It’s about twelve o’clock, and up the Tioga Pass, me and the temperature gauge are good friends. I had been dreading this climb for the last week, so much so that by the time I start talking to my temperature gauge, I’m already in the Tuolomne Meadows.
Back to those early years. I had another dream, and this one had plot twist.
It's an airplane, it's in the air. I'm in the seat at the front of coach. Next to me is a female fictional coworker or friend; brown hair, pale, of medium height. And then the plane is crashing. And I say something to her like, hold on, nothing we can do now, it won't be painful, it's all over.
And then we're in heaven.
Heaven. It's cloudy, it's cold, it looks like Brooklyn in the fall. The buildings are built on top of each other, courtyards are concrete. The hallways have litter; crumpled up paper, crumbs. The girl and I are shown to our room. Our room for eternity. The room hasn't been cleaned, it feels like the spare room at a fraternity house. The bedding is purple, the pillows are gold. Litter on the floor.
Now, this girl and I, we are instantly best friends in this dream because we know God made a mistake; her and I, we weren't bound for eternity. So we bust out of our bedroom-for-eternity and start belligerently tearing down the hallways of heaven.
Up stairs, on an elevator - I don't remember - down a hallway, maybe - and we enter a red brick room that's like a school cafeteria. Everybody's in medical clothes. There is a 'kitchen' in the cafeteria but on the conveyor belt and the food trays are human organs.
All these people, in lab coats they're working on these organs as they come out of the kitchen. They are assembling something, but they seem frustrated, confused.
What we find out is that all these people, they're trying to uphold the premise of heaven being this happy, perfect place. They’re exchanging and recycling their organs in a futile effort to preserve life indefinitely. Somehow, the culture of heaven is transfixed by the fiction of eternal life. But everybody is just a worker drone, just like back in real life.
So this girl and I, we tear off from the cafeteria. Down hallways now and there are more people in lab coats, holding hearts and kidneys and strings of intestines. So we start pushing all these people over, running through the hallways smashing the windows and tearing at the linoleum. We want God's attention and then I wake up.
At this point, I begin really getting into this idea of tapping into my subconscious. I want to be able to create.
In the end, this internal pursuit was fruitless. Certainly in me, that other person was locked away.
Although I always loved that sense of creativity in fiction, I was a severe critic of fiction with faulty premises. Even science fiction and fantasy - my favorites - required a world and characters that were realistic relative to their genre. I could see through Clive Cussler's egotistical characters and Terry Brooks' dwarves and elves as too iconic.
I needed realism in my fiction, because I found reality much, much, way much more strange and wonderful and shocking than fiction.
I started reading travel non-fiction by about age twelve. Paddle to the Amazon, about a Canadian father and son who canoe from Canada to Brazil gripped me. These two, they passed through my very backyard, down the Mississippi. They were shot at, snapped at by crocodiles, thrown in jail.
I was enthralled. But I questioned the book. I asked a neighbor about it. If it was fictionalized, exaggerated, it would be of no value to me, because fiction is stranger than fake non-fiction. 'How do we know these things really happened to them?' I asked my friend's dad. He said something like, 'that canoe trip was really followed by the media. All over the world they were writing about that. The events were independently verified.'
Fabrications and exaggerations are so engrained in so much of society, that at some point in life you realize that a lot of your acquaintances never learned to distinguish between myth and reality: words are so often taken at face value. All of us, we all have friends who even to this day send us hoax emails that had been discredited back in 1996. All the time people send us that picture of the guy on top of the world trade tower or a shark attacking the helicopter. So many people - college educated people - it's no wonder they get caught into weird religions and conspiracy theories and crackpot politics. People believe things just a little too easily.
Part of believing in real things and enjoying real events and credible history means having a profound sense of skepticism. It is a good value to have, especially as an observer. In life I became such a skeptic that I could sniff out any hoax, I thought. A few years ago, a friend of mine mentioned the story of Mike the Chicken.
Matt was the most literate person I knew. He read real books, he had sound theories about things. He could make people laugh, but his stories for real ones. He told me that a chicken, named Mike, lived for eighteen months after its owner chopped his head off in 1945.
I told Matt immediately, “Bullshit.”
