Tag: kids

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Dream Journal

Strange Forms of Water in Coves

Observing shapes of water in a bay from cliffside above. A lighthouse or dock sits amidst what seems like turbulent waves, which coalesce into nearly vertical walls of water rising from the estuary floor. They form sophisticated mirrored patterns. An informational picture-in-picture appears in the corner and I scroll around a wider view, examining the next cove over — where the shapes are less grandiose but more distinct. The sharp outlines of the PIP really help discern the unusual forms, which are mesmerizing.

Riding in the backseat with my dad driving down a road in Palm Desert. A tiny bit on edge as I’d normally be driving myself, but I’m handling it ok. We round a slight curve and he has to brake hard and quickly merge out of the left lane as there’s a wicker bench in the road. Briefly I mention how lucky it is he was only going 22 mph, the same speed I choose to go on that particular stretch. I volunteer to get out and move the bench aside if he stops at next place to pull over. But that’s a country club, and instead of just stopping by the side of the road in the little turnout my dad drives around their big complicated parking lot for a bit till I tell him to just pause. I jog along under some lush overhanging foliage along the outside of the road, mindful of cars that could be coming. I realize I’m not fast like I used to be, and the turnout was pretty far from the bench. I finally round the bend and see it’s actually a parked car without even blinkers on. The task now changed, I dash across the road to see if I can find the driver. I do, on the second floor of a weird little ski slope store. Despite much patience on my part they seem disinterested in even listening. I realize, oh, this person just feels entitled — I can’t rationalize the problem to them because they don’t care about other people.

Running airline tubing in a long narrow kink club space where I work/volunteer. I remember the first time I went there, the entry corridor (made up of personal side rooms for storage/changing) seemed to take forever to walk down; now I barely notice. While fixing something in-between the gate and the front door I get locked out. I was half-expecting this so I’m not stressed, I just climb carefully over the old corrugated roof, taking my time. Spot landlord of the building down ina courtyard and pause, not wanting to meet him. Thereafter, examining the tank, I decide we can’t have a keyboard in the aquarium despite that it looks pretty cool.

Special event room with bunch of kids partying. It’s like a home movie night, with pull-out beds in a bleacher stand configuration, popcorn and snacks provided too. But it’s a small space finished in bamboo, smaller than 10′ x 10′, and I consider the COVID air problem. There’s a nitrous dispenser stocked on the bed, but I’m not going to point it out to the kids — one of them seems to know, and calls it a whippet.

Not long after, I’m cleaning up a couch in what is kinda the top floor flop pad of a hostel. It mirrors the previous space, but I can’t say if it’s the same. I manage to dislodge an old plate that’s been wedged into the cushions for a good long while, discovering in the process it was put there by someone I like. Although I’ve done a great job cleaning the couch, if I report this find I know my bearded and newsboy-capped friend might get in trouble.

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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

A Traveler of Oz, Brotherly Advice, Eyehole Game

A legendary early Australian traveler, mucking about in an island chain that seems familiar from other dreams. Palm trees and native islanders, but not where you’d expect them to be — somewhere north of Australia, but without Papua; somewhere east, but without New Zealand. The fella is a big name but I get to watch him before he’s known. Has a funny way of sitting; I get an x-ray view of his hip bones balancing oddly as he sits leans back on an upturned suitcase while working. The map shows speckles of islets in a lake, a lake that’s the ocean, but a lake like some dusty suburban southern California reservoir (maybe Moreno Valley, Lake Perris, etc). Not like the Pacific — one with loud motorboats and kegs of beer and trashy fun watersports on every summer weekend.

Talking with my younger brother Patrick as we climb into attic in my childhood home garage, though in this dream he’s significantly younger and smaller than me. I tell him I know he’s going to ask about doing things the shortest possible path, yet that’s not the most efficient. As we climb down the attic ladder, my dad asks what we were saying on our way up about Grenada. Fittingly, this situation is somehow exactly the example problem I’d been giving to Patrick.

We’re having a nerf fight in the backyard. It’s a beautiful day and the lawn is green. No fences between us and the neighbor, so I see all their kids playing a game where they take half the pulp of an orange, cut out an eye hole, and stick them in their eye sockets — running around with these weird faces that look like eyehole monsters from Rick and Morty.

Texting my dad as I were my mom as a prank, but I can’t figure out how she’d spell “jare bear” (“gare bear?” “gerre bear”?). I release a scraggly pet parrot into the enclosed tile patio of my parents room, as I follow my dad.

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Dream Journal

From Forest, to Warehouse, to Casino

(Dreamt in the cabin in Weed, California, before I was woken up from tooth pain)

A line of houses at the edge of a sloping mountain forest, separated by a field, or golf course, recently redeveloped with simple white windmills. In the course of trying to navigate past, I come to a stony circular outdoor temple which is shaped from the trees themselves. There I encounter a bro dude (probably a golfer) who directs me further into the city.

I re-enter a dusty large warehouse space, somewhere I’ve stayed not long ago. Gazing on aged timbers, gauzy light, and empty wooden alcoves, I consider how this would be a bad place to get sick. Outside I come across a kid, a nerdy boy who I recognize as having some sort of eye disability. No one has taken the time to get him to a safer place, this one obviously being abandoned. I gather a group of such disabled children — thick cute eyeglasses on their tiny young heads — and make for the most difficult passage. A group of at least two other caring adults joins me; we cross a tight gap with a folding trap bridge, inside a small tricky mechanical gate. I remember my friend Sarah Bliss there using a bicycle to hold down a rotating semicircular apparatus. We safely get the kids across, thanking each other for a job well done. One girl has her name listed as “[personal attribute] one”, which when asked about she smiles and dismisses congenially.

