Waking Finnegan

Spinal Tap Dream

2006-07-15T16:38:00.000+02:00

I'm on a circus-sized swing tethered to something unseen above---feeling a mighty belly-rush as I oscillate forward, my toes stretching at the pendulum crest to make physical contact with the stuccoed wall against which is projected the lasar-light Hubbell images of phosphorescent stars and shadowy planets.

There is an uncanniness about the perspectival changes. As I swing away from the projection, the heavens become much more than a convincing illusion---the sudden display of starry light sends a tremendous sparkling megawatt charge through my spine. When the swing reaches the hump at the back of the crest, all is startlingly Big Bang, with time-lapse shifts of slivered, quartered, halved and gibbous moons encircling other worlds in an astounding and never-ending multi-dimentional complexity.

As I once again swing into my downward arc I make the sudden decision to close my eyes and let go of the ropes just like I use to do at the beach. But this time I'm letting go with no sand in sight. I am certain that if I let go while holding on to that intergalactic vista, that I'll be able to land on one of those other worlds.

Nested in the vault of my lids I lose my gravitational center. With a sudden dread, I realize that wherever I land will now be my grave. I'm holding my breath and cringing, knowing it will all end in a split second. I am spinning down mental spiral that makes me dizzy.

But a billion split seconds pass---the g-force tug on my guts and the bloodrushing thrill of the fall goes on and on until the moment I realize "I'm far past the point where I should have hit the ground". When I finally open my eyes, I realize I'm tethered to a rubber chain "bungee cord" connected to a deep-sea bathyshere. Someone inside is waving at me. Is it a greeting or a valediction?

A solar wind roaring by like a desert train while I try to get a fix on whether I'm right side up or upside down. I wonder "Is this tether tightening or going slack?"

But I succumb to an amniotic, weightless limbo where worries don't worry. It's all as clear as those distant stars that I can travel forever in this fractal dream by orbiting myself---that this is a small taste of what the soul is capable of when it leaves the body for good.

Note: I woke up this morning after having battled a herniated disc. It had me coiled in its grip like a mean snake for nearly a month. I'd finally fallen asleep last night after endless, excruciating hours spent wondering if this were the rare sort of pain women felt while giving birth to octuplets.

When I (finally) awoke to the bird reveille, my bed was soaked in sweat.
I felt like a boneless chicken who'd just wrestled with a fox...and won.

Nota Bene: My chiropractor warned me that the fox is likely to return disguised as boa constrictor.

Buckminster Fooler Dream

2006-06-14T17:51:00.000+02:00

I'm on some Greek island (Patmos? Samos?) leading an island "discovery" tour for a group of hearty old women folk from my grandmother's retirement home. I'm in the main dining hall of our chartered hotel picking up little snippets of hysterical giddyapchatterbuzz from a group of tour veterans dressed in travel khakis and pith helmets. They are also smorgasbord connoisseurs oohing and ahhing about the impressive luncheon spread before us: barrel o'pickles and pies and gelati for the mode along with open boxes of glazed and sprinkled Winchell's doughnuts, macaroni and potato salads on ice butted up against a massive bulwark of stacked up lunch meats: grouchy sausages, pork-and-roast beef, bratwurst, liverwurst, blood sausage, kalbsleberwurst, pastrami and mortadella and more mortadella and more pastrami. Long, hollowed-out loaves of bread looking like canoes are filled with skulking little finger sausages. "These are the terrible offspring of the worst wursts. BRATWURSTS! Und das pumpernickel mit dem family crests are branded onto zer bellies!" I jot this thought down in my memory for the big speech I'm to deliver sometime later. I'm jocular---"And some of these breads have finger-indented "handles" that each baker presses into them in order to create a certain quaint 'pre-golf era' medieval effect" Dungeons! Truncheons! Bludgeons! Cudgels! FORE!

I slip out of everyone's view to get a better glimpse of those great wheels of Parmesan, Gruyere and Emmentaler I'd spied when I first stepped into the dining hall. Up close they are all branded with what seem to be intricate bird-of-prey ensigns. All of them sit like hulking sentinels atop reams of paper. Office documents, magazines and newspapers from every kiosk in the world. The table of cheese-weighted paper goes on and on and on. Dumbfounded, I run across a familiar edition of Life (Kennedy assassinated! Oh no!) But I notice that the date is wrong. It reads "November 22, 1962" (here my distracted dream mind shifts back to an old boyhood fish tale arguement about R.C. actually seeing a WWII copper penny. "Was it or was it not in mint condition?---You lie!" I check to see that nobody is looking and begin gingerly unwedging Kennedy's face out from under the heavy stack. "Don't forget: The value is far greater depending on the condition" But I pull too hard and wind up on my ass with half of John F's. face in my hands.

This jerking movement triggers an seismic reaction which has me ducking for cover with dumbell cheeses and a billion words come dropping down on me with a terrible thud. I'm hurt. No, I'm not. No, it's landed on the foot of my sixth-grade teacher Miss Shaefer, who lets out a terrible, bone-shattering caterwaul. Then silence.

With everyone looking on, she begins sobbing, and all the attention is turned towards me, the leader of all this shit.

I slip and fall in the middle of the horn of plenty big mess, but finally gain my footing so that I can save face with an apology.

But she's not having any of it. She's clearly not a member of my group. She's got on Raggety-Anne Girlscout clothes. She's no longer that hell-raisin', bug-eyed, spark-shooting Nazi teacher I once dreamed of dousing with sulfuric acid. She's just a withered, toothless old bag lady. Christ, what a fuckin' world I live in!

She's rising up in tatters like a scarecrow phoenix, one hand slowly wagging her crooked index finger at me like a broken metronome. She isn't hurt anymore.

I ask her sarcastically, "Have you seen my Life?", but she says nothing. Instead she gives me a glassy-eyed drunken stare and starts chortling about all her hundreds and hundreds of former students. "And you all really believed that school was out?"

As Miss Shaefer continues to menace me, a woman I mistake for one of my mother's friends---or is it one of my grandmother's?---tries to decoy Miss Shaefer by whooping and pointing at some other commotion going on behind a curtained door. "Teacher, may I go to the bathroom?"

I'm the leader of the tour once again, everyone pressing me forward past the curtains to see what all the brouhaha is about. The lady who did the decoying gives me an "I've got your back" wink and smile. She isn't my mother's friend, she's my aunt Mary. I go up to her for a hug and realize that she's got the sweetest, noblest, most soulful face imaginable. Those eyes, my god! I realize a whole universe left us when she died. And then she leaves again, but this time through a side door.

Now I am in my elementary school auditorium and quite lucid about Buckminster Fuller who, on this "elementary" stage, is giving the same dymaxion demonstration that I witnessed on another stage in my life when I was in college. He's overseeing a loony procession of puffy breads like Yorkshire puddings. The little pastries are being shuttled on conveyors, puffing up and down like miniature bellows round his spotlit figure.

I joke to myself about this guy being "Buckminster Fooler" and "The Fooler Brushman" He's speaking in scientific ellipses, swinging his arms and sweating profusely all over the puddings. I'm wondering how this Bucky bread would go with the lunch meat and cheese and what sort of dressing to use.

Then just before I awake, something tells me there's a connection between the energy of those spry old ladies and Bucky's pastry puddings.

Lemon Song Dream

2006-05-21T10:21:00.000+02:00

A tilted cityscape of mixed-era autos along the strand---filmic black and white Wrigley's Spearmint youthful carefree barbeque enjoyment of halcyon summers. Beach Nuts!

News warnings interspersed with temple gongs marking the hour. Trying to count out the seconds along with the analog second hand to see if the radio's accurate: "...one thousand and one, one thousand and two"...tick...tick...tick. Look up to see I'm in Wrong City. I was heading to Pasadena I'm sure. Or was I heading to Sears in Santa Monica?

The Streamline Moderne architectural splendor of Macy's is right around the corner, but when I turn it there is no Macy's. "Wha...?..should to be right...should be there. No wait. Could I be on the wrong corner? Gotta back-track. In my mental rewind, I'm back in "real" dream time, driving where I think I was. "I parked my car after turning at 4th Street, here, then went up to level 2 there then went downstairs and turned right (?) towards the beach which is aha right where it should be. And so where the hell is Macy's?

Out among the jostling crowd I bump into P, wife of R. She's no longer the standoffish woman I'd been put off by long ago. Now a toothy, smiley, gum-snapping friendliness full-of-charm and wide-eyed little girl self-assurance. She's some sort of store guide telling me about the marvels of Bullock's Department Store and "Don't you just love all the departments stacked up high like this? On the 3rd floor you can get girlie stuff (nudge nudge, wink wink) and on the 5th there's more manly stuff like tools and jock straps (wink wink, nudge nudge)."

A humongous shopping cart the size of a single family home piled high with every sort of vestment known to humanity---jolly baby jumpers, designer jeans, bundles of corporate t-shirts, endless Fruit-of-the-Looms (very soft and very fine cotton) More quarries filled with formal duds like waistcoats, tuxedos and ball gowns stacked up willy-nilly among overalls and yet more packages of 3-for-one socks. At the corners of the cart are teetering stacks of baseball caps forming pagoda-like spires (with big-headed sizes at the bottom and tiny heads at the top). Beautifully designed Asian labels from Bombay, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, Singapore and Seoul grace the labels. I'm in awe of how much stuff humanity dishes up to itself. Creating. Composting. Cannibalizing.

Later I'm inside of Frank Ghery's Santa Monica car park looking through the metal grid out onto the sparkling beach tableaux. Each grid section frames a perfectly composed "seascape", forming a pattern of astonishing theme and variation---miniature masterpieces of shimmering spectral harmony.

I'm wondering where the hell I parked my car and what car it was---the Giulia?---the Blue Bug? A hot wind comes blasting through the mesh and I get shore sand in my eyes and am now getting swept back with all the cars towards another dream where a scratchy film loop of the Hindenburg is exploding again and again to the Lemon Song. I can see all the little people on fire running for their lives with that tragic zeppelin re-lighting itself like a trick birthday candle.

Biker Chick

2006-05-01T19:14:00.000+02:00

I'm driving through a lost Ville of dark diChirico shadows and glaring sun-bleached stucco. Mongolian desert devils are dervishing in the distance and my skull is getting baked. The air is so clear that the landscape seems ready to shatter.

Reflected in my rear-view mirror is a biker chick wearing leather pants and a tank top taking up the rear seats of the Mustang convertible I've borrowed...rented...stolen?. I'm trying to find the right button on the steering column to set the cruise control and instead I trigger a full-blown circus of windshield wipers, sprays, electric windows and seat adjustments. A tinny Jack-in-the-Box "intercom" voice comes through the horn speaker and announces that "There's a dead woman in the back seat...more news at the top of the hour". I turn around and the woman, much larger now, is sprawled out on a hillock of food encrusted fast food wrappers, cartons and beverages. She scratches her head slowly to gather up all her drunken brain cells and plant a hard stare on me.
"You were curious if I was dead, weren't you? Weren't you!

"Ah, M'am. Your weight is putting too much pressure on the suspension---the springs and tires are gonna go---this isn't even my ride!

I wonder about always being too polite in these situations. Maybe I should be more willful here so there'll be less trouble down the road. But then I'm apprehensive because she's so Big and Mean-looking and why's she scratching her head like a chimp?

Forlorn and tragic towns further on with bogus Sonoran cacti wilting in sidewalk planters. A Main Street billboard advertising "Race Shaving Cream" shows the finish line sprint with a dromedary trying to out-nose a buck-toothed donkey. Another billboard shows wild-eyed men with outstretched arms and distended eyeballs escaping from exploding mine shafts and oil derricks. Aaahhh! Terrorists! Oil! Eureka! More cinematic billboards posted. "Signpost City" As we exit the town a grande finale of billboards shows a foreshortened vanishing perspective view of an epic mastaba made up of rusted oil barrels. It appears to be some sort of land-going tanker.

I look back and she's still looking right through me and is now scratching her head with tremendous intention.

"You've got lice!" I tell her. I turn around quickly to see her reaction...and she's gone. Maybe she's slunk down on to the floorboard---maybe she's...

"And You've Got MAIL!" she screams in my face. "Harharhar. Took you a few seconds to figger out where that one came from dinnit? D'ya see the movie?" "Back of your cute little car is way too small and way too trashy which makes me look big and stinky which is what you're thinking and why I'm ridin' up front where it's clean and the leather smells excellent!

Closeup: Her five-o'clock face is freshly-shaven and her heavy talc is flaking off in the swirling car wind.

"You love music, so tell me where this song is from!" She begins humming and singing some weary country and western ditty with good lords almighty and jumpin' jesuses running around everywhere. I'm keeping my eyes peeled for any oncoming traffic and fleet-footed road critters.

"Do you mind if I turn on the radio? I ask. "I need to hear the traffic report."

She's working on another hymn and I decide to leave it on cruise and jump in the back. The trash has cleared and the car has become much more spacious and grand. It's a souped-up much plusher version of my mom's prehistoric DeSoto. "Push-button 25th-Century heaven brought to you by Buck Rogers!"

Bike Chick gets up close and in my ear gently says "Why don't you tune in?" "I'm here to show you a quality of sound that might heal you. Don't you get it?"

And she begins another song the same way as the others but then hits the luxury radio dial and sets off a sonic flow so sonorous and full of deep spirituality that I am instantly moved by it. She winks and then pops and launders a huge wad of bubble gum and, noticing the dashboard cracks---saying we'd better get it mended because it's an ideal breeding spot for lice and bacteria. She begins pulling elastic taffy stringers out of her mouth and curling them into little impromptu vinyl patches which she tucks into the cracks. I'm astonished how deft she is---wondering where she's gotten this sort of training.

She toys with the dial---picks up some sputnik blips and beeps and suddenly finds a rhythmic static. She opens the glove box and slides out a super high-tech mixing board and dials the knobs and says "We need the right galaxy. I need a Pulsar...got it!"

"Now I will sing from within."

A hip-pumping rhythmic flow sweeps over the cruiser and Biker Chick has become the man she'd been hinting at in my half-illuminated mind. She is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Biker Chick who begins a slow-burning devotional song mixed with the Pulsar chorus from the tuner. Siberia. Tuva. Balinese Valhallas and Samarkand. Algerian wails and Qawwali howls to the moon and back. It is Khan himself!

I am lucid now, reconfiguring the bedsheets into sails for my drunken ship. This Mustang bed vessel had last been rolling up glorious oriental coasts full of hitchhikers and stowaways with Hunter Thompson always nearby. On we rode till the long awaited traffic report finally came by way of an old Yoda-like sage (who ended up doing all the driving) and began to warn us of tsunamis and end-of-the-world tornadoes. Tsunamis! Tornadoes! I remember telling him to go east at the next Pacific grove.

Koufax (Counter-Clockwise)

2006-04-16T00:07:00.000+02:00

The first part of this dream is here.

I'm pissed-off about my head and getting more frustrated---looking round for another tool---slamming shut one cabinet door---swinging open another...."I've already looked here... and what the hell are the hand towels doing bunched up in the corner there with battalions of dead soldier ants? And the old rubber scabbard I stabbed everyone with is sandwiched between the pages of an old squirreled away Penthouse. And here are some photos of me as a baby...

Shit! I'm supposed to cook breakfast for the neighbor's baby I'm sitting. Where's the baby? Where's the fucking baby!" I'm rifling through a multitude of drawers and cabinets and finding thingamajigs here and thisandthats there. More rifling. One drawer is stuffed with ancient Shredded Wheat biscuits and the other one a stack of instruction booklets telling me how to operate gizmos in every language, but saying nothing about where to find the lousy wrench or baby.

Memory smells. Freshly-painted surfaces. Domestic perfumes of renewal glide across my consciousness as I walk down a corridor and enter the wrong side of the kitchen. I'm standing where the stove should be. Disorientation. "This is not my kitchen". I realize I'm inside my next door neighbor's duplex looking into my kitchen window from their side of the driveway. The hedge has been clipped with a reverse-mohawk indent to open a view through the bottom of the kitchen window. A metropolis of birds is chattering inside the bushes. I'm thinking about the word "hedge" and that it's also a verb which means to "beat around the bush". I tell myself that the birds are in their own mini Vegas "hedging bets". I make a mental note of this.

I backtrack down the corridor towards my bathroom but realize when I enter that things have changed. Multi-sided and round-shaped, it has more sides than a hexagon. More than an octagon. And what is a nine-sided room called? Is an eleven-sided room possible? What about seventeen? And is there an especially bad number of sides that one should avoid? I figure I can work these questions out with some calculations. Geometry. I've got to solve this room riddle. "Let's see. I know there's something called a hypotenuse. Hypo-Ten-Use. I make the acronym HYTEN, as in Hyten one's awareness. H is the 8th letter; Y the 25th. 25 + 8 = 33. What the hell should I do now? All those theorems and proofs and chalky diagrams and worrying about my high school finals. Did I pass my finals?" Panic.

Sepulchral beams of light rake down through the faceted glass. The walls have been beautifully prepared by some master hand in preparation for the rare tiles to be laid. Understanding the reasons for the wrench, vaulted room and religious light no longer concern me.

Instead I'm prying open an old carton full of childhood stuff I'd discarded moons ago. My old Topps baseball cards! I'm riding a busload of joy as I peel the brand new cards apart and hold Sandy Koufax up against the rapturous light. I am home.

Sump (Clockwise)

2006-04-08T20:30:00.000+02:00

The gurgling sounds from under the drain won't stop. I'm tugging on the beaded chain and trying in vain to pull out the hardened, crusty plug. But the chain breaks off and the silvery beads go flying in every direction.

Half of me is in the cabinet below working delicately to break the rusted monkey wrench from an ancient block of sponge. "If I wet the sponge, it'll be way easier". And so in my ecstatic rush to test this logic I limbo my way out of the miniscule space. Then, rising up like Lazarus, I violently kunk the back of my head on the edge of the door opening. I realize there's a massive welt---maybe even blood---but I purposely ignore it, hoping it'll go away.

Having freed the sponge from the wrench, I'm back under the sink (supine). Now I'm having a helluva time trying to get the teeth to grab ahold of the u-pipe coupling. The iron monkey head falls off and clacks against my forehead. I'm embarrassed but mighty glad nobody is watching. Dizzy ideas begin flickering. "Is this really the right wrench? Haven't I heard about another, more effectual tool? Why am I fucking around with this antiquated hunk of corroded metal anyway?"

Once again I work my way out of the cabinet, but this time gingerly. I notice the silvery beads from the plug chain have become translucent little pearls. I'm wondering if the hardware store will allow them as barter for a better wrench.

Tru Fiction

2006-03-18T07:55:00.000+01:00

I'm at another redbrick loft party---this time in Zürich.

Sitting on a great velvet sofa with a wrapped foot propped on a big plastic ball. "A helluva hullaballoon" I say to the misplaced old man sitting next to me. He looks over at me slowly and then slumps forward and begins nodding his head in slow affirmation.

G, a former student, approaches me with his size 9 head and a leotarded entourage of feline dancing girls. He says "I'm really and Truly Capote, so go lightly...hahaha!...and as soon as I get his punch-line, a rim-shot with accompanying laugh track has everyone around me getting swept up in his mesmerizing party persona.

Little balloons, Lawrence Welk bubbles and confetti rise and fall in opposite directions like a great Broadway homecoming celebration. I'm wondering how G has attained this savoir faire. And where did he acquire his gumbo patois? Wondering why such a small brain needs such a big head. Questions.

Harper Lee (Keener from the film) is calm and measured and telling me the real story about "This here G's the one who manipulated Perry Smith's dreams---hypnotized him so he'd enter the Clutter home. That way he'd have his true fiction and become the sort of person his father feared. It's like you and your own fake father". This last remark taps the memory of some long-ago fictional father I'd fashioned out of Mr. Green Jeans from Captain Kangaroo. How could she possibly know? I'm wondering if this fictional father of mine might have been the real Mr. Clutter who was murdered in Kansas. I'm not certain whether the murdered family was Truman's or mine.

And now I'm brooding about Captain Kangaroo and that terrifying Dancing Bear who used to haunt my dreams with its terrible eyes. Was it a he or a she? Who was inside?

The fake Truman (G) saunters over with a wry smile and a tray full of drinks and makes a pun about my injured foot: "What a lovely supporting cast! May I sprinkle some fairy dust on it?" He pulls out a fancy felt pen and gestures calligraphically in the air and says "Now, where do I put my autograph?"

Argyle Dream (The Other Side)

2006-02-26T11:41:00.000+01:00

This is the last part of the dream. Scroll down to Argyle Dream "This Side" and work your way up.

I'm trying to locate the front side of the sac---find out which way it's pointed---in case of a sudden spring. But rather than positioning myself defensively, I sit down, feeling weary---feeling drugged.

The hump has morphed into a staring face with hollowed-out eyes. The animated surface I'd noticed
earlier must have been some sort of gathering together of its features. That same movement, which had earlier seemed like a heaving womb about to give birth, is now motionless.

As I stare back at the mask I become fascinated by the strangeness of its expression. "Greek Theatre", I say to myself. "Like tragedy and comedy as one". "Why are these two expressions separate?" "And is this convergence what the Zo-onna Noh theatre mask signifies?"

I can hear a muted gong coming from below the floor. Is it a funeral? A play? Questions.

As I begin to pick up the mask, a massive, heaviness slams down on my neck and shoulders and manhandles me to my feet. It's him again.

Man ~ "Drop it".

When he lets me go I quickly drop to the floor and roll my right ankle, falling into a crippled heap. The man feigns to jump at me, and each time he does, I kick up reflexively. I know my ankle is seriously twisted, but I feel nothing.

He laughs derisively and straddles me like a giant.

Me ~ "Are you Paul Bunyan?" "Are you famous?" "Could I have your autograph?"

My queries seem to confuse him momentarily. While he's ruminating, I try to kung-fu kick at his crotch, but his balls are perched too high. (Here I'm wondering how break dancers gyrate so maniacally, and how if they could couple those spins with Bruce Lee's moves it would be the perfect martial art. And why hasn't anyone thought of this before? Inspired by all this I try to spin around, using my hands to get up to speed, but it's no use. I have no clue. I'm all crossed up.

Man ~ "You damned fool!". "That ain't break dancing---that's broke dancing!" (laughs)

Frustrated and embarrassed, I try doing "new and improved" moves, but as soon as I think I've got it, he begins jumping over and around me like a potent manchild endowed with feline flexibility and strength.

Intercom voice ~ "Why don't you leave his sorry ass alone?" "Show us the mask trick".

The man suddenly stops, turns, goes over to the mask, kneels down (as if in prayer) and slowly picks it up.

With his back to me (I'm able to witness his actions reflected in the two-way mirror) he begins slowly fondling the inside of the mask as though trying to build up some sort of static-erotic charge. He then begins to press it to his face, making lip-smacking noises and darting his tongue through the voids of its mouth and eyes. He's like a lecherous carnivore about to defile something innocent. Mashing and pressing the guise to his face, he works it until it begins to take on the ruddy features of his earlier self.

And then he slowly turns towards me---laughing hyterically through an expression that is neither mask-like nor human. "You are possessed! Stay away from me!"

I try to scramble to my feet but realize they're fast asleep and also injured. I bang on them violently, trying to wake them up. It this how it feels to be paralyzed?

He's upon me now and so in my panic I close my eyes and begin flailing, kicking and yelling in a desperate attempt to ward him off. But nothing.

I open my eyes, expecting to be face-to-face with him, but he's no longer in the room.
He's once again a silhouette in that room full of others behind the two-way mirror. He's throwing his arms up in halleluja gestures, mocking my gestures and the break-dancing kung fu self-defense---heehaws and chortling all around.

Me ~ "Fuckers!"

In the middle of the floor is a gaping hole much larger than the diameter of the sockeyed object. I crawl over to it on my hands and knees and peer over the edge. At the bottom appears to be an undulating mirror like a pool of mercury.

Needing to "test the water", I pull off my dead-to-the-world rubber foot and drop it in, watching it bob gently on the surface for a few moments before seeing it submerge.

Argyle Dream (That Side Part 2)

2006-02-19T15:00:00.000+01:00

"One sometimes realizes, after the event, that one's consciousness has caught something unexpected on its outer edge, as though the two things had somehow got superimposed".
~ Kenzaburo Oe

The white floor and swollen undulating hump forms a large and horizontal abstract eye. Is this a butcher's...a hospital...a morgue? The combination of clinical, hard-edged sauberkeit of the space coupled with the damaged flesh makes my sense of nakedness palpable.

But then I'm laughing up my sleeve about "that darned sockeye". My internal giggling about the pun triggers television canned laughter in the antechamber. I'm not sure whether I should be amusing myself or the others (?) beyond the two-way mirror. My sense of security feels intertwined with this thought.

The salesman's voice returns through the speakers---this time with an urbane tone. "We appreciate a mind like yours, sir. "You are the preferred sort of customer" We just need to ask you a few questions...would you mind our mind survey?"

More laughter all around---I feel as if this were a stage---as if I were being watched by a very large audience whose feed were being transmitted through a surveillance camera. Have they been watching everything all along? Is this some sort of reality t.v.? I don't detect any mounted cameras.

But what about the transformation of the Republican into posh and understated gent? He's the same man who had earlier threatened me. A mean and nasty hick.

Me ~ "Were you acting for reasons having to do with selling off all the farm equipment and dealing with surly customers?" "I know farmers everywhere are being devoured by agribusiness goliaths".

