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Dream Journal

A Whole Community Summer

Woke up from dreams… a dream of a whole summer of community…

My wife surprised me with a gift. I walk up to the open car door cuz there’s a whole crowd there, marching band even. They’re gathered around the car, and presented on the couch is an elaborately embroidered pair of pants — Chinese or maybe Tibetan patterns, zippers on both sides of the legs and snaps at the bottom so you can take them off quickly.. I found out later there’s snaps at the top so they can be taken off completely like that. There’s a tag reading $1,000… I can’t accept a pair of pants for $1,000, that’s too much responsibility for an item that I’ll actually wear. Looking closer, it seems to have been overwritten with a little orange sticker at… 64 cents!? I actually think this is a bit of joke-y marketing, and the real tag says $40 (which is an incredible price for a pair of pants like this). I don’t think I can stress enough: they’re simply gorgeous.

My cousin Kelly is begging me to tell him how to convince me to let him play a new PS2 game I have, some popular zeitgeist video game moment. But I explained the only thing I want is for him to not play it because I played it and I can tell it wouldn’t be good for him. I had to explain that, since my only goal was for him *not* to play it, there wasn’t any argument he could make to change my mind.

I have a big bag of metal cut-out letters, vintage cookie cutters I think. It’s my personal collection. I’m using it it an project, making text art on an inset wall of shelves. It’s several lines I can’t recall, but the message ends with “luv you cuz”. I end up having to monitor it because it’s super tempting for people to steal the little die cuts. I follow a shrugging gangster-looking guy who I see slip a little heart symbol in his back pocket, stomping his ass when I get him alone, crushing the little stolen heart in his back pocket and bruising his poor thieving ass. Reckon it left a heart-print that wouldn’t seem to jibe with the story of how he got it. I ask him why he would steal something like that… though oddly, I’m not mad, I just want to teach him a lesson.

Walking down a long slope to a beach like some place in Southern California, I see that Nautilus here are able to walk on their thin little tentacles like dogs, cavorting with people’s leashed dogs along the sandy sloped pathway down. I backtrack after I reach the beach wanting to get photo or video of these things, realizing they’re basically only found on that one path for now. They’re very playful, like little dogs, much more fascinating to watch than I can describe.

I’m going to hitch a ride with an expert Captain who pilots her own houseboat, getting to somewhere further away than where I want to go and backtracking closer to where I want to be. She has dramatic trouble turning out of the narrow waterway that is the port, having to perform hard turns a couple times. Something in the boat’s shaky mechanics, or maybe her captaining, is causing the massive and unwieldy houseboat to move unpredictably. After a few hard turns and close calls close (enough to get heckled by a group of vacationing Canadians drinking in lawn chairs) the boat grounds on a tiny gap of sand beach right next to the dock where it started.

Sitting in a crowd. Dara V. is about to depart, but before she does the medical guy she had hired to serve nitrous via a plastic tube (it’s tip covered with a snipped-off condom for improvised protection). He kind of beckons her, gesturing as if to say “I mean you already paid for it”. She kind of goes “ehhhh I mean… I could”. As she’s standing there I have time to study her face, and unexpectedly notice some of the subtle hints of how it’s aging, trying to imagine what it might look like when she’s even older. There’s weirdly nothing as specific as lines around the eyes or something… but I can kind of see it? There’s some distortion too, as I consider how Mar-a-Lago Face impacts visual expectations of age. I’ve been surprised before that she looked older at all — there’s always been a kind of an immortal or ethereal quality to her. Also… I didn’t even know she was into nitrous.

The tube get passed around and, comically, one of the brash younger gay guys in the crowd has a moment choking trying to deep-throat the tube. It’s unclear if this is a prank involving an actual dildo, or whether he intentionally used part of the apparatus *as a dildo* as a reference to not being able to deep-throat.

Two people have been in competition with each other all summer: a portly hip Black guy with a thick beard, and an effusive heavy-set blonde girl barfly-type. They’re dramatically playful, but still honestly trying to beat each other. He’s been trouncing her though, by a long way. He’s regularly working on stuff and has basically been making projects all summer, while she keeps dropping the ball either unluckily or sheer misjudgment. Sitting in a crowd he jokingly confronts her to do a final evaluation of their mutual efforts, which of course she laughs heartily about. He’s the winner and he seems to be bragging, but it’s the nicest way to go about winning for such a situation. She’s failed even on her own terms regardless of luck or anything else.

