Presence Out of Context/Underworld

Message, January 21, 2026. 7:21 PM.

Question: If you were dreaming right now, do you think you would sense the presence of the you who was dreaming? The presence of your sleeping self?

If you could, do you think you would recognize yourself as that presence?

I ask because this evening, I was out in town. The sun was below the horizon, but the sky was still a luminous (if ominous) grey. The lights of the town suddenly seemed to become more distinct, more vivid, with a strange depth. Despite the people and the traffic and the shops all around, I could feel the miles of snowy landscape around me, like a sort of echo.

It all felt slightly unreal. Memories flitted through my head not quite at random - us standing outside the art museum in the November wind, you and me on that drive from Texas to the Midwest. Other, things, too. It all felt similar somehow.

It wasn't just cold grue, but layers of it, like layers of time.

The radio played "wrapped around your finger" and it all felt so haunted that I began to question it, the meaning of it. It was as if I were hearing the song in its proper setting for the first time, the proper context, which allowed me to detect an essence I'd never noticed before. Something liminal. What was it I sensed?

My stream of consciousness was like so:

Underworld landscape. What would it feel like if you were dead and didn't know it? Would it feel like this? No, not quite. We are not entirely ghosts. We are something else. Has the rest the world disappeared, has the real world been obliterated and left this shadowy world behind? No, not quite that, either.

And what was the eerie, nameless presence in the atmosphere?

When running through all the iterations of what this was like, I realized that it was most like a dream, but as seen from the other side.

As if I were in the dream without knowing that I was being dreamed.

Except for the nameless, eerie presence of something unknown. 

***

It's been a few days since this happened, and I'm still thinking about it. Would you recognize your own presence out of context? The remnants of your own energy in a place where you used to live? 

Or (as my husband pointed out) the presence of your higher self, the eternal self that already knows all? 

I told him, if that were the case, I could think of two times such an awareness could become evident: if your higher self intervened to nudge you in a necessary direction, or that you, in your physical existence, had become so nebulous that you began to blend into that other world. 

I still wonder which one I experienced. 

But I suspect I know. 

The Sopping Tuesday/No Longer, Not Yet/ The Past and Pending

 (With apologies to Edward Gorey...)

It's a dismal anniversary, damp and melancholy, not unlike the day it commemorates. It was the 8th of May, 11 years ago now, when a low rumble of thunder got my attention. The heavy sky outside my window brought on a vague panic; I'd forgotten how dark the hill country could be when it rained. 

I shuddered, a bone-deep sort of spasm. I wanted to wail out loud, because how could I hide from the weather? But there was nothing for it. Instead of wailing, I got in the car and drove to the elementary school where I registered one of my children for classes; the next day at the junior high I would register another. The littlest one, I could still carry on my hip, just barely. I remember pulling into the parking lot and having to sit for a moment to catch my breath, because it had been so long since I'd done anything without my husband that I wondered if I'd forgotten how. I remember seeing the gold-green live oak catkins scattered on the damp asphalt like runes. I was not versed in reading them, but I already knew they said, "you don't want to be here." 

The next day, it was still pouring as I sat at the glassed-in office at the junior high on the hill, filling out paperwork while the pledge of allegiance echoed down the hall. It felt so strange, looking out on the silvery world on the other side of the glass. Vertiginous, like I might fall. Last month, last week, even, we'd been living our old lives somewhere else, and now we were here. 

My black ballet flats were soaked through from the run-off, so after I'd left my teen to his classes, I'd gathered my toddler and gone to Walgreen's for a cheap pair of sandals and a bottle of Excedrin Migraine. I remember our reflections in the doorway glass, the sky behind us, the rainwater rushing down the gutters even as the clouds were beginning to break. I remember how I sought comfort in the drugstore's sameness, how it reminded me of Victoria, soothing my homesickness for moment, even though I knew I was fooling myself. I even remember feeling a little weird about buying the sandals, too, as if by purchasing new shoes, it would mean I was somehow betraying my old self, that it would be the beginning of the end of who I was before I came. But when the sandals were worn out by the end of the summer, I found I hesitated just as much when it came time to throw them away. 

