Amidst all this dim worrying and occasional working, and as the nights draw in, and everything transforms to winter – I keep thinking: I'm much more interested in my dreaming life, and sleeping, than I am in my waking life. This isn't because I remember many of my dreams, nor because those have some powerful heroic narrative in comparison to my rather disappointing waking life (as in Thurber's Walter Mitty, or perhaps Gaiman's A Dream Of You); but simply because there seems to be much more feeling and reality in dreams, at least for me.
Waking therefore in the middle of the night, unable to sleep for a while: for some reason I've been led, either in dreaming or in waking or some fuzzy interface between the two, to imagine myself now, but different – still older, a bit sad, a bit reserved, still with many of the same mistakes and stupid life accidents of the past years; but living in San Francisco again, and relating to younger, more energetic gay guys as a quiet bystander. And imagining therein some sense of kindly, rather patronizing affection from those younger ones – and feeling part of a community....
Along with this imagined context, I'm getting flashes of some of the interesting, bizarre guys I knew in San Francisco – discussions, lofts, tangential connections with lives that were so different that they are hard for me to imagine. And it's a bit frustrating to try to remember the details of what I did see – it's a good thing I write now, I really have a flimsy memory.
An amazingly different feeling of life, a different balance, a different sense of my surroundings, and of myself. At least in my (admittedly wistful) imagination.
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