So I’ve been doing this meditating thing to help me go to sleep. You know, observe the thoughts…let them float by in big gobs of rainbow plasma while I refuse to engage with them. Last night, my thoughts were going like this:

My brother’s girlfriend is a liar…my mom is mad at me…I can’t sleep…it’s too hot in here…his girlfriend is really psycho…

Then, up from the thoughts jumped Rusty the Singing Dog. He set up a stool at the crossroads of my mind, and began to play. Unfortunately, I said to myself, “Observe, don’t engage,” and then he went away. I did end up engaging though, once I realized what had been in my mind. Was Rusty there to sing me to sleep? What would he have sang? Why can’t I be crazy like this more often?

I am such a visual person. I guess I was in that hypnogogic state when Rusty stopped by. It was really too cool. Rusty (who had introduced himself) had rusty-brown bedraggled hair on a skinny, but not emaciated, body. He stood up on his hind legs, leaned back into the stool and held his guitar as though he’d practiced for centuries. And maybe he had.

He looked a bit like the dog in the picture. Only taller, more self-assured, rangy and cool. It is times like this when I wish I could draw.

I struggle constantly with the thought of whether or not I am where I am supposed to be, job-wise. I guess I am, since I’m there. Still. Yesterday, one of my kids got arrested for truancy, for crying out loud. As in, they cuffed him and paraded him out of the school in front of everyone. They don’t want the kid in the regular school, they put him in mine, and then punish him when he obliges them by not coming.

I am starting to hate cops–or let’s say, hate what they stand for, which doesn’t seem to have much to do with justice at all.

I saw that Denver passed a law seriously minimizing the legal consequences of the possession of marijuana. Perhaps I’ll move there someday. It freaks me out to live in a place that will seriously lock you up and publish your name in the paper if you have a bit of weed on you. Not that I do–I haven’t smoked in 20 years now. Still.

On the other side of things, perhaps this attitude is the reason I should stay where I’m at. The kids want me to go with them on their Texas Youth Commission “field trip” next week. This, I have been informed, is because I’m “cool”. There is no way I’m going. TYC is the last place I want to visit at the moment.

Maybe I’m the only teacher who understands why they don’t like cops. Most of them are not criminals. I can also accept them for their angry, hyperactive selves, at least most of the time.

I just don’t know, you know? I feel caught in the middle.