[dreams] Inching closer to death, except the inches are going by faster and faster

by

17

I have been dreaming more of loss of friends and my shrinking life. Ah, cancer.

Two nights ago, it was a long, involved narrative about [info]danjite selling all his stuff and driving away in an old Dodge Charger, never to be seen again.

Last night in my dream I was out of work, and trying to get a new job. This involved speculative selling of a custom print solution for office documentation and Advo flyers. (Trust me, that actually means something in real life.) I wound up at a small party with a new author, possibly Max Gladstone. In my dream, he’d just signed with Night Shade. (Though in real life, Max is a Tor author.) As part of Max’s contract payment, Jeremy Lassen had given him a bottle of some liquor. The bottle had been cast (or carved) into a very accurate sculpture of a man’s athletic shoe, about a size 30. The neck of the bottle was the opening at the top of the shoe, and the cap was a quarter scale lifelike rendering of the head of Lee Arenberg in his makeup as Pintel in Pirates of the Caribbean [ imdb ].

Ok, brain. What? I mean, I understand the feeling of being eclipsed by other writers as I slide slowly and all-too-silently toward death. (I haven’t written a word of fiction since June, and quite possibly never will again.) I can handle the symbolism of being out of work and celebrating/being envious of others’ publishing contracts. But Lee Arenberg? Shoe liquor? What?

Sometimes I baffle myself.

More from my site

17 thoughts on “[dreams] Inching closer to death, except the inches are going by faster and faster”

  1. Mari_Kurisato says:
    August 18, 2013 at 7:08 am

    Huh, that’s bootlegging it I guess.

  2. Kenneth says:
    August 18, 2013 at 9:39 am

    I can see how, as a fiction author, you might experience yourself as sliding “all-too-silently” toward death, but your writing here about your life–and your dying–speaks volumes. It tells even total strangers (like me) about what an amazing person you are, so full of energy even in your illness. (Man, you do one thing after another; you take a trip that’s exhausting and turn around and take another trip, and then do it again, and have house guests, and attend your own wake, and I could go on.) But more important than giving readers the gift of seeing a part of you, what you are writing is important for those who care about someone who has cancer or is dying, or for someone who had a loved one die of cancer. The vast majority of people are neither articulate nor honest in the face of death, and you are both. And that is important writing. Thank you.

Comments are closed.