Dream Log: Awkward Closeness With Bernie & AOC

I dreamed that Bernie and AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were a couple. (Only in the dream! In waking life, I have no reason to suspect they're a couple.)

I dreamed that they and I were sharing a small house near the corner of 17th and Laurel in the Fort Sanders area of Knoxville, Tennessee, or to put it more precisely: they were renting the house, and renting a small room to me. I felt very cramped, very uncomfortable. I felt like the 3 of us were always on top of each other. I wanted to move out.

In real life, I lived in the Fort Sanders area for a number of years. I've most recently seen Knoxville in 1992. In those days, Fort Sanders was a residential neighborhood which ran from 11th Street to 24th Street, and its southern boundary was Cumberland Avenue. On the other side of Cumberland from 11th to 17th, the campus of the University of Tennessee was across Cumberland from the Fort, and from 17th to 24th there was the Strip, which consisted of stores, restaurants and bars on both sides of Cumberland.

I imagine it's possible that the area has changed quite a bit since 1992, but in my dream, it hadn't changed much at all.

In my dream, I had been hired by the Sanders 2020 campaign in some unclear capacity. It was unclear to me: I didn't know what my job responsibilities were.

I was hauling a backpack up the hill from the Strip. It was full of chains whose links were an inch and a half long and a quarter-inch thick. The pack was very heavy. Besides being difficult to carry up the hill, it was so heavy that I was concerned that the straps on the backpack would break.

I was not at all certain whether Bernie and AOC would have considered me carrying that backpack up that hill to be a good use of my time as a campaign employee, or not. They could have said Yes, that's fine, or No, why the Hell is he doing this, or Why doesn't he have a motor vehicle to do this, or Why is he messing with the chains at all -- no conceivable answer would have surprised me, because I couldn't read Bernie or AOC, I couldn't tell what they thought or felt about me or anyone or anything else.

I finally got the pack all the way up the hill and into the house. My muscles were aching all over my body.

Besides the 3 of us who were living there, Bernie, AOC and I, many people were coming and going in the small house: other campaign workers, volunteers, reporters, people from the Democratic Party, and Other People.

I went to the kitchen to get a drink of water, and then I woke up, and got a drink of water irl.

Martha Nussbaum, Non-Insider

In 1947 Martha Nussbaum was born. Her name at birth was Martha Craven. She claims to have repudiated her own "aristocratic" upbringing and to dislike elites and in-groups, whether it's the Bloombury group or Derrida. She has taught at Harvard, Brown and the University of Chicago, received more than 60 honorary degrees, and a few days ago she won the Berggruen Prize, which comes with a $1 million cash award.

In the mid-1980's, when Nussbaum was a professor in both the Classics and Philosophy Departments at Brown, she published The Fragility of Goodness, a book which added considerably to her already considerable prestige in academia. In the late 1980's, I was a Collage Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. We College Scholars were given The Fragility of Goodness to read. Prof Nussbaum came to the University of Tennessee to speak. There was a Q&A after her lecture. I asked several questions.

I have never been particularly drawn to nor particularly repelled by Nussbaum's writing. I think I went to the trouble of coming up with questions for her because I was drawn to the aura of power around her. Double full professor in the Ivy League at around age 40, that's sumpin. Many camerapeople followed her around, including at least one video camera crew. I don't remember what my questions were. I'm quite certain they were uninteresting.

By this time, 1988 or early 1989, I had heard the name Derrida, but not with connotations which tempted me to read him.

Bill Moyers interviewed Prof Nussbaum on TV about The Fragility of Goodness. In his introduction, there are several shots of Nussbaum's visit to the University of Tennessee. In one shot, from behind the speaker's lecturn, in the upper-left corner of the screen, is a small smudge which may or may not be me.

In 2007, Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher whom I still liked somewhat at the time, despite numerous German-speaking friends having assured me that he was an asshole, published a book about Derrida. That was the first time I was strongly tempted to read a text either by or about Derrida. However, my competence in the German language never ceases to grow, and the more precisely I'm able to understand Sloterdijk, the less I like him. I didn't get a copy of Sloterdijk's book about Derrida, nor, at the time, did I get any books by Derrida.

Less than 2 months ago I finally began to read Derrida. I've taken an immediate and immense like to him. I'm a postmodernist! Who knew?!

What 31 Years Did

I just found out that last June, a man I used to know and profoundly annoy personally was named the first-ever Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee.

I... Don't know how to feel about this.

The first time I ever heard him, or heard about him, for that matter, was in 1985, when he suddenly showed up at a small private party in Knoxville, playing guitar and harmonica and also a tambourine he'd attached to one foot somehow and singing Bob Marley's "Redemption Song." It was also the first time I'd ever heard that song.

The song and the man have never sounded better to me than they did at that moment back in 1985. Yeah, all downhill from there. Kidding. The beer and the weed and party and the newness of him and of the song all had a lot to do with how he sounded to me at that moment.

And now he's Poet Laureate of Knoxville. I guess it goes to show you... something.

For 31 years I've wondered whether he was singing at that party because, living nearby, he heard a party going on and just decided to drop in and jam, or if they paid him to play. It wasn't his fault, not in the slightest, but I happened to be homeless and starving at the time. In large part because I was profoundly clueless about economics. Economic things such as whether that was him dropping in on friends or a paid gig. Like whether the people who'd invited me to the party were rich enough to summon musicians whenever they felt like it, as if they were Medieval monarchs, or whether they seemed rich to me because I was homeless and missing meals... and clueless about economics... and it has occurred to me just very lately that I'm still profoundly clueless about economics, and very lucky to no longer be going hungry, and profoundly clueless about who knows what all else... I constantly wonder about things which I assume are not all that mysterious to some others.

Such as about how a guy goes from hanging around (not a lot. Like I say, I annoyed him. Sorry. Really, I am) with the likes of me to becoming Poet Laureate of the Great Bermuda Triangle of the Appalachians, la-dee-freakin-da, while I became... well -- while I became The Wrong Monkey, whatever that is.

So give me my freakin Nobel Prize already because I used to hang out with and annoy the very first Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee.

The last time I talked with him, or the last time I remember, was in 1992, and although usually he had been very nice to me, very patient, this time, for the first time, he completely lost his patience (Or -- another example of the sort of thing I wonder about all the time -- had he completely lost his patience with me quite often before this, and this was just the first time I'd noticed?) and exclaimed, "What's wrong with you?!" and I told him I didn't know. I guess I know now that it was autism, and that is was being undiagnosed and not knowing that it was autism, not knowing that I could learn about my condition and thus mitigate it at least to a certain extent, knowing that there are certain things the vast majority of people tend not to like.

I don't blame him for exploding at me like that, really I don't. But since then I haven't wanted to be his friend either. I don't blame him for hurting me, but all the same, it hurt. And I wondered, and I've wondered since then, if we ever were friends before that or if it only occasionally seemed that way to me. I wonder whether that moment was at all memorable to him. And if so, what was it like? Like nothing much at all? Or did it make him feel bad that he lost his temper? Or did he feel good because it seemed I'd finally, finally gotten the message: "Fuck off!" ? Or was that not the message, not then and never? Have I greatly overstimated (or underestimated) the annoyance I caused him?

And I wonder how to wind up a weird blog post like this one. I wonder about so many things. All the time.