nightmares & how to ride them

Just part of the game.  Your body can be at ease and your mind can be placid as a lake when you arrive in bed and you can still wake straining to wake, shouting and tossing and unsure where you are.  It's normal.

Sig never remembers me waking that way.  Generally.  He's so forgiving.  Also, too sleepbrained to register it happening.  He'll check on me, ask what it is, then entwine his fingers with mine, and it's okay, and he's out.  It's enviable.

Me, it'll take twenty, thirty minutes to unclench, get my heart rate normal, ease the muscles.  Thirty minutes at least, if I decide to write the offending 'mare up in the journals.  A trip to the toilet.  Some breathing exercises.  Once all the thoughts are arrayed and the thing examined, it's fine.  I can sleep again.

But it's hard to remember life before Sig was there.  The nightmares were a facet of my Life Before, living & sleeping alone, years at a stretch.  Then it was just get up.  Do some exercises.  Take a night ride on the bike.  Write it all out.  Read the old journals.  Then stay awake until whenever.  Sometimes all night, sometimes until work the next day.  Rest was a thing that existed in parings, trimmings, snippets.

Today sleep isn't the enemy.  My subconscious isn't the enemy.  There is no enemy.  "Enemy" was only a game my brain was playing with my instincts, a preparedness drill...

It's okay, buddy.  You got out.

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 - o2o226: line to the moon

My grandparents' house, the living room.  Empty except for myself.  The faux-western ornamentation on the shelves heavy with their absence.  The edges of the collected Zane Gray gone papyrus.  The cut glass candy dishes dim with accumulated dust.  The rotary phone by granddad's chair rings, a jangled robot exclamation of alarm.  My grandmother's voice on the other end-- a voice out of darkness, out of naked space, distant as the moon.  They don't believe their son could have acted the way I describe.

"He couldn't have done those things," she says, and using a damp washcloth I carefully wipe between the rows of exposed nail ends protruding from where the padded headrest was.  Busying myself with cleaning, dusting granddad's favourite recliner, I listen patiently to the denials, only occasionally asserting the abuse that became my birthright.  In my mind I trace the call, visualizing from whence grandma's voice originates:  a faint blue line describing an orbital trajectory, overlaid on infinite black.

Observing the lunar surface around me.  Pitted ash underfoot, inverted cones & craters in the hundreds of thousands, fine as the dirt floor of a barn and as suggestive of antlions, the vista assumes primacy and the "reality" of my grandparents' room falls away, except for the dull weight of the plastic reciever in my hand, against my ear.  Without any energy I protest, anger dead and suffocated, wondering why no-one ever believed me.  Imagining the moon in its arc, circling in sync with the denials of my dead family.

There:  center of the coal-gray plain I'm standing on, a singular light, a miniature moon, phosphorescent as the soul's own glow.  I study it, no longer truly listening, feeling hollow, ageless, indifferent.  Wondering why I am trying to make my case, when there is no jury to agree, no justice seated on high, no opinion to court.  Grandmother's voice fading as I permit my receiver hand to drop.  Tracing paths through the vacuum with my mind's eye.  Lit by the brittle sphere of imagination. Waiting in wonder.

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 - o52525: gift from out of time

A day trip back home.  The old homestead has been bulldozed, dust still settling.  None of the libraries have survived.  My grandparents' house, altogether gone.  The tiny pond, filled in; the towering magnolias in the front yard, vanished, the bases of their stumps scorched out of the earth.  Back at the campo sancto, the family land, there's some vestiges of the past-- the quonset hut I helped my parents erect remains due to the concrete foundations, but the wooden ends of the vast, corrugated steel drum have been burnt out.

Despite these minor erasures, the land itself is rich, verdant, flowering.  I note the freshly turned clay at the edges of our old dirt roads, the evidence that the bulldozers have been here, too.  The barn still stands, but it's completely vacant & coalblack within.  The clean, subtle sweet scent of dogwood, clustered by the rotted pens to either side, their bleached paper blossoms with punched-tab leaves trembling in the breeze.  The land has never seemed so vacant, nor at ease.

