Tag: Kemper court

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Dream Journal

Planet of the Bird People (Last Page is in the Middle)

Outside my house (my Kemper court house), two of my cars are waiting with people inside. We’re trying to leave and I can’t find the right car key. Eventually I realize we actually have a key sitting on the car’s floor; it looks identical but its untried. And of course, that finally works! Josh insists on driving my convertible Beetle since I made them wait so long. By now everyone’s eager to leave quickly, so both cars are driving in reverse at speed out of the court — I hesitate to ask to slow down since I made them wait. Half-heartedly, I ask if he’ll attempt a fast 180-turn, which I watch the other car do. Unexpectedly, he pulls it off and we merge into busy school-hours traffic — a familiar scene since the court is across from an elementary school.

My friend (S. of P&S) has died unexpectedly young… 32 years old? After realizing what it actually means, I feel the gap of his loss deeply. It’s only later that I also realize he has a kid, which makes it even worse.

A sprawling hostel, where an older lady has stayed so long that her shared dorm room is entirely colonized by bookshelves and stacks of books. The hostel itself is a long building with many stacked rooms in rows overlooking the downslope of a hill — a place that feels familiar from previous dreams.

The setting: a human planet that’s been administratively taken over by harpy-like bird aliens. I’m part of a team robbing a store and things go sideways (though apparently not too badly). Our escape route traverses security-activated bean geysers — most of which erupt chaotically around us during the escape. During the getaway, with authorities obviously observing us, one of the team (who reminds me of Cypher from The Matrix) says into our radio, “Can we blame this on anyone innocent?”

After other dreamss, the setting returns to the planet run by bird-people, where I’m flying in a cathedral-like room with columns and buttresses. It’s filled with redwoods, creating a humid atmosphere reminiscent of a cool redwood forest. There are elegant Asian-style stacked wooden shelves with narrow beams for plants. I fly outside through the large opening in the wall. Beyond, everything seems larger than normal (or I’m smaller than usual). As I fly towards a row of cypress trees (evoking a feeling of Northern Californian natural places), I land on an unoccupied bird-people nest I find. I don’t mess with their eggs for whatever reason. Perhaps I realize I don’t feel the need to indulge, even though I could crush them if I wanted to. I continue flying and swoop over a BBQ picnic, where I impulsively steal the big cooked fish just being brought out for everyone.

For a while now, I’ve had a disorganized stack of papers that I use as study material, flipping over the pages as I go to track of what I’ve read. It’s actually a fictional document but a worthy background reference (perhaps on our avian overlords). I realize suddenly upon flipping a page that I’ve read through the whole thing: it seemed like I was in the middle, but no, the last page I flipped is indeed the final page. I rememeber that, oh yes, I started in the middle, once upon a time.

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Dream Journal

Band Hotel Storage, Free Nowheresville Home, Movietime Interruption

I’m tracing the early crimes of Phil Spector, before the kidnappings. I’m with one of his bands at a hotel and he’s abandoned them. The realization of this is slow. Eventually I’m begging the hotel staff to help us find a place to store a piano. A staff member disappears through a reinforced metal service door, leaving me anxious as I wait next to it. Another staff member warns me to step back, and I assure him I didn’t plan to follow. Hours pass, and I sit outside at a temporary plastic table, surrounded by fancy guests, with my cheap water bottles. I’m far less dressed up, just waiting for an update on storing the piano.

In a vast industrial area, there’s a secluded courtyard with two apartment blocks, feeling like a tight-knit community, possibly in Anaheim or even Antarctica. I live in a home there for free. The layout eerily mirrors my childhood home, making me uneasy. I sleep in the room that would have been my parents’, and I try to describe to my wife how it feels to be surrounded by these familiar yet disorienting surroundings. Outside, the narrow backyard has pathways and large trees, and I spend time planning how to adjust their positions to modify the shade, having nothing else to do.

