Categories
Dream Journal

Thriving African Village

An African village has traded part of its water rights to a group of foreign investors. I dip a hand in murky light brown water off the side of a canoe as I come upon a hut at the edge of their traditional lakeside fishing grounds. The lake contains petroleum that no one has figured out how to extract, but I gather this partially explains the investors interest. Beyond the hut, I’m shown a beautifully restored, wide, gurgling river, bountiful with wildlife including hippos and cranes. In the distance, I see the narrow cliffside dirt road that is the only access in or out for travelers.

Categories
Mixtapes

Hipsterism: a 21st Century Mixtape

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“Uhh, is hipster music a thing?” Well, it would probably be collected on a mixtape made the old-fashioned way — recording the songs 1-by-1 from a collection of favorites. Someone called ‘me’ mighta done that… cause hipsterist or whatevs.

  1. Brothertiger – This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)
  2. STRFKR – Girls Just Want To Have Fun
  3. Misfitted. – M.I.A. – Paper Planes
  4. Milky Chance – Stolen Dance [FlicFlac Edit]
  5. Foster The People – Pumped Up Kicks (Gigamesh Remix)
  6. Kero Kero Bonito – Babies (Are So Strange)
  7. Keren Ann – Life on Mars (David Bowie Cover)
  8. Ellie Goulding – Heartbeats (Cosmonaut Grechko edit)
  9. CHELSEARONQS – Somebody That I Used To Know (Acapella)
  10. Blood Diamonds feat. Grimes – Phone Sex
  11. Black Moth Super Rainbow – I Think I’m Evil
  12. altitude sickness – Frigid Flux (Redux)
  13. Battles – Atlas
  14. Blockhead – Meet You at Tower Records
  15. Plumbline – Once in a Lifetime (Talking Heads cover)
  16. Paddy Steer – Loufoque
  17. Javelin – Tryouts
  18. Prince Rama – Your Life In The End
  19. The xx – Intro
  20. AU – Get Alive
Categories
Dream Journal

Two Different Political Dreams

I am an incorporeal presence floating above the crowds of the Republican National Convention. Loud and angry is the clamor, wretched partisans yelling for blood, dressed in white and reddish-orange. I despise the vicious and violent desires of these people. All gathered, I want them all blown up. Instead (by my intervention, perhaps?) the crowd is suddenly turned against their hotheaded petty potty-mouthed loser of a champion… they yell for his blood now, “Kill Trump! Kill Trump! Kill Trump!”

But that’s not all. In a separate dream, I’m the personal servant/slave of none other than Adolf Hitler himself. Fortunately for me, he’s not thoughtful enough to realize that his Jewish slave being sent on an errand to the railway depot might just escape. I manage to sneak out my wife too, who bafflingly robs the drama from the situation by dryly noting “this is good, I’m glad we do this every year.”

Let’s hope this dream doesn’t get me put on the wrong kind of list… (but if you did read this post under the aegis of law enforcement, I’d be interested to know).

Categories
Dream Journal

Fearsome Giants, an Educational Experience

A house where special kids are sent to learn. A narrow plot on a high hill of San Francisco, up a long, rocky and steep driveway. Deceptively large. Its two-story atrium is built into the trees of its own courtyard. There is a platform whose purpose is not obvious at first, wooden branch railings overlooking a large pit, like an animal enclosure at a zoo. Then appear several selves of the viewing subject, larger and larger — future selves? — and then the last and largest of them all, the fearsome giant, with red and battered single eye socket, furious, powerful, malevolent. I interpret it might be a bit of the ol’ ego-archetype, come to scare some kids straight… not that it doesn’t also inspire them, too.

