While I was not around, a few days ago, the power company came by and turned on a streetlight to the rear of our house. They said it had been out (since before we lived here), even though they had been charging us for it unfortunately. God, I've never seen such an ugly thing. I am really just unreasonably mad about it. I mean, I am cursing mad everytime I see the house. I walk around the side to stare at the light, and the yellow plants and yellow trees, and yellow paint on the side of the house facing it. It's so bright that I can't see anything for it. I don't think that anyone would understand at all how gruesome this is to me. It's a yellow sodium light. When it is on, you cannot see the stars in our front yard anymore. Yellow light pours in through our living room windows and makes everything look putrid. It's behind the house so the long shadow of the building is cast over the entire driveway and front door...so it's only possible useful function of lighting the path from the car to the door is negated. It serves no purpose other than to fuck up my life. I am going to ask lexie if he minds if I ask the power company to turn it back off since we actually have to pay for it anyway. I know he's going to think I'm insane, and of course it's not just my decision, but I'm not even kidding when I say that it puts me in a bad mood every time I see it.

I had a dream last week that instead of seeing the new house going up on the bend in our road, we walked out there one night and they had constructed a huge glittering Shell station. It was a black night and we walked over under the huge canopy with 30 incandescent lights overhead. The gas station was still empty but all the power to it was on. Everything was shiny, and under that canopy you couldn't see anything outside of the station except blackness. And I just didn't understand...Why? Why did they have to put one on my road, where it wasn't needed and it would shine on my house every night and there wouldn't even been one place for me to go to be in the dark? Instead of those bright gas stations at night being mystical and reminding me of being on the road, they would become the eye sore I stared at every morning, blocking my view of the fog on the fields when the sun comes up, after I've stayed awake all night one more time.

After I walked among that empty hull of the gas station I went to our living room window on the other side of the house and looked out to see where a Wendy's sign was laying in the dirt around another construction sign. It was a fucking nitemare.

I guess as a sequel to that dream, last night I dreamt I came home from work one day and someone had built a huge playground in our backyard. It was all new equipment, with the swinging bridges, plastic tunnels, shredded tire mulch, etc. The complex was huge, it was the size of a large city park, and was teeming with people. At the front of it was a card table set up with pamplets on it. I walked up to the table to find a brochure that said "Save the Farmhouse". The pamplet said that they had installed the equipment, which could be played on for a small fee, to raise money to "save" the land around the farmhouse from development. The obvious parallels between this and "saving" a foreign culture by colonizing it or marketing it were drawn in my mind. A charismatic man was standing behind the table, gesturing widely and telling a gathering group about the great work they were doing there. I felt complete hopelessness.

I woke up this morning. I felt better. But I came home tonight and the streetlight was still on and I thought, man, just a couple of days before the bulldozers get here.