(Right now, writing this, I feel as though she’s dismissing and accepting my attempts to remember her name, in fact.)

I’m then within what must be a casino complex, a large enclosed circular courtyard somewhere like Nevada or Florida. This is quite different from the peaceful sparsely-populated forest. Trying to get around there, I bump into a bar in the middle of the road/path, the name is a pun on Peyton Place, somehow incorporating “payday” and also being released from “parole”. I’m baffled there are so many people out during the Corona pandemic. I duck into an employee area, a curved restaurant kitchen similar to a rail car. I tactfully ask someone working intently inside how we normally get out, as if I were a recent hire. I managed to exit out that back door, only to soon step onto a multi-car people-mover, some airport tram thing that ferries guests around this circular temple of gambling. I get caught with a ton of Florida types, none of whom seem to know about wearing a mask, and I burst out after only one stop. I try to get far away from anyone else, and end up gravitating to the middle with rows of benches around me. This place is insane. Far more likely to kill me than the dusty warehouse. Where did I bring these kids?

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Dream Journal

Flying Onto a Skyscraper at Dusk

Near dusk, while flying my paramotor, I buzz right above kids playing in a schoolyard and land in a corner of a vast skyscraper.

On the landing strip, helium is advertised by claiming that Iran knows about it’s production — something that I assume makes it less vulnerable. The wind picks up, and the helium tank on my flying vehicle becomes harder to control.

I need to leave a theater, a theater where they like me, even asking me personally to come back. Maybe I’m an actor. As I go, standing on the threshold of a shattered window, I fill my jacket pockets with plastic beads from a broken necklace and tiny pebbles of pyrite.

I find an M16 handle found in bag of my brother Chris’ old stuff, examining it on my apartment’s rear balcony.

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Dream Journal

Bait Locker, Alien Repellent, Rustbucket RV-land

In a locker room, lots of stuff I need to gather. I head out once my time is over, my two friends waiting outside the heavy glass door, before realizing I still left a bunch of stuff. In the bottom half of the locker, the compartment is open so I can reach in and find other people things. There’s at least a few pieces of funny money left as a trap, I assume. The steam room hot tub adventure cost at least a couple hundred bucks.

I am a scientist like Rick Sanchez and I’m inside my house during the course of an insectoid invasion. I am one of the only people with an alien-repellent sound barrier. The insect forces go to great links with transparently fake news reporter interviews trying to discover how it works and to overcome it. I see a diagram of the architectural plan of the house with the bedroom just outside the laboratory and the clean room.

I’m in the small kitchen of my family’s old Cathedral City house. About twice as many people live with us now, and I think of them as in my family. There are two refrigerators and an upright freezer next to each other and we’re even thinking of putting another refrigerator blocking off the counter corner. I’m using a glass tray to keep a group of aquarium feeder worms alive. I have to use the same tray to store macaroni and cheese above the worms. Meanwhile, two younger kids are bothering me, throwing food and interrupting my project. I ask my dad, who is staring into space eating cereal, to tell them throwing food wasn’t okay. He responds apathetically, and in frustration I fling a spoonful of grits at him, spraying the entire kitchen corner. He still doesn’t react.

I move into a community of rustbucket houses. Old RVs and trailers are pushed together into a complex warren-like structure — everyone seems to have built a private hobby space so they can sneak off by themselves to do work, camp chairs inside old shipping containers stocked with rebar. One green RV from the ’40s has a particularly unpleasant individual in it, but a beautiful slide-off stove in the kitchen, converted to be an outdoor courtyard. It’s a very welcoming community, but also “is this how poor people really are?” is a question that comes up. At some point I try to see if I can build a large house on one of the unfilled plots of land. The small house just downhill from the main road was one of the first built.

We go off and drive on an adventure in an old VW van. We stop at a large gate down the road, waiting with an invisibility power-up activated. When a train comes behind us the gate opens and we can use a speed boost to drive overland far away from where we’ve driven before. What would take 20 minutes only takes about 3, but we still don’t reach our destination — a place called Challengeburg.

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Glot

Damn Kids

Damn kids.

You made me feel old. You made me feel old. Because I had to go outside my place of work and figure out what group of dummie-dum-dums was throwing tiny annoyinf firework poppers out the damn window, then march up to their room, 510, and confiscate their silly little fireworks, tell them this was their “last warning” and advise them that, yes, [poppers in Golden Gate Park = OK funny], [fireworks thrown from our hostel = OK you’re kicked to the kerb]. Anymore of that and they’re out. What’s worse is we don’t even know their names, don’t have their passport numbers because someone didn’t take them. They could be anybody’s dumb 18 year-old cousins. And guess what? Being an adult isn’t so bad. At least I’m not sitting around bored pestering strangers on a level not far above cow-tippin’ in one of the greatest cities this side of the Prime Meridian.

They come to check out tomorrow, ask for their ID.
They act smug or smirk too much, mention the cow-tipping
And if they make you feel like a lame grownup, just remember that you pay your own rent and live in an awesome town and hey, you can drink beer… legally!

♥Orin