We have not had the earthquake I dreamed of, here. One, two, three.

I keep saying to the local land, please wait. Please. The downtown had an underground section, hollow beneath the sidewalks, from when we were a seaport in the 1880s and 1890s. We were the rival port to Seattle. The downtown is dug up, along a core street. I am afraid that if the earthquake happened now, we would lose the Rose and the other businesses.

Please wait, I say to the land. Yes, I am upset, but wait. Let us be gentle and wait until the street and sidewalks are put back together. Retrofitted for an earthquake. Though in my dream, we were not the epicenter. So though the dreams had no tsunami, I woke afraid.

And the recent dream?

I dreamed that I was hungry and looked for nourishment. I saw two woman, one in a navy uniform. They were downtown, admiring the fountain. The street that is dug up has a fountain at the end, with Galatea.

Instead of throwing a coin into the fountain, the woman in the navy uniform reached in and grabbed a handful of coins. She pulled them out, a mad gleam in her eye. The other woman looks at her, frightened. "What are you doing?" She stares at the navy woman, then runs away.

The navy woman turns, and walks towards her ship. In the shadow of the ship, huge and grey, there is a table with a tablecloth and a man sitting there. She goes to him. "I need drugs." she says, holding out the coins.

He jumps up. She now has frothy bubbles at her nose and mouth. I know it is infection. "What are you doing?" he screams, "I'm the commander! How dare you!" He leaves.

The woman is wandering down the street with the coins clutched in her hand.

The commander is in the admiral's office, crying. The admiral looks horrified and uncomfortable. "She had no respect for me," wails the commander. "She came to me, the commander, and wanted drugs. My sailors hate me! They don't respect me!" The admiral's facial expression is that he would rather be anywhere, anywhere, but in his office with the crying commander.

The woman is staggering down the streets, specks of the bubbles scattering in the air. She walks stiff legged. She could be mistaken for drunk, but I can see that it is neurological. Her brain is sick. Madness. She is looking for people, the coins clutched in her hands. I know that she will find people, she will spend the money, and they will be infected.

I wake up, frightened. I think of hydrophobia. But that usually is spread by biting, not droplets. Not by coughing or sneezing. And I have been trying to sort out a local cough, croup like, that is spreading, getting worse, my first patient back on December 30th. No one has died, but I am frightened. I have already had the infection, and very mildly. So has my daughter, and the ex-beau. So we are immune. But it is spreading and getting worse.

I have to think about the dream. The money is in the water. Water represents the unconscious. My unconscious is talking to me. What do the bubbles mean?

The news coverage of the Trayvon Martin case seems to have slowed down, at least temporarily. As I have mentioned before, the case holds some interest for me, but I don't wish to pass myself off as an expert of some sort. Or as another flame-thrower on the internet. I do wish to talk about some of my personal thoughts.

When I was maybe 22 years old or so, I went to Eugene, Oregon to visit with some friends at the University of Oregon. We had all furthermore been invited, in a drifty, Eugene way, to go to someone else's house for a party. And in a further drifty, Eugene way, me and my two friends, who were both female, got lost and were wandering around the neighborhood, looking for the house in the dark. I was getting nervous and suggested that we go find a telephone and call them up (ten years ago, pre-omnipresent cell phones). But they seemed to be oblivious as to why I was nervous, and just walked up onto people's front yards and down their back alleys, until they finally recognized the house they were looking for.

At the time, it seemed surprising, and now doubly so. One of the "suspicious behaviors" engaged in by Trayvon Martin was looking in the windows of the houses he passed. An infrequent visitor to the apartment complex, he didn't recognize which one of them belonged to his father's girlfriend.

It was already a strong, automatic instinct for me, at the age of 22, that as a male, if I am walking alone after dark, I had to think of myself as a threat. Maybe my female companions could have understood that in the abstract, but the instincts were not automatic.

And while thinking of this, an even older incident came to mind. This one probably happened when I was 12 or 13, before I had hit puberty, when I was still chubby and baby faced. My mother was in the Albertson's in Salem, Oregon, in the checkout line, and I, being young and bored, left the store to go wait by the car. Or maybe my mother had given me her keys to get something from the car. This was 20 years ago, I don't remember the details. But I do remember looking through the parking lot for my mother's car. But since my mother had a common Plymouth sedan, I ran up to the wrong car, looked in the window, and was then challenged by a man in a pick-up truck who asked me what I was doing "prowling around looking at cars". I told him that I was just looking for my mother's car, and that was the end of that incident.

In Tina Fey's book, she talks about going to a workshop by Roselind Wiseman, the author of Queen Bees & Wannabes, with adult women, and them being asked when they stopped being girls and started being women. For many, the answer is that when they are sexually approached, or catcalled, often "in jest", they realize they are no longer a girl.

I think it might be a similar ritual that we stop being boys and become men when we first realize that we can be considered a threat. And it isn't a particularly nice experience, especially since it probably happens to many of us when we are only starting puberty, and realistically don't present much of a threat to anyone. But for whatever reasons, amorphous forces that we can describe as "media" and "society" wants to let preteen boys know that they are now viewed as dangerous, potent threats that must be controlled through violence.

I had some more to add, but for now I will leave it at this.

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