Tag: police

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Dream Journal

There Went the Neighborhood (lot of cooking in this one)

It’s the first day in prison for a “The Joker” type character. He’s older, finally skidding to a stop after years of getting away with it. Resigned to finally giving up public mayhem, and fading from public fame. Escorted across a tall prison courtyard structured around catwalks by single elderly guard played by Jim Carrey. And then hosted in his home like a guest, surprisingly.

Proceed to cooking dinner of eggs and ham in a single pot. It’s styled after the show Kitchen Nightmares, which I’ve never seen actually. The cooking takes a long time, and the timing isn’t easy to get right. All the while there’s the gloomy vibe of being inside a big reinforced concrete block.

Driving a borrowed SUV near my hometown of Palm Springs. Veering off along the way into a little cul-de-sac of dumpy houses, I attempt to drive up a steep berm and take a shortcut across a boring rocky plain. Instead I’m immediately flying a small airplane, demonstrating for my wife that they aren’t hard to fly — or maybe that even though they’re not hard, they’re still practically useless.

I discover a phone in my pocket, rubbery and square-cornered and slightly smaller than mine. Only then do I remember how happy I am to have this spare so I don’t have to put as much wear and tear on my normal “good phone”

I don’t know how we got together, but I’m driving Eileen H. back to her secondary home in Santa Rosa. We used to be friends a decade ago — I babysat her kid many times. Now we sit parked in her driveway finally catching up. In front of us there’s kids playing and crawling on the façade of the house, which is decorated with graffiti. In the course of getting out of the car I find two similar-looking USB sticks in her middle car divider, noticing that they have the wrong cap on each. Helping her by swapping the caps back correctly gives me great satisfaction somehow. Across the street, there’s a house on the lot next door to where my parents’ old place would’ve been. The house is smoking profusely. I happen to know this is normal, for this house at least (just some problematic cooking habits of the residents)… and yet it’s a bit unsettling isn’t it? It’s very obviously reminiscent of a wildfire that swept through the neighborhood 7 years ago. I ask Eileen what happened to her home here back then, and she answers that it was just fine, actually; the fire didn’t get that far. But my parents’ house, which burned down, it was… Right. Across. The street.

I’m programming. Trying to place correctly a code block dealing with Chinese police. Am I dealing with the Chinese police, or does the code block have something to do with them? Then I wake up imagining my wife has cooked with a wok, and I’m eager to scrape it out with a spatula. It reminds me of a dream… but none of these. Ironically, I forgot that one. Whatever it was.

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Dream Journal

Underbed Time Travel Shoes

“Darkside”, a chunky playful goth girl with a repeated color theme of black and red. Posing for a very cool elaborate portrait above a planet, red stars in the background of space.

Shoes are lined up underneath the far edge of a bed in a specially-rented hotel room. The room is open on two sides (perhaps glass walls) overlooking a gorge. The shoes each represent a different person’s important incident in the past, an accident, a drive-by, a threesome, an adoption. Having just discovered them incidentally I’m surprised when my work partner tells me they’re what we came for: they can be used to time travel. Each pair can flip into a specific instance of the far future.

I’m a detective in a long, darkened townhouse belonging to a married Armenian couple named Kevita ( kev-it-uh) & Kevita. Next door, they also run a shop that sells the drink, Kevita. We’re searching the home as part of their arrest, though I don’t consider them criminals and I’m not particularly concerned.

My partner passes through the space between a bed and a wall no problem. But I instinctively feel its too narrow. Crawling underneath the bed I follow a cord, where I notice it glows. Sure enough it leads to something dangerous though I don’t remember anything of its nature.

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Dream Journal

Yellow Shirt for Fun Blonde

Somewhere in Germany during a festival, the streets crowded with people milling about. I notice several black Germans pass by in traditional lederhosen, fully German culturally now — yet I can’t help but wonder what their ancestors put up with, knowing how other European countries treated their African subjects. Soon I’m with a mixed group, sitting to watch an indoor performance in the last two rows. A special request is made of me: get a blonde girl (whom I don’t know personally) a special yellow t-shirt to wear as a top. She slouches cooly in the back row with arms crossed, breasts out, but I can halfway imagine her wearing the yellow top already.

I saunter into an alcove where a meek group of bland-seeming workers is watching a training video, though it ends just as I sit down. Mechanical automatic lockers then open in front of them, though not for me, and we mill into a narrow back area. From these lockers they’ve received tokens (which I of course don’t have) so these back rooms with token-operated machines — arcade games or sewing classes etc — aren’t a practical way to earn the yellow top for the blonde girl.

Which seems like it doesn’t matter, since at the end of this back area is a love den, where she and I engage in another one of our rendezvouses (despite being introduced to her secondhand just earlier, now we’ve been casual lovers for awhile). She’s a sexual athlete and a freak in bed — she actually has stackable bins she carries with compartments for nitrous, whipped cream, amyls, toys, even a case of Greek fireworks (what are those? I don’t know). We’re lounging in bed afterwards, and one of our rules is that we don’t tell personal stories so there’s no chance we could get too attached or bored with each other (her rule, mostly). But I’m reading this newspaper article and it’s a bit shocking actually, so I read it aloud to her — some recent racist government exposé that’s almost too outrageous to believe.

At a desk window back down the hall, on the opposite side from the token rooms is a detective’s office. An ethnic family (older, wearing glasses, perhaps Indian) is trying to file a report. Observing the scene, my blonde girl comments about a stodgy white man visible at the back of the room: “doesn’t he just have that ‘I’ll jam your cell phone’ look to him?” Though I think her comment facetious at first, I watch as the family’s phone signal drops… after which they’re unable to report the crime they’ve been victim of.

