D Day

It’s Christmas morning! Well it feels like it to me. I have been up since 3:30 anticipating my appointment with the voice doctor. When I was a child, I would get up this early to see what presents were under the tree. I feel like someone awaiting the rapture.

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God bless this blog. Right now it is so practical for me, dear friends who read this. I can tell you things I cannot say out loud. I love that both near and distant friends can know what is going on with me without me having to speak.

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Last night, of course, I had a dream. I was in a bar (me, who doesn’t drink), and I was picking up a woman. Yes, a woman. Even though I am a gay man, I have more sex dreams about women than men—go figure!

So I say to this woman, “Shall we go somewhere?” She says: “Are you kidding?” She is horrified at the idea so I guess she knows I am gay, but she says: “I know all about you. You were an orphan and then you were adopted. And then your adopted mother went crazy and you adopted father abandoned you. We’ve all heard the story, and thank God, because we all know you trust no one.”

You trust no one. I’d like to think the profundity of the statement woke me, but it was my neighbour’s girlfriend screaming her sexual ecstasy for the whole neighbourhood to hear. Wide awake at 3:30, I pondered the truth of what that woman in the bar said and I think she is both right and wrong.

I, in fact, trust people completely. I am an optimist and I can assume the best in people who do not raise red flags by the things they say or do. But when it comes to “love” (the most ambiguous and heavily connoted word in the world), she, I think, is right.

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I love showing close friends who are forced to hear my dreadful voice that I can sing. It is so weird that someone who can speak so incredibly badly can sing, as a stutterer can do. Talk about a great premise for a musical… a guy who cannot talk and can only sing.

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I normally never remember my dreams. Since I could barely sleep last night, I remember that one vividly. But I had another that I can barely remember. In it, the doctor tells me I will never speak again unless I stop speaking altogether for six months. All I can remember of the dream is feeling I must give Leon, my beloved cat, away for those six months. What torture that would be.