Once in a while an exact phrase or string of text appears in a dream. Usually I forget these things, however clear they might have seemed when I woke.

One time the precise piece of information was an intersection in Elmhurst. Another time it was the e-mail address 11106@aol.com.

This time it was ADS 59402. It looks like a string of characters one might see on a license plate. All I can think of is that 59402 is a zip code, that of Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. A friend of mine moved to Montana recently but I don’t think that explains the dream since I would not have known 59402 to be a zip code in that state.

A search for the exact phrase “ADS 59402” turned up a sea of garbage web pages, including FUNERAL HOME MARKETING IDEAS for the Malmstrom Air Force Base, a listing for an available apartment at the Zen Towers in Manila, and a review of the Asado Steakhouse in Romania.

Malmstrom AFB sounds important. It is home to the Minuteman III ICBM.

That’s as much research as I intend to do into this evidently meaningless string of letters and numbers which, for whatever reason, appeared fully articulate in my head this morning.

It will happen one day that a precise string of text that passes through my dream state will be meaningful. It’s been known to happen. In the 1970s my mother had a dream that consisted of just one word: VOLUSIA. At the time she had no idea there was a county in Florida named Volusia. She also had no idea she would one day live in Florida. She certainly had no idea my father would move to Volusia County after he left her on March 30, 1981.

That word — VOLUSIA — haunted her for about 15 years. But that was not the only random appearance of something that was meaningless to her until our father left. The name PALMER STILES appeared in a dream, fully formed and unforgettable. She mentioned it throughout my youth. I coöpted the name and wrote several short stories which featured Palmer Stiles as a protagonist. It was not until maybe 20 years later that we learned Palmer Stiles was a race car driver living in… wait for it…  Volusia County.

…

I got a mechanical keyboard. It makes a lot of noise and has numerous options for backlighting the keys. The keyboard arrived via a route that many people claim they never take. I clicked on an ad. Gasp. I am marked for life as a purchaser of mechanical keyboards.

Ah, but I’ve clicked on many an ad and made many a purchase as a result. As much as the advertising epidemic has rendered the Internet a spastic, trembling mess I have no objection to that rare instance where an ad is actually relevant to something in my life. In this case what would have been a prohibitively expensive keyboard was going for what looked like a steep discount, though I might have been fooled into thinking this.

This must be the only keyboard I’ve ever had where I actually needed to read the instructions. It is the Gofreetech Wildfire K-001 Mechanical Keyboard.

It is a nice, incisive racket that it makes. Here is how the entire following paragraph sounded as it happened.

The above recording comes from another recently procured gadget, the Sony PCM-D100. That purchase was made outside of the advertising continuum which now follows individuals from the Internet to traditional retail stores. Clicktracking mechanisms today can tell when you buy an item at a retail store after clicking on an ad for it online. I don’t think I ever clicked on an ad for the D100 but I did plenty of research on it, so I don’t think anyone out there will get a commission from my purchase. I have felt a bit of buyer’s remorse. It turns out not to be the best gadget for the job of making recordings at the piano. But I will learn to live with it.

…

I am drinking coffee for the first time since Sunday. I thought cutting the morning Aeropress coffee ritual and eliminating that shot of caffeine would give me headaches as has happened in the past when I skipped the morning coffee. But this time I eased into it. In years past I made coffee strong enough to kill a large animal. But I’ve cut the number of coffee scoops by more than half and noticed that I was not even finishing as much coffee as I made from that. It just doesn’t do anything for me. I don’t need to completely eliminate coffee from my life but it had become kind of a messy bother to grind the beans and deal with the Aeropress filters. I bought a so-called permanent filter but found that it caused as much if not more paper waste than the regular filters. That’s because the coffee grinds stuck to the permanent metal filter so tightly that I could only get them off by using a paper towel. Running hot water over the filter had no effect in getting those grinds off.

I think of my friend Paul almost every single time I use the Aeropress. It was he who introduced me to that fabulous coffee intermediary. It’s funny how a person’s face appears like that as a permanent part of the ritual. I remember somebody at corporate saying he thought of me every time he opened a certain drawer which contained a webcam I gave him back in 1997. That webcam has rolled around in that desk drawer probably to this day.

I had a long conversation last night with someone I’ve known mostly online for over 20 years. I never know what to expect of him. I mentioned that Tuesday was the anniversary of my father’s death, and that I could not believe it’s been 12 years. He did not say the word but I know him well enough to know that he remembered it was a suicide.

He said something about the surprising things he learned about his father after he died many years ago. In response I said there was only one real surprise lurking among my father’s effects: He was gay. This is something I have not told very many people. I made a sort of subconscious vow that I would wait until our mother was gone before saying anything in public. Now I wish I had told her. I think she suspected herself and that she would have been relieved or even amused to know.

Dad’s situation was probably pretty common among his generation. If I take any sadness from it now it is that he never became who he wanted to be. As far as I could tell he had no real-life interactions with other men, and I don’t think he knew he was gay until pretty late in life. It did explain certain half-blossomed eccentricities he had in such things as wearing funny hats and donning awkwardly gaudy apparel.

I asked his estate planning attorney if he knew my father was gay. Without missing a beat he responded “No but I kind of suspected…”

About a year after dad’s death I spotted a New Yorker cartoon that pretty much said it all. Two elderly people are sitting on the front porch. One of them asks “Were we gay?”

The existentiality of things did lead me to consider that in another generation I might never have been born. But such thoughts will not be allowed to open a vacuum underneath my life.