A sudden biblical breakage---renting through a narrow isthmus and inundating the Aborginal European Mud People and their sad flocks of bleating sheep. I see hoards of field-hollering sharecroppers, un-landed and unforgiven trailer trash with everyone trying to stave off Simon Legrees who'd come to make manifest their destiny---to up the land-snatching, speculating ante. They came to kill the ancient souls of those who didn't know the concept of a fence. Kill their souls. Kill their soles. Filetted soles. And I reflect on moccasins, Rubber Soul, rubber feet and that infernal eyesac.

The man doesn't answer me, and so I rant something to the effect of "John Barleycorn and his angry and drunken square-dancing is like a lost coyote. He's not Mr. Blues who has helped stave off heartless shits like yourself who've never even had a soul to sell to the Devil!" I let out a bigger torrent of incomprehensible ravings and in the end am breathless and confused. A silence follows where I realise everything I cherish might be taken; that he'll "get away with it" if I don't change tactics.

Me ~ "Was it me or you who made everything disappear earlier? What about the darned sockeye in the middle of the floor?" "Will you play a fair game here and answer me with honesty?"

Man ~ "You need to look more closely at your mind".

Me ~ "Is that lumpy thing my mind looking at me?"

Man ~ "Something like that. It's known as Past Judgement".

Me ~ "You mean there's something in my past it wants to clarify, or something it wants to judge?"

Man ~ "To judge"

Me ~ "So what do I do?"

Man ~ "Examine it up close and peel it back" "You must confront whatever it is that emerges"

End of Argyle Dream (That Side Part 2)

Go to Argyle Dream (The Other Side)

Argyle Dream (That Side Part 1)

2006-02-11T10:48:00.000+01:00

While I'm pressing on my wounded foot, which makes a little hissing squeak whenever I release it, the man behind the mirror booms through the p.a. system. "Yer a dumbshit to be here....this ain't yer territory, an' yew know it. So why don' yew juss git out!?"

I begin applying an even firmer press-and-release on my foot, which makes it sing with an odd, lamb-to-the-slaughter bleat. The comic sound gives me the right clue, and so now I know with certainty that this ghastly foot isn't real. It's a magic store slip-on rubber fake which is covering my healthy foot underneath. I begin to ponder my little epiphany: "How could such a horribly real thing become so bogus? And why didn't I notice the metamorphosis while it was happening? Then I'm wondering if this fake foot coverall be marketed as a new-fangled sort of footwear? I'm sure it would sell like mad! But what would I call it?" More questions to answer.

Again lucid and aware that it's 4 in the morning, I begin to wonder about the many things in life that slip by our notice, such as moles, nose hairs and wrinkles, but I can't keep the thread alive and so I slip back into the same showroom with my faux foot and the Republican. Beyond the glass, he is a shifting, ghostly silhouette. And someone else is standing alongside him.

Everything is suddenly silent except for the muffled street honks and fluorescent buzzing. I listen to these sounds while I force the whole perspective through squinted eyes. I know now that I'm in control of this dream, and so I squint to make the mirror retreat and disappear. I squint and remove the rubbery foot. The same with the tractor and the rest of the farm machinery. I get a huge rush as I begin to delete things from the dream diorama one by one. I make sounds like dumping files into the trash on my computer and re-arrange the look of the room till it looks like a Soho gallery. I'm feeling nearly omnipotent now. "The power to change is always right there in front of you". I feel a surge of joy rush through me as the room becomes an infinite white. I sense it is my personal Philosopher's Stone.

In the middle of floor is a little hump of something chromatic and alive. Up close it is a livid, undulating sac which vaguely resembles what was once my bloodied argyle sock. Could it be? It's like a living, breathing soft sculpture stuck to the floor at the edges like a scab. Something is trying get out.

End of Argyle Dream (That Side Part 1)

Go to Argyle Dream (That Side Part 2)

Argyle Dream (This Side)

2006-01-21T07:51:00.000+01:00

Last night I hurt my foot when I got my shoe wedged in the treads of a tractor tire. I'd been walking around with C in Paris looking for a particular restaurant supply shop (where they sell phenomenal cheese graters) when suddenly she went this way and I went that, and I ended up kicking tractor tires and getting stuck.

The showroom (where I found myself lost) had an astonishing assortment of specialty farm gear on display. Diggers, cutters, choppers, whackers, splicers, pickers, seeders you name it, you betcha.

A huge sausage-faced Republican (who'd appeared from the other side of the two-way mirror at the back of the showroom) was eyeballing me peripherally. He had on a "farmers suit" like overalls; a pair of "huckster's duds" to help him cheat the local folks out of their hard-earned money.

Now both of us began moseying around the tractors and peeping at each other through the seat springs. I said to myself "Start kicking tires, Finn, I'll decoy him good". And so I began a wild dance around the showroom, thumping one set of treads after another, eventually losing both the shamus and myself. I dervished myself into that gone netherworld of billowy dream inquiry beneath the covers, waking up momentarily to take mental notes.

Suddenly he was looking down on me from the other end of the steam shovel. Out of surprise and sudden fear I swung my foot hard and wedged my boot into the big tread and then cowered and cringed like a trapped animal, knowing he'd be on top of me to snap my neck. From within my pretzel shape I willed a woman's voice from the loudspeakers, blaring a falsetto "Check OK on 13"! And then he was gone.

I pulled on my boot repeatedly, but the shiny tiled floor didn't allow me to get a proper grip, and so I gave a violent jerk and freed my foot and saw that my socks were mismatched (sanitary on the left, and Argyle on the right). I thought "What's wrong with you, Finn? Why can't you even get your socks in order?"

It was then that I noticed the wet Argyle. I'd kicked a set of steel-flanged "ice tires" and now my sock was dripping with blood.

I peeled the sock off slowly, revealing a horrid, bone-exposed gash that ran from my heel to my big toe. The Argyle had sopped up everything, leaving my foot looking drained, like that of a corpse. The other oddity was the rim of the wound, whose purpled edges gave it the hideous appearance of a metatarsal grin with lip-liner.

I wrung out the sticky Argyle and started swabbing the blood around on the white tiles, finger-painting little rocket ships and spirals while worrying about my wound, the ensuing infection and worse---that Republican huckster who'd disappeared behind the two-way mirror.

End of Argyle Dream (This Side)

Go to Argyle Dream (That Side Part 1)

Oma God Dream

2006-01-15T14:00:00.001+01:00

Poking my fingers through a linty hole inside the left pocket of my leather jacket. I'm searching for a tram ticket which I'm sure I'd purchased---where is it? The tram is heading my way, disrupting orderly puffs of steam that rise through vents at the edge of the canal. It is a European city, but neither Venice nor Amsterdam. I'm scanning the street signs and store windows for a clue, but everything is lit up in English. Trying to remember the canals in London. Did Dickens ever mention any canals?

In the near distance, I can see the tram passing a series of curb vents emitting steam. As it passes the last one, I remember about my ticket and continue fingering through the lintballs and sand deposits.

The vehicle looks different upon closer inspection. The front---shaped like the prow of a ship---gives the crowd of people around me a rush as it proceeds to pass. Gleaming and filled with demi-monde hustlers in suits, the first set of cars glides past, sloshing up a miniature set of beach breakers over my shoes. Everyone reacts in spontaneous disapproval to this sole-soaking. What sort of city is this? What town would create a hybrid oddity that moves along underwater tracks and whose eddies wet the tramsters and make the curbs disappear? Perhaps one of the Hanseatic cities like Novgorod or Bruges? (Here I am half-awake wondering about Hamburg, and if I saw anything there that led me to this Hanseatic thread.)

I feel very cold. I'm worried about my soaked socks and remind myself to wring them out when I get aboard. Weakness consumes me.

Pneumonia

And there is something medieval in this waterway. Something with the water rats.

Plague

By the time the rear end of the hybrid vehicle arrives (it is part train, part tram and part vaporetto) I realise I have to piss. Should I get aboard or should I look for a pissoir and wait for the next one? But I'm suddenly herded forward by the tramsters which makes my indecision moot. "Ok, the next station...my coat pocket...the ticket...my wallet? Wallet? Where's my wallet!" The conductor is forward checking tickets in the demi-monde compartments. I've still got plenty of time, but I need to find my ticket...money...wet shoes and socks...got to piss...mysterious city...

Sometime later I'm aboard the number 13 tram in Zürich. A hefty Oma (German for grandma) is now assisting me out of my damp clothes. I'm naked, but nobody seems to notice or care. There's something comforting and warmly firm and commanding about this buxom old gal that makes me trust her. She's quite animated for such a big woman. "Ja, Sie müssen Ihre nassen socken ausziehen, mein Junge. Legen Sie diese über den Kachelofen da drüben!" (Yes, you have to take off your wet socks and lay them over the tiled oven over there.) She's got my back, this Kitchen Queen of the Night mit Kompressstrumpfhosen. I'm not sick. Everything is old world and good. Ah, Europe!

But while I'm kicking back and wondering at my nakedness, I realise Grandma's got other plans. When she opens her carpet bag I spy her deluxe enema kit complete with hose, stop cock, and rectal tips and I wake up immediately.

Roadrunner Dream

2006-01-08T09:14:00.000+01:00

I'm chasing a stub-hooked tetherball down Oxnard Street in North Hollywood.

This reminds me of a dream from long-ago where I chased a ball I'd snapped clean off the playground pole, hitting it with comic book strength and sending it soaring into the blue sky while all the girls were watching. I said "I'll be right back!" and transformed myself into Roadrunner.

I chased that ball down with spinning legs, all the while bobbing forwards, backwards and sideways with my torso. I homed in on it with my two-way Dick Tracy watch and continued socking and kicking and chasing it over roofs and trees and buildings. I kicked it well beyond the neighborhood oh yes I did. I sent it clear across the City of Angels into Death Valley where I deftly scooted past Rattlesnakes, Gila Monsters and Horny Toads. I drop-kicked and pursued that ball well beyond the Sierras---sent it sailing over the Grand Canyon towards barking prairie doggies and waving Wheaties fields. I saw Huckleberry steamboats and kicked the ball clean over the Mississippi and then hightailed it for Chicago and New York.

And then I woke up and realized I wasn't so fast.

Sonic Dream

2006-01-02T19:14:00.000+01:00

An epic dream of buffeting winds, Kitty Hawk dunes and sudden basaltic cliffs towering over tilted Irish seas. There's an easterly on the western seaboard and a westerly where I am standing. I am able to shift my coastal location by closing my lids, turning round and blinking. I see the shifting locales as though looking through the viewfinder of a movie camera; my eye movements acting like a "shutter-drive", controlling not only the speed of the scene, but also the era. Rapid eye movements, which feel mechanically controlled, create a sensation of clarity. But when I switch to myself and try to control things, the sea, the dunes and the windy grasses begin to flicker as though I were watching a silent film. I practice at various speeds in order to shorten the divide between this machine-self and me, sensing that I'll be able to master it. My feelings, in spite of the bodily uncertainty, are curiously hopeful.

Later, a spectral newsreel-like montage of great personalities, inventors and inventions. Edison, Duke Ellington, Laurel and Hardy, Rod Serling, the Wright Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, the Transatlantic Cable...the Transatlantic Cable. I'm obsessed about that early communication tether---my lucid mind is now envisioning those first cable telegrams and their sonic vibrations....could they be heard by whales and dolphins? And if so, how did they interpret those curious clicks? And are echo-locating bats the silent night agents who channel this cetatean sonar? Are they night beasts who relay and translate these codes through berries and blood?

I'm making mental puns about "reeling minds". Nervous laughter. But the other half of me is seriously exerting to manage the action by slowing everything down. The practical me wants to construct something magnificent and lasting from all this.

Later again, a figure is calling---waving distress signals through the windy ground mist. But I cut myself off from this "other". I can sense "it" trying to distract me from the thread of this bicoastal jump-cutting which feels like travelling through the carotid artery of sprung gnosis. There is something holy and profound here, something dependent upon my ability to will it into being through hard work. Yes, hard work! I begin blinking rapidly again, hoping that my cyborg self can call up the right set of actions to put this beast together---make it something unambiguous...transparent.

Back on a blustery Kitty Hawk dune facing the Donegal bluffs on the other side of this dream. I know I will manage this time. This is not like the other dreams.

Later still, the letters are freshly painted over the battened placard. The sign itself is quite old and pocked with a beautiful patina of salt and rust. It is standing astride a stony well, where I can see a hanging bucket attached to a cable.

Strand Dream

2005-12-26T17:28:00.000+01:00

The vast pristine beach is hot. My feet are making muffled, sandy squeaks as I pedal through the powdery sand. Vague memories of unrequited love is attached to this place---I have been here many different times before in reality and in dreams. The pre-dawn beaches of Santa Monica, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Ventura and the Channel Island shores are each hinted at. I can see mother whales with their calves breaching---heading in the opposite direction towards Laguna San Ignacio. I want to sit and gaze, but something presses me to move on and get out of this unrelenting sun.

My thoughts are dull and in need of ocean "smelling salts". A cluster of towers like ones I've seen in other dreams appears on the horizon looking like a floating Aztec metropolis. Earlier they'd seemed so fragile through the misty surf---like crumbling sand castles. But now the structure appears to weigh a thousand Gibraltars, with a spectral backlight making it appear Oz-like. I'm jogging now, moving to the rhythm of my breathing. But the faster I move, the more mired in the sand I get. I need to get over...to the wet sand.

A pack of huge dogs rushes past while I'm trying to extricate myself from the quicksand. The leader skids to a stop---looks back at me. They are not dogs, but hyenas. The leader and I stare each other down in a mental standoff. I tell him telepathically that he is to keep moving--- that his next life will be different---that if he does anything to hurt me, he will remain a stinking ugly hyena for many lifetimes. He starts toward me while baring his teeth, but then he stops again as I bare down on him: "Go on....don't look at me...move on...now!" And just like that they are all off running, frolicking and tearing up the beach toward the towers. As I'm wriggling to extricate myself, a rumbling, roaring breaker looms up and hits the shore like rolling thunder, quickly swallowing up the hyenas and then swallowing me.

But I'm uprooted from the sand, clutching at nothing and everything and tumbling around. My breath...panic...I'm going to die. But my focused mind tells me to breathe and as I do, a terrifying gurgle rattles around in my lungs and inside my head. I cough up a chunk of something and quickly gulp down underwater air to "catch my breath". Yoga techniques allow me to calm down and breathe effortlessly. The water is now crystal clear, and I can see the same pack of hyenas swimming like sea dogs alongside the mother whales and their babies. They are heading south towards Mexico.

Barbie-Q Dream

2005-12-11T18:58:00.000+01:00

Sitting in broadcast booth of some 'Murican littletown looking over a sea of prefab cheapniz. In the booth next to me is a radio neocon-man with a huge head and a toothy Mormon grin. He's chuckling along with his skinny sidekick about Ken getting roasted on a Barbie Q. Station break after station break (when will it stop?) is looping the same bellicose line-up of honks, whistles, train chugs and boingy effects. Through the static hiss of empty delirium comes the station's theme scream "KXTC!! KXTC!! KXTC!!" The two guys are flicking switches and pulling off head gear---going off line. The skinny guy is mouthing me a silent but demonstrative "You're on!" "You're on!" through the glass. More sound effects start blaring and distracting me from...I haven't got a clue. I blurt into the mike "testing testing 1-2, 1-2". I know this is my big chance but everything is subverted. I'm blowing up in front of the whole world with childhood dread and a fluttering, old man's heart. I take a slow, deep breath and begin faking a head-nodding, uncontrollable drowsiness. But my heart really is going. Am I going to die while on the air? Silence.

Later a nimbus cloud from far away quickly balloons atomic---starts raining tendril-winged "seahorse shrimp" onto the tiled, soul-dead stripmall. A topless double-decker busload of tourists careens round the corner, the bus skidding over the shrimpy street and onto its side, spilling out a hoard of screamers and laughers. Everyone jumps up in unison (unhurt!) to get out of the crustacean storm.

The same toothy fat guy from the broadcast booth (now Zero Mostel) is bouncing around with his oversized wheelbarrow "vat", his belly distended over the piles of wriggling horseshrimp. He's stopping to scoop up living, heavy heaps with his shovel, stopping after each scoop to mop his brow and blow his nose. I feel sorry for him from the bottom of my soul, thinking about how he used to be a little baby all innocent and maybe his mother was a hippo and maybe he just can't help it. Then as though reading my mind he bellows: "Barbie-Q, baby! All you can eat!"

Retablo Dream

2005-11-14T22:15:00.000+01:00

On my way from one part of a dream to another. Stooped in a car lot somewhere in the Dordogne "reading" a discarded sheet of International Tribune. The page is littered with misshapen, bulging text. I'm wondering about early type setters and if this rickety display isn't some print media ploy to hold onto its readership.

The car lot is filled with a humpy relief of old 50's Chevy rooftops---a low slung sea of dark, hydraulically suspended rides. Perched up high nearby is a glorious graffiti sign with Celt-ish knotted script that screams "Jumping Beaners---The Original Whittier Low Riders" painted in lurid day-glo colors. The sign is being given its finishing touch of shellac by a Mexican trio advertising themselves on their XL bowling shirts as "The Chino Masters" . They are a joyful work crew, cajoling one another into wilder phantasmagoric heights of graphic prowess while dripping paint, sipping cans of Dos Equis and listening to a crazy mariachi boom box tune punctuated with cartoonish laugh tracks. Rocking the jade-colored grid of bamboo scaffolding is a wily midget who's clearly the Master. He's gyrating and hip-pumping with an array of spray cans in his pouch and at the ready. He's a Norteño buckaroo jester---his golden necklaces all festooned with cell phones like amulets. He is EL JEFE.

I'm carefully wending my way through the lot to check out the amazing cruisers on display. Each one has a lustrous surface built up from dozens of dark layers that look like Japanese Lacquer boxes. Up close I can see between the layers a microscopic motion of glitter like fluttering showgirl eyes. And at the edges, near the chrome, the lacquer is subtly sanded down to expose a chronology like tree rings.

Mirrored off the hood is the upside-down image of the midget checking out my reactions. When I look up he's a humpin', grindin' paintin' fool without a care. He's grinning big---gesturing at his nose and indicating that I should "smell, smell!" So I bend down to get a whiff of a down-home aroma of freshly baked bread and vinegar. And now he's jumping up and down like a monkey waiting for my verdict, doing backflips and pointing to his mouth, "taste taste!" I start licking the hood, which is soft and salty under the hot sun. And now he's making facial signs with his teeth and lips to "eat eat!" So I buck out my uppers and press down into the tacky licorice. I get stuck and the heat of the base metal conducts through my head, but a slow turn and I surface with elongated streamers of black taffy glued to my enlarged, bucky chompers and start into braying like a donkey---for laughs---the three are hooting it up in slapstick ecstasy at my antics. But behind my jestering I am overwhelmed with awe at these subtle masterpieces of edible folk art which rivals anything in a any museum, anywhere.

Later, after another dream excursion through old neighborhood haunts, I'm back at the sign. It's bigger than before; rotating like a Vegas marquee. The flip side of the Celt-ish ad has a cartoon image of "Pachuco Pep Boys" who are the same three lacquerers from before. It is now crystal clear that these three are the original Angelino artists whose masterworks were long ago usurped by Manny, Moe and Jack.

And in the upper right corner of the big marquee is a retablo-like painting of a boiling pot with Earl Scheib's grinning mug levitating on a cloud of steam.

Riverboat Dream (That Side)

2005-11-04T17:31:00.000+01:00

The same sort of whitened rails from the jungle trail that I rode in on line the outer edges of the steamboat. The forward momentum of the dream stops where the boat is moored on a hump of basalt. The vessel feels lighter than it should---even hollow. I notice the rails are not the same supportive ones from the path, but instead are wobbly with loose rusted bolts. A feeling of imminent collapse is in the air, and so I want off. But now I'm far from the river's edge and while I'm debating about what might happen if I jump, the boat goes down.

The water below is crystal clear and fresh, like the inside of a fish tank. The vessel is sinking below me; somehow still whole but headed straight down. The paddle wheel is spinning mad bubbly swirls, cutting everything loose into smaller pieces. Like a runaway mower, the boat paddles down towards the sandy bottom, the rickety hull skin being shed while revealing something much newer underneath.

Later. I'm floating away from the crest on a broken chunk of "old-timer" wooden surfboard tattooed with Maori patterns. Looking back towards the river crest where I went down, I can see great masses of boat flotsam getting churned by the paddle wheel to the water's surface. And as I'm watching all the flotsam rise, the boat, much newer but still antique, emerges out of the water like a breaching whale, white spray spouting out the stacks. The paddle wheel is rotating madly, suspending the entire hull on the surface while turning the boat slowly round on its axis, upending, submerging, resurfacing, then splashing down and going under.

A pontoon biplane is heading towards me. It's as if it were riding on an invisible coaster track, touching the water lightly when dipping down. The hippy goggled pilot in the cockpit gives me the thumbs-up as he passes. He circles several times above the "dance arena", writing cryptic smoke signals that I'm unable to decipher. Then he heads straight up, nosedives, and at the last instant before hitting the water he swoops up, pauses and slowly descends tail first. The bi-wings begin rotating like a hover craft while the smoking tail-pipe gargles each time it alights on the water.

And then the crazy riverboat bobs to the surface, levitating above the water with wild paddle wheel gone insane and smoke stacks chuffing out a jitterbuggy tune and everything jumping like a whirly-gig---a gyrating rockin'-in-rhythm pair...and my epiphany knows no bounds. "Well this is really it. They are for real!"

But the scene drifts away, getting smaller and less real. I'm thinking "Why hasn't anyone thought of an old-time riverboat show like this?" With this gut feeling I realize that if I get back upriver and contact the friendly and talented pilot, I'll be able to convince him of my plans and collect a finder's fee.

Riverboat Dream (This side)

2005-10-29T07:54:00.000+02:00

Running barefoot along a jungle "exercise" trail in Nicaragua. "Fuera!" signs posted by Sandanistas are riddled by Contra bullets. I'm carrying a special backpack containing urgent code sheets for the Ortega brothers. War is in the air. Bullets. Muffled explosions. "You are Phidippides. Now run!"

My left hand is sliding along an "energy rail" installed to protect peace-time trekkers from falling over the edge into the churning river. I'm able to manipulate my weight on the ground as well as my forward movement by varying my grip. My feet are barely touching the trail as I move along in a levitating, air-pedalling sprint. But when I let my grip slacken slightly, the jungle gravity brings everything to a slow-motion crawl. A buzzing, pulsing surge (like a video controller) is being conducted through the railing into my wrist and up my arm. I flex my fingers and eventually locate the proper "energy" grip. The feeling is giddy as my body starts to lighten and I move forward again.

The river is moving faster now as I'm heading up a steep incline. A Mississippi steam boat is paddling at the crest trying to get over. As I move forward along the rail, it's as though I'm zooming through a lens. At the back of the riverboat a wheel of heavy paddle blades is spanking up the river water and churning up a heavy mist. I'm trying to see through the spray to have a closer look. I can hear the firing of the steam engine below the deck and a swinging big band sound is coming through the smoke stacks like a pair of giant grammaphones. The band, the engine and the water churning all fuse to become a cacaphonic wall of abstract sound. As I swivel my head left and right I'm able to locate the main beat by concentrating on the engine. I continue squeezing my hand and turning my head and eventually dial in a righteous "heady" groove. It is narcotic, physical and ready to devour me.

Floating above this mix coming out a smaller set of pipes is Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra singing a divine ode to something lost. It is a heartbreakingly beautiful ballad that I'm familiar with and trying to recall..."What song is it?" But I can't locate it. And after infinite sadness and despair the great architecture of sound is tangled and crossed. The paddle wheel becomes a paddle wheel again and there's no Armstrong, no Sinatra.

Sponge Dream

2005-10-18T15:46:00.000+02:00

Lying sick in my old attic room on Griffith Park Blvd. My mom is sitting next to me with a galvanized bucket of sponging medicine, mopping my forehead with a giant swab, chanting a "cure" with her far away voice. The sponge she's using is an undulating, effervescent living creature---each time she brings it to my face for another medicinal wash I can see a schaumy mass of bubbles brewing in the fissures. I peer over the side of the bed to watch her "sponging technique". As soon as she plops it in the bucket, it darts out of her hand to move behind a large chunk of galvanized bucket coral. While I'm holding myself up on the side rail to get a better look, I lose my grip and slip down onto a drenched batch of bedding. Is this all my sweat? My mom chortles: "Boy, you're sweating so much it looks like you're in a washing machine, heehee". I'm buoyed by the sheets, but the sweat is running out of my pores. My hands can feel all the facial seepage while the bed keeps filling up.

Later the bed has morphed into a night pond filled with water lilies. I'm in the garden of my aunt L's house---the light from her kitchen illuminating a cluster of guppies swimming round my body. Surrounded by a starry sky with frogs and crickety sounds, I can hear my mom speaking calmly as though I were still in the room. But her voice trails off and I yelp for her to come back. I know my fever will worsen if I stay in this dark pool and now in a hurry---working to extricate myself from this backyard bayou. A heavy dark plastic sheeting is hooked over the pond border, collapsing each time I try to raise myself out. As I close my eyes to meditate, a montage of educational footage from primary school warns about drowning people having superhuman strength. (The narrator sounds like George Stevens from his classic "D-Day to Berlin"). There's a "highlight" portion where some Tarzan guy jumps into the ocean to save a drowning man (to illustrate the danger). As the two are fighting each other for water supremacy---they're both drowning---a Jaws shark starts circling. The scene switches back to the smiling narrator who says: "Join us next week folks, when we find out what happens to our heroes".

