A girl with dreadlocks is naked in a dark public bathroom. There’s a vibe of fun menace, but I’m not sure if it’s from her or to her.
Camping on the beach. Takes forever to pack up leaving at nightfall. Picking up my cousin Spencer from somewhere. My colorful vape tip, which I’ve lost many times, rolls under the couch. I find it alongside a clarinet mouthpiece.
I’m climbing up a Statue of Liberty — a fat Statue of Liberty, which may or may not be someone’s art project. Very shortly after, I’m going through a security checkpoint. I look at my ID through a paper towel on a desk, the bath towel around my waist falls off and I ask Lynae help me. I end up falling on my ass, but it’s damn funny so I don’t mind.
While still waiting in line, Chinese-speaking ladies are like “oh good he’s south Chinese!” and starting asking me about dinnerware. I answer by going on a little pontification about sentimentality, and veer into a dissertation about a gravy boat my mom hand-chipped when she was six years old.
A large model of gray naval ship, as long as two men. I’m escorting it by swimming beside it, against a kind of curb, within a twilight concrete jungle. My companion demonstrates how the bow of the ship, even in gentle water on our floating wooden slat platform, vibrates so profoundly that it’s genuinely unsafe and unusable — why it’s being retired.
I’m revisiting Melbourne, Australia and meet a girl. She wears a dark-haired ponytail and is strange and energetic, youthfully careless but with an edge of urbane worldliness. We have an adventure preforming the mundane task of buying subway fare, semi-drunkenly carousing in a grotty, rowdy corner shop. We end up asleep near a rocky beach somewhere down the subway line. She’d neglected to tell me I had to clock out from the ride (of which I remember nothing) and I’m worried that, on account of it being so long after, all my credit is now expended. She languidly reassures me, no, the maximum is one day… I take it we’ve been on the beach at least overnight.
Later, I’m staying again at the last hostel I stayed when I was there. I remember thinking that I should have chosen The Friendlies, which was my favorite. This one has tall sunny glass walls in the guest lobby, and quite a drinking culture. Reminiscent of the Gold Coast in Queensland, or Florida. A Scottish guy, or maybe just someone doing a raucous impression of one, proves his drunkenness by head-butting a glass table. Not content with simply cracking it, he continues head-butting until the entire countertop of the hostel is smashed. Guy is now quite covered in blood and his friends take him away.
It’s my day off and I’m wandering my rainy neighborhood in my socks. The seller of the motorcycle I want (who is also Daenerys) goes to the corner of Z and 24th to mourn; I go to Z and 26th — a clever move, somehow. In an older part of the neighborhood, walking through a park split into three paths, I do somersaults while the rain continues, landing on my head and balancing. I resemble a Hindu god.
I come to a bus stop. I’m stopped by cops, and turn upside down on my head to talk with them, almost daring them to find fault with it. A guy saying his name is John is asking the annoying questions to me and others on the sidewalk, while cops in the car shine a bright light. Confronting him on the pathway, I begin asking him if he is officially working with them yet he refuses to answer. I say I that in that case have to make phone call to 911, and he scurries away!
Back inside my strange two-story house, with no one around, I lucidly float upstairs with a flick of my wrist. Catching sight of my silhouette, I think “this is what I was born for. This is what I want, what I like, not what I think other people think I should like.” Upstairs there are oversized shelves with letters spelling a festive message, a big round clock, a scene of years of use. I recall my mom had them when I grew up, and no one has seen fit to clean them fully. Thus, the warm, fond, grimy patina of time.
Jon Snow has been killed off. He’s brought back (necromancy) and now has magic powers. Guards rush at him standing on stone steps, and the visual effects are lame-looking drawn on stars, four of them, which fly out and teleport the guards about to attack him. Looks like the flag of Chicago. Ugh, the show really stopped trying.
