beautiful, funny, sad & true

I am at a house party where there are about thirty people of all ages.  It is early evening, and there are lots of little kids running around, playing, and watching a DVD, while the adults are talking and drinking wine.  My female neighbor friend and I are talking and sitting in two comfy chairs, when I notice that her wine glass is empty.  “Here you go,” I tell her, reaching behind me to grab a bottle and refill her glass.  My dad reaches over with his empty glass and snaps his fingers at me.  “Sorry, Dad,” I say with a smile, “ladies first.”  The party is bigger than those of us who live at the house had planned on, so we run out of wine before too long, and I volunteer to walk up the street to the store to get some more.

I walk out of the house to find deep snow on the ground.  The street, incidentally, is the one on which I grew up, but the house we’re in is not that house.  I walk back inside to grab a warmer coat and a scarf, and then I trudge across the yard to the street.  Near the end of the street, I meet a family playing in the snow.  They offer me a kids’ DVD, which happens to be the same one that the kids at our party have been watching non-stop for the last few hours.  I make a face.  “Thank you, but I’ve seen that too many times already.”

They laugh, and the wife says, “Yes, I can see that you have.”

“Do you hear that?” I ask them.  There is music playing nearby.  “I’m going to go investigate.”

I hear a band playing down the block.  It’s made up of eight or ten members from WellKnownMarchingBand.  They’re playing on a makeshift stage in a vacant lot with a music store on one side and an apartment building on the other.  I pass a guy who’s getting out a trombone, and he asks me if I’m gonna play with the band.  “I don’t know, actually.  I may just watch this one.”

He looks a bit taken aback.  “Isn’t it an honor, when someone invites you to–”

“–play with the FancySchmancyBandyBand?  Of course it is, but I don’t want to impose on you guys.  If it seems like the thing to do, I’ll jump in.”  I grab a pair of drumsticks and twirl them with my fingers.

I walk past him and into the apartment building.  I feel the need to change my clothes once I’m inside, and when I see an open apartment door, I walk inside and find a bedroom.  No one is home, so I rummage around in the closet and find, to my surprise, a pair of pants that will fit me.  I take off my own pants and and notice that there’s a window on the side wall of the bedroom; which means that the person next door can look in on me from her kitchen.  I see a head-shaped shadow move across the curtain, and realize that I’m being watched.  I step backwards into the closet and start to put on the pants I find there.  The neighbor’s window opens and a blonde woman, slightly younger than I am, climbs down into the room I’m in, walks to the closet door (which also has a window) and peeks in at me.  “I think it’s about time I saw you naked,” she said.  “My name is Heather.”  I feel the pile of shoes on which I’m standing slide out from underneath me, and I feel myself being pulled out of the closet.

At this point, the point of view changes.  I’m driving in my red Honda at night with a female companion.  We are looking for a freeway on-ramp, and there is a big mess of construction.  It’s hard to tell where to turn, and there are lots of other on-ramps, and tunnels, and viaducts, and every kind of interchange.  We muddle our way through it all and I start to accelerate, when a stop sign appears in the middle of the on-ramp, to keep people from driving into a big hole with a 20-foot drop.  I stomp on the brake pedal, and the car skids to a stop.  We narrowly avoid driving into the hole, but my car bangs into the metal sign post and knocks it to the side of the road.   The on-ramp is too narrow to turn the car around, and it’s too dark to see anything, so I turn my hazard lights on, and the girl and I decide that we should leave the car there to block the hole.  We get out and start to walk back up the on-ramp, and we notice that there are other cars in similar trouble.  On the freeway below us is a slow-moving four-car accident.  Then we turn and see a yellow Volvo station wagon on a different on-ramp drive through the hole in a different overpass.  It hits hard on the pavement below and slams at high speed into a cement wall.  The driver’s door flies open, but we don’t see any movement, so we run back up our own on-ramp toward a house on a bluff that overlooks the freeway.  We see a couple of other people along the way who also abandoned their cars, and I tell them, “We’re going up the hill to call nine-one-one.”

