Every night I dream chaotic dreams, usually set inside large rooms of a house or office.

The plots of the dreams vary but they all involve an activity, such as building something or being up against a deadline on a design job. My father often shows up in my dreams. He is always busy, until last night when he sat at the dinner table in his auto body shop overalls. He hadn’t washed his hands and was annoyed the TV was on in the next room. I felt there were other people at the table but I didn’t see them. Some dreams have hundreds of people in them and we’re all trying to escape something in an impossibly large house. Yesterday I had both types and woke at two in the morning. For a while I always woke at 3:33am. What I do to get myself in the mood to sleep follows a certain technique. I keep a book beside my bed and I read a few pages. Lately, I have a book of quotations. Just a few pages is enough to make me sleepy. The books are ones I have read before. Now I am rereading Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar. There are many poems in this collection. He writes in a free verse style without rhymes. A stream of consciousness. If I had a time machine I would go back two weeks before Richard Brautigan shot himself. I’d knock on the door of his house in Bolinas, California and explain to him that I’d come from the future and I had an important message for him. Because he was a creative writer he’d probably let me in. But just in case he was drunk and depressed and wouldn’t come to the door I’d write my message in a letter and slide it under the front door. I would explain that he was going to set all his newest writings in neat stacks on shelves and then he’d shoot himself in the head. There were a few flies in the house and they would lay their young in his fetid corpse and by the time he was found, three weeks later, there wouldn’t be much left of him that the maggots hadn’t eaten. I’m not sure there is an easy way to tell someone such a horrific true story. I might have to go back a month before he commits suicide. Maybe I could speak to him when he was in town buying booze or groceries. I am not a drinker so I couldn’t fool him about wanting to have a drink with him. Maybe in my note I could tell him specific things I know that will occur after he dies. I’d make up something about a beautiful woman who loves his writings. She wants to meet him. So I guess I’d have to get ahold of ten thousand dollars in 1970s paper money and bribe an attractive woman to seduce him. She’d have to be sincere. Maybe she’d be an actress. I could take a feature film script that was a box office hit, like Throw Momma From the Train, and say I was Billy Crystal’s cousin and a producer. I’d say this was an audition the woman needed to do to get the lead in the film. Maybe it wouldn’t be that film script. It could be another script, like The Big Lebowski, or Little Miss Sunshine. I’d tell her she’d get five thousand now and five thousand when Brautigan was talked out of killing himself. Or maybe I could try asking Brautigan to write a script and offer to pay him ten thousand dollars. Somehow I would stop him from killing himself. If he asked me why I cared whether he lived or died I’d tell him the truth, that I enjoy his writings and poetry and I own a time machine which I stole from a guy I know in my time. He’ll want to know more about my friend who invented the time machine. Lying to someone who is a creative writer is not an easy feat. I’m not a very good liar. When I lie my left eye twitches. Anyone will notice it. I do own a time machine. Well, ‘own’ is a bit of a lie. I stole it from a scientist neighbor of mine. We were having dinner at his apartment and he was telling me this crazy story about his latest invention. After dinner he drove me to his lab and he demonstrated how it worked. He took a white rabbit from a cage and put it inside the machine. He attached a note to its collar and had me write a message only I would understand. Then he pushed a few buttons and sent it one minute into the past. Then he brought the rabbit back and I read the note and I offered him fifty dollars for the machine. He laughed and said it was worth millions of dollars. He laughed so hard and then he started ranting about what a cheapskate I am and he had a fatal heart attack. That’s how I got the time machine. And I will explain this in my note to Richard Brautigan, or tell him in person in the liquor store or the grocery, or at his front door. Somehow, I will save Brautigan. It will be the first of many rescue efforts of people who shouldn’t have committed suicide, or been murdered. So many creative people have committed suicide.

