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Dream Journal

My Old Camera-on-the-Curb Project

Setting is some low-slung community living/art space that feels like a janky maze — almost a stock location for me. I notice there’s some high-ranking politician here on an official visit, along with his security. I don’t even think about it; I immediately navigate a back route. There room he’s in was made from a shipping container box, with a wall of various switches near the unguarded rear door where I emerge. I walk directly past a secret service guard without him even having time to get off his phone call.

I take an Orc-lord up on a standing offer. Given a nominal fee, I am allowed to eat any orc from the Orc-band I choose. Several distinct and varied orcs line up for me by height. The catch is that the orc I choose won’t just sacrifice itself, it will fight me — but if I win, eating it’s fair game. The trick then is to choose the right size orc. I stand in front of them one-by-one.

Finally, I successfully download a rare Russian track I’ve been searching for forever. It’s album art — or maybe it’s actual shape? — is a bulbous grey game controller.

Walking through my neighborhood here in the Mission, the streets near Cesar Chavez are like a calm colorful French Quarter. Despite having passed by it many times over the years today I stumble upon one of my projects from long ago: a point-and-shoot camera mounted on curb. It’s remarkable that it’s still there considering I installed it in… 2013? People can take whatever photos they want, then retreive them or give them to others. Some are given a surf background — now faded to a dingy grey.

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Dream Journal

Fossil Comes to Life

Finally invited over to home of acquaintance Colin F. and put to work draining oil from classic 1950s car. Not great at it, and I’ve attempted this job in the past. It’s cool checking out his space though. A plastic 3/4 profile relief head of my friend Autumn T. is attached high on a wall. It occurs to me that this angle, while unusual for a relief, looks better than the dead-on one of her I previously have seen.

In a shallow riverbed I stumble across a perfectly intact fossil skeleton of a raptor (or primitive human) embedded just under the water. I know I’m either very lucky or someone must’ve found this before and left it here. Ritualistically, my partner and I light a tall candle and the fossil comes to life, darting all over and wreaking havoc. I start filming on my phone as this terrifying moment has become a cautionary tale, for young people perhaps. I perform a secret move by cutting off the video to abruptly stop the experience.

While leaning against an L-shaped fence with a middle-school classmate, Amy Pollard, I impulsively tell her she’s pretty. But she calls my bluff and asks me to repeat it. I mangle and abstract my rephrasing into something barely relatable along a formula like “___ is she; ___ is he”. I then openly chide myself for phrasing both people as objects — objects of a sentence, thus objectifying them.

Artistic sequence of a herd of animals, the animal models doubling then all morphing into a different bigger animals. So a rat is stacked on rat which then blends into cat, those cats are then doubled and form dogs etc. I get excited to see what larger animal will be chosen next; the sequence gets to doubles of cows but the next animal is a bizarre model of a cow with two independent heads one on top of another.

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Dream Journal

No Rules Govern the Instant

Generational epic on an ocean liner evading a single alien xenomorph. Stories piled on, variations on a theme, successive generations remixed between earlier characters.

On the last day of the long ship journey, about to pull into port, I share a very specific old sailor’s tale I learned. There’s a brief moment when the ship has come to rest at the dock, yet before the rope is tied fast to a mooring. You can do anything in that moment, the situation is a technical gap in maritime law. No rules officially govern that instant. One of my companions asks if that means someone could murder you and get away with it… I presented this as a fun curiosity so this isn’t the reaction I was hoping for.


Giving a presentation over a projector to an audience with a front row that includes my wife, her boyfriend, and his wife. Part of it involves signing up for new internet (or mobile) service. One reason for that is the signup sequence which has a classy pixel art retro vibe. It unexpectedly reminds me of something my former crush would really like. I get a bit sad when I remember we don’t speak anymore.

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Dream Journal

Vacated House, Last School Day, Old Floppy Disks

Big empty house that I can move into with a group. The house is recently vacant — so recent there’s still laundry on a bathroom island, a teacup with Earl Gray mixed with gin & tonic made on a big pullout bed. The bed has a big frame headboard like my Nana’s bedroom.

It’s the final class on the last day of school. My history teacher Mr. Conklin is in the classroom of my English teacher Mrs. Snowden at my middle school. The room is rotated so it’s facing what would be the back wall. Students are excited and animated, gradually catching on that we have to stop participating in whatever activity there is before we get to go home. A kid at the end of the front row throws around a pistol carelessly, causing it to land on the ground.


