Gravity. Pretty But High. Nordic Ski Dorks. Climbing Food. Ice-Age SoCal. Metal Charades.
Marco McClean
First dream. I'm walking downhill, diagonally down a roadcut
embankment to an empty stretch of Highway 1, which is where the
middle of Fort Bragg (CA) should be. Someone behind me in the
Safeway grocery store is the person who stays in the ship
circling the planet while the explorers land and explore. It
occurs to me that this would be a lot more realistic if the
gravity were shown to be weaker --this is a small planet-- so I
turn around and hop back up in lazy, twenty-foot hops.
The Safeway entryway is here an arch that extends over part
of the parking lot. An unfamiliar butch version of musician
Margie Crowningshield is selling something to everyone who
drives through; you have to pay or you can't put your car here.
I say, "Would you kiss me?" She says, "What, like a romantic
thing?" I say, "Sure, why not." She gingerly hugs me sideways,
the way you hug a relative you wish you didn't have to.
Inside Safeway I have Margie's keys on a keychain that folds
out of a green metal turtle shell. It's ten or fifteen minutes
into the second act of the performance (?) and I have to be back
for a whole section of the show that I do by myself. How can I
get back in time? /Don't worry about it. If you couldn't get
back in time, you wouldn't have left to come here./ Still, I
worry.
Next dream. I'm on an observation deck like the aisle at the
top of the stairs at KMFB, but the windows that in real life
look in on the broadcast booth here look out on a tropical
seascape. Mitch and I face out the window, our foreheads pressed
against it. The singer behind us says, "At least we have
something to do."
I turn to see what she means. She's a vivid, sharp-featured
blonde with black eyebrows. She talks to me in high-speed
amphetamine gobbledegook. I say, "Slow down." She reels off
another several dozen meaningless syllables. I say, "I can't
understand you." Still smiling she starts again and this time
doesn't stop. I say, "Tell me later. /Later./" She stops,
says, "No-- because--" and starts again-- blah blah
blahblahblah-- faster and faster until her lips and teeth blur
to fan-blade near-invisibility.
Next dream. Juanita and I are skiing at a place I don't
recognize. My clothes are inadequate. We look out over the bowl
of this run. /I'm cold./ I go back to where we got off the
chairlift, thinking I'll get something, but-- what?
I've looked away from Juanita and now she's gone. Oh, well.
Back at the lip, the place is very crowded. A Chinese
schoolteacher directs his flock of tiny schoolchildren to go
down single-file. I see where everyone else seems to be going,
then avoid that way, go down to the left, to ski across to the
next lift, but at the bottom is a rocky dirt path; no snow. I
hop and run on my skis on the dirt. Tall, arrogant, Nordic types
come from behind and pass me, yelling back and forth among
themselves in German accents.
Next dream. Two hobbits look at a painting of two blurry
tiny people climbing, hanging nearly upside-down, up the
fluted-out part of an impossibly high cliff that's furred with
bristly shrubs. One hobbit tries to convince the other that the
people in the painting are they themselves, and that they must
climb up and back down this cliff soon in the course of their
adventure.
Now it's Juanita and I who must climb it. I read the
instructions and check them off as we prepare. Things must be
packed: thick slices of eggplant, two bananas (peeled to save
weight), etc. And one (1) drinking glass. Juanita wants to
bring a heavy octagonal pint glass; I show her a better choice,
a big pastel-blue plastic salt shaker with the top off. She
says, "But it's plastic." I say, "It's /light/. Look at the
painting again. Look what we have to do."
Next dream. KMFB's station manager Bob and I are in a
Southern California seaside room with big sliding windows all
around. It's cold; fluffy snow begins to slant down from the
north. I say, "I'd better close the windows." I slide them
closed, wedge perspex panels into the frames on the room side of
the windows, then seal air leaks around the perspex with clear
packing tape.
In back of a wooden cubby rack I find string-ball
marionettes bundled in individual crinkly cellophane bags. I
find a coin-collector's slot board about a third full of
coin-size recorded media of old radio shows-- mine, Verge
Belanger's, some KMUD and KHUM nights, and some not marked. I
find brightly-colored t-shirts in small size only, in a shoebox
labeled, "For the boy."
