Meta-dream: A Manifesto of Contradiction

By T. James Vaughan

Every action is a mistake. Every meal is a waste.
Reality is delusion. Life is death.
Death by dumb luck, or by dumb choice.
The end is nigh, and that’s exactly the way it should be.
This is A Manifesto of Contradiction, and it’s all lies. A record from an alternate universe, Meta-Dream does not exist. Should not exist. And yet, here it is.
Suffering with isolation, drudgery and depression, delivery driver James drives himself insane, and his car into a time-warp, trapping him in a nightmare of his own creation. Now he must rebuild the life he destroyed, and face his own worst enemy…
Himself.
Ride along with a blue-collar philosopher and journey through an all-too-real and present America, where War is Peace, Debt is Wealth, Corporations are People, and God’s Money rules over a nation of drunkards, machines, and slaves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Oct 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483436012

Book preview

META-DREAM

A MANIFESTO OF CONTRADICTION

JAMES VAUGHAN

Copyright © 2015 James Vaughan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3602-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3601-2 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 09/25/2015

Contents

Prologue   The House

Chapter Ø   Square One

Chapter 1   Awake

Chapter 2   Jack-O-Lanterns

Chapter 3   Money

Chapter 4   Tv

Chapter 5   Depression

Chapter 6   Cars

Chapter 7   People

Chapter 8   You

Chapter 9   I

Chapter 10   Lucid Dreams

Chapter 11   Music

Chapter 12   The Redhead

Chapter 13   Crash

Chapter 14   The River

Chapter 15   Voices

Chapter 16   Time

Chapter 17   Snow

Chapter 18   Black And White

Chapter 19   The Bed And The Knife

Chapter 20   Contact

About The Author

To Shorty

Peace and Love

PROLOGUE

The House

There’s a lean to this house, a tilt. You feel it as soon as you step inside. Pictures hang crooked. None of the doors or window frames are parallel with the ceiling. Water collects in one corner on the rim of the bathroom sink. Bacon grease or stir-fry juice rolls to one side of the pan, and if you spill something on the kitchen floor it runs diagonally to the northeast, pooling along the counter near the back door. That’s the lowest corner of the house. Just standing there makes you feel unbalanced. The basement is mostly level and stone solid like any other old Mankato basement but there are cracks in the foundation you can see daylight thru. Between the foyer and living room there’s a huge sliding door that moves like a slab of rock because the frame is so warped and tilted. Closing it all the way is impossible.

Oddly, your bedroom tilts to the southeast. The whole top floor sags directly under your long south wall, which runs above the middle of the kitchen. The south side of the mattress is propped up with 3 textbooks (chemistry especially). Without the books it feels like you’re sliding to the side of the bed. Facing west at your desk, the pull of gravity is stronger on your back and left, and if a dog-eared tennis ball drops anywhere in the room it’ll trundle reluctantly across the floorboards toward the bed and closet on the east end. The room is long and narrow, 7x15', which would be mildly suffocating if you were claustrophobic.

The overall effect is that this house makes you drunk. Whenever you come home in this heat all you want to do is sit down, bury yourself in the couch and pass out with the TV on, rather than climb the steep stairs to your room where it’ll be too muggy to sleep anyway. Then once you’re down for the count, the shoes and socks and maybe the shirt have to come off. Too hot to leave extraneous layers on.

Ok, maybe not so much drunk as lazy. Maybe it’s the mellow red-brown shag in the living room, so soft and forgiving on the eyes and toes—but who knows what’s living in there. Maybe it’s having potheads for roommates—Hey man, wanna get lit?—and that phantom odor always around is getting to you, or maybe you’re just smoking too much, or not enough. Or maybe it is just this damn heat.

Maybe it’s not really the house, it’s just you. There’s a lean in your life, a tilt to the south. Your attitude toward life has always been well-intentioned, practical and sound, but whoever or whatever drafted your blueprint left a gap somewhere or didn’t use enough nails or something and so all your best efforts tend to fall just askew of target because of your faulty construction.