How does the dream end? I can’t remember. I heard a snippet of landlord outside. Nevertheless, I wrote it down. Tried a new journal app on my phone because the Oneirographer PWA was broken, again. I know these are the kind of life details that you, my dear reader, appreciate so you have proper context for all these. You’re welcome. You’re… you’re me in the future, aren’t you?

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Dream Journal

Bank Visit and Cold Pelo, Cards Console Error

I’m somewhere inside a single story building with different compartments or stores. It’s kind of feels 1970s with the many odd 45° walls and it’s unusually tall, flat ceiling. I enter the wide double doors of a bank, where I need to do some research or perhaps fetch something.

A couple of miscreant bank workers near the front (the room is mostly rows of desks) spot me and try to invalidate my fresh papers — before I’ve even started. I understand this is because they assume whatever I’m reporting will negatively affect one of the bank’s performance metrics. They underhandedly want to game the statistics.

I store the bankers boxes which will be mine, including a smaller one that’s an art kit, under a built-in desk in a corner wall (like the one where I lived in La Paz). I pass by again later and the corner is weirdly cold, as if it were underwater and was recently flooded with a frigid, sluggish injection of water. As I investigate, I find a jar containing a small black-and-yellow gecko-like creature, a type of amphibian called a pelo. It’s been sealed and is motionless surrounded by the front of cold water. My wife says she sealed it up because it was misbehaving, and I’ll have to explain to her that you can’t seal something like that up as it can’t breathe like that.

I’m testing my app in-person on a console. It misidentifies one of my cards as having a syntax problem — there’s text on it containing “cards Cards Cards cArds” etc, which maybe can flex with the name of the cards database? But that shouldn’t be so. I’m reading the actual error message from the console and that’s what wakes me up!

The surprising thing is, I don’t think this incident followed standard rules for text in dreams. I feel like I was actually holding and evaluating a block of text instead of it being rewritten whenever I looked away. The “buffer” was large enough that it was like reading real text. Real enough that it overloaded… something, and woke me up I suppose.

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Dream Journal

Coming Storm, a Gift

There’s going to be a big lightning storm soon. Inside the converted big box store where I live in a community of fringe hangers-on, preparations are being made. So much so that things can go under the radar…

The image of a thunderbolt striking the power substation dominates the attention of many — it’s easy to imagine. Meanwhile, I’m concentrated on the carriage-like antique atop one of the aisle shelves, that’s been there long enough it no longer even has an owner.

Things happen after, but are forgotten. Maybe I steal the carriage. Maybe I ride away in it. Do I cause the thunderbolt? My waking self remembered, but was calm. Many times, I’ve struggled with the responsibility of capturing these dreams. This one just flowed. My morning felt grounded, imperturbable. I hesitate to interpret precisely why. A gift, unquestioned.

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Dream Journal

Going Through the Box of Records

I’m digging in my old bin of records.

One, the sleeve of Carmena Burana, is falling apart and empty. I can’t recall where I got it but it’s time to throw away.

Another is a record asking for privacy, which I put at the front — it’s name actually does spell out some request for privacy.

Then there’s my Intonation record, probably my all-time most played, which I find enclosed with a recording of it. Amazingly, the recording is from pre-2014, before I started listening to it quite frequently. Tucked in with and attached to the recording is an old temporary driver’s license of mine, it’s embossed letters on heavy black plastic looking nicer than my real one.
**”
I didn’t think I remembered any other dreams, but writing those down I remembered fragments of others.

It’s the day after family event, a wedding of my Aunt Therese (who isn’t older than me?). Now I don’t know where to go to join the day-after events, which I was told we’d have. I seem to remember there was to be a reception, on a long cold beach like in Eureka or perhaps the North Sea.

Eating out my wife. Can’t figure where she put her head, though I realize now it’s cuz I had her upside down… and it’s not where her head is supposed to be anyway.

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Dream Journal

Big Art District Failuretown

My wife and I are holed up in something like hotel, or a guest house, waiting excitedly for an planned experience. Our bed is in a room with only three walls, one side open to a shared courtyard or parking lot. On a ledge high in this courtyard a TV is mounted. It shows a roster of custom TV spots, made as lore and instructions for our event, which I eagerly try to absorb. We stay in the guest house overnight, during which time a food truck shows up — then another food truck, which upsets the staff of the first.

