Apathy Tree

I got pulled over in Missouri years ago.

2am, going like 95 on some highway or interstate or other. Hadn’t seen another car in hours, and had been driving since like 5pm.

Get pulled over, cop asks where I’m headed. “Houston.” “Missouri?” “Oh, I didn’t know there was one, neat, no the one in Texas.”

Give my license (Texas) and registration (Wisconsin), and explain I’ve just moved back to my home state, hence the interstate papers, and am headed down with a friend to get my belongings from storage. He goes and runs my info, and it’s clean all the way down, as this is the first time I’d ever been pulled over, or really interacted with cops.

He comes back to the car and as he’s approaching, I can hear an all-hands call on his radio. There’s a heavily intoxicated woman throwing up in a Waffle House parking lot. Cop gets to my door, says “it’s your lucky day, I have to respond to an important incident, so maybe have your passenger drive for a while…”

So just a verbal warning and a mildly entertaining super-rural story. 8/10 would drive again.

I’ve literally never had this problem in my nearly 40 years of life. 🤭

Room temp water gang represent! 🫠

Plot twist: it’s the same woman, and one pic is mirrored.

When I get decent sleep, I often lucid dream. I didn’t really practice, I’m just usually aware that I’m dreaming (maybe because I’m on drugs to suppress nightmares, so I’m just really aware of dreams).

I have a dream town I frequent, it’s… usually interestingly mundane though. I don’t need excitement often, just things I can’t do in real life, like taking stuff I want (collectibles!!), playing free at the arcade, eating free in fancy places, drinking free in the nice socializing bar, breathing underwater or flying sometimes if it fits the exploration…

It’s a really consistent sort of place that just grows over time, as more places are added and incorporated as welcoming spaces to explore. There’s even a glass water garden/aquarium/pool that reminds me of some final fantasy shit. And recently a massive underground transit structure was added on that has high-speed shuttles to different large attractions, and a whole new residential tower (for some reason I have a room on the 4th floor, it might be a college dorm), so that was an excellent confusing dream to have for several days.

There’s a house in it that’s sort of my landing pad. A mix of a lot of places I’ve lived or been that just keeps growing over time. It’s got dozens of spaces to explore that mix in things I want and things I know, and just some creepy huge empty spaces that will probably get filled in later but are just full of weird junk I haven’t unpacked at the moment.

I like to just explore the town and surrounding areas, and do things with random people. I don’t really do that in life anymore, so. I’d love to build it in VR but I have no idea how to do that. It seems perfectly suited for it.

I used to get a lot of false awakenings when I pushed too hard to control the story or environment, and I found those to be wildly unpleasant (nightmare reasons), so I don’t exert much control now. I can, but it’s more fun to go with the fantastical and let the adventure play out, fully aware that this new space I’m dreaming about is going to be a recurring space I can explore again in different ways later.