But this house is a lot older than you. This house has seen its fair share of plumbers and painters, parties and potheads and minor vandalism, like the cupid heart spray-painted on the tree out front, or the cartoon characters carved on giant Styrofoam blocks covering all the windows in the basement, with the rafters fish-netted by 100 generations of spiders. Surely it didn’t start out with an inherent fault or a tendency to fall apart—it’s just the ground it stands on: a Minnesota flood plain. So in the house’s case, the origin of this problem is leaning toward external causes. In other words, the tilt is likely an effect of the environment, not the design—but, in your case? How solid is your ground?

***

Rain. Just sprinkling, though. I’m going to be late for class, but that’s ok. That doesn’t concern me. The prof don’t mark tardies anyway. I’ve got to work late tonight after class, and tomorrow morning. That doesn’t concern me either. I’m not really concerned about anything right now—how wonderful—because I’m a realist. A Buddhist might tell you, "It isn’t what it is. I say, It is what it is." Rain is rain. School is school. Work is work. Time is not money.

The bell tower chimes 6. I’m close enough to the tower in the sparse campus arboretum, that I can hear every peal crystal clear, I can almost taste the electronic bronze bells as they echo against the dark blue sky, bruised with wet storm-clouds. Now, I’m definitely late, but no rush.

For once, even though I’m dead tired, a bit sick, a bit stressed, with too much on my mind and too much on my plate, nothing is wrong or amiss. Right now, it doesn’t really matter what time it is, what obligations I have, or how little sleep I’ll be getting tonight. I just am, regardless of where I am or what I’m doing, I simply am. Isn’t that nice? I savor this moment.

***

This place could be Anywhere, USA, like every Springfield and Washington before it, and like the house, built up with local limestone and painted an ambiguous gray. Mankato (man-KAY-toe) isn’t named after a white guy, though. Like lots of New World sites it’s a misspelling of a native word, Mahkato, which means blue earth. (The misspelling translates to blue skunk.) The Blue Earth River feeds into the Minnesota River, and the Minnesota cuts thru town, dividing the house and North Mankato from Regular Mankato. Unlike the natives who probably had to cross the river in a canoe, you can just take the wide cement bridge that connects Belgrade with Mulberry, and then you’re standing right between downtown and oldtown. Or you can hop down highway 169, take the Riverfront exit, and there you are at Cub Foods, Kwik Trip, Topper’s Pizza, Smokes 4 Less—everything you need is right there. Then it’s just a climb up the valley to get to school. The natives didn’t have any of those things, they just had the woods and the river. You don’t have to worry about your survival, or your family’s survival, the way they did, everyone did, during the Dakota War of 1862, also known derogatorily as the Sioux Uprising. Around 400-800 white settlers were slaughtered. Thirty-eight convicted natives were hanged here in consequence. Largest mass execution in American history. Virtually everyone from around here with local relatives has ancestors who were involved. The guy with the rusty pick-up next to you in traffic might have a great-great-great-great uncle or something who was shot with an arrow, or maybe a distant Dakota cousin who escaped hanging. Wouldn’t that be interesting? Everyone’s got a story to tell, whether they know it or not.

Here and now, in Stolen Native Land, USA (which is what a world of honest assholes would call it), you face all the same problems as anywhere else in post-9/11 America: unemployment and failing business, social unrest, homelessness, alive-and-kicking racism, poor educational systems, stagnant politics, crumbling infrastructure, and a growing populace eager to herald in a new golden age, but unable or unwilling to learn from the past and dump their inherited ignorance. Here all you want to do is make yourself a home somewhere and the world around you is shitting on everyone’s doorstep. At least you haven’t had any floods lately.

Globally speaking Minnesota floods are weak competitors, btw. You get your feet wet, sure—maybe even your knees—but this isn’t Malaysia, or China, or New Orleans. You don’t get many monsoons, hurricanes, or tidal waves. Just big-ass plain storms, tippy-top of tornado alley. Some people don’t take those sirens seriously, but you probably should, because you never know when a twister will rip right thru your ceiling and escort you bodily to kingdom come.