A big salt gritter truck parked on a small residential court during the wee hours of the night. I climb into the big cabin and get everything ready for my first drive (fairly sure I’m the yellow-shirt blonde girl now). It appears that in the night someone has stolen much of the trucks tank through the front tank port. However, I confirm the integrity of the single spike guard in front of the port that’s supposed to serve as barricade against a stranger’s siphon hose.

Then there I am, a relatively small blonde girl, driving my new massive beast of a vehicle away at night for the first time. The driver’s view appears as a bright grainy grayscale fisheye lens, a bit disorienting at first but proving very useful. I round the corner out of the short dead-end street, swinging much wider than intended, yet the vehicle’s turning radius is very powerful despite being slow and ungainly.

I drive up a freeway ramp, struggling against the sandy ripples, when I remember I have the option to use the gritter tank to stabilize the slope. There’s a pink effect as I do so, one girl saving the day for all the drivers to follow.

I’m one of two younger girls fighting under table, the other an imposter trying to reach the other side of the room on some nefarious mission. I call “dad, dad!” while holding the imposter down. But the dad is on his computer looking at the email reply of one of his recent online ‘your post has been hidden’ appeals, glancing briefly and perfunctory at our desperate tussle.

In some random rest stop store, I’m looking through the aisles and come across two pieces of a gun hanging from display hooks. It’s wrapped in some kind of sports team graphic, and though they sell other guns from within locked cases, this one is priced so outlandishly that somehow the shopkeepers think it’s ok not to lock it up since it’s in two parts? Ugh.

In a pocket universe, a shabby run-down concrete park is closed during the pandemic. Oddly kids can’t seem to understand this. But adults immediately can spot a certain cracked rear wall, with an exposed adjacent building leaking in foreign universe, among other dangerous problems.

The scene zooms out to the broader area map, revealing the 2-symmetric lobes of this flat bubble universe, and the further 4-petaled algorithmic fractal pattern rotated out from the same central origin. I wish I knew more about this particular place, it seems quite unusual.

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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

Surviving the Apocalypse with the Crab People

Waiting under a tree for the apocalypse to be over. I’m mostly in denial about it, “it won’t be that bad, or that long”. I’ve stockpiled soft drinks. One night, I must I hide inside my neighbors’ converted rest stop bathrooms, plastic panels enclosing it from the wind. I just barely close the doors while a killer cop stalking the neighborhood searches the place. I manage to lock myself behind the supply closet door. He kills everyone else.

After that, I decide living away from [former] civilization is safer. I hole up in a country house in a small coastal community isolated from the damage of society. We’re glad to have no idea what’s going on, we just see the consequences — like a massive locust swarm passing through one day.

Just…doing iceberg things…

Our jungle island becomes an all-male commune. In the center stands a statue of a crab, whose long, colorful, plastic eyebrows I pose into a cartoonish expression of anger. It’s the same place as the restroom, years later. The “Crab People” chant starts up in my head. I show a video to a fellow commune member who reminds me of Vince Saunders or April Arcus, a video I shot just off our shore of a baby crab person. They watch, reflected, in a crevice-shaped mirror embedded into the hillside, scratched into squares. I leave via the narrow café on our northern exposure, eating a lone lost French fry left on a table.

In the backyard of our property, a steep pine-covered hill leads up to the neighbor’s building. It’s somehow the last address on the street, without any street leading to it. They yell down at us trying to get some kind of assistance. We gather around the backyard pond, someone leads us to shout their name all at the same time: “Hot Chocolate!” Thus amplified, we proceed to pack up their deliveries, and I trudge up the sandy slope.

I expect it to find a vineyard-like rich-people estate of stone walls, but it’s more of a spacious modern apartment tower. I carry two deliveries in oversized Munchery bags. Ring the buzzer of apartment 517, just around the corner from the actual door (confusing, a bit). It’s Dav Yagunuma’s place, and he’s pleased to see me as it’s been awhile. My other delivery is for a game design studio, the door covered in hand-scrawled notes. It’s the studio that makes the Myst games. Suitably puzzling, they have a peephole on their door labeled “channel” and a note saying if you wish to “alter the terms of your entranceship” look through the peephole and figure things out.

I never looked, but somehow I know the other side was like a steampunk café/lounge from another dream, 2nd floor catwalks, leather benches, Don Bruce in fine regalia. The riches of old San Francisco, perhaps.

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Glot

About Last Night…

Bikeman,

I have written this letter in the interests of giving you a fair chance. Who knows? You may well have just been having a very bad night, happened to have found a golf club, and were riding around my neighborhood at 4:40 in the morning. In all sincerity—we’ve all had our nights. But hey, when you started screaming when I asked what you were doing, Lord knows I thought the worst. I called the cops. They came looking for you but of course, didn’t find you. Respect enough. Now, coming back to my apartment a half hour later might not have been the best idea even though I’m sure it helped you blow off some steam. Coming again at 7:30 to ring the buzzer was kinda stupid, cause now I have your photo and could make a real good police report if I wanted. On the other hand, that’d just piss you off more, and would probably piss me off too, so instead I’ll do this: TELL ME SOMETHING I WAS WRONG ABOUT. Seriously. Make me feel bad. Cause right now I feel alright, cause I finally got back in some way for the one of you that smashed my car window WHILE I was SLEEPING in it. Dumb, I know (cause hey, if a guy’s sleeping in his car, he probably doesn’t have some great shit to take… and he’ll YELL at you, too). Tell me I’m wrong to feel righted. I ruined your night? It goes around, is what I’m thinking. For real: there is an envelope behind this letter, and a pen. Write it out. I’ll read it.

Peace,

Bluehair.