Nautical Burrito. Farm Furniture Mine. Kiss Kiss. Dry River Sale. Church Stamps.
Marco McClean
First dream. Some kind of worldwide
diplomatic/solar-flare/electrical crisis has occurred, or
maybe it's just a drill, but everyone on the water in a boat
has to get off. I'm not in a boat, but a boat drifts by and
I pull myself up out of the water and into it; it's a fancy
racing yacht.
I'm the only one in the boat; the others are already on
a rock jetty ahead of it. I drag my feet in the water on
both sides of this big boat to stop it faster than it's
stopping, and I yell to the Reed-of-/Fantastic-Four/ guy on
the jetty, "Does it have a little electric motor? Can you
shut it off? I don't know how!" Reed says /okay/ but stays
on the jetty. I have to find a way to stop the boat on my
own.
I run down the center of a dark, damp-burlap-smelling
warehouse, chasing after the ends of two ropes dragging
along in front of me as two ropes stream by just overhead
the other way; obviously these are the same ropes and they
go over pulleys at the far end. When I get there the ropes
have already slipped through the pulleys. I grab them on
their way back and wrap them around aluminum rain-gutter
downspouts. Here I notice that the high ceiling and walls of
the warehouse are made out to seem like the rigging and high
ropework of an old navy sailing ship on a cloudy day, with
gray and brown horse-blankets for clouds. Is this all for a
play?
Some college-age kids who live here seem nice but
clueless and irresponsible. I ask them if they've seen "that
ad for Taco Bell, you know, some kind of golden turkey
burrito?" Some have, some haven't.
Next dream. A schoolbus is parked, engine running, on a
dirt road through a farm. Hippie kids play harmlessly,
throwing frisbees and running around floppily like Jar-Jar
Binks. It's time to leave, and they all leave without using
the bus; they just go away.
There are rows of potato-size grapes --purple ones and
yellow-green ones-- in the furrows in the fields as though
they grew there with no roots or anything. I take one of
each color for samples (this must be on another planet where
farm plants don't need roots or stems).
It's getting dark. Car lights come up the road toward
the farm. I yell, "Mayday! Mayday!" and hurry to slam shut
all the long, sliding doors around the schoolbus. I jump in
and lurch the bus forward to turn around; I want to be going
the other way on the road when the car gets here, as though
the bus had never stopped. I bump over a dirt mound next to
a barn, bump the bus over bookcases, filing cabinets-- I
almost roll over the edge of a black chasm, but get the bus
turned around and...
I'm going the wrong way again, the way I just turned
away from going, so again I have to turn around. This time I
know about the furniture. I jump on foot between the desks
and cabinets and stainless-steel food-prep tables. I'm
inside a /mine/ of school furniture, a geode lined with
crystals of furniture, the source of all these things.
Back at the original position on the farm, new people, a
crowd of a later, rude, selfish breed of hippies has
stripped the furrows of all fruit as far as you can see. I
put my hand on the left side of my face and say, "Oh, God!"
like Jackie Gleason in /The Honeymooners/ seeing that
something private and embarrassing has become common
knowledge.
Next dream. Juanita and I are kissing standing up in a
featureless environment like the white jail hospital in the
movie /THX1138/. Something scared her and I came to help,
and there's nothing I can do about whatever's wrong, and
we're just standing here kissing and kissing.
Next dream. I drive back up along a strange rural road
that I almost-but-not-quite remember having come down a
short while ago; I want to get to the little town (that's
only a cafe and two houses) to put up some signs so people
will come to a yard sale at the dried-up river. Someone has
died and all his things are out at the river.
One of the houses is being renovated by a crew of people
who used to work at Brannon's restaurant. I almost run over
an Oriental girl who might be Lorraine Hee as a young woman
--she rushes out of the house and past the gas pumps without
looking where she's going; she's yelling orders back at
someone inside the house. There's something here about a dog
or two dogs. They go with the house, to whoever moves in.
Fire department dogs.
Now I'm at an empty grocery-store loading dock back at
the dry river, having a serious talk with Tim about whether
I'll ever work for him again. He proposes that I put up and
paint some shelves. But in the dream I've already agreed to
work for Stan at Down Home Foods. I agree to make the
shelves, but I'll have to tell Stan. Tim startles and looks
down, horrified and dismayed, at his knee; he's recently had
surgery and the glue is already coming undone-- the
replacement knee joint (a long, flat, plastic, sauce-serving
spoon) is beginning to flap loose under the flesh; it pulses
out against the knee of his pants. I tell him to sit down.