But on top of the floods and tornadoes (not to mention the blizzards) and the multitude of social ills, you’ve still got to deal with this lean that threatens to topple you and your house. Perhaps if you could fix one you could fix the other, right? Well, no, unfortunately. No wooden shim will level this house and no drug regimen will right your life. You’re both too far gone and you’ve got nowhere to fall but the river. That blue-brown water may look refreshing and serene but even if you couldn’t see the mills and factories and sewer drains lining the riverfront you can still smell that industrial cooked-macaroni smell and imagine all the shit that’s in the water. You can hear the wail of cars and trucks rushing past on the highway, the clacking and whistling as trains rumble by, feel their vibrations shaking the house, and that god-awful bang they make when they’re humping train cars together. That bang is violent enough to wake you up at night, almost as bad as when lightning strikes nearby and the crack of thunder sounds like an explosion next to your window—or, in a sufficient dream state, like a UFO taking off from a dead hover right above your roof straight into outer space, zero to 60,000 in less than a second.

It’s all just so noisy and smelly and wrong that it makes you want to do something about it, makes you want to stand up on that bridge and shout, Stop! You’ve got the right idea, but sidewalk sermons won’t get you far. Shelf that thought. Everyone wants truth and change but when it’s staring them in the face they’re likely to do one of 3 things: ignore it, get angry about it, or panic. You might entertain the thought of just sitting on the bridge with a cardboard sign that says, The WORLD won’t CHANGE until YOU DO! That’ll show ’em.

No, the best thing you can do is just forget about the lean in your house, clean the shit off your doorstep and just let it be. Let—it—be. Hardship is what makes life interesting in the first place. As Buddha would say, Life is profoundly unsatisfactory, and, as cartoon Calvin’s dad would say, Being miserable builds character.

CHAPTER Ø

Square One

A bridge stands at heaven’s door, from one land to the other. You have to cross it right, or you won’t make it to the light. If you fail, light and darkness are identical.

Here I am, at the beginning. Or the end. All the same, really. Things have changed, are changing, will change.

I stand on square one, a sidewalk square at the crest of the icy cement bridge, laced with ribbons of wet sealant that still looks fresh and wet, glistening amber in the lamplight. The metal railing reaches above my eyes. I hoist myself up onto my arms to look at the river. Yellow streetlights wash over the white snow, and a wide crack in the ice shows the river running strong underneath. Waves of light dance in the dark water.

I have the urge to jump. Just to see if I can do it. Like when I was a boy.

My mouth moves, Yeah,

Yeah. I can do it.

But I won’t.

I was engaged to a redhead. I was a father. I had a great job, successful. I had everything I could’ve wanted, needed, or hoped for.

But then I fucked it all up, and now I’m standing on this bridge. The world is dead and frozen now. Watching the water ripple, I see the change. Everything changing, changing, changing. Now, and now, and now.

Things change too fast, sometimes.

I set my ass on the railing and my back against the light pole. Unsteady hands free the glass pipe out of my pocket and stuff a few shreds of weed in the bowl. I hit it once, hard, and exhale wispy white smoke indistinguishable from breath.

Mere ritual.

The sturdy little pipe smokes still, glowing red, white, yellow and blue, lazing so carelessly in my hand that I can tell it wants to be free, it wants to succumb to gravity.

So I let it go.

The pipe tumbles down into the river many meters below, slipping under the water with a barely audible blip.

CHAPTER 1

Awake

There’s a knock knock on heaven’s door, and it’s my door. It’s my roommate, it’s 7:30, it’s early it’s late. My dreams dissolve and the last few bits of strange dimensions stick to the side of my braincase, dripping like glue into the depths of consciousness.

Wanna make French toast? Niko says thru the door. I sit up, still under covers. My mouth moves,

Yeah.

Where am I again?

Why do we need to wake up? We should just dream all the time.

I was engaged to a redhead. I dreamt I met the most beautiful redhead. I loved her, asked her to marry me and soon as it happened I regretted it. Sweet love turned terrible, soured into anxious dread.

I was playing a game. We were kids, a handful of wild youngsters. We ran with each other for what seemed like days, chasing in and out of here and there, nurseries, gyms, and hallways, racing around with various characters. Then, at the very end of the dream, we started playing a game where we all held knives in the dark. I didn’t know the rules, but the girl with us was it, and she had to go down the line of boys, touching each one’s folding knife.