In what remains of the trailer, some piles of old books.  The front porch remains level, but the interior of the trailer is as buckled by collapse as the last time I saw it, fetid with the scent of black mold, my mother's collection of vinyl fallen forward into the pit in the floor, every gatefold sleeve sick with mildew.  I remain on the porch, at the threshold, uncertain.  Turning to the Bally 'Old Chicago' pinball machine to the left of the washer & dryer, I thumb through the books stacked on the glass.  The top volume is a collection of E.C. Segar's non-Popeye cartooning, something I've never seen before.  Tucking it underneath my arm, I step off the porch...

Tempus fugit, and I'm seating myself at a table with Rob James, mom's best friend from Anniston high school.  His Lennon frames glint as he nods hi, and he peers with interest at the threadbare canvas cover of the Segar book as I slide it over.  A forgotten part of mom's collection, it seems.  We both appreciate the clean bubbly arcs of Segar's pen, the pages upon pages of warmup sketches & practice lines, and I ask him if he likes it.  He says he does, so I say, "Merry Christmas."  Rob looks good, not the slightest indication of M.S.; no tremors, no hesitancy in his hands; and he smiles with genuine affection, the radiance of his appreciation sweeping in an upward arc from the art on the page to my adult stranger's face, like a sunset in reverse.  "Thank you," he says.

I do not tell him he's welcome, for the dead are always welcome here.

dream - o3o525: across the water

It's the Atlantic: that perpetual widescreen roil, salt taste wafting in, and the clouds are fine ripples of unwound cotton.  I am standing on pink sand, looking out over the ocean for the first time in what must surely be a decade, marveling at the vista, as a toothpick-thin, perfectly vertical geyser erupts out of the horizon.

Whale spume, I think, as the eruption spreads in an upwardly-rising coil of smoke, billowing outward.

Missiles, I realize, as the ICBMs begin their dispersal, contrails flowering into crystalline horror.  Nuclear missiles?  There is nowhere to go, I explain to myself, my mind's voice steady but barely heard beneath the increasing wind.  Idly wondering where they will fall.  Idly wondering, whose fault was this?

dream - o22725: the holster

The silent parking lot is an expanse of moonless night.  The thinning lines of snow glisten.

When I turn the man's bulky coat is haloed by the overheads as he shifts the wool open, going for the holster underneath his arm.

The three handles protruding from under his left arm announce:  This is happening.

I don't have time to register the total absurdity of the tri-holster.

I only know that my eyes snap open and am staring at my husband's lidded REM flicker.

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....

dream - o2o425: my face is a television where i don't have the remote

There's not too much to the dream.  It's full of strangers.  Strangers in a strange house-- okay, it was my grandparents' house --having a strange party. (Okay, maybe the party wasn't that strange; maybe it was a birthday.  But I don't celebrate my birthday.  Haven't for decades.)  Okay, maybe they weren't all strangers--  I recognized Jayme Reynolds, I think  --but in terms of being people from my lived life, they weren't part of me.

They're watching something.  It's probably Severance season 2.  That's what I watched last night before bed.  The idea of someone loving you so much they'd seek you out, even if you couldn't remember them anymore, it sticks in my throat.  And then someone started saying something nice.  Maybe to do with my birthday.  I don't really remember, because the crying jag hits.  With brimming eyes I split the scene.

The not-a-dream parts of this really outweigh the dream itself.  Because my husband was trying to say something nice to me, yesterday, while we were having a shower, and suddenly my face is a television where I don't have the remote, and someone else is flipping through thoughts & emotions, and it's all on my face, and my husband's watching as I lose control, trying to keep from crying.

Faster than he can say, "Are you okay?" I'm turned away and saying "I'm okay," and trying to reassure him.  "What's wrong?"  And all I have to offer is, "I'm crazy," with a dead man's laugh.  And then we're drying off for bed, and I'm struggling to keep it stowed.  Then the jag hits again, a wave taller than all my breakers, and it's back to being a sobbing mess again.

Because I've never felt this specifically isolated in all my adult life.

When we were in the shower, the crying began because I remembered Siegfried holding my hand when I was in the hospital.  Which made me remember every time I went to the hospital for a member of my family.  Which made me remember the last time I saw my grandfather, and the last time I held his hand.  Which leads to me also remembering the first time my grandfather held my hand, as an infant.  Because that's something I remember.