I'm away from the edge now, dog-paddling towards the middle of the pond where the lilies are. I get nowhere and so turn over to do a backstroke. Now my legs and feet are tangled in a patch of...lotus roots? My feet and legs are suddenly grazed by something. The closer I get to the center, the easier it is to move---as if being pulled by a current. I finally reach the lilies and hold on to the edge of the biggest one, but it collapses. I can feel something sucking at the bottom of my feet. The lilies are turning now, round and round and I can feel the undertow sucking everything down.

Later I'm standing in a middle of the drained pond. It is alive with woebegone trilobites, catfish and little guppies all flopping and sucking for the mother pond. Near the ledge where my bed was, I see the same sneaky sponge sliding behind a large outcrop of bucket coral.

Clown Dream

2005-10-06T17:49:00.000+02:00

A big snarly red faced wino clown is knotting balloon tubes for a pleat-skirted gang of parochial schoolgirls. He's not a real clown, but a smelly disguised hobo with bad intentions. The schoolgirls are innocent---I want to warn them---but he keeps eyeballing me suspiciously---so I'm waiting for the right moment to charge him so they can get away.

He flips the switch on his massive tricked-out ghetto blaster, its console full of dials and dancing lights. A big Merengue tambora leaps out the speakers with thumping bass and the wino clown ups his pace, now assembling an astonishing array of rubbery dogs, cats, horses, bunnies---I'm entranced by the candy-colored zoo multiplying around his feet---his head bopping and fingers flying---the girls screaming 20! 30! 40! 50! Suddenly he flips off the blaster switch, pulls off his wino face, wig and his billowy clown togs, revealing a splendid dapper-dandy. A real magician.

I'm stunned. He's had me completely fooled. Harharhar! He's pointing at me and honking a giant bicycle horn going harharhar HONK HONK! The parochial girls join in the big heehaw---are they his floozies? I'm disgraced, muttering confused apologies to the magical hobo clown and to the girls for having wrongly accused him. They're circling me now, and so I curl up into a fetal ball, his goose horn honking something wet and sticky over me.

Liquor Store Dream

2005-09-27T20:01:00.000+02:00

As my eyes opened, I realized the room I had hurried out of was the same one I was in. I'd been half awake while sitting on the bed with my dead father, who was asking me why I had stolen that carton of cigarettes from Jake's Liquor Store. There was no way out now.

Cheeseburger Dream

2005-09-22T22:31:00.000+02:00

A long battery of fry cook griddles are aligned inside the stainless steel rebar cage. Flash-frozen boxes of ball park cargo labeled "Full-o-franks" "Boigies" and "Fries" are being elevated to our work floor on a clackity dumbwaiter hitched to cords of hemp. A cling-a-ling bell goes off, sounding like "dinner time!" and "back to work!" The platform stops, quickly jerks off the goods, finds its alignment again, and then is swiftly pulled upward to the opening in the floor above.

I get on my knees and stick my head past the floor opening and dangling ropes to have a look. I can see more platforms hoisting multiple rows of the same vapory cargo---those descending going down slowly, smoothly---the rising ones more in subtle fits and starts. Is this a relief station---are we a cook-crew for hurricane victims? I can see into an adjacent storage facility---a polar-cold warehouse staffed with refrigerated workers who are busy loading up the big dumbwaiters...more ropes....more flats on frozen boxes full of eats. There's a "foreman" tugging at the hawsers to signal another jacking. He turns to motion in my direction...is he waving at me?

I know I should be in charge of some station, but I haven't got an inkling---all the maneuvering---where do I fit in? Feeling like I'm squandering something, I watch as wax papered patties and frozen weenies are getting slapped down, peeled and rolled into alignment by my "sous chef" son. He's wearing a baseball cap and apron combo which both have the same looping, cursive "Pit Stop" logo embroidered into happy faces with lumpy burgers for eyes. My own sad apron has got a coating of polymerized fond glazed over the upside-down and backward logo. While I'm trying to pick out the sticky bits from the apron strings, I suddenly see the many customers lined up in multiple rows on the other side of the cage, pressing jailbird faces and yowling "Hey, there's a goddamned ball game going on so hurry it up!" More workers have appeared (thankfully) and Ty is now doing all the griddle piloting (without a worry in the world!) "Doublecheese! "Extra fries...order of nachos...three vanilla shakes!" As the orders are shuffled, he twists around a cooker dial and (whoosh) up slides his service door. He looks over at me with a benevolent shrug that suggests he needs me. But I can't stop toying with the tacky apron strings. He chortles "Don't worry---the cage is plenty sturdy; they can't get in, because I did all the welding myself." I'm nodding in agreement and wondering what the hell is wrong with me.

Svengali Dream

2005-09-15T16:44:00.000+02:00

I'm both the observer and the observed in an old b&w film of epic joy and sadness---a story that both answers and opens questions about the tin pan characters of my life. G.V. is the young, full-o-charm actor/director, handling the camera, grips, make-up and every other sort of equipment splayed out on the carpark tarmac. V.A. is his make-up "powder girl" who is joyful and nonchalant. But I can see through her frank goodness that she's shielding trouble. She's running loops around the equipment, scooping up film cans, jumping over cables and mindlessly plopping valuable and sundry gizmos and foodstuffs into a large plastic cart---set clothes, lenses, jewelry baubles, clipboards, cables and packaged crew snacks. I'm sure she's toting around the cart because she's homeless, Everything she's squirreling away is hock-able at a pawn shop. But I'm worried about her getting busted for this charade; wanting to tell her she doesn't have to worry about all that this time round. "I'll help you", I want to say. But all the stage-set hubbub keeps me distracted and so all this concern dissipates.

A gigantic black boom-mike "X" is girded overhead, feeding down a cracklesputter pair of high-tech pickups. "Quiet on the set!" G yelps. Everybody waits as the boom settles down to a low hum, with workers tuning dials on portable mixer panels....then silence. Surrounding the wooden stage is a gaffed set-up of arc lights shrouded with prismatic gels and morse-code blinkers. G is fiddling with the nobs on his dated walkie-talkie. Feedback squeals from the monitors..testing, testing one two three. I sidle up to him, wanting to get close, wanting say something (what is it I want to say?) and he's suddenly fatting up my ears with highly technical jargon about the museum-piece Arriflex he's manning---the special wide-angle lenses, adapters and filters he's had manufactured for this crazy dream shoot. I'm awestruck by his le plus vieil homme du monde knowledge. I ask him diffidently "What...how...when did you learn all this? I never knew!" He rakes me under his arms and shakes his head at me scoldingly...tsk tsk tsk! Then lets go, hikes up his jeans and confidently approaches the three-legged Arri, deftly unspooling a wriggling kite-tail stream of perforated film stock, tossing the ribbons at my feet and yelling: "I need a goddamn cartridge! Get me a fucking c.a.r.t.r.i.d.g.e.!"

Later after sundry manic dream forays, G is back (from a nap? a holiday?). He's now extremely dark-skinned, but not naturally, curiously covered in blackface like Al Jolson. But the bogus hackjob around his eyes and neck...he's got a shit-eating grin and so...bar-har-har! It's the dignified G turned shithead vaudville, not at all the dignified one commanding the stage. No, he's lampooning himself---the crew joining his raucous mirth-filled hilarity---big teeth all around.

But then he wipes off the grease paint, raises his spectral finger into the light like a medieval raptor, arcs it down toward me, and at the last moment whumping its beak down on my chest. Then again and again, screaming with each stab. "Homes, you need to learn! You need to learn!" There is a dull pain that I know is deep and serious, but I can't feel it like I should. Then he's back with that earlier sneer, bearing down on me with all the weight of his soul. I'm a low down dirty in his mind. He's getting me back for something that my lucid mind is trying to recall. This is a slippery dream of recriminations and doubts.

He pulls out a load of clinking miniature (whiskey?) vials from the velcro pockets of his fisherman's vest, uncapping two, three, four at a time and chugging them down glugglug. Wiping at his mouth with the vest, projectiles of comes flying in my face while he burps and coughs at once. "Damned good!" And he's winking and friendly again, giving me the knowing eye about some past funny only we share.

More dream close-ups and wide shots pass the night from this Mother feature. I can see he's been puppeting my mind and making me shrink---directing me with kinetoscopic Svengali eyes for the big make-over. "Watch me. Learn what you need to learn and then have copies made for distribution. IT is all here". And I understand "it" is the mystery about his residence. But I feel clamped like a vise by Him. Like a trial with him as judge, I'm at His mercy.

Doll Dream

2005-09-08T07:33:00.000+02:00

I'm anxious about revisiting the bungalow on Ambrose Ave where I once lived. The same laconic Gene Autry cowboy from Saturday t.v. matinees drawls: "There was a little girl who lived nearby. I don't know who she was, but I seen her in my dreams; I'm certain she's the one and it was here". I don't know that it's me talking or some other. Or that this is an old song I've nearly forgotten. But this is like the long ago dream about that same talking, pull-cord baby doll that was both fictitious and real. "You can't possibly remember anything because you left this place for elswhere". At the door, I press on a sad little bellbuzzer that's hooked up to springy electrical wires and hanging from the same battered fascia board and feel the mild charge in my fingers. Brrriiiiiing brriiiiiiing! Behind the blackened screen door I can see the same dark gray corpse of a crone smoking in her rocker. What was her name? She was the woman who used to plant things only at night. The vapors of her cigarette are trailing towards the gridded, galvanized mesh. The smoke comes through like Indian signals revealing that she's got the doll.

At the tail end of a snaking customs queue with Ty, Elena, Geoff, and a much older Gena. They're each wearing a wreath-like "crown o leis" chin-cinched with vines of cascading holiday tendrils. Their heads are bopping to some sort of Hawaiian slide uke that's playing over the p.a. I'm not partaking of the festivities---I keep bumping up against a hodge-podge of dented, military-issue jerry cans. The canisters are stenciled with stippled white symbols, all of them visually suggesting the direst warnings which my dream mind runs with: plutonium, aids ebola, cholera and bubonic pestilence. The "family" directly in front the containers seem infected---something is seriously wrong with their skins. The pink freckled dad with his flattened haircut has got something to do with all of it. He's got the girth of a savior, but is going down with the wife and kids. He's got scabrous blotches coating the back of his arms and neck----poking through the appendage openings of his pristine starched white shirt. He looks like something ancient...beached. I'm trying to get the other four to notice all this, but they are now far back towards the tail end of the line. I'm yelling and waving while the crowd surges, but my vocal projection is chord-cut and feeble---drowned out by the funky cacophony. The four of them are now clapping, stomping and whooping it up---entertaining the crowd around them by weaving a Celtic knot of a well-rehearsed barn-dance. The Hawaiian twang of the p.a. is metallic, hard-edged and deafening. We've moved forward in the line, but the canisters, and the family in front of us, are gone.

Migros Dream

2005-08-29T06:12:00.000+02:00

Looking down numberless aisles for cat food at some Migros in Zürich---the bulky metzger tells me: "Für die Katze ist Frischfleish am besten!"---Fresh meat is the best thing for cats! He escorts me by the elbow past the cereals and and crackers, along a long trough of startling flesh. The butcher is hanging his left hand over the pit, letting his fingers ride over the hillocks of manicured meats---along cello-packed noodles of extruded ground beef---past the poulets, turkeys and hams. And now here comes the fish section! He's dipping his thick fingers into colored plastic buckets of eels, shrimps, crabs and lobsters--- occasionally pulling out a little telescoping gauge to check that the sealife is comfy.

We come to a huge "aquarium maze" filled with murky water, where he stops at the entrance, clinks the thick glass with his gauge and says: "Schau mal". "Just look". I can see something moving, but the water is algae-colored....murky. Then he looks up at me while reaching under the giant sea tank, flipping a long metal toggle. There's an electric buzz, and then the entire warehouse begins to dim, except for the butcher's room which is backlighting the massive fish maze, frightening up swirls of tuna, shark, and sea bass. A giant halibut and catfish are battling for something dead below, kicking up an underwater sandstorm. "Come, let me take you to the cat meat!"

We walk into a white-tiled sterile workroom---the same room that was backlighting the tank. In the center sits is a spot-lit industrial-green bandsaw. In his Zürich dialect he asks whether I've ever seen the inside components. Not waiting for an answer, he unclips the motor housing, swings it up and props it overhead like a car bonnet. "You see this? It's good for cutting through bones. Just look at this workmanship!"

Yul Brynner Dream

2005-08-23T15:31:00.000+02:00

Standing at the railings on deck of some sort of junkboat tug with a troop of bare-chested sailors wearing tourniquet loincloths. Advertisement banner-sails are breezily flapping commercial war cries "Drink Coke", "Canon ", "Burger King", and a chromatic dragon mascot up front is howling military orders in curious Sino-Anglese through its megaphone maw. In the harbor is an armada of littler junks surrounding our huge chugging skiff. They're simultaneously dipping their own rows of festooned streamers, and it is dazzling---like a vast synchronized Busby Berkeley curtsy in this harbor of dreams.

The man standing at my left looks familiar. I try to strike up a conversation about the proceedings, half there about what I want to say to him. He utters something shrouded in a secretive sort of whisper, and I can't understand. Cacophony. "Do you know who I am? Take a look boy, I'm Yul Brynner! I died from a 5 pack a day habit long ago, but I'm here again. And this is my resurrection".

Mama Thornton Dream

2005-08-15T22:59:00.000+02:00

Standing just outside a towering San Gimignano-like belfry alongside a small group of university students. A howling gale-force wind is hammering the little lichen wildweeds quivering between the cracks of ancient masonry. Everyone is getting sand-whipped while moving round to shield the delicately flowered clumps from their impending calamity. The professor is yelling in Italian about these rare hermaphrodites being descended from the time of the Etruscans, who earlier shielded their weeds in this same manner. But I have to let them all go---the tower's ready to blow over. I call the professor over and warn him that the old pocked rocks are unreinforced and unprepared for the bigger storm that's coming. He laughs and wags a finger at me, then turns to "conduct" the class' laughing.

I can't bear the thought of leaving these flowers alone to die. Between the tower gaps I see more Manhattoed spires in the distance with their own stone gardens to keep. More wind stripping skin from the stones and I can see the towers disappearing like a sandcastles right before my eyes.

I'm going down---down the spiral stairwell. As I descend, the stones become harder and smoother like polished granite. I come to a small lookout where a skinny little man is mopping up around the doorway. He looks up and tells me; "If you want to use the toilet, it will cost you". It's David Bowie with brown rotting teeth and looking like a haggard old woman. All around the toilet entry are 70's glitter rock posters of himself as Ziggy Stardust in huge platforms. Further down are bigger posters of Jimmy Dean, Elvis and Brando in black leather. But everything looks wrong about them. All the characters are impersonators. The biggest poster of all is a shiny "parchment" scroll, curled up and obscuring other images underneath. A BIG Mama Thornton domina is standing proudly with legs wide apart. She's wearing a shiny black patent leather cloak that looks like wet licorice. She's wielding a heavy truncheon in her left hand---commanding the graphic space over a pack of emasculated and fawning little boy-toys. The poster up close is alive, with everyone looking for a better pose. It's as though I'm watching a video session.

But as I step back everything freezes again. Half obscured on the wall behind Thornton's big wig are the words: "COME ON BABY, ROCK ME!"

Running Dream

2005-08-08T16:27:00.000+02:00

Lavish praise being heaped on me for winning an epic mile race---for all mankind! I'm on the same tragically misproportioned and rutted track of my Marshall High days. Stragglers I've lapped are now coming in one by one. "Hey, there's Peter Mogg, and Kevin Norwall and Herman Jones!" Jones, with his viscous drool flapping and clinging to the big M on his tank top jersey, summons me over to pump my hand like an oil derrick. "Good....going, good...going, you've done it!" I'm gawking at his kudos of complex spittle with fascination and revulsion---I can really see what he means. Glamorous and leggy cheerleaders with gleaming chicklet teeth are making glittery circular pom-pom codes in the harsh spectral light.

My mom and aunts and uncles and cousins are there wanting to get a glimpse of their prodigal hero. Joyce is there too. A great weariness now begins to suck on my thoughts. I want badly to celebrate, but wind up telling all the camera crew, reporters and gleeful student body that I want to go home.

Halifax Dream

2005-08-02T17:55:00.000+02:00

The Halifax room is the same doily-patterned one of of my NSCAD lodger days. Landlady M is around somewhere but unseen. I know now, just like I knew then, that she's watching me like a kindly but venomous snake. Big weather happening outside the bay window. Atomic clouds.

I'm lounging in her forbidden lazy chair with my cat Snacks in lap. While kneading her claws, she suddenly fishhooks a klacker through my shorts. I bolt back, with her still-hooked claw clinging to the bait. "Shhh, it's ok, just caaalm down". An odd pain, which is at once sharp and dull like an injection, has me visualizing horrible massive hydrocoele-sized testes like the ones I cringed at in those high school educational films about Papua New Guinea. DISEASE. This will be luggage I'll have to cart around in a wheelbarrow for the rest of my days. "I've got to call a doctor asap".

Now her tail's twitching like a hair-trigger, so I'm making sure I've got her firmly by the scruff. "It's ok, shhhhh, yeeess....shhhhh". Working delicately, I finally manage to un-clasp her claw. The little hole she leaves in me starts winking and blinking, then jerky aerosols spatter out like a nearly-spent can of spray. She's holding down, then releasing her paw over the hole, and I can see she's about to pounce. As I start letting her go, she takes it as a sign to bolt-and-scoot under the table. Now she's hidden among the stacks of old books propping up the table. My cell phone starts ringing, resounding with a tube-amp stereo sound. Big foghorn blues. But where is it? Is this Mrs. M calling to confirm my demise---has she been responsible for all this?

I head over to the byzantine bathroom for some first aid. After knocking over bottled tinctures and tubed unguents, I twist off the lid of a tiny and nearly empty jar of Vaseline---my fingertips can't quite get at the residual jelly at the bottom, so I'm foraging through mysteriously labeled drawers inside the bathroom cabinet. I'm looking for something that'll fish out the jelly. Sifting through kitchen drawers of meat mallets, sifters, chicken tongs, and cleaving knives, I finally come across a tiny spatula. I feel a huge relief wash over me. I know that I'll be able to plug the sack and stave off those massive sacs.

While I'm shoving the rubber paddle to squeeze past the little jar opening, the cell phone rings again---this time with the retro-ring tone of my Zürich phone. I can hear it somewhere under the dining room table, which is now epic in size and on top of which is a geometrically arranged stack of metal printing type looking like a pyrite Babylon. Over by the bay window I see Snacks in her pure cat bliss, batting around a little pile of dust bunnies.

Bomb Dream

2005-07-26T19:03:00.000+02:00

Acoustically live walls and engine din in the front-end interior of a cavernous transport jet which sports scenic bulkhead skylights and translucent hazy blue "lookout ports". There are no passenger seats, except where I'm buckled next to C inside this metal and glass-gridded nose cone.

A terrible hoard of missiles shrieks down upon us---pirouetting like a squadron of stunt-flyers. En masse, they pull up alongside, occluding the light. I tell C: "This is what Wagner meant by "Twilight of the Gods".

Inches from my face a dark missile begins spinning menacingly, with all the others following this "leader", who I sense is gathering strength from my fear. When I inch back in my seat, I clearly see the shaft adjusting itself in millimeter increments.

Suddenly H.B. barges in from the back like a runty Napoleon and starts loudly barking pit bull orders at the missiles. "Get the fuck back!" He looks rabid, but turns to us winking and smiling reassuringly and says: "They're in training. I need to be like Hannibal with an attitude---Patton on PCP---or else they won't follow orders---start acting on their own. They're are smart bombs, but only if you educate them".

Stingray Dream

2005-07-24T08:54:00.000+02:00

Pedaling my old boyhood Schwinn "Stingray" in a slow-mo peloton---a spectral road race cluster of cruiser bikes whose whip-around glances make the riders seem hyper-alert, like a closely knit gaggle of sightseers. As we pass through a sullen alp valley, everyone becomes intent and studied---now hellbent on not missing a beat. We're all in synch now. I'm catching mossy tree-framed views flickering through the canopy and feeling mighty chummy.

Although the Stingray seems the same gleaming blue metal-flake wonder as my first bike, I notice certain differences. For one, my seat has none of that sturdy but soft tuck-and-roll testicle padding of the original. It's only a thin shell of throwaway plastic---fake in the way of discards from my old Vacuform kit. I'm worried that this shoddiness will leave me vulnerable in the race. I'm being drafted along, not needing to pedal, and feeling guilty about the free ride.

Bang! A booming report from an unseen starter's gun and I'm caught unawares--caught "thinking"---while the staccato clatter of everyone's gear-shifting signals that I'm arrière du peloton. They're gone. My racer has become a clunkmetal puddle-jumper with whole packs of playing cards flapping up throaty chopper sounds in the spokes. While grinding clackity gears and chain-slipping again and again, I notice my furious pedaling has chewed the chainwheel down to barely serviceable plate of nubs. I'm cursing myself for being outwitted by everyone and losing my big chance. I dismount and walk towards...where? the finish? home? I know this trouncing is on the airwaves right now "...a serious lack of racing savvy and preparation...". A megaphone voice in the valley below is barking out the results. I feel sunk.

Later I'm down in the hoity-toity town among the riders and pennants. A heavyset official with droopy handlebar mustache is rope-towing me with his own huge Stingray. While he's escorting my bike jalopy and me through the sticky crowd I ask him if we're headed to pick up my "consolation". With a smokey Kentucky twang he's telling me: "You've done real good, real good!". But he suddenly disappears in the throng and I'm left alone facing the parting mob which is like the maw of a snake, opening as I enter, and contracting as I look back.

Cauterized Dream

2005-07-16T08:35:00.000+02:00

Zürich. Wedged in the crevice of a hulking sofa. The big bonne chance party for Pascal after his throat operation. He's wedged next to me dressed in his hospital togs and correcting my French pronunciation---"nuit, like nwee---you must be careful about zees uit". But I can't form the tongue + palate + lips for proper French accent because my tongue keeps jamming itself at the roof. He's slightly unnerved and trying to hide the fact by smiling through it, but betrays his impatience by flashing too many teeth. I'm worried about this affecting his fragile post-op condition...relapse! When I delicately suggest that he sit back and relax, he looks over at me and slurs out a slow "oouuii". His earlier animation is now replaced by a frightening stillness. While I'm trying to position him more comfortably, I see the dense pad of gauze and adhesive tape half unhinged from a horrible scabby tangle of stitched-up flesh---the cauterized wound sticking to his shirt collar. I pry open and let shut the damaged ensemble from the stuck cloth. There's something in the hinging that lets the lid thump shut. His weight is dead and pressing down on the massive cushion, wedging me more deeply in the corner of the couch. Now I'm stuck, but desperate to maintain sobriety. "He's my ill friend---needs my support". I'm looking past the wound and at his carotid peeking up from the around the corner of his neck and see that his pulse is steady. A cell phone hiding in the tangle of cloth starts vibrating and then pealing like a siren. I'm struggling to undo my crammed limbs so as to answer it, but can't get out from under his dead weight. I finally maneuver my hand through his gown and locate the phone. Click open a moaning, ill-sounding French woman's voice telling me "Get out of the house, monsieur." People I don't recognize are walking past our emergency, bantering. Except for the old lady looking over at me from the kitchen door, whose lips are synching with the phone lady's warning, telling me to get out.

General Phonograph Dream

2005-07-10T10:15:00.000+02:00

At a tool-strewn boot-maker's bench trying to stretch a hairy cowhide over the shoe last---but can't. My boot making instructor is an old craft-genius relic who knows ancient guild secrets. He kindly suggests to do work "more suitable to your talents" and now wants me to repaint the window sign. I'm straddling the dusty shoe displays in order to freshen the sign, which from the inside reads: "EGDELWONK GNITSAL". The faded and crackled beauty of the original paint has me entranced and I suggest that it only needs some shellac---let the patina show your customers you know about subtlety. He nods a knowing grin and says in an old world way: "Goot tinking".

Later the boot shop becomes General Phonograph on Melrose Ave. (where I worked for the yoda-eyed George Illes). He's lining the phono shelves with coin-op dispensers filled with plastic-encapsuled black nugget "toys". He turns around to ask me if I can't glue some "before and after" samples on the glass "for dee customers". I twist open a capsule and tap out a vulcanized black pellet onto the table and try to pry it apart. George tells me "Dunk it. You need to vett it; drop it in dee coffee." So I'm now struggling to fish it out with my finger while George looks on. He motions for me to stand aside so he can swish his hairy index around. He pauses briefly, begins slowly hoisting a slug of throbbing matter looking like soft wet licorice and then quickly shaking it onto a stack of wrapping paper. He prods it a bit until it flips over, revealing its eyes. A polliwog? Before I have a chance to examine it, he takes my thumb and presses over the lump, smearing it into an approximate shoe shape. He says "Now vatch carefully!" After the dark shape melts through the tissue layers, and he lifts the pulpy mass like a printing felt---revealing a dark sparkling slipper coated with an animated prismatic surface. "Now look, it's just like a computer slipper". Up close I can see nano-animated images of Great Wall vistas, Panda mourners under groves of towering bamboo in the background, Mao and Stalin posing stiffly like tourists in front of Forbidden City---Kublai Khan with big wet Manga eyes. I'm beside myself with astonishment and ask George "Where?! How?!" He's my heroic boss now, and I can see that his mournful days are behind him. "We will sell many!"

