I dream a lot at night. Every night I dream. However, last night was the first time I have not had a dream that was a complete hamster wheel of a hustle, and was just an interesting vision from my home. There is a lot in that sentence that makes sense to me, but I need to unpack for anyone reading this, but also so that I draw a little line in the sand of my journey with a stick. My dreams are always a television channel left on overnight, but when it comes to which channel is left on, it is something that is very much influenced by how I am doing overall when it comes to being Kin Lane.
For about four years now, my dreams are just what I consider digital hamster wheel hustles. If you’ve ever seen the movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World from 1963, it is a more incoherent, less funny, and cybernetic version of that. Sometimes I wake up more exhausted than when I went to bed. I get myself wound up in the day and it is something that plays out in my dreams. I am always chasing some cryptographic puzzle, system hack, or other inevitable digital adventure that I am stuck in. The world winds me up. Technology winds me up. Capitalism seems to wind me too far up. I live a very kinetic existence, and my dreams are just a reflection of this reality. I don’t always properly manage the cycles and find myself in a bad way, in my regular day, but also in my dreams.
When I am home, in heaven, or the beautiful place, it is in a dream version of the Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia. I know it sounds weird, but the hotel is a recurring place in my dreams from long before I ever laid my eyes on the waterfront hotel. I’ve since spent many nights there roaming the halls, just like I am in my dreams. When I am in a good place in my real life, I spend my nights attending concerts, dinners, and parties there. All my dead best friends are there. Rock stars are there. It is where I go home in my dreams. I know every inch of the place and have been dreaming about it since the 1980s. I haven’t gone there in my dreams since before covid. Luckily I’ve gone there in real life, so it kind of makes up for it.
Since Isaiah passed I haven’t gone there. I also haven’t gone there since I worked at Postman. Maybe it was Covid. IDK. Likely a combination of all three. My dreams since 2020 have all been cybernetic hamster wheel hustles where I am stuck in the gears of late stage capitalism with digital velocity. Last night I was just sitting in the hall drinking tea and waiting for my friends to arrive so we could go see Pink Floy play in the great ballroom. We weren’t chasing any crypto devices that meant to destroy the world. I wasn’t stuck on some hellish hamster wheel that I could get off. I was thinking about the way the soft leather upholstery felt on the chair I was sitting in, and the excitement I had that Manny, my best friend from my youth, was coming to the show. I miss Manny. I would give anything to go to a Pink Floyd show with him.
It felt nice to go home for a little while. Even just one night. I mean, I am a soldier, and I signed up for this shit. But goddamn I miss the way sitting in those chairs felt, and a big bear hug from Manny. I just can’t let myself get spun out to the level I found myself in May of 2023. The cybernetic startup hamster wheel is fucking unforgiving and meaningless. In a pandemic it will suck whatever is left of the nutrients in your soul, and sell it back to you. When you are also burying a kid and trying to keep it together for your wife you are struggling to keep it together, you feel very thin, chewed up, and unable to function each day. I don’t feel like that anymore. Shit is still hard, but it isn’t in that red zone of the tachometer where everything is about to blow. Don’t get me wrong. I love a good cybernetic hustle which requires endless cycles on a late stage capitalism hamster wheel as much as the next guy, but this round I came dangerously close to one of those big gears and almost got ground into nothing.
