Tag: work

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Dream Journal

Dine-n-Ditch Work Reunion

A reunion of co-workers/friends in Australia. Several people from different groups in my past: my salesman job in Melbourne (my boss Benjamin Haynes, the French girl Bubbles), the Pacific Tradewinds hostel (Laura Lynellen Meller-Weller, Rachel from Felixstowe), and Camp Tipsy (Anya the sculpture teacher, others). Held at an upstairs Chinese restaurant. This place is within my persistent personal dream version of Australia, the one I sometimes see with wide open maps of places I’ve traveled before, like the great red desert, or long port-covered coastlines, that I never went to in person.

I suddenly notice that my co-workers have all disappeared one-by-one, and I’m the last one there in. It’s a dine and ditch scenario and I feel obliged to probably pay for all of them if I can’t negotiate something else.

The last person I see come in Kendra Gilpatrick-Tropez (she’s married since we last knew each other). We share a moment of sympathy as I relate what just happened, and for reasons I can’t explain I feel greatly relieved that she’s the one who came in later.

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Dream Journal

Return to School/Work: Naardviot or Naardveet

A multi-stage heist to steal a baby (or wealth) in broad daylight. It repeats, the same beats with variations of setting, dozens of times. A grouchy burly male criminal, a heavy cart going off the side of the road, and opportunistic me. A sci-fi Star-Wars-like fleet of floating swarming police assault craft, of AT-AT like bubbles, zooms away from a post nearby foiling bystanders hopes of intervention.

The last repetition, we’re stealing the baby/treasure out of the mother’s body. A gesture made fingering to an unexpected hole in the mom. A blank beat, an empty space, the pattern finally breaks and our criminal gang is dismembered and transmogrified. I see my dream character as the female protagonist of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, just her doll-like torso and head, floating down into a watery abyss trailing tendrils of blood as she rapidly exsanguinates. The question sits there at the end of the dream: what was different this time, what went wrong?

My first day returning to work as a delivery driver after a long break. I feel different, pulling up and parking my motorcycle near the assemblage of other vehicles. I carry a folded-in cardboard box under my arm, two of my smallest pet rats inside. I naively try placing a delivery bag in there too, and hastily pull it out when the ratties predictably find it (but before anyone notices).

It’s my first day back at school, too. I’m in a classroom where the teacher is demonstrating how to hang string lights above a blackboard, but giving wrong information. I smoothly take over and show how to correct braid them so the strands stay together. She admonishes me by asking “something-something to not” and I wittily joke as if she said “to knot”, still trying to act as though I’m not overriding her. She pivots to teaching a lesson of describing me by an insulting term, akin to”North Idiot”, or Naardviot. I’m pretty sure she actually meant Naardveet, though by now I can’t say anything without her authority feeling threatened.

A girl I don’t know is sitting on a locker room bench talking to herself in Korean in a semi-crazed tone. But I can understand her, and see the danger for her, so sit nearby and begin talking too. I begin improvising as if we’re having a normal conversation, miming eye movements as well.

Still sitting nearby, I change from my 2nd school period outfit into that for 3rd period, without taking off my pants. When I see the pants I believed were white on me, they have huge overlapping layers of colorful stains on them. I don’t have enough time to change again and I have to make a compromise one way or the other.

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Dream Journal

Short Stairs Make Quick Work

I see my friend from middle and high school, Alexx Sanchez. I never did finish that drawing of her as an elf that she requested in 7th grade — I didn’t know how to draw, and I still don’t think I could make a passable go of it. Demonstrating some of the knowledge of the weird sandstone building we’re in, since I’ve been working there so long, I slide down set of stairs with an extremely low ceiling (perhaps a 2 foot space). I then call to her from the subterranean work area. She looks mildly horrified that we’re expected to get in and out through a space so small.

My younger friend Lily Z. is in a band. I round the corner of my high school, playing a drum, telling her about three other Lilys I met with her exact name, and how strangely different and the same they are.

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Dream Journal

New Orleans Job Interview

I’m on vacation in New Orleans but decide it’s worth a shot to go in for a job interview… maybe if I’m lucky I might just be able to live there. I make the regrettable decision to get there by bus and get stuck between the doors trying to exit with all my stuff. Damn tourists.

