Tuesday 23 May 2000

Pic of the day: Found this un-opened shirt, from sometime this last year, while I was searching for Bedside Loverboy.

Uh, this may require some clarification for new readers. The paperback book Bedside Loverboy is a collection of illustrated jokes from ca 1960, and is actually in quite good taste. It is poking fun at contemporary gender roles, and in particular the big, cute, stupid husband known as Loverboy. Our would-be hero stumbles from error to embarassment in a wide range of situations. I felt like finding the book again, for reasons I shall not detail here, but it is lost in the Chaos Node.

Crashing dreams

Ooops! It seems that my diaries the last two days have been virtually unreadable in Netscape! My shamefaced apologies to the poor souls who have had this compounded atop the daily suffering of using an inferior browser ... ahem. OK. Apologies anyway, and I've fixed the stupid markup error now. You can go back and read them, if you're still with me. "If it looks strange in Netscape" people will say automatically, "you have forgotten to close a tag." Indeed, and it was even a tag that was obsolete and should never have been opened. Opera and even IE, being designed with dummies in mind, tactfully ignored the error and showed me the page the way I wanted it to be, not the way I told it to be. BIG difference, obviously!

Yes, I have continued my experiments to find some, any, use for Cascading Style Sheet. Next to myself, you are my guinea pigs. Your feedback is much appreciated. I have however downloaded an old Netscape now. "Netscape Navigator 4.0" it says when opening. It's sort of sad that one needs three browsers to write a diary. Perhaps I should have kept it simple.

Then again, I have had fun with sheets since my childhood, so why should style sheets be any different? :)

***

Tonight I dreamt that I was visiting SuperWoman and her family. I was alone in a room and looking out the window at the beautiful evening sky, praying to God for health and a long life. Then a small, strange looking plane came from the left side of the house and in the direction I was looking. A thin wisp of smoke came from the part of the plane that was closest to me. It was flying too low over the suburbs, and it dawned on me that the plane would crash. It disappeared down behind a low ridge, and shortly thereafter I saw a lorry being thrown into the air, rising above the ridge, turning over and falling down. Shaken by the sight, I went to tell the others.

But the girls had gone to the mall, and the mall was strange with small rooms and corridors instead of large spaces. I met a small girl wearing a mask. She recognized me and led me down long, large, winding stairs to a living quarter of exclusive style, paneled in rare woods.

Later in the dream - or a later dream, perhaps - I was on the farm where I was born. I was looking south through the windows as I heard the sound of a helicopter. It was a strange looking helicopter, and it was flying too low over the farm. It dawned on me that it was going to crash. I ran out, and saw the small helicopter crash in the low hillside that our house was built on, closer to the barn. But instead of fire there was an explosion of electricity. My next to oldest brother was hit by it. He survived and came walking towards us. I ran up to him, and he winced as I touched his bare upper body. He had marks that looked less like burn marks and more like a rash, and they covered much of him. None of us was interested in looking at the wreck.

***

In the dream, I typically prayed for health and a long life only for myself, not even thinking about including others. This reminds me of an episode several years ago, in the early phase of the computer use at our workplace. I and a couple dozen other people from around the country were sent to a two day conference, or seminar, about the new computing tools and stuff related to that. This was held, of all places, in a village on Norway's west coast, outside one city there. I think the place was called "Fiskarstrand" or some such. Certainly it was about fish somehow? Enough of that. In this case the road is more important than the goal, as the oriental saying goes.

I had taken the train from Kristiansand over Oslo to Åndalsnes; this had taken all day and some of the night. Then aboard a bus taking me the rest of the way. We had not driven all that long before we came to a section of the road that was part of a steep mountainside, virtually vertical stone on both sides of the road. I have traversed plenty of such, both in my mountaineous home province and here on the south coast, and I never liked them. But this time a terror came over me. I was so tired that all I wanted to do was sleep (which I do easily enough in bus). But the fear drove me awake and I silently prayed to God for my bare life. Being magnanimous and saintly, I even included the rest of the bus. (As if I'd somehow not share its fate.) Eventually we passed into other terrains, and I got my rest.

Early that morning, the mountain side slid down into the fjord, taking with it a young woman driving to work. Neither she nor her car were seen again.

***

A philosopher I may be, but I do not quite say in my heart when I see another suffering: "Perish if you will, I am safe". No, I feel guilt and doubt like any one of you. And I know that eventually, one day, the bells will toll for me, and for my loved ones (who probably don't even know that they are such). Eventually there will be a prayer unanswered - or as someone said: All our prayers are answered, but sometimes the answer is NO.

Until then, I shall live with my hopes and my fears and my doubts and my errors, in a reality that is sometimes crystal clear and bright, other times like seen through a glass, darkly. And I intend to report on it as long as I can.