Jung Ones

"Who am I?...
Where am I going?...
Can I bring my mother?"

It's quiet here in the Summer, relatively so.  When "the students are in town" there appears to be a highway three blocks from me, which I guess is true:  a highway that becomes a regular road while passing through & turns back into a highway as it wanders West.  There's a constant rumble of traffic that makes me think of Montag hobbling across the street in Fahrenheit 451.  It bewilders me that so many people would be out driving in the evening.  But tonight the cars are isolated.  They punctuate the sound of the neighbor's air unit, a dog barking, tree frogs.
Lately, I've been hearing what the Great Internet tells me is a Barred Owl:  hoo-hoo-hoo-hoowurrl.  It's pretty cool, if you aren't a squirrel or a rabbit.  I stand in the back yard, watching a single bat looping across the dimming sky, wishing it would help itself to the mosquitoes trying to land on my face.  The air is humid, but not enough to draw out more than a few lightning bugs.  Imagine if a part of your body were to phosphoresce in relation to your desire for company.  Would we view lonely people as beautiful, or freakish?  How many people never meet because we can't see each other glowing?
The dark treetops are barely moving, framing a smudge of cloud like something badly erased.  I feel a sort of suspension of time, which I long for, but which also frightens me.  We created the clock & calendar.  We sized up & marked off our lives in days and hours & grains of sand.  But what happens to time when you aren't expected to be anywhere or do anything, when your main activity is to breathe in & breathe out?  If you halve the distance between two points, then halve the new distance, and again, again, etc., the two points will always get closer, but never touch because the space between is only ever partially closed.  The half leaves a hole, so to speak.  And so, this moment.  Inhaling the night, seconds into milliseconds into micro- into nano-...an eternal existence in the gully of a Temporal Grand Canyon.  I don't want my life to be ticking clocks, but water flowing over mossy rocks.
Getting older seems to be a weird combination of accretion & erosion.  I'm wearing out skins before I ever get comfortable in them.  I'm dragging around a few barnacled husks, looking for a talented tailor.  "Oi, Savile Row!  'Ow much for a metaphysical niptuck?"  "Erm...Sir, is this a Monkee or a Bunnyman?"
I have a recurring dream-situation, in which I'm driving a car, but there's always a problem--I'm in the back or passenger seat, straining to operate the pedals, I'm driving backwards, the road is so steep the car goes airborne.  It's comically obvious I feel I'm bungling this journey.  But I'm suddenly curious what my dream metaphor was before I had my license.  Or maybe becoming a driver in real life symbolized an adult phase I was never ready for and it created a crisis.  In which case, thanks to all of you who guilted me into getting behind the wheel.