It’s been a long time since I’ve dreamed of flying or floating or even just doing that thing where I’m running along and I fall forward and find myself skimming along the ground. Or, there’s the one where I climbed a tree all the way to the top until it bent over and catapulted me all the way over to the top of another tree. I also classify most swimming dreams in this same category because usually I am swimming very fast, like flying, and sometimes I actually launch up out of the water like a dolphin. The point is, it’s been a long time, years, since I’ve had any sort of dream like this.

Over the past few years the most common re-occurring theme in my dreams is fishing. I know it sounds innocent, but the fishing is always wrong. I’ll be fishing in a place where you just wouldn’t expect to find anything worth fishing for, like a fountain or a shallow swamp or the grassy low ground of a freeway interchange that’s been flooded after a big storm. Then there’s my fishing tackle; it’s all wrong too. I’ll be fishing with those big lures with feathers all over them that are designed for catching marlins or something, not whatever lives in the wrong places where I am fishing. Or there was the time when I had a hot dog threaded onto my hook like a big stiff worm. Yeah, I know, it’s sexual as hell. But maybe a hot dog is just a hot dog. Finally, I always catch something, but whatever I catch is also wrong. I once caught a pure white dolphin. Another time I caught an octopus that had hair all over it.

Wrong place, wrong bait, wrong fish. It’s kind of obvious what it adds up to: wrong life. Going after the wrong things in the wrong places and using the wrong approach.

Last week I was a project manager for a big software development company; next week I’m going to be a farmer.

“Two weeks notice? We’re in the middle of an eighteen month project and you give me two weeks notice? It’s gonna take me at least a month just to get HR to approve the paperwork for a replacement. Six weeks to sort through résumés and do interviews. Whoever I choose is going to want to give their employer at least four weeks notice, and then it’ll take another month to get them up to speed. I had a boss who used to say that new people were useless for the first six months. Took “em that long just to figure out where the bathrooms were.”