Put It Away, Mr. President

Last week I dreamed that Donald Trump pulled his pants down, sat in a chair, and told me to get on my knees.

But let's back up a little.

In high school I drove a Ford F-350 Super Duty Diesel Crew Cab. It wasn't mine. It was my stepdad's. I hated driving it. You couldn't park it anywhere. It ate up the entire lane and half the next one. I once backed it into a tractor implement and gouged a scratch down the side. The truck was so big I couldn't see what was behind me.

But there was another car. A 1963 Volkswagen Notchback. My stepdad bought it freshman year. A project car. He told me he'd get it running if I could find a way to pay for college. I did. The car took all four years to finish. It was still a project when senior year ended.

That Notchback was everything the truck wasn't. Curved, smooth, elegant. Small enough to park anywhere. Fuel-efficient. Weird in the best possible way. Nobody in my family shared my obsession with Volkswagen. It was mine. Inherently, inexplicably mine. I still have it.

The truck was a mask. Something I was trying on for size because it was parked in the driveway and the keys were available. The Notchback was the thing that actually fit. But it wasn't ready yet.

My dad wanted me to play football. He'd played football. He projected his love of it onto me and I performed that love back. I went to the practices. I wore the pads. I dreaded every minute of it. Every interaction with the team, every drill, every Friday night. The head coach, for what it's worth, later resigned amid hazing allegations after players were using a weapon to assault other players on the team. That predatory energy was present even then, even on the field where boys were supposed to become men.

I was better at soccer. I loved it. My dad bought me a really nice Puma bag for my gear. I still have that bag too.

But nobody in Shasta County, California, was telling a boy to pursue soccer. Soccer was too European. Too soft. Not masculine enough. Football was the thing. Football was what the men around me valued, what my peers expected, what the culture said a boy should want.

So I played football and buried the part of me that wanted something else.

We humans are machines. We receive the programming handed down to us. Sports are part of that. Vehicles are part of that. Masculinity and manhood are part of that.

In the dream, I was driving to my middle school in my dad's truck. His current one. A Chevy Silverado, too big for the parking spot. “Why the fuck do people drive trucks like this?” I said to no one. Then I drove over a shovel. Just lying there in the lot. The handle came up and smacked against the truck.

Sit with that image for a second. A tool designed for digging, lying in the path of an inherited vehicle. I ran it over. It struck back.

The Economist was putting on an event at my middle school. A debate of sorts, organized by Democrats and independents to rally support against Trump. Against fascism. An intellectual event. I walked in expecting resistance. What I found was a room full of people kowtowing. No debate. Everyone pandering. Trump onstage, getting free airtime while the opposition just sat there.

So I stood up.

I gave a speech. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, right there in the room. I called him a fascist. I called out the room for sitting there like this was normal. I asked why the hell any of us came here if we were just going to hand him the stage.

And the room listened. Everyone realized the error. They got up and left. The whole event dissolved.

Just me and Trump, alone in an empty room.

That's when he got angry.

He grabbed me. Pulled his pants down. Sat in a chair and pulled himself out. Wanted me to submit. To kneel. The most powerful man in the world, exposed and demanding.

This is the part of the essay where I should probably pause and say: I know this is a dream. I know how strange it sounds. But Carl Jung wrote that “we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.” I've come to believe he was right. The unconscious speaks in symbols, and it doesn't care whether you're comfortable with what it's saying. The dream doesn't lie. It doesn't perform. It shows you exactly what you need to see.

And what I needed to see was this: the corrupted masculine, in its most distilled form, trying to force me to submit. Not through strength. Through degradation.

I refused.

I walked outside. Trump followed me, predatory but also somehow pathetic. And there was the shovel. The same one I'd driven over. Lying in the parking lot.

I picked it up. A real shovel. The kind that moves dirt.

He picked up a shovel too. But his was tiny. A child's play shovel. He swung it at me, wild and clumsy, and spun himself around and fell and cut himself. Started bleeding on the pavement.