I went to back to Victoria for a visit a couple of months ago. I hadn't been there in a long time. It was equal parts more decrepit and yet also somehow revitalized. My family never had much interest in returning, so it was my friend who drove me south. He wanted to see the place I'd written about, the inspiration for the name at the top of this page. He wanted to know the "infernal geometry of the streets", the unnaturally silent corners, the haunting sense of being in a place that felt like no place much at all.

We sat on a bench downtown and drew sketches in our notebooks and listened to the clicking of the crosswalk lights. We watched the eerie shimmer in the intersection of N. Main and Santa Rosa while the palm fronds rattled in the silence.

We explored the places on the map I'd once made, climbed to the top of an abandoned parking garage where we found mysterious signs and wonders. We rested, hot and tired, as we watched cloud shapes drifting by. 

And all along I had the unnerving sense that I could just go home, as if I'd only gone for a long walk in the sunny afternoon, or just popped out to pick up lunch, like I'd done so often. As if the landscape of my life had not irrevocably changed. As if I could just walk back to the gold house (now painted blue), as if my children would be there, still children, and not nearly all of them grown up now. 

That's when I knew for sure that - in my mind, anyway - I'd never really left. That part of me (my heart, soul, psyche?) had remained there all along. Life on pause, transition incomplete. Those worn-out shoes I didn't want to toss. Unlike the rest of my family, I'd never really made the leap. 

Maybe that was my way of surviving. Perhaps, perhaps. But it's way past time now to collect those parts of myself and go. The life I lived in Victoria and the quasi-suspended-in-transition existence that came after. I'm tired of dismal Tuesdays and dread at the sound of thunder. Finally, at last, I have a new key.

The hex of the past is unwoven. Maybe one day I'll even remember it fondly. For now, though, I must turn my attention to that which is pending, and for the time when not yet is no longer. 

Exercise Your Inner Eye

 Always good advice. 

The Inconstant Muse

1. Something Happened

It was a cold, lightless day, perhaps it was January; the weather had that distinctive, hopeless feel. I was in my mother's car, coming back from San Antonio, I think. On the corner of Magazine and Butcher streets, I remember seeing black branches and telephone wires outlined against the sky. There was nothing special or unique about this moment. There is no reason it should have lodged itself in my memory. Bur there it is.

The moment fades, or rather fails to continue to exist.  I am sitting in my apartment. Through the windows I can see remnants of the lowering gloom. Fear is running though me like electricity, like a red-hot grid of nichrome wire. There'd been no segue from there to here, no awareness of movement, only nothingness, a numb and fathomless void.

I take out my notebook and write the words "something happened", as if this could help me reconstruct the missing time. It couldn't, of course. It still can't. I can only recall suddenly being there, in that dismal place that smelled of rat-chewed paper. What can you construct out of nothingness, beside the alarming certainty that for a moment you had ceased to exist?

2. The Curious Tale Of The Invention Of Prozac

It was a couple of years later, in the middle of summer, I caught a bus to Waco. It was hot and sunny that day. I wore a crop top with a sunflower print - sunflowers being the thing that year - and jeans with navy blue flats. I had a tiny handbag and eyeliner that matched my shoes. It was an ill-fated romance I was having up there in Waco, though it might be more accurate to call it a waste of time. Whatever it was, the ride to get there was 6 hours of sheer and utter boredom, although if you think about it, the sort of excitement you'd get on a bus is probably not the sort of excitement you'd want to have anyhow.

I've never been able to sleep in a moving vehicle, and back then there were no clever phones to occupy your time. On the way to the station, I'd stopped at the new grocery store on the south side of town to grab a bag of Gardetto's and a magazine from the rack. There was no sense in being hungry as well as bored. Thus fortified, I got on the bus.

It wasn't until halfway through the trip I'd started flipping through the magazine. That particular bus took a long and torturous route once it left Travis county, so unless you enjoyed looking at dilapidated buildings and cedar brakes there wasn't much to see. Memory tells me it was beginning to get late in the day, although that might have just been dimness from the tinted windows. If I had to guess, I'd say it was about 4 o'clock.

That was the year Prozac Nation: Young And Depressed In America was the hot bestseller, which I hadn't read because I was already young and depressed in America and didn't feel the need to read about it. Elizabeth Wurtzel was everywhere though, and she was in this magazine, too. I remember her photo next to her byline, wearing a lavender-colored blouse. The article was about the invention of Prozac, how she'd gone to research the story of the drug that had saved her life. I read the article, which was somewhat of a disappointment, and nothing much interesting happened on the rest of the trip. I left the magazine on the bus when we got to Waco and that was that. Whatever else was in the magazine, barely a hint remains with me now.

