March 8–16, 2023

My dream from Wednesday, 2023–03–08: The tape.

I’m driving a strange car up a narrow gravel driveway parallel to a four-lane highway but separated from it by a high chainlink fence and some rough ground. This is a forest with driveways branching off the main one into the trees. Someone who lives here and passes around us in a car and at the same time is standing by the road, is sarcastically amused that I’m stuck on this side of the fence, that I don’t know how far you have to go this way to get back over, that I should have got on the highway when I had the chance, back at the bottom of the hill. He doesn’t know I can just fly the car up and over as soon as he’s gone.

This whole area is a rural post-apocalyptic spread-out college campus. At night I’m in a temporary-classroom trailer with all old recording equipment from the Community School in the early 1980s. There’s a set of shelves against one of the short walls, with a Technics 10-inch reel-to-reel tape deck, an FM receiver/amplifier, a medium-size TEAC mixer, all comfortable, familiar things I know all about how to use and take care of. A black-haired mean but insecure girl is here from a spy agency of the government to get the seven-inch reel of tape of a computer program that’s been cleverly goofed into audio of one of my old projects where we were trying to sound like Firesign Theater. She doesn’t know what format the recording is in and so she backs off from demanding. A similar but Asian college girl helping the spies figures it out, takes it but takes the wrong reel. I pretend it was the right one and snatch it back from her. She’s too clever; she also has the right one and tries to smuggle it out balanced on the back of her bent-forward neck. I take that back too. Both girls are upset because their boyfriend got them into the spy program and he’ll be disappointed. I have a half-memory of passing by him earlier by the college’s gym. He’s a prick; he’s like the psychopath Ray in /Dead Like Me/.

I’ve flown away with the tape. I’m at a bus stop on the side of a forest road almost at San Francisco, going down from the north. I think about putting aluminum foil over my phone so I can’t be tracked. (I’ve read that they can find you through your phone even if it’s switched off.) I should /do/ the aluminum foil thing, get another phone in my name, and put the new one in someone’s car, or mail it somewhere, or drop it off the bridge into a sailboat, so they follow that…

Now I have the car again, and I’m in Alaska on a busy tourist road going bumper-to-bumper past a wide river beach. I get out and put the tape under some sand by shrubs. A cross between my friend Bob Seaver and writer Paul McHugh shows up to write a story about my fleeing with the tape all these years, and flying around, and hiding the tape in the various places I’ve hidden it in the time I’ve been on the run. I lead him away from the tape, but I know he saw me hide it. That’s a decoy tape. I lost the real one a long time ago. There’s the sense that the rumors and stories about the tape has become a cult sensation around the world. I wish I still had it. I’d like to hear it. I only barely remember what’s on it.

Walking in the sand is like walking in snow. Light sand.

—

My dream from Thursday, 2023–03–09: Duck fetch.

It’s the last day of a weeks-long Cal Expo-like fair in strange fairgrounds. On a mile-long football field, Edwardian-dressed men play a game of competition to throw a football by a new technique that makes it go hundreds of yards. They throw it to me but it’s too fast; it goes through the loop of my arms. I run to get it, pinch one end into a fold along the lace line, and throw it farther than anyone else. This causes three big fairy-tale-cartoon-like drunk or retarded teenage girls with lumpy misshapen heads to be interested in me and try to capture me, like the Klingon women catcall-like teasing Riker in the Star Trek episode where he’s an exchange officer on a Klingon ship. I get away from them and off the end of the field near the parking lot.

Here’s the place on the grass where amateur musicians have an electric band set up, after the real acts have gone. Kay Rudin is here, playing bass, or rather holding a bass guitar and giving instructions to the others.

Here’s Juanita. Good, we can leave now, but there’ll still be things to do first that will take for fucking ever. This is a familiar real-life feeling from the end of Ren Faires and Dickens Faires and every other kind of place like that. It always happens, I hate it, but I’m here and I have to do it.

Others heading off into the parking lot are watching a phenomenon in the sky. The air is churning gray and white, somehow suspending cardboard and poster-paper and big jagged sheets of white sheet metal. How can it? But nobody seems worried about the metal falling; this must happen all the time.

