Tag: boss

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Dream Journal

Next Door, A Fancy Pool I Treat like my Own

I’ve been living in a dingy apartment that used to be a motel. One nice thing about living here is that I have a view of the large pools at the fancy place next door, and I know how to sneak in whenever I want. However, the fancy place’s new owners have started paying for updates that actually detract from the beauty and usefulness of the pool for me. I’d rather it be old and enjoyable than new-looking and ugly. One day I’m lounging against the side of the pool and realized they’ve installed speakers that play easy-listening garbage. Without waiting I reach up and break off the speaker nearest me — realizing it’s better than planning it out and appearing suspicious.

I’m hanging out near the boundary of the property where there is a waist-high fence; I’m thinking about how it will still be easy to get in whenever I want even if they start locking the tiny gate. Chris P., a Cambodian childhood friend of mine, and two of his entourage arrive through the gate. He’s some important manager or boss of the place, which makes things perhaps more complicated or perhaps easier for me. We have a brief conversation joking about whether I’m hacking the power grid of the pool, like a famous incident in the history of Bermuda. Luckily, of all the liberties I’ve taken with this overly-wealthy next door property, that isn’t one of them.

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Dream Journal

Pontecruff, a Group Video Server

It’s the end of the day and I’m in the living room of my communal apartment closing up shop for the night. I stand waiting near a fridge in the wall saying goodnight to roommates one by one. I wave the door open and closed as our director (perhaps someone we just call “the director) walks past. He looks like The Dude from The Big Lebowski, and I apologize because I realize I’ve been wafting cold air into the room this whole time.

My crush comes in and asks a question about our group video server, specifically where she can put some nostalgic TV for sharing. She also asks about the name, which is something like “Pontecruff”, derived from pontiff + scruff. I give her friendly instructions and offer to make the name easier to remember. But also I confess that the functioning server was set up on the last router we had and by now the correct config is probably buried.

Waxing poetic, we reflect that the server should give you a feeling like the smell of a box of plastic VHS tapes. Dusty, familiar, a smell from another time, a collection of things you might not remember but know you want to keep.

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Dream Journal

The Boss, The Barbarian, The Beast

Sharing a bed with a female boss, and a kid who joins us. It’s quality snuggle time but I have to be a good sport on account there’s an orange-lighted lamp behind us, one I just barely can’t reach while we’re ensconced together.

Female boss and I leave the relative comfort of this bedroom, a place which has the sensation of a single-room ground floor unit of a multi-story underground parking garage. The neighborhood is the dusty, sunny, oldest part of my hometown (although I don’t think of it as Cathedral City at any point, the architecture and streets are no other). We’re leading a class single-file while we roam the near-empty streets, searching for even one business compatible with ours. Finally, in a wider old-west-ish double collonnaded warehouse area, I suggest that the business there — in publishing — is close enough to journalism that it’s worth pursuing.

Unfortunately there’s a brutish barbarian who guards nearby; he manages to kill all of us before we even realize what’s going on. We’re left — not quite dead, but as good as dead — to perish slowly in the sun strung up on a tall post, like a ship’s crow’s nest. But there’s a saving grace — we’ve got a Brock Samson bodyguard just for such an occasion. He hides under a bridge until the hulking brute passes overhead, stabbing his machete through chipped slats and impaling the aggressor in brutal revenge. We’re taken down from our gallows and recover with no ill effects.

Going a little further in the small near-deserted town, there is a wide shallow lake to the right (something like I’ve seen before in dreams, a wistful view with balconies worthy for gazing in reflection) and to the left, what looks like what could be an ornate orthodox church. I’m pleased to go and explore, knowing I’m versed in how to behave in almost any religious building. Turns out it’s a Hindu shrine to Ganesh, one with specific obeisances to enter. My dad advances too quickly through the entryway crowded with votives. I watch him try to balance on two upturned djembe drums, not quite successfully.

Inside the building, I chat with a few close friends as we sit on barstools. Idly we gaze toward the adjacent wall, the only light in the room, adorned with a massive floor-to-ceiling aquarium — and at least one monstrous inhabitant. It looks like a swimming centipede, maybe a polychaete worm, as if from the Ordovician era. My sibling Patrick seems quite concerned — it’s large, aggressive, and very near. Yet I know something about the tank, reassuring him “that glass may look only 10, perhaps 12 inches thick, but it’s not. That’s what we may I’m call ‘arcane glass’, and for that thing it’s actual measure is [literally] infinity inches.” I’m quite serious with this assessment. As if to punctuate my point, the thing winds up to the glass again, bigger, meaner, with a frightening face, and hits it full speed — which makes a satisfyingly tiny donk sound.

