David McElroy

There was a very brief period when I passionately wished I could have her back. It’s been so long that I have trouble remembering when it was. Maybe a dozen years ago? I’m not sure.

I no longer think about her very often — although I’ve written about her before — but I dreamed about her Tuesday night. I have no idea why. As I thought about the dream right after I woke up this morning, my first thought was, “Be careful what you wish for, David.”

In the dream, I still lived in the townhome where I lived for about 20 years in another Birmingham suburb. We had just married and she had moved in with me — but it felt more like a nightmare than a dream.

The narrative was less about her than it was about what she was doing to the space in which I lived. It felt very symbolic of something dark and dangerous going on in my mind and heart.

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I had dinner Saturday with a friend. She was already seated when I arrived.

“You look terrible,” she said, almost laughing. I didn’t disagree with her, but I was surprised it showed so easily.

I haven’t been sleeping well. When I do sleep, my dreams are often confusing. I wake up feeling as though I’ve been wrestling with something which leaves me exhausted. And I’ve been eating horribly, which makes it harder to sleep and makes me feel terrible when I’m awake. But I didn’t realize any of this showed on my face until my friend said so.

My life has felt lately as though I’m going through a dark hall of mirrors at a carnival. It’s not just a three-minute trip with a quick exit, though. I work here. I eat here and sleep here. Somehow, I’ve brought myself into a long nightmare in which things are distorted and scary — and I can’t find the exit.

When I woke up Saturday morning from another restless night, I found a note which I had made for myself at some point in the night. I don’t recall having this thought or making the note, but I make such notes in my sleep every now and then.

“Looking back on it now, I can see that she was afraid of intimacy,” I had written.

I must’ve been dreaming about her again.

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On April 1, a teacher in Quebec had a surprise for her students. She told them that the government had imposed a new rule requiring them to wear shower caps in the classroom. She told them it was an additional safety precaution.

You won’t be surprised to find out this was an April Fool’s Day joke. The gag was posted on Reddit Thursday afternoon and most people seemed to think it was quite funny. I’ll admit there’s something mildly amusing about a bunch of teen-agers wearing shower caps in class, but I couldn’t really laugh at it.

All I saw was a classroom full of young people who have been so brainwashed that they’re willing to do anything an authority figure tells them to do — in the name of their own safety.

To me, this “joke” reveals the dangers of living in the conformist bubble that we call the modern school system, where good little boys and girls learn that obedience to government is required — whether it makes sense or not.

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