I dreamt that I was holding a tray and standing in a cafeteria line of about six people. There was another line next to us, with about a hundred people. Everything seemed to be going okay, and I thought I was very wise to have chosen the shorter line, when suddenly the cashier for my line just walked away, with no explanation! The six of us waited and waited, but the cashier never returned, and none of us wanted to get into the other line of a hundred or more cafeteria diners.

Eventually I started making noises and getting semi-belligerent. Another cashier showed up, finally, and charged me $40 for my three lunch items. I mentally calculated, however, that they could not cost me more than $15. Trying to be considerate to the people waiting behind me, pushed already to their absolute limit, I paid, and then examined my receipt. None of my lunch items were itemized: there was only a bill for $40!!

I then put my tray away and spoke to a manager, who advised me to write a letter of complaint. I was in the process of composing my thoughts when I awoke, and was left to ponder the meaning of it all.

I told my wife of my dream. She started groaning when I was still waiting in the cafetria line, and the groaning continued straight through to the letter of complaint. Her interpretation was immediate and decisive: she was appalled by the utter banality of my dream. It was, she said, the latest of a series of dreams that did not speak well for my character, where I am faced with trivial challenges, and overcome them in utterly predictable ways. My dreams, she said, suggested a squalid inner life, filled with ordinary preoccupations of the most inane and petty nature.

I’m wondering if there is not a Mormon perspective here that I am missing, and perhaps also my wife. Can anyone help me here? I stand accused …

(Written with Scott Calhoun)

I didn’t know that Cosmo, BYU’s official cougar mascot, wrote poems until I recently read a collection of Cosmo poetry, entitled My World is Blue and White: Not For Cougar Fans Only.  The collection contains over seventy written by dozens who have worn the Cosmo costume over the years, gone out week after week to give their school 110%, and have never asked for anything except a few high-fives and the cheers of thousands.

For starters, I never knew of the emotional costs of the whole tryout process, especially when over a hundred compete each year for one coveted slot. This may be seen in the following poem, “The Winter of Our Tryouts.”

In a room almost empty of hope
we wait to hear the news
of who will stay
and who will go,
cast out
dismissed
de-Cougared
cut low.

Some sit in the corners,
and hide their face,
some of us quietly play Uno,
or stare into space.

We retreat into our own little holes:
so many broken dreams,
so many dead souls.

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Who saw this one coming? A middle-aged Mormon man from Missouri swims at midnight across a lake in Myanmar to warn world-famous Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi of her imminent assassination, and winds up getting her sentenced to 18-months of house arrest, as well as seven years of hard labor for himself. Apparently Mr. John Yettaw, the midnight swimmer, had a dream, and he was simply following the dictates of that dream.

In fact he, in his own words, has had a number of “impressions” and “camcorder moments,” one of which compelled him to make an earlier attempt to see Aung San Suu Kyi, back in November 2008. On that earlier swim, the human rights activist immediately sent him away, though Yettaw was reportedly able to still leave behind a few pages from the Book of Mormon, before donning his pair of improvised flippers to make another long and perhaps very prayerful swim across Inya Lake, to eventual reunion with his family in Missouri.
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You’re settling in for a nice long sacrament meeting.  You’re hoping for a gentleman from the High Council, or maybe that woman who works in the primary who always pitches her remarks to the ten-year olds.  You’re thinking you’re in for a relaxing hour, and then some guy gets up there to the microphone and shouts “ALOHA!” and expects everyone, including you, to shout back “ALOHA!” This is the Aloha Violation, and it has to end. 

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Hey a new anthology of BYU Grounds Crew poetry came across my desk this week, and I thought I’d review it for the blog.  I must confess I haven’t always been a huge fan of Grounds Crew Poetry; sometimes it’s just too angry for me.  I mean, I understand no one’s making a million dollars working for grounds crew at BYU, and that it’s an awesome responsibility keeping the grounds as neat and tidy as they are.  But still, I thought last year’s anthology Grounds Crew Poetry: A Voice of Oppression was taking it a bit too far. Dedicated to capturing the “irreducible varieties of a life of labor lived by the often forgotten or ignored landscape maintenancers amongst us,” the tone of the poems was openly provocative, such as in the following:

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Some of you may remember me from my work in the BYU Standards office in the late-1990s. My title was “Councilor,” and I met with various student violators (a few of whom post comments here, and they know who they are), but early on I was selected to join an elite team of researchers, intellectuals, and all-around idea-men, tasked with producing pamphlets and other materials to explain the continuing need for dress standards at the ‘Y.’ We had our own offices separate from the other councilors, our own water cooler, and certain discreet preferences when it came to office refreshments.
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How’s it goin? Long time, I know.  I thought I’d start off with a few poems, since that’s kind of what I do.  There was a time when I was very well known for my poetry, when some critics in the late-1980s claimed I’d captured the mood of my generation, the spirit of my times, but you know how things happen in life.  Yeah, it’s been awhile! 

After my mission I sunk into that despondency familiar to so many of you: the post-mission syndrome.  Fortunately for literature and for art in general I turned to writing as a way of relieving my despair.  One poem from this period is entitled, “Thoughts on a Gray Day While Watching The Six Million Dollar Man.”

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