Tag: backyard

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Dream Journal

Animation of the Corner of a Painting

I remember where our truck is parked here in San Francisco and it’s gotten a ticket by now. No need to have kept it there, but instructions led me to believe that it was necessary for that time.

I watch the corner of a painting like the Garden of Earthly Delights, a recently assembled animation which shows animals morphing. The action skips around a bit with sections that have been lost over hundreds of years.

I vacuum a fence to where there are no more dead leaves in the backyard, but it starts to feel so clean it’s not our backyard anymore. This unusually parallels actual cleaning I’ve recently done in our own backyard.

Queen Elizabeth, a law passed to make her decrees about family easier to enforce. Learning about this in the gutters of a miniature golf course.

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Dream Journal

Ice Spiral Tower; Dating Over Different Backyards

A mood detector and translator — for guinea pigs — beeps out “cunt! fucker! safety! what’s that!? over there!” Seems surprisingly accurate, though I’m not able to spell out how exactly (you’ll have to use your imagination, dear reader) but now I’m annoyed that I know for certain how easy it is for me to pick up a guinea pig wrong and irritate it. Wish I didn’t know, actually…

A clothesline of skulls and other bones stretches across the city towards Plarvolia — for artistic purposes. As I gather some bones, I realize they may be only enough to fill a single transported line, rather than the usual convoy that she typically sets it up for. Perhaps enough to fill a single box.

Within a photorealistic video game universe, I ascend the long spiraling ramp of an icey tower. Proves very easy for me; perhaps I’ve trod this path before. As I climb higher I hear the voices of a pair of Native American brothers discussing money that I owe them. I keep navigating up and up, like a vertical glacier. At the top of the tower I discover a metal statue with jewels scattered about its base that resemble Infinity Stones. I pay them no mind. Instead, I focus on collecting small horse-shaped carved figurines from nearby stair alcoves, ignoring the “main objective” of the statue and jewels. Winning is not my priority, as it was never my objective, though certainly someone else’s.

For the first time now, I utilize my ability to flash between scenes (similar to fast travel in other video games). An sudden shift in scenery transports me from the straight garden pathway of a 1920s-era California country estate to a bright 2-story orphanage full of white, sunny windows. In this level of the game’s story it’s where I am being raised. But there are also multiple Home Alone-style criminal adult baddies who are chased me, hiding like the guards in Legend of the Hidden Temple. When they catch me it resets, and I attempt again to navigate through or around the ground floor rooms.

I find myself dating multiple girls, a situation that began around the same time. I effortlessly carry on multiple conversations, often switching from one person to another in the next room. Remarkably, I can recall each girl’s recent stories and seamlessly pick up where we left off when I encounter a different girl. These interactions take place in a narrow, unremarkable communal space, divided by wooden fences into backyards that are a dull blue and translucent in tone. It’s somehow based on the design of my childhood bedroom? Hm. During a barbecue, I access hidden panels where I keep stored equipment for certain occasions. Despite the complexity of juggling multiple relationships, I’m doing quite well.

Over a fence, I join a conversation about young Australians who have developed a new casual tense of their own invention. This isn’t just slang either, but genuine emergent grammatical innovation. I note that this has happened like three times now in my life. I observe that these kids find the demands of formality-entrenched work culture to be at odds with their Aussie attitudes, leading them to develop a new way of communicating with customers in their teenage retail jobs. This inevitably leads to the absorption of this new casual lingo into formal expectations though, necessitating yet newer forms of casual lingo. And so the treadmill marches on…

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Dream Journal

A Nice Neighborhood Stroll, Pretty Femboy Look , & Our Newer Place

Walking back from Mission Street, the main street in my neighborhood, I spot the panel of a lone phone booth that might still work. I idly start wondering about how many of those used to be around — how I’ve witnessed the changeover during the relatively time I’ve lived in San Francisco — how not long ago, wherever I was on the street, I’d have a mental map and know exactly where the nearest payphone would be. I also idly wonder how much it would cost to get one installed as a novelty, say in in a rich person’s backyard.

On the way back to my apartment I take a rest, laying down in the mouth of a slide, gazing at the sky while my waist is through the middle of part of a clothes hamper. I ponder the bemusing question of what time of year it’s best to arrive in Antarctica: the 6 months leading out of winter, or the 6 months leading into it? I have a playful argument with someone unseen about the sacrifices I’ve made going to Antarctica when I did (worth noting: I haven’t actually been to Antarctica).

I get up from my rest, floating above the trashed out grass-overgrown parking space, noticing as a car pulls in that I forgot part of the plastic hamper which I wear around my head. I float down to nab it quickly as the rumbling car takes the space. I’m dressed today in an aesthetically-pleasing purple velour lapel shirt, worn underneath a pair of white overalls shorts. I look glamorous. I recognize that with my pretty long hair this is what someone would probably call a “femboy” look. Meanwhile I’m already late for an exercise class I occasionally take at 2:00 pm to the north near Potrero Mall. I’m not worried about being late, even though at this point I either arrive in the middle of class or miss the whole thing. I remember that the hamper hat (that I just picked up from the ground) has in its brim an empty glass bottle; I decide to store it on the balcony of my apartment. Floating up to the landing, it’s been recently replaced with a metal grating and is still packed with disorganized chairs (a short bamboo one, three rocking chairs of two different types), etc. Realizing I can organize it slightly differently, I pull a chair or two into the sideyard just beyond. The sideyard is narrow, with a fence of prickly pear cactus, exercise equipment which came with the place, and a view of the Latino neighbor’s wide lawn just beyond (despite being on the third floor). This is the second place owned by our landlord where my wife and I have lived, having made the decision to move out of the Fartpartment a few years ago — while making a deal that we still get to visit the old place now and then. But the reality is that this new place is much harder to get nice, there hasn’t been an organic long-time progression of acquiring stuff and finding a place for it. This place has a backyard, it’s a better layout, but it’s been months or even years and it still feels like we’re moving in. It’d be nice to visit the old place again soon.

