War And Shit-Carrots. Spare Socks. They Misread Her. Magical-Weather Defense Mats. Chinatown. Suffocation. The Steve Martin Pepsi Journey Website. Lawyer's Beguine.
Marco McClean
First dream. I and some other people are running flat-out on a hard
dirt school playground that, in another superimposed world, follows
sweeping curves of the lips of crevasses that go down and down and have
other levels with people below; in this other world a war is happening.
There's something about Barbara Champion in the crevasse world that
I'm entirely in now. Barbara Champion's place is in one of the
under-levels (that now I see clearly to be all on the design of the set
of Mendocino Theatre Company's recent production of Susan Ruhl's play
/Eurydice/. Just like the layers of levels, there are layers and layers
of meeting agendas on animation cels for war plans. /Why does everyone
everywhere always have to be fighting?/
Now I'm in a school that's spread out in a jungle. There's firelight
and activity far off to one side. The outhouse is built on a dead
truck's bed. I get in and pull decomposing greenish plastic shower
curtains to try to cover up the opening out the back, all the while
comically explaining to a sympathetic girl next to the truck what I'm
doing. "Here I am pulling the curtains... and trying to unfold the
curtains without cracking them apart..." The girl is in plain sight;
there are no sides on the truck. She says, "Anybody can understand
that," and she politely turns away.
There's no place to sit, but there's a flimsy folding toilet frame
made of fastened-together toilet-seat crescents. If people come through
the jungle to the right, they'll see what I'm doing. Oh, well; I have
to. I force my belly empty like emptying a toothpaste tube, and use a
pocket flashlight to see to gather all my shit up on an abandoned
(decomposed) vinyl three-ring binder. The shit is in long tubes of
familiar consistency and color and also there are /whole ten-inch-long
carrots/.
The girl is now in the truck bed with me, crouching down, running
water from a hose to wash her hands. I throw the last of the shit (and
carrots) out of the truck bed, into the trees and plants, and I join the
girl in washing hands. I say, "That is the last time I'll ever eat a
carrot." The girl nods in agreement, carefully cleaning under her
fingernails.
Next dream. We evacuating a camp (previously safe, now dangerous),
in the center of a small strange continent. (There's a whole
nebulous-because-not-important-while-in-danger back-story about what
world we're on and why we're here.) We collect up paddles and get in two
dory-size boats and start off down a river to get to the coast the river
seems like it's headed for. I realize that I have only the clothes I'm
wearing and one spare pair of socks for a journey that might take
months, and that's okay-- we're all in the same boat, so to speak. And
the other boat.
Next dream. A strange man calls another man on the telephone so
/Juanita/ can apologize. Juanita is against this. The call connects and
the man offers the phone to Juanita. She takes it up and isn't even
slightly contrite; she's even a kind of mean I've never seen. I'm amused
and so fond of her; I could have told the man he couldn't make her
apologize for something she isn't sorry for. I smile in case she looks
over at me; we all need her to make this right, but if it means fibbing
that she's responsible for the trouble, that's out. Think of another
way, people.
My dream from Saturday, 2009-12-12:
My point of view moves around in a leaky house in a pounding
rainstorm. I see a closeup view of a room where the thick bluish rug has
rucked up into a kind of dam; the dam rolls over, breaks, and the water
drains down the hallway and into either a downstairs garage or the
basement.
A little man like Doctor Zalenka of /Stargate Atlantis/ comes in
from a suddenly calm blue afternoon. We talk in gibberish for awhile,
then I take his wrist and fly him out, up over a back lawn, leftward and
over a line of beach houses.
Our flight becomes indoors and ends in a busy restaurant that's in a
state of disarray over something erratic being wrong with the weather.
Zalenka becomes someone else, just one of the restaurant patrons, and
wanders away. I wait in the crowded kitchen for the cook guy to come
back from where I've sent him out scouting and tell me about the
availability of magical thick felt mats I need for reinforcing the roof
against another weird partly magical storm.