Watching motorbikes race in a slope-walled mud course — reminds me of running the hose when playing in the sand as a kid. One scooter-looking motorbike driving round a curve gets it’s throttle stuck; the rider loses control and it jumps the fence into the neighborhood nearby. It runs up a hill street and hits a couple cars along the way, smashing into the side of one, which causes the Buick behind it to flip backwards down the hill. Seems expensive, and I’ve no idea who will pay for it. I read the web address monterey.com/’91 (with the apostrophe) and understand this to be a historical event at Monterey, California.
A circular redwood half-height room with Lynae lying in a bathtub in the center. I’m telling a story of some kind.
Fixing the glue on some top floor gutters, trying not to get caught by landlord. Watching buildings next door tumble into place. Buying four oranges out of a vending machine with quarters for someone else, before a trip. Serving a pie baked with a top layer of elegant crinkled-edge blue felt.
Working to fix a boat on a rickety dock with two levels, like scaffolding.
Inside a house is a light switch specifically installed to call a repairman when pressed. I know because I pressed it.
Circle of people chanting absurd slogans as some kind of abortion protest. It started with me sharing an 8-bit black-and-white VHS tape. Creative masks, a lady wearing a rippling face mask, like a tank of water. This is the audience for a talk show (perhaps Sh0eOnHead or The Daily Show). They march around in a figure 8. All happening in a New York subway, gross and dirty, but somehow the perfect setting.
I unlock a panel with nothing behind it with a key of mine, an excuse to eavesdrop on a nearby couple. Can’t tell if they’re arguing or playing. I focus my eyes on a pair of dry leaves dancing nearby.
Later my aunt is talking with me about this march, wondering if it wasn’t somehow disrespectful as an abortion protest by its very levity. Not certain myself, I note that it was spontaneous, and compare it to other tension-relieving characters like… hmm, perhaps Santa Claus? I think I meant krampus. Christmas is no less solemn for their existence.
A model of the ocean is drained; the question of whether France technicality still has slavery is asked. Pouring in something the consistency of bacon fat on the ocean floor near Fiji or Tahiti, to illustrate the extent of this weirdly unperceived modern slavery. The model refills. Finally the last colony drops out and is s no longer France. Thereafter, France must deal with being completely in northern Europe with its cold winters. Near Notre Dame, I amble down a ski slalom with hurdles leftover from the Olympics, now hobos use it as a thoroughfare. I discuss public housing when someone says something insightful concerning modern poverty.
I’m outside my childhood home on Kemper court, trying to get my scooter over the fence. This is behind the family room, the narrow walkway. My green vintage Vespa ends up just a foot or two into the neighbor’s yard, and I unlatch the side gate and wheel it over the front path. I notice a garage freezer among the gravel landscaping near the house, door hanging open, chugging hard to keep cold — so hard that I smell melting plastic. So, it’s the first dream where I realize the house belongs to someone else now.
The neighbor’s house on the other side has a Starbucks running out of it now. I note this curiosity to my homepie friend Lauren, since the road construct “court” or “cul-de-sac” is more formally termed a “starbuck” (at least in the dream).
A big gym or theater, an enclosed space, flooded at end of year for cleaning. People can now float around in three dimensions. Varieties of ocean life shows up, one is a species of fish that leaves a trail of blue pigment. I share this info with the crowd, as a vast school swims through, turning the water almost black in places. I also half-speak/half-chatter nearby my third-grade crush Christy T. about my secret and considerable knowledge of drugs and/or sex. I slyly offer her a giant pretzel from a jar as I snag one myself… she takes it, and we’re both rather pleased with ourselves.
The performance stage club at one end is flooded for first time too. Lauren had worked there before — at one point she doesn’t recognize me and so I respectfully abstain from pursuing sex within the club (no surprises for anyone). Go there again with Lauren on a waveskimmer, dipping a paddle ahead of us, cutting water to steer. Lauren unlocks a crypt off to stage left, a heavy metal door. The way it latches, she must squeeze through a smaller secondary hatch. As she’s getting out I read an unnoticed sign above instructing to smell for lisp gas (?) first, as there could be decomposition. Geez, it’s actually a crypt!
