Dreams of beans

I ceased shaving two weeks ago. If a man is to be unemployed he should play the part. My work visa expired last Friday and I have to wait a maximum of six weeks until my immigration situation rights itself. This isn’t a big shock, it was only an 18 month visa and I knew from the start that I’d have to face a certain period of downtime.

Prior to reentering the working world it will be obligatory to no longer resemble Rashers Tierney. It’s not that beards are unwelcome or that sporting one would prevent me from being hired. No, the problem is that I am short and don’t fancy being known as the new guy who looks like a garden gnome. I’ll enjoy my bum beard, but when it’s time to work again I’ll have to shear her off. What a perfect opportunity to fulfill a life long dream though? I’m talking about a hot towel shave here.

My dreams last night were strange, such is the nature of dreaming I suppose so there is no reason why this particular dream should be anymore noteworthy than those of Thursday night or Wednesday night... A mysterious figure took me to the top of a stone tower on the edge of the city. Looking down I observed a complete absence of urban sprawl eating into the land, consuming the trees and substituting farms for gas stations and fast food restaurants. Instead of all that crap there was a sudden and definite point where the city ended and the land began. Maybe the city was contained by walls. Or maybe the city had come ready made and was just dropped onto the landscape and prohibited from extending beyond its original size. In an aerial photo the scene might look like a grey and brown version of the Japanese flag. Its perfectly circular perimeter was hard to comprehend. From the top of the tower I was able to see all the way north to the Canadian border, a distance of nearly 300 miles. One vast field of soy beans stretched from here to there. My eyes had a high zoom capability and I was able to see individual soy plants anywhere within that 300 mile expanse. Had there been civilization I would have been able to count freckles on the faces of folks living in Duluth, International Falls, Fargo and other towns, but there were no towns at all, only soy beans.

Our baby is due to be born this week. Today I made building blocks for her from some rough and dirty 2” x 2” oak pallet lumber. The blocks are chunky and deceptively heavy for their size so if I get one flung at me I wouldn’t be surprised to wake up in the hospital. I sliced the boards to produce cubes of 2” side. Each face was then skimmed to liberate the beautiful grain hiding beneath the surface. The rich, dark, almost aristocratic smell of the freshly cut end grain is such a reward.

And so unemployment, tea drinking, beer drinking, photography, woodworking, beard maintenance and eager, possibly amateur parenting will fill my days until mid April rolls around. Good times.