Assigned to deliver a triangular wooden picture frame with writing inscribed on it. Actually a duplicate, though I’m uncertain whether it’s the copy or an original.
Walking down a hillside on a set of stairs through people’s private apartments. Gardens, cottages, wooden gates and fences, open bedrooms. One cozy-looking bedside belongs to Betty White, with whom I briefly converse.
I notice that after carrying it, the long sides of the triangle frame have been bent into the opposite directions — as if they were broken and reattached.
I’m raising sundew seedlings into adult plants, leaving them outside in pretty bottles to grow. At one, I show cousin Diana the progress that it’s made. While I’m pruning and rewatering one and her friend Reesa screws up and squishes it –three times. Find former of this and she asks why I want to make her feel bad to which I say I just want her to stop hurting my plant. I also manage to get trapped behind a set of portcullis gates in a play castle, before luckily yelling to the maintenance crew that closed them at that hour. (When I was younger, I might not have yelled!)
There’s some little intermission on the roof of Notre Dame of two people meeting clandestinely to exchange information. I’m one of them, but I’m also someone unseen, behind the point of view of the observer. Adjacent to them his rows of unused flags, one green one from Astoria I remember, as part of a story told by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about someone in her district who went missing.
I’m making a delivery of two of the bottled plants to a fancy upscale residence after dark. I double check my containers as I’m making the delivery and when one is missing I go back to check my car. It’s a low two-door, and I say approach I hear The Futurama/EVA mashup song, and recognize I left my door open. Inside the driver seat I noticed the glove compartment is cracked slightly. It’s a cold winter tonight in the city, and my breath inside the warm car is unusually easy to see. I realize the possibility, but don’t use my flashlight as was my first impulse… instead using my phone as a mirror. I catch glimpse of a wicked clown grimace and actually laugh a little, boosting myself into a quick wakeup so I could write this down. I said as dry as possible, “ha, that’s really funny” …but I meant it.
Waiting under a tree for the apocalypse to be over. I’m mostly in denial about it, “it won’t be that bad, or that long”. I’ve stockpiled soft drinks. One night, I must I hide inside my neighbors’ converted rest stop bathrooms, plastic panels enclosing it from the wind. I just barely close the doors while a killer cop stalking the neighborhood searches the place. I manage to lock myself behind the supply closet door. He kills everyone else.
After that, I decide living away from [former] civilization is safer. I hole up in a country house in a small coastal community isolated from the damage of society. We’re glad to have no idea what’s going on, we just see the consequences — like a massive locust swarm passing through one day.
Our jungle island becomes an all-male commune. In the center stands a statue of a crab, whose long, colorful, plastic eyebrows I pose into a cartoonish expression of anger. It’s the same place as the restroom, years later. The “Crab People” chant starts up in my head. I show a video to a fellow commune member who reminds me of Vince Saunders or April Arcus, a video I shot just off our shore of a baby crab person. They watch, reflected, in a crevice-shaped mirror embedded into the hillside, scratched into squares. I leave via the narrow café on our northern exposure, eating a lone lost French fry left on a table.
In the backyard of our property, a steep pine-covered hill leads up to the neighbor’s building. It’s somehow the last address on the street, without any street leading to it. They yell down at us trying to get some kind of assistance. We gather around the backyard pond, someone leads us to shout their name all at the same time: “Hot Chocolate!” Thus amplified, we proceed to pack up their deliveries, and I trudge up the sandy slope.
I expect it to find a vineyard-like rich-people estate of stone walls, but it’s more of a spacious modern apartment tower. I carry two deliveries in oversized Munchery bags. Ring the buzzer of apartment 517, just around the corner from the actual door (confusing, a bit). It’s Dav Yagunuma’s place, and he’s pleased to see me as it’s been awhile. My other delivery is for a game design studio, the door covered in hand-scrawled notes. It’s the studio that makes the Myst games. Suitably puzzling, they have a peephole on their door labeled “channel” and a note saying if you wish to “alter the terms of your entranceship” look through the peephole and figure things out.
I never looked, but somehow I know the other side was like a steampunk café/lounge from another dream, 2nd floor catwalks, leather benches, Don Bruce in fine regalia. The riches of old San Francisco, perhaps.