We arrive at the house and look around.  Somehow my companion and I get separated, and I talk on my cell phone while walking around on the lawn.  I finish the call, and decide to have a look around.  The house is a hundred-year-old Victorian that was historically preserved at the time the freeway was built alongside it.  It is currently inhabited by an assortment of hippies, artists, musicians, slackers, and a couple of garden-variety weirdos.  Since it’s a sunny afternoon, many of them are outside in the yard selling a myriad of shiny, colorful, beautiful things.  I walk around the yard and greet each of the people in turn.  They turn out to be a very engaging and creative bunch, and I think to myself that I would really enjoy living in a similar situation.  I ask one of them if it would be okay to explore the property a little bit, and maybe even see inside the house.  He agrees, and off I go.

I start in the yard, and walk around the north side, the west (front) side and then back around to the south side (where the freeway is), which is overgrown with thick blackberry bushes.  As I’m walking through the bushes, I hear someone else rustling around inside them.  A short, chubby old woman appears, holding a megaphone and orating crazily about witchcraft of some sort.  I tell her she surprised me when she came up behind me like that, then I turn back and walk to the back yard again.

I walk into the house and up the stairs to the second floor landing.  There is more selling of goods, primarily jewelry and music, going on up there, and I’m again impressed by everyone’s creativity and communal spirit.  There are a handful of customers wandering around as well, and the witch woman comes out wearing a big wooden box in front of her with a small stereo inside it that’s playing an Edith Piaf song.  The woman is singing along tunelessly about witchy subject matter, and the customers tell her, “That’s lovely, is it your own composition?”  The woman smiles and avoids the question, so I answer, “It’s Edith Piaf, actually.”  I walk toward the next person, and the woman sets down the musical box and announces, in a very loud voice, that she’s always wanted to do THIS, and she jumps in the air toward a rail above the door of one of the adjoining rooms.  She kicks her legs up in the air, and holds them aloft for a long time.  Since she’s so short, her legs are at everyone’s head level, so she’s letting the room know (in no uncertain terms) that she’s not wearing anything underneath her dress.  Her dress slides up past her thick waist, and stays there.  The customers laugh, I turn away, and two old women who live in the room next to the one in which she’s hanging appear and say to everyone and no one, “There she goes again.  Why is she always doing that?”

Just then, an old man in a wheelchair appears from out of the bathroom that serves this floor.  On his lap is a shaving kit; brush, mug, shaving cream, and a large circular razor.  He asks me if I’d like to learn how to shave.  “I’ve tried using those,” I tell him, “but I never fail to cut myself.  I guess I’m just an electric guy.  I could show you how to use an electric one, if you want.  They’re much easier.”

“I like these,” he replies, as he stands up out of his wheelchair and sets them on a nearby wooden shelf.  “I usually miss a hair or two, but these give me a much better shave overall.”  He gives me a smile, and I see that he has indeed missed a hair or two.

I tell him, “I’m here because I almost wrecked my car out on the freeway last night, and my girlfriend and I saw a bad crash, so we came up here to call nine-one-one.  I’m really impressed with this place.  What’s it like living here?”

“It’s a pretty amazing place.  Want me to show you around?”

“That’d be great.  I’ll let you get dressed first.”

So he goes off to get dressed, and in the meantime I walk back downstairs and out into the yard again.  Before long, the old man comes wheeling out to meet me in the middle of the yard.  He says, “Show me what happened last night, and where your car is.  Maybe by now we’ll be able to get it out of there.”  I take him toward the edge of the bluff, to overlook the various interchanges, but I’m unable to find the one on which my car is parked.  Traffic is moving along briskly on one freeway, but the other freeway and its myriad of on-ramps are clogged with stopped cars and holes in the road, and a few drivers are trying to maneuver their cars around all that.  It’s complete chaos.  “I see what you mean,” the old man says.  “What a nightmare.  Seems like you’re better off up here.  Grab that bike over there.”  He nods his head toward a dilapidated mountain bike that’s leaning against the side of the house.  I walk over, grab the bike, and roll it to the edge of the yard where he’s sitting.  “Come on,” he says, pointing at a small structure on the house’s property near the corner of the bluff, with a door and a stairway leading down.  “I’ve been wanting for ages to find out where that goes.”

