dream log

lazer walker and i were at a party and we decided to take a day trip to see the Presidio, which ended up being a ruin on a hill.

we didn't end up making it there, instead we huffy puffied our way up and up. i did the thing i do best, which is figuring out which way to go to keep moving forward. we hunted the top through buildings and schools, and long staircases and steep upward slopes. in a way, it was like finding your way to the Acropolis in Athens.

there were others on the way up, but none were as good at getting up as me.

at one point the trail led through a school that had been shut down for an event and we rang the bell anyway. we wandered around the corner to try to find another in, but eventually the doir opened and we were in a high school gym dance party. everyone was wearing Halloween costumes and damn they could boogie. but so could i! we danced our way out the other end of the school, through hallways of revelry.

we didn't make it to the top before the sunset, which was game over.

dream log

strangest of strange.

at one point i wrote a note in my dream about how the police had forced me to sign a document giving up some right to a trial when and if they decided to deport me, yet i knew it was a lie and i worried what you would think if you found it, the lies, all.

we had been on a field trip. we went to a dance class, and sang an old song. on the way back, in a 7-person van, we passed carnage. cars were down below us, the river was full of them, chock full of hundreds, if not thousands. i was worried about us, about where they had come from, how they had ended up there, so many but our driver just kept going. we were fine. we came around a bend just in time to see a the last of a fleet of expensive, last minute buggies disappearing into the tail of some large boat. a joyride amidst the destruction. it was impossible to tell if the boat had, in some way, caused the wreckage of all the other cars. impossible to tell.

the next thing i knew i was alone at the strangest subway I've ever been to. it had these tracks that were more like moving in walkways. it was a long but narrow station. everyone spoke Finnish and I couldn't understand a thing. it was late. i took the wrong train, by accident, and ended up at this part of town where the trains only ran one direction. even getting back to the train platform felt impossible -- all the walkways were running in the wrong direction. every time someone new arrived, a crowd would cheer. it was here that i wrote the letter, the fake. as i was writing it i knew it was dramatic storytelling, expressing how trapped I felt, but also wondered what anyone would think if they found it.

so bad.

i eventually went outside and it was quiet except for the roaring of a freeway in the distance. there were no cabs in sight and i couldn't communicate with the lone woman, standing there, not even with a paper map.

i resolved to sleep in the bushes.

dream log

we were moving. it was a group effort. we had rented one of those big 18 wheeler trucks and used it to port everyone's things around. everyone from the office needed to get their stuff but i was in charge of moving the truck. i wasn't bad at it, which was weird because i thought that i would be. we had all tossed our stuff into the back of the truck, luggage and things mostly, like hiking backpacks and pillows. i moved the truck close to the new place so everyone could unload it. luckily there was parking out front, but of course there was parking, it was a fire zone only. the building was like a north williamsburg warehouse that had been transplanted somewhere tropical, i parked and knocked but no one came. we sat out there, sweating and no one came. i rang the doorbell and pounded, small diminutive pounds, on the large wooden door and no one came. eventually i just went inside and told some people and then they all showed up but the experience of no answer left me shook. i left the van parked for a bit and waited inside. when i went back out to move it, it was empty but it was also time for us to leave. we needed to get on the road before rush hour and head downtown to visit some old teachers but there was no way to do it all, you know, before the traffic started. we left in a hurry.

dream log

I got an email from an old friend regarding a request for marriage to her friend Vaim Nevrutu. I agreed, sight unseen, because it sounded like a fun time. A few weeks later we headed out on a train trip to meet up with the betrothed. He was nice & clean cut and showed me the wedding invites that at first i mistook for some Airbnb party. Everyone I recognized on the guest list worked at Tumblr though. The train took us all (there were a bunch of us on vacation) to a house in the desert where we watched TV, talked and tried not to step on Ginger. My sister let me pick out a dress from her closet -- none of the white ones fit me though. My friend let me borrow her makeup and said i was lucky I had such nice strawberry blonde hair as it framed my face just so. I did look nice. Later i caught sight of myself in the mirror and something horrid had happened. It looked as though someone had given me a bowl cut with a long back - like a bowl mullet. It was intense. Vaim liked me anyway though i could never exactly work out how I felt about him. He was excited and I was ... talking myself into how anulments were perfectly normal and in fact expected, if it didn't work out how i wanted.

dream log

too good to retell. but I'll do it anyway, for science.