Next dream. Juanita and I come down from our dream-only
trailer house on a mountain in like Virginia to two barns that
are open and facing each other, that shelter scattered pieces of
/old/ electronic equipment. Somehow, even though we've only been
here a moment, Juanita has constructed a shortwave antenna of
three /heavy/ colored-plastic-coated wires stretched from
insulators screwed to a stump; they go diagonally up into an oak
tree about a hundred feet away.
Now Juanita's gone and the antenna and the old electronic
things belong to my friend Mark, who in the dream owns the whole
mountain and is our landlord. Mark shows up, quiet --he won't
speak; he's both very angry and very sad. And there's something
creepy about his eyes. The iris of each of his eyes is a bulging
skin-mole-like button the size of a penny, and the pupils are
the centers of these soft buttons pulled in by thread, maybe, or
by the optic nerve. He says something I can't make out, then the
word /cornea/.
He sells some kind of folded-up yarn-loom thing to visitors
to this yard sale --it's a yard sale-- and sells six-foot-long
pipe cleaners with ski bindings to bassist Lenny Laks. I say to
Lenny, "Int'resting shirts." These are another thing Lenny has
bought: folded-shirt shapes cut out of closed-cell foam
insulation.
Mark becomes all kinds of different broken metal robot
things, slams his head (the head of the metal thing he is at the
moment) on the ground again and again like pounding a hammer,
and so conveys via an evolving game of charades that 1. /I/
caused his eye injury (one of his mole-button eyes is pushed
in); 2. the damage is permanent; 3. I did it by fiddling with a
Phillips shortwave receiver last night and leaving it on,
leaving the tubes hot, so he got an explosive electric shock in
his eye when he came along in the morning and opened the case
and stuck his hands in; and 4. he wants me to move out, move
from my trailer house atop the mountain and go far away from
him; he hates me that much.
I keep looking at his creepy eyes. The damaged, blind one is
particularly repulsively fascinating, like, uh-- like a morbidly
obese woman poised on the edge of vomiting toward you through
Indian-corn teeth.
Note: I woke and slept again between the last several
dreams. Each time I woke it was to a /loud/ soundscape in the
real world, whose main theme was a nonstop bellowing, shrieking,
drunken quarrel between the man and woman in a house behind
Juanita's, on the next street over. (The gravel-voiced woman
must have a new boyfriend; with the last guy, last year, you
could mostly only hear her side of the argument; it used to be
as if she were on the phone.)
Another group of people nearby developed a boisterous
drinking party. Dogs barked in relays. Garbage trucks beeped and
hooted, backing up to crash into every dumpster on both streets,
setting off car alarms. Police and fire vehicles blew their
sirens, driving to emergencies in several directions, and borate
bombers shook the building with their tremendous thrumming as
they flew over from nearby airfields to fight the wildfires at
the north end of the county. Oh, and babies wailed like
fingernails on a blackboard, of course, and phones rang. Labor
Day in the suburbs.
How different it'll all be when the oil runs out.
-end-
Dick Silk
"Marco McClean" <me...@mcn.org> wrote in message
news:413D77EA...@mcn.org...
<a LOT of stuff, snipped>
Marco:
Did you once tell me that you work in a radio station? If so, doing what?
I have a rather interesting idea that just popped into my head, relating to
your volumes of dream postings.
Marco McClean
> Marco:
> Did you once tell me that you work in a radio station? If so, doing what?
KMFB, Mendocino. I repair electronics devices (telephone system, computers,
audio gear), set up remote studios and invent and build things out of surplus
junk to solve problems and do new things. Also I do a live mostly-written-word
show every Friday night from 10pm to around 5am. On my show I read what people
have emailed or snailmailed to me, and the juicy bits of whatever I've been
reading during the week, including newspaper columns, storybooks, newsletters
and articles from the web, and I play recorded serial radio drama and science
fiction from the World War Two era and just after. Sometimes musicians will
stop by and play. A man comes just about every week to present the latest
evidence he's uncovered that Edward de Vere wrote all the plays and sonnets of
Shakespeare. I take the occasional telephone call. Near the end I read my dream
journal. Then I play records while I clean up my mess.
> I have a rather interesting idea that just popped into my head, relating to
> your volumes of dream postings.
Great. Let's hear it.