Eddie Whitlock's Blog: Reader and Writer - Posts Tagged "chickens"

“Sickness will surely take the mind where minds don’t usually go.” – a line from the rock-opera Tommy by the Who.

I was in high school when that movie premiered and I had to see it because Elton John was the Pinball Wizard. When I did see it, I was impressed with the whole thing.

The girl who was ever-so-briefly my girlfriend at the time got the Tommy album by the Who afterwards because she was a lot cooler than I was. (Actually another boy had bought her the album, but he was a lot cooler than I was, too.)

Anyhow, this is not about Tommy. It’s about sickness.

I think sometimes that dreams are mental illness: that we have brief little takes on what it’s like to live in the illogical world of the mentally ill. Some of those little takes yield ideas that challenge us to consider alternatives to the “logical world.”

For me, those little takes include some pretty bizarre trips into places where there is knee-deep snow and no visible streets and houses occupied by ghosts. There are places where the zombie apocalypse is strictly for entertainment purposes and yields the opportunity for target practice without the fear of horrid death.

There are places where my dead father is still alive, his death a misunderstanding and his advice and help and support still right there where I need it.

Last night’s little stroll into insanity included a chicken egg that had something alive in it, something black and feathered and hideous and that I didn’t want to see so I washed the rotting shell until it gradually disintegrated in my hand and the thing I didn’t want to see got caught in the sinktrap where it squirmed just enough that I would know it was not dead.

Yeah, I like my dreams, even the ones that totally creep me out. I know that they are just little excursions into insanity, little trips into a world that I can’t get to any other way.