Superman

I withdrew $30 of my last $37 from my "sharebuilders" account, the last of the money I made last fall, managing a temporary Halloween store. Spent about $25 of that the last two days, sitting in a coffee shop paging through Halloween catalogs, as I recently agreed to manage the next incarnation of that store. I had nearly given up on my house, with the intention of putting it up for sale, planting the garden, and in the fall paddling south on the Mississippi with my veggies. I peddled my bike to the edge of a bluff overlooking the flooded confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Tuesday, wistfully imagining the trek. Alas, I am to stay, as the Goddess has called me to stay.

I have a $100 dollar check from my two performances at Patrick's Cabaret, about $85 of which is dedicated to the phone bill. I have maybe $10 in change scattered throughout the house. There's a $45 check, which I found while organizing my sun room, money I earned last July doing yard work for a friend and his family. I probably had about equal the money then, that I have now; how it didn't occur to me that I hadn't cashed the check, I don't know. It's a nice find. I'll call them tomorrow to ask if I can still cash it.

I've been putting off doing my taxes because I worked as a contractor at the Halloween store, and no income taxes were taken out. Though I made only $12,077, I expect my State and Federal governments will expect me to pay considerably more than GE's obligation.

I've set up about $12,000 in orders for Halloween merch the past two days. Before the weekend, that number will climb to $15,000 or more. I'm on the payroll again, though I expect most of what I will earn preparing these orders will go to my $360 water bill. Of the $3100 dollars I owed the city for my new stop box, I broke the $2000 barrier last month. If I don't continue to pay, the city will condemn my house.

Yesterday I organised orders for antique replica guns, prosthetics, makeup and fangs: Parris, Cinema Secrets and Scarecrow. Checked in about some plastic pumpkin teeth, and some gel hair-coloring, with two small family businesses, PumpkinTeeth LLC and Zack's Wax. Today I paged through six inches of catalogs, from Fun World, Underwraps and Forum. Tomorrow I address the imposing Disguise, with their abundance of licenced costumes and their relative indifference to the small retailer. I'm inclined not to order much of anything from them, especially not the costumes for this summer's Hollywood blockbusters, as there is no guarantee they will be well received, and even if they are, things are moving so fast pop-culturally, I expect the costumes will be mostly obsolete by October. Superman always sells, though.

It feels good to start working again on something other than myself, though I'm feeling a bit disconnected from myself tonight, after two days staring at page after page of costumes and novelties and accessories and myriad grotesquerie. Perhaps I'll take a bath, and pull some cards, meditate.

I was telling myself too that it might be a good idea to take a break from the bud. (Glimmers of awakening on that issue all over HuffPost of late.) I tell myself that it suppresses my sleeping dreams. It's been awhile since I had a real break, maybe last summer. I puffed anyway. As I was doing bath yoga last night, I called out, that if I am indeed an old soul, it is time to become conscious in my dream state. I dreamt a detailed dream last night, woke and wrote it out, went back to sleep and resumed the dream. It was very much gray-scale, and though it was detailed, I seem not to be able to awaken to myself in my dreams. Though not long ago, I leapt off a cliff, fell thousands of feet, and landed standing knee deep in a river. That was nice. More of that.

I've been feeling a certain mastery over material matters lately. Which is good, because my house is a disaster, after this winters dark night of the soul. I sang tonight with more intensity than I ever have before. Visions of a stage, and a band, though that is about as far outside my experience as direct counsel with ancients in my dreams - and as seemingly unlikely.

The mastery I speak of however is the faith I have that what I need will come to me. Hard earned. And worth every difficult, every irrational, every intuitive step.

**** a friend sent this to me. It has flaws, but it brought tears to my eyes, and hope radiating throughout. Blessings, http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/viewvideo.php?id=r_YOG3jMlV4&tid=203258 ****