Month: September 2020

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Dream Journal

Remembering “Say the Thing”, Parking My Truck in Mexico

An island of scrubby brush and dry dirt. Camp Tipsy-like event of a gathering of friends goofing off in the water on junky boats. Twice someone locates a submerged set of “black eyes”, two large stones one can stand on in deep water off the pier. As he does it the second time, I’m clambering up the pier ladder, thinking about what Chicken yelled at me during a performance, “say the thing!” (reminds me of Varrick in Legend of Korra.) Back then I thought I wasn’t remembering something, but I think I realized it may have been a cue to just say something funny or catchphrase-y. I scoop out three tiny googly eyes floating in the dark water. The sun is dim, sky is twilight, and we’re leaving the pier. Debris of a wooden shelf is sticking out of the dirt near the end of the pier, it’s sharp little carpentry hooks ready to snag. I shove back and forth to dislodge it and one or two friends pause to help.

I go to retrieve my truck from where I parked it. This is Mexico, on a pleasant tree-lined urban residential street running down a diagonal hill. Sliding down the side toward it, I look downhill and notice the name “Billy” written on the slope. The drainage channel there has gone a bit crooked. I scoop out the dirt and straighten it out, but I immediately notice the water now flowing much too fast. I try to correct it, then absentmindedly return to my truck. With the keys in my hand at the door, I notice this is NOT my truck. I turn around and notice that (since I parked) a car has been parked behind and to the side of this truck, unnecessarily blocking any traffic on the street. Indignant, I scoop up a bunch of dirt and spread it all over the hood of the car. I then turn around to get my truck, the only other car on the street, only to find this truck isn’t mine either. I instantly know it’s been towed and I’m in for hours of bullshit, equally instantly am I infallibly certain that I parked it legally. Something has gone very wrong where I parked, and I don’t know where to start with figuring out what.

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Dream Journal

Hidden Object, Artifact Stash

Yeoman and secret alley. Hands carved from rock. Housing from my former mentor, who may return. Moving to a closet. Trying to put stuff back in drawers like it was, even though we’ve consumed the stuff in them. Old battery in half on counter. Hiding in the top shelf of a back closet. Feels like the place gets evacuated. In a front closet drawer, I act as dull as dead. I become like a kind of intelligent object. Get sent to the artifact stash, where there are cutaway model railroad tracks.

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Dream Journal

Destination: Cozy Nostalgic Coffee Shop

A “destination” coffee shop with various odds and ends, tasteful lighting and wood panels, a relaxed atmosphere, comforting smells. It’s run by Eileen (but with nobody else I know). I say hi to her, tell her I finally saw her in that documentary “Caffeinated”, but it was silly how they only used one clip — she’s already turned away though, either doesn’t hear me or pretends not to. Haven’t seen her in a long time, so it might be fair.

I’m here because I spent most of my day postponing putting on my motorcycle riding gear to get to my Russian school, not admitting to myself that I just don’t want to go. Eileen’s shop has rows of merchandise, uncrowded during the pandemic. I find a few items that make me nostalgic for earlier times in San Francisco. One, a cardboard tube with a signature affirming it’s been packed by my old friend Kelly Gallamore. (Perhaps the store is instead run by Noona Nolan?)

Someone I talk with there shares a personal difficulty. In what is a typical response for me, I share a tangential factoid I happen to know… some incident that happened to Queen Elizabeth II (then, viewing a flashback with Prince Philip as a colorful robot, playful geometric designs on all his clothes, colored plates covering his face). Later, I discover my old moto jacket and pants stuffed in a garbage can and fish them out.

The shop has a long row of machines (perhaps for copying or the like). Mine gets a very long piece of paper stuck in it, just as an employee unknowingly points me out to someone as a veteran user/customer who might help them. Down further the row become a trough of water, with a long flat rail down the middle. Several objects I need are floating in it.

Home now. Looking down from our apartment’s back room. To do that, we peer around a large rusty statue of a chicken that our landlord’s had mounted on the corner of the building forever. I think “huh, so odd but I’ve never had that thing remind me of Chicken John.” There are a few massive beasts getting aggressive with each other in the backyard. One looks like a bodybuilding panda with eyeliner, the other a stairway-bumping basilisk. They’ve wandered in, though could choose to fight anywhere. Up closer, I try to consider what to, but there’s not much else except watch.

Spiderwebs encrusting the middle of trees, trees all in a row, as I travel past at high speed. The only way to see them is to line their row and look through several at once. I crack that code, but can’t guess if anyone else has seen this strange metaphor. A metaphor for what though, I can’t say.

I remember: looking up at a dusk-time sky, thinking as if I’m outside my own life, that I was born here and now because I picked this lifetime so I could see humanity’s transition. In this case, the transition to digital.

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Dream Journal

Suit of Armor of Precious Nacre

Heavily secretive exclusive museum of pandemics, owned by the Catholic Church (or somebody associated with it). I’m one of a pair of journalists granted brief precious access. It’s a little storefront-like space inside a larger building, perhaps a European-style pedestrian mall. The walls are covered with tiny writing (data) paired with genuine artifacts — floor to ceiling. In the forefront of our minds is trying to remember as much as possible in our short time inside. To me, the most beautiful object is articulated shell nacre armor, a full cowl top.

