Tag: landlord

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Dream Journal

They’re Painting My Home, Badly

Landlord has started painting our apartment building. I discover this sporadically, noticing the sudden changes, and never see his workers. Ugly strange patterns in garish colors, dappled sponges (like in the ’90s). I have to find him and complain, having this lack of control and this poor taste is unlivable. Usually he doesn’t do much work — and usually we don’t even complain about serious stuff. But before I can get him, I peek out into the entrance hallway and it’s transformed by a second coat into a surprisingly acceptable if bland two-tone blue.

A couple teenagers steal a bag of UK Pound coins. They dash haphazardly out into the street and spill it on the pathway of a public park, inviting everyone to grab one.

An advertisement navigates down a scenic but underdeveloped street in San Francisco, a slight slope with scrubby greenbelt on either side. Though the ad substitutes a silly marketing phrase, I eventually imagine looking to a street sign and recognize it as Jones from my time as delivery man. I picture what a single land plot would be, snug perhaps, but the kind of multi-level house that would be built in SF would accommodate several people. And it’s a few long, long rows.

Inspecting my art aquaintence Colin Fahrion’s collection of old banknotes. Ones from Bolivia, Brazil, others. In their pleasant little folios they have a fine canvas texture, yet seem to feel like tragedy, as if they bare the weight of political events long ago that they could’ve changed. Beautiful, cursed money.

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Dream Journal

A Day at our New Home in the Country

A country house just off a main road somewhere small, rural California, where we’ve moved. My wife and I still have a landlord but are overall happy finally settled into the new place.

It’s bright midday and I seal up our younger rats, Pierre & Roscoe, making sure to stretch the three wire cage doors so the locks are tight.

Outside it’s so much quieter than the city. I ponder the neighborhood as I gaze down the dusty street where ours is the corner house. I haven’t fully explored the area yet. Feels like a hot day, summer. I observe a distinction with the city I never thought of before: here, people are spread out enough that you kind of miss them, back in the city it was so packed that you often like people less because there’s already too many of them.

All our old stuff made it there but most things still need arranging. A few items are out on the grassy brown lawn, or under a covered porch with built-in brick planting beds. Our building is old, and has a name on a vertical sign with green letters — something that sounds like a Chinese restaurant. There’s a smaller sign underneath for wayward out-of-towners, clarifying that it’s just an old name, this is a house, and they can find an actual restaurant a couple lanes down.

Back inside, I see Roscoe is out of his cage. I’m sure I locked it securely, and sure enough I see he’s managed to bend several wire metal bars at the side of the cage! I tell my wife and we’re not sure what to do. There’s a square patch of grass on the lawn where the cage would fit, and be blocked off securely, but the ratties might easily get overheated in the sun.

Someone reveals something about my parents I didn’t know (this part is confusing in retrospect as it’s a persona shift, perspective remains continuous, but the backstory isn’t from my l life). When I was first adopted, my parents kept me in this very house. They were inept, and couldn’t keep things up, to the point where they couldn’t keep me either. They only got me back much later, though I was too young to remember any of this.

Inside a few of us (guests and I) are playing around, searching through storage areas in the house. We’re also in part of a lobby for some unnamed organization, a nexus accessible from many locations. There’s a dried mud sculpture, arched and abstract, looking like the letter Π hunkering in the near distance. Old refrigerators containing long-term food stocks hold many curious root vegetables. Some are still viable, and I take one from the drawer with a 3-foot long taproot and swallow it down to the base as a trick.

Danny Glover is there among us, and soon after I’m beside him at a stone sink (I can think of no connection I have with Danny Glover, his presence is puzzling upon consideration). When I pull the long root out of my throat, the thin length ending in a tangled clump, I realize that it could still be planted in the dirt outside. Whether it’s the worse for wear being in contact with my stomach acid for an extended time, I simply won’t know until I bury it in a garden bed.

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Dream Journal

A Nice Neighborhood Stroll, Pretty Femboy Look , & Our Newer Place

Walking back from Mission Street, the main street in my neighborhood, I spot the panel of a lone phone booth that might still work. I idly start wondering about how many of those used to be around — how I’ve witnessed the changeover during the relatively time I’ve lived in San Francisco — how not long ago, wherever I was on the street, I’d have a mental map and know exactly where the nearest payphone would be. I also idly wonder how much it would cost to get one installed as a novelty, say in in a rich person’s backyard.

On the way back to my apartment I take a rest, laying down in the mouth of a slide, gazing at the sky while my waist is through the middle of part of a clothes hamper. I ponder the bemusing question of what time of year it’s best to arrive in Antarctica: the 6 months leading out of winter, or the 6 months leading into it? I have a playful argument with someone unseen about the sacrifices I’ve made going to Antarctica when I did (worth noting: I haven’t actually been to Antarctica).

