Tag: Kemper court

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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.

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Dream Journal

Paved-Over Backyard

The backyard of the house where I grew up has been paved over. The pool and the lime trees look especially desolate. You can still see the outlines of our life here, though. The hill against the far wall is the only other remnant of back then. Everything is toned a shabby pink-beige-grey.

I survey this from atop a publicly accessible platform of fence-height, built on a portion of what was once the neighbor’s property — ceded by eminent domain to satisfy some unloved bureaucratic subclause, without rationale. It occurs to me on waking I’m only feet from where I lost my virginity.

Inside the house, in the addition, I look up to the naked rafters toward what looks like a faraway sky. A cypress tree and a telephone pole peek through. Oddly, I have a vague fantasy of taking down the pole’s crossbeam and carrying it like Jesus would’ve. I am left with the impression of gems/jewels dropping from that telephone pole.