I’m watching a movie in a theater, discarding the tiny bones from my chicken snack on the floor. A greyhound dog starts bothering me as I sit in a single chair ahead of the other rows. Eventually, I move closer to the screen and concession bar. A young girl sits across from me at a cheap temporary table, chattering nonstop, even annoying her friends. I drag her by her hair across the slick floor and dump her outside, which her friends seem to enjoy, but I continue talking to her afterwards. She’s now naked, complaining yet acknowledging how she’s being a pain. She finds a scooter on the street with my old blue leather motorcycle jacket draped over it. The similarity is striking – it looks identical, and the scooter is the same color as mine, with a brown battery that doesn’t quite fit under the seat. The memories it stirs up make me emotional. The scooter appears to have a loose security chain, and its back wheel is missing.

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Dream Journal

Skilled Work in a Work Tent

A long day of work in an enclosed tent area, where I’m left in charge after. A couple that had been working on a car were idly painting a chair purple. The work is patchy, only grazing the surface of the woven fabric, the threads giving a textured grid appearance. Given my broader skillsket I’m able to more easily imbue the upholstery with an even saturation of dark rich dye, which comes to a nice burgundy — while I’m completing other projects after others have gone home, mind you. I hope the couple appreciates my job, but it occurs to me that I’ve completely overpainted their work.

I leave once my tasks in that area of the tent/garage are finished and go up to a white office with a receptionist window. I still need to replicate a car key for an old roadster, and the materials we’re using are a stack of glued-together plastic cards. This is going to be tricky and I don’t know how I can properly delegate it.

As representative for Trump, I take out an orange coat of his and set it out like a scarecrow in the front yard of my childhood home. And then, the singing of the song “Wimoweh” begins. Thus begins the celebration of him finally going to prison.

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Dream Journal

Peering at Yard Prettiness

At the edge of a very wide artificial pond serving a fish market, I pull out a special creature. A frilly fish that I know belongs in an aquarium. I have to take it somewhere across a barrier, perhaps up to another pool.

Helping at friends P + S house while they take care of their baby. While I’m there I idly volunteer to take care of the backyard. I have a moment where I’m distracted by the lovely light teal color of the painted fence, the perfect color contrast it makes with the stubby plants growing along it. It’s strange thinking that a landlord painted it such a nice color, but then again it looks like it was painted in the 50s or 60s. Walking through the backyard, I shake a tight bundle of tree branches which is laid on the grass and set it upright. It’s like getting a witch’s broom to stand up straight.

Peeking out of window of my childhood bedroom, I observe the nicely-built brickwork in the front yard. There’s a half-barrel for a fountain, and behind that the neighbor kids play next door. Reflecting on how I’ve been privileged by never having had to move away from this house for my whole adult life, but that’s it’s also constricting to have to still fit into the same space.

The window has a warped shelf in front of it, and I set down a wide milk-glass bowl on it. It predictably tumbles to the floor, landing oddly on its edge, and leaving a distinctive symmetrical chip.

There’s a shiny holographic plaid sticker which I examine, turning it side to side. (This marks the transition to wakefulness.) Moreover, train authorities can swap your luggage out on the train car if they need room at any time — which makes the service useless. Connected with the sticker somehow.

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Dream Journal

Singular Standing Dream, Dad’s Casserole

A marathon of a first dream that seems to last most of the night. Yet little of it is remembered… as so little seemed to happen. My crush and I stand next to a program guide — this is the main image. We simply stand there, still, static.

As the dream deteriorates into wakefulness, I ride a bike around a specific blind corner in my neighborhood (the crosswalk at Potrero and Cesar Chavez). In the instant I round the corner I imagine threading my trajectory between a former crush and new crush, one oncoming and one outgoing. I wake up and realize I’ve had the strange experience of sleeping nearly 8 hours dreaming basically a single scene.

I go back to sleep wishing to gather more dreams. Not the worst excuse, I suppose.

Visiting my childhood home after a long hiatus, where my dad still lives. I notice the house’s original CRT TVs are mostly gone. When I ask about this my dad says they tended to get cracked from falling forward onto the ground, since their design was off-balance. Eating some of my dad’s
hastily prepared food at the kitchen bar (maybe Cheez-It casserole?) I find a hair embedded through it. I make a conscious effort not to worry about it. My dad puts on an 8tracks playlist he made through tinny computer speakers. I help by casting it to the living room speakers too — they coincidentally sync together on the first try, no trouble. My wife mentions she’s hungry so I offer her the casserole. She tries it but finds the hair right away and can’t eat it. Because of the hair. Guess I can’t blame her.

