Tag: motorcycle

Categories
Dream Journal

Motorbikes, and the Bays of Australia

Have to retrieve my motorcycle from a public classroom (or small compound) where my old nemesis — well, former friend/boss — Chicken John is in charge. Red dusty walls, open entryways, stalls where kids learn. I try to be as quick and discreet as possible but we still exchange an unfriendly glance. Outside I have a bit of difficulty getting the kickstand down, and balanced, but leave the motorbike in a good location against a short retaining wall with line of shrubbery.

The compound is on on high ground above distant water. I survey the different bays of Australia, noting how their unique shapes have affected the developing character of their cities. Canter Bay is the one where I now am, the smallest, hanging out on a chunky narrow little peninsula near the water in Melbourne. From here my friends and I can view the ocean and the harbor going around, chatting and having a lovely time together. One of the people with me is a female singer of some fame; perhaps it might’ve even been the great opera diva Nelly Melba.

From out of the foggy ocean horizon I spot a stubby battered-looking orange military transport plane heading north to the compound visited earlier. I declare “oh that’d be our ride, time to get back.” A pallet of two motorcycles arrive delivered by tow truck, but there’s been a miscommunication: my wife can only ride a bicycle. This makes our time to get back quite tight. I offer to haul her on the bike on the trailer but my bike’s folding safety-yellow hitch extender just barely doesn’t reach. Instead, I kindly offer to go get her helmet and protective gear from outside the compound. I really out of view as I speed off to fetch them.

Categories
Dream Journal

X-ARDOS

I don’t know why the dream must be named what it is, but it was the strongest word in my head upon waking. Perhaps it has some relation to bardo, the Tibetan spiritual state in between death and rebirth.

Three of us are traveling on a long motorbike, my friend Aislinn, my wife and me. I’m driving from the farthest rear, which proves difficult on the freeway. As I’m about to take an exit, another motorcycle passes me on the right making things just that much more difficult. This exit is somehwere in the state of Iowa. It strikes me how much like every other freeway exit in America it is, yet with subtly apparent differences that make it like Iowa.

Rounding through a parking lot and a few low buildings, I swing around to a gas station (something like a gas station anyway) that’s broken down and is now freezing everything around it. I comment that it’s gonna be some expensive snow, and we decide to park and check it out. That proves somewhat difficult, as I back into a space alongside a cinderblock wall. The car ignition also seems to freely turn with any key I try, which is clearly something else to be concerned with. The vehicle is an SUV now, more like the old Nissan truck I used to drive (and drove from Iowa).

As soon as I park and get out, Aislinn asks if I worry about parking in front of that door, pointing to a barred gate which looks into the courtyard of an African monastery for junior monks. I curse and start to park all over again — though the neighborhood looks shabby, there’s clearly a lot going on. I do more back and forth nudging into a space, now there are even more cars to work around.

When I finally make it out, I’m at a family reunion for my Dad’s side. They’re loud and boisterous, very familiar with each other. The car becomes some white-furred furniture or a stuffed figure. There’s an exchange of gifts, and I must find a place to stack long tentbag-like objects on a similar white-furred bed (not sure if it’s the same, but it’s a different location). I correct my dad and place these objects off the head of the bed, onto the sheet, to minimize dirtiness.

I get invited to follow my uncle Vince on a short tour. I follow him while adjusting a set of recording glasses, falling behind because of them after he exits a set of double doors, then jogging after to keep up. I feel younger and younger in this dream, my role shifting. My uncle and I tour a dark, mostly empty parking garage, a caverous metal warehouse-like space, while he narrates the story of various murals telling stories of our family. (On reflection, this almost sounds like a transplanted version of Aboriginal Australian lore.)

One particular story, high up on a side wall, tells the story of a broken branch hanging high in a pine tree, staying stick even in strong wind (I’m almost certain this story is from another of my dreams a long while ago). Something all my male relations witnessed at the time, some broader story I can’t make out now. I confess how even though I never met my great-grandfather I have a nickname for him.

After a great effort to remember am earlier set of dreams, I can recall being transposed back to Australia in 2006, nostalgic for when I actually visited. I’m physically emobodied in that time again, as I was when I was really there. I stand outside a grand modern airport or mall, manicured fountains outside, the curved steps leading down to a light rail transit line. I carry an iconic backpack I’ve used forever in Australia (not accounted for in waking life) which is like a trailer-like shell which unfolds, revealing pockets within pockets, all labeled with names of politicians or notable Aussie figures.

Categories
Dream Journal

Destination: Cozy Nostalgic Coffee Shop

A “destination” coffee shop with various odds and ends, tasteful lighting and wood panels, a relaxed atmosphere, comforting smells. It’s run by Eileen (but with nobody else I know). I say hi to her, tell her I finally saw her in that documentary “Caffeinated”, but it was silly how they only used one clip — she’s already turned away though, either doesn’t hear me or pretends not to. Haven’t seen her in a long time, so it might be fair.