The next day we pass through a gift shop before boarding special transit to the actual big cool thing. The glass counter is laid with bright custom-made floral miniatures. I ask if they have natural fennel growing in field (I heard about these specific miniatures somewhere long ago). They show me a mini vase holding cut fennel stems, which somehow sloshes raw water over the edge and also has grainy gel creeping up the stalks. A short rocket ride takes us to what is called Carlas’s Place, supposedly hidden in the center of pointy mountain. This is an attraction and experience somewhat like Meow Wolf, yet also an exclusive gathering space and elite artist venue. Here there are plans plotted; showpieces shown; careers made.

I arrive and I head straight forward down a long massive ramp of scree into a yawning neon underground. I can only make out a little of it as the image of it seem scrawled, broken. Instead my wife pulls me aside and tells me I’m supposed to use the map on the back of the computer mouse visitors are each given. I can then exchange it at the location for a travelling vehicle. Although I somehow missed this tip in all my preparation, I take it as my first task.

The imprinted map shows the district. It is large, while the map small. The place swarms with people and activity, and I figure it must actually be somewhere like a neighborhood (with a normal entrance I just never knew about).

I try to find the indicated dot on my computer mouse map, and come into a giant video arcade with rows and rows of vintage machines. The place is crammed with people actually playing them, all lights and noise and crazy carpet like a casino. There are even big overhead displays which cycle though game screens, showing action happening somewhere on the vast arcade floor.

I leave the arcade far from where I entered. The arched and collonaded high-atrium mall is elegant, rectilinear, easily navigable. So it seems. I pass through the a central plaza (I don’t even look to the side, though the windows — why?) and into a cozier passage of stores and jauntily angled hallways. Some stores are recently set up for Christmas here. Dining outside on a barstool of a cafe, I pass a man I strongly recognize. He notices me noticing him and quickly names a news program, tucking his chin down in acknowledgement; as a new anchor he must get this a lot. So, I take it to this place is a place celebrities sometimes hang out.

I am left wandering the streets, which feel like a city all their own. It is like nowhere quite familiar, exactly. Alaska? Denver? 1940s movie set? There are steep mountains in the near distance. I happen to walk by a building-sized prop, a vast art deco hotel with a detailed façade. Closely inspecting the green tiles of the sweeping rounded corner, I find statues of exquisite alien dancers, their appearance like skinny insectoid bears. The style itself is Pacific Northwest native blended with Balinese temple deities, exaggerated poses and dramatically cut forms. I take pictures of this work from many angles. It is clear, at least, that this place has had a lot of effort put into it.

Suddenly my timer runs out. Was I told this was a timed experience? I’m teleportationally kicked back to normaltown, a 20-part survey immediately plonked in front of me. The first inquiry: I am asked to rate the vehicles I found. I start selecting every vehicle, laying heavy red shapes over them, indulging my impulse to rate them all zero. I’m disgusted and furious, not having even gotten past step one. I realize partway that my “feedback” has no chance to be recognized. For real feedback I have to yell at someone directly. If this has become so developed, if the experience cost so much money, yet they don’t even care if people are actually able to *do anything* of what they are meant to do? If the little survey doesn’t even know what you did? If they think they should even ask? Then, I will find someone to yell at.

I wake up mentally listing the things I will say. The many things.

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Dream Journal

New Country and Surprise Splash

There is a joining of two countries, one in Africa one in French-speaking Europe, a new country beginning with B — Besquiod? Bitsiarritz? Bandofou? Bismillahi? Here, countries are different than how I’m familiar. They are more of a choice of affiliation and a decision of what agency you have to interact with other people. Maybe it’s the future.

Inside a confined space (like a lighthouse or a cargo ship in port), someone has sprayed a wall with droplets — maybe as art, maybe as prank. Over a long exchange inside the lighthouse, a woman becomes mad after she realizes she has essentially been tricked into depriving her pastor. This goes against her morals, she claims.

Riding Splash mountain. I have somehow forgotten that this ride has a gigantic drop at the end, only remembering as it happens. I experience it fresh and find it extra exhilarating. (On waking reflection, I wonder what might’ve been happening in the room or my body that might have contributed to the sudden feeling of weightlessness that I dreamt of as this log ride.)

When I get off on Splash Mountain, two women begin to fight about selling. Someone immediately warns me “[Mrs.] Acuna is here” and so I attempt to block the line of sight — no luck. They fight on a lawn and knock down roses, meanwhile I’m trying to separate them and remind them they’re adults. I manage to pull one of them away, urging them to cross a line of railroad tracks before a train comes so she’ll be physically seperated. She doesn’t make it as she’s not even trying; like she’s not even listening.