The building is tiny, with windows on all sides, built in the same style as the house, and is only big enough for a door and the stairway.  We open the door, and he stands up and walks down the stairs in front of me.  I’m carrying the bike over my shoulder while I walk down.   There are three or four flights of stairs, with a couple of short landings along the way.  At the bottom is a tiny enclosed area, about ten feet square, with windows on all sides and daylight flooding in from somewhere.  We seem to be underneath one of the freeway overpasses.  There are a few scruffy people, also attempting to sell things; mostly art, and mostly either out of their bare hands or off of the walls, since there’s no room for tables or anything.  They all know the old man, of course, so they know not to sell me anything, but there are two young Asian boys (maybe five and eight years old) who are too young to know who’s a customer and who’s not, so they try their usual aggressive selling tactics, by cornering me and blocking my bike, chattering all the while about their tiny pictures and thrusting them in my face.  One of the other artists smiles at us and makes a gesture to help me lift my bike over their heads.  The old man and I walk back up the stairs and out of the structure onto the lawn.  I notice that the bike has a pseudo-Japanese brand name on it, something like Fujasoki, which isn’t even a real Japanese word.

“What was that all about?” the man asks me, clearly amused by the entire endeavor.  “I had no idea that was down there.”

“Seems like a tough way to make a living,” I reply, just as a familiar blonde woman comes out of the house and down the steps.  “Oh, hey, Heather,” I say.  “Do you live here too?”

“Yes,” she says, and gives me a little laugh.  “Are you naked yet?”

I laugh too.  “Not yet, as you can see.”

The old man chuckles at our bizarre conversation, and looks back and forth at us.  “You two know each other?”

“Sure,” I say.  “We go way back.”

“That’s right,” Heather replies.

I tell them that I want to go back in the house to look around for a while, so we say the usual pleasantries and I make my way inside.  I have a terrible time remembering everyone’s name, including the old man’s.  I want to inquire about renting an apartment in this house, but I’m not sure who to ask, since everyone seems to be busy selling their various wares.

* * * * * *

That’s when I woke up, fully aware that I had to write this all down before I forgot any of the zillions of precious details.

I wake up in what used to be my bedroom in my childhood home.  I’m lying on my back with my head propped up on two pillows, staring at the large TV that is mounted on the wall above the door.  That’s weird, I think to myself, I never had a TV on the wall in my room. On the screen is snow; apparently I turned off the cable box the night before, but neglected to turn off the TV before I fell asleep.  I am weak, and unable to move my head enough to look around, so I use my arm to feel around on the blankets for the remote, which I do not find.

A nurse appears by my bedside, wearing one of those little face masks that people wear if they’re worried about germs on the subway.  She sees that the TV is still on, grabs the remote from the night stand, and turns it off.  She says to me, “We thought it best to bring you here.”  She moves her eyes to the side and then back toward me, in a gesture that tells me she’s referring to my old room.  “You’re lucky to be alive,” she continues, placing a ring in the palm of my hand.  The band is tiny and gold, and the stone is small and blue, with a five-pointed star pattern that very subtly fades to white against the blue background of the stone.

While I’m looking at the ring, she hands me a blue circular jar that is the same shade of blue as the ring, with a similar white star pattern on the surface.  The jar fits in the palm of my hand.  “We removed both of these items from your stomach last night,” the nurse tells me.  “You seem to have ‘daddy issues.’  Would you care to explain any of this?”

I make an attempt to speak, but my lips have been frozen (but are just beginning to thaw) and there is a single strong thread tied vertically between them, so that my mouth is neither able to close nor open.  I say, as best I can, trying to be deliberately vague, “I certainly don’t remember passing this. . .but then I didn’t, did I?”  The nurse gives me an exasperated look, then turns and walks out of the room.

