Finally had a good dream. (Dreamed that I was asked to photograph Hillary Clinton and her house was so beautiful I started weeping. I told her aide that I now understand why anyone would want to get into politics.) Beforehand I kept having not good dreams. Not necessarily bad ones, good writing material, to be sure, far from them being nightmares, but they woke me up with a sense of negativity. I told about one of them to G and then cried my eyes out, howling: I've been arogaaaaanttt!... (In that dream I turned an obnoxious neighborhood kid into a small hedgehog and he got stepped on, so I contemplated throwing him into the river to drown. So for his crime of being loud and a child, I made him spend his last hours petrified, in a broken body, his tiny limbs crushed, and then thrown away like garbage. The moral of the dream was - people with power to serve punishment of any kind must be people with very high tolerance for bullshit.) A fucking depressing dream.

       Some part of me is raw with sensitivity and an overabundance of empathy. I sat through some historical lectures to learn of some terrible things that happened, but also read about a beloved local thug who did some pretty awful things. I do believe in vengeance, although I've of late began to trust the system enough to stand against death penalty. In an attempt to explain it, I said to G: since knowing you I understand how horrible it is to be locked away. That came out very weirdly and he was not happy. Of course I meant to say that in my previous life, I was in a small room - my school dorm - then in an even smaller room - my army guard night and days, then at home, which was a small room with curtained windows... So if I was to be locked away in a small room with not much social interaction, I'd feel perfectly at home. But now, when G has taught me to socialize, to go out, have coffee, go to the movies, walk the dog, go hiking, surf the net, pilgrim to buy chalks, go to museums all the time... and my favorite part - sleeping with him (not talking about sex). To be locked away from the things I love would be the ultimate punishment. So I don't believe in killing the guilty anymore. Let them suffer for 50 years, in the worst company imaginable - their conscience. And gangbangers. 

       That said, I understand when in the time when violence was the only means of getting justice, people killed one another. I understand it had to happen sometime. But do it quickly and painlessly and be done with it. Fuck the obscene showmanship of public torture. I am not saying some people don't deserve to get locked in a cage in the middle of the town square to be whipped, spat and pissed on - but I am happy I exist in the time and society when even the worst get punished so that their integrity is not compromised. It says quite a lot about us, and some very bad things about them.