Tag: park

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Dream Journal

Flying Carpet Travels

Waiting in line to get passport approved. Get my paperwork back, and I try not to be rude as I remain standing at the counter looking for the seal of the Queen of England — which I’ve been told is necessary. Very soon though the office is closed anyway, and they tell me if I have any other business I must go to their Denali office.

Flying carpet above a river. Better at it than I used to be, flying between lamppost and building. A section of an onramp is closed, so I must fly over it instead. Piloting a semi trailer over scrubby plains and spotting occasional scrap below, like an abandoned dirt bike. Scavenging vintage yellow Dr Pepper headphones (with a broken-off microphone) as a gift for my wife.

Traveling across a city, going halfway and meeting myself, going back, in the middle. Passing a squat row of buildings like a rundown amusement park on one side of the road. Arriving at the important intersection, on the corner is a semi-famous long McDonald’s which takes up almost the whole block. Under an overcast sky I see bumper boats in the distance.

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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

What’s Your Opinion on Rat Autostatus?

Outside the back door of my cozy ground floor apartment, a neighboring building has recently constructed a gravel path. Opening the back door of our kitchen today I discover they’ve expanded it, from merely passing by the front our place, all the way so the gravel runs against the back wall of our kitchen. It’s another parking spot, with no barriers at all — cars could drive right through the wall. To compromise, I negotiate a window to be installed in that wall. When the wall is opened we find there’s a window frame already built into the structure, which I scoff at, and opine that we should’ve had one there all along.

It’s a lovely day outside. Near the other building, I spot a 3-wheeled white BMW which has been parked (or drifted) onto a fence. I move it off the common path, a bit derisively and vindictively, and it settles in front of a realty office. The grill cracks a modest hole in the glass door.

Discussing strange and noteworthy oddities in city layout. From a map high above, I zoom the group’s view into a house here in San Francisco perfectly surrounded by a circular complex of inaccessible military buildings. Abruptly I’m inside the location myself, a tiny community set in an odd miniature forest park — for intelligence agents or staging — where I can’t see the horizon of city buildings.

Boarding a first class airline cabin, which has been adapted now as just a small, unremarkable room. I have a huge duffel bag to stuff under the seat, with nitrous empties in one side pocket. No one seems to mind but I still worry. They get lined up in a long row at the front of the cabin until someone (me, I think) realizes as soon as the plane lurches forward they’ll be scattered everywhere.

I try to convince my sister Alia to quietly help me gather them handful by handful. Alia is engaged singing a two-part Viking harmony dirge, which I join in as a third, middle harmony to get her attention. While she’s deciding I come up with a algorithmic method to get them fastest. I don’t have time to implement it before I awake, but I remember asking, in terms optimizing the algorithm, “what’s your opinion on Rat Autostatus[] ?” A variable I cannot explain, nor am I sure anyone understood me asking.

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Dream Journal

Happy Headstands in Middle of the Night

It’s my day off and I’m wandering my rainy neighborhood in my socks. The seller of the motorcycle I want (who is also Daenerys) goes to the corner of Z and 24th to mourn; I go to Z and 26th — a clever move, somehow. In an older part of the neighborhood, walking through a park split into three paths, I do somersaults while the rain continues, landing on my head and balancing. I resemble a Hindu god.

I come to a bus stop. I’m stopped by cops, and turn upside down on my head to talk with them, almost daring them to find fault with it. A guy saying his name is John is asking the annoying questions to me and others on the sidewalk, while cops in the car shine a bright light. Confronting him on the pathway, I begin asking him if he is officially working with them yet he refuses to answer. I say I that in that case have to make phone call to 911, and he scurries away!

Back inside my strange two-story house, with no one around, I lucidly float upstairs with a flick of my wrist. Catching sight of my silhouette, I think “this is what I was born for. This is what I want, what I like, not what I think other people think I should like.” Upstairs there are oversized shelves with letters spelling a festive message, a big round clock, a scene of years of use. I recall my mom had them when I grew up, and no one has seen fit to clean them fully. Thus, the warm, fond, grimy patina of time.

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Dream Journal

Missed Opportunities, Missed Everything

Someone rediscovers an old secret of mine, that when I was in high school I got a letter of acceptance into Yale but never followed up on it. I lost the letter and chose to forget about it over the years. I’m embarrassed but also just don’t know what to say. I don’t have an explanation for why I left behind the opportunity, it just… slipped away.

Later on I’m at a swap meet near a terraced park. I’m packing up some metal rods embedded in parking lot asphalt into the truckbed, hopefully to sell. Their partially dug already, and it turns out a vendor there already decided they weren’t worth it and gave up. That same vendor has just sold a small black heart-shaped vessel for $302, a vessel I sold to them only a few days ago for $16. I calculate it immediately in the dream as $285, oddly off by one. For a variety of reasons, I’m not actually upset — although the way he told me, it seems what he expected.

Then I’m cleaning up the park after the show. Walking away with my arms full I see I’ve missed some vape tips in the dirt. I’ll get them another time, I think. I go to visit a group of friends in a further-away part of the bay. I pass their apartment and open a heavy door to a tiny bare windowless ground floor apartment, somewhere no human should live of their own free will. I know it must be hella expensive, too. I go next door to see my friends and their place is the same, but twice as wide.

As I’m driving home, I’m dropping off one of the girls at her subway stop. The town is like New Orleans, her stop is named Mystic, and it’s practically right by the swap meet earlier. Just as we get there she begins to try sweet-talking me into driving her across the bay. She’s cute, might’ve worked, but I see pretty clearly how it’s manipulating my attraction. There’s no actual feelings from her.