After she’s gone, I think, She doesn’t need to know about the ritual, or that I tried to castrate myself. I reach my left hand down to feel a testicle.  It’s there, but frozen and thawing in the same way that my lips are.  I think, Is it real or synthetic?  I don’t know; can’t tell. I move my hand away and lie there for a while, until I decide to get out of bed.

I get up and hobble slowly across the hall to the bathroom.  There is a large mirror on the wall behind the sink, and I look at my reflection.  I’m wearing a light blue V-necked hospital shirt.  My skin is pale, waxy, and withdrawn.  My hair is three inches longer than normal, unwashed, and extremely disheveled.   My lips are frozen and held apart by a strong surgical thread.  My eyes are blue and huge, and I look as if I am haunted.  I think, When did this happen to me?  When did I become this person? I can’t bear to look anymore, so I turn and shuffle back into the bedroom.  I put my arms against the walls to keep myself steady as I make my way to the bed, shaking with fright, waiting for the nurse to return.

* * * * *

I woke up in the same position in which I’d been lying in my dream.  No idea where all that came from.  This is one of the most disturbing dreams I’ve ever had.

Last night’s dream took a while to get going, but it ended in a classic BFST way.

I am sitting in the back seat of a van in the driveway of my childhood home in Yakima with my two estranged stepsisters and one’s husband, drinking a concoction that the younger stepsister made from lemonade, vodka and whiskey or something.  We are sitting and talking awkwardly, and the husband calls me by a different name, so I say automatically, “You mean Todd.”  He gives me a little laugh and shrugs it off.   I set down my mostly full glass, stand up, climb out of the van, and walk across the front yard into the house.

As soon as I get inside, the dream’s location changes to that of a busy office setting.  I duck into the bathroom, pull down my pants, and start to. . .um. . .go Number Two.  As I’m doing that, the door starts to open.  It’s C, one of my real-life friends, so I tell him, “Hey, I’ll be out in a second.”  I reach over to lock the door, but the lock is broken.  I stand by the door, pants down, and try to  maneuver the door into position in such a way that it will latch and lock.  C says, “Oh yeah, I think they said something about the lock being messed up.  Here let me just [he opens the door enough to reach through] try and jimmy it.”

I say, “Just. . .hang on.  I’ll be done pretty quick.  Let me finish up in here first.”  C ignores me and continues to fidget with the door.  Pretty soon, there are five or six people walking around in the large bathroom, which turns out to be sort of a hallway that leads elsewhere in the building; a very high-traffic area normally.  I tug at my pants and tell everyone that I’m almost done, and that they should be patient for just another minute.  I finally get them corralled out the door, when a co-worker of mine runs into the room, smiling mischievously, knowing that she’s consciously disturbing me.

I make a sort of growling noise under my breath, and she asks, “What?”  She has her hand over her mouth, and is clearly trying not to laugh, which makes me totally furious.

I can’t contain my anger anymore.  “I’M WIPING MY ASS, EVERYONE,” I say loudly and exasperatedly.  “GO AWAY.”

She runs out the door, and I wake up, laughing at another crazy ending to another crazy dream.

In no particular order (Actually, they’re in reverse chronological order):

veni, vedi, vici

not quite there yet

Ethiopian wedding

Hydrox

George Harrison

beach trip

halfway through

the mental game of music

synchronicity

still don’t smoke

quite a group

lovely day in Seattle

Amen

happy as we are, thank you

Silver Falls

Port Townsend trip

dream girl

non-nostalgic nostalgia

wedding, play, garden, hike, learning

Of Yakima and Feces

the Oriental Chicken

Catherine Burton (Bunton?), R.I.P.

Oceanside

mona lisa

lots of big musical news, and links galore

a very coherent narrative

what if it is?

apples and bananas

cello scrotum

by way of example

flirtation versus pedantry

communication breakdown

Enjoy!

On my last morning in San Francisco, I had a series of four dreams that were linked together, and I hope I can convey that by combining them into a single narrative.  Here goes.