It was based in a school classroom. I got abandoned there with you. we hadn't ever really talked but it was interesting to get to know you. fun, almost. we spent the night under old blankets that smelled musty. it was cold and i was glad you stayed.

I didn't leave but just woke up, alone

dream log

I was back in NYC and Liz was visiting from Houston. We were hanging out and then we got word that her husband, who is secretly (?) Croatian had been in Dubrovnik visiting family when the bombing started. We didn't know if it was ok it not but Liz was pregnant so there was at least that and I thought this is what it's like to be in a WWII romantic drama.

There was more to it that involved books by JJ and other stories but i can't remember it right now and probably won't ever.

It's funny though, I still remember that unwritten dream from half a decade ago where we ended up making pipe cleaner art in my aunt + uncle's ranch house. Yours was very good and you left before i got a chance to make mine and then i helped my uncle put up Christmas lights indoors with one of those utility company basket robots that you raise and lower while riding it. Then a storm came and we camped out in the van to avoid the lightning.

Dream log

I dreamed we were on a cruise. It was a dangerous cruise because the weather was understood to be bad but we had time before it got bad so whatever.

It was me and you and my sister and a new husband (she had gotten remarried to a Spanish professor?) and Ginger my dog and some of your friends. People I didn't know. It was a weird week of sailing. I don't remember leaving the small floor on the boat that we were occupying. There was cereal to eat. We almost ran out of dogfood.

My sister's new husband (wat) was a professor and he spoke Spanish but it was one of those subtle things where he only spoke to communicate effectively not to exhibit his skill. 

After the boat ride we went to a restaurant reservation in a shopping mall in Houston. We had made a reservation; it was more like a small catering company than a restaurant. In the back space there was a big Indian wedding going on. We could hear the talk. They had set up a big table to the side for the 12 of us (it was a family reunion). You tried talking to the host in Spanish because it was Texas after all. I couldn't tell you that the guy was a light skinned Iranian, Persian probably. It didn't seem important. He looked confused but just accepted your crazy.

dream log

We were out on an outing with everyone else. This was late dream, after I had been on the carride and moved apartments and had that strange hotel experience. Then we were dancing out in a courtyard beneath string lights and blossoms. It is springtime after all. I wasn't supposed to dance with you, but we were all there together and your date was off doing other things. We left to go get cake from the shop nearby as everyone else had gotten some while we were on the dance floor. It was just the two of us in a back booth, laughing. They had a last call for cake, fruity cake, and I wanted to get up and get fruity cake and fruity tea but you stopped me, forcibly, and said: are we doing this?

And I asked: what about your girlfriend?

And you said: two envelopes mailed.

I nodded then you

Jumped into a dialogue about how I needed to know that you were a nerdy geeky thing who loved crochet. Like totally manly crochet but it was hard to express that because so much of the crochet market was just not, and you meant *not* manly.

I noticed I was holding a list of restaurants and it was short and then I needed to know if this was it, if this was the sum total of places you eat at and you said yes mostly but we both agreed that maybe it was more like a template, a pattern for finding restaurants you'd enjoy.

I forced myself​ awake then because I was nervous about not knowing what might come next, how things wouldn't work out after working out so well, so fast.

dream log

Ginger broke a leg and we were riding around on bicycles to get to a meeting. She kept trying to walk on it, so I had to keep an eye on her so that I could come pick her up and carry her whenever she wanted to move. I kept thinking we should go to the vet to fix it but there was always some bigger emergency looming that got in the way of taking her to the vet.  Or maybe we were underground and going to see the doctor wasn't on the list of things that we could do, at least not without risking everything.

I'm not sure how much more I should tell you.

Unrelated to dreams, I went to the acupuncturist several times this week for a very very stiff/painful neck and they fixed it (mostly).  It feels sore now, but it's entirely usable; the sharp immovable pain is largely gone.  The needle poking continues apace, however, as it's still not gone gone gone but I want it to be, desperately.

