Fallout robobrain robot, which looks like:
  
• this:


• except with the Queen's head attached in place of the glass dome, and the additional, horrifying detail of:
  
• an unnaturally large mouth, opening unnaturally wide to reveal:
  
• rows of enormous, long, jagged, horrifying teeth, with which:
  
• she proceeded to bite off some poor child's arm, lots of blood and screaming, and I woke up.

I do not like this monarchy. It is skraaaaatched. As are my sleep cycles. I should add, also for posterity, however, that playing injudicious amounts of Fallout 4 is (a) satisfyingly apposite to the current state of global geo-political meltdown, (b) satisfying to the general state of homicidal misanthropy, as I wander around with a maxed out plasma rifle and sniping skill taking down deathclaws with single headshots, and (c) apparently colonising the dream landscape.

(my subject line, by usual processes of free association, is David Bowie, "Time").