Cro Magnon Dream

2005-07-04T16:21:00.000+02:00

Bagging a load of peculiarly lightweight set of cudgels around some wooded golf course. I'm hunting for a ball that I don't remember hitting. A big 12th hole sign is posted along the offramp which is snaking its way through the otherwise pristine course. Parked along the offramp is an assembly of smoke-burping golf jitneys, and I'm wondering: "Why the running motors with no passengers or drivers?" Later I'm still searching for the same lost ball in a tiny meadow of scattered wooden nursery trays used for growing putting green patches. I forget about the ball so as to eyeball several hunched and ancient stacks of time-pocked golf balls---golfer dolmens! It's now clear to me that it wasn't the Scots who'd invented the game at all, but instead was a tribe of pre-druidian stone masters! While visualizing the enormity of my discovery, I get tangled with my bag while reaching around for a dolmen poker. The bag bottom rents loose, spilling total contents and so "Shit whuttle I do now?" I visualize a golf bag of ancient Cro-Magnon innovative genius---now excitedly foraging around for lengthy sticks of varying suppleness for my paleolithic golf tote. Some young boys approach with curiosity. I give them an impromptu song-and-dance about the need to hone survival skills for when the robots take over the planet yadda yadda, and they eagerly scatter to collect willowy branches. I decide to lie down on one of the nursery pallets. The leader of these boys is shouting orders. "Weave this!" "Cinch that!"...and the happy bee workers soon parading around with my willow sachel! I feel a righteous Lord of the Flies rush and wonder if this is the same pride-of-purpose emotion that those early fairway kings felt? Maybe not. Later, but without the sachel (those little fuckers absconded with it!) I'm struggle-trudging up a steep grassy knoll with cleats weighted down by boggy clumps. I'm trying to remove this tacky unk---it's oozing through my soles and glued to a brand new pair of cotton argyles---and now I'm cursing those dolmen kings because I'm certain it's the eons of their high-piled shit that's come to get me.

I find my way out of the woods and come to a clubhouse and enter (hoping for a cool drink). It's hush empty except for a dim wall projection of a trio of 60's Flamingo dancers with TV smiles sporting neck-to-crotch boas. I go to the soda machine to get myself a fizzy drink, but while fishing for change I realize that my pockets are bottomless. Ducking my head under the nearby bar spigot, I open my mouth while squeezing the tap button...gurgle...and then a sudden rush of sprudelwasser is slapping my gums and teeth oh hell yeah!

Austin Healy Dream

2005-06-25T14:35:00.000+02:00

Playing a game of "marble checkers" (like Chinese checkers) with Ty at a picnic gathering under a grove of towering willows. But the marbles are rolling out of their gridded ball sockets---we're now working the card table legs like gladfaced synchonized dowsers aligning numerical balls into their alloted slots---green, red and yellow rinkaround orbs finding their own little cubbies. and I'm only half sure that I'm really half of the circus magic. Ty seems so keen-eyed and riveted to the table---it's clear that if I let it all go he won't miss a beat. He makes this clear by saying "It's just like with karaoke---the song will lighten up as soon as you stop singing". So I let go. He's free of me as "boat anchor". He's holding the table up one-handed looking like a sinewy Charles Atlas; much brawnier than the real one. He seems so television primed; so not real. I establish the fact that I love this 'television Ty' too, and that if there are in fact two versions, that it's alright by me.

Later we're in a familiar old Austin Healy Sprite---joyriding roofless through an amazing jungle hybrid of municipal parks---Griffith, (the Planetarium) Golden Gate, (the Botanical Gardens) and Central (with its wall of 5th Avenue apartments and hotels). I can see the bug-eyed bonnet through the chrome-plated frame and I'm sure it's the same Austin Healy that Donald P. (Claw) and Michael I. hotwired on Benton Way back in Bellevue days. Above the din Ty asks if I know about all the hidden gears. "It's got a special endless syncho-mesh of possible speeds which are radically advanced even for today." And with that I'm shifting madly while he reads instructions from a tattered glovebox manual: "Round-out the pivot hamper with slight pulling motion while damping the pinion" and I'm on grinding gears here and there but then suddenly I've got the rhythm of it VROOM! And how does a 16 year old know all this? I'm popping the squeaky clutch---slapping delicately at the stiff cueball shifter---it's radio time and there's that deliciously sticky funk of Sly Stone and his boom-chakka-lakka. I try singing along feeling mighty cool, but I mangle it and Ty says "See what I mean about the karaoke? Family affair, you know"

Hobo Dream

2005-06-19T00:40:00.000+02:00

In Ventura on Main Street standing across from the old San Buenaventura Mission. Examining lushly thick yellow road dashes on the sidewalk which some road 'artist' has brush-scudded---an abstract sidewalk painting taking advantage of weedy cracks and bubble gum blotches for color effects---now caught up in painter's shop-talk with a beardy old depression era Woody Guthrie hobo with stained and ratty long johns. He's deftly yammering about 'earliest' abstractionists---speaking in measured laconic phrases about layerin' the "paynt" with a "winter tar brush" an' makin' sure yer workin' "from lean to fat" an' usin' only special "asphalt gluepaint" which is workable only when heated through and found only in "bitumen shops"---I'm down on my hands and knees scrutinizing the loosely spattered dashes tentacled under parked cars, over parking signs and dripping down store front plate-glass. His wry expression tells me "I know you're impressed" but he says (now without any hobo dialect) "There's more to the image when you see it from up in that belfry. It changes depending on where the cars are parked. Parts of my painting move around the city and even to other places...like a hobo code."

June 11, 2005

2005-06-12T11:52:00.000+02:00

At a 'tea' party hosted by a gay Russell Crowe which is happening down the street from my old Bellevue Ave. digs near Silverlake. I'm on the toilet in a blackandwhite tiled (Moderne?) bathroom with contrary curtains---like doilies hanging on dark stained and burly woodrings---all of which makes me mind-flit to huge sailboats and Russell Crowe as Fletcher Christian in some new Hollywood bounty mutiny---now wriggling my toes in the U-rug---and why have I taken off my shoes and socks? I'm sitting on the pot but no action. Freezeframe. I'm trying to catch the conspiratorial falsetto conversation of gravelly-voiced Russell and (?) in the next bathroom. He's raving about some sensational loverboy he's been shagging and once again everything goes quiet---the medicine cabinet mirror over the sink swings open and he's back in his world-famous butchtones and tells me: "Take your fucking dump, flush and leave!"Then he smiles and immediately bellows "Mates, come check out the joker taking a dump!" and the bathroom door handle rattles a bit, then swings open onto a spectral corridor of backlit faces, all peering over one another to get a better view. I'm thinking speedily about how to get out when suddenly all goes silent and my stomach starts rumbling out of control, then lets out a tremendous bronx cheer with reverb effects. I'm feeling overwhelmed with shame and Russell yells "CUT!", and now everyone is applauding wildly at my 'performance'. A picture on the wall next to me pops out and Russell sticks his head through and he tells me "Mate, this is gonna be a world-beater. You've outdone yourself". I can see his face powderstreaked with stray eye-liner tracks and am wondering why an actor of his stature can't get better makeup. He says: "You still haven't flushed, mate. Flush and take a bow". I reach behind and find the cold metal handle and plunge. A muffled gurgling and my balls now getting submerged and I'm hopping about with ankle pants while the water rises and my turds (a baker's dozen) jostling each other over the gangplank and onto the U-rug and Russell's beside himself with joy and yelling out: "You've seen it all yourselves! A star is born, mates!"

Sick Bird Dream

2005-06-10T06:34:00.000+02:00

I'm up in some sort of 19th century research lab. Traffic below. looking through a galvanized screen cage at a tiny, featherless cheep-cheeping chick with beaky head too big for its frail body. I'm repulsed by it, but while trying to rise, it is shaking horribly---I feel a strong urge to help. I'm carefully turning the cage so as not to knock down the fragile tinybird...where's the cage door? I accidentally bump the hanging cage, which is suspended from what looks like copper wire---WHAM! everything drops on the floor suddenly and I'm sickened for the bird and what has happened---but the cheepcheeping starts up onced again and now it's crawling slowly, painfully up onto the throw rug which is fronting the lab shelving. I get down low to look at it in closeup; nearer than the cage had allowed---it's now gone bumpy with sad little welted fractures and all brokenbeaked...I'm trying to foist it up but there's nowhere I can handle it without maiming or killing it. I feel around in my pockets and there's my favorite old Rapidograph pen! I pull the yellow tipped cap, and now, very delicately, prodding the stunned embryo with the fine metal slider tip to bring it back to it's feet. "Come on little birdy. It's a little perch for you!" The veiny broken beaked thing is now looking directly at me and conveying a deep understanding for what I'm trying to do. But the head's too heavy and just clacks back down after each attempt to raise itself. I'm thinking about finding a tiny flag to cover it up when it dies.

George Walker Dream

2005-06-08T07:30:00.000+02:00

In some country kitchen cracking walnuts with the small rounded peen side of a jewelry hammer but can't hit the walnuts squarely---the glancing blows landing on my clamphand---I'm growing side-minded wary of its swollen and mottled appearance---now holding both hands up to the bare bulb and can see the bones of my left hand like shattered glass. I'm calmly flexing it---can feel the internal jostling---I'm aware it's numb and swollen---my mind harking back to some dimly-remembered other dream of having damaged it. Now testing its dexterity by trying to screw on a bottle cap, the hand repeatedly loses grip and I'm wondering whether it's permanently damaged. Feeling emotionally detached---strangely scientific---fixedly studying everything around me more closely as if this were the first (last?) time. The kitchen table is now a lab workbench with a motley mix of professional tools...vise, porphyry, clamps, soldering iron, test tubes...on the floor is a large rusted anvil and I realize I'm in old Mr. Walker's basement. I go upstairs to see if he's around, but all doors and windows are unlatched and knowing he's obsessive about locking, I go out through the front door look around, but no Mr. Walker. I continue around the corner to a Bogie's Liquor that's no longer Bogie's---instead some sort of pawn shop of sad and dusty bric-a-brac. A row of gleaming bicycles are hanging along the back wall where I can see someone working. I enter the jingledoor and go to the bicycles and it's Mr. Walker in a Peugeot apron inflating tires with a pneumatic pump and he's real happy to see me through his thick glasses which he never wore in real life. He looks up. I ask him about the windows being open, but he pays no attention but instead staring at my big hand. He grabs it with a wince but says there's nothing wrong he can't fix. I have a young boy's deeply profound trust in his words and so I hand him my hand and he blows on it some with the pump---then says "We've got to fix it in my basement". We go to the back of what was Bogies---now attached to the real Mr. Walker's house. Descending a stairwell I'd never known, we pass various knarly wooden levels stacked with old washing machines and boilers nearly rusted out and I now can see myself at that same 'science' table screwing something into my hand with a cordless.

San Remo Dream

2005-05-22T20:15:00.000+02:00

Floundering around once again in San Remo looking for my wallet and Ufe---the same Swedish guy I once traveled with in Brasil and who in my dream is the same sinister cad who once pinched Brasilian crusados and passport. He's surely counting his thick wad of purloined Lira. Later, near the water, a 19th century line of gas lamps are hissing and casting flickering pole shadows on the quay. I'm half looking for Ufe and half on my way back to some vaguely-remembered hotel room but have no idea where it might be. Lost. I cross the tracks in front of the quay and sense a train around the corner.

Later in old Flamingo Hotel Lobby changing speeds on the stick-shift controlled shoe polisher working my Alden Oxfords towards a movie star shine. I'm pleased and let go of the polishing control-shifter. Stepping back onto the ultra dense horn-a-plenty carpet I begin losing traction and end up ice-skating towards an orderly row of one-armed bandits being fed-and-pumped by middle-aged women with hard-laquered space-helmet hairdos. I go from slipping and near falling into a spastic Fred Astaire. It's entertainment! Everyone turns to watch and I'm hot stuff and feeling like the Tasmanian devil and now jumping into a dervish move. Suddenly I'm being splashed by a blinding spot with drum-rolls and MC trying to sucker me into double-time and egging the crowd with 'faster!' 'faster!'. I'm lost in my own giddylaughter comic speed. I'm in a tux-and-jockey shorts get up with black socks and spats over shiny shoes and this realisation cattle-prods me with an instant rush of doom-and -failure---everyone's laughing at me---I try to camouflage my shame by trying out an entertaining spin move but the slippery soles are like walking on glassy ice, and I pratfall face forward. More laughter, but by staring into the flowered carpet I'm able to avoid eye-contact. Still face down, I start snaking my body towards the entry and the distance (not more than 10 meters) seems to lengthen as I approach. Now out of breath from the crawling struggle I signal into the spotlight that I want a time-out. I sit up and see my mom and a man (who could be my dead father) looking at me fixedly.

I'm tending succulents in a huge desert-theme glass house with my 5th grade teacher (the now-deceased Mrs Bitzer) who's there working under me as a sad-sack gardener. This is the same Mrs. Bitzer I once disliked (like a plague rat) who's now breaking my heart---I know she's without any home or family---her creased little face so damned sad and lonely---'such a sad lost old woman'. She reads my mind and starts penetrating me with wet eyes and I feel like I'm going to break down and so quickly turn away. It dawns she should be dead and so I'm now apprehensive about being here inside this big plant house with her. Up in the skyglass I see veils of spider gauze curtaining the double-domed surface. One of the glass panels is hanging open and the corner of my eye keeps catching glimpses of fast moving (trap-door?) spiders.

X-Ray Glasses Dream

2005-05-17T07:55:00.000+02:00

Yanking up phenomenal peppercorn clodded tree stumps in a forest clearing---the living trees are thickslabbed giants like California Sequoias--only greyer; more deeply runneled. White and red-speckled toadstools scattered everywhere and I'm impressed by the series of whorled damp patterns my gardener clogs have drawn over the fungi field. I'm uprooting green, red and white clumps of nodal peppercorns---bounties delicately clinging to the rotted black roots and I'm wondering why these ancient stumps are so simple to unearth---breaking off like sponge bricks. No matter because I'm well on with my task---and these being rare peppercorns (I'm certain) and worth handsome sums in gourmet markets. I need to protect this find---stake a claim. But how? Several trails lead off where splayed cracks of cathedral light are spotlighting my cache. And how am I gonna cart all this away?
I'm puzzled about logistics---walking in circles---seeking a solution. Later on I've got green, red and white corn separately laid out in rectangles over the forest peat and noticing how it resembles the Italian Tricolore. Sid shows up and is there giving the peppercorns a good looking over, hemming and hawing so as to consult me in 'business matters'. He seems intent on friendly patter and I realize I can leave the booty with him---locate a truck somewhere. As I leave I'm thinking "As a dead man he's not such a bad person; maybe we can pull of this enterprise."

Photo snapping down bright aisles of some vast Walmart Costco cheapbox all-in-one shopping nightmare where throngs of fatties repulsively bobbing to ridiculous banal loonytoons 'hiphop' Muzak. N is there with her nitwit husband who's in ecstasy in this madness yammering up a storm to himself allthewhile sashaying to the Musak "groove". I'm testing a camera in Digital Equipment and N is in my viewfinder asking me to auto-focus on her left 'better' profile..."Take more glamorous ones than that dolt over there knows how". I'm fumbling with the manual settings (why does this camera have such a heavy feel?) A crowd surges towards us and I'm getting indignant ---all the labored-breathing bodies bumper-car jostling me. I feel puny and wanna leave but it's cavernous; N is no longer herself but one of the hefty crowd. This woman is using her hands and lip-synching 'just chill, baby'.

Later in the same mall edifice with Cécile in Ladies' Underwear; she wants me to help her pick out bra and panty combos and I'm not up for it. I wanna get back to my Photoshop lessons, but realizing I'd better be obliging because of possible recriminations and "What the hell did I do wrong now?" She's inandout door swooshing through variouos changing stalls---other women seem completely oblivious to my state of mind. I'm standing like a mannekin and nobody sees me---perverted sentinel in all this underwear frenzy. I'm trying to be cool, discreet but all these nipples and pubed panties catwalking past me has me excited and flushed at what I might catch a glimpse of. I'm rewinding mental images to an old back-of-the-comix advert selling mail order 'X-RAY glasses' with translucent see-through lady figure who seems unaware of the not-quite-ready-for sex kid who's actually me, oh and did I actually buy that camera over in Digital Equipment? Cécile startles me from behind and starts laughing at my mannequin pose and I'm busted.

More of the same shopping but now C is gone and I'm with a group of unknowns from some 'club'. They've all got the same rainbow-colored NBC peacock stenciled on their t-shirts. A director in a director's chair (much like N's M from earlier shopping section of this dream) is yelping instructions to cameraman and crew---it's no longer a mall but a cavernous film studio; all these events a series of scenes being shot for what I'm dreaming (at this point I'm lucid dreaming and start controlling the action) Director (it's now me in the chair) yells "Action!" and the NBC t-shirted characters raise protest placards and right off another throng of anti-protesters enters from another department and the two groups lunge forward frothing and now doing battle and everyone is whooping it up like "The Day of the Locust". While all the commotion is running I signal with finger to lips for silence and everyone freezes, some giggling and then I yell "Action!" I do this repeatedly and am amazed at the control. But now my director's chair is telescoping on some boom lift---I'm holding fast to the side rails and the action now swaying far below with everyone applauding me while I fade away...up past the roof tops. I'm squinting through hard-edged shadows and stuccoglass reflections to a sign that reads "Hollywoodland". The Capitol Records Building nearby has a tone arm at the top and the glinty spectators are motionless. It feels about noon.

Colosseum Dream

2005-05-12T21:26:00.000+02:00

Bending my neck up at a blue dream wall of Fenway proportions---this vertical stoppage plastered with tattered signs hocking Burma shaves and corn flakes. It could be the 50's, but I'm sure it's later because of familiar slats of zig-zag pavilion roof shading voices and eye that are leering at me because I'm standing at shortstop on the cinder brick-colored infield in my underwear, donning an old-fashioned pair of Kiwi-blackened baseball cleats and my LA cap. The sun is low, so I can't read the usual stark shadows off the foul poles sun-dialing the time of day---sweeping cantilevered aisles have lost their light and so no clocks. I sense vague snickering laughter seeping through the big wall.

Oddly mixed visions of gladiators like ballplaying heros in simulated Coloseum---but somehow I'm savvy about my need to escape this naked-with-black-shoes ignominy and so wend my way to the opposing team's dugout which I'm inching towards by following my cleated groove circles. I arrive at the dugout steps and run straight down through the spectral corridor; now stopping to chuck my clacking shoes-and-sox and find my way out to that same perfect view to where the orange 76 glow-ball is vibrating against an obscene lurid blue sky where I watched purple San Gabriels and twilight double-headers. I can see slivered views of Deco LA City Hall. There's a helicopter chopping up some clouds and I can hear the pilot speaking through a megaphone at someone below. Is it me?

I'm with Uncle M on a repeat old trip to Zion and Bryce of long ago deserts and Rat Pack Vegas days---but he detours this time to where Glen Canyon lay before the fossil terrain floods. He's pointing out big Pueblo rock drawings like a scientist while barreling down the rutted gravel path. Aunt Mary is alive again and sitting in the back seat---but something is wrong---she seems too much like the same mannequin lady who lay mute in that satin-lined box just before she and uncle G sank into different pits. I don't know how to approach her and I'm afraid of what she might do. I'm lucid and want to shake this image of her being 'alive' but thankfully she disappears from her dream cameo but I'm jolted. But Uncle M is oblivious and half muttering cryptic comments about fishing tackle and bait and I'm losing the thread of his thoughts. He points out the sign reading 'just 20 miles' to world's best charbroiled triple decker burgers with authentic Belgian fries and I'm gonna wolf special meat with pickles and cheese and onions and bacon and lettuce and tomatoes and shakes and fries and sesame buns! We drive up to the sad old brick Van de Kamp's off Fletcher Drive where we used to get trays clamped to our car doors...and it's real gone and I'm blue because my uncle who never cried is speaking about all the good things gone and his voice sounds so old and lost and weary.

Hollywood Bowl Dream

2005-05-05T08:11:00.000+02:00

Up in the high seats watching a great spectral jam session through hot foggy Hollywood Bowl plume haze---odd crickety night bugs chirping---giggly voices mingling with a dry raspy stoned-out dialog in the chaparral behind. I'm an usher once again and feeling that ancient halcyon joy riding in me. My miniskirted date is next to me on the splinterbench. It's sweet and smiling P. Ferri, and her sister D smiling alongside and making them look like one gorgeous two-headed girl. They're both slightly sloe-eyed from something smoked, which I realize is due to the cloud-seeping from the rock and roll fog machines (clipped along the bowl's rim) all stutter-pumping a gauzy haze down on the crowd below and slowly seep-curling its way through hippy hairdos all the way up to our high-hill bench. Ah this is the life! Machine-pumped concert wonder drugs---me here with my nearly-twin-sisters double-dating---I can feel the floating guitar lullaby-licking my ears from this magical band in silhouette.

Later the narcoleptic smile on D's face has me worried since I've got to steer them both back to Echo Park (and their alcoholic mom) on my blood-red, tanked-up and ready to barrel BSA. We're struggling through fits of stony buzz laughter (a stream of nutter jokes) and I'm worried that it's gonna be too damned naked the three of us riding with no leathers, helmets and me at the throttle...then kicking at the rancid oily dirt trying to get the bike to open but only managing some sputtering pops and the girls howling together at my ignominy and I let it slip and we all go down kickstand up and now a trio of dying hysteria fitsters and why isn't the bike heavier and hurting us? It's no longer the baddass BSA but a big cheap display model and now D goes to the sages to pee and suddenly her head is bobbing to the splash beats of her hilarious rainbird sprinkler.

We're back at the crickety sage-side of the Bowl where I'd heard earlier chaparral giggles (this being where D was pissing buckets) I'm wondering why the concert is still 'on' because of my earlier crowd exodus memory---strange Herb Alpert Mariachi trumpeting starts up with hip-hop funkybeats and now a Chicano rapper comes onto the stage and then a few more and all sounding like Cypress Hill chanting astonishing nasty raps mixed in with melodious harmonies and D looks at me and says: 'It's another fear-moan pumped sonic crowd down there. Get it? FEAR-MOAN!' Then she starts into a perfect Karaoke memory rap with the Chicano stage guys and some other boys beyond the bushes and I'm trying desperately to follow her lucid lips and suddenly feel a rush of amazement and love for her own joy and now know that she's the queen of my dreams.

Marbles Dream

2005-04-25T14:59:00.000+02:00

Endlessly sifting through a hempen sack full of kid marbles---big cat's eyes and solids like precious gems---gleaming mixtures of prismatic clacking sounds sending me into kid-joy wonderment of scudded levi knee patches hooding phenomenally big ready-to-pick itchyscabs formed from marble games like 'ringer', 'cherry pit' and 'nine-holes'. I'm hanging out with David K and M Espinosa (those two never hung out together) Now lucid dreaming I'm trying to connect the two, but then lose the thread and now they're far down the road walking away and it's clear that I'll never see them again. Switch reels back to marble emotions mixed up with early years' hatred of Danny C for thieving black onyx pee wees from my cinch-sack---the same sack I'd slipped off a luxury bottle of booze at Jay's Liquor on Hoover St on my way to Dayton Heights Elementary. And lo! I'm in Jay's now---but that's not Jay behind the counter---just some fake Jay with thick ladies' pancake make-up and eyeliner (here I know Jay's been dead for eons but I'm back again and it dials straight to the same haunted childhood mind-wrestling about death). Now this impostor "Jay" looks at me queerly with pursed lips---starts into his mopping of checkerboard lino-tiles behind private cashbox register---maybe he's only slinking in order to avoid my third degree and possible anger that he's the one responsible for Jay? Unsolved questions...Now I make out his made-up Clockwork Orange Droog's eye looking up at me from his stooped spot through the counterpane glass where he's scraping at something. What's he's cleaning up? Someone else is in the back aisles watching us. I quickly leave through the swoosingdoor and spot Sam the barber across the street making hairy dust halos with his broom.

Trying to play guitar at a gathering of old high school friends---A. Rapaport and L. Firth bending the Los Feliz apartment space with lyrical songs---one after another---I'm desperate to get in on the melodiousnes but I can't find the right key---too many strings on the oversized guitar, which is more like a sitar with its bulbed base and mini frets---there's a big bowl of corn chip 'guitar picks' and I'm trying to strum a tune on micro gut strings but each one brittlebreaks and a sad pile of cornchip shards are scattered over my Jesus sandals. My frustration at my ineptitude has me ranting that 'Fucking Jesus can't even make a decent pair of sandals'.

Queuing in an Alpine ski run tower chute---shiny gondola pods like candied apples cable swinging out into a vast cirrus sky---airplanes passing far below in the satellite distance. I jump aboard with 3 ski-outfitted, geared-up, masked (androgynous) others. The automatic door latches shut with a furious hydraulic force---delayed hisses hinting at the serious ride ahead---my organs bang together as we suddenly drop off backwards from the overhang. Trickster supersonic jet craft are coming at us mach speed then pealing past from every side and now the contrail wakes coming at us, obscuring the windows with sudden hyper volleys of crytalline mist. "Property of 6 Flags" is embossed in Braille and English onto the metal door. Fleeting visions of doing all this blind has me cackling out loud nervously....then one of the androgenous others opens the second door and leaps like a paratrooper with the others following one two three. My weight quickly tilts the gondola and I'm face-pressed against the glass wondering how the cable rollers can still be...then suddenly spronging loose the pod is in free-fall and my mind takes over and steers it upright and I'm now holding the two opposing doors in hang-glide position, turning, lifting and guiding the gondola home!