Maybe I'd save Anthony Bourdain. I always enjoyed his cooking shows. He hung himself in the bathroom of his room in Le Chambard Hotel in Alsace, France. Jim Morrison allegedly died of an overdose in the bathroom of a Paris hotel. Chambard, in French, means "confusion or chaos." That seems eerily appropos. He'd had an argument a couple of days earlier with his girlfriend, Asia Argento. The kitchen is my favorite area of my home. You can find out a lot about somebody in a kitchen. It's not easy to stick around when things go sideways. Like Brautigan, Bourdain committed suicide because of a woman. They were both depressed personalities, with addictions. Vonnegut didn't kill himself, but he had a problem with depression. With him it came out as cynical humor. He never got over his mother killing herself with sleeping pills. And his beloved sister, Alice, died of cancer, two days before her husband died in a train wreck. That's spooky. And Vonnegut's WW2 experience as a prisoner in Desden could have figured into his depression. He survived the fire bombing of Dresden. I will try to save them all, and maybe I'll dream about my role as a time traveling anti-suicide superhero. It's the only superhero role Marvel hasn't done. I will need a cape and a non-polyester suit. My daughter says polyester puts microfibers of plastic in our bodies. So maybe I'll wear a cotton-silk blend. It might be safer. But, based on my near death experiences thus far, when it's my time I won't be able to dodge the Grim Reaper. This past week I was almost run over by two teenage boys going forty miles an hour on the sidewalk. I was only able to yell to one of them, "Get in the fucking bike path!" Neither slowed down. They were hell bent on suicide and murder if necessary to "break on through to the other side" as Morrison's lyric goes.

Parlez-vous français?

It's not easy to be fluent in any language. French is no exception. Bien sûr (of course). Grammatical rules like not pronouncing the 'h' in words, and combining words so the delivery is like a smooth wine, or something savory spread on la baguette. I look for logic in a language, but that isn't always easy. For example, why is it "la baguette" and not "le baguette? because a baguette resembles male anatomy, not female. For instance, most nouns in French that are openings are female, like la fenêtre (window) and la porte (door). And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Native French speakers have sayings that aren't in guide books or classrooms. 

My daughter is quite fluent. She's lived in Paris for sixteen years and is married to a Frenchman named Grégoire. He is quite fond of soccer and cheers on his favorite teams with "Allez! Allez! Allez!" (Go, go, go). He also likes tennis.

I've been to Paris a few times. I lived in the 19th arrondissement for a month in a huge apartment. The owner was a middle-aged Italian woman. She was an urban planner from Tuscany who was losing her peripheral vision. Her three children were beginning to help her by leading her around. Her keyboard has Braille on it now. My adventures have led me to write a novel titled 21 Days in Paris. Normally, a screenplay is adapted from a novel, but in this instance I did it the backwards way. I completed the screenplay in 2020 and submitted it to a handful of screenplay contests. It was the finalist in the 2021 Paris Film Festival. I have had six invitations to submit my "film" in various film festivals worldwide. So in 2022 I began writing the novel. It took a year or so. Because I am not fluent in French I had a lot of research to do. My son-in-law, Grégoire, read the first draft of the feature  screenplay and made some suggestions. The problem with this story is that most editors have no keen interest in France unless it is a horror story about a lesbian black woman. I wish I was exaggerating. That's how narrow a submissions window I am dealing with. Mostly women editors. And the male editors are mostly gay. So that's what they are looking for. It has been disheartening, but I am still trying to get the novel published. It's just one of six novels. For a francophile it's a good idea to read as much French as possible, and this memoir by Sarah Turnbull was an easy read. It reminded me of my daughter's story, although Turnbull is a journalist from Sydney, Australia who met a frenchman named Frederic while on assignment in Romania. Frederic is a lawyer and is used to a certain way of doing things. But relationships aren't easy, wherever they sprout. As of 2024, Sarah Turnbull and her husband, Frederic, are still together. Not sure how many children they had. The book came out in 2004. Here is Sarah on a 2024 podcast: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNsEjfJjZu4

This book is not my only francophile read. My father-in-law, Laurent, gifted me with his big memoir, Un Homo sapiens contemporain (A Modern Human Being). which is all in French. I have not been able to read much of it. In summary, he made his fortune in heating and air conditioning and now splits his time between his Paris apartment and a place in Croatia. I envy his decision to seek a Mediterranean climate.

My favorite place in France isn't Paris. I am in love with the Côte d'Azur (the South of France), and have been since I first visited it when I was eighteen years old. The hardest thing is to follow your heart. My life is slowing down, but I am hoping to visit the South of France again. You have to do what makes you happy.