So then I’m late by 30 minutes (appointment was at 3:00), but I’m still willing to try. The place is a wine restaurant with charming unfinished wood paneling, upstairs is a big shipping department, high ceilings, round floorplan. I set my extra stuff down on a table in their common area. After I come out of the interview I have to pick it out from their Lost and Found at the security desk. Apparently my wallet was in there, now there’s only a single dollar left. Thankful they didn’t take the credit cards, I guess.

As I’m waking up, I recall being in bed next to my wife and exclaiming “grinding coffee isn’t a career, it’s something goats do by accident!” Unfortunately she says she has no memory of this.

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Dream Journal

Acme Bread, Pet Rat Dead

Applying to work at Acme Bread Company which is a big multi-level modern building, glass, columns, and white walls. I encounter Mary (from long ago at the PacTrades hostel) in an art installation in the ground floor. While I’m there I unexpectedly get a phone call from Chicken. He starts in on a speech about how the time has come for he and I to settle the past, make up and all that. It’s such twisted wish-fulfillment claptrap that I actually break out of my dream in order to shut it down.

Back in the dream, I’m working across the street from Acme Bread at a more overgrown/neglected industrial building, I watch the company car’s futuristic white plastic dashboard light up the underside of the car through the dashboard as I drive away. Incredible overkill for a safety feature, reminds me of the F-35’s $400,000 helmet that lets a pilot see through the plane.

A run-down rustbucket of a bathroom at a friend’s house, maybe Don & Tracy, maybe Uncle Robert & Aunt Carol. I peer the over top of the wall’s half-height window/mirror a look into the exquisitely messy bedroom of some punk rock artsy girl. She comes in and notices me, comes over friendly-like but with a glint of challenge in her eye. Reminds me of Koe a bit.

Outside the Fartpartment, on the sidewalk of the Mission, I’m helping unload a bus. We have to rescue Mabel’s stuff that’s been left on the curb in disarray. Perhaps echoes of the occasion when Mabel moved out from downstairs and a crew including Lorelei left all sorts of interesting stuff out overnight, only to get collected for the dump the next morning. I wish I’d rescued all of it.

On a bike, escorting Chicken to the hospital after the birth of his second child. I find it difficult to pedal up the ramp, and I’m actually escorting him less and less. We make it but I wait outside with my bike.

Lynae tells me a rat has died, calling it Scrap at first (Stimp?), then rat #1. When she finally admits that our rat Henry died in the night, I’m instantly bawling. We just had such a nice time playing together on a chair, I even read an article about him. I wake up exclaiming “but he wasn’t even sick!!” That morning at breakfast we discovered that one of our fish had, in fact, died in the night.

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Dream Journal

Sleeping in the Truck, Portland Parking Lot

Doing deliveries, there’s an accident involving a moving truck at an intersection, and the motorcyclist rides off angrily. I know the bike (Nissan) and ride off after them, coming across the abandoned bike near a low wall of a building owned by Chicken. In the semi-underground room, I start working, even though I know Chicken could be pissed. Eventually he shows up and yells at someone (Jimmy?) wanting me gone; we never even make eye contact.

Waiting in a line for older veterans, slowly climbing the staircase of something like a child’s playhouse to hand over our books, I’m given a cut in line when an older black guy (looks like professor in Man From Earth) stops on staircase. A friendly girl takes mine but is visibly confused, having never seen one like it before. The playhouse is on a train and I walk behind it as it slowly edges into a siding.

Mickey dead? Replaced with a toy crying baby in coffin, we’re unsure what his wishes were to present this to his family. It’s an Old West context, stagecoaches and cowboy hats.

Huge wild flock of cat-penguin-monkeys outside a monastery can be approached, even picked up, because the elder cat-penguin-monkeys will take their cues from the monks also watching nearby.

Josh cancels his wedding the day before, I’m sad and don’t know how to engage him so I ask ”laundry day?” when I run into him on a corner of Mission Street. It’s laundry day, I guess.

Lynae has a problem where she’s been panhandling then using the change to buy goose eggs to sell, but she keeps getting the occasional fertilized one and it upsets her and others.

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Dream Journal

Still Helping the Hassnaldis

Project I’m working on for Chicken (or some boss like Chicken) is a large, decorated, blue-tone fishtank. We work with masks on, I think. The last part to be done is add a large, scale-less, small-eyed fish, similar to an electric eel. At that point the tank gets partially obscured by a mattress, and it’s surface moves like a waterbed.

