Tag: rain

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Dream Journal

Hot Vampire, Bedroom Rain, Hardware Construction

A vampire demonstrates some of his heating powers. First round isn’t too hot, then he has his girlfriend back up. Guess he’s a Twilight-kinda vampire, having someone called a girlfriend and all. The next time he glows bright red. This is a family entertainment show, and I remember thinking how rare it is to see people just comfortably naked (on TV). Someone brings up the idea of using the ultra-cool morgue refrigerator to keep them chill, but aren’t sure if it would kill them.

I spot my 92 year old Grandma walking away down a grassy sidewalk. I try to say goodbye to her as she leaves a gathering. Though I’m myself, fully grown, I still feel like an infant, like it’s still the 1980s, like my relationship to her has never changed.

In the smaller of my childhood bedrooms (second night in a row, here). I’m letting rain run down the walls, dripping from the white “cottage cheese” ceiling, flooding the hardwood floor in an inch of water. My original bedroom had neither that ceiling nor that floor. I remember to peek under the bed and inspect the spot where floorboards are cracked and missing. I reflect that I’m 36 and still live with my parents, gazing at my mannish arm hair. While I don’t precisely feel like a loser, I also don’t feel like someone to be envied.

There’s a hardware store under construction across the street from my home. It’s replacing a leaky warehouse where the second floor temporarily housed my favorite art store, SCRAP. Climbing down from peering over the wall, I notice that an AirBnB there has placed a painted post outside, horizontal rings of dull green and red. It’s a crude wayfinder for helping guests, and I’m sure unlawful, but the longer I look the more I admire it — and the matching ring-shaped gate made similarly. Crude, yet beautiful.

Categories
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.

Categories
Glot

Wishing Away the Smell

Project Room Full of Projects There’s a room in my house that smells like abandoned building. I know this, because I’ve been in many, many abandoned buildings. For the past few days San Francisco has had (while not quite “Biblical” as described by some) torrential rains, and the normally warmer drier Mission has seen as much as the rest of town. And I love my apartment; my neighborhood is great despite some evidence to the contrary.

It’s just that the place is a bit of an old girl, you know. She does the job… the job of being inhabited… just, sometimes she shows her age is all. One room at the back of the apartment I call the “project room” (pictured, to the left) despite the fact that no “projects” to speak of have been completed there. We just called it that when we moved in. Besides, it’s easier than calling it the “sitting slash storage slash plant slash kiln room.” It’s actually one of our cooler rooms and used to be outdoors in fact, which is why it has two windows looking in on it from other rooms of the house (err apartment—a personal history of single-family home residency is apparent in my mental constructs). Perfect RoomIt also doesn’t really hold in warmth too well which makes it not-too-handy for sitting in seats as far as “sitting room” goes, but which is pretty handy when Lynae’s kiln hits the 2400 Fahrenheit mark. Except of course when it rains and water starts coming in under the door, which doesn’t fit because it’s swelled up in the rain.  And as far as the rain goes it doesn’t stop at the door. The roof hasn’t started leaking… yet; however, one gets an inkling of why I might notice a little aroma of dilapidation. I think you kind of get the picture here: the room is neat for its uniqueness and its feeling of history, but has its disadvantages as concerns actually taking care of the place.

Well, I did want to live in an abandoned building once. I guess we ought to be careful what we wish for.

Categories
Glot

November has Come

It’s raining outside.
It rained yesterday, in the evening.
It rained all last night.

It’s November, and it’s the first rain since I’ve been here. I used to love the rain, used to slosh around in it in rain boots that only ended up keeping the bottom third of my pants dry. I grew up in Palm Springs (well, Cathedral City) and rain was was warm and small and benign. We played in it because it was an unusual friend. But I’m not in Palm Springs, and now I think is the rain has come for a longer visit. It’s the difference between a visit and a visitor. November in San Francisco means rain. It means Dave was right when he said that the rain wouldn’t come till November, and then it would come like young travelers to a hostel—more and more. But it’s now off-season in the hostel, and I’m living here now, and writing a novel and trying not to be too presumptuous about it. The rain has its own reasons… it’s cold and falls in big drops that make the whole city darker turning the streets to black rivers. It keeps me inside. There’s a reason for everything. That’s practically a cosmic rule. I’ll stay in, and I’ll write, and I’ll clean, and I’ll craft for myself a sort of life. And what more could I hope for in such a month?