Your chance to be Freud

For some reason I dream a lot more in Vienna. More dreams, stranger, and more memorable.

A weird one from last night: I was somewhere in Missouri. A house in a rural area. I was there to meet my friend Skip G, who lives in St. Louis but in the dream he was living in the sticks. We were going to go for a drive, but each of us driving our own car. VW Beetles, as it turns out. The old kind, not the new one.

So I knocked on his door, then went back to my car and started it. While waiting for him to come out I noticed an iguana walking back and forth parallel to the side of his car. Then suddenly I noticed Skip, who had crawled under his car. In real life this is impossible, because Skip is a giant of a man and not even an anorexic girl could fit under a Bug. Anyhow, Skip was laying on his side. I was about to ask him WTF when I noticed him firing a stream of urine from beneath the car, about fifteen feet out, directly into the path of the pacing iguana---who walked right into the stream but kept going, seemingly oblivious. (Another thing that would never happen in real life, because no man in his late 50s can fire a stream of piss fifteen feet. Your range and pressure decreases significantly after the age of 10.)

I kept hearing a kitten meowing, even over the sound of the engine, and I wondered where the sound was coming from but it was time to go, the ritual with the iguana having reached its logical (?) conclusion. So I took off down a gravel road, looking from time to time in my rear view mirror for Skip's car. Finally I noticed it, maybe a quarter of a mile behind me.

The meowing continued and it suddenly dawned on me that the kitten was probably in the car somewhere. I was just about to pull over and find the kitten when I woke up.

I've had some weird dreams before, but never one in which a guy ambushes an iguana with a stream of high-pressure piss from beneath a car.

You figure it out, Freud. I can't.

Back In Vienna

Interesting seatmate on the Vienna flight.

Shahin was a tall, friendly American who spoke with a hint of an East Coast accent---New York? He lives in Switzerland and was returning after a visit to his wife, who is an American doctor teaching in one of Johns Hopkins satellite institutions.

“I don't guess she'll be moving to Switzerland; her license isn't transferable without a lot of retraining,“ I said.

“Plus, she doesn't speak German.“ Which can be a handicap if you're trying to doctor German speakers.

Shahin goes back and forth from Switzerland to Baltimore every three weeks or so. He owns an e-learning company specializing in training executives. I told him I've been to Vienna 13 times in 6.5 years and he said: “I do that every six months or so...“

Shahin mentioned he follows the Baha'i faith. This religion was started in Iran and its adherents have been prosecuted to one degree or another since, including members of Shahin's family, who emigrated to America when things started getting really hot for the Baha'i.

He told me that several members of his family had been killed and his parents couldn't return to Iran because they too were on the hit list. So they began immigration proceedings. They were living in New York but moved to Pennsylvania to be near a lawyer there who'd taken on their case---only to remove himself from the case when the Iranian hostage crisis happened. PLUS, the asshole took all their money and wouldn't give it back.

So they moved to Maryland where they heard people were having luck getting green cards as political refugees. Shahin's father blew his life savings on the previous asshole lawyer so decided to defend himself before the judge, after extensive study of their case (the lawyer had retured their paperwork, if not their money.) His father told about the asshole lawyer, their struggles since coming to the US, but mostly showed documentation about family members in Iran who had been killed.

The judge awarded the family their green cards on the spot.

It took several years before the family was able to finally attend their citizenship ceremony, but by then the father was very sick with terminal cancer. Nevertheless he insisted on attending, because after his long struggle he wanted “to die an American.“ The family got their citizenship and the father died a few months later, having become, sure enough, an American.

I enjoyed meeting Shahin. We talked about a lot of other things, things of note, but somehow or another the story of his family's long struggle to escape persecution made the biggest impact.

----

Very overcast in Vienna, with light rain. A bit chilly.

For The Gary----results of today's data-gathering: P = 7 S = 1

Sunday

I'm leaving here tomorrow morning, very early.

Vienna to Frankfurt. Frankfurt to DC. DC to the Other Dimension.

There's a lot going on in the Other Dimension and my brain will be busy with it for a few months.

But with any luck, next time I come back here (lucky visit #13?) I can stay for months at a time if I want, instead of just a few weeks.

ABOVE: I took this photo from the balcony yesterday morning during a gentle rain.The picture itself isn't much...but for me it's a great reminder of home, because that's what this place has been to me, off and on, for six years now.

ABOVE: I took this picture last week in Vienna's Central Cemetery. Sooner or later we all end up in a place like this, or some equivilent thereof. That much is certain. The question for me isn't what to do after I'm dead, but what to do before I'm dead, and to keep from being dead while I'm still alive.

See you next time, from Vienna.