Tracing Gould - o11

"Childhood.  Education.  Art.  Sex.  And death."  The freckles on Sam's phizz all but glitter.  "We leave anything out?"

Our scissors stopped spinning a forever ago.  The house is infinitely silent:  fathomless stillness in the ventilation ducts, each as wide around as the boy I was.  Staring into the ducts elicited a curious sense of coded time--  time suspended in light as perfectly as motes of dust performing a tarantella, the room tone of eternity preserved pristine as pearls of air in honey.  Sam won't stop staring at me.

"I'm..."  It's impossible to say why I'm nervous.  "I don't quite know."  Standing, my right knee seems to catch.  Favoring the enormous irish-pale scar center outboard of the joint with a glance.

"Yeah, I don't remember you getting that one either."  Catching a glimpse of himself reflected in the catatonic eye of the floor model wooden paneled Panasonic, Sam gives a subtle start.  "Cripes, Kid.  What'd ya picture me as, Ringo Starr in 'Shining Time Station'?  C'mon.  Shoes the sizea filberts, when I got corns the sizea walnuts, already?  Christ!"

"So..."  Words stretching and distending in my mouth as the captive afternoon strains to synch with my present.  "Sooo...  Whaatt ddd

But my words stick and hang, starchy and forfeit, in the bottled moment.  Sam is three times my size and height, at the side entrance door, opening it.  Kinetic blue discharge escapes, sparking from the hinges, freezedried momentum rasped free.  Turned toward the field of red clover, pecan boughs frozen midruffle, adult back to me, Sam clears his throat.  Cigarette clicks from left to right, right to left of his profile, visible just beneath the lobes of his ears, and Sam hoists a captain's lighter:  the impossible flame there bejeweled in a painterly hash of nib marks and shards of letratone.  The precise photo negative of fire.

"My young friend, I dunno whatcha do with whatcha got."  Sam tokes, and an ellipses of french curves wafts out through the screen door.  He opens the screen door, stepping out onto the creamy faded limegreen porch, heel of his brogan hitting the concrete with an inaudible crack.

The waveform collapses.  Memory imploding abrupt as a soap bubble.  And what's left...

"And what's left?"

Sam's voice a beacon in the black hollow beneath our dreaming.

Tracing Gould - oo1

In my psyche there is a direct association between my great-grandfather & Dick Tracy.  He used to collect them.  His daughter, my aunt, found them appalling & violent & disgusting, so as soon as he died she threw them away.

I did not know this detail until after my aunt's death.

Throughout my childhood, I spent Saturdays "up the drive" at my great-grandfather's house, the hearth of the Patty Family.  That place is very imprinted on my subconscious.  In my dreams I revisit it, though with significantly less frequency at this distance of decades.  My great-grandfather died in 1988, I believe.  He found the intensity with which I pored over the Sunday funnies, which they collected for me, amusing, and I know he watched me really grapple with the 80s incarnation of Dick Tracy.

I was fascinated by the faces.  Sam Catchem was particularly striking, to my child's eye.  But I didn't really know what I was ever looking at, what the stories were, who these characters were.  I had inherited the Max Collins / Kurt Lochner era of the thing, the attempted "modernization" of D.T., and it was completely impenetrable to me.  I understood Peanuts, and Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbes.  Dick Tracy was just thing full of talking about "cases" and "criminals" and I was just a kid who stared at teevee passively trying to understand what the fuck a Brady Bunch was and why it looked exactly like the Partridge family, and why did adult stuff seem so fucking stuck in the past?

But this was the 80s in Dogwater.  It was a bubble.  I didn't know who Chester Gould was.  I didn't see the effect he'd had on the culture I came to love because I didn't read the creators of my favourite comix lauding Gould, y'know?  I'm sure los Bros were talking about Dick Tracy but I didn't read those interviews.  I just didn't hear people talk about the effects, the influence.  I was a Bat-Fan like anyone who got secondhand toys and books and grew up with Adam West.  I didn't know how rooted in D.T. Batman was--  because DC made an editorial POINT of not talking about Gould, or the debt owed.  Crime fic writ large owes to the popularity of D.T., and the determination of Gould to bluff & hack his way through producing a daily strip for forty-six years.

