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Dream Journal

My Old Camera-on-the-Curb Project

Setting is some low-slung community living/art space that feels like a janky maze — almost a stock location for me. I notice there’s some high-ranking politician here on an official visit, along with his security. I don’t even think about it; I immediately navigate a back route. There room he’s in was made from a shipping container box, with a wall of various switches near the unguarded rear door where I emerge. I walk directly past a secret service guard without him even having time to get off his phone call.

I take an Orc-lord up on a standing offer. Given a nominal fee, I am allowed to eat any orc from the Orc-band I choose. Several distinct and varied orcs line up for me by height. The catch is that the orc I choose won’t just sacrifice itself, it will fight me — but if I win, eating it’s fair game. The trick then is to choose the right size orc. I stand in front of them one-by-one.

Finally, I successfully download a rare Russian track I’ve been searching for forever. It’s album art — or maybe it’s actual shape? — is a bulbous grey game controller.

Walking through my neighborhood here in the Mission, the streets near Cesar Chavez are like a calm colorful French Quarter. Despite having passed by it many times over the years today I stumble upon one of my projects from long ago: a point-and-shoot camera mounted on curb. It’s remarkable that it’s still there considering I installed it in… 2013? People can take whatever photos they want, then retreive them or give them to others. Some are given a surf background — now faded to a dingy grey.

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Dream Journal

Paris Hilton’s One-Way Ticket To Space

A very curious title, the last thing I remember before I wake up (and not much to do with the dream I’m afraid). Which is later changed / fixed / revealed to be “Perez Hilton’s one way ticket to space.”

Each student at my college gets a handset for the semester. They’re big chunky things, ones like used to hang on a wall — reminding me of the ones appearing on a shirt I made for my crush. The phone system is a local node run by each Resident Advisor. You can’t use them very far from the node, so they’re not very useful. This is outside on the edge of a concrete courtyard, in a planter. It’s a bit janky and I soon volunteer to fix it.

A cathedral at the end of a corner, barren, where nothing else has been built up. Behind that on the unpaved road is a shrine that looks like a New Orleans crypt — which my dad is planning to rob. Beyond that is a slight hill in a pine tree forest (I notice the thick layer of pine needles) and an older fellow student, perhaps a masters candidate, carefully assembling a shrine where people can do magic.

Near the forest floor I rediscover a toy bulldozer. I clip in treads of different colors, gradually remembering from my childhood. The tread rotates in an oval facing the ground, a strange way off locomotion. It takes me awhile but I recall that I improvised parts of the tread from scraps and discarded the originals. There are small sections made of grainy black tape. The clip end itself is an odd but clever shape, like a spiked hook that clips into a trough.

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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

No Privacy for Sexytime at Cozy Hostel

I’m staying for a while in a hostel, a very long narrow two-story building that’s like a lodge. It’s not swanky, but it’s scenic and has lovely aged wooden construction and friendly common areas, where strangers gather and sit around chatting and drinking. I have a cozy spare private room there I’m sharing with my brother Patrick. It’s a special place, a beautiful relic — viewed from above, I see a version where a fan artfully redid it in a magical cartoony Warcraft style.

At some point I run into a friend of my cousin, a skinny blonde girl, someone who’s stayed at my house before. We hit it off enjoying the outdoors near the hostel, some flower garden or botanical hall for guests. We decide to head up to the main lodge, waiting in a grubby loading dock for the oddly cited elevator.

We start to make out on a couch once upstairs. I’m hoping to move things to my room — where at least we’d only have to keep out my brother — but she’s insistent and we start to have sex there in one of the common areas. Inevitably someone interrupts us and we hurriedly stop. I’m a bit frustrated with her at this predictable outcome.

A bit later and we’re socializing in a room decorated with curiosities, curved couches along the wall, and a big picture window. And she starts going at it again (though I can’t even remember if it with was me or another guy across from where we sat before). I remember the reactions of the group being mixed, from conflicted fascination to willful ignorance. It’s not uncomfortable for me, but I do have a feeling of exasperation; it seems this is just how she is. She had no specific interest in me, and I passingly consider whether we should’ve used a condom. But in the end, the situation does come out rather well — it seems once the ice has been broken those assembled are pretty ok with an friendly. impromptu, afternoon orgy. Though whether she could’ve expected this or not is another thing entirely.


Visiting an oddly mom-n-pop country Apple store (to be clear: Apple the company, not the fruit). There, on a display of shoeboxes, is a display model for the new iPhone mini. It looks much like an iPod mini, the one from 2004, with the chunky last-century grey buttons of an old Nokia phone. An unexpectedly easy pass.


Awake in the pre-dawn light of my workroom. Building a campfire, carefully piecing out kindling into a blackened metal ring right there on the rug. As the fire burns down and the sun comes up, I fiercely whip the edge of carpet, making that edge briefly glow with every strike. When I’m done and put out the fire, I find that the rug is barely warm underneath.

