Tag: poverty

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Dream Journal

LA Cinderalla Phone Sale, Returning a Message

A gambit pays off, and after I leave a comment or invite for Plarvolia she finally responds. I think she messages about being open to meeting. I spend the rest of the dream vaguely excited and anxious how this will turn out

In the Los Angeles area I witness the rich meddle with reshaping hilly land near the coast. I decide to interview for a job available in the oil extraction industry. In the dream I’m in persona as an older black guy, wearing tall black leather boots and a blackleotard outfit. There’s some logic that this minimizes the problems of getting the black-colored oil on one’s skin when you’re a worker, so is kind of part of the job.

Through Criagslist, I visit a decaying neighborhood to but an older candybar-style phone. I look around and recognize many “Cinderella” style details on the underkept houses, fairytale roof awnings and such. The whole neighborhood was once an overly-decorated marketers dream in (perhaps) the 1950s or 60s, though it probably looked overly cookie-cutter back then. It’s obvious there was never any plan to upkeep them, and the natural tides of money and time left buildings that were difficult to distinguish between abandoned and simply poor.

I spend time going up and down neighborhood catwalks trying to conclude the sale. It’s a mess. In the course of negotiations I realize that since this is LA I don’t have an easy way to get back to where I’m staying unless the person who broght me here on the prospect of buying the phone also drives me back. I settle for a much-inflated price of $100, hoping to get back sooner than later at least.

The dream ends with me realizing I’m now the one who has taken a long time to respond to Plarvolia, much different than before. I am worrying that the phone won’t even work and I won’t be able to get back to her in time. I find I can’t get back to sleep and message…

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Dream Journal

Martin is a Good Boy

Pine needles in a glass box, a terrarium actually, marinating in some kind of food juice pickling solution to make them tasty. Being cleaned, as part of job training for some 22-year-old Latino kid with a bald head (and a bad attitude). Not that I blame him when this is the only productive thing your society allows you to do.

Examining the phenomenon of the BART station spreading out into neighborhood; discussing the perspective of the wealthy (and perhaps parasitic) suburbs. I think I was talking with was my old neighbor friend Richard H. As we walked down the sidewalk on 24th. Their unquestioned attitude is treating the lower classes who take public transit like an infection which spreads. Trying to establish local lore about where the “poor part” starts, supposedly the consensus is an alley halfway through the block — “Inception” or “Industrial” alley.

Asking Perplexity.ai about an empty cage on a ceramic counter, countertops like the work surfaces in a science classroom. This rat cage is almost the same size and shape as the marinating box from before. Could be the same box, for all I know.

Something triggers me to say “Martin is a good boy”. I still miss my pet rat Martin-Martin. He *was* a good boy.

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Dream Journal

Bait Locker, Alien Repellent, Rustbucket RV-land

In a locker room, lots of stuff I need to gather. I head out once my time is over, my two friends waiting outside the heavy glass door, before realizing I still left a bunch of stuff. In the bottom half of the locker, the compartment is open so I can reach in and find other people things. There’s at least a few pieces of funny money left as a trap, I assume. The steam room hot tub adventure cost at least a couple hundred bucks.

I am a scientist like Rick Sanchez and I’m inside my house during the course of an insectoid invasion. I am one of the only people with an alien-repellent sound barrier. The insect forces go to great links with transparently fake news reporter interviews trying to discover how it works and to overcome it. I see a diagram of the architectural plan of the house with the bedroom just outside the laboratory and the clean room.

I’m in the small kitchen of my family’s old Cathedral City house. About twice as many people live with us now, and I think of them as in my family. There are two refrigerators and an upright freezer next to each other and we’re even thinking of putting another refrigerator blocking off the counter corner. I’m using a glass tray to keep a group of aquarium feeder worms alive. I have to use the same tray to store macaroni and cheese above the worms. Meanwhile, two younger kids are bothering me, throwing food and interrupting my project. I ask my dad, who is staring into space eating cereal, to tell them throwing food wasn’t okay. He responds apathetically, and in frustration I fling a spoonful of grits at him, spraying the entire kitchen corner. He still doesn’t react.

I move into a community of rustbucket houses. Old RVs and trailers are pushed together into a complex warren-like structure — everyone seems to have built a private hobby space so they can sneak off by themselves to do work, camp chairs inside old shipping containers stocked with rebar. One green RV from the ’40s has a particularly unpleasant individual in it, but a beautiful slide-off stove in the kitchen, converted to be an outdoor courtyard. It’s a very welcoming community, but also “is this how poor people really are?” is a question that comes up. At some point I try to see if I can build a large house on one of the unfilled plots of land. The small house just downhill from the main road was one of the first built.

We go off and drive on an adventure in an old VW van. We stop at a large gate down the road, waiting with an invisibility power-up activated. When a train comes behind us the gate opens and we can use a speed boost to drive overland far away from where we’ve driven before. What would take 20 minutes only takes about 3, but we still don’t reach our destination — a place called Challengeburg.

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Dream Journal

Impromptu Absurdist Protest

Circle of people chanting absurd slogans as some kind of abortion protest. It started with me sharing an 8-bit black-and-white VHS tape. Creative masks, a lady wearing a rippling face mask, like a tank of water. This is the audience for a talk show (perhaps Sh0eOnHead or The Daily Show). They march around in a figure 8. All happening in a New York subway, gross and dirty, but somehow the perfect setting.

I unlock a panel with nothing behind it with a key of mine, an excuse to eavesdrop on a nearby couple. Can’t tell if they’re arguing or playing. I focus my eyes on a pair of dry leaves dancing nearby.

Later my aunt is talking with me about this march, wondering if it wasn’t somehow disrespectful as an abortion protest by its very levity. Not certain myself, I note that it was spontaneous, and compare it to other tension-relieving characters like… hmm, perhaps Santa Claus? I think I meant krampus. Christmas is no less solemn for their existence.

A model of the ocean is drained; the question of whether France technicality still has slavery is asked. Pouring in something the consistency of bacon fat on the ocean floor near Fiji or Tahiti, to illustrate the extent of this weirdly unperceived modern slavery. The model refills. Finally the last colony drops out and is s no longer France. Thereafter, France must deal with being completely in northern Europe with its cold winters. Near Notre Dame, I amble down a ski slalom with hurdles leftover from the Olympics, now hobos use it as a thoroughfare. I discuss public housing when someone says something insightful concerning modern poverty.