Hanging around former crush in a space that’s hers. Been long enough since she was a jerk to me that I realize she should I’ve already trusted me by now. I consider asking to take one of the floppy disks she has sitting in a pile, the ones she was saving for an art project. Despite that, it occurs to me that if it’s a floppy disk it most likely contains ancient financial documents from her parents or something equally benal yet private.

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Dream Journal

Prince Andrew’s Art Class

My third grade crush is swearing and idly playing with her junk, talking about “cunt cunt cunt”.

Prince Andrew (or George W. Bush) is teaching an art class. Has some hapless young students, some journalists fishing for stories. Hard to learn anything as he actually doesn’t have ability to communicate his aesthetic sense, if his royal one is worth communicating.

I pack up to leave early on my motorcycle, as  this class is on a Friday. The Prince is rambling about his mistress/lover not showing up. I clean around the sink during my many attempts to get out of there, and leave a bin of pancakes with a lid for the next folks who will use that space. On the way out I take an old bag someone has left behind so it doesn’t rot there, but it has an Apple Watch clipped to it — now I wonder if this good deed is essentially stealing the expensive watch.

“Patrick library” written on a sign with a photo of a forest fire. Trying to figure out what that means, and show someone else, but the words become more faded and harder to find the more I look around. I end up in a back room, with a few parking spots for rented electric trikes behind a hospital’s ER. I give my parking spot up voluntarily for a frazzled mom.

Planting trees in a backyard which represents America, possibly. Two of the pines will grow oddly where they’re sited, I reckon, but I’ll wait till they grow in and harvest them. The credits roll with soft music (which is an unusually on-the-nose ending for a dream).

But interestingly, what actually ends the dream is me repeatedly rehearsing what notes I will take upon waking. So, here we are then.

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Dream Journal

Egyptian Hallway Art, Archeology Property Snafu

In the hallway of our home I notice Egyptian art hanging on the walls. It’s been up so long, nearly since we moved in, we’d just about forgotten it. But, what to do since I realize it’s there now.

Tall hexagonal barriers (maybe like the shape of coffins?) contain a flow that fills up the hall like a tank. I can’t recall what substance it was, but I feel like it wasn’t a liquid, but an actual everyday thing.


A shack in the middle of a pasture that serves as both museum and archeological site. Spending my days in dusty careful study without electricity, I’m part of a small group of young people dedicated to its special care. A respectable older man, my teacher, has spent years of his life creating it.

By way of a simple legal trick, a younger female (possibly an estranged member of our group) gets the property line reassigned. We are forced to close up the building and shut the gate till the legal wranglings are sorted through. Knowing the site is in danger without care, I sneak back in one sunny afternoon. I just walk back in. No one stops me, no one seems to even notice though I walk down a gravel road in a broad field. I start to feel the people involved and obeying the law are acting downright foolish.

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Dream Journal

Collaborative Art Experience, Door 42

Invited to the opening of a large collaborative art project, something like Meow Wolf. The tall Victorian facade of a house is embedded in the wall of an enclosed chamber (reminds me of Petra, Jordan). We’re let in all at once. Wanting to dissipate from the crowd I quickly find a door marked 42 which leads to what feels like a back area for staff. Inside there’s a room with stalls and toilets, some working some not. They obviously didn’t think anyone would want to explore here. Nevertheless one of the rules of the event is that you take what you want — it’s supposedly essential to collectively solving the “mystery” of the experience of the place.

Later, down a narrow greenway from the toilets room, I recreate on a pleasant lawn with friends Miah & Jessica (who don’t live nearby anymore, irl). In the background we listen to Trevor Noah’s Daily Show. I fixate on building a tower in a tree, a spiral of overlapping flat metal square plates arranged around the central post. I’m almost done bending the plates into place over the rim when I wake up.

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Dream Journal

Legend of Gastromo

I’m on a date with my crush (who won’t be named here for now). We eat in a narrow restaurant on a corner, and it’s… ok. We leave, a bit weary, then turn left and find an open garage next door. There’s a bubbly alt-culture girl who tells us about the art collective operating there, the project they’re working on. We barely have energy to engage with what sounds like a cool local thing.

Besides being tired nothing goes particularly wrong, but I remember feeling like it turned out a disaster of a date.