I don't know how many people actually possess pre-verbal memories of infancy & access them.  Is it a common phenomena?  I can't say.  But I remember.  Maybe because I'm me, and my brain is fundamentally, biologically different from the majority of people.  This planet is hard on brains.  And nervous systems.  And consciousnesses.  Anyway, which crying jag was I on?

The second, while in bed, straining to isolate & articulate the specific "trigger" for the sob-shit I was taking all over myself.  Because the emotional blocks I keep in place to function around people, and the world, it's about as effective as putting a cork in one's ass to stop diarrhea.  I have emotions, but I don't vent them the way(s) I used to.  And a great many of these emotions regard how I feel about humanity.

As the problem(s) with my operating system cause my thought processes to flicker & stutter like fluorescents working with a bad ballast, I asked Sig, "Am I different?  I mean, since the accident?"  Because in the three years since, it feels like I've grown very distant from other people.  Like, I find them fascinating.  I love listening to them.  But because I'm me, there isn't much common ground.

Sig held my hand, and said, "No.  You're still yourself.  But I think you... turned a corner.  Like you found a reason to live?  Not like you didn't have one before.  But times were difficult..."  Which is an understatement.  The last few years have been a strain.  I should probably have a shrink.  But I don't.  I have this little box I type on, and this window on a diminished & darkening internet.

Anyway.  After a bit, the sob-shits stopped, and I went to sleep for a little.  Had some dreams.  Had crying jag #3.  Then woke at 4am, as usual, to the solitude of another day grinding at a physically exhausting job I do not like nor have any interest in, amongst people I don't relate to, speaking as little as may be managed.  Maybe before work I'll make a stop at the Wind Phone.

There's a li'l red british phone box in the middle of a field, a few blocks from my workplace.  Like I told Sig last night, I've stopped there twice before.  Once, to apologize to my grandparents for not being there when they passed away.  They were old, I had been hospitalized anyway, and covid was a brush fire in a parched landscape.  I didn't know they were dying.  It's hard to not feel guilty.

The second stop at the Evanston Wind Phone--  do you even know what a Wind Phone is?  I didn't, but my husband did  --I dialed Sam, an old friend from the Auburn years.  I called him to say sorry for re-purposing his death in one of my books.  The guy in my book bore little resemblance, but I knew what I had done, so: I apologized for the possible disrespect.  And for not knowing him better.

Dunno.  Maybe those talks helped.  Certainly seems more helpful than keeping a dream journal.

dream - o1o325: three uneasy pieces

(1)  Candlelit and cavernous, the dimensions of the room flicker.  Intimate and impossibly large, our dance oscillates around a dark rider on horseback.  The oak floor echoes with every tap of the wooden hooves as the virginia reel cycles.  I watch the rider reaching down to touch a stranger's rising hand.  My mind's eye closes on the classically carved fetlocks of the creature:  and I sense horse & rider are the same construct.

(2)  A test.  The lines on the paper are not numbered, but there are two columns of purple ditto.  I spend entirely too long recognizing that I'm in class, and that the test is timed.  My handwriting is impossibly bad, and I've only begun revising my answers.  Seated third from the front in the farthest left row of the class, I filch a test booklet from the stacks atop the radiators by the window.  It begins to dawn on me that I'm going to fail.  But what is the subject?  History, presumably.  The hay-coloured light of a southern winter fills the windows...

(3)  When did the actors in this horrid production contract the parasite?  Clambering up warehouse shelving I watch them rehearsing their scenes.  Some marking time, waiting.  Others already in the throes of fatal struggle.  It could be an Orion picture, for all the quality on display: everything relies on sub-optimal lighting.  There's an elasticity to time here, trapped as we are.  I sense that the movie has been filming for hours, days, weeks.  The script could be a knockoff of Aliens, the white persian barncat an expy of Jonesey.  From atop the shelves I watch the crew straining to come to terms with their roles and the reality that these events won't simply end in death.  Events don't have endings.  They have intervals.

dream - 111524: pleas, pleas, pleas

In the ancestral house.  Packing for a trip.  At the door of my parents' old bedroom.  Repeated knocks prove nothing.  Enter to immediate regret.  Have to brace myself to balance against pain.  Fragmented glass all over.  Picking grains from feet.  Glittering mound of shards in my right palm.  Picking them, dropping them.  Increasing volume of pleas.  Begging for any aid, fearing myself unheard, crying.

