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Dream Journal

Old Gas Station, Renovated for a Cult

I inherit a gas station and repair shop from a rich uncle. Good to own, simply to have such a resource, but the land itself is probably a multi-million dollar value. The neighborhood is rusty and industrial, but wooded and scenic, near a picturesque mountain bend.

Roof has plants growing on it and the sloped edges are chipping away with age. I note to my dad that several electrical inlets have started to swell (especially an old Christian cross near the road). Kids are inquisitive about my motorcycle as I roll it into the first set of doors.

I allow the visitors who show up to start becoming gurus. Everyone wears white clothing with yellow details over them. A game is played over the course of a day, where the cult members get more and more expository, grandiose. A car trunk starts blinking in the repair shop, which is a prize for our scrappy band, but by the end of the day the winner doesn’t even want it. There are blue finches in the gritty central courtyard — not endangered but it’s nice to give them a home.

“What is inevitable?” I ask a small group of disciples. Some petite blonde mishears me and gives a definition of a weird drug (N-N2-DL?) — dredged from her past life of sometime debauchery in the city. Eventually we agree, mostly, on a definition of “unavoidable”.

The phrase enters my head, profound and banal at once: “you can’t teach a god how to behave.” I awake with my arm powerfully asleep, hanging off the side of the bed.

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