I stood there holding my shovel, watching the most powerful man in the world bleed from a wound he'd given himself. His little weapon turned on its owner. I thought about ending him. I had the shovel. I had the opportunity.

Instead, I called 911. A kind of mercy.

“I'm dead serious,” I told them. “It's the president. He's bleeding. Send someone.”

He was still exposed, still hanging out of his pants, lying there on the pavement. I looked down at him and said: “Dude, put it away. The ambulance is almost here.”

He tucked himself in. Looked up at me. And something shifted.

He stopped being a predator and became something else. Curious. Almost gentle. He asked me: “Who are you, young man? You're very talented. What do you want to do with your life?”

I wasn't ready for that question.

Not from him. Not from anyone. I had just lost a competition earlier that day in the dream. I'd been strong in practice and completely collapsed when it counted. Couldn't hold my own weight in the moment that mattered. I felt weak. Directionless. And I told him the truth.

I don't know. I'm kind of lost. I'm just trying things.

That's the part of this that scares me more than the president's pants. Not the darkness. The honesty. I'm 38 years old. I'm building a company called Tala. I'm ten weeks from starting a new life in Berlin with my two sons. I have a vision and a work ethic and a handful of yoga studio owners who are starting to trust me.

And the honest answer, the one I gave the shadow king in a dream, is that I'm not sure what I'm doing. I feel powerful some days and lost on others. I have moments where I dissolve rooms with my voice and long stretches where the direction isn't clear. The strength comes and goes and I don't fully understand the pattern yet.

The corrupted masculine doesn't ask honest questions. But when you strip it of its power, when you refuse to kneel and watch it bleed from its own clumsiness, sometimes what's left underneath is the question you actually need to hear.

What do you want to do with your life?

Still in the dream, Trump connected me to someone. A guy from Newport Beach. Tan, fit, well-dressed, older. The polished version of male success. He was running a high-tech beekeeping operation. Artificial hives built from mycelium. Bigger cells than normal so the bees produce more honey. Everything optimized. A beautiful system.

He was proud of it. It was impressive.

I asked him a question: Do the bees have any involvement in building the hives?

Or is it entirely artificial? And if it's artificial, do they rebel? Is there a chance the bees won't move in because they detect something foreign?

A woman next to him, tall and corporate and dismissive, waved me off. “No,” she said. “They love it.”

I woke up thinking about that answer.

They love it. The bees love the artificial structure built for them by people who never asked what bees actually need.

I've been offered hives my whole life. A full-ride scholarship I didn't choose for myself. My first product manager role I took because I loved the people who offered it, not because it was mine. One funded company after another where the container looked right from the outside. Bigger cells. More honey. Optimized for production.

And something in me always knew. The way bees know. Not intellectually. In the body. A low-frequency rejection of what's foreign, no matter how organic it looks. The organism detects what wasn't built by its own intelligence.

That's not rebellion. That's wisdom.

Last night the moon was full. First full moon of spring. They call it the Pink Moon, not because it's pink but because the first wildflowers bloom around now. Moss phlox. A small flower that pushes through the last cold and opens without permission.

Full moons illuminate what's been in shadow. That's not mysticism. That's what light does. It shows you what was there the whole time.

Here's what the light is showing me.

I spent years driving someone else's truck. Playing someone else's sport. Chasing the approval of someone else's version of strength. When the corrupted version of that masculine power tried to force me down, I refused. And the refusal wasn't the hard part. The hard part was what came after. Standing in the parking lot, holding a shovel, being asked what I actually want. And answering honestly.

I don't know yet. But I'm digging.

Not driving. Not competing. Not performing. Digging. The shovel is the tool for going underground. For excavating what's been buried beneath the truck, beneath the football pads, beneath every version of myself that was built for someone else's hive.

The shadow king swung a little shovel and fell over. The corrupted masculine, when you actually face it, is clumsy and small and bleeds from its own weapon.

My shovel is bigger.

And the bees know the difference.