...

Years pass. Waco, with its dour atmosphere and concrete skyline, recedes into my history. The dismal apartment recedes, too, thank god. I move away, and life goes on.

And yet. The memory of that bus ride and that article come back to me again and again. They show up in unguarded moments, prodding at me like a troublesome ghost. Here is where I wish I were a better writer, because how can I truly describe the eeriness of these moments? The way it brought to mind writing in my notebook that "something happened"? The way what should have been a simple memory seemed as if it were hiding something I should have known all along?

Around 2010, with growing uneasiness, I finally decided to look up the article. Perhaps it would give me a clue as to what was wrong. The magazine had a large and thorough archive that was easy to search. Nevertheless, I could find no such item. I looked up everything Elizabeth Wurtzel had ever published. Again, there was no such thing. I searched for other writing on the subject, but there was nothing that was familiar in any way. Frustrated, I looked up the actual history of the invention of Prozac, and discovered that almost everything I'd remembered reading in the article was wrong.

And then comes the funny part - because the Cosmic Joker has a way with these things - I realized that the author photo I so clearly remembered wasn't of Elizabeth Wurtzel at all, but Elizabeth McGovern, the actress. No sighted person could possibly mistake one woman for the other, but here I was, with both images in my mind, somehow without questioning it. How could this happen?

There was an obvious explanation. I must have fallen asleep on the bus, even though I'd swear I hadn't, and dreamt the article. No, this isn't a usual thing to happen to me, but who's to say it can't, after all. Nothing mysterious then, only an ordinary foible, mistaking a dream for reality.

Except...except...I realized (and records bear this out) that the store where I'd bought the magazine and snack hadn't even been built until a year later. This is the point where the dream theory falls apart. I rarely went to that side of town unless it was to go to the bus station. I only used the bus when seeing Waco man. I was no longer seeing Waco man by the time the store was built. And the only time I'd buy those kind of snacks or that certain magazine is for a road trip. Anyway (for what it's worth) I remember it as clear as day: me in my sunflower top and my navy blue shoes, excited about seeing my boyfriend, waiting in the express lane, plucking that magazine out the rack, the smell of the brand new store, the high windows, the light on the south side of town.

There is no boredom, road hypnosis or toxic traffic fumes to confuse this part of the memory. It is untrammeled. And here the eeriness comes over me again. I would swear - will swear - I got off the bus with the memory of reading that article. But now I have to ask...when exactly did the false memory sneak in and replace apparent reality? And what happened to the reality?

Where does memory go when it disappears?

I suspect only Mnemosyne knows.

Catherine's Eyes, Or The Peculiarities Of The Human Psyche

It's been one of those frustrating weeks, when the behavior of other humans seems endlessly, irritatingly confusing. Do people really not know what they do or why they do it? Do they really lack so much insight into their own foibles or worse,  hypocrisy? This eternal headscratching is one of the pitfalls of the bookish introvert (me) who must spend the requisite several hours a day in relentless examination of  this thing they (horror of horrors!) don't understand. 
 

When my overwrought brain gets stuck on this particular spin-cycle, a memory or two will come to the surface, much like lint from the towel you didn't know was buried in the bottom of the washer. A couple of years ago, such frothings produced the saga of Heinrich and Peggy; this time - due to a specific situation that's been developing -  it's coughed up a story about my friend Catherine, or more properly, the effect Catherine had on men.

Catherine was (well, is) a fun girl, beautiful, very clever, and as such had a cadre of friends. Male friends especially, but female friends, too. I'd known her for a long time and very well, so...how can I put this?...it was normal for Catherine's male friends (the heterosexual ones, anyway) to be in love with her. She has a way of making a man feel like he's the most fascinating thing on the planet, so whenever her lovely green eyes lighted on him, he'd get this massive ego-boost and come over all soppy in love.

 This was just par for the course, and not something it ever occurred to me to think about overmuch. It's just a Catherine thing. In other words - don't take it personally, she's like that with everyone.

