Antes Que Anochezca

When I got home from work last night, I locked myself in the bathroom, turned on the hot water, and sat on the toilet seat, with my feet on the bathtub ledge, reading books in the steam.  After around an hour, I could breathe through my nose.  I was struck by this passage:

...Through his memories I recall hours on end sitting in the weeds in the backyard next to the lawn chair where my uncle lay in shorts and a wedding ring, his body hardened and brown from days of skin diving in faraway oceans filled with the mysterious fish and creatures he described.  I stared and stared and sometimes played with his arms for hours and I remember feeling a slight dizziness that years later I came to see first as a curse and then as a tool: a wedge that I might successfully drive between me and a world that was rapidly becoming more and more insane.

I guess it's pretty common for radically-aligned queer people to see their sexuality as a "tool" or a "wedge" - a privileged opportunity to distance yourself from an unsustainable world.  But I worry that it's getting less and less common.  I know I've asked this question in a billion different ways over the past few years, but: If being queer gets too easy, will it no longer serve such a crucial function?

Two nights ago, I dreamed I was sunbathing on an idyllic hillside - the kind with only one tree.  Joseph was hiding in my guitar-case, which was lying in the grass somewhere.  Suddenly I was apprehended by a bunch of Cuban soldiers, who said I was trespassing in Cuba.  They brought me and my guitar-case to a dungeon where I was tortured by a bunch of old ladies in masks.  When they were done, most of them left, but one lady stayed behind to guard me.  I told her to open the guitar-case, and she was so startled to find a human being in there that she had an emotional breakdown and let us free.  When I escaped the dungeon, I was in New Orleans.  Someone was chasing me, so I started leaping over the tops of the buildings, from roof to roof.  I had a gun, and I was indiscriminately shooting black people.  Then I woke up.

What a horrible dream, no!?!?   I mentioned it to Joseph and he said, "Those black folks could have been spared if they'd just offed you in Cuba."  And that is TRUE.  It got me wondering how my subconscious mind feels about the following subjects:

-Communism
-Leisure
-Art vs. Action
-Places where "natural disasters" have struck
-Race
-Privilege

I mean, in a way, the dream is quite direct.  A bunch of communists punish me for relaxing.  They torture me in Cuba, the same way my own government tortures people at Guantanamo Bay.  When I escape, I find myself confronted with the aftermath of a disaster, and my response is to kill the people most effected by that disaster. 

Ugh!  Guilt is so ugly and obnoxious!  Especially when it's VICARIOUS guilt.  Guilt for not preventing someone ELSE for doing something bad. 

Earlier that day, I donated money to a relief agency working in Myanmar.  Maybe this was my subconscious reaction to the puniness of that measure.  And yet: What else can we do?

That is not a rhetorical question.  Let's talk.
Love
Dan