A Tale from the Vaults of Hope

Actually, it's more like a file cabinet than even one vault, and I haven't even nearly filled one drawer yet. But it's slowly filling up with files and case studies. As a case in point:
My mother's youngest sister, who is my older brother's age, has an expanding brood. Sarah, Jenna, and Quinn. She and the husband took the children on the Polar Express, which I gather to be some type of magical family-type trainride through the White Mountains that ends in an artificial Christmas-type village. So they took the kids on this ride.
The next day, Sarah... well. After they watched some Star Wars movie last year, her small brother was eating Cheerios and began throwing them around. Sarah, at six, said to her sister O no! He's gone over to the Dark Side. So this year, after this trip, she asked her mother if they could talk in private. So she got my aunt In Private and said Mommy, I know that wasn't really the North Pole, because we would have had to cross over water. We have here a sevenyearold with the geographical savvy to know, and the consideration not to wreck her younger siblings' illusions.
It would appear that my family, besides the aforementioned Wunderkinder, bear some share of the light. I am itchy, in both heart and loin, to begin my own contribution to the work of improving the world by one remarkable family at a time. But my luciferian seed isn't very well sowing itself.

The Horror from Beyond the Sleep of Time

I had to go back to South Central yesterday, for family photography. Spectral shades of gradeschool oozed out of their eerie spaces of repose to haunt me. But I escaped.
Last night I dreamt that after the Session, I'd gone back to the parents' house to find my father engaged in weird and eldritch rites. An awkward hello, and an exhortation not to touch nor to disturb anything. Just beyond the grass of the yard, just into the dry leafy matter and scrub, he had built two fires. One he tended, and one was watched only by a white sheet bearing under it four ominous lumps. At points in his muttered chanting, both flames would flare up perilously. Perilously indeed, because they were under a canopy of barebranchy trees. A forest fire was the least of my concerns, for from under the sheet I detected a singularly disturbing shuffling, as of unknown shambling horrors rustling through the decaying leaves.
It was then that my strength vanished, as in a dream. I fell to my knees as certain persons, some known and some unknown, scraped and shuffled their way out from under the sheet. My father was as alarmed as I at this unforeseen interruption to his wizardry, 'though he at least still possessed the power of locomotion. We both made for the garage, myself on hands and knees and pursued by the whiteclad strangers whose eyes were not quite right. Through the garage was the relative safety of the house. I called for my father to give me his hand, to lend me his strength to get me out of this awful harm's way.
Then I woke up.
This is what I get for spending the better part of two days reading Lovecraft online.

Hypnos teased

   One of my favorite winter activities is, on a really cold day, to get onto the bus for the ride home. As a rule, the colder the outside of the bus, the hotter and drier the inside. (This is an objective phenomenon, as measured by my Calecotronic Portable Thermohygrometer, and not just psychological relativism.) On such earlydark days, the busride is like a herkyjerky liedown in front of a fireplace (but more upright-seated). And inevitably, the dry heat lulls me toward sleep while the knowledge that I've got to get off the damn bus at some point pulls me back awake. The net result is the sort of dreamy dazed doze that I've mostly only experienced while curled fetally up in a library chair.
   Dry heat, dry eyes, sleepytime and drool on the armchair.
   A hynagogic state is the clinical term, and a fine term it is. Pseudodreams aside, my favorite thing about this state is the combination of peace and time dilation. Five minutes balloon into an hour, like LSD without the tweakiness or other side effects. I could almost stand to live forever like that, and the best thing is that it wouldn't even take forever to do it because of the expansion of time. Of course I jest; any fraction of infinity is still infinity. Alas.
   Hypnagogia is much better than hynopompic states. Coming back awake from sleep, with one's last memories being random scraps of dreams, one doesn't tend to get the same peaceful ease as with the transition into sleep.
   As it happens, I would just as well take either one: They're about equally difficult for me to attain. Whatever analog to Cerberos may guard that Lesser Divide, between the lands of the quick and the asleep, does not let me go gentle into either that good night or the next good morning. If I'm awake, the odds are that I won't be able to sleep, and vice versa. After the past several nights that I haven't been able to sleep, I came to accept this. I would rather not sleep at all than oversleep. What with being almost thirty and supposedly supposed to be like a grownup and, you know, stuff and junk.
   One of these days I'm just going to ride an on-campus bus from one end of UNH to the other, again and again in great circles of restful not-quite-sleep. And I will get off, dazed, blinking, and with mid-evening morning-breath, and I will probably regret having wasted three or five hours. But I'll have enjoyed it, and will look back on it nostalgically on many future sleepless nights.

Four or five Points of Light

[Edited for veracity- Ed.]
Stately Parsons Hall has a problem with doors. There is a pair of doors in the front that, if the wrong one is used, will not close. This leads to security concerns when the building's meant to be locked, and also to massive heat loss over the winter. I have watched hundreds of students blithely push on the wrong door, and when it fails to open easily, just push it harder and walk away as it fails to close.
The other day, I overheard the following exchange between a few students who'd just come in:
Girl: You used the wrong door!
Boy: So?
Girl: So it doesn't close! And...
and on down the hall they went. This was the biggest single reason for hope in the future that I've seen in maybe years: A young person was paying attention to her surroundings. I bet she's the type who even looks both ways before crossing the street- an uncommon behavior on campus.
So, children being the future, I was much encouraged by this. Until later that day. Later that day, I met four much better causes for hope. If the first girl was a point of light, these were supernovae.
My friend and roomate-to-be Ann was surprised with a birthday party the other night. In attendence, among others, were children named Max, William, Dora, and Bean. Let me start by relating the cards the three eldest made for the birthday girl.
Max made a card whose insides featured a variety of animals making animal noises and wishing Ann a happy birthday. An alligator, a monkey, a fly, a snake, and more. The snake has just failed to catch the fly, and says, 'Damn! I missed!' while the fly rejoices, 'Thank God! Happy birthday! Bzzzz!' He is 11.
Seven-yearold William's card featured some type of toothy dog attacking a stickman's tookus. The butt in question had a flap torn out with a rubber band, possibly so you could move his can out of harm's way. On the back was drawn a man being shot. There was also a legend included, explaining that dark circles represented bullets, and red drops were blood.
Dora made a round card with layers on the front making a bow, like would be tied around a box of chocolates. Inside the card is a rendition of Dora handing Ann the self-same card. Self-referential art at five years old.
I only met young Bean briefly. He spent most of the time hanging on his mother like a tiny baby monkey. When she told him to say Hi to me, he mumbled something that was obviously over par for a toddler. I later learned that he was inviting me for a ride in his spaceship.
They have a band, these children. I can't remember the name, but it's basically what you'd expect- The Well-Aged Cheeses, something like that. [The Creepy Muffins- Ed.] I don't know about Max, but William plays violin and has offered to teach Ann how to play. Dora is the drummer, and when they start playing shows, is going to play wearing only pants. Because drummers never wear shirts.
    So I'm a little more hopeful about the future. Under this American presidency, a lot of people have feared the setting up of an empire of fools, ruled quite rightly by the biggest idiot the people could find. I now have hope.
    I now have hope that when the people are broken and finally wholly subjugated, when our cruel overlords seek superiority through eugenics of their own bloodlines and dysgenics of the rest (to quell competition), when they seek their very immortality through cybernetics, that those rulers will truly be, like so much Dalek, the Superior Beings.