but first this: This morning a beautiful, strong woman shared with me the story of how she was beaten up by her supposedly feminist/anarchist conscious punk boyfriend and how her life has unfolded from that point on. What happened to her makes me so sad, angry that such horrible things happen to such beautiful people. Sad, angry that all of us have to do so much deconstruction just to try to grasp a little perspective on our lives. That we must guard ourselves so much in order to stay free. Is that true? I would like to see it a different way, but in the current reality it seems that... sometimes society and government and the ideas they have ingrained into people's psyches and perceptions of possibility seem so all pervasive, all encompassing, that there is no freedom without struggle in this context, it is designed that way. And yet in a way it is important to maintain that as a lie not to fall for. The system wants to be perceived as everything, as all that is and all that can be, with alternatives dismal pictures of suffering. We are told that our ancestors lived short, brutish lives and modern civilization is the pinnacle of human existence. And if we don't like it we will still follow all the rules or we forfeit the right not to have violence used against us. But-

the walls of the machine are wearing thin, and we can see through them now.

DREAM- this morning: (continued from something I don't remember) I'm walking through a high school parking lot with my high school Spanish teacher Sra. Wilson and we come to a girl with her truck with a shattered back window. She is saying Look, you can tell it was quality, all one piece, see you can move the pieces all around - Because instead of the glass bits falling out of the pane they had become of liquid form and could be moved around within the window pane like flat squares of ice in a thin, angled pool, though not wet to the touch. Then the scene changes, shifts, and the truck window becomes a cloudy-clear wall that the three of us are standing in front of, the girl still showing us how it works. -Look, you can reach into it- Now the surface moves differently, more stretchy and is malleable on a 3-D rather than 2-D plane. It is fun, it is a game. I stick my hand into it, then my arm, it stretches forward like some kind of clear plastic, or like a great wall of very strong clear latex. I keep going forward, hand out in a pose that reminds me of a martial arts warrior, body lunging into it against the stretchy resistance, which becomes stronger but also more exhilarating the more I succeed in pressing forward in spite of the pressure. My finger pokes a small hole through and a fresh wind bursts through and fills my lungs, and I smile and drink it in and press forward more, knowing that it's just a matter of will to get through completely. Then I realize that the wall wants my center of gravity to be five feet behind me, squarely on the other side of the cloudy boundary I'm pushing, but the way to win is to realize that my center of gravity is right here under my feet and there is no resistance - and with that the wall disappears and I am standing in easy sun and fresh air on the other side of a wall that no longer exists.