On occasion it did come up, when one of the guys came to me hoping for an inside track of Catherine's affections, or just to talk about their anguished unrequited crush. Then I would shift to the motherly role, giving them a pat and talking in soothing tones. I did not give them false hope -  in those days, Catherine herself  was suffering a bout of crazy love for one particular man, and frankly, no one else had a chance in hell. Oh, I'm sure I was kinder than that, but that's the gist. For her part, Catherine was glad I was there as a comforter of desperate love angst - that way she didn't have to hear awkward  confessions like "I feel like a giant blinking neon penis whenever she walks into the room."  ;)

This was the situation, back in Catherine's single years, and as I say, par for the course. This is not what's been preying on my mind, the lint in my mental load of washing. No, it's something else. It's that there were other men, too - also "friends" of a sort, but not so close, more on the periphery of Catherine's circle, and they were not like the sweet yet passive buddies who came to me with their feelings, or even just garden-variety friends. These were the ones about whom Catherine would sometimes say, "don't leave me alone with him" or "if he calls, tell him I'm not here".

There was no more promise of a romantic relationship with these guys then the others, but something was different. I could feel a cold, hard-edged rage coming from them, and the rage was not directed at Catherine - it was directed at me. This was an uncomfortable situation, and I tried hard to understand it. I knew they didn't like me and worked extra hard to be nice - though of course mindful that my friend did not feel comfortable alone with them - but the overwhelming feeling I kept getting was that I had ruined everything, that the only thing keeping said guy and Catherine apart was me, champion cock-blocker of all time.

 There were only a few of these guys, but that was plenty. It's never a pleasant situation to feel so much hate flowing your way. Had I been more sophisticated at the time, I likely would have identified this as the kind of red flag situation akin to the the man who fawns over his date at dinner but denigrates the waitstaff. But if I'd been more sophisticated, I  probably wouldn't feel the need to write this. Strange as it sounds, it's  possible to be naive and knowing at the same time. It's the nature and sensation of being hated - that particular sort of hatred (disgust? derision?) that's been puzzling me. Being the target of a sort of blame I didn't understand.

This is where it gets muddled. It's hard to put into words. The best I can do is to say that, in the eyes of these men, Catherine was a sparkling treasure, and I was clearly some slimy thing that had crawled out of the bubbling muck at Innsmouth and was STOPPING THEM FROM CLAIMING THEIR PRIZE, DAMMIT!

But the thing was, I knew this wasn't true (about Catherine, not the Innsmouth thing). Catherine wasn't interested in them that way. I wouldn't have been there if she was. I was only there because she wasn't. For Pete's sake, who would bring along a friend if they were trying to make a sexual conquest? No one with any sense, and certainly not Catherine. So what did they think was going to happen? 

And more to the point - was I really that awful, so wretched in comparison? Is my low self-esteem justified? These are the questions that keeps the bookish introvert up at night. 

Long experience has taught that whenever something is muddled, there has usually been a failure of logic somewhere, or some clue that's been missed. In this case, the kind of clue that your average fourth-grader would have picked up, but must have slid right past me at the time. These particular guys - no doubt the more aggressive, possessive type - had misread the light in Catherine's eyes as romantic (or at least sexual) interest. In their minds, she must have been a sure thing, if it hadn't been for "the friend". Because the human psyche is full of  peculiarities and blind spots, they didn't get that she was like that with everyone, or that she wasn't a possession to be claimed, or that this very attitude made them even more unappealing to her. Hey, there's nothing wrong with me, so it must be Cthulhu over there at fault. Not questioning why Cthulhu was there in the first place. 

Well, it makes sense, but it's really not that hard to grasp. Surely I must have known this at an intuitive level? I'm not that dumb. Yet the subject still seemed muddled. Logic was still failing me somewhere, and therefore I had to worry it like a dog with a bone. This sort of obsession always means something is wrong, a blind spot in my own psyche. What was it that I couldn't see? 

It seemed irrational, on the face of it. If someone is a close friend of the object of desire, it stands to reason that it would be foolish to alienate them from the start. After all, they're in a position to have information that one might want to know, aren't they? A potential way to someone's heart? Even from that strictly Machiavellian perspective, it makes no sense. And then I understood. The reason I fielded so much angst from Catherine's lovelorn buddies was the same reason for the cold-blooded disdain from those other guys.

This quiet girl, sitting there, contained one particular piece of information - that they would never, ever sleep with Catherine.