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Dream Journal

Fantasy of Home Ownership

Sitting alone at home next to a sunny window. I’m drinking a beer and watching sports, unusual for me, but no one is watching, no one sees me. Weirdly affirming to play normal. An isolated snippet of dream, apparently unrelated to the rest of the night’s.

We’ve bought an overly spacious house far in the country from our current landlord. I consider worrying about him, but realize if anything goes wrong I’ll now be dealing with the bank who gave us our loan — an altogether different beast, thankfully. The only landlord foibles I’ll be dealing with now are his shoddy fixes and poor communication / documentation. For instance, I remember spotting a 1950s fridge shoved in the back corner of a tiled shower room.

Often we have multiple rooms of the same kind — four different kitchens! I fantasize about how I can convert them for various specializations. The largest of the kitchens is an extended hexagon with a large central island, already suited for heavy-duty work, a room I’d obviously love to make my workroom and fill with tools (all in their special place).

There’s another thought, though. Now that I’m no longer under as much pressure for space as in the city, will I actually do this? I got the odd sense there are some rooms I’ll probably forget about. Imagine that! We’ve been living here several days already and still haven’t gone back to the upstairs level; the last time was when we did the inspection. Having a real place of our own is different than I might’ve expected.

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Dream Journal

Light Work & Play at Family Home (After Defending from Invasion)

High atop a stadium overlooking a valley, like a 3d model in tones of grey. This is a neighborhood I’ve come to that feels foreign, but where I could imagine living one day. Maybe I’m newly moved there.

Preparing to defend a house in a Jewish neighborhood, laid out on a long curved suburban street. Suddenly the ongoing warnings are quiet and it’s the eerie sounds of just nature and emptiness. The tanks of the invaders are easily defeated before they arrive at the house, self-destructed or -dismantled, then fired on by various unlikely things (like a wolf that can hold a gun). One defender who made a ten foot knife for the battle is walking down a regular street with this giant knife in the aftermath, a sight that might cause me to advise him against it.

My cousin is 18 and fixing a computer in the open hallway of the central living room of his childhood home (this is different than the home they had in Eureka). I tell him “if I had an 18-year-old, I’d want to put him to work fixing the computer” to which he smiles and shushes me.

In the same communal family space, a girl from elementary school, Amy Naud, and my hostel friend Dave V., are the best performing two people at growing up. They complete a series of tasks that mature you along the way and they do it fastest. This hallway has long been a gathering spot — I look at pictures from years past, parties with banners, random family albums.

After carrying unwieldy stuff down a set of stairs, I miss my subway car because a clueless younger guy (supposedly on my team/group/side) doesn’t think to hold the doors for me. Of course the large raised red button outside the doors doesn’t work either.

Playing a game with different shaped cards in a single deck, like a highly-adapted Magic the Gathering. One of the older kids on my team is Amy Naud, from before, who needs to draw a certain oval card. I offer to shuffle the cards in a big pile behind my back, since then she would be able to fairly draw the card. I’m on her team and the expectation is that I might subtly help her with this. She doesn’t expect my true motive, which is to do a bit of mischief by placing all the oval cards which *aren’t* the one she needs closer to the top.

While trying to hand over D batteries to someone, I have to lean far over while doing the handoff, holding onto smaller AA batteries in my other hand to maintain balance. This leads to awkwardness as it confuses the person I’m handing them to, as they don’t understand I’m handing over each D battery separately. They try to get the AA’s and I frustratedly fall to explain my intent, as I manage to finally swap my primary hand back to give the other D.

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Blog

Make Actiloquy a Thing: the Case for Fixing Linguistic Philosophy’s Worst Name

There are moments when the act of saying something is the thing that makes it happen. There are some serious heavy hitters to consider:

  • a judge saying, “I sentence you to life”
  • the officiant saying, “I now pronounce you married”
  • sorcerers saying “abracadabra!” (or the possible Aramaic original אברא כדברא, Abra K’davra — “I create as I speak”)

On these occasions, speech isn’t just hot air or describing the weather. This speech is a pressed launch button; an proclaimed formal decree; an act of actual power. When such words are spoken aloud it is reality itself that echoes. So… what’s the right word for those words?

Well obviously I went digging. Just get itchy like that sometimes, I do. Somewhere in our shared meta-lingual hyperfield a.k.a. chatbots & web searches, I sought whatever noun-lemma-thing that definitively, English-language-ly, captures the idea of “Word as Deed” …though I could’ve sworn we already had one. But I found something else: a steaming disaster of ill-fated scholarly branding that has probably confused people for 70+ years. Even worse is that it probably is the term I remembered — I just didn’t remember it being this terrible.

