The laundry is done. The extra goats are gone. :breathes a huge sigh of relief and satisfaction: Now I need to find a job, and soon- before I fall back into the pit of despair. Momentum!! It used to be that I had to trek halfway across a city on foot, (in the days when I was homeless) before I got to a Job Service and registered. Filling out the resume was always a problem....Now, it's a lot easier since it can all be done online. No waiting in line, eyeing other homeless and migrant workers, no exchanges of where the best free lunch is, don't I miss it all?? Nope, not a bit! See, I've been there already, time and again. I have hit rock bottom a few too many times and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend the rest of my life there.

I figure that by now, whatever sort of penance or punishment I may've deserved or had coming has long since been meted out. Much of it seems to have been self induced, anyway...but that's another story in a moldy, mildewy chapter, and now that I've got access to the laundromat, I hope never to see moldy clothing again. I'm rambling....speaking of homelessness and mildew, I found a few thigns while sorting through a box of papers (now that I've abandoned organized religion, there are a LOT of irrelevant pamphelts and magazines and etc, etc that can be disposed of). I'd forgotten about this, but I ran across a newspaper article and booklet of some artwork I'd sold when I was homeless in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Cheyenne is a crappy place to be homeless...let me tell you. The people there do NOT want homeless people around. I think they had a soup kitchen, though. It served roadkill antelope stew. Don't think there was a shelter, I honestly don't recall where we slept. They did have a Wyoming Coalition For the Homeless; it was just a rundown old building where you could hang out during the day. They had this deal where they'd pay $3.00 per drawing or piece of art, and so I sold them quite a few. I kept the originals: they just copied the work. I thought little more of it. The money was welcome either for gas, food or diapers. A year or two later, envelopes arrived at my dad's mailign address: the artwork, mine as well as other's, had been exhibited and featured in a newspaper or two. One paper has a full color reproduction of mine on it's front page. I leafed through them, the work embarrasses me a little now. It's so...dreamy and idealistic/romantic. I guess it was my escape from the all too unpleasant realities of life.

The dreamer lives on, a little disillusioned but quite alive nonetheless. It's just that pipedreams aren't enough, there has to be action and change or nothing happens. And you know, it's a little ironic. Because for as miserable as life was with my first husband, I was able to endure it. Why? Because he didn't crush my dreams. They were always possibilities he was willing to entertain and consider acting on. The guy was a nutcase, true. Now, things are actually quite a bit easier, but without a dream, without a purpose in life, a passion, something to love or to strive for, what good is it? Hardship is tolerable. A pointless existence is not. So- :shaking off black shreds of melancholy: I have to recapture the dream (while maintaining objectivity and sensibility, of course).

That reminds me: I had the wierdest dream last night. In it, the world was falling apart, to pieces, literally. But I wasn't scared- I braced myself for it and handled it just fine. When the blow had struck, I saw a group of goats, and realized that all the evolution and hundreds of thousands of years of breeding dairy goats had reverted to square one. These goats were feral, wilder than anything I've ever seen. They had long, black shaggy hair, horns, were small, wiry, and had the wildest, craziest eyes I've ever seen. Oh, and they were *aggressive*. I felt a sinking in my stomach to see that this was all I'd have to start out with in recreating the dairy goat, and just how far removed the two were, as to be almost unrecognizable as even related species...They were leaping around with blazing eyes like creatures possessed, and they reared at me. But I grabbed their horns and broke them off, broke all the horns off all the goats, and then they stood quietly, their eyes became calm and golden like a domestic goat's eyes, and I knew it wouldn't be hard to effect the rest of the change. Strange as dreams go, but it seems auspicious enough. :-)