Damned, Doomed

Still more dreams. I don't get it. Maybe it's because I've been having a beer before bed. It must be equivalent to eating candy before going to sleep. In one dream I had made a bet, and left it up to the tried and true method of coin tossing to decide my fate. I called heads and lost, but continued flipping to see how long it would take me to get heads, curious to see how wrong I was. Tails came up every time. This prompted me to turn the coin over and inspect the other side: tails, twice.

Well I'll be damned, and I was.

Then I had a dream about another, still older ex. I don't remember what happened exactly, but it was nice to see her, even in the astral plane. In my next adventure I caught a bus to a show, but once I boarded the bus became a black town car where I shared the backseat with an Irishman whom I did not know. By his accent, I thought him from Armagh, but when asked he looked at me as if he didn't know the place. He tried to sell me a handful of ecstasy tablets he'd wrapped up to look like a roll of Smarties.

I just read an article outlining the distinction between passive and active voices. It shames me to say that I cannot write well in the active voice. The voice is alien to me, but shouldn't be, considering I've been writing for a while now. I blame the school system, of course, for not teaching me the necessary skills to write well. I can understand the voices in their simplest forms, but not when applied to first person narratives: the cow jumped over the moon (active) vs the moon was jumped over by the cow (passive). But what about cases like: I had been bit by a snake vs a snake bit me; I was hit by a car vs a car hit me. The article cites phrases like "it was," and "there is" as ones to be avoided, but I know I use these phrases like mad on this blog. Maybe I'm not cut out for this. Surely, if I haven't mastered a concept as simple as this, I'm doomed.

Well, no time to dwell. I'm scheduled to pick up a car in twenty minutes and I must be off. We're headed to Russian River, to enjoy the ride and pick up some Pliny.