I get up from my rest, floating above the trashed out grass-overgrown parking space, noticing as a car pulls in that I forgot part of the plastic hamper which I wear around my head. I float down to nab it quickly as the rumbling car takes the space. I’m dressed today in an aesthetically-pleasing purple velour lapel shirt, worn underneath a pair of white overalls shorts. I look glamorous. I recognize that with my pretty long hair this is what someone would probably call a “femboy” look. Meanwhile I’m already late for an exercise class I occasionally take at 2:00 pm to the north near Potrero Mall. I’m not worried about being late, even though at this point I either arrive in the middle of class or miss the whole thing. I remember that the hamper hat (that I just picked up from the ground) has in its brim an empty glass bottle; I decide to store it on the balcony of my apartment. Floating up to the landing, it’s been recently replaced with a metal grating and is still packed with disorganized chairs (a short bamboo one, three rocking chairs of two different types), etc. Realizing I can organize it slightly differently, I pull a chair or two into the sideyard just beyond. The sideyard is narrow, with a fence of prickly pear cactus, exercise equipment which came with the place, and a view of the Latino neighbor’s wide lawn just beyond (despite being on the third floor). This is the second place owned by our landlord where my wife and I have lived, having made the decision to move out of the Fartpartment a few years ago — while making a deal that we still get to visit the old place now and then. But the reality is that this new place is much harder to get nice, there hasn’t been an organic long-time progression of acquiring stuff and finding a place for it. This place has a backyard, it’s a better layout, but it’s been months or even years and it still feels like we’re moving in. It’d be nice to visit the old place again soon.

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Dream Journal

Hitting it Off with Art Girl, bit of a Pokémon

Twilight in a round mid-sized stone cathedral, an art show of one girl’s work is displayed in every direction at eye-level height. I find it enthralling, wanting to know more.

Back in my own building, the grubby ground floor apartment of the girl includes a living room half open to the outside, cute little plants on the exposed basement walls. Her sideboards in the disused interior still have the landlord’s old stuff such as 80s radio scattered about. Next door (in apartment #306?) where the landlord’s family has just moved in recently, it’s a lot less grubby than expected, like an 80s nightclub in a mall — colored plexiglass panels, plush diner booths, knocked out walls — a multi-level living space big enough for the family not to have to see each other.

My wife introduces me to the girl who made the art, repeating her name like a Pokémon. We really hit it off; before I know it I’ve been pimped out and the girl is making out with me.

A twisty beige ground-floor office in the process of being decommissioned. As a stop-gap measure we often lock things in place so they don’t move — for example, a log in the hallway, or a heavy military-style desk made of enameled metal (like something I’d see on old Fort Ord during college). We’re setting little plants out on the exposed retaining walls outside, going back and forth down the unlit hallways even as someone pulls up in a red sports car outside, looking for someone I don’t know.

In a rolling almost artificial landscape, unfinished-looking, grid-like. Myself and a few associates are trying to get to a power plant I now own. In our way is a locked gate and barbed wire-topped wall abutting a rocky outcrop of a hill. Trading property here is like trading cards, and I only recently acquired the power plant (sight unseen) from a Mr. Burns-type character.

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Dream Journal

Scorpion Fright

Landlord showing apartment next door to one little black kid, representing his family. Landlord elected not to finish the bathroom in the middle, which is huge, and has at least two working toilets for every person who could live there. One in particular sits in the middle of the room near the courtyard window and has had it’s stall walls removed. You could use it as a chair now.

At beginning of night, I’m watching a video while sitting back straight upright in a chair. The video is of two rust-colored puppies playing amongst matching red rocks, while it rains. Val lies on couch. I’m half-lucid and think I’m actually asleep on the living room couch (I’m in bed).

I get up to go to the kitchen. At the bottom corner of the kitchen table a tiny cute spider emerges — followed by a tiny scorpion. As soon as I notice it, thinking I should warn others, it incredibly quickly scrambles across the floor, up my body, and to the left side of my neck.

I wake up, my heart pounding, and remember to set my sleep tracker.

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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

Boban Vervinsky

My wife and I are sitting in our living room when a sudden noise shakes the wall overhead. A 4-in nail has popped through and knocked off one of the top row trading cards, the same like the arrangement in our apartment’s hallway art gallery. My landlord has been renovating the apartment next door for weeks (this is waking-life true, actually). I angrily walk down the hall to give him and his crew working next door a piece of my mind. He opens the door and as soon as I start describing what happened he pretends to act like they did it on purpose — despite one guy down the hall yelling “hey I’m sorry”. In response I act like I’ll helpfully go measure exactly how many inches of nail are sticking through the wall, so they can measure it from their side, possess an accurate perception of wall thickness, and not do it again.

While we stand outside on the balcony, an older sickly-looking interloper shows up who starts stealing the conversation away, acting like they’re trying to empathize but only talking about their own problems. They’re abruptly standing in the apartment next door while my landlord is standing in mine. Normally I suppose I’d be sympathetic, but instead I turn to my landlord and ask “who the heck is this?” He just says “someone annoying” and I’m simply inclined to agree. There’s nothing to do but let this energy vampire drone on and try to avoid them.

