Woke up from dreams… a dream of a whole summer of community…
My wife surprised me with a gift. I walk up to the open car door cuz there’s a whole crowd there, marching band even. They’re gathered around the car, and presented on the couch is an elaborately embroidered pair of pants — Chinese or maybe Tibetan patterns, zippers on both sides of the legs and snaps at the bottom so you can take them off quickly.. I found out later there’s snaps at the top so they can be taken off completely like that. There’s a tag reading $1,000… I can’t accept a pair of pants for $1,000, that’s too much responsibility for an item that I’ll actually wear. Looking closer, it seems to have been overwritten with a little orange sticker at… 64 cents!? I actually think this is a bit of joke-y marketing, and the real tag says $40 (which is an incredible price for a pair of pants like this). I don’t think I can stress enough: they’re simply gorgeous.
My cousin Kelly is begging me to tell him how to convince me to let him play a new PS2 game I have, some popular zeitgeist video game moment. But I explained the only thing I want is for him to not play it because I played it and I can tell it wouldn’t be good for him. I had to explain that, since my only goal was for him *not* to play it, there wasn’t any argument he could make to change my mind.
I have a big bag of metal cut-out letters, vintage cookie cutters I think. It’s my personal collection. I’m using it it an project, making text art on an inset wall of shelves. It’s several lines I can’t recall, but the message ends with “luv you cuz”. I end up having to monitor it because it’s super tempting for people to steal the little die cuts. I follow a shrugging gangster-looking guy who I see slip a little heart symbol in his back pocket, stomping his ass when I get him alone, crushing the little stolen heart in his back pocket and bruising his poor thieving ass. Reckon it left a heart-print that wouldn’t seem to jibe with the story of how he got it. I ask him why he would steal something like that… though oddly, I’m not mad, I just want to teach him a lesson.
Walking down a long slope to a beach like some place in Southern California, I see that Nautilus here are able to walk on their thin little tentacles like dogs, cavorting with people’s leashed dogs along the sandy sloped pathway down. I backtrack after I reach the beach wanting to get photo or video of these things, realizing they’re basically only found on that one path for now. They’re very playful, like little dogs, much more fascinating to watch than I can describe.
I’m going to hitch a ride with an expert Captain who pilots her own houseboat, getting to somewhere further away than where I want to go and backtracking closer to where I want to be. She has dramatic trouble turning out of the narrow waterway that is the port, having to perform hard turns a couple times. Something in the boat’s shaky mechanics, or maybe her captaining, is causing the massive and unwieldy houseboat to move unpredictably. After a few hard turns and close calls close (enough to get heckled by a group of vacationing Canadians drinking in lawn chairs) the boat grounds on a tiny gap of sand beach right next to the dock where it started.
Sitting in a crowd. Dara V. is about to depart, but before she does the medical guy she had hired to serve nitrous via a plastic tube (it’s tip covered with a snipped-off condom for improvised protection). He kind of beckons her, gesturing as if to say “I mean you already paid for it”. She kind of goes “ehhhh I mean… I could”. As she’s standing there I have time to study her face, and unexpectedly notice some of the subtle hints of how it’s aging, trying to imagine what it might look like when she’s even older. There’s weirdly nothing as specific as lines around the eyes or something… but I can kind of see it? There’s some distortion too, as I consider how Mar-a-Lago Face impacts visual expectations of age. I’ve been surprised before that she looked older at all — there’s always been a kind of an immortal or ethereal quality to her. Also… I didn’t even know she was into nitrous.
The tube get passed around and, comically, one of the brash younger gay guys in the crowd has a moment choking trying to deep-throat the tube. It’s unclear if this is a prank involving an actual dildo, or whether he intentionally used part of the apparatus *as a dildo* as a reference to not being able to deep-throat.
Two people have been in competition with each other all summer: a portly hip Black guy with a thick beard, and an effusive heavy-set blonde girl barfly-type. They’re dramatically playful, but still honestly trying to beat each other. He’s been trouncing her though, by a long way. He’s regularly working on stuff and has basically been making projects all summer, while she keeps dropping the ball either unluckily or sheer misjudgment. Sitting in a crowd he jokingly confronts her to do a final evaluation of their mutual efforts, which of course she laughs heartily about. He’s the winner and he seems to be bragging, but it’s the nicest way to go about winning for such a situation. She’s failed even on her own terms regardless of luck or anything else.
How does the dream end? I can’t remember. I heard a snippet of landlord outside. Nevertheless, I wrote it down. Tried a new journal app on my phone because the Oneirographer PWA was broken, again. I know these are the kind of life details that you, my dear reader, appreciate so you have proper context for all these. You’re welcome. You’re… you’re me in the future, aren’t you?