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Dream Journal

Suddenly Iced Coffee (dream of LA)

An odd Wikipedia entry of a female author’s biography. It’s odd because it’s the size of a neighborhood, displayed laid out in a giant index like blocks of a city. And if I were to guess the city, I would guess Los Angeles — it’s certainly dry and sunny and industrial enough.

Park the car in a parking spot at a long, convoluted, angular strip mall. Find out there’s a store that has paid to make the spot available, the Panax Ginseng Store. Decide to walk there to check it out. Partway, I realize just how long a walk away it is. It’s shorter to walk back to my car and drive there. That’s LA.

The store itself is small, mostly novelties stored in plastic boxes in front. Plastic tarps cover most areas as though this is all temporary. Honestly, it’s not what I expected. It’s more intriguing, really, as I want to know what the deal with the place is. There’s a certain kind of benign neglect that elderly Asian immigrant shop owners have in their businesses. The very specific type of dirty-but-interesting corners I happen to find quite appealing.

Passing by, someone invites me to Costco with them. The entrance has very tall nursery plants and the same smooth cement floors I remember. We shop separately once inside. I worry whether the person who invited me actually can share their membership, as they said. As I pass by a free sample table, iced coffee is snuck into my hand, or mysteriously appears. For whatever reason, this seems to be the strongest image from the dream (and seemed a funny-enough title — well, why not?)

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Dream Journal

A Cozy Compound in the Woods, and Famous Guests

Lazing around in some open vacation courtyard, an asymmetric rhomboid. Tired, I order Carl’s Jr., instead of pizza which my wife later reminds me she asked me to. I switch on the Weather Channel for light background noise… but apparently now it has ads?

I catch sight of a man I know, his balls exposed, but it’s just another fashion choice somehow. For a moment it strikes me how oddly it’s much less obscene than showing just a dick or the whole package, but I’m surprised to admit, it totally is.

I find myself idly wondering: when do surgeons learn how to bring someone back from the dead? Is there a day where they talk about the rules, the records, joke about being necromancers? Strange job.

I’m soon walking around a swimming pool while my friends and I are all skinny dipping, but then it seems a new group of grungy beer-drinking hipsters has showed up to the compound/courtyard — private party over. My wife and I start packing clothes and arguing about how long it will take, how much exactly we still have to pack.

Take a break briefly to shop at a grocery store, but I’m sad from the arguing and the mis-ordering and the leaving. On the ground I find a strangely-shaped oblong orange fruit (mango? squash?). I discover among the produce its other half, the banality of the explanation causing me to sigh and set it back on the ground instead.

While visiting my high school creative writing teacher Ms. Fitz’ classroom, I perch on the edge of a blackboard. But Lauren joins me, and us both sitting on it causes it to crash off the wall. Taking responsibility, I construct a replacement of a homemade paper version covered in art selections. The piece on the back, which I think clever (and which won’t normally be seen), is of a hand-drawn skeleton: an oblique downward view of the spine, scapula, and pelvic ridge. This is apparently a too-creative stretch for Lauren, who pans it and has me explain what she’s looking at.

On a creaky wooden staircase out the back, becoming woods, I encounter a weird deer with moss growing over the side of one eye. It’s friendly — almost spirit-guide friendly — so I go to get it carrots. I bring out an ice chest with two bags. As I re-emerge outside I gaze down the neighborhood hill, a single puff of steam popping out the rustic chimney of a tall squarish cabin house down the hill. The morning silence and fog is impressive, encompassing. I have a brief chat with a random neighbor guy and tell him what I’m doing. He asks for one of the bags. A bit selfish, but I offer to give him as much as will fit in his hands. A few animals immediately show up, at least one anteater (which I don’t think eat carrots, “but oh well” I say as I offer some) and a deer with teeth that look like it should definitely be carnivorous. I hand-feed that angular animal with great caution, but it seems not so much dangerous as derpy.

Up in our personal quarters, the musician Amanda Palmer is visiting. Hanging out with friends and band-mates, mostly naked. She’s very easy to host, quite self-possessed. and independent. Hangs out with her crew and chats/chills, taking breaks to talk with me or other family.

Meanwhile my wife tells me Kevin McAllister (Macaulay Culkin) a.k.a Kevin Pill is staying in another room in the complex. I want to thank him for his recent funny tweet and say how glad I am to have him, but I peek in and he’s doing some private conference. I don’t mind, but it could’ve been a sex thing? Masturbating? I don’t know.

I ask Amanda Palmer if they’d like to meet. I’m like “oh wait you already know each other”, and we together recall a time where they got into a debate and she surprised him with a detailed rebuttal, concluding at his shock “that’s right, I went to formal school too”. Listening to her voice is mesmerizing… deep and gravelly and calming. I remember that I should be recording it, and regret not doing so already.

A group of jock-ish “Lost Boys”-looking kids fly onto the room’s balcony. I block the view of my naked celebrity guests while he asks some random probing question, hoping to see them. Gauging my guests’ reaction, I deflect and gently let them down with whatever it is they wanted to ask. Part of being a good host, I guess.


Writing this all down, I realize we never finally departed to courtyard complex after all.

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Dream Journal

No-Go Costco

At Costco, it’s taking me a long time to pick out stuff. I only have my wife’s membership card, but I hope to convince the cashier. Before even looking at it he says they can’t accept it. I get uncharacteristically mad at a cashier, cursing the guy out for being such a dick.

Looking for an exit then. Storing stuff in a Spanish-style back hallway. One room is a walk-in freezer that looks like a bank vault. They escort/guide me out a back door, but it exits to a housing development in Florida.

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Dream Journal

Neither Brookstone, Nor Sharper Image, but P…

Diving into sparkling blue-white pool naked, after taking clothes off at water’s edge. As recommended by Pan Priest last night. Gathering of high-status leisure, Eileen is there, Koe, others too, attended by gynoid pool-parlor assistants.

Dr. Mrs. The Monarch has an electronically-assisted power to talk secretly in front of outsiders. It’s disguised, warped, imperceptible to normal hearing. She’s doing this on one occasion in a tile-walled library waiting room, located in my teenage bedroom, but when she starts talking about sex the filter starts to break. A maternal woman in the same room suddenly perceives her as a disfigured bird-faced large toddler.


There’s a high-end electronic store whose name I didn’t know. It was similar to Brookstone or Sharper Image, and it started with a ‘P’, but the owner there kept misleading me that it was different stores… that I knew it wasn’t. One, for instance, was affiliated with a Chinese family, incorporated the name ‘Chinatown’ and owned several different places in SF but not this one. I pick up an employment application from the floorboards, but I just can’t figure out the name. Most of the dream, I’m bugging myself trying to remember it.

In an aisle of rifles, there’s a loaded crossbow which predictably goes off the moment I touch it. I practically roll my eyes. Upon drawback, a thin silvery arrow-bolt shaft levers upwards 45 degrees for ease of loading.

In a distant more-forgotten section packed with older merchandise, on a lone mid-level shelf above the aisles, Lynae finds a curious vacuum (or… vacuum-like trinket). It’s package is the size of a coffee cup box, ancient-looking for electronics, from the 1980s at least. Some kind of toilet pun. Christmas-themed, too, with faded rainbow shoehorned in there. I don’t recall us opening it, but it was an amusing curiosity.