Our sleeping arrangements are in the first bay of a metal car-repair-garage-like building: two twin-beds and some white bedroom furniture. I say to Juanita, “I don’t think we can carry all that on the rental car.” She says, “That’s not all of it. We still have to get my [something].” How did we get it all here?

I’m in a fair-makeshift bar area that’s like an antique aerodrome airport place, behind and indoors from the garage, waiting for Juanita to make arrangements to get even more things to somehow tie to the car to take away from here. While I wait I’m watching a CRT teevee on a shelf above the end of the bar. I see ducks in a swimming pool. One duck in particular is the focus of the show. The camera follows it as it fetches something like a pingpong ball from one end of the pool and brings it back to the trainer, and we see a closeup of its feet under the water, going mechanically like a wind-up outboard motor. It’s /so cute/.

There’s Juanita, next room, behind the bar, bent over and down to her shoulders doing something in a big cardboard box. Fixing something? Choosing a pet duck for us?

—

My dream from Friday, 2023–03–10:

First dream. After a vague time of having sex with Juanita while both lying on our backs with our heads away from each other (and where are our legs?), I wake up from sleep, still in the dream, where train tracks come out of a tunnel along the side of a steep mountain. The old train mechanic guy lives in the tunnel. The tracks are buried in avalanches of snow and broken flat rocks that don’t seem to weigh anything at all. The company that owns all this is getting ready to make this a tourist playground — the customers are already on their way — so I think it must be safe to follow the train guy down the hill a little bit. It’s not. I have to dig way in with my hands and boots to get back up to the track. The train guy tells me not to do that. I say, “I’m not,” but the alternative is to slip down and fall forever, so I keep wrecking the hillside to get back up to relative safety.

Around the corner to the right, inside the hill but also outdoors in a springtime land of strips of green grass bordered by flower hedges, middle-aged tourists are learning to sing and play music for their church. The guitar player woman has to leave. They ask if anyone else can do that. I offer to. The chords are written in chalk on chalkboards along the hedges. I experience a weird combination of both easily being able to understand the music and play the chords on time and also being all fumblefingers about walking the notes between the chords. It’s just practice; that’s good enough.

Next dream. There’s a dream-only gravel road curving to the right around my house and into an industrial yard of broken flat gray rocks like big rock corn flakes, where the train company of the previous dream is establishing a kind of half-assed adult Disneyland of bar booths and restaurants in the gravel and no rides at all. The closest thing to anything fun is a dog-trick act but, like with the church music group and the guitar player, the dog trainer has to leave early. It turns out that he has to leave because he lied about knowing how to train dogs. I take a strange nine-inch-diamter shag-rug-covered sausage of a pug/poodle-dog and test it, throwing one end of a rope and I keep the other end in my hand. The dog-thing runs (on what? no legs), grabs the far end, tugs at it. I tell it, “Bring it here.” It brings it to me. I say, “Drop it.” It drops it and waits for me to throw it again. /Good./ Okay. What do you suppose was the matter with the last guy? How can someone not know how to train a dog?

—

My dreams from Saturday, 2023–03–11: Sword escape. Hamster ring prison. Nixie tubes. The pee rule.

First dream. A Zorro/Daredevil-like man with a sword runs away in front of me and jumps out a window of a tall building down to the vast flat rooftop lawn of the next building. People come after him and appear in front of him. He fights them off, kills them, continues fleeing. I wonder why they don’t just shoot him from here, from other places in the building I’m in, but they don’t. He’s getting away. (In part of this I’m where he is, swinging my sword around, cutting other sword-people’s arms off and stabbing them.)

Now my point of view is inside a slightly-quilted-texture oblate ball of thick amber plastic in microgravity. I and a pig-person like the institutional cook character in the webcomic /Monster Soup/ run around the inside of the outer wall to push against it by centrifugal force. Others are here. A man-size upright polar-bear person and I go outside onto the ground between rectangular buildings in like Los Angeles to play in gray mud and hose-water because the process of being inducted back into the plastic prison environment up there momentarily squeezes you tiny and all the dirt is left behind. This is how you get clean.