I’m standing in a long winding line on the street here in my neighborhood, the Mission District. I went out to buy a case of beer, Pabst Blue Ribbon, for like $23.99. The line moves surprisingly quickly, but it’s split up into a few sections that complexly join into one. The lines’ purpose is labeled only at the penultimate merge, so of course it appears I’ve gotten in the wrong one and should be in the $19.99 and above line. Right about the final merge I look and see the entrance to the store, just another neighborhood corner store that happens to handle particularly high volume right now. The place only allows one or two customers inside at a time, and it’s upstairs through a single doorway — the place I think is called Boban Vervinsky. Exasperated, I realize in this unnecessarily crowded line that I’ve had my mask around my neck the whole time.

Some unannounced blonde attendant (who’d otherwise be pretty cute) starts blithely giving me instructions from behind my back, that I can’t hear, don’t understand, and don’t want. The stress and crowding involved are too much and I give up, throwing my items on the ground toward to store, flipping off the clueless unhelpful attendant on the way out.

This leads to a short back and forth where I’ll see someone I know on the sidewalk giving the middle finger, like Courtney K., and I have the great timing to give them the middle finger back. I’m getting in flipoff doubles, at some point I feel like I’m physically throwing flipoffs… all in a cinematic-quality slow motion montage with scenes bouncing one to another to another. (It reminds me of another dream, where I first learned to double-middle-finger the whole world around me like Rick Sanchez on Rick and Morty.) But the chain is broken when there’s a girl, Morgan or Megan, with long dark hair over her eyes who doesn’t see me gesture to her.

Not about to stop acting free, I set off running down the cracked asphalt streets of my neighborhood. I run like a big cat, galloping on all fours. While doing this it’s like I’m narrating my method to some unseen flirting female observer riding along with me. I start running on just my hands, floating my legs up for more speed and maneuverability. It’s at this point the observation strikes me that this is the kind of locomotion I’d choose to do if I were dreaming. The dream rapidly breaks down; I wake up with a sharp inhalation and a beating heart.

A search of the name “Boban Vervinsky” has no results at time of writing.

Music in my head upon waking up, Eydie Gormé, “Blame It on the Bossa Nova” (1963)

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Dream Journal

At Michigan Bluff Cabin

In the bath, I hear a reminder about a gathering the landlord is throwing. My friend Jerome (who was our roommate once) is texting, wanting to know who’s there at the party.

Some kind of medicated powder. Someone suggests I could just sell it to Max directly instead of showing up at this faraway party (I’m not at home now, you see, and somehow I know it in the dream). I’m highly concerned this whole endeavor could end up causing more anxiety than it fixes.

Walking along a row of plants, watering a few, then being asked by a little kid to please improve their life. Redwood branches are built like stacked walkways; can’t think of how to train them better to become a usable treehouse. I walk away feeling overwhelemed, a failure.

Walking another row of this plantation we’re on, I discover a set of wooden sliding doors that it seems people don’t usually see. Words printed on either door read “interior”/”exterior”. I can’t get them open — but I think this is the secret order who’ve figured out how to live surreptitiously. I keep hearing about them.

“See wha the doves think”, a quote from someone. A pretty short-haired blonde girl, reclining in opulent luxury.

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Dream Journal

The Landlord-Hidden Stairs

Our apartment has the same landlord, but is in a 5-10 story skyscraper in New York. There is a set of convenient stairs which the landlord has blocked off. I make my way through a public elevator to three rooftop garden mall, which the landlord also owns. On a path near the edge of the roof, I see strings of Christmas lights left unhung on the ground. I manage to sneak into my own hone by going down a disused private elevator behind the shucking station of a Chinese restaurant there. It’s a charming hand-hewn wood space that reminds me of a spice rack, and it looks like the old lady next door has one just like it. Perhaps that’s why he blocked it off, he couldn’t separate the two and couldn’t bring it up to code as a communal space.

A different dream possibly. On our outside stairway, the landlord has taken all the plants. He’s told my wife (who assures me he said he’ll bring them back) but I still complain that he gets to take them for an entire spring season.

I’m reading a book in class, might be reading on my phone. Walk from the front of the classroom to the back. A small cloud of vapor escapes the precession of students, but I’m not sure if it came from my mouth or the older black student in front of me. Girls practicing basketball in the gym, studying collisions by crashing their bodies mid-throw. I meet a childhood friend, Robby T., as an adult finally. I ask if he even goes by Robby anymore and tell him of my new name. He tells me he was taken out of school at some point. I walk away for a minute and my backpack’s missing. I find it quickly, intuiting that the Robby of now would hide it, as was a prank we might play on each other in school, but wouldn’t hide it far as that would be funnier for me to fail searching for it.

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Landlord Fixing the Stairs

The landlord is in the backyard, and the wooden stairway has had one of its columns eroded away. I call him and he actually starts to fix it. I discover the shady lower column, underneath the landing, is also broken completely through. There’s barely anything holding up the right side anymore. The physical orientation is oddly different than our normal backyard, rotated somehow — the landlord too — both true-to-life and not. Lazy overgrown potted plants grow thick and lush over puddles and concrete, everything seems to have a fine coating of moss.

The view zooms out, showing the Victorian building that Ais lives in being a relic of earlier development, isolated in a business park, itself within a large airport and whose roads serve cars as well as planes. Reminds me of Alameda.