It gets more and more crowded in the kitchen. A martinet manager boy
comes in to make trouble. I see from outside the situation as the /I/ in
the room, wearing a flexible plastic costume techno-armor-disguise
shirt, punches the manager boy twice in the face then /thumps/ him in
the chest and knocks him down.
I take over for the decisive but scary /I/ who did that, and I start
upstairs to check the roof again. Maybe the other guy already has the
mats up there.
My dreams from Sunday, 2009-12-13:
First dream. I come to myself driving a car, following a tiny
screen's directions to a mountain lake (Tahoe?). Several others are in
the car with me. We come through a pass and the road makes a miles-long
gentle sweep to the right in a flat valley between blue rock hills.
We come to a town whose low skyline is dominated by billboards and
business signs, all for food. We pass a school and are enveloped in the
town; I say, "Well, there's a school, and these signs all seem to have
something to do with food, so that's a good sign-- we won't starve."
An Oriental version of Juanita and I go into a store --a music
store?-- in like this town's Chinatown area. I'm attracted to a bin of
tiny-planetary-gear steampunk-design tuning pegs for string instruments.
There's one card of pegs left, and two pegs are left on the card; the
card is marked /2.85/ in pen-- so, $2.85 each peg? or for both?
A fat boy in a motorized wheelchair drops something plastic and gets
out of the wheelchair to pick it up, himself.
The counter girl says, "Five-fifty." I think that means the 2.85 is
for each peg and I'm getting a slight discount for buying both. I give
the girl a five-dollar bill and drop on the floor and pick up a small
mountain of all kinds of different change. Here are two quarters. Okay,
but where did the tuning pegs go?
The girl comes back from wherever she went, with two cards of eight
or sixteen pegs each. I say, "This doesn't seem right." She says,
"Fifty-five dollars." (So she brought fifty-five dollars worth of tuning
pegs.) I say, "I gave you a five and fifty cents." She says, "You gave
me a fifty-dollar bill." (!)
Oriental tourists bunch up behind me at the counter. I say to them,
"This is gonna be awhile." They all leave. I say to the counter girl,
"I gave you a five." She says, "/Fifty./" I say, "Look at the
receipt."
Several kids are behind the counter now; they all go to get the
receipt from wherever the girl got the pegs from. They come back, show
it-- it's a two-foot-long strip of tiny advertisements for everything I
ever bought on the subject of musical instruments. I say, "Where's the
tuning pegs?" A boy says, "Right there," and points at something that
isn't tuning pegs. I say, "No." They all stand there.
I'm feeling a little frustrated. I say, "Okay, I gave you fifty-five
dollars? Then, here: I'm returning these parts. Refund my money." (!)
They go through the process of this, involving spreading out behind the
counter and passive-aggressively wasting time. A black boy starts slowly
counting out money: "One... two..." I become worried that he'll
eventually count out two dollars or so for each of the now total of
sixteen pegs and stop at, of course, less than fifty dollars (I'm
assuming now that I did actually give the girl a fifty and not a five)
and that means I'll be cheated, and they'll laugh.
I say, "Just-- hold it a second." The counting boy says, "This is
the historical method of doing it." (Meaning, of counting out money.) I
say, "Go ahead, then."
A black boy with Oriental eyes, sitting up in a niche in the wall
has a big two-ended pickle jar of some kind of muddy jelly around his
long neck, that's full up to just under his nose. He's waking up after
being asleep (or in a medically-induced coma) for a long time. Some of
the kids go to help him. They pull the jar off over his head, which gets
slime all in his eyes and ears and hair. He slumps forward and they
catch him. He sits back up, smiling enormously-- he was faking it;
there's nothing wrong with him, and he's been enjoying watching everyone
fuck with me at the counter about the tuning pegs.