In a storage drawer, in a small anteroom off to the left, I find the huge preserved head of a predatory flightless bird, either a Moa or Elephant Bird or Roc, and playfully bite with it’s detached jaw and cranium.

Doorway with viewing windows at head level and foot, doorbell rings and outside are trick-or-treaters! Somehow everyone inside has forgotten it’s Halloween, and all our lights are still on.

Traveling by a handbuilt wooden bus, connected with a matching wooden trailer, a long and capacious artsy space. Chicken is absorbed driving. I’m at the very back with Eileen.

Helping Eileen in the city of Shenzhen, navigating an inconvenient alleyway obviously not designed for people. She rides a bulky horse named Henry clopping up an oversize stone stairway. At the end of this linear maze of a commercial zone, under an alcove are samples of pre-made snacks. One is decent, the others flavors are unfamailiar and unsuitable to serve in a cafe, and Eileen says as much.

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Dream Journal

Dream of a Spanish-style Chez Poulet

Back in my parents old bathroom. Sitting in a long, empty bathtub. I’ve found an old grooming toolkit (self-care) package of mine in the cupboard, birch or cedar-scented, but the important applicator tool is missing. I’m disappointed. A family member says we can order it online but when I scan it reads off as bipolar something-or-other. Lynae, who hasn’t been paying attention, suddenly asks what she can do.

Roaming through a nostalgia-scape, reviewing the past… November 2013 if I recall. It’s like the streets are numbered years. Looking to find (buy) a replacement for the lost part of the toolkit. Death Valley-like place, great view, fresh dry smell, isolated but well-tended semi-open-air store. Guy rides in on cow (or bull). Retracing his entrance, driving or walking along, I see the narrow strip of fenced natural desert he would’ve taken. There’s an expansive view of the valley floor. Drippy watered roads flow into rivulets and, further downhill, that water shoots from the mountainside in a powerful spout.

Going to artsy movie theater, think it’s not the movie I’m there to see but instead Lake Placid. In the opening scene (still looking for a seat and I’m standing near the right wall) people turn themselves into “pets”. Epic girl hero riding a dragon through a videogame-y fantastical castlescape. Boast that they have three Golden Gate Bridges. Screen is too high up, beyond it is an under-screen room, but there the main stage picture is off (while a live show is trying to get ready) and even that room’s secondary screens are relatively small. A Mortal Combat fight is playing. One fighter (the “good guy”) is just a badass tattooed-and-pierced arm, but his superpower is slowing time and taking 8 hours to finally hit the ground — his opponents usually become exhausted.

I leave the theater but am still watching a movie somehow, and I’m sitting next to big girl. I’m leaning on her we’re packed so close. As long as I don’t think that intimacy with a stranger is weird, she doesn’t either. We introduce ourselves; her name is Monica. She’s still on good terms with Chicken, which I discover by reading a handwritten mail over her shoulder. We get to talking, about a 14-year-old on Mission Street who’s just starting to experiment with makeup, and has garish outlined black lips. I like Monica and (though there is some attraction) we’re friends all of a sudden.

I go into Chez Poulet with her. It’s bigger, a converted funeral home that used to be for the many Mexican families here. Saltillo tile and arched stucco ceilings. Big room in the back where a community market is happening. She’s friends with one seller, we talk at a booth with them, making fun of another seller next to them we don’t know as well. That person is selling intricate carved wooden bowls, placed on shiny woven Asian mats. Monica and her Chicken friends decide to smoke pot in a back room, one with a Christmas tree. I start snooping around and discover that many of the signs I’d last left around the place were still in the same spot. At the far end of the right-hand wing, near the next-door radio station, I discover a neglected door and follow a secret passage. I can see through narrow high windows onto the tiled roof. The hallway passage leads to the Christmas tree room and I surprise the gathered friends.

The Chez Poulet has three bedrooms on the top floor, former accommodations for staff. As third person perspective, in the corner one I locate Chicken John. Instead of being angry because it’s me back in his place, time stops and I gaze at his true face. It’s both softer and younger than I noticed before, and also more old and damaged. His left eyebrow is janky, his forehead wrinkled, his hair is gray and sparse. No mustache. It’s like looking at an old kid. I realize the only way to get such a face is by doing art projects with people you choose to care about for years and years. I admire it and see in it the innocence that it really has. I float away, he turns into pissy mustachioed and porkpie-hatted Chicken again, yelling at me to go away, Orin. The other bedroom residents seem to be yelling it, too. This is when I wake up.

