So my unconscious sent me a Valentine.
Since the end of the second Before Times — the halcyon interregnum spanning the period from “everyone with a brain got vaccinated” to “here comes Omicron” — I’ve been waking up from exhausting nightmares. It didn’t happen in the first year of the pandemic; everything was shite, we were washing our groceries (note: apparently this is unhelpful and unnecessary), the shitgibbon was President, I was rehabbing a fricken surgery, but we were hanging on the news of a vaccine and people were taking it all pretty seriously and there was something to work toward.
This time it’s different. There are more cases of the virus than at any time since this crap started, but for some reason — even though a big chunk of those cases end up with blood clots and long-term cardiac symptoms and chronic fatigue and organ damage that no one wants to talk about because we have no strategy for coping — everyone’s supposed to send their kids back to school, take off their masks and party. I’ve shut down business again after six months with no clear idea when it’ll ever be safe to go back into the water, and every day is Groundhog Day. The handy-dandy Fitbit says I’m in better shape than I have been since before it all began — the hills are outside my front door, the weights are in the basement — but I wake up every morning feeling like I’ve been beaten with sticks. The handy-dandy Fitbit also says I spend something like a quarter of my night dreaming, and most of it is like a Guillermo del Toro movie.
This morning I got a little musical offering. Longtime readers will know this happens sometimes, but it’s been ages. There was, in the dream, a blond gentleman in an ornate military uniform seated by the Engineer’s side of the bed — it looked a bit like the medal-encrusted dress greys seen on Field Marshal Zhukov in The Death of Stalin —

— delivering a lecture on, unsurprisingly, military history. The same lecture was appearing on three screens of a tablet set up on an adjoining table, obviously recorded in other circumstances, and I spent a few pleasant moments trying to tell whether he was lip-syncing before he announced he would be concluding, and then began to sing us a stanza of an Eastern European sounding ballad. I couldn’t understand the language, presumably it was Romanian or Czech or whatever, but I woke up with the melody. This is why I keep stave paper by the bed.

The dream only gave me the first phrase, which was repeated as music readers will see here, so after dashing that down I thought a moment and added a second line of melody, also to be repeated before a return to the opening phrase. I am sure it is a song about how the woman took the chicken to market and met a man who offered too low a price, or the innkeeper’s daughter spurned her suitor three times before accepting him. Key of A minor, in a deliberate tempo, transcribed here an octave higher than sung like any self respecting tenor line.
I caught myself dancing a grapevine to it with arms upraised, so maybe it’s a shtetl song.
I have no idea how long I’m going to be stuck in here — at any rate, until we get a more powerful vaccine like the Novavax that’s in approval process or the nanoparticle thing that the Defense Department is working on, which I’m sure will be roundly spurned by all the people who think they were injecting microchips with the last one. At least I may get occasional entertainment.
Does anyone else find their brain doing shit like this?