So, the Old Guard Said So

Right, so: J.L. Austin. Illustrious midcentury philosopher of language (beautiful title btw). Best known for developing the theory of “speech acts” (yes, exactly this, yes). Left us the well-known posthumous opus “How to Do Things with Words” (that’s what I’m talking about). Dude was a linguistic pragmatist, was big talkin’ up O.L.P. which means Ordinary Language Philosophy btw, and finally formalized the objectively-correct opinion that not all speech is merely for describing or communicating — some speech does things (YES, THANK YOU). Great start!

Man couldn’t stick the friggin’ landing though. His chosen term for this world-altering, nigh-magical power of speech? “Performative Utterance.” Wow ok.  Bit underwhelming. Distinct lack of whelm there.

It’s clunky. It’s overly academic and uninspired. It’s two mul-ti-syl-lab-ic words when one should do. Also, it’s downright confusing, isn’t it? Admittedly no one could predict that “performative” would increase in usage by over 100 times since 1960 (the year Austin died), and mutate into what is essentially an insult. “Performative” now suggests empty virtue signaling or faking something for online likes. It’s more like “fake it till you make it”, when it should be the real deal… make it.

But wait! It gets worse maybe? Austin later refined his limited initial ‘performative utterances’ idea and framed it as the middle of three levels, an analysis now called Speech Act Theory:

  • Locutionary Act: the noises one makes from one’s face-hole
  • Illocutionary Force: the actual intent and purpose (informing, ordering, promising, spellcasting, etc).
  • Perlocutionary Effect: the impact had on listeners

“Illocutionary?” Sorry, at least it’s a unique word, and I should be grateful, yet instead I must say oof. Oof, I say. The thing smacks of academic jargogling at its worst — high-on-its-own-supply terminology that gatekeeps a concept which everyone understands intuitively. It needs the whole system to even make sense. Somehow it’s more forgettable, too. A word like that was never going to see wide adoption. Respect to J.L. Austin, but for a language guy I expected you would’ve appreciated words more…

Uh oh. Maybe you had hoped to. You were a meticulous perfectionist who died unexpectedly before you could finish your greatest work. That rough draft made its way into the groundwater, and is still somehow quite highly-regarded. Kind of wish I hadn’t so deeply dunked on your aesthetics there, bud.

How bout I illocutionarily concede I only did it to make a particular point. (Reader, you may perlocutionarily decide if the point is made.)

Then There Was the Word

Right, so: we probably don’t need three confusing stuffy overly-similar tongue-twisters to describe the power of words. We need one useful word that clearly indicates what it is. We need a word that might gain traction outside specialized analytical contexts and find broad appeal. Maybe even a word that’s kinda cool? We need:

“Actiloquy”

Derived from the Latin Actus (action/deed) and Loqui (to speak), it is exactly what it hopefully sounds like: Action-Speech. The Spoken Deed. Say + Do.

The beauty of “actiloquy” is that it feels native to English speakers before they even open a dictionary. It shares a rhythmic and etymological DNA with “soliloquy,” a word common enough you might’ve been quizzed on it in high school. While a soliloquy is a speech of isolation, turning inward to the self, an actiloquy is a speech of projection, turning outward to the world.

You may have heard of  “somniloquy”, for talking in one’s sleep, or “colloquy” for a formal conversation, and of course honorable mentions “eloquent”, “loquacious”, and even “grandiloquent.” Mm, good stuff. Meanwhile we also have active, acting, actress, actuator, actionable, activity, transaction, interaction, activation, actuary, and actual, which are pretty solid words in English as well.

This intuitiveness can bridge the mental gap between the sacred and the bureaucratic. It forms a linguistic umbrella that covers the “so mote it be” of a pagan ceremony, the “presto change-o” of a kid’s magic show, or the “I accept the offer” of an employment contract. When a CEO says “you’re fired,” the employment contract is severed; the social reality has been altered instantaneously via actiloquy. This conceptual framing acknowledges that these are all the same mechanic: a switch flipped by human voice. It is closer the original and unrefined performative utterance.

Austin’s illocutionary act tries to get at this, but feels far too cerebral, too focused on the speaker’s internal intention. Actiloquy shifts the focus outward. It suggests a kinetic weight and importance, that action is inherent to the word’s definition… as befitting its intending meaning. It is no longer mired in Austin’s locational metaphors of within versus beyond the speech, however analytically useful they might be.