* * * * *

I’m at work, when one of my friends, a Hispanic guy about my age with a curly mop of black hair and wire-rimmed glasses, walks over to my desk and says, “Hey, I have someone here who I think you used to know.”  He disappears and returns with one of my friends from the video store at which I used to work.  We are very surprised to see each other (it has been fifteen years, after all), so we sort of awkwardly hug and talk about the usual pleasantries.  After a few minutes, I excuse myself, saying that I should get back to work, and we go our separate ways.

After a while, HispanicFriend comes back over to my desk and I give him one of those desk calendars that is large and flat and takes up the entire surface of the desk.  He thanks me and says, “Hey, you should consider coming to work for me.”  He tells me that he has a new job that involves working with kids somehow.  I agree to it, and he sets me up with a small but very classy apartment, with hardwood floors and a lofted bed at one end.  When I’m moving in, I see that there is lots of forwarded mail that’s addressed to me, but that I’ve never seen before, and it’s either taped or rubber-banded to the door as if someone has been storing it for a while.  Some of the kids HispanicFriend works with come by to say hello, and I make friends with them all easily.

The apartment is located in a hidden corridor inside a mall.  After I get all of my stuff moved in, I walk out into the mall to explore my new surroundings.  The mall is closed, so I have the place to myself, or so I think.  As I walk, I notice that the cement tile floor is covered with a multitude of small piles of colored beads, which have been painstakingly arranged into swirly floral and psychedelic patterns.  A security guy in casual clothes is kneeling on the floor and attempting to sweep them up with a hand broom, which is a slow and arduous process.  I ask him how this happened, and turn my head to see that similar patterns of beads are located throughout the entire mall.  I say to him, “It must be annoying for people to walk around all of these beads, but I have to admit that I think they’re beautiful.”

He stands up and says gruffly, “Beautiful, huh?” and promptly launches into a long diatribe about how artists shouldn’t be publicly funded, and how this was a ‘rogue’ artist anyway, et cetera, et cetera.  He asks me my name, and I tell him.  He looks at me strangely and asks, “You just moved in, right?”  As I nod in agreement, his casual clothes suddenly change into a uniform and badge, and he grabs me around the shoulders from behind.

“What are you doing?” I yell.  “You can’t do this!”

He pulls me towards the mall’s exit doors and throws me out, but I quickly walk around to a different entrance and let myself back in.  When I get to my door, there is even more mail that has been stuck to it, including the desk calendar that I gave to HispanicFriend.  To me, this is a clue that he’s in on some sort of plot against me.  On the ground near my door is a strange-looking tool, with a corkscrew on one end and a handle that rolls like a hand mixer on the other.  This is a device that is used to pick locks, and I realize that someone’s been messing with my place in the short time that I’ve been away.  I turn and see a young blond guy walking away in a bit too much of a hurry.  I walk into my apartment, grab all of the mail, and set it in a pile on the wood floor to be dealt with later.  I crawl fully dressed into the loft bed and pull the covers over myself, pretending to be asleep.  Before long, I hear voices outside that belong to a woman and the children that I had befriended earlier that evening.

I hear a slight whooshing noise, and when I peek my head out from under the bedcovers, I see my mail sliding toward the two-inch gap underneath the front door, as if someone is using a silent vacuum to retrieve it.   At the same time, someone is opening the window and trying to get in, so I duck back underneath the covers and stay completely still, while still peeking out from a tiny air pocket between the sheets and a blanket.  One of the kids climbs in through the window and walks into the main room in which the loft bed, my hiding place, is located.   He looks at my unmoving body for a few seconds and then turns to walk in the other room and climb back out the window, where he reports to the woman, “He’s still asleep.”  From the bed, I can hear her round up the kids, and they all walk away.

I get up and walk out to the parking lot in the back of the building, which is swarming with policemen and cars, lights blazing into the night.  In addition to the police, there is a large crowd of people milling around, saying things like, “He must not have checked his mail,” and “He’s way behind on his child support,” and that’s when I realize that the police are here for me.  I see my mom and BoringFish in the crowd, and I run over to them.  My mom is crying, and she asks me, “How could you do this. . .to the kids?”