Uncle George Dream

2005-04-20T23:25:00.000+02:00

I can no longer stand the weight of him---the fatman falling in slow motion in reverse onto me. Geddoff! His heavy heels have my sandals crucified to the floorboards, but he too is a victim in the human domino surge of hyped up spectators rushing away like lemmings from the hot dog and beer vendors towards the HOME RUN! magic sound of stitched-hide ball and ash reverberating in the standing-room only heat, and I'm suffocating from the heavy man bearing down on me---a tank-topped hulk with distending masses of pink flesh and I'm ooked out by the oozing leakage from his oversize pores and crunched acne craters pressed against my face. He's on top of me now and I'm screaming for help but the crowd is now yelling Olé!---with sudden black-on-white etched visions of Goya con Picasso serial bull killerz merry-go-rounding with dark slaughterhouses of epic Chicago meat factories. I'm gonna die now. I can't breathe. Here I wake up in a dull panic, take a piss and moments later resume my night rambling in another place when I was younger and my uncle George was driving me in his El Camino careening past the Tommy's Burger booth on Rampart and Beverly with multitudes waiting for charbroiled chopped cow 'n glumps of 'chili sauce' in waxy yellow paper with pickes on the side---the Camino muffler now scraping the asphalt screeeek! and Uncle George heading somewhere fast with fireworks sparklers lighting up my peripheral vision and now lined-up folk faces lit up like old homicide photos with spent flash-bulbs sizzling hot and I'm in driveby open-mouthed amazement. My mind is now flashing back to the earlier dream of epic Chicago meateries and Upton Sinclair protest marches on Washington mixed in with thoughts of same baseball stadium fatman's hanks sizzling on a big backyard Webber grill with p.u. scorched hairball reekage. I'm feeling sick now and imagining this would make a pregnant woman open my passenger door and wretch. More sparks flying all around and we're heading straight towards the Rampart Police Station where I once got booked as a young teen for kicking Louis R. in the nuts for no good reason. Remorse.

Ottenweg Dream

2005-04-16T20:10:00.000+02:00

Trying to worm my way into a paper sleeping sack plumped-stuffed with natural' ingredients---I'm fingering the warning label which I recognize as bogus, so I rip it off causing a jerk motion, seam opens and out float tiny puffed rice seedies with feathery 'wings' allowing them to spin and hover like little alien seed craft. Now blowing rice-ules around the room, delicately making certain none of them sink to the floor....now mentally affecting their orbits, like a dance, and "I see the beauty of the universe floating right here, right now, in this room"

Later on in Ottenweg kitchen with rolling pin---Hawaiian sweet-bread-dough-struggling for plasticity and Cécile now 'helping out'---tossing quantities of airy cake flour at the dough mass and screaming ha-ha's at my disobedient blob---I'm flogging the sticky heap (the flour is so fine and the dough seems to keep wicking it off) allthewhile kitchen clouding up with cake powder. I'm irritated now; hissy-fitting about the dough not cooperating. I dump it on the floor and kick it in disgust and my foot gets gummed-in. Now I'm on the floor picking dough-nits from toe valleys, fingers backandforth prodding out lost Hawaiian pan nodules.

Cécile is scrubbing my back with a hard bristle brush. Faucet echo drips in some northern black-and-white tiled bathroom. Sweden? Laplandish peatybogs and hot whisky rushes are definitely "in the air". I can feel a dark and ill-tempered earth outside with holy light streamers passing through foggy panes...I'm wincing at the bristles but realize they're 'healthy' and so fix my stare at a billion bath bubbles..."little wastrels---ne'er-do-wells" Drying off and now noticing how my feet are not at all mine--too large---and toenails---disgusting, thick---I'm fixedly clamped on them with the nail kit clippers, but dense toenails all petrified. Can't...break...through...and so go to fetch some scissors but heavy like pliers. They're pinking shears and first lop is like butter, leaving hardened toothy bakelite ridges---I'm looking at the floor clippings and wondering if they might not work well as inlay tiles. Oh mother-of-pearls!

John Ford Dream

2005-04-11T23:22:00.000+02:00

Long wooden building with saloon and 2nd story rooms for sleep 'n sex like in wild western giddyaps---I'm upstairs sleuthing through a monitor/camcorder and smallchatting with old 'colleague'---can't remember the name---John D. from long ago Culver City illustration gig? But he's thicker, older and dressed up in John Ford classic laconic cowboy duds. But what's different about him? Is he from South America? I realize he's 'authentic' and not acting. He's a real Pampas gaucho de Argentina who's slack-jawed staring and so I swing the camera monitor for a close-up telephoto bighead....he's got more wrinkles now. I want to ask him personal 'interview' Q & A---he claims he's worried about something 'back home' while point-blank burning laser eyes at me in judgement. Now I'm swinging fat boxy monitor from the town square folks back to 'John', and the monitor is flashing on-off. Everything is sticky and hot.

Later on I'm walking through porticos of a similar wooden space but elsewhere---I'm in suburban simulacra zone of western 'theme' mall, cheapened Robinsons Crusoe May Company Nevermindthebullocks cheapniz stinkperfumery---repugnant. I walk through more wooden fakery and then later I'm mercifully indoors lounging in 'ranch-style' living room. Mish-mash bric-a-brac and big wagon wheels---plastic palms with christmas lights rimming wetbar with lurid clearblue cocktails. It's a stage-set (like earlier) and I'm telling myself "all will be torn down in time" & "This must be San Fernando!". On a huge mosaic coffee table, scattered wads of spent balloons along with pink tooth-marked gum balls all enzyme spittled and air dried shiny---I'm now separating the real party balloons---fascinating with their cluttered little boyscoutish ship knots and chalky coatings...Ding dong! The door. Wrong place now. Wrong valley...I'm trespassing and so scanning the room for a quick exit. "I'm heading out through the patio where the coolblue kidney-shaped pool is....Kerblam! I splat into an invisible sliding window; now on my duff watching sheer sheetglass undulating over me. I scoot back some more. It's gonna come down.

Topanga Canyon Dream

2005-04-07T19:53:00.000+02:00

Back again in Topanga Canyon of once upon a time dream-oddities. Jennifer B from Halifax is walking with me along hot dry scrubby trail. She's somehow merged with Jenny A who's really from Topanga. I'm looking back down scrubby trail seeing intermittent peeps of Pacific Ocean vastness which seems 'tilted up' and pressing against the eucalyptus openings.

She's 'narrating' like PBS about this being a Chumash Indian passage to the high Sierra Nevada "all the way to the Whitney Portals"---reminding me to boyscout times of old stinky tents and potscrubbing messes. She unrolls spectacularly detailed and secret Landsat map---patchworked, quilted and 'antique'---nevertheless ultramodern hermetically sealed in plastic coated vinyl? Standing close to me she whispers "It requires a special lens to stitch all these places together cohesively" now smiling and pulling an egg shaped crackled glass out of her shiny patent leather handbag---it's like fine old translucent chinese porcelain which she says only exists for reading the map and now telling me that "It's a Ouija pointer"; they invented it. She's professorial now---fast-talking way over my head about esoteric Chumash secret code coordinates for moving up to the high country. "We're standing where the Sierras begin". I'm being distracted by a hive nearby. Wasps? Honeybees? Droning drones. She tells me to "Wait now"---kisses me passionately and then disappears down same sad dusty trail but away from hive buzzing. More codes and surprises? I decide to play around with the Ouija egg pointer on the secret parchment but can't unfurl it---struggling with dusty trail gusts---now squatting and peeing on the map like a girl. Bee distractions. Dryness now feels ready to explode into Angelino wildfire. I need a drink and exactly timed comes Jennifer bringing up dripping wet khaki suited canteens. She knows many secrets and allotta knowledge---I want to know her better. Realizing now that she's an artist shaman. Many ideas flashing with questions I want to ask---clumsy eroticism mixed together with something I need to know.

Antarctica Dream

2005-04-02T08:04:00.000+02:00

Staring down at a half-filled pond---could be a small reservoir even---a dusty window view in the high loft attic---open space---varnished---knotty cabin pine. Alpine. But this place could also be Uncle M's 60's Torrance tract house wedded to a Swiss style chalet on steroids. And there are stones and it is huge with many rooms lurking.

I'm making my way down a small spiral stairwell---'Watch your step; it's rickety'. There's a man making his way up the bottom rungs (the caretaker?). I look below and the scene is open and spiral-skewed like Vertigo belltower steps, not at all like the stonewalled stairwell space I'm standing in, which leaves no room to pass and so I'm withdrawing awkwardly, backwardly while fingerfeeling the wooden stairstringers (more varnished piney knots). My achilles are starting to set---like hardening concrete---throb-aching, numb. I'm keeping an eye on his 'progress' throughout---catching glimpses of crew-cut hair, hands, arms, shiny shoes flash-lit by a vertical string of pond-viewing windows. I see a tray with shiny cutlery...room service?.

At the same space of earlier attic but now with sink and faucet looking down again at a much bigger pond area (more like a lake) but now with a much lower water level---farmers and fishermen going about their trades, but stiffly---like Sim City early settler automatons. Everything brisk and pristine except for bogs and seaweed zephyrwafting in murky green water. My mind sees minnowfish hypergilling---struggling for 'air' and so I turn the water dials and instantly fry swimming in all directions like tragic escaped fish prisoners. I'm feeling rushes of relief....that man. Looking around for my video camera (where did I put it?) to capture whatever shenanigans he might put me through 'just in case' (where is it?) L.R. is sitting on my mom's old leather sofa watching tiny tv right where (I'm now sure) the camera should be. I know she's responsible. She doesn't see me. She's transfixed on something flickering on the screen that I cannot see.

More epic dreaming of castle-hut-pond-moat-uncle M's. In an airliner looking down at same algae lake and higher perspective shows it's really a moat around a cheezy Lego-like alpine village castle knottypine hut propped up manse-like high on Gibraltar hillock. Everything is still of that oddly mechanical space---only higher up. I've got 'my' camcorder again---but this one's not mine because it's much heavier, professional. I'm ZOOMING in on the digital Lego space and the zoom control now jammed and I'm admiring all the beautifully machined anodized dials and switches with its thrilling solid heavy state....the pond lake moat is in the viewer now---I can see the landscape is innundated---Apine farms submerged and plankton-ridden with mechanical medieval tradesmen knocked-over with some half in the water face down. The camera is operating on its own now; is 'showing me' where to look. Southern polar region is visible beyond the Andes and my gut wrenches suddenly in the knowledge that a mammoth ice shelf has broken free. I'm now trying to zoom in on Antarctica, but as I get to it the camera shuts down. It's really happening.

Anza-Borrego Dream

2005-03-31T14:53:00.000+02:00

Walking down the boardwalk along memory banks of San Remo Italy---lost Romanov onion-domed candy colored casinos---like simulated decay ala Vegas. Whiffs of a possible tsunami in the air---people motioning seaward...la! but without panic. Calm.

C is now a little girl (my daughter?) begging for the hotel key 'Pleeeze!' and now I'm futzing through sandy tiers of backpack pockets. Finally find a key-shaped 'credit card' with rough metal edges---binary numbers embossed both sides. She grabs it and heads up long steep San Fran bricklayed knobbyhill---rows of houses now Victorian gingerbreaded and now no longer Italy. Wind buffeting sailskiffs nearby and I'm getting wary about the wooden planks. I head up the hill towards onion dome cluster but not sure the brickstreet is the right way. Hesitation.

Later...same unreal lost time seaside resort but now in bone-dry Anzo Borrego badlands desert---everything sanded over with giant tumbleweeds fronting porches and empty lots. NAMIBIA! SKELETON COAST! My mind reels about Anzo actually being a lost Namibian land chunk set adrift with all these parlors and gamerooms where Rasputin swung his Svengalisword 'n' scabbard. Nobody but me knows that he was really a landlocked pirate from this place---also the secret knowledge that he's the Yaqui teacher Don Juan. There's buried knowledge he's left behind and I'm certain it's here.

Oddshaped concretions sprouting from rock banks like aborted sand babies---Jimmy with me now---he's pointing with manzanita walking stick at special geological facial formations---poke poke---and now a long tide is rolling in from salton eternity---desertocean bulbous concretions multiplying and alive now---Jimmy acting like an imp ---sniggering at sandbabies contracting slightly after each poke and now I'm excited and wanna poke too---J mind-reading me and hands over the stick with a sly smirk and I know the fun is on; I can't hold back and my first baby stab makes a big Brrreeeeeekkkk fleshy wet hissing emission---like stepping-on-talking-baby-doll sounds. Epic-hilarity, and now Jim's rolling on the grit in laughing convulsions because of my jumpy reactions. BrrreeEEEeeeeeekkkk!

Crystal Springs Dream

2005-03-28T22:02:00.000+02:00

"Waiting" for speech presentations at Griffith Park near glen-like Crystal Springs with formal dining tables lined up dressed in white linen looking like some sad veteran's cemetery. Ceremonial podium with pokingout speaker stanchions and boyscout flags flapping in the wide-angle distance---nearby tuxed waiters placing cutlery just so with 'high occasion' stiffback postures, mechano-glide sentinels. Flags flapping. More waiting. I'm thinking this is the calm before momentous speeches and big waves. Now hyper-aware of big birds tree-housed in the white oak canopy shading my spot of grass. Now a group of 'my' students arrive---a huge class anticipating my giving them instruction. I bleat that I'm 'off duty' and to find another instructor while pointing off yonder to flagged podium. One wiseguy calls my bluff: "You're full of shit" he says. I'm fumbling around for a juicy retort but end up stuttering some horsepuck nonsense and everyone chuckling in good fun smiling and trying to let me 'off the hook'. I can't think clearly nor do I care. It is hot. I'm waiting....watching.

Miss Skinner Dream

2005-03-24T07:30:00.000+01:00

I'm dressed in 'authentic Roman toga' enjoying a cup o' joe while reading inky newspaper; admiring toga togs miraculously soft like old nappies yet sailcloth sturdy . 'Gotta hand it to the Romans!---but what's this? Coffee stains soiling sacred togacloth with my stupid mindless slurping; as I jolt up reflexively sploots and O O O ! Knowledge of toga as an ancient relic 'on loan' and no way I can return it soiled like this---but now I'm running down the east hallway of Dayton Heights Elementary in adult body---I do know where the bathroom is and so run right in seeing same sad broken stall doors framing shame-faced littleboys taking vein-popping world premier dumps---whole stinky boysroom permeated with conscious-stricken self-loathing---now I'm puddle-jumping stinkwater barefoot-naked with toga; mocking laughter echoing off white tiles but now I don't care like then---my mind reeling over consequences of returning tarnished loan-toga---looking along long-sink with clean water and washboard but other half of water is suspended vile and menacing at the other end like two rivers yet unblended---I've got to work slowly with utmost care not to allow polluted bilge bolitos to swim over here---dry snickering in the air and I turn to see the shitter boys bareteeth mocking...but bigger concern lurks (I know they know about the toga) sudden grabbing from behind---headlock-armtwists and grabbing at toga---my mind in a pickle for a way out while me naked and schoolyards of ingnominy waiting out there. I'm now back-to-the-door bracing a forceful hunchbacking shove..........Later boys gone and all silence except for sinkdrips---stark naked in front of Miss Skinner (how'd she get in here?) She's staring at me updownupdown and whoooah I can't keep my cock from spring fever dancing OH SHAME---she's so glamorous now opening her purse pulling out lanyard keychain reaching around me and click-locking the door. She's on me up close and kissing me with my mind mixed up between nowself and thenself. Excitement beyond the rapture because this is real---first love feelings thought lost now renewed and we're actually gonna shag. No matter about the locked doors because here comes kindly Mr. Orth right into the room checking stalls; newshoes waterslogging---making certain. Miss Skinner runs up to him and oh yes I sense something erotic between them, but Orth is ancient....and....how? They've somehow retreated half hiding into a stall; his hand already up her skirt and she's grinding, really digging in like wild rover. Big jealous current running through me but I'm way more excited at the prospect of live porn and so angle over for strategic views and serious wanking but somehow the plug gets pulled and I'm brutalized by something from behind, far off but bigger....muffled dinglebuzzing and it's my alarmclock bringing down heavy toga-curtain on smoldering xxx rated joy.

Latex Dream

2005-03-22T22:57:00.000+01:00

Cooking some flayed hibachi meat in an old decayed Alfama apartment in Lisbon---Sao Jorge Castelo stonepiled masses---discrete prismatic views from every hand-made rounded window---church-like but oddly Pueblo Indian with densely patted adobe---buckets of whitewash stacked and the thought of coating these absorbent walls thrills me to the core---I pick up the telescoping paint pole and commence dunking comically large lambcovered roller with curdled white custard---now cussing out loud calling it 'cheap clotted curds'---I've got to thin the mix, but no faucet anywhere and so I head down spiral stairs in what is now Andy Wilf's downtown L.A. studio. I spy a stack of buckets labeled LATEX and know instantly 'This is it; luxury paint!' But oh man these buckets weigh in like wet cement. And how'm I gonna lift these puppies? Now I'm rummaging further back in cluttered storage recesses and---eureka a forklift sitting there amid paperpiles! I jump into the seat giddyup---but there's no key; no fork levers---I realize it's all a heavy plastic casting of some cheapniz rooftop signage. And who's selling forklifts? I'm hee-hawing at the nuthouse idea of it all, including my ridiculous jumping-aboard. But I feel urgent need to paint! I want those buckets upstairs---deep longing for the chalky alkid odor; my mindeye sees great purification of whitewashed surfaces; tiny bubbles like dried ghost fossils---afternoon shadows and now mentally surfing out the little adobe holes and I can feel the spring coming on. And what happened to the meat?

Don Pedro Dream

2005-03-16T07:30:00.000+01:00

Sitting alone next to the plexi-guard-railing in some industrial Portland taste-testing some oddly sticky risotto with lemon slivers, diced ham, and what the hell is this, okra?---can't discern any citrus, but butter yes. Eyeballing me from an adjacent table are 3 migrant farm workers from maybe Mexico. Guatemala? El jefe among them now gingerly scoots his chair out, stands, turns and slowly approaches. He's holding a folded-up newspaper humble hat-in-hand suppliant,--- now standing directly beside me and magician-like and from around my back, unfurls an ancient mariner's map---cloth---right over the bowl of risotto and wine and water glasses. All is happening slo-mo; I'm tuned into frame-by-frame nuances---cash register, people talking---his buddies looking on; anticipating something. Fan rotors revolving overhead fluttering the map; a pre-Columbian 'America' but geographically 'distended' from Europe---Maine being given birth by Portugal. The guy introduces himself with 'Me llamo Dom Pedro'. I say: 'Tu nombre es Portuguese---¿De donde es usted?' In educated Español he proceeds in a rapid-paced point-and-describe tracing of crypto-historical deeds and misdeeds allthewhile popping his mud-caked index finger on dirt-clogged ragmap exactly where Main and Algarve are one. This isthmus must be something crucial. Is Dom Pedro giving away a secret clue to something I shouldn't know? And why? Flash fantasies about possible riches and I don't want to betray myself so I ask '¿Donde es la Arista Atlántica Media?' Throw him off. Dom smirks and instantly the air has a palpable menace, like ether before the knife---I can't follow his educated rap anymore---he's too loud, shabbydressed and restaurant crowd is gawking. He suddenly yanks the map off the table, ripping pirate-treasure-location along the deteriorated faultline where the map lay over the stickyrice. I excuse myself by faking "I gotta go to the toilet!" gutcramps, and he's now suspicious. Watching me. As I start towards the basement my bowels really do rush. I'm changing mental channels and decide to bolt; taking manysteps at once and leap into a leg-pedalling float down the last long stairwell. A long corridor. Which door? Running to the end of what seemed a cul-de-sac (but is instead a 'T') with only left or right and so I go left---now new halls opening up and I continue weaving. I'm exhilarated by all this action, but something's suffocating.... "is it all a setup---a chamber of horrors? Thoughts of hissing gas, closingwalls and imminent collapse---and where's Dom Pedro? As I say his name I spy the shadow of a man, frozen. Waiting. It's him. I wait an eternity while my bowels are on high alert. Gas building up. Why now?! "Only way out is to get past his shadow". I slowly untie and snake out my shoelaces; doubling them up as a choke holder. I barefoot over to the wraithlike form and hold my breath. I jump backwards as I turn the corner (figuring that a leaping D.P. will hit the linoleum) and my torniquet...but it's a street lamp-and-post shadowcasting of a phoney el jefe. Multiple surrogate Dom Pedros along the corridor, picket-fenced to infinity. I look out dusty windows onto what now is long-ago L.A. That bleached and lonesome City Hall standing high against the Santa Ana furnace heat---BIG tube-amped radios tuned into Vin Scully "A pleasant evening to you wherever you may be" All cop sirens like in Dragnet, and I know I'm safe.

Niederdorf Dream

2005-03-14T05:25:00.000+01:00

I can make out a bridge from my building from vast gridded window---is this San Pedro? My mind detouring to maybe not---New York? Brooklyn? The 'studio' has riveted corner brackets fastened to redbrick old and all is beautifully sandblasted; seems more ship than earth edifice. Savoring the newsmell of the labor---blown away by the impossible hours invested---and now all I see---it's due to labor unions and better morale....'anything can be done if the conditions are right!' E. Debbs and Caesar Chavez thoughts swimming around mixed up with San Pedro Bridge and rivets but now interrupted by pip-squeak mouse spying me from an indent in the brickwork. Gotta see and so I move closer...? No sign of mouse cavity but once again admiring same finely sandblasted handiwork; inlayed flushness of steel and mortar---seamless. How did they? But now gothic ding-dongs high and distant. Answer the door! I'm standing in my underwear in a supple teenage body, and on the way to answering bell I'm parked at a wall-to-wall mirror with hanging sports paraphernalia all doubled---surfboards lined up tethered, rollerblades, frisbee disks. I'm doing squats at the door and not answering; looking at my flexed thighs amazed at the frog-like definition. Dingdong dingdong. 'Let 'em wait!'---and now I'm squatjumping higher each ring and end up fingertips at the window above the door. 'Who's there?' I can't get an angle from my perch. I see the top of heads. Someone looks up but I coil back just in time.

Later waiting at tramstop Niederdorf, Zuerich. Big monorails like in 'Metropolis' running through medieval streets---crowd is lined up and here comes one now! A big fella presses me back from the big rush of vehicle whooshingclose windtunnel sounds nearly subterranean---I'm grateful now knowing I'd have been flattened. He warns me 'Die sind doch viel viel groesser und schneller als frueher...mann muss eigentlich aufpassen!' ' They're a whole lot bigger and faster than before...you have to really watch out!' We board and I realize it's N Rubin from Floral Supply and much younger now---how does he know German? I try probing with subtle hints, but realizing he's discouraging me from doing so and now speaking in oddly familiar Yiddish/Swiss/English pastiche half-jokingly like ancient vaudeville, then graver suddenly much older with false teeth half showing plastic gums giving me the willies---telling me he's in Zuerich to tie up some 'odds and ends' with the museum. 'Can't tell you what it's about, son' I'm mentally connecting all this with the banks and stolen art but say nothing. Something tragic here.

Fascinated by a buxom sugar-spinning girl conetwirling a long paper stem puffcloudy...bouffante...Cotton Candy! She's smurkles as she hands me the hairdo and I'm staring down at her glistening carnival cleavage---upright tits like saluting soldiers. 'Yessir!'

Griffith Park Blvd Dream

2005-03-10T23:26:00.000+01:00

Trickling sounds mixed with car honking loops while walking home from Dufourstrasse studio in twilit space. Oooh the pretty light so I stop to take a fone-foto. I dig in my pocket for fotofone and can't figure how it opens---seemingly solid and..What!? Why isn't there...where's the hinge? Now pressing the belly and it starts buzzing wattvoltage much too strongly; something wants out...then it suddenly unfolds itself tripled, quadrupled and now cluttered dialpad on the last flap not allowing me into menu functions. I realize it's some older mobile I don't remember buying but some vague recollection reminding me that I actually had.

Street now not in Zurich. I stop walking to get my bearings. Pedestrians. Woofing doggywalks. Tired old muffler cars tread-heavy with downhill bicycles lanehopping and then a rain drop; then on my head two more. I Have to get this apparatus working (and why is it so much bigger now?) Lost in unfamiliarity and just as reverie... Eureka! Find a tiny slide which functions like a button and I hear that familiar but obscure shutter sound inside a recording sound of a shutter! Then a blue light tiny screen with spectral shapes and a fat wad of Bazooka Joe; again I hear the tell-tale shutter loop---the screen hesitates at each stoppage and I'm thinking 'It's gummed up" The pun makes me laugh---but the nowstuck mechanism is motordriving with me no longer pressing the finger slide---I'm holding it away like a wrangled snake half worried it's gonna blow.

In my old room on Grifffith Park Blvd downloading massive terrabites of serious pirated sounds in surging clusters. Myriad windows filling the screen but the BIGASS hard drive with Cadillac grill---"Oh this stuff's gonna be GOOD!" and I'm watching the analogue meters swivelling out of synch but amazingly 'in time'. I'm grinning at all THIS---What it will do for my soul. I wake up feeling mighty fine.

