Sleeping under the curved wooden rafters of a roof like an eggshell. Reminiscent of my middle school gym.
All else lost, no further notes were made this night.
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Month: March 2021
I carry around a huge case shaped like an upright base, but it’s filled with all manner of instruments in different compartments. For whatever reason right now, the only one I want to play is banjo.
I merge onto a pandemic-stricken 24th Street, the commercial corridor near my home here in the Mission District. Empty businesses line the far side. Posters advertising kratom have taken place of the storefronts.
Gazing at the face of an old acquaintance, Katie Petro, and remembering we dated once. Her identity was later lost and rediscovered.
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Heromum on the Seashore
A high wall, like a seawall, and behind it people I went to high school, walking. Reminds me of a gigantic pool I’ve been to in many dreams over the years.
Dropped into an alcove/alley with a plaque, a weird little oddly sided polygonal space. Behind a disused door I gain access to the 2nd-story of an RV house. My key fits in the ignition of the complicated control panel. A quick jump in narrative to the aftermath of driving/flying/crashing it into a burned-out tree (which is practically charcoal).
As I awake I have a fantasy of a place called Heromum: on the seashore, a hot spring on the edge of the ocean in the Greek province of Laystatia.
Belle Delphine invites me to her concert, from a corner balcony at the edge of the venue. She seems really nice and I’m even considering joining her Patreon/Onlyfans for $5. Held inside walled-in park grounds that usually hosts metal shows, once I’m inside I’m not surprised the crowd is mostly guys. It’s a pretty good concert for someone not otherwise known as a singer/musician.
Random piles of cool little toy skulls can be found in stacks, many different shapes & colors. I collect as many kinds as I can. In a confined screened-off space I come across a squat bulky machine totally covered in controls and meters, like Dalek steampunk art or fused-together antique medical devices. But my boating friend Marc Roper comments that to him it “doesn’t look like they’re just kludges” (a.k.a. greeblies, that is to say not just for show). Chicken John does an explanatory bit in the middle of the show for Belle in order to explain the machine: we are to drop the skulls into the top of the device to collect a variety of corresponding prizes. I’m happy that I’m set to collect a lot.
It’s now very crowded with fans behind the machine, among some open-air shelves. Crouched in a small ball near a top shelf, I try to cheer up a sad withdrawn little Triceratops (like Sarah from The Land Before Time).
Part of the show involves an experiment where the crowd is allowed to feel Belle’s outstretched leg. This seems to go well; perhaps something of the peer pressure of not wanting to be the guy that caused the fun to stop. She’s really engaged with her audience and seems to interact on the same level. Soon she is milling among the crowd after the performance and personally thanks me, using my name. I question aloud how she could’ve known my name, and my friends parrot back, perhaps mockingly, “I dunno Orin, how did she know your name?”
Driving a junker car through dusty parts of my hometown. As I drive along, alone, I chuck my signature ping-pong balls with skulls melted into them in the backseat. I’m listening to the radio (AM 1205?) because I don’t have my usual phone transmitter. Only just make a yellow light at a large intersection against a long line of cars going the perpendicular direction — while crossing, I maintain my eyeline on the tall tamarisk trees on the opposite corner.
From memory, I park in the driveway of the address I think I’m headed — 1284 — next to a woman parked in a car there already (it’s a long driveway so there’s room for me to pull right beside her, then back up). If this is the wrong address, I figure she’ll just have a close encounter and nothing will come of it.