“What kids?” I ask her.

My mom ignores my question and asks, “But what about all the drugs they found in your system?”

I’m exasperated now.  “Someone injected me and called the police.  I like drugs even less than I like kids.”  That statement makes Mom and BoringFish cry uncontrollably.  I look over at BoringFish, who asks, “Don’t you love me?”

“I do love you,” I say, “very much.  But what’s all this about kids?  You, of all people, know that I don’t want them, so why would I have them?  Clearly, I’m being framed for something.”

I turn away from the two of them and leave the parking lot to go back to my apartment.  The blond lock-picking guy is there with a different, more advanced version of the special tool I found earlier, which I kept in its plastic bag and left outside my door.   BlondGuy doesn’t seem to recognize me, so I ask him, “What’s that?”

“It’s for picking locks,” he replies.

I reach over and grab mine out of its plastic bag.  “Have you ever used one of these before?  I mean. . .can you show me how to use it?”

He looks it over and appears to be impressed.  “Whoa, you have the simplified one.  I wish I had one like that.”  He gestures toward his own.  “This one’s overkill.”  He reaches for mine, places it over the lock, and turns the handle.  We both hear a click, and the door is unlocked.

I thank him and leave to find one of my gay friends, who’s an expert in situations like this.  I find him at his apartment, and he says he can help, but that he, his roommate and I should go to a party first.  When we arrive at the party, which is in a large gymnasium, he instantly disappears with a boy and I’m left on my own.  I wander around, looking at the multi-colored flyers that are pasted on the walls of the gym.  As I walk from place to place, I have to step around couples that are lying on the floor making out, or just talking, or standing around looking at flyers too.  As more and more people start hooking up, I decide that this isn’t a party I need to be at anymore.  I feel the sudden need to escape as quickly as I can, and I make a beeline for the door, with my arm raised in front of me to push my way through the crowd.  Roommate sees me and says mischievously, “Hey, Todd, where’re you going?  We were hoping you’d stick around for a while!”  I ignore him and keep walking.

As I get closer to the exit, I see that there are three women, one of whom is lying on the floor, in either extreme ecstasy or great pain.  It’s impossible to tell which, so I stop for a minute, in case I need to call someone to help her.  Her two female friends are standing there watching, as well as the gay male bouncer who is leaning up against the wall.  I decide that the woman on the ground isn’t in danger, so I walk around them and head for the door.  As I pass, one of the women turns to me and says, ‘Wait, wait. . .don’t you want to stay?”  I put both of my hands up and continue past her, but she persists.  “I’m sure we could explain the age difference. . .”

I continue to walk out the door.  I need to find a friend, or a policeman.   Someone, anyone, to let them know that I’m being framed for something, and that now I have enough evidence to prove it.

Last night, I had an extremely stressful dream which involved a job search, among other things.  My lack of money had forced me to move into a spare room above a computer store.   I was walking around in the store, customers kept asking me questions.  I continually had to tell them that I didn’t work there.

I had to go upstairs at one point to check on the status of a resumé I had sent out, and I kept getting interrupted by ridiculous questions.  Finally, I decided that I might as well work there, since I was there all the time anyway.  I went upstairs to change into some nicer clothes, and came down to find the store completely empty.  The guy behind the counter and I were talking about a girl with a guitar case who was waiting at the bus stop outside the window, and he kept making comments like, “She can come to this stop any time, heh heh.”  I pretended to laugh, then walked back upstairs to check my e-mail.

I’d gotten a response to my resume, in the form of a bunch of YouTube links with a note that said, “Watch these videos, and you’ll learn the correct way to apply for a job.”  I didn’t get a chance to read it, however, because the store was suddenly extremely busy, with people even milling around outside my room.  I went out and started my first official shift at the store.

It was crazy.  The people I worked with were a bunch of maladjusted teenagers, with the exception of the manager, who was an alien (yeah, I don’t know why either) and could keep watch over all aspects of the store at once.  He had a way of flitting up behind me and making a comment any time I stopped to take a breath, so I got into the habit of constantly moving around the store.  People asked me questions, and I would say, “It’s my first day; let me go find someone who can answer that question,” and that would propel me on another trip, looking for one of my co-workers, who I also didn’t know, and could barely differentiate between them and the customers.

