January 20, 2004, Tuesday

Imagination can be a dangerous thing. It takes us away from where we are and deposits us in an entirely new and different world, one that doesn't really exist. While imagination can help us to discover new things, for me, it seems to be only a temporary distraction from reality that is like a mind-fuck. It is my drug. I need it. If I don't daydream for a couple of hours each day I don't feel right. I get edgy. Grumpy. My daydreaming, while at times productive, consists mostly of imagining my life somewhere else doing some other thing, avoiding the real work that is in front of me. Lately I've been loving me and Issac living on the shores of Jamaica in a raised wooden shack, making sandcastles all day and I am gloriously tan with colorful silk cloths tied around around my waist blowing in the wind. The diet of melons and beans has done my figure wonders. I don't mind being poor. Our days are given over to nothing but swimming and walking along the beach, climbing mountainsides, and talking to the island people who are all as poor as we are. We stay away from the resorts. Issac develops the cutest Jamaican accent and at night we jam out with our neighbors because my prize possession is my guitar. Issac dances and shakes a marraca and runs around with the black girls. We go to the church full of crazy bright religion and we do our best to pray. I post gaudy pictures of mother maria on our wooden walls. I import clay and sculpt. I home-school Issac and several other Jamaican children. The people are thankful and send me food and chickens and goats. I am never lonely. I draw and I paint and I write. Creative energy oozes out of my body. I write letters to everyone in the states who ever doubted that it could happen, and tell them "our biggest fear is a hurricane. I dread tending the garden but we depend upon it so for our survival. I am becoming one with the earth. My fingers are brown from the clay."

God- why do I have to go to math class? Why am I too much of a wussy to actually DO this little dream of mine? It feels like I am too poor to even go live on a poor island with poor people. Isn't this silly? Utterly.