Tag: renovation

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Dream Journal

Mall Empty, Different Owners

Over visiting someone else’s place, a rental. I run across the landlord in the downstairs garage, with his tools out, fixing some old Victorian equipment. I quickly get buddy-buddy with Mr. Landlord since I seem to understand what he’s working on. The light in the garage / front room has a gauzy look from being filtered through dusty windows.

An aquarium sits on its side such that I can dip my fingers through where the front glass would be. Working out how to get a filter to work, I flip it back and forth over different surfaces of the water. The water remains cloudy and dirty, despite that I’m confident the filter is now working. It will just take a while to clear.

I walk all the way down the ramp of a mall lined with storefronts. Then back up. During the time I walked down many stores have closed, and the place feels much emptier. Maybe like SF’s Chinatown.

Across a mall parking lot (different from above, I suppose) there’s an abandoned store which is poorly renovated. The owners perception was it just seemed any good buyer would consider it dated. I think it looked fine, warm and nostalgic even, but they insisted on renovating it for whatever fad they imagine business owners want this year.

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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.