The manager saw me doing this, and suddenly appeared behind me to say, “You’re circling.”  He sighed exasperatedly.  “See those white things on the floor?”  He pointed to some pieces of paper and litter.  “Why don’t you just go around the store and pick those up.”

“Is there some sort of bag I could put that stuff in?” I replied.  “I don’t really want to touch it and carry it around.”

He disappeared, and instantly appeared with a small white bag like the ones French fries are served in.  He handed it over.

“I don’t think that’ll be big enough, but I’ll give it a try,” I said, suddenly feeling very deflated.  I took the bag and half-heartedly looked around, but I didn’t bother to pick anything up.  I stood there, unable to believe that this was what my life had become.  “I’m thirty-eight years old, I’m working retail with a bunch of nineteen-year-olds, and I don’t even know when I get my first break.”  My stomach rumbled.

I woke up, feeling anxious and not at all rested.  I hate job hunting.  Hateithateithateithateit.

This afternoon, I took a nap for all of twenty minutes, but that was just enough time for me to have a really strange dream.

I was the cellist in a rock band, and one of the band members was buying me a monitor speaker so that I could hear myself over the band better.

We had found the speaker on Craigslist, and it was offered at a great price.  We were very excited about the deal we were getting, but we weren’t nearly as excited once we found out that the seller was a member of the Aryan Nation (I have no idea where THAT little tidbit came from, by the way).   The speaker was painted blue and red, and I thought, ‘Crap, how am I going to repaint this thing?’

As my bandmate and I were loading the speaker into the car, the seller thanked us, and BandMate said, “Hey. . .anything to help the cause!”  Once he and I were in the car, I said to BandMate, “That was a weird thing to say.  He probably thinks we’re down with the Aryan Nation now.”  BandMate replied, “Well, it was a good deal.  I didn’t want to blow it. . .”

That’s when I woke up.  TOTALLY WEIRD DREAM.

For the record, I couldn’t be less of a fan of the Aryan Nation.  Just so you know.

I had two romantic dreams this morning, the first of which was more so than the second.  I remember very little of the first, except that I was walking through a park, and I saw two young guys practicing a form of acrobatic dance.  I slowed down to watch them for a while as I passed by.  I walked a bit further and saw a girl who was doing the same sort of dance.  What a coincidence, I thought, they should all be friends. There was a long scene that I don’t remember, but I was back to the park later, walking in the direction from which I came.  As I walked closer, I saw that that the guys and the girl had joined forces and were now acrobatically dancing together.  I gave the group a smile as I passed, and the girl grabbed me and pulled me into an embrace that was surprisingly intimate, yet still looked like part of the dance.  “I just had to meet you,” she told me, “I don’t know why yet, but I felt that I needed to know you.”  We sort of danced around each other for a little while, in that intimate way, while we talked a bit and got to know each other.  It was very beautiful.  Then the dream changed to another scene, the rest of which eludes me.  This is unfortunate, because I do remember that it was also pretty romantic.

* * * * *

Dream #2

I was lying in bed with a girl, T, and our relationship wasn’t particularly close yet.  We hadn’t been seeing each other long, maybe a few days, and for some reason we were both wearing pajamas while we were in bed.  She resisted and got annoyed when I tried to cuddle with her, so we had an incredibly long, uncomfortable conversation before we ended up just cuddling anyway.

When we finally got up, we decided to call one of our female friends and go hiking.  We stopped in at a convenience store on our way up to the hills, and after we’d bought some supplies, the three of us hit the trail.  T led the way, then me, then our friend.  T got a long way ahead very quickly, and the other two of us weren’t able to keep up with her.  We walked and talked with each other instead, and said things like, “Man, she sets a grueling pace,” and “I sure hope everything’s okay up there,” and “I was hoping we’d all get to have some time together; I wish she’d stayed with us.”

