The Formation Of Stars. Construction. Botched Antenna Removal. Toe Sock. Umgeheben Ausgeleben. Angie Dickinson, Postal Spy.
Marco McClean
First dream. I'm in a clearing in the Pygmy Forest talking with a
sweetly helpful middle-aged lesbian about random problems with projects
I'm working on in real life at the theater company and the radio
station. I'm just talking, not complaining of helplessness, but later
the woman comes back from a visit to an old once-famous hippie guitar
player who she knew would be able to solve everything, and she gives me
slick pamphlet he has produced.
The pamphlet has a story printed in low-contrast red on brown, about
discoveries about the formation of stars, and it folds out into a galaxy
image that really gives you a sense of all those billions of stars, not
just the regular milky cloud you ordinarily see. It's the same image as
the sky above a slot in the trees to the south. The guitar player made
the pamphlet from the real 3-D sky. It's beautiful.
Next dream. Outdoors on the grass in a mountain community of
scattered cabins and barns, I repair Ira's old IBM desktop computer.
Next I'm supposed to work on a shed. I say, "I need some spikes." Ira
gives me a lump of stuck-galvanized-together 12-penny and 16-penny
nails. It's easy to break them apart. I say, "This'll work."
I go to the old shack and go in. It's dim and full of dust and
cobwebs. I climb up inside. /Can this be the right place? I'm supposed
to be /building/ this, and it's obviously been here for years./
It's new now and only partly framed. I'm high up in the frame at a
corner that's temporarily tacked together with a single nail. I have no
hammer; I use my hand to pound the wood so the sticking-out nail goes
back into the hole it just fell out of when I bumped it. But when I jump
down the wood comes loose again. I'll come back and work on this
tomorrow.
In the dream my mother lives in one of these cabins. She wants me to
stay here overnight. I have to go back down to town to finish a bunch of
work at the theater. My mother pushes me backward onto the kitchen table
and lies on top of me to keep me here. /Too creepy./ I get out from
under her and leave as gracefully as I can, trying not to upset her.
Next dream. In the dream my friend Mark lives in a house like Tim's
ex-wife Diana's house but inland in the dry hills. I'm here to take the
high antenna down; I'm already up on the roof. Mark, on the ground,
says anxiously, "Do it next time. Do it later." I'm here; I'm doing it
now. I take loose a metal cable. Something breaks so part of the roof
falls in. On the other side of the roof a second cable is held taut by
being wrapped around a big aluminum ladder before where it's fastened;
when I pry loose the cable end, the ladder falls and smashes apart on
the ground. I say sadly, "Your ladder..." Mark says, "/Your/ ladder."
I've already made a mess; I might as well finish. I lift the bottom
of the antenna mast out of its pipe-base but can't keep the shaft from
falling over before it's all the way out. It bends open the top of the
pipe-base and crashes in the yard.
The roof is torn open in two places. Okay, I've learned my lesson;
I'm not going to do any more today. I'll come back tomorrow and patch
all this up. I hope it doesn't rain tonight.
I see through one of the holes a faded poster for a musical show
coming to town in the early 1970s, starring a singer/guitar-player who
is almost familiar-- he's like a cross between Lyle Lovett and Gary
Trudeau's cartoon character Jimmy Thudpucker. I climb down from the
roof. Mark is coming back from the next yard, where he has found
something he says is mine; he presents it on an upturned trash can lid:
it's a do-it-yourself electronic project book printed in the style of an
early-1900s Sears catalog.
Mark becomes a lumpy old white woman in just a greasy terrycloth
bathing suit top; the woman goes into the house, brings out a cute
golden retriever puppy and gives the puppy to another old woman now
sitting on the porch in a lawn chair. The women cackle over their
collection of live baby animals all piled up on a folding table, and
they talk in drawling old-people-speak about the wonderful urge to
procreate and make and collect baby things of all kinds. I say nothing;
to me, too many of even the cutest animals all pushed together and
breathing and licking on each other are really kind of horrible.
My dreams from Wednesday, 2009-10-28:
First dream. In a long one-floor office building I put on a sock
that somehow only covers my big toe, and the sock is brightly painted to
look like a wooden human toe. Huh. Cool.
Next dream. I have a big pump-type pellet rifle whose solid wood
stock makes it as heavy as a splitting maul. In the back-story of the
dream I've hidden the gun on rocks under the outside lip of a seawall.
With a storm coming, the water level is coming up, so I climb down to
get the gun, and a homeless teenage boy is drugged-asleep down here and
in danger of drowning. I shout, "Get out of there!" The boy wakes up,
jumps to his feet. I grab the gun and run one way to get to a place to
climb up; the boy runs the other way.
Up on top, at the road, two kids climb up from about where I imagine
the boy would have to have gone. Is one of them the one I saw? Or are
they two more kids, and is the boy still down there? Because if he is,
he's dead; the water is slamming against the seawall.
Now I'm walking through a complicated claustrophobic city of clay
buildings, reading a thin folded-card-cover comic book that's all just
pictures inside. I walk onto an uphill ledge around a cliff that opens
out to the right. Monks shuffle along behind and in front of me. /The
same thing is happening in the comic book./ The sky and the cliff
stretch like taffy and pull themselves into each other like being pulled
with taffy hooks, and the monk behind me gets a smug scary bug-eyed
expression on his face, reaches to grab me-- and we're all pulled out
over nothing and fly-fall in the wind. /Just like in the comic book/,
whose cover fills my field of vision, and whose title is --I read this
aloud, with amusement-- /Umgeheben Ausgeleben/ (or maybe /Umgeheben
Ausgefarben/).
(Later, now, writing this down, I just had Babelfish translate those
German-looking terms into English, and they turn out to mean, /Go
around-evenly expenditure lives (or) go around-evenly expenditure
colors./)
Next dream. I'm a kind of civic engineer in a strange city. I carry
my dream-only little boy with me to do my rounds and check on fire
hydrants and various machines that need to be kept running. I know
another government agency has begun to check up on me, so I'm also
looking around for anyone who might be watching me, and I see a
blue-uniformed woman across the street, who looks like actress Angie
Dickinson at about forty years old, when she wore her hair in the shape
of a blonde motorcycle helmet. She opens a street mailbox and pretends
to do some mail business inside it, but she's looking right at me over
the top of the box.
She can tell that I know she's watching me. She looks up to the
building behind me to confirm that someone is watching me from there, so
she can turn away, but she gets the message from whoever's up there that
they're all to close in on me now. I drop my toolbox, hold the little
boy tightly to my chest and fly up in a fun erratic evasive pattern to
avoid being shot.
-end-