Next dream. I and my employer Tim are in a room like the dining room/kitchen of the house on Clay Street in Fresno where I lived just after my mother married Roland in 1967, but it’s not a house now, it’s a shop space cluttered with 1970s-1980s surplus technology. I wander around, interested in the things. Tim is repairing a tabletop mostly-analog pinball-like machine that has a simple computer and a nixie tube display. He’s at a green-screen IBM XT computer, hurrying through an Autodesk-like 3D-vector modeling program to eventually get 3D-printed parts for the pinball machine. I don’t know how to use that program. I’m just waiting for him to tell me what he needs me to do next.

Next dream. A little girl is one of several prisoners in another prison with the same feeling as the one in the previous dream, but this one is entirely an enclosed landscape-from-orbit-looking land in the rectangle between blocky buildings. (Maybe this is what the mud-place grew up into.) Everyone here has been taking drugs and drinking for a special holiday. The little girl flies out into the air over the landscape and flips upside-down (head down, feet up) to pee. I replace her there with myself. I fall a long way before I figure out how to levitate upside-down, and peeing like this turns out to be stupid; it gets all over you. It’s not like I expected it to come out the top of my head, but I thought you had to do it this way because it was a rule.

—

My dreams from Sunday, 2023–03–12: Family. Schlafer’s stables.

First dream. It’s dark and cold, but I’m not cold. I’ve just returned to Mendocino on foot from work (or maybe from prison) somewhere miles out in the dream-dry bay and am waiting across the street from the Art Center because this is where we agreed my mother would come and pick me up in the car when I got back to town.

Things change so I can just walk to where my mother is, which is a couple hundred yards away, where the high school should be. It’s the dream-only crappy old one-story plaster house that our family was supposed to have finished moving out of by now but that still has furniture and things in it. I look around in resigned despair at the things left to move. I can hear my mother talking with others in the other room.

My whole family is dream-only: my mother looks a little like an Indian-Asian Diane Wiest with reddish-lens sunglasses on. I was on foot while away because she need to use my car for the family. I ask her where the car is, so I can go, and she fusses around in the kitchen talking about whatever they’re watching on teevee in the /next/ farther room. I repeat: “Where did you leave my car?” This doesn’t register with her. Finally she understands and says that it’s “in the car repair place yard”. I say, “What car place? Schlafer’s?” No.

The town is not big. I wander around until I find a car repair place yard where in real life are a bunch of little bungalow-houses by the old grammar school. It’s even darker than before, now, and there are boys’ voices coming from among the dead cars. I have to decide between just going in there, finding my car and driving away, and calling the police on the boys first, because what if they’re hot-heads and they shoot me? But the police will take forty-five minutes to get here anyway, and what if the boys are already stealing parts off my car? Oh, well — here I go…

Next dream. The same feeling and situation as the previous dream, except I’ve just arrived at the house my dream-only family is moving out of. Here, I have two little brothers, one of them befuddled and agitated, like Leonardo DiCaprio in /What’s Eating Gilbert Grape/. I kneel down, put my hands on the sides of his head and settle him down. I tell both boys to go to Schlafer’s* (Chevron station) and wait for me. I’ll be along in a bit with a car. The older boy said, “What car?” I say, “It’ll be nice. I’ll try to get a red one.” (I’m going to steal a car. Of /course/ I’m not gonna specifically steal a red one.)

The boys don’t know where Schlafer’s is. I say, “You know. It’s next to the church.” They’re like, What church? I say, “There’s /one church/.” /What’s it look like?/ (Oh, Christ, they’re /both/ deficient.) “It looks like a /church/.” I make a steeple with my hands. “It’s right over there. It’s that way. Go /that/ way.” They’re still confused. Am /I/ in the wrong town? I point and say, “Go /that way/ and stop when you get to the gas station.” I’m trying not to shout, but wow.

