The confusing, crazy, frustrating and anger filled past two weeks ended with a dream. It was one of my patented should be animated Yellow Submarine type dreams that would make sense if there was massive amounts of booze, blow and broads beforehand, but being sober and sleeping alone only makes having those types of dreams more disturbing. I won’t bore you with a lot of the sitcom references, guest stars (living and dead) and the flying that took place early on. I’m still sorting through all that myself. The dream got interesting when I attended a big teenager rally. Somehow I was passing myself off as a teenager and I was with other teens at what was supposed to be rally to save the town. When we had a small crowd, a woman came up and started talking to the small assembled group about homosexuality. At this point, I saw Marc and Nicole were there, old high school friends. They knew I was ‘undercover’ as a teenager and they were in on the joke too, as they were posing as teenagers themselves.

We listened for a few minutes while this woman talked about tolerance and acceptance to the assembled group. The teenagers were interested at first but soon they drifted away. She did say something, and I can’t remember what, that made all three of us high five each other, but the look of the youth around us conveyed they were less than happy with what the woman said. I’m pretty sure it was something about marriage equality, considering what happened next.

We boarded a sleek modern monorail and onboard that vehicle was another woman. She was definitely a Fox News anchorwoman type. She could have been Megyn Kelly, but she seemed like a mashup of a number of female hosts from the show. I distinctly remember she had the lips of Kimberly Guilfoyle. Standing beside her was Dr. Ben Carson and they were talking about good old fashioned Christian values. The monorail was packed with teenagers and unlike the talk earlier, they were in raptured attention. At least everyone was listening except Marc, Niccole and myself. As the woman continued to talk, my eyes went over the crowd and saw the young folks drinking in the dialog they were giving.

Two things happened at that point; I saw people had name tags on. I had a name tag that said REGGIE (which I hate) and I guess it made me so mad that I was named Reggie that the letters started to change. They formed the number six. My clothes changed at the same time. They turned into the familiar jacket and slacks of The Prisoner. I started hearing the music of Depeche Mode, specifically People are People and like a cool music video, I stood up and started lip-synching the song. Marc and Nicole stood up and sung with me, as well as a few other people. We were drowning out the speakers as we sang of acceptance, but Dr. Ben Carson put a stop to that. As more people stood up to sing with us, he pointed his fingers at teenagers that were singing and their faces turned into Guy Fawkes masks. One by one the people that joined in with us were changed. Soon no one was singing with us and our numbers dwindled. Dr. Carson went through the crowd, pointing his finger and changing folks, which was causing teenagers to cheer him on. He finally got to us, pointed at Nichole and Marc and changed their faces. Just as the song was ending he tried to do it to me, but it didn’t work. I stared him straight in the eye and recited the motto of my life, the line from the TV show. I turned to the side, and like the ghostly visions from Return of the Jedi, I saw the following people looking at me with smiling faces; George Lucas, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Tori Amos, Kate Bush and Patrick McGoohan. That’s when I woke up.

As crazy as the dream was, it all made sense. What has frustrated me for the past month, maybe two months, has been a lot of things happening in the news and personally that seemed overwhelming only because I was expecting, either in a great or small way, to make an impact on. In the back of my head I knew it wouldn’t happen. Wanting to make a difference is something that cause people to be misguided, can cause people to change their principles and can motivate people in the wrong way. I’ve always said I’ve been concerned that people believe social media will enact change, and will use it to the point where they won’t do what needs to be done which is physical action. They try to make a point by changing an avatar to the cause celeb of the day, thinking it will evoke awareness. In the meantime, the people they fight against continue to use the system, and you can define the system anyway you with, to continue the status quo. When they find out they have been hoodwinked, the social media people cry foul and blame the few people who are on their side instead of looking to see what they did wrong and change their tactics.

I remember a few years ago when I had a friend tell me she didn’t care about the truth I was telling her about a cause she felt was right to fight, but the way she was trying to attack the system was futile. Another friend was very willing to make post calling people sheeple, yet they blindly posted links that were easy to confirm as false statements. This was a person who, while not a Tea Party member definitely lived by the Tea Party creed of hating the government while chanting don’t touch my Medicare and supporting people who were willing to kill that.

It wasn’t until a few days ago, as I started getting my head into getting artistic, did I realize my pursuit of art was an asset but I had to think why I was looking to go down this path. Sometimes we can’t get rich, sometimes we can’t get recognition. I have written hundreds of stories and it pains me when I write something and friends won’t pass them along, but will pass along similar stories from groups or people that aren’t objective. I may agree with a stand or issue someone has, but I can also be critical of it and expose the flaws that might doom them to failure. The Occupy Movement was important and it could have been the start of a new political and social construct in this country. People can claim all they want about how they are still active, but the Tea Party movement, which too many pundits on the left have declared dead, still has power. You may laugh at Michelle Bachmann but she is still in Congress. You may want to say the GOP is dead but they have quite a number of candidates that will run for President in 2016, while the Democrats are waiting with breathless anticipation for Hillary to run. Question, if she doesn’t, who is the heavy hitter on the bench who could take her place?

These past few months have helped me get my head back in the game. I’m done with trying to please people because of friendships because they don’t want to hear the truth. I’m not going to change my avatar on a whim because of Kony, Equality, Occupy or any other wind blowing social issue. You know what, I shouldn’t call it truth. Too many people have supposedly given me truth and they have been derelict in being skeptical about the truth offered to them but are quick to dismiss the point of view of others. I’m going to give knowledge to the people. They can do with it was they wish, ignore it, use it, I don’t care. What I can’t do is continue to feed a false sense of security because the thought of something different challenges someone’s convictions or purpose.