Saying goodbye to my mom while she drives away in a minivan. Very sad to see her go. Watching the sunset from a ridge above the ocean, a place that was supposed to be San Francisco but didn’t have any city in it. A bookshelf the length of the city.
A train made up of different classes. I move to a cheaper one from a more expensive one to look for my mom. She’s there but as a kind of replay. I can’t interact with her.
Grocery store. Black store rep guy won’t take off his sunglasses. I go to another checkout line and a small velociraptor starts harassing me. I dodge elegantly. It has huge feathers.
Someone is asking for directions to an address that is just across the street. I try to direct them, but perhaps escorting them there would be easier and faster.
I missed the tree outside therapy. I had a vivid sequence of logic working where I imagined I was trying to teach my apprentices something that I’d already learned. Something simple like how to work at McDonald’s (even though I’ve never done that). But I was trying to logic through it.
We were trying to figure out how a video game is designed and how it can be designed better. A lane-changing game where we were also trying to determine a real-time estimate for the car to arrive at the goal destination. There were several variables, including speed and even atmospheric clarity.
My brother Patrick may have been there. I’m not sure if it was a dream or just intense problem-solving.
A computer setup outside, with a large monitor (F.O.B.F. Monitor) and little lamp to light up the space. Multiple music stands placed behind the desk, next to window. Could be a Canadian spy.
Large TV that had VHS tapes you could put in the base. Mom (or dad?) was acting up and yelling and I slapped them, they seemed surprised but satisfied, like I’d done what I was supposed to do.
Miners loft filled with junk in rocky valley, difficult to find good map route to it. Somewhat next to log cabin.
Angel Island octopus can shape it’s body into jet, fly around and confuse people. When the water is dark it glows.
Old Arabic man with a ladder is trying to clean his house, ends up scraping the walls up and damaging it (house on Kemper ct.).
As an exercise, I was awake for a long time during the night asking questions and trying to answer them the wrong way.
Conquest of the New World, Deluxe edition. There’s an error where if one of the computer’s units runs out of automatic moves, I can see where it is and what it’s discovered. This includes a couple French naval academies and some Japanese units that look like big canoes. The Native Americans appear to be colonizing the glaciers somehow.
Chicken John’s bus is sitting quietly near a curb. I eat scrambled eggs and ketchup and listen to a black girl with a hair pick and Afro jewelry. The bus isn’t properly parked and starts to roll away. I ask whether it was legal to buy the bus in the first place as it rolls across a high school football field.
…and it happened to me. Ask me about it and I won’t know exactly how to explain. I’ll tell you what I think I know. Knowledge is tricky, it seems to me. If we really get down to nitty-gritty, if we really examine the evidence carefully, it can be said — in a literal, non-symbolic sense — that we actually know nothing. We only think we know. I’ll tell you what I think I know. Hopefully you want to think you know it, too.
Hey, I have a blog. Wow. That’s nice to rediscover.
So I just had one of the more powerful, scary magic experiences of my life.
I was hanging out with my dad in my living room talking about god-knows-what. We were kind of talking about magic. He was trying to talk me down from considering it. Then a funny thing happened — we both saw something that should be impossible. A magazine with which I’m very familiar — the issue of Cabinet with the article on Boethius and his wheel of fortune, the one thing that most helped me get centered while I was in jail — was seen to be levitating several feet off the floor. I didn’t mean to point it out, I didn’t want it to be real, but I did anyways. My dad and I lost volition. Fell to the floor. Stared and stared. Our vision left us. I started talking, trying to talk my way out of believing, and my voice kept going but I heard no sound. I began trying to signal that we needed to cut it out, using the throat-slash hand gesture. My dad held tighter on to me, believing I was saying something more sinister. So then I couldn’t gesture.
All of this really happened — in a dream I just woke up from. It’s the first dream I can remember since the last dream I can remember, which I had near the beginning of February. It was one of the scarier experiences I’ve had in a dream in awhile, because it’s comforting in a strange way.
It means that magic can’t really hurt you as long as it’s only a dream…
…
Got that?
(Let me tell you about my dream this morning…)
We were walking up the stairs to your apartment. I was behind you. You opened your front door, turned around, and suddenly noticed me. With a gasp, you hit an emergency switch which slammed down a portcullis — a genuine medieval portcullis — over the entry. Immediately you recovered, apologized… a bit embarrassed perhaps… and began trying to retract the damned thing. It was stuck. There was a solid mechanism, but it was finicky, antiquated. This went on for a long while. It got awkward. I felt silly helping you from outside. I don’t know how we got it open. Or who. But the portcullis ended up on the floor. I don’t know if we just broke it down, or what, but by the end of the dream we were making out on top of it… metal spikes and all.
On July 8, 2012, Chicken and I were returning to Lodoga to retrieve his RV, the Hotel Miami, left there after Camp Tipsy. We saw some strange clouds on the horizon. After briefly speculating on whether they could maybe (possibly) be smoke, we came across an honest-to-goodness wildfire (about 10 feet across) burning on this very hillside.
The Sites Complex fire of 2012 involved 88 fire engines, 24 bulldozers, 6 helicopters, and 1339 personnel. It burned 4185 acres. It’s the only good reason I’ve ever driven the perilous Leesville Road.
I was pretty amazed to locate the exact hillside this year. A lot has changed. But when I compare the original Instagram from that day, I’m sure. The geo-location is as precise as possible.
We fought it with a squeegee and my front door mat. Chicken got smoke inhalation. We did a bad job stopping it, but the California Fire Marshalls who later visited me to investigate told me that — of course — we really couldn’t have. When it comes to wildfires, 10 feet is already too big. No heroes came back that day. Just pictures.