Slowly realize that I’m in bed and just had an interesting complex dream that I can remember, but feeling wary of the laptop beside me that’s there for writing it down. Gradual boot-up process. Distraction from writing the dreams details, though they don’t seem to fade… sometimes the remembrance is like that. Wariness of posting publicly. Allowance to let it be cast.

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Glot

The Long Weekend

On Saturday, I got in a scuffle with my boss over a moral issue which he refused to even acknowledge. I alerted him of my wish to take this concern to a higher authority, and he threatened disciplinary action. After this, I went to see an old friend until 2:00 in the morning the night before Folsom Street Fair. I got on the wrong bus on the advice of the driver, who said that he went to Mission. He went to Mission, alright… the bus was the 91, and he went to Mission and Geneva, almost out of San Francisco county. After the bus let off at West Portal Station at about four in the morning, I collected my bearings, realized the 91 was my only way out of there, and told the driver I wanted to get back on. MUNI pass in hand, we went on to have a conversation about his job, passengers sleeping on the bus or leaving trash, San Francisco, learning a new language, and much else, all in a darkened bus in a quiet neighborhood at four in the morning. The only other humans I saw were trashmen, briefly. Only two minutes off schedule,the driver renewed his route. Damn right I got off on Mission and Geneva that time, only to find that I had just missed my bus connection back home and the next one was in 26 mintues. 27 minutes. 28 minutes. And that it was freezing cold. Seemingly many minutes later, a single taxi passed by and I bit the bullet, and hailed it. Too bad he could only take cash. Screwed, and freezing, once again. Then what do I see? The cab backs up, full reverse down Mission. He asks if I could buy him gas. Hell yeah, I can buy you gas. He took me home, and I talked about the kinda day it’d been, and even paid me back the difference. I got home about 5:30.

I was awakened Sunday to a voicemail from my boss saying I’d been suspended for the “incident” the day before. Well, I called right back and said, ok, I’m fine with that, did you make the appointment with said higher authority as requested? Of course he hadn’t. So I spent the next day, the 30th, alternately gawking at naked weirdoes and writing a five-page letter to by boss’ bosses. It was a good letter, and the only reason I’m not spilling the beans (and they are some juicy beans, mind you) is that I volunteered some confidentiality on my part. They said I was “a good writer” when I presented it to them on Monday. They looked a little worried but I can’t blame them. I don’t know if that they had any idea of the kind of things that’d been going on.

The rest of Monday was nice. Me and the little lady went to Sutro Baths, the Dutch Windmill and Doorhenge in Golden Gate Park, got my favorite Chinese stuffed meat pastry (Chao-Su-Bao) in the Inner Richmond, and generally enjoyed life. I’ve gotten a lot of housework done. Being suspended has sort of been a boon, especially when A) you know you were in the right and could have accepted no less from yourself, and B) there might be a substantive apology for you in the works.

I have a meeting tomorrow at work with the boss’ boss, at 12 noon. Wish me luck.

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Glot

Damn Kids

Damn kids.

You made me feel old. You made me feel old. Because I had to go outside my place of work and figure out what group of dummie-dum-dums was throwing tiny annoyinf firework poppers out the damn window, then march up to their room, 510, and confiscate their silly little fireworks, tell them this was their “last warning” and advise them that, yes, [poppers in Golden Gate Park = OK funny], [fireworks thrown from our hostel = OK you’re kicked to the kerb]. Anymore of that and they’re out. What’s worse is we don’t even know their names, don’t have their passport numbers because someone didn’t take them. They could be anybody’s dumb 18 year-old cousins. And guess what? Being an adult isn’t so bad. At least I’m not sitting around bored pestering strangers on a level not far above cow-tippin’ in one of the greatest cities this side of the Prime Meridian.

They come to check out tomorrow, ask for their ID.
They act smug or smirk too much, mention the cow-tipping
And if they make you feel like a lame grownup, just remember that you pay your own rent and live in an awesome town and hey, you can drink beer… legally!

♥Orin