It dawns on me that the amount of males and females living in our apartment building has always remained constant. Whether this is intentional or not I couldn’t guess. But I do note this was true until a pair of kids move next door not long ago. They are, curiously enough, a boy and a girl.

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Dream Journal

Hovering Presence and Menacing Cow

Skin writing is used as apunishment on someone suspected of human trafficking, marking them for later.

A dog-sized cow is acting menacingly at the property line of my childhood home, just at the edge of the neighbor’s lawn. I walk all the way down the street trying to read its dog tag, with no real plan how to make it go away.

Discover I’ve moved in together in the same ground floor apartment as some people I know in real life, but mainly from Twitter — KC Crowell, Feral, all Oakland peeps. I myself am an observer, but unusually, one with an identity — a hovering presence dwelling mostly in the rafters, where a glowing horizontal level divides my space from the everyday living space. The easily discerned border of the ceiling has curved buttresses, marking its construction in the early 1900s. On one section of old wood paneling, I spot a poster advertising old-timey glassware, lab glass perhaps. My roommates begin reinstalling some authentic hand-blown stained glass fixtures, decorative colored filigrees that have been in storage for almost a century. The landlord likes the residents so much he was convinced to let them haul it out from storage. The square ends of the curvy abstract forms fit perfectly flush against the buttresses.

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Dream Journal

Swimming through Election Chaos

It’s shortly after the election, and the Cult of the Dead Cow has hacked Whitehouse.gov. A documentary now posted there with a French-language title exposes exactly how Trump has stolen the election. I swim in a deep natural pool at the road’s end of my childhood home on Kemper court. Beto O’Rourke (a.k.a. Psychedelic Warlord) is sworn in as president by Mike Pence. I see the military on a double-decker bus, unsure who to take orders from.

Spot my old blue truck parked down the street, make sure it’s mine (yup, dents are the same), and I worry about moving it for street sweeping. Soon I realize my neighbor now owns it by some coincidence. Narrow windy sand-bottomed channels are the unique pool outside this home, my father-in-law’s old home, evocative of hot springs. The neighbor volunteers how police officers often get deeper, sandier waterworks as they can skirt regulations.

I watch more of the documentary and it’s actually rather daring, exposing all manner of American government corruption — no matter what side wins I figure a lot of people are going to jail. Wasn’t aware any libs still had this much bravery.

At the end of the court I swim past a driveway hosting an Avenue Q-style Broadway play. A fat Alex Jones puppet dressed as a king heckles Trump and his crony walking up the steps of the White House, as they slam the door. I manage to get in a quip of appreciation, telling him I didn’t expect some puppet guy would do such a good job.

The documentary continues. The movie is being streamed from dsicu.net or dsico.net — I marvel at the incredible amount of pressure their servers must be under right now. Watching more I realize there’s a call to action at the end and I’m actually behind most people, which explains the largely empty street.

I bust my way through a set of double doors, a backstage area that feels like New York, during some performance. They won’t let me through between the audience bleachers. So to get through this big donut-shaped arena building, at knifepoint I make them open the rear doors so I can go around outside. I avoid a murderous knife-wielding Donald Duck (could I have been the Donald Duck?) and reach a hospital emergency ward that’s been hit hard with the recent public revelation/call to action and the righteous chaos that has followed. There’s Mickey Mouse graffiti written in blood. Inside, the documentary plays on whiteboards, with handwritten explainer notes jotted next to it.

Just such an amazing job overall, the whole story and especially the documentary central to it. I awoke suddenly pre-dawn with a fascinated “huuuuuh”, wrote down pretty much all of it, then managed several more hours sleep.

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Dream Journal

Last Night in New Orleans

Slim invites us to a museum he’s been to before. Not knowing much about it, we end up liking it a lot — a museum named after Abita about New Orleans, and death (death with a little d and big D, Death). The black folks who run it are really into the place, too, and I wish I kept more details. One run-through, many catwalks, like a brewery tour. Death is alive.

Playing outside on the street of my childhood home on Kemper Court, I watch the adults steadily, one-by-one, leave their homes and leave me abandoned. There’s some new requirement for a federal ID (like the new TSA requirement, perhaps). I’m still a kid, but I’m also still me, and I know it’s some flavor of bullshit. In my head, while gazing at the neighbors house, I demand to know how much it costs to raise the neighbor kid Brandon. I haven’t thought about him in decades and I’m almost surprised I recall his name.