I don't know why acupuncture works but it does.  It seems to point out that our current understanding of how the body works is incomplete.  My inkling is that there's something mental or neurological that's attached to pain and poking at muscles with tiny needles triggers some widely missed connection between the self and the body.

When they poke you with needles it's like having your skin pinned more firmly to you, like a tanner pinning a hide to a board.  It's like having a half dozen lightning rods affixed to the plain of your skin, so that you can breathe out energy through more holes than just your nostril.  It's also none of these things because by and large they are unnoticeable.

The place I went for acupuncture in Manhattan's Chinatown had a machine with electrodes that they'd hook up to needles across a muscle and send pulses down and into it, a flood of alt-signals all attempting to coax your frozen muscle fibers to stop sending out distress flares, to relax, to forget about what they were mad about and just chill the fuck out.  This new place doesn't do that but I wonder sometimes what it'd feel like to get those pulses into the very core of soreness and tenseness that comes from holding up my head.

apartment hunting dreams

i went to look at a really promising apartment in the perfect neighborhood, almost as far West as you could get. the building was big, and wooden, but Flatiron-like: when I walked to the corner it wrapped right around, heading back almost in the same direction at a very acute angle.

it was colorfully colored, with big windows and big, like a city block.

i was to live on the second floor, but the whole thing was rabbitly warren like, and colorful.  there were high ceilings and an infinite showering of sunlight on hard wooden floor. the ceilings were slanted up against the roofline.  there was an elevator that i went to get in -- it wasn't so much a box as a concrete beam tied to ropes that jumped onto when the doors opened.  it started falling when you hopped on -- i just barely stopped myself from falling after you.

you stopped it in time, and came back alright.

i took the stairs.

and discovered the most magical small office with a dark-blue tiled with gilded accessories water closet, with a matching, rainbow-mosaic water basin.  the office next door had glass windows, and an antique wooden door with a delicate, intricately wrought brass handle (the lever type). in the bedroom next door, i was delighted to discover a fire escape just out the window, just like my first New York apartment, where I used to climb out to escape the oppressiveness of my tiny bedroom in the shared, oversubscribed apartment.

i climbed out to the roof, and then farther, onto a small spit-like platform to get a better look at the road and treetops, far below, and lost my nerve to come back from the edge.  i sat there paralyzed, feeling the edges of the platform i was on (no side rails, of course) looming close in my subconscious and my muscles too weak with fear to get up or even start inching my way towards the window I had crawled out of in the first place.   it was dumb, being stuck in a mental puzzle of 'what would it be like to fall' and too terrified to move, untrusting of my muscle's own, separate intentions.  curiosity is a hell of a drug.  i laid down, closed my eyes, and let the panic wash over me.

i made it back, eventually, after the wave subsided and i managed to forget to look down, and we explored the first floor where you, the realtor, lived and played on the staircase, knocking over the colorful pillows that had been stacked like stairs to reach the landing.  you weren't too mad at my carelessness, just exasperated.


i woke up to a grey sky and the soft-shusshing sound that cold wind makes when it blows strongly against the plastic wrap I used to patch up the A/C vent a few weeks ago.

Dreamy cats

I had a dream that you got a cat. I came over unannounced. You had guests. And a cat.

I don't know what the cat looked like.

I know it wasn't you though, it was some other you, some dreamworld you, multidimensional but in other dimensions than reality. I know the difference, now.

And also just that
you don't have a cat.

Wherein I confess my deep and true love for pop

I've been having a lot of good dreams lately. I've also been on what feels like an insane schedule.  In bed after midnight, still wired.  Up before 7am to let the dog out, to go on a walk, to make breakfast, to sit and to write.

I'm tired in the afternoons but I love it.  The dreams come, the mornings come, the evenings... they come.  But they don't go.  They aren't leaving me, I am here and I am awake.

You left Austin months ago. We last spent time together over Thanksgiving, when I was in town for a few hot moments. You gave me some books, and told me about how you were leaving. For real, for good. I wondered what it meant.  You, who had weirdly and yet emptily been there for everything.  Parts of London, Brasil, Atlanta, strange cities, and Austin, always Austin.  But you were packing, you were giving out books, belongings, aprons. You who I joked were my constant, my LOSTiean time-stable person who, if I ever got lost in time, would be the person that I would go to find.