Travelled to visit a big warehouse-like Toys-r-Us in Tennessee. Shopping for a present for Patrick/Alia. At the end of one aisle is a dollhouse-like playset of the Millennium Falcon, $422 — way more than I could spend, but cool that it exists. One shelf has a display demonstration of DIY plant life in test tube, as home decor.
I skate through aisles using the metal tip of an umbrella on the floor, it’s memorably loud.
I babysit a baby named Arnoit (has a French pronunciation), who may be the child of a drug addict mom. I can’t really tell if he’s human, or can see. But the toxicology report does show a bunch of stuff including Dr pepper in the cerebrospinal fluid (!).
Uncertain if this was Arnoit, but I have a history conversation with a kid born 18 years after September 11 2001. We compare my brother Chris who was actually born 10 years before, who still seems old to this kid.
I’m suddenly rich, no longer apprehensive about money. But still mourning something… lost youth, maybe? I buy a place with a wide, flat aquarium in one room, whose low sides allow you to step in and see the rare, strange sea pens clustered around the central filter. I chat about the two aquarium walls I will build in the next room, to fill out the space now that I have nothing better to do.
A bit later I’m knitting in the open courtyard of an aerospace museum. A vehicle like a cross between a Huey helicopter and an A10 Warthog lands briefly right beside me, then lifts-off nose up and parks at nearby cylindrical tower reminiscent of the SF Museum of Modern Art. For the record, I don’t knit.
In my new leisure-enabled life I get to make a special visit to the ADA Baths, an artificial hot springs built for the grand public good of accommodating those who wouldn’t be accommodated anywhere else. It feels like a spacious concrete temple somewhere in San Francisco’s Western addition. Yet also, I experience memories of it’s founding as a campaign which convinced the country of Gabon to construct it. The once bustling entrance there is now little more that a small stone pathway off from the main road, disused but for occasional field trips.
Attending a disability seminar at a grandiose white-surfaced union hall, a wall-sized window with a view downslope to an elegant smooth grassy hill. Feels like a palace. I miss most of the honored speakers talk — perhaps I ought to feel bad — but I actually am trying to accomplish something while I’m going in and out during the talk. I’m also furtively vaping during most of this, and I have the pleasant discovery that I’m not the only one when I walk through an unseen stranger’s vape cloud. First I’ve dreamt of vaping, that I recall.
We’ve moved out of the Fartpartment but still keep the empty space. We’re in the midst of moving into a new ground-level commercial-like home just three blocks away — I can’t tell which direction though, and oddly it was at some point also Australia.
In the alcove there several feet off the ground, up in my hammock, I’m both lounging and tele-transporting our moving goods, dropping care packages onto the tile floor. A new roommate shows up, thick eyebrows and appearance much like Caitlin M.’s partner, and adjusts the curtain in front of the hammock. Another roommate is Victoria from Hedonisia, excited to report there’s a Dynamo donuts nearby. Someone else, perhaps just stopping by to wish us well, inquires if I know that the location (in Australia, mind you) was once quite near the terminus of the old steamer cruise ship route between Buenos Aires and (1930s Rodger Rabbit Toontown) Los Angeles… as seen on Deep Space 9? Of course this makes only vague sense but I’d an interesting historical tidbit, and I thank them.
From the ground-floor window I then witness an odd scene sex on the sidewalk across, an enthusiastic young woman with a strapon penetrating a guy just below the base of his dick. Wow. Later on, I’m returning back toward the new place and notice them casually walking different directions as if to throw off suspicion that they even know one another.
I’m pleased to find out the neighborhood has its own dedicated web service to meet people. I spend lots of time on it in order to make new friends but sadly, I soon enough realize the only people still hanging around are individuals who, by some personal flaw, weren’t able to make friends with anyone else.