I’m here because I spent most of my day postponing putting on my motorcycle riding gear to get to my Russian school, not admitting to myself that I just don’t want to go. Eileen’s shop has rows of merchandise, uncrowded during the pandemic. I find a few items that make me nostalgic for earlier times in San Francisco. One, a cardboard tube with a signature affirming it’s been packed by my old friend Kelly Gallamore. (Perhaps the store is instead run by Noona Nolan?)

Someone I talk with there shares a personal difficulty. In what is a typical response for me, I share a tangential factoid I happen to know… some incident that happened to Queen Elizabeth II (then, viewing a flashback with Prince Philip as a colorful robot, playful geometric designs on all his clothes, colored plates covering his face). Later, I discover my old moto jacket and pants stuffed in a garbage can and fish them out.

The shop has a long row of machines (perhaps for copying or the like). Mine gets a very long piece of paper stuck in it, just as an employee unknowingly points me out to someone as a veteran user/customer who might help them. Down further the row become a trough of water, with a long flat rail down the middle. Several objects I need are floating in it.

Home now. Looking down from our apartment’s back room. To do that, we peer around a large rusty statue of a chicken that our landlord’s had mounted on the corner of the building forever. I think “huh, so odd but I’ve never had that thing remind me of Chicken John.” There are a few massive beasts getting aggressive with each other in the backyard. One looks like a bodybuilding panda with eyeliner, the other a stairway-bumping basilisk. They’ve wandered in, though could choose to fight anywhere. Up closer, I try to consider what to, but there’s not much else except watch.

Spiderwebs encrusting the middle of trees, trees all in a row, as I travel past at high speed. The only way to see them is to line their row and look through several at once. I crack that code, but can’t guess if anyone else has seen this strange metaphor. A metaphor for what though, I can’t say.

I remember: looking up at a dusk-time sky, thinking as if I’m outside my own life, that I was born here and now because I picked this lifetime so I could see humanity’s transition. In this case, the transition to digital.

Categories
Dream Journal

That Hot Pokémon Girl

A stone bird submerged just below the surface of a pond. Jumping on the stone and seeing the profile. Meant to be a cue for a longer dream, now forgotten.

Last day of school. The ebullient kids from Mrs. Plescia’s 5th grade, with the boxy confined aesthetic of middle school. After hours of games and getting up/sitting down from a desk, we have quiet time at end. My childhood friend Robby T. and I are part of the group who cleans up during it, stuff from microwaves to chipped commemorative mugs. I peek over the wooden-post fence to the road beyond, as in another dream set in a mountain prison where I planted mushrooms in a garden bed. I see boxes a boxes of supplies I’ve brought during the year, all of which I need to bring home. There is, in fact, what Robbie (it’s spelled Robbie for some reason) points out what he calls a mushroom tray, but which looks to me like a colonized mushroom tray.

An art event sponsored by Cameo W., a darkened central room with grand, open rooms branching from it. Avoidant of typical San Francisco tech themes, despite that she made most of her money from cashing out in tech. There’s a girl I don’t know, Erin Collins, who gives out loads of her self-made business cards to everyone at the event. I’m not interested in calling her on account of seeming desperate for… whatever it is she wants.

Later, though, I’m back within the setting of the last day of class. There’s a jumping contest to leap from the last railing of a stairway leading to the beach. I make impressive distance, but realize I may have not followed the rules by stepping further beyond my sandy landing imprints. The girl, Erin, makes a similar impressive showing and I realize she’s a Pokémon (!). And she looks, very, very good naked. We make out and then begin to fuck. Her vulva does this weird thing where it bulges forward, almost as if her vagina was just below her skin. When I’m fully inside, a small bump appears at her pubis. I realize that although it’s amazing to fuck someone this pretty (and a Pokémon!) I won’t be getting off as she’s missing something, somehow. She’s not getting as much pleasure as she’s giving and we can’t fix it for now. We gaze at a sick battleship docked nearby, being eroded by the waves.

Riding my motorcycle, turning onto a street like Mission in SF. Behind a group of riders on what look like scooter versions of my motorcycle, the Honda CTX. I pull off and park near Willows, labelled on the awning as “A CTX Bar”. I remember thinking how I have to be on my best behavior so as to give a good impression to the young ones.

Categories
Dream Journal

Lone Beach Tower Motorbiking

Nighttime along a brightly lit coastline, reminiscent of southern China. High cliffside roads hug scraggly beaches, threading by tucked-away housing developments. I can zoom around changing the perspective. I focus in on one usually bright street lamp right on the beach, so bright it has a pixelating distortion effect. Its two layers of trestles are color-coded by location and height. It morphs into a detailed 3-D mountain, the highest in the region, which is now seems more Japanese.

High above the beach, at the top of a tree, I print out multiple orders for motorcycle stuff using an older printer located there (to save time). I ride my motorcycle with dirt tires on and pop a wheelie, jumping over a fallen log. I commit mentally to a fantasy of bumming around Europe by motorbike, staying for $0 just on sides of roads

Categories
Dream Journal

Moving Scooter, Unseen

Sitting on my scooter around the corner from home. I’ve been awake most of the night, in and out, and realize now it’s Thursday morning and time to move it for street-sweeping. I start it up and carefully putter it down the wrong side of the street, mostly pushing it — yet I don’t have my glasses on and realize it’d be safer to not even have the engine running.