This situation is impossible. I don’t know any of these people. Fuck this. Things change so I have a single little sister instead, and I walk through the now-daytime town to rent-a-horse stables where the church and the gas station should be, to let her know I’m back in town. She’s blonde, busy with her dark-haired friend helping the woman who runs the stables (Diane Wiest). They check tourists out on their horses and send them on their way. While I wait I sit on a barstool, daydreaming, rewriting the story I’m in, looking out through a wide, glassless window to the next big dirt-floor room of the stables, where rich-looking dude-cowboy-dressed car-salesman-like men are standing by a window to the (wet) bay, talking about real estate. They keep looking over nervously because I’m here, they don’t know me and they’re crooks. All real estate men are crooks.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was /Honey/ by Bobby Goldsboro, mixed with the ethereal windchimes song Juanita’s phone plays when she’s late for work.

(*Shlafer’s Chevron in Mendocino had the distinction for many years of the highest gas prices in the whole United States. When gas everywhere else was $3 it was $9 there. One time when my mother had just moved to the coast twenty years ago she went there for them to fix something and they tried to tack on $50 or $75 to change her windshield wipers.)

Asleep again. Next dream. I’m working with a stranger on a strange flooded road. There are tube dams made of bundles of straw. I go along scooping up blankets of straw that got loose and throwing it all back over where it belongs, pushing water along with it, not clearing water off the complete road but clearing it off thirty-foot sections of road, leaving it on the sections in between.

Later, after work, Depression-era Mexican and Okie workers are standing under the metal awnings around a corrugated metal shed waiting for the bus or the truck or whatever. Some of them have gray school binders. I have one. And I also have a soft plastic pen-and-pencil bank-money-purse-thing.that I become fascinated with for awhile, moving the pencils around inside.

—

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–03–14: Housing. Shrink-wrapped pizza. The Who. Car garage bar movie.

First dream. People live in an abandoned shopping mall. Juanita and I have an apartment that used to be a deep, narrow store. It’s late at night and I’m worried in a dream-familiar way because Juanita’s off on one of her adventures and I don’t know who she’s with or when she’s coming back and looking for her will never work. There are no phones; there’s no way to call her.

Her mother and a strange woman help Juanita back here with their arms around under her arms. She’s embarrassed and won’t look at me, because she hurt her leg by falling in the parking lot. I feel like I’m not needed here, like why am I even here? Everybody’s young. Juanita is younger than she was when I met her, and much taller… This is the wrong world. I don’t have to care about these people. I go out to explore.

Next dream. I’m at my college friend Dan’s dream-only family’s house, inside, but also outside an /inner/ outside wall. Dan’s father and some others are in an even farther-inside part. Dan left school early because of a crippling /fear episode/. I want to make sure he’s okay but I don’t want to have to tell anyone he had a problem and embarrass him. I should just leave.

Dan’s father sees me through lined-up windows and comes out to be an asshole at me. I pretend I had papers for Dan but forgot to put them in the folder. All I have in the folder is paper pulp mush woven into paper lasagna. Dan’s father is like, /Dan’s fine, scram./

Now this house is simpler and in a cross between Ohio and Albion, like where Pam lives. Everyone’s gone but Dan. A bunch of big cardboard boxes just got delivered of plastic-shrink-wrapped pizzas and quarter-pizza slices, like something you’d buy from the freezer section at Costco. Dan offers to make pizzas for us: /We can use the oven./ “No, thanks, I gotta get back.” I don’t want to be here waiting for the oven to heat up and have all the others return. Dan’s the only one I like, out of all of them. His father is a smug horrible jerk. (In real life he died a long time ago. I don’t even know if Dan is still alive.)

Next dream. I’m walking up the hill on Highway 1 going south, just south of Big River. There are lots of old nice-but-aloof hippie people scattered around this wide field of roadway, playing a long, slow, new-age cooperation game. I continue uphill through a strange valley, to where the road goes below a hillside of dry grass and rocks on the right. A thin, stooped-over old woman is far up there going the other way with her white German shepherd dog. Also Dan is up there. He comes out onto a ship’s-prow-like rock cliff point and stands precariously at the edge to quietly shout back and forth with me. I tell him about a dream I had on a nap, back when I was “between Mendo and Elk”, of The Who trying to practice their show…

As I tell the dream, I have it retroactively: The band is having difficulty getting started practicing this time because they’re all high-school kids, and Roger Daltry has just got out of a mental hospital or back from a drug episode and is unpredictable, unstable. A band member who looks like Todd Rundgren (at fifteen) gives him a tiny but sharp paper-clip-size folding knife for a present, to cheer him up. Roger Daltry opens the knife to an L-shape and /licks it off his hand into his mouth/. While they’re playing the song /Bargain/, Todd Rundgren keeps going over and trying to slap the tiny knife out of Roger’s mouth.

