Tag: city

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Dream Journal

What’s Your Opinion on Rat Autostatus?

Outside the back door of my cozy ground floor apartment, a neighboring building has recently constructed a gravel path. Opening the back door of our kitchen today I discover they’ve expanded it, from merely passing by the front our place, all the way so the gravel runs against the back wall of our kitchen. It’s another parking spot, with no barriers at all — cars could drive right through the wall. To compromise, I negotiate a window to be installed in that wall. When the wall is opened we find there’s a window frame already built into the structure, which I scoff at, and opine that we should’ve had one there all along.

It’s a lovely day outside. Near the other building, I spot a 3-wheeled white BMW which has been parked (or drifted) onto a fence. I move it off the common path, a bit derisively and vindictively, and it settles in front of a realty office. The grill cracks a modest hole in the glass door.

Discussing strange and noteworthy oddities in city layout. From a map high above, I zoom the group’s view into a house here in San Francisco perfectly surrounded by a circular complex of inaccessible military buildings. Abruptly I’m inside the location myself, a tiny community set in an odd miniature forest park — for intelligence agents or staging — where I can’t see the horizon of city buildings.

Boarding a first class airline cabin, which has been adapted now as just a small, unremarkable room. I have a huge duffel bag to stuff under the seat, with nitrous empties in one side pocket. No one seems to mind but I still worry. They get lined up in a long row at the front of the cabin until someone (me, I think) realizes as soon as the plane lurches forward they’ll be scattered everywhere.

I try to convince my sister Alia to quietly help me gather them handful by handful. Alia is engaged singing a two-part Viking harmony dirge, which I join in as a third, middle harmony to get her attention. While she’s deciding I come up with a algorithmic method to get them fastest. I don’t have time to implement it before I awake, but I remember asking, in terms optimizing the algorithm, “what’s your opinion on Rat Autostatus[] ?” A variable I cannot explain, nor am I sure anyone understood me asking.

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Dream Journal

Rocks, Parks, Plants, and Avatars

Driving down what seems like a miniature Hot Wheels freeway in San Francisco, through a rocky little cactus and succulent park. I take what must be a wrong turn and continue driving over the road, but it’s now invisible. It’s disconcertingly like flying between the channel of rocks.

I come out the other end at a corner, noticing a small sedan parked just to the side of the intersection, practically in the crosswalk under a tree and sticking out into the lane. It appears to have been there a while as there are pieces of broken-off succulent plant growing on the street around their car. I consider rescuing some to take home.

Instead, I enter uninvited into the condo-like apartment building, in the tall flat block adjacent the intersection. There’s no lights on inside, and it has a “Miami retiree” vibe. I get lost in the maze of bathrooms, trying to leave feels like going through one after another, in the dim interior twilight.

Once I’m outside, I start writing a note to explain how the invisible road in the park must be fixed, and in the process one of the rent-by-hour bikes that’s always parked on the sidewalk in San Francisco gets knocked down. An older, gray-haired motorcycle-type guy with a goatee, his outfit covered in motorsports logos, reflexively tells me it’s knocked over and I should leave a note. He’s just passing by and doesn’t even seem to have any investment. I gather myself and rush after him and ask him pointedly “why did you feel you had to say that?” He immediately understands it was unnecessarily bossy and apologizes, yet I agree I will leave a note and say I’m sorry.

Afterwards, I use a personal gliding machine to fly directly above the rocky triangle-shaped park. There are huge spherical floating balloons holding up art projects, the work of one artist not long ago. I fly low enough to graze them. In a fit of enjoyment, I fly low over the street, wobbling to and fro between the lanes as I idly ply the neighborhood.

Walking between two fancy houses on the seaside. Modernist concrete right angled things, floor to ceiling windows overlooking long patios which double as piers, covered in tasteful potted plants. I walk between two of them (neither of which I have permission to be on) and observe how their roofs hold up a flat trellis between the homes. (The orientation switches at some point, as if I’d been looking toward the sea, or looking toward the street.) I imagine hanging a certain pitcher plant perfectly in between the two homes, such that it overhangs the walkway.

I am, by this point, also an Avatar Aang type character. A younger girl, resident of one of the fancy homes, lays down on the concrete, bereft of energy. In what I understand to be a friendly gesture, I dip my nose into her exposed armpit. I must’ve been invisible to her before, as she startles and knocks me backwards. In penance I turn myself into a potted plant with tall pointy leaves, called a snake plant. I watch the clock fast forward by a factor of 36, while in the background my unknowing allies search for the Avatar.

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Dream Journal

A Dream with a Lotta Stuff

[Stefon meme] This dream has everything: spearfishing Ewoks, the greater city of Baltimore, urban renewal, a passport control office, class trips to a death spire, a mental ward with random small animals, and Lil Nas X performing a cover of a version of a David Bowie song with his dick out.

Ewoks hunting with spears by the shore of a straight, marshy river, perhaps a canal. Secretive. Traditional. Trying to return to my Ewok brethren, but floating somewhere in the greater Baltimore region — called Mellopotron (pronounced in a Greek manner). City is having a blue-collar revolution, replacing ugly cheap infrastructure (for example chain-link fencing with signs zip-tied on) with permanent works of concrete, making it look less mean but somehow more irredeemably urban, decided.

I go through a passport control office during a school field trip, a group with a field trip vibe anyway, even knowing my passport is missing. Somehow, maybe I get rapport with the guards, I get through and begin the climb with the rest of the class up a bony, jagged “death spire” at nighttime. When it’s time to go down, I break out my wings (a wingsuit? appendages?) and glide over the heads of my companions — even knowing I’d probably pay a price for the experience.

And I do. I’m interned in a mental ward, one that I’ve been in once before. Comparatively this time is a breeze, since I knew in advance what I was choosing. Still, I hide the fact from my companions. Every now and again I’ll throw out the odd mention of, for instance, how weird it was when the nurse’s station used to have its counter open to the patient’s room when no nurse was there. A small scurrying animal, maybe a rat or a lizard, creeps from one room to another undetected — perhaps a transmogrified companion? We are assembled for a special guest. Much to our surprise, rapper Lil Nas X drops from the ceiling and performs an amazing cover of Major Tom (Coming Home), in a long flowing trench-coat… with his dick out.

Flying up to what was supposed to be our lodging, a dilapidated but beautiful hand-restored floating bus house in someone’s backyard. 30 feet above the ground — which I don’t even look at — it rocks back and forth, left abandoned for what I discern is some lamentable procedural reason. I note how even in its aged state, it could still drive around the side of the multi-story house, where cargo containers are stacked up nearly to the roof.

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Dream Journal

Goodbye to Mom, from a Bookshelf

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.