Vicky Dream

2005-03-08T20:13:00.000+01:00

I Saw Vicky under wet skies with the same subtle lisp so slight it almost wasn't. We're walking up monumental flight of 'heroes only' stairs that hardly anyone ever uses because of too-insane-for-humans zigzag slope and the same ones Laurel and Hardy trudged up during Mack Sennett reign---piano-movers in Music Box up and down and 3 stooges with ice melting scene later....Silverlake....rain. Vicky telling me she loves the sound because it's balm rubbed into her soul through the umbrella...but now forceful windwhipping gusts and no umbrella because tumbling down the hill. 'Let them go. They aren't good enough because of the heavy hail coming down'. Waxed Hubmart banana boxes stacked up and I tell Vicky 'Look, we only have to flatten them and hook-link them together for a ride down to the reservoir over all this baby spring grass'. She doesn't understand, but smiles anyway. 'George, you're not there yet'....Moody turquoise waters way off down long stair perspectives and now she's sad with the fun-sucked out telling me 'I'm dying' just like before. My panic overwhelms me not knowing what's happened---Are you? Is it really so serious?

Later. Crystal method soundtrack rushing atom-smashing through cylindrical caverns both ancient and modern. Water channels. Is this where they filmed 'Them'? No, that was a functional space where water flowed inwards the sea....this is more clinical and pristine; angioplastic carotid. There's wetness in here. Bloated walls. I stop and try to map out where to go---now seminiferous wide forks ranging into foggylight. There's someone out there. People muttermouthing 'gotta fix...' and '...might....might not...'. Now sounds not far away but right next to my ears and gicky like sticky meat. I know it's an operation on me and so start singing and now Vicky once again with me but this time to help. She runs off yelling 'Come on George!' but instantly no longer there---suddenly me all alone and Vicky so fast away. I thought I'd lost her forever because of death but she came back and this time you'd better get it straight. You need to run and catch her---no more reprieves--so much lost---don't lose it again....Now my cell phone ringing and Vicky laughing on the other end chuckling about some wonderful garden tomatoes from Crete that her mother wanted me to make my pizza sauce with. The cell slips and then I stop and stare down at it floor vibrating; jitterbugging like some Ma Bell crab and when I pick it up it's Vicky off distant; bad connection, then suddenly replaced by that horrible phone lady siren---that same terrifying telephone moan that scared me half stiff in my ancient once-upon a time drooling and I wake up damp and pulses pounding and no Vicky.

Rice Cracker Dream

2005-03-07T04:53:00.000+01:00

Looking through Tages Anzeiger classifieds with Cécile---everything written in dialect because too many umlauts---looking for little homes in Ticino or Vaud, but prices way too high. Dreams of future happy lake views with juicy vinyards, whirlygigs and windchimes all down the drain now---she says Swiss are up in arms about beaucoup rich Americans having left because safe-tax haven and too many babies from swarthy-types now making demands for bigger roads and more American amenities, Costco, Walmart, Burger King and I can see those names standing out from the text in angry bold. She's angry and throws the paper at me and I'm limp, defeated.

Poking through big impressive raku bowl---frustrated with Japanese rice crackers mixed up with potato chip shards---can't stand the bad visual aesthetic. Need to get those chips out. Sudden rustling sounds. Snow outside. I'm nervous. Who's there? I wait. Then slowly put the bowl...coffee table. What's that sound? Need to move carefully towards floor lamp across the room; turn it off, because my shadow---my silhouette. Tiptoeing slowly...crunch...what this? Oh Jesus the cracker chip chunks...all over the floor! I don't remember spilling. I get down low; spying for more rustling noises....there! Now I hear it coming on louder. It keeps...is that scratching? Moving slowly towards the lamp now, chipshards clinging. Feet feel sticky. Something's wrong---little holes pierced. Blood. Reach back to pick out pieces still careful not to make a sound. Face down low now looking for glints of glass and oh jesusmoses, there's an archipelago of crackerglass all the way to the lamp! I stop to pick out snacks and slivers, but the light not showing...too far away; can't see. Wiping the blood with the floor rug but blood oozes from invisible seams. Something is wrong with my right heel, it's much too soft and pliable. No heel bone. Thick silicone. I feel queasy. I don't care now about the sound outside. My foot! What? How? I walk around and it's definitely not right. I stomp and now my whole foot...but the ankle...how am I able to stand up? I move gingerly; closer to the lamp with tiny stickyblood slits and I know it with a sickening dread 'If I don't keep moving my foot will scab to the floor'.

50's Hi Fi Dream

2005-03-06T12:21:00.000+01:00

Big birthday party for me in some swanky seaside house maybe Malibu---from memory days there housesitting for Robert A. when he left for Austin. People arriving in buffed fat cars all rich, multilayered dense black like long ago movies. Perhaps dream now B&W---not sure---everything reeks of 'premier', 'Oscars' 'celebrityhood'. I spot an older version of James Dean like later 'Giant' oil tycoon character. He's doing facial/mouth/breathing exercises like some pufferfish---comical---but everyone studying him intently and not laughing; I go over to him and he greets me familiarly like an old friend but with a strange 'something's not right' look. He barely stands before sitting down again and continuing the same odd breathing, rotating shoulders, lifting up his legs in slow-motion like yoga but not quite; loosening-up preparatory motions---prizefighter, track athlete---He's wan, with no legendary aura about him---prosaic, even pathetic in his older years seeking attention like a child....Later...music playing in the background and ceremonial cake presentation with glowfaces pressing in---happy birthday singing begins with me half mouthing along. I not sure. Then halfway through an overwhelming singing voice dominates the room, taking over. Phenomenal electrical hair-standing radio hall sound---it's the skinny young Frank Sinatra at a hanging mike singing an otherworldly, heartbreakingly sad lang syne---his voice; the whole missing orchestra emanating from a huge space age 50's Hi-Fi. I'm upandclose amazed at it, wondering whatever happened to those modern names. Magnavox? Grundig? Wurlitzer? But oh my god that amazingly warm and luxurious sound---redolent furniture polish. I'm now lying out on the floor looking up the speakers---fabric panel cloth, small golden threads glinting, and thinking 'Oh man this is big luxury with those gold threads!' Obsessed with this old but very savvy technology all smart like aerospace with so many big sonic tubes pulsating orangeglow inside past the speakers; this is what makes Southern California so special!---these world class scientists creative---congregating here in big brains, Jet Propulsion Aerospaced in Silicon Valleys with orange crate orchards all purple magic mountains; nothing is wrong anymore and check out these stars! With even Frank Sinatra singing! I'm beside myself with crazy happy birthday aerospace stereo joy and yelling out 'Let's all dance!' 'We gotta DANCE!' And everyone takes it like direction with everything now movie scene---grips, stage men, makeup folks all scuttling about trying to set up equipment and it's clear we're in a studio stage set; not Malibu and Jimmy Dean alone without the crowd---looking over at me---looking through me. He's some sort of shaman sage and saying 'It's all a sham and you've been duped.'

Carioca Dream

2005-03-05T03:57:00.000+01:00

Hello Kitty carioca bar? restaurant? A revolving Big City view with big glass. I'm sitting in crazy big airline seat with mounted cockpit panel like a jumbojet pilot. Wow! Head-sets, volume controls, diodes, mikes and sundry tiny levers, odd knobs---slowly being conveyor-dollied in s-curves, corridor-like---others waiting, inching along and it's like old Disneyland days on acid. Alice in Wonderland, Mad Hatter and Mr. Toad, only much slower. We're all sitting in identical but slightly different lay-z-boy loungers. Young Japanese woman horribly butchering Marvin Gaye's 'What's going on?' Her voice coming from another place round the bend where we're all headed. Hard-walled live acoustical echoes. Everyone adjusting seatbelt harnesses, looking around at one another, smiling, giddy. I'm wondering 'What song am I going to sing?' and so try asking the guy to my right 'What's your song?' but he doesn't take off his headphones---just smiles, shrugs and starts making simultaneous finger circles around his head and ears---slowly and then furiousfast---backwards, forwards, reversing directions and changing speeds with each finger. Incredible! I try doing the same but retarded as hell and he's not impressed and pulls up a side panel from the armrest to block his view of me. We're moving along and...Aha! This seat can be reclined with this button! Now I realize the loungers have vastly complex modular tricky design and I'm blown away at the genius of it all---now dying to test out all these buttons and levers but no time---singing's getting louder. Everyone pulling up side panels, sliding dome-like pod space vehicles hyper modern and no longer airline seat like mine. Why is mine not converting to newness? I'm feeling around for the side panel to cover up and pod-convert like the others, but my panel is too warped, flexy, flappy and cheap. Keep fiddling with buttons and levers and something really wrong here. Everything's slapshod and I'm embarrassed now about the cheapness vehicle now horrified that I'm just like whitetrash southerners no different which is why that guy shined me on. Now I don't want all the others to see my face, my shame.

Basel Dream

2005-03-04T15:12:00.000+01:00

In Basel at Cécile's mom's dealing with the portioning of a hilarious giant chocolate Easter bunny with two heads having open 'O' holes for mouths like pinky blow up sex dolls with inset white chocolate buck teeth---I want to start off by pulling the teeth but everyone overseeing my ceremonial portioning at once telling me 'No don't!'. Feeling apprehensive now and not knowing what to do (this is surely an important Baseler cultural event and I won't be forgiven I know) and so now nervously passing the polewire cheese-cutter to Cécile; she gets red-faced miffed making eyes and now prodding me stiff-mouthed and ominously 'You'd better not screw this up!' Electro toothbrush cutter wire on the end of a long braided AC cord with staggered switches and some sneering macho American, drawling , menacing with no variation between his neck and head like some crew cut wigged pink ugly penis, barks 'Why don't you turn on the fuckin' jyoose you Dumbshit!' I'm contemplating sizzle-frying his eyes out with the cattle-prod, but he's HUGE and so I instead flip the top-positioned switch and the prod getting red-hot smoky and I'm blowing on it furiously and start cutting off all four massive ear flaps and it's like dense dark butter and all 'oohs and aaahs' now everything hunky dory---even with head and shoulders penis head who's now smiling and nodding at me approvingly---kids jostling to collect the chunked-out waxy shards falling from my scissorhands. Going fast at it now and there's now stopping me. I carry on carving the bunny everywhichway---all that's left is a pair of dark chocolate feet, long, lengthy supports and earless bucktoothed bunnyheads. The latticework supports I've fashioned are now becoming labyrinth-like, intricate. It's a maze and everyone now astonished at my skills---beebuzzing around and trying to get an in-close glimpse. Macho guy is impressed and quite friendly now. But where do I go from here? I'm all lost. Crossed up. Don't know how to stop. Everyone anticipating my next move...

Fly Fishing Dream

2005-03-02T07:20:00.000+01:00

My brother Jim is trying to describe his new flyfishing floatboat to me---a brand new exotic technology---I don't get it, and Ellis pulls out his really huge 'Power Mac' (had to be 25'' or more) and I'm gagga looking at it, get lost with the oddness and how light it is---Ellis switches it on and up comes an animated screensaver film full blown and beautiful subtitles, voice over narration...Jim goes by the screen in the flatboat like some Star Wars ship---slowmo; lake water much like mercury. The 'boat' is clear plastic and flat with Jimmy prone looking back and waving to the camera---I ask 'Where are the windows?' They both look at each other and laugh but never tell me. Ellis talking both on the screensaver film and in the room---his voices crisscrossing and I'm getting confused and tell him to let his voice-over do the speaking---now we're following alongside the floatboat and camera zooming in on contents---Saltines, Weetabix, bacon, cans of preserves...he's inside his sleeping bag and has a shotgun---not fishing rod---poking out the front. 'We're into duck hunting now. It's on whole other level'. Now the big Power Mac starts acting up and Ellis is hunting around for his AC but can't locate it. I'm looking at the laptop and thinking it's much too light to be a serious computer; so how? Ellis now going into a long and complicated technical explanation of Mac evolution and I'm feeling like I've been away for a very long time. Fleeting thoughts of coma.

Large transport plane flying close overhead. San Diego? Near an ocean. Stooping down with a stranger smoking a joint talking about the dissolving naval fleet docked in the harbor....plane is sinking and now going much too close to mass transit overpass and we watch its left delta wing clipping a long stacked row of storage containers; a maze of sparks flying....then a fireball explosion and we can hear moaning and stranger says 'let's go' and is scampering deftly billygoats down. But I'm not able, I can't negotiate the steepdusty slope. Big drop ravine---now he's waving maniacally and I'm stuck. My mind is terrified at the prospect of seeing human meat chunks and poop guts in the trees. I take a drag on the roach and start cleaning my teeth, thinking of what to do. The signs nearby speaking Spanish all bullet-riddled and wrinklerusted---sad poor houses, whitwashed with flapping laundry. Tijuana? Andalucia? I see the tide coming in.

Joyce Dream

2005-03-01T06:14:00.000+01:00

In and around gallery rooms, some empty, others vast, Mom's tug-rolling a sad old red rustysqueaky Radio Flyer wagon from Bellevue and I'm feeling guilty about it and try gently taking the handle from her but then a dressed-up-in-Sargeant-Pepper-red security guard slaps my hand away and Mom says 'Why don't you hop in?' She's much younger 30'ish, and I'm watching her elbows thinking how dark and wrinkled they look---she's asking me about my artwork; wondering which room they're in. And me I remain seated patiently while squeaking along; guard's paw on my shoulder, which is keeping me-loaded wagon from tipping when we turn corners---He keeps looking over at me; is he watching me, or watching out? We roll through boxy spaces---dim corridors---on and on forever but finally ending at a long bank of rope-suspended enameled sinktubs---bigger than human-sized---Sargeant Pepper gone and so no more with the shoulder clamp but tipsy now and so I'm straddling the wagon feet splayed on the floor sos not to tip. Mom says 'We've gotta clean up' and suddenly pulls on dangling rope sticking out of one tubbasin. Big jerkiing pulls and then plop. A wadded clump of funky rags lands heavily splooshing dinge water all over my bare feet and cuffs---where are my shoes? Mom telling me 'These are the better-made 'Nihonjin' dishrags, so they'll sop up no problem' and sniggers and we're telepathically jumping thoughts about a trip to Japan long ago...deja vu.

Joyce is back from the dead and speaking hush-hush with Mom. I try listening in but Joyce keeps eyeing me warily, then pauses. Now she marches up to me saing: 'This is none of your business and so start cleaning the floor!'---I'm astonished because she's dead but here and now. I'm scared because of vague premonitions about Mom. I want Joyce to leave. Go back. Bad vibes. Who sent her?

I'm trying to untangle plopped moppups foul and fetid from ancient boggy swamp drain hole---can't untangle and disgusted because some stink splash-jumps on me, on my lips, and I'm spitting and jump up to wash but the tap rinse water all rustmuddy---Mr. Pepper there again standing guard but not the same guy---morphed into service station attendant decked out in 1950's old fashioned blueworker duds now kindly smiling and willing to help 'clean up'. Pulling on the oversize tap and then a groaning rattle, and suddenly pppfffppttfffpp...POW! Big spiggot kerpow and a comical series of spattering scaldrhythms cannonfire against the basin like little boys pinch-pissing. Big Steam; now I can't make out through the fog...no sinks, people...but the groaning pipes. P.A. voice now yelling: 'Everybody, this is an emergency. Please proceed to the front of the building!' I shuffle around looking for Mom and Joyce but they're gone. Hsssss.

Same building and I'm showing Peter some collage tricks. He's grilling me about glues, varnishes, oil, waxes, masking---shopping lists---I tell him 'slow down; you've gotta learn in stages'---He's antsy eager and much smaller than in real life long drink of water self. 'He's a lad, I'm thinking'. I pick up a pair of pinking shears heavy and two-handed huge. I try cutting through a large long paperboard but can't manage this boat-anchor-for-shears...getting heavier....Peter jumps in and we right the ship and all is smooth sailing through the long cardboard surface. He's pleased; happy now because I've shown him such a cool trick and I dub it 'long-cut zig-zags'.

Now building a gaming arena---Las Vegas-like casino---Is this an 'art exhibition'? People playing slots but not just for coin-drop lever pulling idiots---no these requiring pachinko-skills only---dials, flippers, buttons---accordion complexities with oompah hurdy gurdy sounds wheezing in and out half alive breathing...scary.

Same place but outside walking along white railing and spanking-clean boat deck thick industrial glossywhite everywhere. I stop to admire lusciousness of gleaming boatpaint---pressing the paint on a pole and oh shit it's not dry inside the layers!---I look around; press my finger to test and now my nails making little indents and oh joy! Nail patterns. Then my little abstract pole drawing is getting out of hand; I've made thousands could they all be mine? Sense a big reprimand from the skipper and so start to skedaddle but now I'm feeling slightly queasy-headed and move towards the stern. There's a pirate plank but as I approach and upclose examine I see it's synthetic resin and a diving board for sea-plunging.

In the casino again watching a little tinykid much too young negotiating a tricked out Smart Car---a conversion for a vid-game wildride outrageous spleentwister gutting madness. Oh man he's good! He's kidcontrolling everything from cockpit all maniacal reflexes at-the-ready no stopping him now he's going to re-set the odometer!---I'm overhead viewing standing on some special platform on cast metal footprints 'stand here' and holding onto metal knobs but can't get a grip and emotional waves in the house now he's gonna turn the odometer over. Then bing bing bing---and Smart Car starts gyrating---I'm holding knobs but car now slowly broncs; it's part mechanical bull. I take a timed leap waiting first for the swing up to jump and thrust me out as far away as possible and I'm now bounding from one balcony to another treemonkey free. People looking up at me in wonder pointing as I jump from one level to another and yelling 'I'm flying, Mom!'

Robert Altman Dream

2005-02-27T09:57:00.000+01:00

In some big auto garage, grease blackened and musty, and having trouble remembering my lines for my role---no clue as to what to say or who I am---Robert Altman is standing over the scene with oversize horn-rimmed glitter coated reading spectacles---his assistant is instructing me but speaking too fast and I'm ready to quit all this and run out, but as soon as I do R.A. steps forward, smiling, kindly and very reassuring telling me 'Don't worry, there's nothing here you haven't done in real life, so just be natural and it'll come'. Assistant again starts rattling off instructions but I can't, I don't know what...now she goes over to a big tank pulls a tube into her mouth and turns to me speaking even faster and with helium chipmunk voice and I want to laugh but I'm getting pissed cause I'm worried and telling her to slow down---she's yapping like some Pekinese and R.A. yells 'CUT!' and comes forward, grabs my hand shaking it while grinning hugely---'That's it! Perfectly done. That's how we get the magic to happen, you see'. I'm relieved; confused--- what did I do? But now the garage doors are being opened by someone outside---a horizontal snowfall and can hear footsteps shuffling and it's the crew leaving. I'm feeling greatly relieved at my 'success' but now only intent on seeing the individual flakes out the door, but everything going in and out of focus---now there's a black shadow of someone's head over the snow scene. I realize it's mine and start making puppet head shadow movements ticktock like an upturned pendulum. When I look back to see the where from, I can see the crew up in the projection room watching me. I feel uncertain about the vibes.

Same dream but now in a trailer dressing room with R.A; huge Rococo mirror with animal portrait photos taped up and old half rubbery masks of fx ghouls behind him reflecting all the hanging beads and baubles and scattered make-up and hairspray cans mixed up with Chinese take-out containers and I'm picking on some hardened stir-fry noodles glued to the table's edge. My fingernail is split and it looks like a pen nib and I'm flicking it on the noodles in a funky rhythm. But R.A. gestures for me to stop and starts speaking morosely, 'I'm real sorry but we're gonna have to let you go. You're work is top-rate, excellent stuff indeed, but not gonna pass the public litmus at the test screening. I go back to plucking my noodle tune while he starts rattling off statistics, me feeling deeply humiliated at what's happened; my career...fuck! R.A. says, 'Please....eat!' 'You ain't hungry?' 'Well if you're not gonna eat, I'm gonna!' and he comically chopsticks out all the kungpao, broccoli w/oysters and fried rice all over the table, all over the lipsticks and creams and his papers and looks up and says 'It's all good!' and now moves in deftly with both hands ambidexterously chopsticking everything clack clack clack.

Ignatz Dream

2005-02-25T06:04:00.000+01:00

Trying to find some word in my beatup old thesaurus but odd words listed and I can't decipher them except for a page headed 'Cyrillic' in big letters and so 'This is where the Russians are' and sure enough I find Dostoyevsky heading and realize I've found something unknown about his writing and that this surely is the Rosetta Stone of his mind---revolutionary and wilder than the world has ever known. 'Gogol' jumps out in Roman scripts among the Cyrillic jumble and I realize he's part of this inner circle, but no Gorki, No Tolstoy.

Our cat Ignatz has grown much larger---like a lynx and not tabby. What's happened to her eyes? They seem oddly misshapen. One of them looks at me directly but the other seems slack and wandering. She gives off a low growl and suddenly I realize this isn't sweet little Ignatz but some wild animal that somehow got into the house...and so where's Ignatz? As the seriousness dawns on me---she knows---and quickly grabs my forearm in her jaws, not breaking my skin, but no monkey business-like. Everything quite still and she's looking at me clearly with both eyes like lasers and I know by their look that she's reading my mind---'You'd better be cool here or you will be eaten. She' somehow morphed larger while holding me and now presses me back until I'm supine and realize from her look that she's in heat but I'm mortified thinking now that she'll devour me if I don't get an erection and fuck her. But somehow she doesn't persist springs back and slides off the bed pulling the comforter with her and now she's out of view. I'm terrified that she's only waiting for me to get up so that she can attack. I instinctively grab the lamp for protection. It has a dimmer slide and I turn it all the way up and the beast crouching low, half slithers out of the room like a snake but much faster. In a panic I up and quickly shut the door and as I do she's suddenly there again but her head gets caught and I'm pushing on it as hard as possible and can hear her skull cracking. Cécile is screaming on the other side of the door but I can't understand and keep the pressure. Then I hear 'Oh God!' 'Oh God!' and let go of the door and she's hysterical and now I realize that it's Ignatz...I wake instantly and she's right there sleeping next to me in the same bed and I almost had sex with her.

Hyperion Dream

2005-02-24T07:40:00.000+01:00

Somehow I've got a 'daughter' who's sitting yoga watching tv---we're in some tragicpoor flophouse where others are living in rooms down a long darkwood hallway corridor--spectral tv lights flickering and stammering in unison---I know they're all on the same program because of the stereoscopic din. Something tells me she's 'mine', but her looks---I can barely accept her 'syndromed' appearance with the unfocused and too-closely set eyes---Kreist why me? And this tragic end-of-nowhere halfway house and now what am I going to do? Fleeting thoughts of running but I know this little girl needs me; I'm her 'daddy'. She looks up at me and smiles with Appalachian banjo player's teeth and I'm heartsickened and thinking of various methods of escape but my mind is reeling; I know in my bones that I'm now here, with her, in this place, forever.

But now I'm away from that place. It's raining now. Walking umbrella-less and the droplets are really pelting me good. I'm mouthing a ditty out loud: 'This sort of rain is not good for the brain, especially in Spain'. I'm in a going nowhere pedestrian stride with this mantra looping. Now the sky cracks suddenly and I'm walking down Hyperion to King Jr. High looking at the myriad cracks in the sidewalk with the lichen, moss and dampness. This can't be L.A. because the gigantic viridian dark conifers with their sun-streaking light in the gaps shouldn't be lining Hyperion like some Yukon lumberjack town maybe even somewhere in the Alaskan tundra. This sudden break in the sky doesn't last but for a moment---and then even heavier foreboding and it's getting colder; light getting sucked up again with the trees quivering in anticipation of some horrific maelstrom---I know I've got to get inside quickly now, and so I duck into a small door-open tree-tucked house right across from where I'm standing---but when enter, the stairs don't make any sense; they don't follow the exterior appearance of things. I walk down and there's another second entry and it is massive---like a vaguely familiar decaying Bel Epoque port-town hotel lobby I once stood in somewhere (France?)---I descend the stairs and my son is there waiting for me. He asks me about that 'sister' and why did I go and have her when everything was just fine and he begins to weep with a terrible sadness and my guilt is finalized. I tell him 'This sort of rain is not good for the brain...'

Bellevue Avenue Dream

2005-02-23T07:23:00.000+01:00

On that Bellevue Ave. again now bopping along the street with my buddies Danny Casados and Richard Chavez and they're kids still but I'm not---we're playing musical farts and Richard wins like always. Danny comes in second, and me last. 'It ain't fair', I'm thinking. 'They're Mexican and get to eat frijoles regularly and me with the Japanese food.'
But Richard asks me where I've been all these years and I'm wondering why they haven't aged any and I have. No answers---looking for the old duplex where we lived next door to Grandma. Can't find it. Things look strange. Too many apartments. Richard says he wants to 'scuff up' his new Levi jeans and so crawls around on the sidewalk while talking about what happened to our place. 'They bulldozed it 'cause of the infestation'. I ask, 'What infestation?' But he just crawls around in circles and doesn't give me a clue. Danny is gone. And where's that old guy who lived in the abandoned house on the corner? Mr. Dill? I never knew his real name. Like Boo from 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. A sad man living alone---no one---nothing. As I'm thinking about him (maybe partly awake) my mind takes in that I'm not a kid anymore and wondering what became of him. I know deep down he's dead and gone, but my kid's mind and the memory of him wants to know he's alive. I'm grappling with this and only notice that it's twilight and my mom's gonna be angry if I come home too late. But where's the house? Where's Richard?