I'll bicycle back to the the little crossroads town, get my
car from the gas station, come back and drive him to the
hospital.
He insists on riding in my car to go /get/ my car. (!)
"Tim, please, just stay there. Don't bend anything. I'll be
back in half an hour." I ride away uphill on my bike.
Jacques Helfer, who for many years before he died was the
horrible right-wing old busybody of Mendocino, stands next
to the road and scowls as I go by. I know he's dead; it
makes me-- not /happy/ to see him, but interested in how
someone can be unhappy all his life and then be unhappy dead
too. It's too bad, of course, but it's interesting on the
face of it.
Next dream. I'm shown a giant map of the world made out
of what I think of as real materials: dirt for the land,
water for the ocean, and --when my view zooms in really
close-- human body hair for seaweed, drifting just under the
surface, growing from the underwater continental shelves.
My fisheye-lens view pogo-sticks around at random while
an announcer reads economic news in a British accent. I pay
no attention until he says, "Fifty percent of all new trade
is occurring in South America." Well, that's not possible.
"Seventy-five percent in Venezuela." Seventy-five percent
what? New trade? When my view bounces to where I can see
Venezuela, it fills, graphlike, three-quarters-full
(northward from south) with red over green.
I zoom in on a tiny island in a cluster of islands just
west of France as I'm told this island is technically part
of South America. (That would explain how fifty percent of
all new trade is occurring in South America; they just add
countries to what they call South America until they account
for fifty percent of all trade.) My view gets more and more
magnified as I crash down into the map-water and float
around in waving hair, like the hair on my forearm when my
arm is a quarter-inch underwater, but with each hair as long
as a person is tall. You know, seaweed.
I'm a member of a sloppy, careless expedition to shoot
video for a lowbrow teevee science show; we're like the
Geraldo Rivera version of Jacques Cousteau. About a dozen of
us swim away from shore with our lights and cameras and
things on long cables. A Chinese scientist is grabbed around
the waist by a six-foot-long intelligent human hair and
jerked this way and that in the water. He gurgles and
bubbles and screams and his face turns red. He blows blood
from his nose. He's pulled under, and the hell with him.
/Did you get that?/ Cameraman nods happily, treading water.
/Good, good./
We all swim back to the muddy, rocky beach. As I reach
the shore, the professor who's running the show (Chad
Everett as he appeared in the early-'70s /Medical Center/)
grabs me by my big toe. I sit down on a patch of gravel and
tell him to let go. He thinks he's being funny; he won't let
go. Others turn their attention this way. I say, "I mean it.
Let go." He laughs and starts pulling me back into the
water. I jerk my foot away, pick him up, upright, by both
his ankles and slap-bang him down onto the beach like a
spatula! I stomp on him. His head turns into a two-color
dishwashing scrubby-sponge, and I grind his head --this
flat, square sponge-- into the muddy gravel with my heel,
shouting, "/Just keep your fucking hands to yourself! Got
it?/"
Hmm, maybe I shouldn't kill him with so many thousands
of people watching the live documentary we're making, and
the camera-people looking right at me. I step off him. I
think about squeezing his head in the water to wash the mud
out.
Next dream. In a hat-check room off the side of the
upstairs hall in a big, modern church, Leona Walden (local
Mendocino artist) is xeroxing some photographs through
white-dot halftone plastic to make halftones for use in the
Mendocino Art Center's /Arts & Entertainment/ magazine. She
says to me, "See this picture?"
Now I'm in a busy print lab laying out my old paper on
flats. I have two long, sad obituaries. Fit them both on the
same page? Why not. I realize that the subjects of the
obituaries are the people in the photos Leona Walden showed
me: an old black woman and her white friend, like a black
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. /I should have asked for
copies of the halftones Leona was making./
An prick of an investor in this print lab comes in-- I
leave before he sees me; I owe him money. Again in the
hat-check room, this time I see a young version of the dead
black woman and her dead white girlfriend; they're both
cute, in their twenties.
Downstairs on the way out I stop to buy a 25-cent
postage stamp at the baptismal font. I give a one-dollar
bill to the clerk-- the same black girl, who seems harried.
It's a very busy time for her, when everyone leaves the
church and buys a stamp.