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Dream Journal

Landlord Fixing the Stairs

The landlord is in the backyard, and the wooden stairway has had one of its columns eroded away. I call him and he actually starts to fix it. I discover the shady lower column, underneath the landing, is also broken completely through. There’s barely anything holding up the right side anymore. The physical orientation is oddly different than our normal backyard, rotated somehow — the landlord too — both true-to-life and not. Lazy overgrown potted plants grow thick and lush over puddles and concrete, everything seems to have a fine coating of moss.

The view zooms out, showing the Victorian building that Ais lives in being a relic of earlier development, isolated in a business park, itself within a large airport and whose roads serve cars as well as planes. Reminds me of Alameda.

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Dream Journal

Tree Cottage in Washington State

A group of about 6 girls charge into the boy’s locker room, in towels, to officially request better treatment from a coach/official. Unexpectedly, they take the intrusion seriously and treat it the same as if boys had charged into the boys locker room, and have the police arrest them. They sit in a row in jail looking dejected and shocked.

Two sisters, one on a motorbike. Experience of sucking one’s own penis, but from the perspective of slutty sister. Feels like a baton or walking stick.

Watching what seems like a pricey daycare service van with a male driver yell at a few of the toddlers. I raise my eyebrows trying not to show my disapproval — it’s hard enough being male in childcare, I think, and the woman working with him looks like just as much a pill. I use a back door through the messy garage.

Tree in a grassy fenced backyard somewhere in sparsely-populated rural Washington state. I consider it for the site of a cottage-sized tiny home. But if instead I put it in the chain-link fenced lot next door, it looks like it would fit snugly, even have a backyard of its own.

There’s a zombie outbreak. Only one survivor, the smartest man there (someone who appears as the Deep Space 9 character of Chief O’Brien). The town has to be abandoned and they reboot the series.

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Dream Journal

Peculiar University Housing

Moving into a shared dorm apartment. They seem unprepared when I move in. Mickey is there, his brother Zach. It’s an underlit bachelor pad with tile floors and bare walls. There’s a small, wraparound sideyard of slatted wood, which opens to wooden benches in the sloping, grassy backyard. A pond filled with lively, tropical rings of algae and moss, craggy decorative rocks, and looks like a living volcanic pool. I get acquainted with a large snail that lives there.

There’s a portal in one of the rocks which emanates concentric rings, and staring into it I can see the world linked beyond, where my snail friend is from. Quite out-of pace, in retrospect.

I ride my scooter on a wide expanse of asphalt, eventually noticing there are dips and holes spaced in an even grid. Some are deep, deep pits. I inform the school administration about the deep ones on our property, which they seem perfunctorily apologetic and give me an extension.

I then sit down to watch an assignment for one of my university classes with my wife Lynae. The program auto-loads an episode of The Cosby Show, which I am categorically uninterested in ever since Cosby’s rape allegations. I skip it and instead manage to find an episode of Deep Space 9 in the course database, which of course I’ve seen before, but is happily comforting.

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Dream Journal

Dream: October 5, 2018

Small 1-person boats impaled on pillars, to dry perhaps? Reminds me of a golf cart installation I saw in the Mojave Desert.

In a free movie theater, there’s a disused and neglected triangular video game room off to the side of the hallway. Behind a flimsy wall can be found a secret, colorful 70s dining hall. The hall still has chandeliers somehow. I’m discovered fairly quickly by some other students who work there.

I’m a red-headed sun-kissed kid, looking in a mirror. This is the end of the dream and I’ve been experiencing it as him, and he’s the character I’ve most liked, he’s made all good decisions. I use his image as an anchor, hoping to remember the whole story.

Seeing mom in Cathedral City backyard, confused because I remember some people who are there actually aren’t supposedly around anymore.

Diztroyo: a kind of chaotic and confusing music I hear with glitched-out visuals to match, the end of the night when I’ve essentially slept too long.

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Dream Journal

Paved-Over Backyard

The backyard of the house where I grew up has been paved over. The pool and the lime trees look especially desolate. You can still see the outlines of our life here, though. The hill against the far wall is the only other remnant of back then. Everything is toned a shabby pink-beige-grey.

I survey this from atop a publicly accessible platform of fence-height, built on a portion of what was once the neighbor’s property — ceded by eminent domain to satisfy some unloved bureaucratic subclause, without rationale. It occurs to me on waking I’m only feet from where I lost my virginity.

Inside the house, in the addition, I look up to the naked rafters toward what looks like a faraway sky. A cypress tree and a telephone pole peek through. Oddly, I have a vague fantasy of taking down the pole’s crossbeam and carrying it like Jesus would’ve. I am left with the impression of gems/jewels dropping from that telephone pole.

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Glot

Small Discovery

'Mander from Below I discovered a small colony of creatures under refuse of broken cactus plants the other day. I thought they were earthworms at first, those dark slimy shapes squirming around under the wet debris. But they squirmed wrong. I looked closer—very close in fact—and saw, oddly, that they had legs. Tiny, tiny legs with minuscule fingers. I thought they were skinks as their bodies were so long comparatively. After research, however, I have concluded that there is a population of California Slender Salamanders living in my backyard, in urban San Francisco. They’ve probably been there a very long time. I’m told they have a lifetime range of about 14 square meters—less than the backyard. Salamanders in the garden make me happy.