Uncle Billy finally arrives.  My father as well.  Faces of quiet scorn, blaming me for carelessness.  Dad offering a wastebin.  Pouring dust like diamonds.  My hardframe hiker's backpack stashed in a closet.  Father sullen, Billy snickering.  Whole house without power.  Dim forgotten fire flickers in the cold black hearth.  Why'd I come back?  But I always do.  Memory of hollow redounding shouts for help, echoing.

dream - 111424: back on the baize circuit

At the Indy (or is it the Highlander?) hoping to cadge a ride.  Dial Jayme Reynolds, who I believe now to be a dealer, and set down to wait.  Perform some scriptwork on Battles, my laptop, trying to stay anonymous.  As I edit, watch old acquaintances delicately brushing paint onto miniatures.  Some kind of crafts night?  Poolside in the main hall, Mark O & MaryAnn have tiny bas relief ovals set on dish easels and are carefully daubing the details in with sable brushes.  At first I'm surprised either has the motor control to do such work, then realize the bas reliefs must all be masked.  Though not with tape or rubber cement; some kind of clay perfectly fills the fine interstices between ivory-white leaves...

Jayme rolls into the parking lot in an old cadilliac & I dash out, hopping in the back seat and plonking my heavy bag down, prepared to do a li'l unpaid therapy to coax a ride (& perhaps a joint) out of him.  Judging by his long face seems he's still experiencing contratemps with Amy-- and he's high, so we only circle a quarter of the lot before he's exiting curbside and in a bar.  "Babysitting ain't never been easy," I console myself, and follow.

Cajoling Jayme out of the Highlander (or is it the Indy?) with Jayme's tiddly ass in tow I must circle back through the main hall of tables.  MaryAnn's soused now, flirty but incoherent.  All the spaces where we were are occupied by a fresh wave of players, most of them taking selfies with booze.  Grown adults playacting as if they exist in whiskey ads, I swear.  "No drinks on the felt, please, no drinks on the felt," I scold, making a rushed circuit of the room.  Half the partiers hear but couldn't care.  Nor do I, on automatic.  Passing table 8, which is at least covered, I continue nursemaiding: "Please, no drinks on the felt.  Please."  And duck behind the counter to grab something from beneath the bar...

dream - 11o124: eternal exit

Back at my aunt's house, my great-grandfather's house, the house I can't seem to escape dreaming of.  The house I used to run to, despite the pervasive basement chill hinting at lonesome futility.  The home away from the home that abused me.  In the dream I'm even aware that refuge is why I preferred being here.  Because at least this sorrowful christian estate, with its dust-laden recesses of mystery, wasn't where I was being raised in fear.  It was near to fear but it wasn't living there.

Sig is with me, trying to help me leave.  I'm not being helpful in the exit.  Because I'm aware that this is where it starts & ends, in my internal eternity.  Sig's trying to shove my bike in the back seat of the car, having one hell of a time.  The cushioning is snagged and the bike seat has broken in two halves.  I'm sure it's cut him, but he's exhausted and not receptive to my ministrations.  He just wants to get away from this place that isn't a place.  He needs me to escape its gravity.

I take over maneuvering the bike and he climbs into the front seat, casting impatient looks at the old home with its peeling paint, forest green sunbleached to faded jade.  Sig's phone keeps pinging with fresh notices from friends.  My phone, the old broken one I use strictly as an mp3 player, is playing some pod about Grant Morrison.  Even on the level of our appliances & crutches, we're disconnected and in unrelated states psychologically.

I climb back in front.  Maybe we will leave this time.

dream - 1o2624: reprise of final departure

A reprise of my final departure from Atlanta, presumably.  Set in a precarious lunchroom, chromium picnic tables arrayed in a row over permanent scaffolding above a well-lit abyss.  I maneuver in & out of my position amidst former workmates from the Indy and members of my own family.  The seating arrangements are preposterous.  Who set this up, a blind wedding planner?

My mother is in attendance--  a first for these dreams, as she's usually never anywhere to be seen  --and she's visibly tearful, but that doesn't affect me any more than seeing Greg's wistful smile.  People who perpetually spoke of my Value (my Meaning in the Great Script, as 'twere) while never delivering any actual evidence of their love.  "Keep your promises" seems to be the message, here, and nobody seeing me off did.  Everyone knows I'm going, because I've chosen to tell them, but where the fact of my departure should be celebratory instead there's a general apathy.  Again, an absence of Meaning.