Can I have my change, please? The girl says, "Dig the
fives out of there." She points at a cigar box bulging with
cash, mostly ones, it looks like. /Fives?/ Did I give her a
ten instead of a one? But then I'd only get one five back--
a five, four ones and three quarters. I know I didn't give
her a twenty... I have a quarter. I toss it into the
birdbath-thing and rummage through the cigar box for two
fives to get my ten back. The crowd thins out so there are
only five or six people left. A businessman-type stands
close behind me, watching over my shoulder as I handle the
money; he's digging his chin painfully into the muscle next
to my neck. I tell him, without turning to look at him, to
keep his distance.
He walks around the little baptism nook acting all
snubbed and hurt. He bitterly whispers something to his
friend, working himself up into an angry state.
I finally find two fives, fold them into my wallet,
ignore the guy.
He says to the room, "But I /don't need/ to have my ass
nailed to the wall and taped!" (!)
I say gently, deliberately being infuriatingly
reasonable, "There's a qualitative difference between having
your ass nailed to the wall and taped, and my simply
insisting that you not touch me."
He says, "Huh?"
I say, "What part of what I said don't you understand?
...See ya later-- or not." As I go out the side-back door of
the church I sense the man is about to hurry after me. I run
as fast as I can in zories across the back of the church
instead of walking out to my car, and I make it around the
other corner before the man can see where I went. All is
calm. I hear a lawnmower in the distance. I'll take a nice
walk around this pastel, spotless housing development and
come back, get the car and leave later, after the hot-headed
goof is gone for sure.
I feel like the king of all cleverness.
-30-
Gnarlodious
My dreams from Monday morning, 12/31/1:
Start spectrum 3:25:32 AM
frame 0513299413 *339 glob(globe)*
I'm shown a giant map of the world made out
of what I think of as real materials: dirt for the land,
water for the ocean, and --when my view zooms in really
close-- human body hair for seaweed, drifting just under the
surface, growing from the underwater continental shelves.
frame 8513299413*558 heard*
My fisheye-lens view pogo-sticks around at random while
an announcer reads economic news in a British accent. I pay
no attention until he says, "Fifty percent of all new trade
is occurring in South America." Well, that's not possible.
"Seventy-five percent in Venezuela." Seventy-five percent
what? New trade?
NOTE:These two frames were written as one
frame 0813299413
When my view bounces to where I can see
Venezuela, it fills, graphlike, three-quarters-full
(northward from south) with red over green.
frame 5413299413
I zoom in on a tiny island in a cluster of islands just
west of France as I'm told this island is technically part
of South America. (That would explain how fifty percent of
all new trade is occurring in South America; they just add
countries to what they call South America *935 mate with* until they account
for fifty percent of all trade.) *1109 unit* My view gets more and more *194
see in*
magnified as I crash down into the map-water and float
around in waving hair, like the hair on my forearm when my
arm is a quarter-inch underwater, but with each hair as long
as a person is tall. You know, seaweed.
frame 8413299413
I'm a member of a sloppy, careless expedition to shoot
video for a lowbrow teevee science show; we're like the
Geraldo Rivera version of Jacques Cousteau. About a dozen of
us swim away from shore with our lights and cameras and
things on long cables. A Chinese *2103 there for* scientist *119 craft,293,
solve what* is grabbed around
the waist by a six-foot-long intelligent human hair and
jerked *814 pull in* this way and that in the water.*183 wind up* He
gurgles and
bubbles and screams and his face turns red. He blows blood *3308 ripe*
from his nose. He's pulled under, and the hell with him.
/Did you get that?/ Cameraman nods happily, treading water.
/Good, good./
frame 2513299413 *425 dig in
We all swim back to the muddy, rocky beach. As I reach
the shore, the professor who's running the show (Chad
Everett as he appeared in the early-'70s /Medical Center/)
grabs me by my big toe. *514 grasp of* I sit down on a patch of gravel and
tell him to let go. He thinks he's being funny; he won't let
go. Others turn their attention this way. I say, "I mean it.
Let go." He laughs and starts pulling me back into the
water. I jerk my foot away, pick him up, upright, by both
his ankles and slap-bang *5104 flap at* him down onto the beach like a
spatula! I stomp on him. His head turns into a two-color
dishwashing scrubby-sponge, and I grind his head --this
flat, square sponge-- into the muddy gravel with my heel,
shouting, "/Just keep your fucking hands to yourself! Got
it?/" *934 had a fit in, 9303 temper to
frame 4413299413
Hmm, maybe I shouldn't kill *443 (expire)* him with so many thousands
of people watching the live documentary we're making, and
the camera-people looking right at me *14 serve(observe)*. I step off him. I
think about squeezing his head in the water to wash the mud
out.
End 3:35:54 AM 7 frames