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Dream Journal

all dreams can be interpreted as custom tax advice if you want

Ok, so first off, I should say that I’m not sure what the title means either, but it was funny enough to jolt me awake and get me to write this down — so there you go. Now here’s some custom tax advice (???):


Arriving at the driveway of my childhood home in a fully-laden pickup truck, where I switch out with her to drive. I roll the pickup up the drive a little too slow to make it all the way, somehow trying to do the opposite of backing up.

Unloading is uneven. On the walkway to the front door I randomly remember a colleague’s custom parameters he programmed for CRUD, realizing the letters (only three of which are present) are his daughter’s initials S, L, P and T.

The front door is open and I walk right in. The place has wall-to-wall Saltillo tile floors like I remember, and it’s currently getting cleaned for new residents to move in. I shout a greeting to the maid mopping the next room. I start to record a tour video so I’ll have something to better remember childhood home. The interior bathroom (across from my smaller childhood bedroom) is bigger than I remember, a wide open layout with stalls, high ceilings, and tile gutters. I peek around a couple corners and there’s a cavernous shower stall with a urinal on the opposite wall. I get the impression that it’s architecturally significant, perhaps something shared with the home next door.

I change my mind about the video, deciding it’s a wasteful thing to record my entire walkthrough. I climb over the ¾ wall out of the bathroom itself, and the space is bigger, public, with a few cheerful gay folks I seem to know milling about. Feels like a neighborhood thoroughfare.

Things turn serious and sweetly mournful as I abruptly switch into a greeting card poem moment: trying out different dinosaurs peeking just above a mirror-calm pond gazing at the moon, and reading poem text printed against the sky. Out of the water, the color-coded dinosaur group realizes they can inflate their necks bigger, making them feel larger and safer. In a humorous note, a big predatory crocodile standing right behind them realizes the same, inflating his whole body (looking like the croc in the Don Bluth movie All Dogs Go to Heaven).

Ending that sideline as suddenly as I started, now walking over the cracked tile floors of a derelict mall, toward the wide entrance of an abandoned Sears store. While trying to demonstrate something with my phone, I trip and it slides all the way into an opened elevator door. I monologue about the predictable timing of these kind of things, expecting the doors to shut on cue as I get within reach. But I make it, surprisingly. Honestly I’m still a little flummoxed.

I talk with a cool gay black guy wearing bug-eyed glasses at a check-in desk at the Sears entrance. A brief conversation ending with the Rocky Horror “antici-” … “-pation” joke, which he gets — but the other people at the desk find bizarre.

Peering though a lens on my phone at older pictures from this mall, I discover some that were taken in sequence. In frame-by-frame holographic 3D, I watch a messy, fun, 80s-looking Florida blonde, carrying shopping bags, in a red dress, slip/fall on her butt and laugh.


In our bedroom here in the Fartpartment, we’ve rescued a paper bird. It’s fragile, rough, an appearance like folded newspaper. After a long time caring for it, one day I see it actually flap itself down from the top windowsill onto the bed. It picks up a little upside-down ladies hat and flies it back up to use it as a nest.

I think strongly about how to keep raising this vulnerable little bird, cognizant of how it needs an outside space but that rain would destroy it. I come up with a plan to build a row of little birdhouses underneath the apartment’s outside stairway awning.

The paper bird grows up/time travels into a cute and athletic girl, reminding me of some girls I think I know (Kenna M., Lee T.). She’s wearing workout clothes, hanging out with me on our back stairway. I put my hand on her bare midriff in a flirty way, noting how much flatter it’s become since I last met her. I idly climb upwards on the underside of stairs, checking out the cool moss growing through the stair cracks, feeling very energized and athletic myself just being around her.

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Dream Journal

Good Old Burning Man, I Suppose

Invited back to Burning Man, with the camp my sister stays at. They last stayed in 2015 — it doesn’t seem so long ago.

When I first get into camp I find a few emblems lying on the ground at he entrance. My old rabbit fur bag of elfstones (that I carried in middle school) appears to be there, as well as some important books from my past.

The camp is indoor and outdoor. There’s a book counter in our camp, and the bookseller asks me if I know that a photo of mine is currently first place in a competition. He seems to be clued in to the unusualness of the situation, and I can’t fully recall if it’s a photo I did take, but I definitely can’t remember submitting it. He reminds me of my wife’s dad’s friend, Loren.

Nice slow conversation with friends in our camp about bringing a good smartphone camera to Burning Man. Mickey is there, my sister Alia too, I even notice my dad sitting at the end of a table — had hung out with him without even realizing he was my dad.

The photo from the competition comes out: a very clear photo of statuary in a twisting wood, the lighting a deep velvety eerie calm midnight. Studying it closely, the sensation forms of how the angle, framing, color treatment, and more are recognizably my style. It must have been made several years ago now.