Now I’m in an old dry-rotted plaster and gray-redwood house farther back north at the bottom of the cliff hill with some bad-but-currently-calm drug dealer redneck hippie boys, telling /them/ about the dream, because this is the actual house where The Who practiced. I keep it short, say Keith Richards before I think of the name Todd Rundgren and put off correcting it. One of the drug guys complains sarcastically about /people who tell you their stupid fucking dreams./ Okay, whatever. I jump out the upper half of a sash window and start back up the road. A kind, older one of the redneck drug hippies says to me out another window: “Did you hear /once/?” Is that a song name? I say, “What?” He says, “Did you hear /once and once/?” I say, “I don’t know.” He says, “Did /Juanita/ hear once and onceness?” I say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means.” I turn and walk away. /Bargain/ continues to play through all of this.

Workmen pounding and pounding on something in a nearby apartment, shaking the floor, woke me up.

Asleep again. Next dream. They’re getting ready to film a movie in and around a three-story-high corner car repair garage that they’ve changed the front of to make it be a bar. This is in a part of San Francisco where Juanita took me to an art supply store once, but the Berkeley hills of apartments and eucalyptus trees are nearby to the left. Some of Juanita’s friends from the various anachronism fairs are working here, and I almost recognize some people from the Mendocino theater world. I wander around and people just talk to me, tell me about their lives. One old-mechanic-looking man operating a small crane tells me that he’s worked on lots of famous dangerous films around here, including one called /Action Team/, that he’s particularly proud of. I get an image of people on a scaffold attached under a helicopter, and I say, “A lot of people hanging from ropes?” He smiles dismissively like that’s the /other/ Action Team movie I’m thinking of, not nearly as dangerous as the one he was on. I was going to tell him about my radio show and invite him to talk about things on the radio but now I don’t want him to remember me. Also I’ve been farting a few times, partly on purpose, and pretending it was the kids pushing up too close behind me, by a door between shop spaces.

Farther inside the building a man uses another, even smaller crane to move a window-frame over and hang it from wires close to the white papier-mache headlight of a mostly papier-mache full-size derelict sports car hulk.

People from the community have been allowed to sit inside the temporary fence and watch all this work, but there’s a special presentation where someone in charge confronts a boy in the crowd, from the family of someone up on the hill, who’s been interfering and making noise and trouble. The boy refuses to leave; he says, “You can’t do anything.” A worker behind me and to my right hates that family for some other thing that happened a long time ago; he says something mean under his breath about them all being piles of shit (or maybe he’s calling the boy “backpfeifengesicht” — a face begging for a punch — because of his attitude). The feeling of problems rose to this point because last night someone apparently got up on the roof and smeared part of the new bar signage with gray paint. Everybody has to leave anyway because it’s a shift change to the rehearsal and business part of the operation that happens in the evening, while the building and set construction happens only until four..

I wander around inside again, watching people pack up and put things away, and others pack in and set up. I’m having trouble finding my way out through the maze of shop spaces, and somehow I have some three-foot-long panels of papier mache and cardboard in my hands and tucked under an arm. Where do they go? Why did I pick them up? If they’re part of the car set from before, the car is gone, so…

The people here now are all clean and dressed for office work. The concrete floor is clean. Backdrops of white canvas are hung against walls. /I have to get out of here./ I set the papier mache things against a canvas wall and get a tall man’s attention; I say, “Can I just leave this here? I don’t know where it goes,” as if I made the things and am delivering them now. The man gets another man. An office woman stops. A crowd is gathering. They’re not for me; they have no interest in me. There’s the big front door, and here’s my chance: saunter out. A song is playing that’s been playing for awhile, of a 1960s group of young people all sing-chanting, “Ev’rything’s started coming back, ev’rything’s coming back.” (repeat, repeat, repeat)