I sneak into Greg's car & filch a few roach-ends, make sure my bag is loaded, and look over my bike.  Everything seems to be in order.  Except for some sort of nagging irritation in my left shoe.  I adjourn to the bathroom & discover one of my toes is not merely injured-- it's hollow.  The damaged skin flaps, and I am alarmed.  Not at the injury:  at the fact that I do not feel it.  There is no pain.

dream - 1o2o24: first ride out

'First ride out, I'm done,' I think, settling the immense two-handed tablet into its rack on the back of the scooter.  Of course it's not my equipment, and it's not my scooter, but the damned thing cranks when I settle in, and it rides as naturally as any bike I've ever straddled, so I coast 'round the serpentine curves of Gulf Shores swampland, wondering 'Was that, at last, the last I'll ever see Victor?'

Slowing to pause as our flock approaches the traffic stop, a rider in the adjacent lane reaches over and extracts the tablet from its saddle on the rear of "my" scooter.  He seems to've mistaken my equipment for his own, which is missing.  I don't dissuade him so much as bluntly state, "That's mine, by the way," while we all wait for the border cops to do their inspection.  The brunette rider with a military buzz gives me a dull thud of an appraising glance as he intones, "Sure."

He's having his shoes confiscated minutes later.  As the cops clap the soles together, knocking loose mud, he rattles his cuffs and wishes me luck.  Yanking the tablet by its handles from his scooter, re-seating it onto my stolen vehicle, I thank him:  "Best to you, too, on your first ride out."

dream - 1o2o24: old enemies

Return to "Backwoods Electronics," the original incarnation of ACE Electronics.  With Victor Cypert, organizing & rearranging all the electronic corpses in the old shop.  Shelf upon shelf, wall upon wall.  We seem to be attempting some sort of reconciliation.  Dad is cleaning up his personal life, apparently.  Sober now?  Vic seems to know something about it-- but he also knows how sparked on cocaine my father was, at one point.  Whatever.  Vic always has an angle.  He and I shuffle & re-shuffle several shelves worth of equipment to get to his old television, which still needs a bullet hole in the front chassis patched.

Then I'm left alone with dad, essentially hemmed in.  Shelves have to be shifted so I can even step back onto the main path in the shop, piled floor-to-ceiling as it is with all this junk...

dream - 1o1624: detail work

The montage I'm penciling is a mix of artstyles, Al Columbia & Keith Giffen.  Mounted on a massive floppy expanse of posterboard.  It's late afternoon and I've chosen to finish the thing at the Highlander, so I wrangle it in and flop it down on an open table toward the front.  No-one's seen me in years, and being sober, naturally no-one recognizes me.  I pencil a while, taking extra pains at the margins, as some kid idles 'round, attempting to fiddle with my work when-ever he thinks I'm not watching, just for jolly.  But I'm vigilant; calmly I erase all his sabotage and keep at it.  Going to get it right this time.

The details are precisely my jam:  mohawked punks in white riding pants w/ black stripes wearing comically oversize fur coats, large brass costume jewelry chains like cape clasps dangling from every lapel.  One punk owns a dog and the angle I've chosen for the scruffy animal is an absolute bastard.

The poster board has a layer of newsprint which snags every time I try to erase, but I soldier on, beatifically, unflappably determined.  Everything must be correct.  The kid's impressed with my imperturbability, so when I step away from the table and tell him to guard my work I know he will.  He stands to the left of the table, studying my lines as I move toward the back bar.

One of the former bartenders, Kelley, is in a wheelchair, straining trying to shift a wireframe tray; she nearly drops it as I pass but the cumbersome load miraculously lands rightside up, every bowl cantering in place.  I wave and she beams with a shock of recognition, giving me a thumbs-up.  I move on.

Stepping into the hall encounter Allie chatting up a completely unshaven, gray-bearded Darb.  Realizing the length of my hair obscures my identity I say hi.  Without thinking she launches her right hand to my throat, mock-strangling me.  The action's automatic, for comedic effect, borne of a decade or more being employed here.  I recognize it for what it is, but still.  Her exit's mechanical, like she's on a track, out the door before I can react.  Patrons filing toward the toilets wonder at the scene.  Darb smiles and shrugs.  I'm left pointing after, exasperated.