Categories
Dream Journal

Invasion of Ghost Cat

Awoken suddenly by an unusual growl… unusual because it was clearly one cat warning another, but the only cats supposedly in the house are total BFFs Aloysius and Katie. Jumping from the living room couch, I catch a glimpse of a gray furry mass speeding out the back door like a ghost. In the bright sun of the dawn, I manage to visually confirm a well-built cat with dust-bunny appearance escaping the backyard, into the neighborhood garden (just like a raccoon, too). It’s at this moment of passing danger that I realize I must have been surrounded by cats all through the night… not just Wishus and Katie, but up on the shelf, inside a wooden box, by my dear departed Flop as well. And that for a long while I’d been dreaming of him — playing youthfully and with vigor, tumbling in the pile of blankets behind that couch, watching me with curious attention. There are mere coincidences, and then there are uncannily meaningful and timely coincidences. Come visit again soon, little buddy.

Categories
Blog

33 years, 7 months

I wonked around writing my own code for this-here site I call ori.nz — something to display my exact age relative to the date of my birth in years, months, and days. Logicking though the process can be quite satisfactory, but so can just having the answer you want easily presented. So here’s what I came up with:

$birthdatetime = array(1983,12,13,19,30);
$year_diff = get_the_date("Y") - $birthdatetime[0];
$month_diff = get_the_date("n") - $birthdatetime[1];
$day_diff  = get_the_date("d") - $birthdatetime[2];
if( $day_diff < 0 ){
        $month_diff--; $day_diff += date("t", (get_the_date('u') - (get_the_date("n") * 86401)));
    } // CALC FROM month b4
    if( $month_diff < 0 ){
        $year_diff--; $month_diff += 12;
    }
    $age_then =
        $year_diff .' years' .
        ($month_diff == 0 ? '' : ', '. $month_diff .' months') .
        ($day_diff == 0 ? '' : ', '. $day_diff .' days');
    echo '' . $age_then . '';
Categories
Dream Journal

A Timeless Dream, Rotating Like a Clock

Non-linear, a dream in many parts yet all the same part. A place that could be called a wonderland.

A walk up a long ramp, a balding Bartolomeo de Las Casas or Samuel Tonsure is there among rough-hewn and brightly painted railings, tables, chairs, like being in cuckoo clock made in Mexico. He is St. Jerome, as far as I know, but his bald head and toga remind me of Aeschylus. Though he is an old teacher, because of the strange non-linear nature of this dream (all is happening at once, or can be re-ordered) I’m able to provide learning to him. It is settled at some point that we are something like the same person, if time-dislocated… I am to become him, or him me.

South Park kids are in this dream too. Perhaps they are leading a philosophical insurrection, or turning the hands of a clock that does not itself move, but moves all the time around it. This is the pivot, and the story returns to St. Jerome, who through further work is now a glossy porcelain dinner tray. His venerable cranium emerges from a moat, a bit like a well-heeled origami boat.

It was a late night and I slept between my wife and a friend. Something like a distillation of beliefs, some out-of-bounds experience, a timeless time travel, suffused this dream. When I awoke I knew exactly what it meant (I still do) but not any words to describe or reflect its true structure. I had to wait for the opportunity to write it down, which was after I’d slipped unexpectedly into a fitful, hot nap in a replica Arctic hermit’s hut. On the undersized fur-covered bed, my foot jerked and kicked over a glass kerosene lamp, which shattered on the dusty floor. I cleaned it though, had the will to pay for it too. I’m suspicious enough to wonder about a subconscious motive for such an action…

Categories
Dream Journal

Attending Trump’s Kids Wedding (A Dream)

I’m invited to a huge wedding party — the catch is that it’s one of Donald Trump’s kids.

It’s at this expansive palladium/neoclassical sports grounds (not soon after, I witness it being torn up and redeveloped). Decorations are sparse and modern, and Lynae and I play music on these white plastic devices made available… the volume down is hard to control (using shift+F6). I notice someone I once dated, Meredith S., walk in arm-and-arm with another former partner of mine, and realize they’ll eventually realize they have me in common (she turns and glances back at me for just a second). There’s also a bin full of elaborate foreign hats (I have the thought “this is what our wedding would have had). Donald gives a toast and I enjoy it the same way I enjoy my father-in-law, knowing that our politics differ greatly but appreciating him as my family.