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Dream Journal

Outside in a Tsunami, Thanos as my Boss

I’m in a neighborhood of San Francisco with my wife Lynae. In the distance I see the Golden Gate Bridge, beautiful dusky light in the air, and huge swells of an oncoming tsunami. I start looking for shelter, trying to use the time we have wisely, but it’s quickly apparent that we will probably be trapped outside.

Working for Thanos, vaporizing people and such. I’ve got some cool high-tech vehicles but things start getting precarious once my special magic starts wearing off… my body has fewer and fewer of the 100 eyeballs I was once lucky enough to grow. It starts to look like I’ll be the one getting vaporized soon, so I need to get evasive and clever.

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Dream Journal

Exploring the Forbidden Office

Escorted on a secret tour through a complex of interconnected office rooms. The workers there have lived with the strangeness of the place for so long that, despite possible serious consequences, they’re willing to take small groups through it for a token bribe. I get an Ambergris vibe on account of the mysterious powers that run the place.

At the end of the tour, I return to a desk with a suitcase full of my shoes underneath. In the corner of a room, like my parent’s bedroom. There’s the chance my unseen boss will have a problem with it.

While waiting at a train station, up in a broad autumnal-leafed tree, I spot a very unusual-looking creature. It’s almost intentionally strange: a single large, unblinking eye on a prehensile stalk points at me while a confusing locomotion of multiple limbs shuffles/crawls/drags it through and out of the foliage. I watch as it leaps down from the tree, around the corner of a concrete wall, joining (or becoming?) a family group of ten or more and shimmering/disappearing into the ground.

Foggy wooden V-shaped viewing platform that I visit before my group. Climbing up a second time, the ladder has moved back and I’m not sure I have the upper body strength to pull me over. Kate Willett, who has lightened hair tips (perhaps from age) climbs up also and I realize this is as foretold in an old vision… a dream? Hm. She reveals a special name that lines up with my secret knowledge, something like “Ec-sdo-mai-ssis” without the dashes.

In our home, we have two regular-sized fish tanks. One has divider and a thin sick fish (a gullet?) breathing heavily on its side. Lynae does a water exchange at the same time as I do, and it results in one tank being nearly empty, and excess water for the other. Meanwhile I intermittently find tiny rats on floor, a consequence of a pregnant female escaping.

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Glot

The Long Weekend

On Saturday, I got in a scuffle with my boss over a moral issue which he refused to even acknowledge. I alerted him of my wish to take this concern to a higher authority, and he threatened disciplinary action. After this, I went to see an old friend until 2:00 in the morning the night before Folsom Street Fair. I got on the wrong bus on the advice of the driver, who said that he went to Mission. He went to Mission, alright… the bus was the 91, and he went to Mission and Geneva, almost out of San Francisco county. After the bus let off at West Portal Station at about four in the morning, I collected my bearings, realized the 91 was my only way out of there, and told the driver I wanted to get back on. MUNI pass in hand, we went on to have a conversation about his job, passengers sleeping on the bus or leaving trash, San Francisco, learning a new language, and much else, all in a darkened bus in a quiet neighborhood at four in the morning. The only other humans I saw were trashmen, briefly. Only two minutes off schedule,the driver renewed his route. Damn right I got off on Mission and Geneva that time, only to find that I had just missed my bus connection back home and the next one was in 26 mintues. 27 minutes. 28 minutes. And that it was freezing cold. Seemingly many minutes later, a single taxi passed by and I bit the bullet, and hailed it. Too bad he could only take cash. Screwed, and freezing, once again. Then what do I see? The cab backs up, full reverse down Mission. He asks if I could buy him gas. Hell yeah, I can buy you gas. He took me home, and I talked about the kinda day it’d been, and even paid me back the difference. I got home about 5:30.

I was awakened Sunday to a voicemail from my boss saying I’d been suspended for the “incident” the day before. Well, I called right back and said, ok, I’m fine with that, did you make the appointment with said higher authority as requested? Of course he hadn’t. So I spent the next day, the 30th, alternately gawking at naked weirdoes and writing a five-page letter to by boss’ bosses. It was a good letter, and the only reason I’m not spilling the beans (and they are some juicy beans, mind you) is that I volunteered some confidentiality on my part. They said I was “a good writer” when I presented it to them on Monday. They looked a little worried but I can’t blame them. I don’t know if that they had any idea of the kind of things that’d been going on.

The rest of Monday was nice. Me and the little lady went to Sutro Baths, the Dutch Windmill and Doorhenge in Golden Gate Park, got my favorite Chinese stuffed meat pastry (Chao-Su-Bao) in the Inner Richmond, and generally enjoyed life. I’ve gotten a lot of housework done. Being suspended has sort of been a boon, especially when A) you know you were in the right and could have accepted no less from yourself, and B) there might be a substantive apology for you in the works.

I have a meeting tomorrow at work with the boss’ boss, at 12 noon. Wish me luck.