The Missourian With Jason and Ed

I was working at The Missourian again. Again, I didn’t write a single story—just could not get myself interested in reporting. It has been like this in all my dreams of returning to my first newspaper job.

I think I usually have these dreams when I’m nervous about money. Maybe at no other time. Well, I’ve had the Missourian dreams often across the years. Have had those times of financial low a fair number of times.

In this dream, Washington was more a city than a town. Like a small New York or Chicago in an old film noir. It was a rainy night. Some killer was on the loose. There is often a killer in these dreams. 

I’d been on the job for two or three weeks but had not yet filed a story. It was strange that no one was pressing me. I remembered what Bill Miller had once told me in real life, after I told him how many evenings I’d covered for how many weeks in a row and thought that warranted a raise: “Don’t go to every meeting,” he said. It had shocked me. I had never considered cutting back on my coverage of the town, of my devotion to the job, of giving 100%.

Now I was giving about 20% or 10%, and not doing any reporting at all. I was still trying to figure out who my contacts in Union were—I was on the same beat as originally—and scraping my imagination to come up with a story worth writing about from that small, dull town.

I was staying at a house with my sisters and some of their friends. It fell to me to rewrite some Flash code that others had written. This was easy for me. I was doing fine. Then my old reporting buddy Ed and my recent programming supervisor Jason arrived in combined form and started looking at the same coding problems I had, and coming up with suggestions I hadn’t even thought of. At first I was dazzled. Then I began seeing, “No, this is just Jason’s naiveté about Flash coming to the fore again, sounding like impressive stuff, but being just that typical amateur half-ass coding that is so hard to fix later.”

There was a scene were Kathy and I were driving around, and Dad was there for part of it. The trip took place in the terra incognita between Lake Sherwood and Foristell, that region my dream imagination always fills in with interesting incident and places. There was a town occupied almost completely by a large sheriff’s compound, and in this compound were toys of all kinds, scattered across the ground, waiting for kids to play with them. They were lying in the rain and mud. I wanted to take some of them—nice vintage toys like I’d known in my youth—but didn’t dare to steal from a park managed by cops.