dreams and demons

Last night I dreamt I was roller skating and I got on the freeway.  It was a very vivid and intense dream, and it became more so as I picked up speed.  I heard once that if you realize you are dreaming and you want to remain in the lucid dream, you should look at your hands right away.  The more you focus on some relatively inconsequential detail, the more grounded you become in the reality of the dream.  This helps keep you from waking with the sudden adrenaline associated with the realization that you are dreaming.  I suspect this is why the dream became more intense as I merged with traffic and began going downhill, so fast that I had to shift to one skate.  I couldn't stop, and I had to wrap my other leg around to maintain balance.  I was keeping pace with traffic due to the decline, and for some reason, I was wearing hotpants.  I realized that if I hit a rock, my body would flay out over the asphalt, and that would be the end of me, but there was nothing much to be done about it.
Today in my waking life, I passed out and hit my head.  There are details surrounding this event and they may or may not be relevant.  I woke up in a puddle of my own blood and I walked into the next room where eight or nine people I work with were having a meeting.  Between the blood puddle and the door, I managed to keep my shit together, but the second everyone started freaking out about what a bloody mess I was, well, it was on and I was all hyperventilating and stuff.  It was interesting being surrounded by a group of people who are accustomed to working together.  One of them got me water and one got me orange juice and one wiped the blood off me and one wiped the blood off the floor and one stood there in case something else needed to be done.  One called zoomcare and one went to get a paper bag for me to breathe into.  I pretty much just freaked out until one commanded me to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth.
The gash in my head is above the hairline and when the doctor looked at it, she decided it was best to braid it closed, as opposed to stapling or stitching it.  So I have a blood-soaked braid in my hair, which is pretty much the hippest coolest thing that's ever happened.
This is sarcasm.
I listened to a radio show (radiolab) one time about language, and how we basically have great difficulty thinking about things for which we have no words.  Was it Habermas who said language is the house of the mind?  It fascinated me.  Clearly there's a chicken and the egg thing operative here, in that we can't have developed the word first before some semblance of the concept.  I started thinking about how languages are dying all the time as cultures are quashed.  What words are we losing as these languages die?  Surely there are unique words that are already gone, whole concepts and ways of thinking we might never find again.  I started thinking about this, and I googled a list of words that only exist in one language.  I knew it was the kind of list that someone had already compiled, but that it might be difficult to find.  I tried "schadenfreude list unique words."
Schadenfreude is a German word for the pleasure derived at the expense of other's misfortune.  I had a conversation with a German friend about how Americans are totally fascinated by this word.  I have a theory for this.  For one thing, I think that Americans have this concept and it's mega-prevalent in our culture, but nonetheless we have no English word for it.  So when we hear this word, we get all excited that it exists.  Also, I think there's a certain schadenfreude in finding out that it's a German word, because how unfortunate for the Germans to be the ones to claim and name such a concept; poor bastards.
Is there a word for laughing at one's own misfortune?
I feel a little foggy today.  I suspect my sentence structure reflects this.
There's another German word on the list.  Torschlusspanik, the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages.  Also very prevalent in American culture, we like to name existential crises and number them along a fictitious timeline according to which we die in our late eighties or early nineties (quarter-life crisis, mid-life crisis...).  I think it's a cop-out that we label our existential misgivings with this kind of word, betraying a false sense of being somehow entitled to a solid eighty years or so.  I prefer the German here, stark, direct, lacking guarantee that you will definitely die of old age.  Yet this word hasn't caught on in quite the same way.
My grandmother died at 86. She was the last of her friends to die.  She had her children and her grandchildren and her great grand-children, but everyone older than she was had passed.  She would talk about it, how strangely lonely it was.  It seems to me the most vicious and horrible way to die, old age.
My father has had six strokes and is 69 now.  For about four years, he has been completely certain that he will die in three months time.  This makes it very difficult to make any plans with him.  I can't convince him to get a dog.  He won't sign a lease.  He's a pain in the ass.
I saw that movie Krull when I was a kid and was totally caught up by the conversation about the cyclops knowing when he would die.  Would I give up an eye to know when I was going to die?  Dude, totally.  I'm much more afraid of wasting my life than I am of death.  And the idea here, obviously, is that some kind of calculation could be performed with regards to life remaining and tedium of tasks acceptable.  If you know you're going to die tomorrow, you don't stand in line at the bank.  You don't do your taxes.  You don't watch movies you've already seen before.  You go skydiving.  You spend all your money on a big party for all your friends.  You watch the fucking sunset.
It was the anniversary of my mother's death today.  She died twenty one years ago.  I was eight.  My dad woke me up in the morning and drove me out until there was some greenery on the side of the road, because he seemed to feel like some semblance of nature was required scenery to break the news.  He walked me out next to a tree, the traffic sounds still audible, freeway in sight.  He told me my mom had died and then drove me home as I sobbed inconsolably in the passenger seat.  I suspect that if he thought this part through, he may have opted for the backyard.  I remember being mystified by the beautiful weather that day.  How could it be sunny?  Didn't the sky know what had happened?  Was the world really going to continue as if everything was the same?
Yes.  Every world but mine.