"Oy," I begin, "not cool!"  And follow.  At bar's narrow end, beside the handwritten sign declaring Ass Funnel, Allie recognizes me at last.  "Al, you remember the first time you did that shit?"  Thrown, not remembering, she answers, "No..."

"It was brunch, I was barbacking, and you felt like horsing around.  Cornered me, pretending to throw a punch."  Before she has a chance to answer I throw my arms around her in a bear-hug and whisper in her ear:  "You meant no harm.  But my earliest memories of my father are of being regularly throttled."

Releasing the hug I step back, all benevolence.  "Jesus Christ," she breathes, wide-eyed.  I smile, patting her tattooed shoulder, turning back to my table.  I see the kid still there, guarding my art.

Just like that I'm one hundred percent conscious.  Puffy-eyed, rise to write it out.

dream - 1o1524: editing tarantino

The same mind movie, three times in a row, about a bunch of bank robbers trapped in a sprawling junkyard, trying to get away after a heist:

In the first iteration they barely escape, having lost many of their band, and those who do are badly wounded & probably fatally.  In the second they've strategized, fight back successfully, and escape without any casualties, but they'll probably get nabbed.  So when I play the reel for the third time, it's all very clever & well-organized & stylish, lots of pyrotechnics.  Everything is fictionalized, and the Director in my head overseeing it all likens this retreaded narrative to being very Tarantino, making the deliberate choice to be more commercially appealing & less factual in each successive iteration.  Success is all a question of how to present the violence.

My mind talking to me about how I process trauma, and how Real any of that processing is?  A dissertation on dissociation, I suppose.  I note at no point were the police visible:  they were always on the outside, firing blindly in.  There's no clear notion of whether the invisible police suffered any casualties, either.  Artificial & disinterested in any outside perspective.

Rather like 'Reservoir Dogs', in more ways than one.

dream - 1o1424: up the road

Up the road from the campo sancto.  In the unpainted concrete basement of my great-grandfather's house.  I've dropped a small, red-glazed ceramic pipe, and it bounces down an unfamiliar stair, off the landing and into a sandpit below.  Going to collect it I encounter the recent, marvelous tables my grandfather has been crafting.  The top of the largest is a cross-section of pine, at least five feet across and three-quarters of a foot thick; the round still has the bark on, shiny beneath the saplike coat of finish.

Retrieving the pipe from the sandpit beneath the stair I go back up to the top landing and find granddad knelt there, woodworking, shirtless & panting as he planes the surface of the table level.  His sister and wife watching with skepticism.  Keeling forward, his fingers dig into his chest, and I experience a shock of recognition.  How much like my father he looks, his hair not yet gone completely gray.  A.E. straightens up and lurches off for a nitroglycerin pill, dismissively irritable with everyone for carrying on and making a meal of things.  "Been this way ever since the operation," his voice a bass murmur.  I feel ashamed-- not for my concern, but for what he would call my effeminacy.

I descend to the basement again, going from vacant storeroom to vacant storeroom.  No electricity.  The rooms faintly cold, accruing damp.  The dark resists my eyes, the details of blank concrete the blurry forest green of retinal afterburn.  Remembering that my aunt is dead.  The house did not long survive her.

* * * * *

After an hour of dicking around with every search engine I could find, asked Siegfried to help me check on my grandparents.

A.E. died in 2022.  Mary died shortly thereafter.

Guess now I know.

dream - 1o1324: paralyzed again

Endless dream of not falling asleep.  Depressive slough in which I can't get myself out of bed.  Interminable ringing in ears mingled with the whispered roar of wind currently encircling the building.  Imagined Siegfried coming into the room to goad me.  Imagine we quarrel, which depresses me still further.  Start to gasp, unable to breathe as I struggle to stagger from the room.  Siegfried shuffles off, acting like I'm just being dramatic about not being able to get a job.  "It'll be fine!"  He doesn't realize that I'm not acting and cannot inhale.  The shrill silver tone in my ears rising, rising...

I know none of it happened.  It all feels like it happened.  Worrisome.