The celebration winds down, I head north to explore some tangled dry woods (this dream turns into a city-planning dream, the industrial and residential areas angled diagonal to each other, joined by a single thick link road, arguing in favor of adding more links). I view a flyover of all the thin multi-story houses (the opposite of the bungalow in Ojai that I’m visiting).

Afterward, somewhere near the wedding grounds, Lynae and I are talking and realize we left some important item under the table. Returning, we fruitlessly search. We ask a large hairy bearded guy who seems friendly if he knows where else to look — by way of answer, he and two other guys perform a song-and-dance bit about how reasonably long certain things might be held for lost-and-found. As our item (maybe a bag) is much less important than a dog (48 hours) there’s not much chance for it. At least I got an entertaining soliloquy from my subconscious regarding expiration dates on “lost” things.

Oh yeah, my wife got scared because she thought I was a monster shape-shifter (one with little white ropes for a body) and I decided to play along for a while until she came up with a reason to believe I wasn’t. It was easier that way, but I must admit to a certain sinister enjoyment of a well-received villain act. Maybe that happened because I was still waiting for a response from earlier in the dream, where I was out-of-communication with Dara V., and my wife said she woul resolve the problem one-on-one. That… makes me long for the long-lost girl again (not unusual for me). I suspect her presence is a big reason why the dream felt important enough to write down — here in the summer heat and flies of Ojai valley, sticky and rough.

“There are those that are lost to us forever.”
–message from a dream I had in 8th grade

Categories
Dream Journal

Dreaming of Internets Past

Forums info lasts too damn long. Passing opinions from barely passable experts keep around forever, never get updated… some small part of the dream talking about how the internet has changed. Yup, in this dream I had a long discussion with with my wife, topic: when blogs ruled the world. People used to pay for their own sites, their own stores, their own obsessive passions… because there was an ecology of people doing it at the same time. People used to go to a good deal of work to have their own toehold in that vast yet somehow intimate space. We didn’t know then that it united us, made our internet world the warm, snug little home it was. There is mention of tech utopianism and I gaze further down a hill toward a woven bridge of white lace. Spy is there, riding bikes with me, halfway distance to the bridge. She’s meeting a new sweetie of hers.

Categories
Dream Journal

Dream of IN20MN1A

Truck is parked on a curvy road, with it’s bed oriented up the slope to where two men sit in a car. The gate has been brought down and slid off somewhat. I check and, seeing that nothing appears to have been stolen (I have a bunch of typical junk kept back there, like a subwoofer speaker enclosure) I slide the gate off the rails and discover that it *can* be stolen. Obviously this isn’t desirable so I lock the gate closed with my car key. The two men on the hill have been muttering complaints this whole time — I think they disliked having me nearby. One of their aspersions directed so I could hear it was that they should call the police to deal with me, and I shot back with “do you think they’ll arrest me for existing?” I notice the car license plate reads IN20MN1A…

(I’d been kept awake until 6 in the morning feeling weird about money.)

Someone is telling me the story of the first time their partner took the test to be a contractor. It could’ve been Ais, about Reece. There’s a fence made out of foot-diameter PVC pipe ends, and there’s a big open pit filled with toxic, discarded seeds the previous testees have picked and discarded. (For some reason the ‘end-of-the-cul-de-sac’ locational feel reminds me of another, maritime dream, a street-side deep pool with old military ships sunk into it in with a Hawaiian vibe.) Of course, Reece falls headlong into it and contaminates himself and everything around him. This is related as both embarrassing and hilarious. He still has three more tries, though.

In an elegantly-styled modern library, section titles tastefully backlit, there is a flash-mobby conspiracy to hide behind the walls during closing hours. The day is communicated with candy bar wrappers placed in the trash cans. Of course, the hidden couples, eluding detection, still manage to all make out together in the secret compartment.