I feel like I've spent my entire life tracking influence & interpreting the greater historical context of all this mishegas, catching up with the past, in an attempt to understand & accept the present that we've all been borne into.  Surely cooking my brain in the process.  Ah, the joys of being a human, walking to & fro, up & down this wired-ass world.

The point is, there's no one good reason I've discovered the Need to learn more about Gould and his work.  It's what I'm supposed to do.  It's an alternative to the deadspace that daily comix have become, in my attentions.  I grew up reading dailies.  In a way comix are an integral part of how I learned to read.  And probably why I was so credulous and literal-minded in my adolescence.  Not to diss on dailies.  But the stuff kids dig on?  Oof.  I'm not revisiting fucking Garfield, even ironically.

But then Sam Catchem casts his sardonic eye my way and says "Kid," around his perpetual cigarette...

dream - o21626: escapes & avalanches, in no particular order

The dullgreen fluroescent throb of artificial light as I cross the transom.  Every upstairs is a further level.  A whisper of air kisses the arch of my bare foot and I bend to slip free slats of hardwood, revealing yet another stair.  This access narrower and even less lit than the last.  The passage littered with aged newsprint.  Headlines from forgotten papers fluttering like agitated birds in the subgreen.  I hear a rustle, a granular grating of stone against stone, and step backward from the secret passage.  A bricksize rhomboid clatters, redounding off shelving overhead like a pachinko pellet, setting off other avalanches, wrecking surfaces, wrenching brackets free, the whole storage system collapsing in fits of tumbling slats, dust rising and boobytraps raining all 'round.  Looking on the collapsed egress, I sigh.  Siegfried sighs.

"At least we aren't climbing down that."

dream - o12426: the rotted synagogue

There is dark, the dark of gables two stories high overhead.  A blackish poodle runs through the incense-scented ruin, pulling a chain of dust behind him, sewing discord through the pews, encircling the bimah with his rough little whoops of alarm.  The dog is as unknown to me as their owner, but I follow anyway, thinking perhaps to gather the little noisemaker into my arms.  He eludes me and the urge to escort him out fades.  Lit by faraway dusk leaking through boarded-over twin windows, a bundled crew of parkour athletes lift a scroll from within the sundered ark, laying it cattycorner atop the reading table, knocking free charred fragments of fir, the char bouncing with a glassy clatter between the traceurs' feet.  The young men carefully unspool the scroll, "reading" the red line of the EKG as it charts the events that led us here.

I am the only other person here, besides these young men in their military surplus, and do not recognize them beyond their profession.  Their voices do not form words so much as an atmosphere of forgotten song, and it draws me in:  I stand below the railing of the bimah, peering at the end of the scroll as they spool it, scrying the QRS complexes for signs one might identify with sound.  Meaning eludes me.

Did I arrive with these men?  It feels like I arrived after, or independently, and we only converged here by chance.  They do not acknowledge me; in fact I might well not exist, were it not for the evidence of my smudged hands and the bounce of my tread through the boards in this sundered place.  The disturbance of the dog fades, perhaps having found a way out, leaving me behind.  Wordless chanting descends all around like constellated motes in a sunbeam.

jobs (a post-it nope)

Woke to a dream of dicking off at work.

There I am, washing bloody dishes.  Everyone stands at the back window, gawping at the sunset.  I stop drying silver and go to work the switches, which stick, shy of full contact; the descending dim falls away and I'm given to wander.  So I wander out of the kitchen, into main dining, which-- I'm dreaming about the covid lockdown, here, and three jobs back --is all open air, surrounding the decaying house.  The wheelchair ramps are half-rotted, soft wood buckling beneath my feet.

I sneak up to Dominic Monaghan, who's apparently one of our new servers.  Charlie, from fuckin' Lost.  This is a really low-rent dream.  Playfully I snap my towel at him--  this was something I noticed our new cook doing, this past week, reviving memories of when I was a grabasser at any-and-every gig  --and it cheeses him off.  He starts talking trash about my double standards.  I pretend to be mollified, but my mockery is muted by pain in my right hand.  It occurs to me Charlie here has bandaids on his fingers in the same places I'm experiencing pain.  I ask him what happened.

"I turned a bloody doorknob, if you must know, and the rusty bastard didn't spin.  Laid me open."