Both about the odd calculations about safety I come to, and the necessary reminder to move my bike. Wasn’t even Thursday, though, so just goes to show I didn’t know what day it was.

Categories
Dream Journal

Motorcycling the Hills, Shopping Ice Cream

Rounding a rarely-visited corner on the rocky coast of San Francisco, a road built around a dirt hill. In the ’50s it was used in a bank promotion, which is how most people know it.

I drive past two flatbed trucks with massive reinforced metal plates for moving homes and other buildings. Watching an educational film on the subject of a motorcycle’s back case, addressing it being further from the center of gravity. Watching (or rewatching) a video of a Motorcycling Mom going backwards over a long patch of rocks in a canyon side road, laughing about how clumsy she is.

Visiting a destination ice cream shop whose flavors constantly change. Hugging my own mom, who wears several buttons of her favorite flavors — she has an idle fantasy that one day she can point to them, and that will serve as her request for a particular ice cream.

Having planned to go out, I end up shopping most of the day. I keep a stringy cactus attached to my ankle, while I trip over other plants. Drop off my childhood friend Robby T. at a sand-lot home he’s staying at somewhere in a working class neighborhood of our hometown. Two Rottweilers come out the front door as I’m parking my motorcycle. They immediately try to get the chocolate in my duffel bag, then jump up to the top of the closet to get a sausage hanging there.

A demo of someone who isn’t Italian but loves to cook Italian food; the man is buying $500 of ingredients on a grocery checkout belt. So much, the clerk can’t even let him pay for it and has to wait for a manager. She stands at the end of the line (per policy) to keep the customer from running. This wastes all of our time, so we waste hers explaining how stupid it is she that can’t accept our money. We could, if we knew, just split it into more than one checkout. A security guard comes out afterwards dressed in pink camo.

Categories
Dream Journal

Father Knows Nothing

Visiting my dad at his home. Park my motorcycle by pulling it upright, waiting for another rider to pass next to me, then pulling in adjacent to a baby blue convertible.

(New) Patrick is at the house, he’s proudly been driving around that 1930s-40s baby blue convertible roadster. I halfheartedly go through a few movies I’d be interested in seeing together, before she heads out the door late for something and I comment “do you have to drive stick on that thing?” As she heads out one set of double doors I peek out and say I just wanted to say I love you before you go.

In the yard there’s an elaborate and creepy statuary set centered around my late mom, behind a tetrahedral protrusion of fake gold from the ground. It represents my dad’s wealth from the wildfire payout, which was bigger than I knew.

It’s revealed that Patrick, like me, has a $200k reserve account. I respond incredulously, “say that again?” A $130k account for me… ha ha ha. I try to ask my dad what it is he thinks I need, and he’s prepared a list on a shopping bag, which he wrote on my birthday that’s turns out to be all mental health shit like serotonin, dopamine, routine activities, stable home life — I’m insulted and disrespected, reminded all over again about how he just didn’t get what happened to me (or pretended not to).

The conversation devolves into me trying to sympathetically explain how none of that was true. I repeat “that wasn’t it” and make an attempt to write it on his back, but his shirt is already off and he’s too sweaty for the marker to take.

Categories
Dream Journal

Backpack fell off from Motorcycle

Riding my scooter on the freeway south down the coast of Monterey, CA, with my wife riding another motorcycle alongside. We pass the skinniest Costco I’ve ever seen, with a parking lot running adjacent to the roadside. Just after passing it, I notice my backpack has fallen off. This has been a fear for awhile. I can see where it is and, seeing no better option, I begin driving backwards along the shoulder. Some cars let me pass on the left, some on the right. I make it there and I’m relieved to see it’s held together, although it’s obviously been flattened and run over a few times. I don’t remember everything I had in there, but I know there’s a few things that probably survived, definitely not my croissants though.

Categories
Dream Journal

Crash at Monterey.com/’91

Jon Snow has been killed off. He’s brought back (necromancy) and now has magic powers. Guards rush at him standing on stone steps, and the visual effects are lame-looking drawn on stars, four of them, which fly out and teleport the guards about to attack him. Looks like the flag of Chicago. Ugh, the show really stopped trying.

Watching motorbikes race in a slope-walled mud course — reminds me of running the hose when playing in the sand as a kid. One scooter-looking motorbike driving round a curve gets it’s throttle stuck; the rider loses control and it jumps the fence into the neighborhood nearby. It runs up a hill street and hits a couple cars along the way, smashing into the side of one, which causes the Buick behind it to flip backwards down the hill. Seems expensive, and I’ve no idea who will pay for it. I read the web address monterey.com/’91 (with the apostrophe) and understand this to be a historical event at Monterey, California.

A circular redwood half-height room with Lynae lying in a bathtub in the center. I’m telling a story of some kind.

Fixing the glue on some top floor gutters, trying not to get caught by landlord. Watching buildings next door tumble into place. Buying four oranges out of a vending machine with quarters for someone else, before a trip. Serving a pie baked with a top layer of elegant crinkled-edge blue felt.