You were leaving. It felt like the end of something.  Like a final goodbye. Like I was shut of all the places that I had encountered you.  Like there was no going backward, not now.  All hopes of being lost in time and then found again, left. Evaporated.

I don't know where you are now.  I don't know that I want to.

Your apron was destroyed by a potty training puppy a few months ago.  The book you gave me, I got halfway through before desisting, as I do most times when confronted with anything that even vaguely resembles deep self-inspection.  It wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, this therapist's idea of a book form of things.

I thought that you leaving meant that I was done with the places that you had found me.  That would be here. That would be there. That would be almost everywhere.

I was wrong.  It just meant that you were done.  You were gone. You were leaving.  You were moving on, and I was just doing what I do -- observing. Seeing, watching you get the fuck out.

That did mean something, but as is with most things, it meant less than I thought it did.

There is love in the tiniest breath of the universe.

I came here because I have a confession.  I love pop. I love country. I love the latino channel. I don't really like electronica, or house, or non-nostalgic rock.  These tastes are strong and have endured.

They will not change, they are as fixed as the stars under which we born.

Strange Stranger

drunken, spun dreams of a tall. towering stranger that told me all wonderful strange and unbelievable things. i woke with a start. it was dark out still. and i couldn’t help but wonder, who was the stranger? was it me? 

if it was me, 

who was i?

dreams, from moving

Horrible dream of movers with thick foreign accents and ugly leers who came early and then I fell asleep and when I woke up it was 4 hours later and they were still arguing over the best packing tape and then they left to get lunch and didn't come back forever and then we were looking for my new place but it was like a dormitory in a treehouse that was also an auditorium and then it was raining outside and I was awake and it was dark but the rain,

the rain was real.

dreaming of you

It started off with me in some skivvies in the backroom den just hanging out, waiting for a party to start then the crew showed up and I got recruited for a dance routine that I wasn't sure I was going to remember. We didn't end up performing but instead I landed in Denver with my friend Liz who's moving there and we went book shopping and we talked about this book I had read (a book I dream wrote) and she gave me a pair of scissors to cut out the part at the front that wasn't right. As I was cutting an officer rolled up and Liz left but I ended up in a line, another queue, waiting for the safari or underwater adventure. A line formed, and we were a singing class, outside the same book store, carolling but not. I wandered into the wrong section, the sopranos maybe, only to be sent back to the other side and then we became not a class of singers but again a line that I was near the head of. The boats weren't running yet tho, so we all of us, got to talking and a dive computer came out from somewhere but we couldn't use it because it was too heavy and it would weigh you down once you got in the water. Then the front of the line didn't end in the waterfront, but instead a sparsely wooded safari and I followed you down to spy on the rangers cabin, perched on a steep incline. The way over was steep and the porch began to sway precipitously at my ineptitude of walking on it but everyone survived and then we were driving, four or five of us, me in the backseat, cuddling with two new friends and a faceless driver who was talking to KLosse, in the front seat, about the writing seminar she was working on and her latest blog post in a new website. I was listening and decided not to brag about how I had been stalking her lately. As we drove, suddenly I was confused about where we were as it didn't look like Colorado. I tried to check my smartphone but my friends had papered it over with stickers but I managed to take them off and then I saw that we were just outside Columbus, OH and I felt more at home here than I ever had. 

The road wound down thru fields, where we narrowly skirted hitting field hands surveying their handiwork from the vantage point of the road, to winding back up into the mountains, where we narrowly missed a snowplow driven by a septuagenarian woman with the longest face I'd ever seen. Then my cuddle buddy was at the wheel and we were driving across a long narrow rickety wooden bridge on a high pass and I was interrupting KLosse to ask about how you could write, you know really write, if you didn't have a narrative, a strong story, to tell.

No more

No more running from the memories that are slowly driving me insane.

Insane is a strong word. Better to say 'driving a wedge between perception and reality'.

The reality I live in is a low dissolving behind this tempered layer of glassy recollections -- the smells and sights and feelings of being there.