Sometime later in the same dream but different place---in Bellevue Park where the old reservoir used to supply water to dried-up Angelinos below and I'm thinking about Chinatown and Noah Cross raking it in with Mulrway---WATER! There's tons of it below ground and I've known it all along. Why don't they tap it? The 90 year rains back when LaBrea creatures roamed here pouncing on one another like they still do today. It 's a vast and deep aquifer and it frightens me now knowing such a massive amount of water is below. The darkness. I'm imagining this will all erupt one day like a liquid Mt. Saint Helens---bursting forth and drowning everyone in the basin. It's a horrific but fascinating vision and I'm wondering why Hollywood moguls haven't ordered it filmed. I'm going over titles in my mind and then 'smack!', someone has hit a massive towering fly-ball from the practice field and I see it infinityhigh---it's coming towards me---but I lose sight and cover my head with my hands wincing---immobilized; too stupid to move like a deer-in-the-headlights. I have an epiphany and realize where the
term 'dumbstruck' originated. A whistling sound and then a loud 'thump' and the ball is half-buried in the hard-pan next to my leg. I try digging it out with my keys but it's fused like some meteorite, and it's hot.

Jeremy Irons Dream

2005-02-22T07:20:00.000+01:00

Taking apart a Fed Ex box 'Too much packaging, dammit!'---inside it a strange contraption I'd ordered for my computer---it looks much too primitive tech, even gerrybuilt. Slathered over its entire surface is an afterthought coating of translucent waxy material and I say aloud and to myself: 'This could be a type of plastic, but could also be agar agar and edible---nothing will happen until I remove the coating'. But now it seems smaller; has shrunk since I'd first unwrapped it---now looking like the hybrid child of my video camera and an electrical current transformer. It has an overall boxiness, along with two wooden 'handles' for toting. Now I'm trying to get this surface coating scraped off with a metal kitchen spatula---now pulling apart the hinged handles and now I realize it's only a decoy housing for something else, because inside is a tiny brushed titanium or aluminum saucerian disk. Now puzzled as to where or why I'd ordered it. What do I do with it? What is it for? My computer? Is it dangerous? Where are the connectors? The disk is completely seamless; obviously designed for visual pleasure and so conclude it's a sculpture!' But now something's activating; a low whirring hum like a cooling fan is spinning, muffled---it's getting louder now; the pitch is now varying---rising and falling basso up through high 'c' as if it were singing some sort of metallic opera...alto, soprano, basso...and now a melody I vaguely recognize. It sounds like Mahler or maybe even R. Strauss---programmatic, romantic. But then it stops---dead silence---and something else is activating; a clicking, buzzing. My computer switches on. The screen is dull and dark but I see a sudden movement on the screenand it startles me; slowly an image is coming into view---a close-up---it's a man's face, icon-like, but then I see another movement---as the picture materializes, I see it's a man, and he's looking at me, physically, palpably right there and I know him--- but from where? He startles me completely by enunciating deeply and all the while smiling: 'Good evening my good man'. And now I realize it's Louis Raspa from Marshall High who's become Jeremy Irons. He starts to laugh and says: 'I know precisely what you are thinking. Is it any wonder? And have you any idea how far out they have really traveled with this technology sort of thing?' 'I too am a traveler'.

Poli Street Dream

2005-02-21T07:21:00.000+01:00

Trying to learn Dreamweaver but it's no longer the same interface---looking more primitive and pixellated. Looking closely at the LCD---I go to touch it, but sparks jump off like Dorothy's ruby slippers. There's been some burning, leaving a lot of patchy real estate where blurriness prevents me from seeing clearly. I slam my laptop screen down and it comes unhinged and drops on the floor but doesn't stop streaming, and I'm wondering if this wireless technology could allow such a thing---I'm using my mouse now to control the screen documents---the mouse has a row of buttons all around its base which I'm testing now. Not all of them control the computer---one button is switching my lamp on and off; another works as a dimmer and some do nothing at all. I hit a flashing red button at the back of the screen and a car alarm goes off right in front of the house---I walk outside and am now on Poli St. in Ventura---not in Zurich. The street is much wider now, curving away from the house on the north side---the city must have re-constructed it while I was gone.....I've got my mouse in hand and see a little red diode flashing. I press it and the car alarm shuts off. Astonished, I now try out the other buttons on this---what is it a mid-1970's GM....but nothing happens. But I press the red one together with any other and something on the car is triggered. 'I've got it!' Some playing around and soon I'm coordinating them like a symphony conductor; flashing the lights, turning the ignition on and off, revving, signals and car stereo---unbelievable! I'm doing it in a syncopated rhythm---got a whole crowd 'ooohing' and 'ahhhing' now...everything going at once now, with the hydrolic suspension bouncing the car off the street and I'm like the Wizard of Oxnard.

Victim Dream

2005-02-18T07:13:00.000+01:00

In some smorgasbord waiting in line with my dark brown bakelite food tray like in elementary school---heated-up inedible greenbeans and oddball concoctions with jiggling jello and I'm walking along making comments to one and all such as 'This stuff isn't even fit for retarded people's prison' and 'Whose graveyard did they dig this stuff up from?'---But then I see it. Oh man, sushi up ahead! I perk up for the attack now because I'm feeling like a shark---but what is this!? The conveyor is moving at a too-fast clip and I see now that the sushi section is past the point where the line is backed up from the register---why is the goddamned conveyor still moving? I yell out for them to 'Stop the fucking conveyor belt!' It doesn't and now I'm coming up to the line like I'm on a camera dolly but I'm hellbent and like dominos the line goes down and I'm jumping on people in order to keep up with my tray---I miraculously manage to grab what appears to be uni and maguro, but I can't reach the crab, which is what I really want. Everyone is cursing me out but I'm happier than a squirting clam and then and there bite full of chompers into my good luck sushi----but, when I bite the uni, it's jawbreaker hard.---I realize now it's one of the those plastic window display food mannequins like you find all over Japan and Little Tokyos everywhere---but now surround-sound laughter and an older bald guy comes over and taps me on the shoulder prompting me to come with him and I'm now painfully remorseful-worried about all the people treading and let him escort me...where? As I walk past my knocked-down victims, they all grin madly and begin clapping in rhythm---then a few official-looking men saunter over as we're walking and along the high-wax floor and join the escort---but I'm calm now, not really caring about whatever 'just desserts' await me. The bald guy---don't I know him from somewhere? He looks vaguely like that Olympics documentary guy named Bud Greenspan? We stop at a gigantic curtained entry and I can hear a real hubbub happening on the other side of an oversized door with flashing red lights above and now a bell goes off, the light turns green, and an MC voice belts out 'Ladies and gentlemen, heeeeeere's Alan!' The bald guy looks to me nudges me and smiles, saying: 'That would be me, son!'. And now I know who he is. It's not Greenspan but Allen Funt of Candid Camera and I realize instantly I'm the 'victim' and now we're walking onto a stage in front of a live t.v. audience and it's white bright now---can't see a thing except a huge teleprompter. But then in a panic I bolt for the stage door on the opposite end and while I'm dashing the whole audience is hooting it up and I take a big pratfall slide like I'm stealing home plate and as I come to a grinding halt I hear the drummer let off a big rim-shot but I scuttle back up on my feet, fall again and more rimshots as I do this over and over. Now I realize I'm a hit with the crowd and start tap-dancing furiously. More laughter and big clapping. I try doing a break dance (not even knowing how), but thinking 'Nothing can stop me now, 'cause I am a Star! But my breakdance skit gets all tangled and now my back's kinked and I'm stuck in place like a seized up frozen lobster. Now what do I do? Some big veiny bouncer guy dressed up as a pro wrestler comes over and starts chuckling and tells me: 'You fucked up dude. A big time flop, and you could have made a million'. I say: 'But Wait. I've got more up my sleeve!'

Dallas Zapruder Dream

2005-02-17T08:12:00.000+01:00

Going up some long mountain road with Censy and another couple---who are they?---the 'husband' character resembles one of my students, but he's someone I've met before on several occasions and can't quite place him...is he an archetype from one of my dreams? I'm sliding in and out of my dream awareness now---and the woman; is she his girlfriend?, but I recognize her as Cécile's friend Bice, and they seem so mismatched because he speaks no German and she no English; I know this because they're in the back of this rented car clumsily trying to play scrabble on the humped car seat and the guy (I'll call him "Guy") is complaining about the umlauted German letter tiles; that he doesn't know what to do with them; she's answering him in German and the communication is all crossed; now she's leaning up front telling Cécile something discretely and through the whispering I know she's miffed about him. Guy has now picked up a strong Southern dialect. Mississippi? Louisiana? He starts arguing with Bice and poor Bice hasn't got a clue now, because it's all twangy and jumbled and I'm working hard to unjumble the dipthongs. Then a big loud but oddly muffled 'BANG!' Bice starts screaming and I can see in the rear-view that 'Guy's' head has tilted back way too far---a familiar and sickening feeling rushes through me. He's been shot. My mind reels back to the Zapruder clip--- Dallas and pandemonium emotions of that time now overwhelm me and I'm watching and pushing on the brakes but too hard---the black iced road---and now the rental car is turning round in slow-motion---I'm looking forward and back waiting for the big crash of glass and metal....nothing. The car continues slowly pirouetting and Cécile is serenely reading her wine magazine, licking her page-flipping fingers and completely oblivious.

Sao Paulo Dream

2005-02-16T07:37:00.000+01:00

Staring hard across a Hudson-like river---but not the Hudson---towards a high and long wall of skyscrapers---and thinking that this vast and dark mass looms like the myriad endless apartments and office buildings of Sao Paulo---where is this? It's so much bigger than New York, which now feels quaint with its stylish skyscraper clusterings---No! these are 'out there'---standing supertankers and going on and on like some horrific strip mall of poured dimly-colored concrete and steel---gargantuan, empty---many look bird-roosted, abandoned or unyet occupied. It's grey-dark twilght in my dream but the city is backlit with an eternity horizon---the vast silhouette so menacing that I decide not to cross the big river---I'm clear and unequivocal about this---I know in my dream-mind that it would mean sudden death.

Toledo Dream

2005-02-15T17:48:00.000+01:00

Driving along some sad section of a filthy town in the back of whoknowswhere with a British right-side wheel and my left hand can't get used to the stick-shift and now grinding repeatedly---oh man, and I'm feeling it all up and down my arm like a shock---the clutch, brakes and gas are all rearranged so that I'm totally confused and gears go on grinding and now smoke and the car starts lurching and I stall it now---restart is now just funny dance rhythm of ignition turning over---I hold key and there's an incredible set of rhythm that starts to build like a crazy hip hop beat and I'm absolutely astonished that no key in ignition now but musical break beat alive and hyper complex now coming out of the speakers and a bunch of black dudes hear it all and come over cracking up and start grooving too---I get out and British car is sort of Mini Cooper but maybe Smart Car---but older and beat up with lousy paint---Police there now and they're also tripping to my groove mobile and all feels ok.

Now in another section of the same sad redbrick funky trash strewn Nowheresville---but now I'm looking for a party---not sure if it was someone back at the British rhythmic car dance who'd told me about the fiesta or not; no matter now 'cause I'm lost! Feel in a deep fix---it's getting dark and I have no clue where I'm staying and begin feeling heart infarction gurgling in my chest---mucho desperate to find this unseen party because I'm know for certain it's my haven. But where is it? I have no idea where I'm going.

Now not the same 'ville' but in Toledo, Spain---not Ohio---still lost but now thinking better thoughts; of that great painting, called 'View of Toledo' by El Greco---Wow, I'm here! Oh man I've made it to the painting! An overwhelming gladness sweeps over me and now I'm excitedly wondering if his ancestors are still around and begin asking people ¿Donde esta la familia del Greco? But only shrugs. 'One medieval hill town dweller after another' I think to myself. Now I Meet some old schaggy hippy guy who's hanging out and plucking his 2 or 3 stringed broken-down forlorn guitar and oh man he's unbelievably blue and so I feel an ocean of sadness for him---his eyes have a ready-to-cry welling when he looks up at me and I cannot bear it, but he seems to understand my feelings and begins plunking out a slow and lyrical Mexican mariachi tune that brings back George --- the heartbreaking Equadorian mountain songs we used to play on his old Ampex and now it's all in that old man who's now really George and again I'm walking around this Toledo labyrinth and asking 'Donde esta la familia del Greco?'

Pompeii Dream

2005-02-13T06:42:00.000+01:00

Trying to wipe the bathroom mirror in some high school like gymnasium---too fogged up from steamy showers running---need to see my face---it's no longer stubble but instead adolescent peachfuzz mug---can't see my new baby face propped on older body. But then, 'Oh Jesus, what is this?' I feel my neck and there are thick metal stitches all around and my heart flapping from terror cause I'm thinking of Frankenstein's monster (Karloff version) and wonder if I've got any other telltale signs---like squared-off head or neck bolts---but nothing, only the stitches. But now I'm antsy to get them out and so start feeling for where 'the doctor' had sutured. But they are seamless and zipper-like and I realize they're permanent.

Teaching a painting class full of elderly folks all sitting on some sort of hyper-mosaic floor like Pompeii or Herculaneum---my instructions (only vaguely clear to me) being that they are to 're-arrange' the floor into something new---together as a team---but I'm realizing now that this floor has some significant archeological importance; that I'm doing something terribly wrong-headed here. But I can't stop them now---they are like excited children absorbed and so I don't have the heart to stop them and I'm thinking 'This is real life today!' and 'They're so happy!' but I'm terribly conflicted---pacing around the displaced tiles.

Making chocolate Easter bunnies, oh boy! But wait, these are not supermarket ones, but instead half hard-core 69/fellatio/cunnilingus postition bunnies. I'm in an industrial kitchen filling finely crafted and detailed metal molds with brown and white chocolate---the heads are normal child-seducing happy dark brown buck-toothed chocolate Easter bunny sort, but below innocent bunny heads are variations of x-rated positions in manifold flesh tones that I'm mixing together along with an array of food coloring in a paint box---Now I'm guffawing at the absurdity in my dream and wake up laughing too.

Hub Mart Dream

2005-02-11T07:39:00.000+01:00

I'm standing in the check-out in some suburban outback of Paris (?), so many speaking fast French but there's a mix of other languages and now I see it's the old Hub Market on Hyperion Ave. in Silverlake---the same set of offices overlooking the store with their thick stucco walls densely layered with enamel (I know because I'd sneaked up there as a little kid and checked out the paint thickness where it was chipped)---now there's no mistaking it's Hub because there's that sweet old Jewish guy (Herb?) running the deli section up front and he's cajoling the customers. But now I'm thinking 'hasn't he been dead?' now wondering if it might not be his brother or even an older son. He notices me and waves me over. The checkout woman now speaking perfect English tells me 'Don't worry about the groceries. It's important, so you'd better go'---but now checkout thief alarm goes off and the red light twirling---now it's all like Las Vegas and people smiling everywhere and the checkout lady congratulating me with confetti raining down on her oddly space-helmet like hairdo---the Jewish guy's brother now standing next to me with his dirty deli apron and he's got a sort of cheap toy-like phony looking microphone---the tv crew alongside and he smiles with big buck teeth while shaking my hand forcefully. He comes over to whisper something but I can't understand through all the party sounds. I can smell his breath which is like mint and tobacco just like my long ago 3rd grade teacher Mrs. Skinner who drove a brand new Mustang. He's now hand-gesturing and signals for everything to stop and it all goes pin drop. I say 'wow' and the MC deli guy shushes me and then starts slowly and rhythmically to clap. Checkout lady picks it up and then it's everyone in unison and nobody is paying any attention to me---they're all looking up at a huge big screen monitor at the back of the store and I'm thrilled to see Don Drysdale on the mound in old black-and-white sad tv and now I see it's not broadcast tv but a slide show. I slip out when I pass the doors I see we're in the loge section of Dodger Stadium. The stairs are steep and I need to hold the rail and now it's getting even steeper and I'm holding on but it's slippery and I'm sliding down like a fireman and come to rest at the railing.

Wally Cleaver Dream

2005-02-10T06:21:00.000+01:00

Futzing with an old pair of Koss headphones heavy as lead in my old room on Griffith Park Blvd.---the wires are much too loose where they connect to the speakers so I try screwing them in better and it all falls apart in my hands, but the sound is still pouring out and I'm amazed wondering if these are the 'wireless optional' but somehow knowing in my mind there was no such consumer thing back in Led Zeppellin 2 daze and anyway this is too cool so why should I worry?

Now going through my old and long vanished baseball cards of 60's players from sad and lonely-looking shoebox shoelace-banded with many packs still fresh Topps bubblegum scented and cornstarched-dusted-so-the-cards-won't-stick-to-the-gum wonder of it all. Sandy Koufax is in a strangely crippled-looking wind-up and not the seamless oiled pitching-machine beautiful that I remember. On the card I try reading the long text written in German about his past and the Holocaust his family suffered through and that he was an escapee and now I'm dumbstruck beyond imagination; what I'd thought before innocent now so different and my boyhood idol now with this sad tragic past and I break down weeping next to my box at the vast tragedy of it all...but then I'm absorbed again looking at a 1959 Wally Moon card (Jesus Christ Wally fucking Moon!) but it isn't Wally now at all but the actor Tony Dow who played Wally Cleaver from 'Leave it to Beaver' but in my dream I'm remembering that he became John Holmes of titanic dick porno fame now remembering an episode where Wally tells Beaver about homosexuality and 'The Beav' is scratching his balls on stage in front of a live tv audience---everyone now hooting and cat-call whistling scandalous-angry from the rafters of massive, multi-tiered La Scala-like space.

Sunset Boulevard Studio Dream

2005-02-08T07:08:00.000+01:00

Tall stack of putty-colored cds---each one with black-numbered code around the rim---and I'm tossing them like a circus knife thrower across a long narrow span of space towards a big concentrically banded black and white 'target'---is this my old Sunset Blvd. studio?---but it's not a dart board---this one many times bigger---and now I go to fetch my imbedded disks covering the target and as I approach it the cds give off a prismatic effect shimmering as I change my perspective---and now I'm up close on the board pulling the disks out and trying to focus on the cd codes, which are all html and java script. Hard to focus except for one depth-of-field point that homes in on the numbers and letters. There's a buzzing, clicking sound coming from behind and I know I need to investigate but right now obsessed with this code and my 'camera eye' vision. Moving my head forward and back to adjust the focus---and now see that the code is changing like a digital counter but it's too tiny---can't move my eyes any closer than the range will allow. Pull the last of the imbedded disks out of the dense target and now want to go behind to investigate the strange buzz-clicking. A walled room but no entry door so I put my ears against the unfinished dry-wall boards to listen and can hear machine sounds and someone talking. I start peeling the drywall tape and thinking 'no big deal' and now I can see a high tech flourescent room and the machine---but no person. Pull off the drywall panel past the few holding screws and now a radio playing and it's a talk show host with guest but I can't make out what they're saying. Old radio. Arthur Godfrey? I can't hear. Radio is old bakelite and lovely moderne like old Southern Pacific trains and I try tuning in the station better and it gets loud and static. Machine starts up. It's 19th century looking black enameled cast iron like sad old factory textile looms---even below deck engines of old riverboats Mark Twain wrote about---and now this big looming thing is moving faster and the room is hot so I go out to the other side where the target was fixed and now it's gone.

Egg Yolk Dream

2005-02-07T07:49:00.000+01:00

Traveling up California Highway One near Arcata---big dark conifers on both sides of dampish asphalt---and I'm with some stranger--I think he's the guy from Anawalt Lumber on Santa Monica Blvd---were jawing about the tsunami at Crescent City back---he doesn't believe me and gives me variations like 'It was much bigger than the government reports claimed'---'You have no real idea how big it was'---Then he starts rubbing my leg which I jerk away---he pulls out a gun from his jacket and I'm thinking 'This is the end George'. I try swerving the car but the steering wheel is floppy-loose with much too much play and there's not enough room on the dark road---too many big redwoods---he starts laughing and tells me not to worry he'd never kill anyone and that it's for the bears. I don't trust him though, and tell him to put it away which he does. We drive out of the dark into a massive clearing which becomes tidal flats, marshy, swampy with some of the road slightly dipping into it and it's all looks hand-tinted and vague---the color not registering---we're in a different car now and it's much smaller---like a Mini Cooper but even tinier than that. The engine is going all out but we're barely moving along, and it isn't the Anawalt Lumber guy anymore but Pascal my friend from Paris. He's tells me we've got to go faster because the tide starts rising and we'll get inundated but my foot is pressing hard on the gas.

Later everything fine we're in small diner eating full on English breakfast full of bangers and spuds with yolky egg I'm now playing with---pressing down on the yolk tempting the viscous yellow seepage that both fascinates me and disgusts me at once. I find the 'umbilicus' on the edge of it, and pull out a tiny baby chick all yolky but alive and trying to cheep. I'm amazed it's alive and call the waiter and now the little thing is crawling up the string like one of those pull-toy monkeys. I'm freaking because the yolky beak is cheeping mechanically the whole time and keeps turning slowly to look at me with eyes that look much too human. I drop it on the plate and throw my napkin over everything and now groping for my wallet. Where the hell is it anyway?

Extreme Yoga Dream

2005-02-05T11:46:00.000+01:00

Trying to extreme yoga-wrap legs around my neck--get stuck and cramped back now not at all mobile and tip over sideways and gyrate tossed coin-like only slower---then all coming apart undone and flopping flat backwards and thinking I've discovered a new yoga coin-tossing position sensation ultra advanced and wondering if maybe it isn't so new after all. Then later looking at toaster oven of an early deco design gleaming with telephone-coil type cord but thick and fat. Wrong prongs for Switzerland and I'm trying to connect adapter but no go. Inside toaster are mutiple curly-Q wires for heating and I put my fingers in to feel them and get a slight shock but it's not plugged in and I'm thinking it must be remnant electrical particles--mind drifting off to atom smashers and plugging the toaster into the side of massive nuclear cement cooling tower looking up at infinity of metal steps disappearing into the steam above.

Skull City Dream

2005-02-03T06:55:00.000+01:00

Strong sadness overwhelming with Mom in wearylook standing in her hospital gown much too hard to contemplate all this but 'it's real' and I know so because my aunts Yone and Lilly are wearing tandem grey-blue suits and not at all like them and I know in my mind these must be special for death. But they don't answer me when I ask about getting a second and third opinion--just deep pall of sadness and gloom. Dr. Shigekawa tells Mom she'd better 'make arrangements' and I'm stricken with deep grief knowing it's not true and that Mom seems so resigned to leaving everyone and I can't understand why cause I'm thinking about her steady handwriting and driving about town and I'm desperate to voice this but they don't hear me. Don't see me.

'SKULL CITY'--the name of the town I'm driving into--desert-dusted day-for-night black and white bleak like old 50's tv with rolling-around-by-themselves-tumble-weed-Saturday-night-channel-
11-Chiller-with-a-scare-the-shit-out-of-you Leave-it-to-Beaver-Cleaver-
kid-choppers-theme-song and now I'm mortified and have an anxious piss my pants get the hell outta here feeling and don't know what to do-do so keep driving and the car has hardly working breaks and I'm pumping them for fluid like those Long Beach derricks only faster but the car is going too slow for damage so I steer it down now dismal strange redbrick alleys and not at all like the tumble weed town anymore--but now the car's breaks work too well maybe because of too much pumping and gives the old FordBuickChrysler a lurch and no seatbelts on the long benchseat and I'm parked double and so barely enough room for others to pass and here comes one now-- I can't start it up to move outoftheway so I get out by climbing through the window with clothes catching and shoes greasing the upholstered bench and I start running while thinking 'Whose car was I driving?' I know it belongs to someone and now I'm thinking hard but unclearly as I head back towards the tv street--and then I vaguely remember it was Sal Mineo's, who somehow looked like he might have had Polynesian ancestors and is related to me because I do remember him from a long ago birthday party and then he was somehow my cousin--a child polynesian Sal Mineo so handsome with his jet black pomade Elvis hair and me admiring him even before he became a star.

Peggy's Cove Dream

2005-02-01T07:17:00.000+01:00

At Peggy's Cove Nova Scotia--a slow procession of whales passing and M. Oshima talking to himself by the campfire. I motion for him to check out the baleens popping up in the day for night light but he's caught up in the pathetic little damp and mostly smoking pit. I go over and he's tending some odd sort of fish and he looks up and says 'grunion' and 'check out their amphibian flippers' which I do and yes they are and ungutted too so I ask 'Did you clean them?' and he says 'They don't need it' and goes into a tripped-out scientific rundown on grunion and I'm hearing a rhyme inside it but can't get its rhythm and meter, then I blurt out that 'grunions' sounds like a rhyme from Dr. Seuss like 'Grunions with Onions' and he smiles and starts up a break-beat from the back of his throat then an incredible Seuss rap very long and complex with that wan little fire-pit hissing at his feet.

Creepy looking census-taker at my back door at Ottenweg--he's holding a huge adding machine and he shouldn't be there at my door in the backyard garden and he's tresspassing so I tell him to go and he's reluctant but he does and then kicks at the snow violently.

