This morning I woke up again from an alarming dream. I'm doing that a lot lately. Not sure why.

This morning right before I woke, I was driving our minivan across a Kmart parking lot. And when I say across, I mean in a diagonal, cutting through the lanes of traffic and parking spaces of the empty lot without regard to the sort of mandated directions.

I felt drugged and not myself, hardly able to keep my eyes open to drive. I just wanted to get to that parking space right up front and shut off the car so I could close my eyes and sleep for a minute. Even though I shouldn't have been driving at all, I was moving at a pretty good clip, but figured that was o.k. because it was a pretty big parking lot and I was the only car I could see on the whole thing. Or so I thought, till someone honked at me, long and angry.

I looked over my right shoulder just in time to see the car I was flashing past---a car that had pulled into the lot from the street and was coming down through the lanes of parking stripes the correct way. The driver had to put his breaks on hard to avoid hitting me in the side, and it was a nice car, one of those new eight cylinder Cadillac luxury cars, one of those overpowered, gas guzzling status cars. I was sure that the driver was as concerned about his car's safety as he was for his own.

I continued on, rocketing to the front of the parking lot, up by the store doors, and pulled into the stall I was aiming for and parked, relieved that this embarrassment was behind me, if only just. I was leaning my head back to close my eyes for a moment when I heard a car screech to a stop beside me. I looked over and it was the Cadillac. The guy had pulled beside me, and it was obvious even before he even opened the door to show himself from behind the tinted windows that he was furious. He was a blond, well dressed, well groomed man in his mid 40s that you could tell had worked all his life to gain the money and status that a car like that commanded---and you could tell that keeping a grasp on it was something that was a constant struggle, even so. One that he did not loose good naturedly, and here I was cutting him off in a parking lot with disregard in my dirty little minivan.

He leaped from his car, slamming his door and stomped around to my driver's side. At this point that my embarrassment was turning to fear. It was becoming clear that there was going to be an exchange. He screamed at me hysterically through my drivers side window but it muddied his words so I couldn't hear exactly what he was saying. I didn't realize just how bad it was until the passenger side sliding door opened and a rent-a-cop came in with his billy club drawn looking to teach me a lesson. I shot awake when the angry man's fist shattered the glass in the door coming for my face.

I lay there in bed, the alarm from the radio playing the local classical station softly, too softly to have woken me up. My breathing slowed as the vivid images faded. The sun had been up long enough to be throwing patches on the ceiling of the room through gaps in the curtains. I just lay there looking at them and thinking about the lawn care that lay ahead of me that day. I've never been the best in the neighborhood at keeping my lawn and yard and car all up to acceptable middle class standards. The people I live around are good and friendly people. I feel lucky to have them surrounding me. I have never heard them complain about us or dissapprovingly mention anything, so I don't think that the man in my dream personified any of their sentiment. I think that angry man lives somewhere inside me.

I've never been able to pull off the middle class thing. And it's not that I resent it, just that I don't do it well. Not well at all. And sometimes that gets to me. I look at my yard and house and compare it to every one else in the neighborhood and think, I'm not keeping up my end of the bargain. I'm not being a team player. I'm not climbing the ladder like I should so I can have the money to put the polish on things around here like needs to be. I don't know why that angry blond man inside me was so angry, and it's not like I'm feeling shackled by middle class mainstream American expectations that I have some secret inner longing to break free of or anything.

I had this friend in Virginia who after years in a corporate setting sold most everything she had, packed the rest in her car, quit her job and went over to the art supply store to buy what she needed to become an artist. Had never painted in her life but couldn't bear the thought one moment longer that a cubicle was all the more she would ever amount to. Last I heard, she was making a living as a professional painter/sculptor. We have one of her paintings in our living room. She and our church gave it to us as a going away present when I finished school and we treasure it. But she was single, which made a jump like that easier than when you have mouths to feed, and I just don't feel the walls closing in on me like she did. I actually want to be better at playing the game.

I told my wife that every time I go out to do yard work it's like being forced to run a race with the fastest kid in school, just so I could be sure that I still sucked at sports. But I do it, for what it's worth, and the wife looks on a sees a man taking care of his family, and she gets a funny twinkle in her eye after I spend an afternoon of sweating my guts out. She still won't touch me till after I've showered, but you can see she's crushing on me a bit. So I endure the inner beatings of the blond angry man because I love my family. Someday, I hope to get the best of him.