I uses to think it was you, hiding behind them all, deeply masked but you're gone now and you always have been and the eerie second vision comes unbidden anyway.

Some dreams are so strong they have you anyways, whether you live in them or become their prisoner, trapped behind the foggy glass of nostalgic synasthesia.

dream sxapes

last night I was lost in Split/Dubrovnik, responded to an ad for a game night via a list serve and ended up, confusingly enough at a different game night, the weekly meeting of the local bdsm club. (oops). they were nice but I couldn't keep up with their jokes, the newspapers filled with lewd images were beyond my reckoning, the night ended when i couldn't remember my ATM pin, which would get me into the second round of that night's games, deeper in the pub's belly.  Some nice ladies stayed out in the common room though, playing some weird form of newspaper boggle with pencils and tales of sexploits.

upon reflection it was a weird form of social psych sadism, I suppose.

I headed home early and got lost or something somehow ran into my old 7th grade friend/crush named Two who was working in the pub as a busboy and saw me there. He warned me that it was a good thing I hadn't been able to remember my pin; that the back room was dirty and dank and that it wasn't a good next level to find yourself at. I struggled for a while with the decision to somehow reassure him that it wouldn't have been the first time I found myself in dark places or that I could have handled it but decided that that was quite beside the point of it all, anyway.

Then we were escaping, somewhere still in the city, mostly just to stone benches where we could catch up on lives long since lived. He was afraid of running into his wife, but I felt something bigger looming down over us, and ran away, back to my room, at the corner of the city, built into its heavy stone walls and up above the din of the crowded streets, below.

The Dust Mote

It was a small dark cabin.  I'm not sure how long I had been there, nor how long that he had.  Without a doubt, he had been there far longer.  There was a refrigerator stuffed full of bulky dark paper packages, with grease stains forming on the creases.  It was musty, as if daytime was an event that never happened inside the cabin.

We use everything, he said, gesturing downward at a grease stained sack, where charred bones had once sat.  It takes hours, he said, to skin a chicken, to de-feather it, to remove all the innards, and organs.  But we do it.  Not a thing is wasted.  At the end, all that's left is the bones.

What do you do with the innards? I asked.   The workshop was small.  He was talking massive amounts of slaughter, that would have filled the entire back room.There was nothing back there but an old crate, some dust motes, hazing the light from the gas lamp, and a rough hewn hickory trough filled with blackened bones and a greasy burlap.

We sell them, he said.  As he turned toward me, the light from the gas lamp pooled deep in his black eyes.  It takes a long time, he said.  To truly use a chicken.  It's hard work.  There's no stopping til it's finished, each one stripped down to just bones.  Used up.

Sometimes, he said gazing off at the wall as if at a thing unseeable, a speck of dust gets caught in my eye.  It gets caught deep -- it becomes a part of myself.  And in it, I know the creature that the dust came from.  I know it by that mote of dust, it's how I find them again in the dark, to keep at my work.  By that dust, that piece of the hen in my eye.  I can't wipe it free  until it's over, til they're nothing but bones.   By then they're old friends, familiars.  I know their stories, where they're headed next.

The dark pools turned toward me.  I shivered.

That's where I saw you, he said.

Ringelnatter

We were in a space ship, intergalactic travel from the earth to an unknown destination. We had a fearless leader who directed us to set down on an alien planet for a picnic lunch. We unbundled ourselves from our tent ships (my sister and I were sharing one, that later I couldn't figure out how to rewrap to make "space tight".) We were boarded up in a makeshift classroom with the two of us on the far end near a closed door. We pulled out snacks, but the next thing I knew there was pain on my hand. A ringelnatter had gotten a hold of my hand, bitten it clean through. It was the skeleton of a Ringelnatter, dangling from its jaws, hinged through me. When I looked up to try and locate the origin of the snake, I noticed a skeletal foot under a door, a few feet from where I was sitting. There was a commotion from the front of the camp and suddenly our base was beseiged. The skeleton foot belonged to an entire race of skeleton people. I left some earrings on the ground which they were trying to take from beneath the door. I passed them over instead of fighting to keep them.

We didn't manage to escape.