Tag: gift

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Dream Journal

Third Trip back to Australia

My wife and I manage to cobble together enough money to take a 6-day vacation to Melbourne, Australia. It’s now my third trip to the continent, also the shortest (I must be counting some other dream I’ve had in the past, perhaps I can even remember which one). I relish showing my wife around some of the old places I used to go, but it’s difficult to remember exactly where they are now as it’s been so long — if they’re still there at all. The Friendlies Hostel somewhere in the CBD comes to mind. So does Mt. Helen, which somehow seems like one single pioneer-era street.

In the far back of a long narrow resort, I help myself to the cups in the back storeroom. Service cups for the on-site restaurant, that is. I run into my friend Oz and we do some opportunistic kissing.

Seen from resting position on a couch (but not my couch) I spot my rat Bertie. Also a checkerboard pattern rat, some rattie associate which somehow doesn’t strike me as odd.

I tale bounding leaps across a courtyard up to the grid-pane windows of a Victorian house. In that brief moment, I spot two old cats keeping watch.

In our apartment, I have to distract my wife to keep her from looking in our bathroom. I just saw that her girlfriend has left an N64 cartridge which is supposed to be a surprise present.

I do a double-take at a drinking fountain after I notice that someone (maybe me) put a discarded penis in the drainage hole up top. You can just make out the glans. Shortly after, I meet a cute femme enby named MidJourney who is riding bike. Reminds me of a very put-together clean new Tilde Ann (someone I knew and shared a hot tub with long ago. I ride along behind her. She’s notably meaner than most people I’d consider being around, but we converse and make fun repartee. An unusually caustic friendship but it seems we do like each other.

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Dream Journal

Festive Solitude & the Razor Tree

Standing around in crowd of men, or more likely boys. It feels normal in this space, a mall, or a cafeteria, some other large enclosed space where access in controlled. My mind and personality is as I am now, but perhaps in a younger version of my body. At the other end from where I stand, some boy expresses interest how, since it some festive time, drugs might be procured. Not long after that someone shows up and begins negotiations — I, instead of being curious how it’s done here, straightforwardly leave through the rows of aisles. I think I pass right out the front door, in fact.

Nothing better to do, I settle in near a stage where Christmas songs are sang with a twist. Perhaps the lyrics are altered, or maybe the performer is a kid in a VR cartoon owl projection. There’s much going on today so it’s about as solitary as I’m likely to find. There are chairs set up facing the stage but I prefer to sit on the ground and be with my own self.

Later, I’m pointedly following Plarvolia, a girl who rejected me IRL. I have a sense that I’m bugging her so she might consider what she did and perhaps one day even apologize. She’s ahead of me at a theater box office, where she buys the last two tickets (tickets can only be bought in pairs here). Despite the perfect opportunity to ditch me, she makes a show of leaving the other ticket on a ledge for me.

I find myself in possession of a strange gift. There is a tree which always grows back from its stump long, spindly tendrils, razor-sharp thorns all along them, like vicious squid tentacles. I see it growing on what might be a Greek/California seaside, which also abuts a prim English waterway. It hides another terror, which is that it keeps within itself every disease there is. A terrifying thing to exist, much less to have. But I only admire its strangeness.

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Dream Journal

Dinosaur Footprints and Thrift Store Gift

Viewed from above, I can see that my childhood friend Robbie T.’s house on Desert Inn road is only a few hundred feet, by air, from a dinosaur excavation exhibit/museum. The several blocks in between are separated by a main thoroughfare but it’s still surprising that we never realized when we were kids.

My wife and I take the subway there (a short trip) and while exiting the station on a short connecting dirt path, with scrubby but pretty green nature on the side, I momentarily think we’ve angered a guy walking behind us. He’s muttering something loudly and it takes an anxious second to realize he’s talking to his directions via headset.

The museum is outdoors, the ground muddy under a sky of brisk blue. There’s preserved dinosaur footprints and maybe puddles. I prod downward with a stick as to measure depth. A detectable but unidentifiable smell is then on the stick, a nearby elder volunteers the information that they smell like The Devil (like the tarot card, not anything recognizably satanic or evil).

A sizable chunk of my back molar comes out and I sigh, looking at it in my hand. It’s been going on awhile without being addressed, falling away in pieces so it’s down to nub. No one around me seems to care or notice.

We set our pet rats to free roam loose in our home, halfway hoping they can find some wild ones. (Yesterday I saw a whole group of rats in the New York subway.)

In a thrift store I run, I prevent an old friend from buying my warm comfy German army jacket for $4. I actually chase her off, hoping she isn’t too upset despite appearances. The friend is either Meg from college (who played Columbia in Rocky Horror) or Amy Pollard from middle school (whose birthday was on Christmas). Soon I reveal a surprise gift for her — the jacket, which had a hole in the lining around the armpit, I completely repaired. Now I can give a perfectly functional jacket to her for free! Which might even make up for how I treated her in the store before. (The large atrium room reminds me of the Temple of Dendur in The Met, which I didn’t visit until today. And hadn’t even planned on seeing today.)