My boss, Emily-- who I've developed something of an internal distaste for on account of her promising a raise at six months, then backsliding & gifting me an 8oz bottle of olive oil instead  --appears as if by magic, perhaps irritable to find me here, seated at a staff table next to a waiter who's ignoring the massive reservations milling about all 'round the grounds.  He promises to get back to work.  I do not, instead preferring to extract the-- what are these, cactus? --needles bloodlessly from my fingers.

The thin bladelike tines slide out of my flesh as cleanly as slivers of glass.  Charlie gives me a curious, perhaps sympathetic look, and fucks off.  As do I.

Woke and read some more 'The Power Fantasy'.  Got to the backmatter & realized Gillen's done a Watchmen riff.  I look that up.  Gab at an internet friend--  as distinct from the meatspace variety, yes  --and then...  And then?

Welp, today, unlike yesterday, I am scheduled off.  Yesterday I called in sick.  Because fuck that place.  Spent the day with my husband, because that's actually important.  We don't have days off together now.  Stumbled across some new-to-me comix in a l'il free library.  Read another chapter of 'Vineland', a chapter wholly about Frenesi, the ex-activist, ex-mom, turned gov't informant, and thought about my mother & her association with the Weather Underground.  Talked to Sigfried about that stuff some.  We went to a park, he had a swim, we documented some butterflies together.  All in all a lovely unscheduled holiday.

What I'm not mentioning:  the physical fatigue from the weekend at work.  The chronic aches & pains, mostly localized along the right side of my body:  my right foot, which is still healing from me bloody working on it while injured; my right knee, which nowadays bitches when I take the stairs too aggro, and I try not to think about the inch-wide white scar outboard it where I literally caught a nail in the joint as a toddler; my right shoulder, which I landed on during the wreck that cracked my skull; my right hand, which was split & skinned & sewn together again b/c bike accident; my right elbow, which was the preferred point of articulation to land on, back when skateboarding seemed cool; and the right side of my jaw, which I've come to unconsciously clench until my chipped & fractured molars make sounds of distress not unlike tree trunks scraping together in a hellwind.

Hey, I'm not insured.  My job offers insurance.  Which is great if I feel like deducting money I'm not making to pay for injuries which, historically, they haven't paid for.  They didn't think to deal with Northwestern back when I got some stitches in the-- you guessed it  --right side of my scalp, from mis-gauging my distance from the dumpster & laying my head open, on a trash run.  Now Northwestern, who's never sent an actual physical bill to my actual physical residence, has turned me over to a collections agency.  I've mentioned this to my bosses, a couple of times, and they've done sweet f.a.

So maybe I don't trust these guys to give me insurance.  So maybe calling in sick doesn't wrinkle my conscience.  Much.

Still, when I start dreaming about a gig, it's time to fuckin' quit.

Anyway, back to my Real Job.  Drawing.  Let's see if I can accomplish some shit today, and post it.

dream - o21125: aches & hauntings

Not a detail-laden one.  Work-flavored dream.  Trying to make my hands function without pain.  Manual dexterity is impeded.  Stumblebum reaction time.

Am trying to apologize to Bertie, my manager, for inventing a dumb nickname for him.  ("Tu-bertie-losis", because he's been struggling with respiratory whatever for five plus weeks, now.)

Inability to get a clean grip on things is humbling.  Some sort of hint that kitchen space is haunted?  But it doesn't look like a kitchen.  Basically resembles a redressed set: the hardwood floors suggest to my conscious mind that it's my grandparents' house, again.

What else...  An old chevy--  I believe?  Am no good at remembering makes & models of cars  --is parked indoors.  In what would have been the 'dining room' in my grandparents' house, if it were twice the size, but in the nature of dreams this space, directly adjacent to the kitchen, doubles as our prep space.  The ragtop has a faintly eggy paint job, the kind of hardbaked cream colour one gets from being parked in the sun overlong.  Even the chrome looks blistered.  Salt damage, I assume.  Whose car is this, anyhow?

The "ghost" of the kitchen watches me strain & fumble, trying to apologize to Bertie, the scoop springing loose of my grip and clattering on the floor.  The "ghost" seems youthful, but unknown to me....