After: in the last century rich people built trendy castle houses — regarded for their ostentatious aesthetics, but lacking any credentials as a fortification. The one I spot, displayed off to the left side on a table like a school diorama, was called “the height of progress in castle tower building.” I notice angular zigzagging stairways between the indefensible stone towers. Curiously, the stairs leading up to them have occasional big vertical rises. Up to the top of the hill, secluded from public scrutiny, I visit the village of lower-class workers who mind the castle grounds. Descended from the first minders, they strike me as amiable and humble people, who I could imagine happily spending a great deal of time with.

On a 1940s-ish city street I pop into a heavily-frequented doorway atrium. I’ve been waiting to see when it’ll open, checking often. It’s been graffitied and painted over so many dozens of times… a place with an everyman vibe. But a place where I never realized (until it’s pointed out to me) I shouldn’t store my electronics, two of which have been incautiously stored under flimsy cardboard for some time. Despite this, they’re still there and I understand the likelihood of people finding it, thinking of stealing it, but giving me the grace of my ignorance — almost as an act of charity. I just never put together how rough and tumble this fondly-regarded neighborhood actually is.

In a small upstairs apartment where I’m staying, while my friend group is gone, I discover a small furry animal (perhaps a baby rat). I present it to them when they return, including, for some humorous reason, a small rock for comparison. I put the tiny rat into a hamster cage next to the big rat cages, which are stacked precariously five terrariums tall. At the small vibration of shutting the small “hamster cage” door, those glass terraria fall down and I immediately recognized their center of balance is far higher than their middle. I resolved to fix it next time, cursing.

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Dream Journal

Dine-n-Ditch Work Reunion

A reunion of co-workers/friends in Australia. Several people from different groups in my past: my salesman job in Melbourne (my boss Benjamin Haynes, the French girl Bubbles), the Pacific Tradewinds hostel (Laura Lynellen Meller-Weller, Rachel from Felixstowe), and Camp Tipsy (Anya the sculpture teacher, others). Held at an upstairs Chinese restaurant. This place is within my persistent personal dream version of Australia, the one I sometimes see with wide open maps of places I’ve traveled before, like the great red desert, or long port-covered coastlines, that I never went to in person.

I suddenly notice that my co-workers have all disappeared one-by-one, and I’m the last one there in. It’s a dine and ditch scenario and I feel obliged to probably pay for all of them if I can’t negotiate something else.

The last person I see come in Kendra Gilpatrick-Tropez (she’s married since we last knew each other). We share a moment of sympathy as I relate what just happened, and for reasons I can’t explain I feel greatly relieved that she’s the one who came in later.

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Dream Journal

Two Masks, an Empty Simpsons-Inhabited Mansion

Standing in a place where recently a pregnant Marge Simpson stood, waiting to see someone. Now 3 grey chairs are lined up in a row outside that door, on gray carpet, among empty halls. They leave the impression of a scene very recently abandoned. I observe the vibrating cartoon outline of The Simpsons’ Monty Burns standing sideways against the column of my backyard stairway — events unfolding without him, inaccessible yet seen, as if inhabiting a windowed universe. He remains throughout the dream.

Taking the elevator to the rooftop, and the 38th story of this Addams-Family-like mansion. I get the hint that there might not exactly be 37 stories below it… it’s some sort of status thing. Whoever I am in this dream, I recognize I’ve lived a privileged life, and so recognize while gazing out among other high skyscrapers the calculated prestige of this place.

This whole time, we’ve been searching for two masks. One of them is real, of old Judaic provenance, and quite important. My younger sibling brings me one that their crew has found, flattened and rubbery and empty-eyed, a crude (though not cruel) caricature of a Jew. When asked how we will know which is which, I tell them with big-brother certainly, “to really to know which one is real, we can take samples and do composition analysis at a lab — I bet one of these will come up as being made some time in the last 50 years, somewhere in the vicinity of Southern California, while the other will have a vague 1000-ish year estimate, somewhere from Eastern Europe to the Levant… and which one would you bet on?”

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Dream Journal

Russian LGBT, Cartoon Dog for Time Travelers

In my teenage bedroom. A river of ghosts, like a circular racetrack. From the direction of the closet someone says say “that’s us”, then two hand-carved reggae dolls kiss.

(I don’t remember what this means, but: reincarnated as ghost and as colored lights, eaten by a shark to complete the dream sequence.)

Accusing Putin of being gay due to his homophobia, but contemplating the ethics of outing someone even when they’re hurting their whole community. I think this while I’m scraping flakes and microSD cards off of my red metal thermos/cup. Congressional Democrats now have the push to reconsider a Russian LGBT bill, while I look over a box of bottles.

Still in the bedroom, I ask a future traveler as he prepares to return, “hey have you heard of the 80s cartoon — sorry, 1980s kid’s cartoon movie All Dogs Go To Heaven”? I gesture toward two stickers on a filling cabine, different characters named Union Jack: one an actual British person, one a floppy-eared dog from that movie. To prove my point, the time traveler does recognize the dog.