Dear Diary

This nonsense is not journaling, a creditable undertaking sometimes to seek God or to be found by. Although thinking and writing helps keep me sane, when my weblog posts sink to the level of Dear Diary, I’ll see it’s time to quit. Now, for example. About 1:40, wakened, thankfully, from an anxiety dream by Linda rubbing my chest because I was shouting. An absurd dream, dark of night, encountering trespassers in the garage when I went for my car. I remember the color of their clothes, and they were as frightened as I as I picked up a large piece of wood and moved toward them, shouting. The underground garage beneath the house of a friend I’d been visiting. One of you had been with me, headed for your own car elsewhere in the garage. I don’t recall the garage from before, but the house itself has been in my dreams several times of late. An enormous house with a large section that is unused, vacant and unfurnished, ignored. The residents never go there.

So far as I discern, it has nothing to do with my house, but why a new anxiety dream? My other two standard anxiety dreams are about, called up in the Navy, reporting aboard a large warship, summoned over the 1MC to the admiral’s cabin, can’t find my proper uniform, can’t remember what rank I am, don't know if I'm now a chaplain or what, getting lost trying to make my way around the ship, and the sailors I meet in the passageways just stare at me and move on.

In the other dream I am supply priest at a church, usually a parish I served in the past but they’ve totally changed around, can’t find my vestments or my sermon notes as I hear the congregation singing the opening hymn, searching for a vestment to borrow, can’t find the back door into the pulpit as they finish singing the sermon hymn.

This is a new anxiety dream, empty rooms in a vast unexplored area of a house with a section that is almost like a cave, perfectly accessible, cavernous, empty room after empty room, some only partly finished, where no one ever goes.

Got up to honor Father Nature, saw lights moving outside on the Bay, went out to watch a very large ship moving past my balcony, the lights of two tugs waiting for her just around the turn in the channel to my right. My copy of the vessel schedule says, if I have the right ship for 22 March, her last port was Panama, her next port Liverpool. Time, 1:48 AM. Back to bed, but couldn’t fall asleep. Nine to two, five hours.

Coffee now, splash of half and half for a change. Why the nightmare, supper was pleasantly sixteen raw almonds because an article in my monthly heart health magazine says it’s a snack recently shown to take off stomach fat, a one-ounce bit of lambpatty folded into a slice of 40 calorie whole wheat bread, glass of cabernet.

After dark last evening someone set off a noisy and brilliant fireworks display across the Bay, perhaps at Bay Point, couldn’t tell for sure. Or it could have been beyond the point at St. Andrews State Park. It was not from the twin-masted schooner, still anchored and waiting.