I help haul out stuff we’ve brought this year, much of it packed into a rundown old ’70s luxury car (one of those big fat Buicks or Cadillacs) parked on the roadside exactly behind the spot where I parked last time. After that long discussion on phone cameras earlier I happen to uncover an old Motorola flip-phone. Though only here for novelty purposes, it proves worthy of close examination — a true artifact. Somehow I finally appreciate just how many individual technological bits and pieces were sorted out in its making.

The chaos of the festival is just coming into swing, though it’s early yet… and a bit more reserved than I remember. I watch a procession of long mechanical costumes march up a slope toward us. An articulated worm-dragon, I realize, was probably made with help from my friends Don & Tracy.

Mickey is futzing around camp, pensively searching for a special spiritual emblem of his that’s missing. Meanwhile I’m feeling annoyed as the bookseller has closed shop early, and without notice. I could’ve asked him about the emblem — I’m worried a book I traded could’ve contained (or perhaps was) Mickey’s cherished talisman.

We settle down together at a table, playing some emulated old video games. Mickey brings my heavy motorcycle boots over and sets them nearby, which bothers me until I understand he wants them as a cool prop for his fighter jet game. Following that is yet another emotional conversation, both of us worried about different things. It strikes me suddenly that we’re both distraught somehow yet still doing exactly what we want — this is a true vacation, with no genuine adult responsibilities, and we’re both literally playing Nintendo just as we would in our childhood. (Though, odd detail: I have a Steam Controller and he’s still using a keyboard and mouse.) Our mood improves immensely after this observation is made. Ironically but perhaps unsurprisingly, when I unpause my game it crashes to the JavaScript backend. One can only sigh, or laugh, and wonder at the predictability of such things.

The bookseller returns unexpectedly soon afterward, having only taken an evening break.


The music playing in my head, as I woke up and tried to remember as much as I could: N.O.H.A. – Do You Know

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Dream Journal

Outdoor Ring of Learning

A hallowed hall of education, circular ring of open-air lecture spaces. Speakers are a variety of interesting, respectable people I’ve never met before, reminiscent of the BBC hippies documentary I was watching last night. I find myself at one end of the ring, a beautiful “room” with cracked plastic walls, trailing vines, and white columns surrounding an open area.

Nearby is a small art display of four objects, which symbolize struggle, made by a grey-haired female instructor. There are tiny toggle switches that electrify, for instance, a frosted glass chalice (reminds me of an absinthe brouilleur, something I’ve lately been struggling to make/buy). Also a spider plant with a naked root ball — something that looks identical to something the instructor wears in her hair.

One lecturer I listen to intently, to the point I try to record them. Unfortunately instead of beginning to save audio my phone starts playing an ad. I’m quite upset — I don’t want the instructor to think I disrespect them. All is well though, and when I volunteer an anecdote about my own expertise I’m dispatched to fetch an item from the far side of the circle.

I pass through what appears to be the open wall of an under-construction bathroom. There I find a wire bucket of pink toy balls with silly doodled faces on them. My childhood friend, Vince Saunders, has also grabbed a bucket and makes a chiding comment. I shoot back that he’s just jealous that I have bigger balls than him — which comparing our buckets, I do. This, for whatever odd reason, does the trick.

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Dream Journal

Face-to-Sexy-Face with Friend Spy

I’m dropped off directly across from my first elementary school in my hometown (possibly by plane), and find an important but broken piece of… something in the gutter. I round the corner and spot a half-empty vape juice bottle, grape — there’s a store nearby and I spot these a lot. I consider whether it’s a good idea to pick it up. Walking up to my childhood home at the end of the street. My phone helps me walk by showing the rear camera feed behind the text I’m reading. I only notice this once I start earning points by passing over certain objects.


A badass Bruce Willis-type guy is driving/walking down a concrete bridge. My friend Spy and I appear together there. There’s some unusual sexual tension between us, perhaps due to the guy being there too. In typical fashion for us our sexual tension is diffused by amping it up, as I hold my face close to hers — actually touching cheek to cheek. Somehow that usually works.

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Dream Journal

Men Are Dogs (title taken from next day’s dream)

Welp… no getting around this one being weird: I was presented with a humorously-intended blowjob voucher from my old crush, while sitting in my own living room. In front of my wife no less. Not exactly a bad dream. Let’s just say I won’t be surprised if nothing comes of it though.


My Uncle Robert and Aunt Carol have a long, sloping, grassy field through the forests. A Pacific Northwest vibe. The grass is so tall (and wet) in places a full-grown man can hide in it. Taking a narrow tree-lined canyon path off from it, Lynae (to a small group) sketches out on a whiteboard her idea of a baseball score-keeping concept. Columns of Team A / Team B, a simple but useful discursion.


A bartender at a restaurant, perhaps a company cafeteria, gives me my change as flecks of gold suspended in a glass of water. I try to transport it outside by holding it in my mouth without much success. Coming back to my motorbike, I see that I’ve left my phone on it in plain view, on top of my jacket no less.

The store I was planning to go to has closed while I was inside the restaurant. Soon I do some super-high jumps on my scooter, front flips even, but the bike will still be fucked when I land.