Zebbler's Dreams and Realities

Yet again I am running away, hiding, playing a game of "let's hide from nazis and then try to defeat them". Or is it a game of "this evil magic being has too much power and wants to take over the world"? Hard to say. But I guess it's fun. Or my depression and bitter disillusionment with the world is back. Hard to say. At least I seem to have some friends in there, and we're organizing and resisting the evil. But that's just in my dreams. In real life, I just have a metaphorical stack of work on my desk and fingers that ache from too much computer use.

Last night was rough. After a very nice week together, amazingly cute dinners and patient walks through nearby parks, I nearly shattered my schizophrenic mom's reality but explaining to her that she felt better for a while after being admitted to a hospital and being given medication. She saw that, for a split moment, then recoiled very rapidly and became enraged. I betrayed her. How could I not see that the world is full of spies, mafiosi and invisible electronic gadgets that cause tremendous pain in her body? She started screaming at me and pacing around the flat, undoubtedly waking up all of our neighbors. That night I dreamed that my body was full of holes. Hundreds of tiny holes, spouting blood in steady streams. It would have been the death of me very quickly, if not for my friends. Out of the dark shadows of the dream, hands of my friends appeared, hundreds of them, and, one by one, plugged up my bleeding holes. And there I was. Standing up, propped up and plugged ...

I had a pending meeting with my band mate Encanti.  Anxious to find him, I climbed up an old building, through antique staircases, old elevator shafts, all the way up to the roof top.  Things were already smelling a bit weird, I lost myself in a trail of thought as I was walking up the stairs, about my roommates' old apartment... which was more of a treehouse anyway, with a cute window and a giant branch outside one could use to escape in case of an emergency... But here I was, at the top of this 19th century skyscraper... And here's Encanti! "You ready?" he says to me. "Sure." "Then JUMP." I take his hand and jump off the building, no hesitation.  My stomach weightless, beyond butterflies, I cling to the side of the building trying to slow myself down by sliding and scream out a good 'ol "WOOOAAAAHHHHHH".  It was all getting a bit out of control and the ground was coming fast.  But I knew what to do.  I lean back further into the...

I didn't know I was going to get into this paranoia.  But surprises tend to spring up on you once in a while, you know?  In the words of the great Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes... I got adopted by nice American family - a cute girl with a loving father.  Had a bedroom of my own and a lovely loyal pet dog.  Things seemed as normal as can be - great family dinners, slight flirtations, good jokes and vast family home to explore with all sorts of hidden surprises.  Then I got a phone call from my already paranoid brother that flipped that whole thing upside down. I will take a moment to explain the backstory, so that you, my wonderful reader, are not totally lost [snap to reality].  You see, I got political asylum in the U.S. in 1996, since I feared political and ethnic persecution upon returning to my home country of Belarus.  Since then I had repeated mysterious tragedies in my family.  My father was found in a puddle of blood in his apartment,...

I wake up on a wet slab of granite from something scurrying over me. Yet another mouse is acting crazy. It seems that more and more the animals in this dungeon are losing their fear of humans. They've been running over me and nibbling my skin for a few days by now. And here's another one! And another! This is starting to hurt. One bite I can deal with, but what we have here is nearly a dozen mice, all trying to sink their teeth into me. I scream out and flail, shaking the creatures off. "What now?" - mutters a tall gray figure in the corner. My guard usually has very little to say, so I jump on this opportunity. "The mice are acting really weird," I explain, "It's almost as if they set out to, ow!, set out to drive us out of here or something... This is not normal." The guard would normally care less for my comforts, but by now the mice are starting to get to him as well, so he returns my worried look of concern back to me. They seem to b...

I didn't believe my high school friend when he told me he found human skulls. It wasn't even that he seemed like the type to make things up. It wasn't even that it was that uncommon to find old World War II remains, scattered here or there throughout the farms and hills of Belarus. It was that he had claimed that the remains he found numbered in hundreds and were located in downtown Grodno, the city near which I grew up. That was kind of strange. "I've been trying to tell the authorities about this for a while" - he continued, undeterred by my disbelief. "No one seems to want to listen to me, but they have to - this is a discovery that could go into history books!" This was also kind of strange. How hard was it, after all, to check up on such a simple claim as "hey, there's a skull sticking out from the pavement", even if a claim is coming from a 15 year old. Andrei was right though. He was totally right. The place he brough...