Juanita reappears --I don't know where she went-- and she grasps the
situation instantly. She gives me a look like, /It's Chinatown, Jake./
You know, /You can't win this nor figure it out. Let's get outta here./
Next. A sequence of short, confusing, fascinating image vignettes
play on my unsatisfyable worry that my woodstove is burning up all the
oxygen in my house and replacing it with carbon monoxide, and
consequently my brain is being ruined.
I woke up and checked the stove. It was fine. I opened the kitchen
window and went back to bed.
Asleep again. Next dream. A person like Steve Martin is driving a
car on a coastal highway. He turns off the road and stops, bumping
gently against a brick pillar in a narrow driveways' brick wall. He
edges back and forth, gets the car back out onto the road, starts off
again, going the other way. A comic/dramatic
Harrison-Ford-/Blade-Runner/-like narrator's voice is going the whole
time. Also in my field of view a gif-file/billboard-shape plays a
constantly-flipping (pages turning upward) glittering
flattened-Pepsi-can image.
I'm on foot in the road to parking-lot in the tourist area of a
seaside industrial town. I put my old pen on the curb next to where
(retroactively) I put down (hours ago) my pencil and the torn-out
notepaper I was (I am) doing the webpage/cereal-box numbers/crossword
puzzle on. To solve the next problem, I need to know the local zip code.
Is it like the number I've come up with in the puzzle? (Three digit
number starting with 5.) I ask some tourists. They try to help by asking
/me/ questions to determine if I need medical help.
A huge friendly shaggy gray-black horse has its neck all twisted
around, but it doesn't seem to be in pain. I pet it and massage its
neck. (Awww, poor thing.) Near the door of an old-fashioned gas station
another horse comes to me; it becomes a little long-nose dog and
silently demands to be petted. An old but ramrod-straight Scottish man,
my old friend in the back-story of the dream, comes to the gas station
office and approves of my being good to the dog. I say, "Watch this,"
and I gesture to the dog to show the man what it showed me. It sits up,
leans its head back and /talks/ in one-syllable words about something
across the street behind it that interests it. It wants to go
investigate. I turn my hands up to the Scottish man --/Whatcha gonna
do?/-- and I go with the dog to see what it is that's so important.
It'll probably just turn out to be another dog; that's what dogs care
about most.
My dreams from Monday, 2009-12-14:
First dream. I fly northwest over low mountains to a seaside
community of flat-roofed pastel buildings and houses. Some children see
me in the air and chase after me. My flying power weakens so I can only
be five or ten feet up, and this lets a horrible persistent little girl
almost catch me as I dodge in and out of carports and across people's
yards. I end up slapping the girl's face with a rolled-up newspaper to
discourage her.
I can fly a little higher now, but helicopters are out looking for
me, so I have to stay under things in the general landscape. I go to the
sea to try to hide in the jumbled rocks. Here's a tourist attraction of
caves at water level that once were part of a giant ship. I go in and
pretend to have been here all along, which would be perfect except that
the tide is coming in and an alarm sounds for the end of the
museum-viewing day. Still, I continue southward through the main
corridor as the water rises.
There's a food buffet in a part of the museum that's on stilts.
I'm flying in the open air again, so subject to being caught, but
now I can be mostly invisible. I have to go through a place where
soldiers stand in two rows across a courtyard, practicing skeet-shooting
using crossbows. This is dangerous but fun, dodging away from wherever a
soldier raises a crossbow. They're in more danger than I am; they're
shooting right across at each other.
Next dream. At night in a dim suite of unpainted-wood offices a
woman researcher in one office is working, compiling the results of her
study. In the next office, a politician/lawyer character has written a
love song all about kissing. (He's participating in the study.) He sits
at his desk, reading from his notepad and singing in pleasant
Bing-Crosby-like tones. For his song he's used the tune of /Begin the
Beguine/. I hum along to demonstrate to him and to the researcher that
he only wrote the words, not the music. She'll take that into account;
she can still use his song.
Dry redwood dust in the air tickles my throat. I wouldn't be able to
work in here. I'd paint it.
-end-