Yet a word isn’t better merely because it’s more intuitive, or familiar-ish, nor because it’s less worse than the alternatives. Actiloquy is more than that — though you might not guess why. The particular subject of the word touches on phenomena which mystics and legal scholars have had to contend for millennia: the effect of spoken language isn’t just in the meaning of the words, but in the physical, enacted, momentary event of their release.

There is the Japanese concept of Kotodama, the “soul of language”, where words aren’t just labels slapped onto objects but an influence on the object itself. This aligns strangely well with the Neoplatonist Iamblichus and his defense of magical “barbarous names” for ritual use — that an incantation’s power didn’t lie in understanding the words, but instead in the sound itself. In the modern era we could connect these ideas to the famed Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and linguistic relativity, where a language’s structures directly affect a speaker’s perceptions. It is said that a specific acoustic key unlocks a specific meaningful door. Well, why wouldn’t it?

Actiloquy sounds good. It just does. Try it out; maybe you’ll like it. When a priest consecrates the host it is actiloquy. An officer gives an order, and that is actiloquy. When mom tells you “it’s bedtime now”, you better believe that is actiloquy. An ancient and sophisticated linguistic device, a sonic weapon, the power of The Word: actiloquy.

Not the Final Word

Language is supposed to evolve to serve the people who use it, not the other way around. We aren’t all meant to be burdened with “Illocutionary Force” just because a guy at Oxford in 1955 hadn’t come up with something catchier yet. People need a word that acknowledges speech that’s a force of change. You need it.

Whether you are swearing an oath, casting a spell, or borrowing a few bucks from a friend, you aren’t merely talking. You are very much engaging in actiloquy… that is, unless you come up with a better word for it.

Let’s ask one last question, then. What is needed to make such a word real? Using it. Understanding it. Telling people that it is real and treating it the same, certainly. But there is a also a more direct, more relevant, more obvious way…

Hereby, “actiloquy” is now a thing. I have spoken. Thanks 🙂

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Dream Journal

Stolen Cyberpunk Timelines of Plarvolia

I come across Plarvolia who is sitting in a clear box for her art project. I can see her getting mildly harassed by children tapping on the glass among other things. Though I feel moved to intervene, I understand that I shouldn’t be the one to try. After her shift inside is up, I inspect café baked goods where she had been stationed. She was promoting/selling a new line of rainbow spectrum lights from General Electric — one of which, interestingly, is a strong bright black. Also notable is that I now know she actually does make money from her art (at least sometimes).

There is a unique cyberpunk setting that feels somehow European, old world. Inside a building are haphazard beds in a place seemingly used as a squat. I break through multiple walls of the interior in what feels like a sequence puzzle. Beyond, a darkened (but daytime) town square is buzzing with various activities.

I steal an invisible scooter-skateboard from a man riding it in the square. It’s broken in the process and gluing it back together proves problematic. Not only is this invisible kind a special color, the connections are finicky. It’s a specific brand that others feel is reputable called “Eaver” or “Matric” or something. I later go with someone who encourages me to try to buy one. The store has the feel of a cyber-renovated luxury 19th-century “Robber Baron” era place — dark wood columns and sophisticated electronic monitoring. I find a new board for $35 up on a shelf inside a bag, but decide it’s too expensive and I don’t want to try stealing it.

At the checkout area for this town square zone, I encounter my Homepie friends Juicy and Coco lounging having drinks. They’ve already paid for theirs, and when I look to pay they’ve already paid for mine too — though confusingly I don’t see them on the check. Perhaps they were omitted, which is all the same. Juicy notices he has to have a charge corrected before he goes, as the pipe he picked out was supposed to be on sale. He went to that same Robber Baron store as I did earlier.

There is a complex sorting-out of the timeline of interactions with Plarvolia. Time travel seems at play, nonlinearity, acausality. I put on a colorful fur-trimmed vest before I talk to her. I’m preparing for her timeline which is about to finish, and finally her timeline happens to line up with my own.

I revisit these narratives of Plarvolia for two hours. Retelling the story out of order; I can’t play out the events. I perceive parts where I saw perfectly from her perspective. But when did we talk? Wasn’t there more scenes with her? At some point I was explicitly instructed (or conclude?) that I need to write this one down. But now it hardly seems profound or important. But this dream feels different than other Plarvolia ones… I admit I even have a hard time thinking of her as Plarvolia, but instead think of her as her real self, as something outside her relation to me and what happened. I think of her with her real name and her real life.