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I’m staying in Brooklyn for the next two or so weeks. I’d like to get back to blogging – the better me, in some senses, is the me that blogs… rather than leaving all the passing thoughts to quick dissolve in time or silent suppression. So watch this space – I’m already working on a couple and should post soon.

Writing a lecture on “essay writing” in the off-minutes today. Will deliver it to the first-years on Monday. In America, I never “wrote lectures,” as I played everything, no matter how large, as a seminar. Here, you’re at a podium and the students won’t talk back, even if asked to. And so you write lectures. It feels strangely old-fashioned. The upside is, I suppose, that there’s a chance that the work that I’m doing today will last me for the remainder of my career, some thirty-two or so years if I stay at my place (and I might!) and they don’t get rid of manditory retirement (which they shouldn’t!)

Writing this takes me back to my year teaching first-year writing (too posh, the place where I was, for “composition.”) I sat through an endless week of summer sessions on how to teach writing; I was surly; I learned an incredible amount. More than half of what I know about the teaching end of teaching English I learned during this period. It was a big time for me. I got my first job, conceived my first child, came to terms (well, sort of) with leaving Brooklyn, the only place I’ve ever unambiguously loved.

I drove to work from Brooklyn, my little blue VW Jetta Wagon, two or three days a week. It was a half time job with half time pay – still more money than I’d ever made in my life. I had an office in a building that wasn’t the English department, and a primo parking spot in a primo lot. I listened to NPR, day after day, while making that commute. Brian Lehrer. Strangely, I never thought to stay late, extend my stay at the university. Life, from my perspective now, seemed incredibly uncomplicated. I picture fast, clean roads, the view from the bridges that I’d cross on the way there and on the way back. Easy conversations with friends who’d hitch a ride back to the city with me when they were out at the university too. At night, I’d type away at my dissertation, which needed to get done.

At the end, we had the baby, who lived for five weeks in the city of her birth, and then we left. They were filming an ad for Nike on the stoop of the brownstone across the street the day the moving trucks came.

Just to test the limits of my new, no limits blogging, a dream from last night…

Running late, as usual, getting home after a night of drinking. For some reason I get stuck, I stop, at a vacant lot, a parking lot, on the north side of Atlantic Avenue. There is of course no parking lot on Atlantic Avenue, but this one is directly across the street from that Shell Station. This one, only at night….

I have my bag that I always carry there with me: books and magazines and notebooks, and my eee and its plug. Perhaps I am giving up. It is too late to go home; I have blown it, and not for the first time.

Just then a “madwoman” – overlayered as the homeless are during the New York winter – and swinging about broom or a rake with neither intent nor reluctance to injure slowly makes her way up the sidewalk and into the lot where I am standing. She thinks that I’ve done her wrong; whatever she is angry about it is my fault. But it is easy enough to disregard the charge. Clearly she disturbed, and moving under the guidance of something other than reason.

She moves past me and down the block, past a few buildings, to yet another vacant space, another parking lot. In this one, however, is the little shed where the attendant sits, the person in charge of both this lot and the mine.

I get there, to the other lot, just after the menacing woman has left. There’s a young woman in the little shed, in her early twenties, neither particularly attractive nor particularly unattractive. She is frightened, but not too frightened. This sort of thing must happen all the time to her, working nights at a place like this. I offer to walk her to the train, just to be sure – the F stop at York Street. It doesn’t make sense – York Street is two stops away, Bergen Street is basically right around the corner. But she reluctantly agrees.

I realize I’ve left my bag back in the other lot, so I decide to head back to retrieve it. I further decide to take a weapon with me, just in case. The only thing available is one of those branch cutters – long handles, tiny scissoring head. I can’t figure out how I’d use it as a weapon – you certainly wouldn’t try to snip somebody with it, and if you swung it by a single handle that wouldn’t work either. Obviously the answer is to hold the two handles, one in each hand, and swing it like that, but it doesn’t occur to me in the course of the dream. I take the cutter anyway.

I know before I get back to my lot that everything will be gone. The eee, probably my notebooks, the memory stick. My phone is still in my pocket. But when I get there, a man is just leaving – sheepishly, only half-stealthily – with a book in his hand. It’s Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Money, and Interest…. except that’s not what it’s called in this dream, it’s simply called Theory of Unemployment. When I yell at him he turns, walks back to my bag, drops the book in, and then disappears and then I am woken up.

Elements of dream that recurred from the waking day that preceded it: I was a bit late getting home. I wrote a post on Brooklyn in which I mentioned Atlantic Avenue.  I worried about the fact that there is a hole in the bottom of the bag that I carry, and that old keys that I don’t need anymore were threatening to fall out. I mentioned to someone that someone else really doesn’t understand Keynes’s General Theory.

Elements of the dream that have appeared in previous posts: Aside of course from Brooklyn, the tool.

Other contextually significant elements: I visited that Shell station repeatedly when my car developed a mysterious “power drain” issue – leading to battery failure at inopportune times, such as in the JFK airport parking lot after a 24 hour long flight back from Beijing or in the middle of an intersection on Clinton Street. My first daughter was born in the brown brick building visible to the right of the gas station – that’s Long Island College Hospital. My good friends may well be in that hospital tonight, delivering their second child.

Strange matters for report: I never would have walked drunkenly from Cobble Hill to Brooklyn Heights by myself. Quite the opposite. Generally when I came home worse for wear, I would have taken the 2/3 to Borough Hall and then walked down Court Street from Brooklyn Heights to Cobble Hill. When I did live in Brooklyn Heights, I never drank in Cobble Hill / Carrol Gardens. Strange that I was headed in the other direction, against the stream of personal history as it were.