LACC parking lot with R. Keene and me wheeling around in an old jalopy DeSoto with no hood and oversized manifold sticking out much too far--he's teaching me to drive a stickshift and I'm feeling deja vu. R says 'Car got no torque!' and tells me to stop and I do--he's miffed about the car and tells me to wait up while he fixes things and then a sudden unbelievably loud and explosive race car roar as he guns it and tires peeling leaving me in acrid stinky smoke--now he's way off at the end of the parking lot but no screeching brakes and he doesn't stop and heads right into Vermont traffic horribly crashing with cars and people screaming. I look around horrified and see an old black man and he motions for me to come over and he looks just like Juell from my Crenshaw studio. He looks awfully sad and slowly tells me 'He's that same dude from the Santa Monica market'

Big Bird Dream

2005-01-31T15:06:00.000+01:00

Can't figure out a question asked by a female student--she begins making snorting oink noises at me, then horsey-cows goats and roosters. Class is whooping it up and I'm completely lost now flush-faced embarrassed and feeling totally inept and I ask her 'Why?' She responds with more barnyard noises and it goes on and on so I get up and try to leave and class starts stomping their feet in unison--a 'recess' bell goes off and everyone is smiling now completely oblivious to what just went on--saying 'oh yeah!' 'break time!' The culprit female walks past me then winks while grabbing my crotch and I spring back shocked and say a lot of gibberish curses like 'whatfigunnin shitzin gottnofukkinhell!' and she just cracks up hoarse voiced and then begins coughing violently and shooting off phlem-chunks with some landing on my new sweater and I'm now thinking about how I'm gonna kill her.

Riding the tram looking up out the view windows--curved skylit like the ones on some of the trans-Alp tourist trains---a sign plastered on a humungous billboard looms into view: 'Big Bird is visiting Zürich!' But the image of Big Bird is seriously different--his face has a real man's--a down-and-outter and not the chicken beaked one from Sesame Street; this one looking filthy and weather-beaten, and I'm thinking 'Big Hobo Bird' and start cracking up out of wildly out of control and point at it and directly at others on the tram laughing harder now just to get everyone going and one by one they do and we're all rocking the tram swaying it in unison--some people panic attack but the rest not--everything finally tipping too far and BAM the car falls on its side and I'm clenching a hand rail so it's no big deal to climb out--a bunch of others climbing out too and now they're jumping up and down and someone across the street turns up his car stereo full blast playing a techno version of 'God Save the Queen'. I see a tiny monkey dancing on a chestnut grill--tiny hot smoking monkey feet and all but s/he's totally oblivious and keeps dancing as the music pulses louder.

January 30, 2005

2005-01-30T15:15:00.000+01:00

Riding a massive metal shovel-as-sled down an insanely steep slope in some Alp mountain now too dark outside--a big bell sounds and the folks are all cackling in dialect about how we've got to get down soon but I'm thinking 'it's all good' and so pay no mind.

Standing in some 30's moderne swing era ballroom with war posters plastered o walls--some saying the ordinary stuff like 'Support Our Troops', but then the odd ones-- 'Get out of 'Nam' and 'War Whores' faces of politicians with Nazi insignias superimposed over their faces including one of Humprey Bogart in an officer's uniform---his face mostly obscured by a blood-dripping swastika--I look up close and see his lower eyelid veins protruding thick and vericosed like narly blue worms crawling beneath--but I know it's him anyway, making me awfully sad that the Bogart I thought I knew is marred by this forever. A waiter is walking around with a tray full of thin-stemmed champagne glasses but nobody seems to want any. I wave him over and he's got a huge smile and walks up to me and saying: 'Don't need to explain at all sir, everything is in order'.

Back on the shovel but all alone now. Earlier folks far gone and I'm being conveyed up the mountain with a hook and rope apparatus tied to the comically big handle through a metal grommeted hole--the lift now moving up in violent jerks as everything gets much steeper--making me hang on to the handle base so as not to fall. Looking back now and all the world's snow's clean and pure and nobody at all in sight so I yelp 'Oooohhhhaaaa!' and let go and now tumble backwards with sliding slolom flags whizzing by and whacking me but only lightly and no matter it's such a gas and I get up at the end with sinking sun darklight my heart about to explode from all the cold burning frost air--I have to get back up that big mountain for another and so wait for the hook-and-rope clamp to come get me.

January 29, 2005

2005-01-29T08:20:00.000+01:00

Dream of a vast theater in downtown Los Angeles from early silent movie daze; arena black vast with opera house tiers steep and frightful distances from the stage and screen. Plushy seats but itchy in my shorts and I feel a rash and scratch it furiously and I'm telling myself to stop or else it'll crawl up my crotch and 'Oh boy Jesus no need of that!'--looking for the movie to begin. Where is everyone? I can see a group near the stage from my balcony seat right under the projectionist cubby but hell they're so damned far away. I walk down the much-too-steep stairs to the railing and lean a bit to get a closer view and the railing gives and I'm holding on and the whole thing keeps unplugging from the barrier like some kind of heavy-duty toy part and I'm descending one big hitch at a time but my initial horror gives way to utter control and confidence and the railing is now a ladder and I can see the same group watching me amuse and amazed expressions flashing--now I'm climbing it like a trapeze artist and wondering what kind of trick to do and the projectionist is casting horror house shadows all over the place by watching me in front of the white light. I'm swinging and the feeling of control is total, like my mind and not my body is swinging the rail-trapeze. But my arms are tired now and I try to climb up but they're too numb and now can't even hold on and gripping with my legs now shit! what am I gonna do? but my legs-as-clamps manage to hold me and then come to rest on a cushiony seat and the group is now seated in front of me and turn around in unison like nothing happened and the lights go out and the MGM lion appears and roars.

January 28, 2005

2005-01-28T08:02:00.000+01:00

Standing up fishing with a bunch of nameless men on a metal fire escape balcony--too many of us and I'm leery of it all collapsing into the river directly under--no sidewalk-- just the red brick industrial apartment building and a fast moving river. Across the waterway are others fishing from balconies up high and I'm trying to figure which fishing line is mine--everyone crossed up and Katsu is standing next to me tangled too but serene--nobody pays any notice when I ask them to let me by. Fishing robots I finally get my line free and reel it in but it snags a guy's porkpie hat along with a cheap looking wig with netting attached. He doesn't seem to notice until another fisher guy whispers in his ear--they look over at me--I hand Katsu my pole and go into the apartment I thought was small but is actually a big loft. I check to see if they're following, but nothing. A big bank of windows facing what looks like Manhattan--but far too many gigantic buildings and all nearly the same height. I'm realize I've got really bad gas and had better leave before the guests arrive. I see a young woman sitting in the corner of a long divan reading with a dim lamp. I go up to ask where the bathroom is and it's Elizabeth and I'm overcome with happiness to see her after so long, but apprehensive about the gas. She's quite animated and begins talking about her brother Paul and says 'Did you know that he died in Viet Nam?' I tell her I thought he was working for the Southern California Gas Company and she's now laughing her hysterical Liz laugh and comes over to poke my stomach and says: 'You're the one working for the gas buddy!' and presses firmly and I let out a huge one. She's delighted and does it over and over again--each time producing a full blown effect, like I'm a squeeze toy.

January 27, 2005

2005-01-27T14:28:00.000+01:00

Santa Anita Race Track in a strange sulphur light--trying to anticipate whether to pick a mud horse or not for the 8th race. No mud yet but a storm coming on soon and an old pro next to me with a cigar telling me Delahoussey is the best mud jocky and I know that but don't tell him I know--letting him be an expert--but he's now not that man but my old friend Katsu from Tokyo--old now--much too deeply creased and raspy voiced frail. He says he's won a lot recently and no longer has to work--he's found 'a method'. I tell him I don't believe him so he becomes defensive and sulky. I don't really care and start to walk away and he's now quite friendly and wants to give me a bunch of tickets all neatly stacked in an old fishing tackle box with 'CIGAR' branded inside the lid.

Walking in the snow in Seefeld at night with Cécile--I'm barefoot and she's wondering where my boots are--I tell her 'Don't worry it's not cold at all--you should try it too' but it's not real snow at all but little spongy white styrofoam packing beads. They're floating off as I step down and statically cling to my face and keep re-clinging each time I try to brush them off. I pull out my camera from my backpack. It's got a rotary-like head attachment clamped on the body which I attach in place of the lens and start shaving my face while walking around in a circle. My foot sinks into a cold water hole and Cécile is panic-stricken for me to 'Turn the razor off!' I'm fumbling with the shutter button but it's not the the off switch--then I remember in the back of my mind that it's on batteries. I start laughing and then fake being electrocuted and she's now crying hysterically. I play dead with my eyes wide open staring at the tiny white beads swirling and I'm thinking of the Milky Way.

January 26, 2005

2005-01-26T09:58:00.000+01:00

Snow shovels lined up along the wall outside the bedroom on Ottenweg. I'm counting the usable ones and some old white whiskered guy is waiting for me to finish so that he can have the broken ones. He's speaking a toothless Swiss German dialect that I can barely decipher. Snow is building up around everything and the reflected white light off his face makes him look saintly, but not when I see his teeth.

I'm having a party at my studio but not my studio--trying to clean behind conversing seated folks--everyone getting annoyed and a woman tells me 'Why don't you serve us something to eat for Godssakes' and I panic thinking I'm screwing things up, but somehow I don't get up but continue cleaning. I bump into black nylon- covered legs of a young woman--but then I inspect them and see dense hair underneath even hairy for a man. S/he bends forward and tells me not to tell anyone--but I see the 5 o'clock shadow and lots of pock-marks and I'm wondering who he's fooling. S/he's talking now about Johnny Depp and Ed Wood and seems to know a lot about both--telling me how he knew Ed Wood and was an extra in 'Glen or Glenda?' but I see he isn't old enough. I can see it's Mr. Wagner my math teacher at King Jr. High who was an excellent magician and used to write on the blackboard sideways without looking while talking to the class and I was amazed.

Receive a package in the mail. I know it's a dvd and struggle to get the package open..scissors broken--screw holding two halves comes out and can't get it to screw back in--packing tape way too glued down--package reinforced--impossible to tear away with my hands I wanna scream. Finally get it out and the dvd packaging more horror-struggling to get the cello/taping off with no fingernails. DVD box starts playing a tinny children's sing-song message-gram from a tiny speaker telling me the wrapping is edible like Japanese rice candy. I lick it and plastic box melts and now there's just the disk--all mosaic-like colored tesserae with hundreds of tiny puzzle pieces laminated very high-tech--my computer keeps rejecting it from the disk slot and I'm freaking out.

January 24, 2005

2005-01-25T09:19:00.000+01:00

Dialing on an old phone in a London phone booth--red but with a Chinese-style pagoda roof much too big and it's snowing outside and insanely cold and windy--this booth is my safe harbor but I can't connect to anyone and it keeps asking me for more coins which I'm feeding from a tin chocolate box piggy bank slot. The wind is buffeting the booth and I'm frustrated as hell trying to pry off the lid--which unexpectedly opens too easily and now all coins jumping out of my box and scattering while I'm trying to hang onto the phone and few remaining coins. 'These coins are too tiny', I'm thinking. 'They don't look right'. I look at one closely and can see it's not a real coin but instead a token from one of those sad old spinning money machines from ancient L.A. buses.

Lying in bed next to my old paint-chipped and dusty window on Bellevue Avenue. Wind rushing past along the driveway between duplexes. I can see Luticia watching T.V. in the reflection of her bathroom mirror. I look out on the ground and see snow and I tell Mom and she doesn't seem at all surprised. 'It used to snow a lot in Los Angeles. It snowed the day you were born.' I'm amazed beyond belief at this and thinking it had to have been an omen and so now hunting sad browned Herald Examiner newspaper stacks in the garage out back but they're too old and crumble in my hands. There isn't any snow on the ground when I look out now--just my grandmother digging up weeds in the garden next to the sad old splintered porch.

January 23, 2005

2005-01-23T16:29:00.000+01:00

At a carnaval trying to unclog a paint squirting container nozzle--add color to a fast-spinning paint support. I squeeze too hard and the whole cap shoots off and it everything splashes on the spinning canvas and splatters the people eating corn dogs at the next stand. I start cracking up and a woman grabs a plastic squeeze bottle of mustard and tries squirting the guy selling hot dogs. A bunch of police squad cars are slowly approaching with spinning lights and no sirens through the dense carnaval crowd barking something indecipherable through a bull horn. I start walking away from the paint booth and the guy working there yells 'Hey wait!' but I start moving away even faster. I'm wearing an old pair of flip-flops and the toe-hold fastener keeps popping out of the base. I throw them away and gingerly walk through the dense crowd and can see a gigantic white roller-coaster like The Colossus in the distance move towards it. As I get closer I can see that it's hundreds of times bigger--goes on and on and with insanely high drops hundreds of meters in the air. The crowd is moving together and we're now passing under the white strutted edifice with coaster cars moving above us and around us all screaming and unbelievably great. I ask some kids walking alongside if they'd been on it before. They start hee-hawing but not in a mean-spirited way. One says: 'You'd better have a good heart dude, 'cause this sucker rearranges your skeleton'. They all guffaw some more and we get to the entrance of the ride and can see a view off into the distance and it's full of roller coasters everywhere. 'We're in heaven, dude', the same guy says. We all crack up and I'm beside myself with joy.

January 22, 2005

2005-01-22T11:47:00.000+01:00

Curly baroque letters; etched on a chicken bone that I'm examining up close--but can't read clearly--much too tiny. Running my fingers over it trying to decipher what's written but instead get a small sliver and it hooks into my thumb skin but it doesn't hurt so I dangle it around. But it breaks off and drops on the dining room table.

I'm with D.K. in a weed-overgrown corner of a train yard washing down a large wooden freight car with ornately laquered slats--can see there are animals inside--dim light from within won't reveal their identity. A big one kicks the back of the car with a sudden violence and dust is shot through the slatting and I can't swallow because my open mouth is dirty inside all dry-caked. My eyes have grit and I'm wondering if I'd put on my contact lenses. I hear a woman inside with the animals speaking Chicano to them in a lullabye voice.

In some forlorn port section of Oakland. Barges and tugboats all half submerged and bobbing in rusty, slime-grease water. The sunset is molten red orange and I put on my sunglasses and it all animates like an old silent film. I hand my 3-D viewing glasses to Ty and say: 'Look!' He takes the glasses and says he can't see anything. Laughs at me and says I'm blind.

January 21, 2005

2005-01-21T07:37:00.000+01:00

Winds blowing, howling. Cold rain and tons of trash strewn about. I'm in Zürich. There's no one on the streets and I'm trying to walk through the windy rain and arrive at a tram stop but it's uncovered and I'm standing there with my umbrella trying to hold onto it but it's oversized and yanking on me too hard and I let it go and it flies off like a kite into the sky. Then see it descending off in the distance and worry now if it's going to hit someone. I hear a horrible crashing sound of cars just as the umbrella comes down. Car alarms and a woman begins screaming and I'm petrified and start running towards the screaming. An ambulance. Incredibly loud. I see an apothecary and there's a nurse in white working behind the counter and I'm trying to open the door but it's locked and she shakes her head 'nein'.

Sitting in a 50's style diner watching a man on his knees picking up french fries from off the floor, dipping them in a bowl of ketchup and eating them. He looks very poor and then I realize he's a homeless. He looks over to me, his eyes terribly sad. I offer my plate of un-eaten food and it falls out of my hand and shatters on the linoleum. I get down on my knees--he's there with me--we're picking up little dirty peas and bits of mashed potatoes and he's not being careful about the shards of plate and eats everything he picks up. I can smell his odor and quickly try to get away and fall backwards into a dirt pit/room where the benches had been. There are lots of dried up food bits, old newspapers and magazines scattered about. A plaid blanket with someone under it looking at me and glassy-eyed. It's the same man.

January 20, 2005

2005-01-20T07:10:00.000+01:00

At mom's house but everything looks wrong--large plate glass windows re-arranged and not plumb--more rooms and everything white. Silverlake is gone--just a big open pit, white, and I can see little whorls of whipped-up chalky dust. The Eucalyptus trees are gone and there are very large bonsai-like trees in their place. I ask her what happened while I was away and she tells me they've made improvements-I ask her who 'they' are and she doesn't answer. I'm beside myself and tell her ''This is a Neutra house. You don't make 'improvements'!''. I go to the backyard garden--it's bone dry with more strange bonsai landscape trees but these are miniatures--I touch one and something barb-like pricks my finger--a metal prong--and it's a fake bonsai shaped Christmas tree with remnant shards of hanging tinsel. Old dusty plastic-covered telephone wires strewn about. A sick feeling in my stomach--I go looking for mom to ask who did all this and why but can't find her. Downstairs t.v. flickering with a shadowy video of a cat walking forward and backward--a distorted track of Japanese children singing in the loop.

Nancy there now. I see her through a tiny wall aperature between the kitchen and hallway corridor. She's standing at the stove cooking but can barely reach up to stir the pot. She looks really small and much older and I ask her what happened to mom. 'She's gone'. I ask where and she shrugs but never looks at me and keeps cooking. Inside the walls of the small opening are ballpoint etched-in phone numbers bleeding through the white paint.

January 19, 2005

2005-01-19T08:14:00.000+01:00

Having breakfast at a long table with a village of tsunami survivors--can't understand how I got here or where I really am. Everyone is speaking English with an Indian accent, very kind. A priest in orange saying prayers but I can't understand what he's saying. The man sitting directly across from me is staring at me and smiling, but it's not sexual in nature--very spiritual and I can feel his vibes very clearly.

There's a group of musicians playing in the background, and it's ceremonial with hand drums and flutes and chanting. The priest at the table now takes a large bowl of dry rice and people begin passing their bowls to him one by one to receive a scoop of rice. I pass mine but the man across gestures a subtle 'no' with his head and eyes, so I stop. I'm wondering what to do.

January 18, 2005

2005-01-18T07:51:00.000+01:00

On my Mac trying to use some strange Terminal-related application and I'm completely lost and in a panic when a window appears asking me to identify myself. The font is a hideous red one, and when I look at the faint shadowed background image on it, I notice the pixels are moving like some sort of microscopic organism, wormlike in motion.

I touch the letters and the screen gives and indents till I can feel the back of the lap-top lid. The letters are move under my pressed down finger and I'm worried and pull back. The screen is stuck to my finger and I hold it knowing it might tear, but I pull back anyway thinking maybe not--it rips and a sort of sparkling ruby red liquid like sparkle paint oozes out. I begin smearing it on the table fascinated and horrified about the screen.

In my old studio on Sunset Blvd. painting on an ebony block of wood--a block of ebony?--heavy and dense and extremely black. The paint is viscous but brushable; I'm painting white code from my blog. 'It is just like Babylon' I think to myself. Now a tablet. Now many tablets. All around me and in room after room are these ebony tablets--pristine, blank, and needing codes. I know I must paint them all and the feeling is a good one.

January 17, 2005

2005-01-17T06:57:00.000+01:00

Playing with Ignatz the cat--she's looking at me ready to pounce and then she does and hooks her claws into my arm and it's painful but not really. I can see them in deep so I grab her at the scruff with my left hand and try to pluck her off but her claws are meat-hooked so I've got to lift and 'curve' her claws out so as not to rip off the skin. Can't get her claws out and she's struggling now-- I'm trying to hold her tight because it's all going to rip up my skin and suddenly she growls and hisses and rips free with a sudden movement. My arm isn't bleeding--Huge hunks of skin--flaps which I calmly pat back into place. No pain but I'm looking in the bathroom cabinet for some Mercurachrome. Nothing there except sad old rusty Band-Aid tins. I open one and a black spider starts coming out and I drop it into the sink horrified and now the spider is trying to crawl up sink but keeps sliding back down. I pull the plug lever and start filling the sink with hot water--the spider is swimming in circles and I feel sort of awful but now push the plug lever and the spider goes down the hole and I'm glad.

January 16, 2005

2005-01-16T07:33:00.000+01:00

I'm delivering letters as a bicycle courier. My letter bag strap breaks and drops and I look back--it's lying on the road but I can't stop because it's like a one way freeway suspended up high--no shoulder--everything running too fast. The road is a deep velvety black and rubbery ike a synthetic athletic track. No off ramp and so I have to keep going forward. Another cyclist pulls up and points behind us about my bag and I nod. He points ahead to the left and I see an offramp but it's hard getting across--but he's managing easily and barely pedalling. I miss the offramp and he's gone and now I need to get over to the other side but everything going to fast.

At an old green chalkboard writing down some mathematical formulae I haven't got a clue--the chalk keeps breaking and is drying my hands--can't grip the chalk and it keeps slipping. I say 'fucki it' and everyone in the class laughs and they're amused by my actions. I grab a magic marker and begin writing on the chalkboard and everyone hee haws and I begin drawing an abstract sort of image and ask another volunteer to come up and assist me.

At Rincon Beach. There's a cave. I see some people huddled inside and so approach. There's crying from a baby but it's deep inside the cave. The twilight is orange and lighting parts of faces. I'm thinking 'Oh my God are they a lost tribe?' and what are they doing here at Rincon? Chumash Indians? But I'm afraid to come closer because I can't see clearly. Somehow I know they are actually tsunami survivors.

January 15, 2005

2005-01-15T07:27:00.000+01:00

I find a huge warehouse full of incredible DVDs from Criterion, even the unavailable issues--'This is the mother lode!' and I'm freaking out that there are all sorts of titles available that I'd never seen--I see a stack of K. Mizoguchi's 'Ugetsu' dvds sitting under a sink and the the beautifully designed jackets and fibre paper are all soaked and puffy from absorbing the rusty water dripping--I open the top soggy one and there's no disc inside and then the one underneath--nothing. The same with the rest. I start checking out stacks of others and they either have no discs inside or the discs are stupid throw-away film titles bad kitsch not good. There's a huge floor to ceiling stack of cello-sealed boxes and I try sliding out one from the middle of a column and everything comes down and I'm buried now and it's like a dark tent but I can see all the match-shaped flourescently lit interstices and then I blink and can't get these shapes away and I'm terrified more than disturbed because they're so bright.

Knitting a brilliantly-colored sweater for Censy out of some strange soft neoprene-like tubing somewhat fuzzy and in day-glow colours. She asks me how I learned how to knit so beautifully and I tell her that it was when I did time and she doesn't understand the expression and I try to remember when I 'did time' and somehow a vague sense of being in Camarillo with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis visiting in a Cadillac and Mingus there too.

January 14, 2005

2005-01-14T05:26:00.000+01:00

Holding a book with an unreadable cover title black on black--can feel the embossing and try to get a braille-like reading but it's too spongy--I begin peeling to find out what's under and find another title hidden and it's white on white but I see the words 'Das Buch der Toten Namen'. The book of dead names? or The book of the names of the dead? I can't figure the German meaning. The book is new-- pages have a printing ink stickiness -- some don't unstick and then the binding lets go and the cover comes off and all the pages are scattered, some still stuck together. I'm looking at the pages--like a Sears catalogue of objects and clothing but this book has lots of strange cooking and medical supplies. Some have no info and I can't focus anyway because lights too dim. Get up to turn on the lights and my foot is numb and feels like a dumpling.

I'm in the middle of some sort of televised conference with panelists and a television audience but haven't got a clue what it's about so I just improvise and ask tongue twister questions like 'How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?' Everyone is laughing at me and the camera lights are much too bright and I can only see a darkened audience. The man on my right whispers to me: 'You need to ask about the T-Set groupings' and I tell him I don't know anything about it but somehow I realize I'm supposed to. I'm sweating profusely and someone in the audience yells out 'He looks like Nixon' and everyone cracks up and then a loud mariachi band with way too many players starts up and the TV announcer yells out over the PA that the audience member has just won 10,000 dollars for the answer. I can't stop sweating and the panelists (players?) are all smiling at me with huge toothy grins.

Trying to wax my bicycle and the wax is much too hard so I light it in the can and it flames up and spills out all over the floor and I throw newspapers over it and they catch too but nothing seems to panic me and I calmly wait and it goes out. My bicycle is like new after the fire, as though it were purified. But the leather seat is scorched black and it crumbles in my hand leaving only the post end clamp.

January 12, 2005

2005-01-12T06:27:00.000+01:00

Driving around LA in an old Citroen with lots of little pieces of newspaper scattered about--arrive at Bogie's Liquor store in Silverlake but no more Bruce Bogosian--'Bogie'--he's in Hollywood the un-friendly Korean guy at the counter tells me. I know he's Korean because his t-shirt says: 'Proud Korean'. I look for money but have no idea what I'm purchasing and then while leaving the alarm goes off and the same guy pulls a gun on me and presses it to my temple and I get tangled and wince as I'm expecting the trigger to pop but it never does and in my mind I'm thinking about that Vietnamese guy in that famous photo wincing before he gets dropped and I'm still tangled up and he smells like rancid garlic and I tell him 'You smell like shit motherfucker' and he starts to cry like a little kid and I kick him in the nuts while he's not looking and see that his gun has 'A Hasbro Product' written on it. I get back in the car with the gun and it's now not the same Citroen but my old Mazda RX2 and it's like new and I'm freaked out with the same excitement I had when I first got it.

Little baby Siberian tigers on display in Chinatown LA in a display window-- a crowd of people looking on. I can't get a good view---whenever I get a peep I can see they're like kittens but they're adults and they look ratty and sad. I tell a man next to me that 'this is wrong'--he stares at me blankly and turns back to gawk mouth open. I want to move forward and help the little tigers but the crowd is stiff and unmovable. I'm feeling hemmed-in and begin to get a claustrophobic panic and as I'm struggling to get out, a huge hand grabs me around the neck and lifts me up and out. I'm petrified and look straight at the face of the giant man--it's Yao Ming and he's smiling in a frienly manner and doesn't say a word but places me right up to the little tigers. Everyone gives me respect and I can feel it all around. I turn to tell everyone that the tigers belong in the wild so they won't be dwarfs. I begin talking about tigers like I'm giving a speech and have no idea what I'm talking about but everyone seems to be listening intently. An old lady hands me a little red book and nods. I open it and it's all in Chinese. She nods and I begin speaking in fake Chinese, mixed with Chinese accented English like Hop Sing from Bonanza. People begin boo-ing and I feel mortified.