Passing the redeveloped portion of my hometown, Cathedral City, the part where Cat City Elementary used to be. Understanding that the absence of a place leaves the memories of that place unmoored, unrelatable. In the dream I can’t remember what it looked like, and all I observe is a line of tamarisk trees. The street has recently been the site of homeless encampments. A new bureaucratically long-named assistance center sits on the site of a former narrow park, battered tents obstruct the street (either in my direct experience or in my recalling of the past). Cranes return to the dark grass on the side of the road.

Spend several hours on a grimy and ghetto-y pedestrian overpass, passing the night in what ought to be an urban hell. Instead, there’s an erotic aspect, a sexual pastime. Who am I there with, am I male or female? — can’t remember. But it’s our secret location, ensconced above the rabble of vagrants, watching as if from a crow’s nest on a ship’s mast.

Inside a dainty house sometime after, I’m in charge of running the place.  I’m female, notably. There’s fancy teacups and luxurious wallpaper, but middle class, somehow unpresumptuous. There’s a stack of electronics that’ve been set up by my partner, stylishly white, antique by only a decade or two. Per someone’s request, I play some music on the DVD player, which is a clear plastic model, revealing the many spinning gears/components and quite fascinating to watch, spinning up, then becoming still.

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Dream Journal

Bigfeet, Submarines with Screen Doors: A Multitude of Amusing Dreams

The house on Kemper court has been torn down and replaced with a huge ornate Victorian abomination. I remember carved wooden Africanesque statues piled outside (one of Socrates), dirty glass picture windows set in a wall looking into an empty garden, Chris’ old remote control toy truck under a layer of dust at the end of the driveway, rain leaking like a sieve in the vast empty garage. In the garage I film a little kid (my brother Chris) who knows how to skate impressively. Later, everything in my parent’s bedroom is oddly pastel (vaporwave, I now realize), and I sit in front of an old CRT TV that previously played a specific… song? Mantra? Now it displays a number to dial.

A jar one mixes with salt, a substance Lynae doesn’t have access to, with which one can access the seraphim.

Bill O’Reilly show is taping in an elegant narrow San Francisco TV studio, so narrow that only the camera, computer, and host fit in the dusk-lit back room. Crew and visitors (me) sit along benches in main room. Cozy, intimate. Afterwards, in the backyard behind the Queen Anne building, I’m floating/flying above what appears to be a miniature forest of small bushes while a fan of mine fawns for my contact info.

Piloting a covert submarine, my team runs into an unfortunate problem… the underside of the bow has clearly been fitted with a pair of flyscreens. Ridiculous. The gathered Sub Team leave our “elite yurt” as new romantic couples, leaving only two big girls who depart proudly arm-in-arm, in good humor, to cries of “Fat Girl Solidarity!”

Near the compound with the yurt, which has a storage facility/Looney Toons vibe, I espy the face of a Bigfoot, which reveals, with continued peering, a multitude of Bigfeet eyes — an entire tribe. They line up single file along the forest hillside and play a game of passing balls with their feet in both directions, the goal of which is not to get stuck anywhere.

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Dream Journal

Disneyland, Silo Fairy, Cannibal Kinslayers, Patrick at Christmas

There’s a beautifully decorated lizard enclosure at Disneyland, bedecked with bromeliads and trickling waterfalls, and I’m climbing up the back grating of it. I fall backwards from the more-than-vertical surface into the limpid pool below, and crawl out across a blended-in rock bridge that serves as drainage.

Bouncing across some rolling plains below a college-evoking Monterey, stumbling across a metal silo powered by a curious trapped fairy spirit in the point of the cone. Fire play ensues, a rakish young innocent grin, and the fairy (a male one) breaks free, speaking with a rough and somehow primitive German accent.

Cannibal warriors (orcs?) walking up a line of soldiers back to front, hunting down kin. There’s an ill-fated Julius Caesar-type at head of the line, resigned, resolute, doomed.

The family is sitting in our old Kemper court house around Christmastime, selecting a movie with a clunky Windows-style file hierarchy. Patrick is looking very intently, thinking what I’m not sure.