and suddenly i am compelled to write again

Some things happened recently.  What were the things?  How were they different from other things?  It is hard to begin to say.  Suddenly I want to write again.
Yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night and plodded upstairs into the bathroom to wee.  I turned the light on and went in and closed the door behind me.  I sat down and looked over at the door.  A shadow passed.  It looked like the light under the door flickered.  My eyes playing tricks on me?  I stood up and felt like something brushed against my feet.  And then I saw it, and I screamed.  If you know me, you know the scream I screamed.  It is the scream I make when I drop a spoon, not a knife.  It's the scream that errupts out of me as I try to suppress it simultaneously, saying to myself this is not screamworthy.  It sounds a lot like a mouse.  I know this because as I was screaming and running around the bathroom, so too was the mouse screaming and running around the bathroom, both locked in and doing our frightened little dance.  All I can say is it's a good thing I had already wee'd.
I thought as I was standing on the edge of the bathtub that maybe I should leave the mouse in the bathroom, since it clearly could not get out.  Maybe I could open the door quickly and rush out, and it would somehow be easier to trap it in this smaller enclosed space.  But the door was on the other side of the mouse, and I feel in the depths of my soul that the mouse and I both knew this was not actually going to happen.
I leaned over and opened the door, because I was always going to open the door.  I did it because rather than be trapped in a very small space with a diseased rodent, I would prefer to be in a slightly larger space.  These calculations, they are strictly emotional.  Reason is a lie we like to tell ourselves as if it differentiates us from the other animals.
If I could unzip myself into multiple versions and wander off to have alternate lives, I would spend one of those lives in the wilderness with the wild things.  I would touch base with civilization as little as possible, for coffee and socks and duct tape.  And in this alternate reality, I would not scream my little scream at the mice.  I would live in a fire tower or keep food in buckets, and if I saw a mouse I would say hey you.  Hey you.
In another life I study linguistics and learn sign languages and create a universal sign language like esperanto, only it would be way more awesome.  Because if you were speaking to someone who could hear, but couldn't understand your language, you could communicate effectively while teaching your own language.  And they could do the same with you.  You would be able to teach and learn a language while communicating effectively.
In another life I would learn to program computers and create a website that allows people to share resources like a dispersed library.  You could check out your neighbor's hammer, and your neighbor could give you a five star rating for returning it in good working order.  I would spend my whole life designing websites to share resources and refining them.
In another life I would only write.  I would write constantly unless reading.  I would write everywhere on everything, in bathroom stalls and in other people's books.  I would write so often and so effectively I would make a living doing it, and my vocabulary would never shrink, my skills get rusty, my habits fail me.  I would never break my heart and stop writing as if diseased and broken in a way I could scarcely have imagined before.
In some life, I have a dog and I teach children.  Mysteriously I don't long for alternate realities, because everyone I know is kind and good, I have the distinct sense that the world is getting better, and I never forget to brush my teeth.
Meanwhile, in the one life I really live, there is a mouse in my house.  We are aware of eachother.  I tell myself that some day soon I will catch it, but time is against me and in the midst of my procrastination, the mouse has gotten bigger.