Marissa Tomei is one of my teachers. She’s gets in some unusual positions, backflips and the like, in some half-walled area with a hexagonal backdrop. She (or someone nearby) reminds me of the unopened vape juice bottle I’ve stored here for awhile, that I meant to give as a present to my brother.

Turns out I didn’t read the label properly. I thought it was peanut butter flavored — weird but not outlandish. But the still-sealed playful yellow bottle, sitting near an upturned chair where I left it, is a bizarre flavor I’ve never even conceived: “Clear Onion Butter”. Not something I would necessarily give as a gift. I hesitate to open it though, knowing rules about buying new vape juice have changed and I’m no longer sure how easy it is to get anymore.

Curiosity gets the better of me (only live once and all that) and I crack it open. It’s utterly strange as a flavor, but the uniqueness grows on me: clean, a creamy smoothness like butter, with the oddly transposed delicious light smell of cooking onions thrown in. I give it some time then very much start enjoying it. Who knows about the onion breath; I forgot to even consider it.


Later I’m on a bus made of bricks, or perhaps driving past many brick buildings. I have to start yelling to the driver that two people need to get off, that he needs to flip the bus around so the exit will be on the right side. The bus stops but on the wrong side. I’m about to have to explain this when the two people (my dad and some other adult male, maybe an uncle) thank the driver and descend the exit at the back corner of the bus. Frustration turns to reflexive self-critique — I completely forgot you could use those steps and I don’t know why.

Two girls took my single bus seat a long while ago, and after waiting they finally get off the bus too. My backpack is still piled there, along with a cast iron skillet. I was in the middle of cooking when my seat was stolen — the meat and veggies needed to be flipped long ago. Annoyingly, a youngish guy comes up and seems to think he has a claim to the seat too. Ugh.


Just now, I went to title this entry and realized ”Legend of Gastromo” was one of the first things I wrote. The title was just there when I woke up; a whimsical little evocation. Useful. Sometimes choosing the title can be my least favorite part.

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Dream Journal

Art Burned into the Wall

In a hallway of a home I share, someone has left a piece of art pinned to the wall with a burning stick of incense. Left unattended, the art’s image has been burned into the wall paint. It has the feel of a traditional East Asian woodcut, the impression of elegant architecture clinging to a foggy mountainside. I’m annoyed that I seem to be the only one responsible enough to avoid this kind of damage, annoyed that I’ll have to clean it up to get our security deposit back. Yet it’s a unique print, a unique story, and the image can remain as something contemplative until we do move out. Who knows when that might be…


I awake in the night and realize I’ve just had some dream with Dara. Though not remembered, I’m pleased to realize it — their mere presence being a good sign.

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Dream Journal

Which Witch Was It?

My wife and I are considering moving to Hawaii. I see a map with a border marking the cutoff, where one island close to the others technically is in the French Frigate Shoals.


Scavenging just down the street in my neighborhood, I come across an inflatable armchair. The dirty mismatched arms have come off. I have to fiddle with them for awhile to get them inflated and finally decide it’s comfy enough to drag back. Perplexingly, I don’t even think I want it — there’s already so much furniture in my apartment.

Down another street in the perpendicular direction there’s an art store with a notable elevator tower in front, which some neighbors have started slurring as the “hatelift”. In some recent incident they were accused of bigotry, but personally I believe it was misrepresented and they were slandered.

I enter a rival small art space/shop on the other side of the street, diagonally opposite from our apartment. It’s a low-ceiling place with white walls and a vaguely Spanish feel. One of the people there is like Ted Danson’s character Michael from The Good Place, but he’s drunk and chaotic. He offers me some delicacy from a fancy hexagonal box, which opens with elaborate unfolding rose wrapping paper inside — though actually plastic, not paper. This is what got him drunk, apparently. Another odd gadget he rakishly offers is a tiny non-functional crossbow with a rounded pin at the draw end, easily workable if the pin were removed.

There’s a plan hatched to trap him into being alone with a young 17 year-old girl in the group (there are ten people in the store now), then accuse him of taking advantage of her. In the end he actually doesn’t; I’m then asked, as the story’s observer, to decide who was indeed the ultimate schemer among the diverse motives of the assembled cast. Like a game of Clue. This is phrased in terms of all of them being artist/magicians, and with the question “which witch was it?”