After hiking for a while, we arrived at a turn-of-the-century inn that was nestled in a little valley between the hills, and since the front doors were wide open, we walked inside.  There was a lot of activity, and the place seemed to be a sort of retreat.  As we walked from room to room, we saw different things happening.  One room was the quiet room, where people were reading books or admiring the scenery out the windows.  Most people were single, but there was a married couple standing by the window.  In the next room was a dancing class, which appealed to both T and our friend, so they immediately took off their hiking boots and jackets and spontaneously joined the group, which the group seemed to encourage.  I gave them a little wave, and continued walking through the building.  I came to a large kitchen, in which a cooking class was in session, where they were making omelettes in the old-fashioned French way, over a fire in the huge oven.

As I passed one of the young women in the class, she was pulling a long-handled omelette pan out of the oven, rather awkwardly, and it looked as if she was having some difficulty, so I reached over and helped her maneuver it onto the prep table.  We made a few jokes back and forth, and had a really short but great conversation, and I thought to myself that already this girl and I probably had a better relationship than T and I had.  I bid her adieu, and walked out of the kitchen into a library room, where I saw a writer I’d met a few times standing next to one of the bookshelves with a guy friend of his.  I walked over to join them, and Writer asked me how it was going with the new girl I’d been seeing.  By the way he worded the question, I could tell that he knew we weren’t particularly close.

“I don’t know yet, we’re still figuring things out.”

He smirked.  “Do I know my audience, or what?  You been together long?  You f**k her?”

“We’re not quite there yet,” I replied.  “Like I said–”

He cut me off.  “Man, I could never do that.  If we don’t have sex, I’m outta there.”

“Hey, most of my friends are girls.  T and I are taking it slow, that’s all.  Seeing where it goes.”

He gave me a dude-I-just-feel-sorry-for-you look, and we changed the subject and talked about other things for a minute, then I took my leave to find my companions.  I saw them in a large dance performance room, which had bleachers on one end that were packed with people.  I found a seat before they did, so I motioned for them to join me.  They were on their way when a girl plopped down on my right, and dropped a huge duffel bag and overcoat next to me.  I told her that my girlfriend’s sitting there, and asked her to please move them underneath the seat.  She grumbled but finally agreed.  T and our friend weren’t able to make it through the milling crowd, however, so they decided to sit on the floor in front of the bleachers.  That figures, I thought, T and I are kept apart once again. The group of dancers walked out to the middle of the floor, and the show began.

At this point, the dream changed and I found myself in my home, which was an old farmhouse.  It was comfortable but needed a few repairs here and there.  I was walking across the gravel driveway, from the house to the shed, when a dog ran by me.  He was running from Cletus, my crazy neighbor with long black hair who was wearing a black suit, top hat, and John Lennon sunglasses.  He was chasing the dog with one of his homemade guns that had a short, flared barrel.  As he ran by, the dog yelled back to him (yes, the dog was yelling), “Don’t shoot me, Cletus, you hillbilly!”

Cletus lived in the next house down the road.  There was a large orchard between our houses, so we didn’t interact very much.  He was about five years older than I, and his two adult male cousins lived with him at his house.  A few seconds after Cletus and the dog ran past me, his two cousins came running by with two guns of similar design.  I said to them, “Okay, guys, that’s enough; just let him go,” and one of them turned and ran toward my shed, where I was leaning in the doorway.  He was either high or drunk, but I knew he was harmless, so I was unfazed and stood with my arms folded across my chest while he pulled out a switchblade and started to wave it around.

“I don’t recommend you do that,” I said, pausing at one point to lean away from one of his pathetic lunges.  “We’re neighbors, and at some point we may need to. . .help each other out.”

By way of an answer, he lit something on fire and stuck it onto the door jamb next to me, then laughed and ran off to join his brother.  I expected it to explode or something, so I shut the door and waited.  Nothing happened, so after about ten seconds I opened the door, grabbed a small hand towel, and snuffed the little fire out.  I’m gonna need to talk to Cletus about this one, I thought to myself, and that’s when I woke up.