At the bus stop on the street I’m talking with someone about cars we like and wish we had. A perfect, brand-new-looking dark-blue, sparkly shiny chrome and dark green 1964 Ford Falcon Futura idles slowly by. Out of all the cars I’ve ever admired, that’s the best one, and I say so twice. My (dead) school-friend Randy had a white one and I remember every detail of it: the pattern on the bench seats; the problem with the clutch pedal spring where you had to use a belt to pull the clutch pedal back up and hook it on the door between shifting; the time when Randy got it up to 110 mph on the freeway to see if it could and it was tipped back so far by the wind that it felt like it was trying to lift off the ground…

—

My dreams from Wednesday, 2023–03–15: The newspaper. Time. Familiar recording problem.

First dream. A whole floor of a giant office building is a newspaper office. I’m a new hire, assigned to help a famous old negotiator/reporter confer with Eastern European mafia revolutionaries having a conflict among themselves. Some thugs in suits come in; are these the ones? No, they’re other criminals being interviewed by another old reporter.

The right ones come in, six of them, and are shown seats around a table. I’m told to get them food. I order on the phone from another business in the same building. There’s confusion because they say they have French bread but they don’t understand that it means /hard crust sourdough bread/. Eventually the order goes through but there’s the sense that they’re just saying they got it so I’ll hang up.

None of the criminals speak English and nobody, not even our guy, speaks whatever language the criminals use. But our negotiator/reporter is an expert, intuiting how to facilitate this. He keeps them talking and starts and stops them, pointing at this or that one of them to speak now. It’s all recorded, so someone can translate it later.

Everyone is led off in a direction I didn’t even know the building had, to get them lunch or dinner or breakfast, depending on what time they’re on. Somehow the newspaperman managed to keep them all from shooting each other. The people in charge of the paper knew it would work out.

I vacuum up newspaper office-type dirt and all the breadcrumbs (from the bread that never came) and now I’ll have to empty the vacuum cleaner to prevent mold and disease. I think through emptying the cloth vacuum bag into a metal wastebasket and leaving it by the dumpster outside when I go home, so I can bring it back in tomorrow, maybe leave a note first, so they don’t think I stole the wastebasket…

It’s 1:30am and I’m finally going home after my tumultuous eighteen-hour first day at work here. I’m looking forward to my dream-only apartment in this weird city. Just a few others are still in the building. A girl says goodbye to me. There’s some bread left from what came after all. I ask the girl if she wants this. No, thank you, she says.

Next dream. I’m doing my radio show at a desk against a wall somewhere else in the newspaper building from the previous dream. It’s almost 3am, nowhere near 5am, but I see that there are only two or three pages left to read and then the papers underneath are just the mess of old publicity that’s always on the reading easel. I’ll put on long recorded things — Firesign Theater or Boston Blackie or something, and set an alarm and take a nap.

Next dream. In the back-story of this dream a country-music group played in a small venue (fifty people in folding chairs), and I didn’t record it right; I got a bad recording. They’ll be back to play tonight, so I’ll be doing it again. The place’s workers set up couches and stuffed chairs this time, so there’s only room for like twenty people. The sound-tech guy is a cross between Tony Tringale and Merlin Tinker (sewing machine repairman). I want to put the microphones farther back in the room, but the tech guy has the p.a. speakers in the back of the room pointing forward. I’m thinking about it. It might work, or it might be like last time, where I won’t know it’s not going to work right until they’re already playing and it’s too late to move or change anything.

—

My dream from Thursday, 2023–03–16: Ferris wheel.

I’m watching a story about a big future city of rich people’s giant concrete brutalism modern-architecture houses covering vast low hills like a carpet. A hapless but confident college boy like actor Owen Wilson has been going through the unhappy wives of this place like a rooster in a hen-yard. Here, he’s with a young woman who he comes back to a lot, kissing her in one of these giant featureless concrete rooms. Her husband calls something from another room. /Oh, no!/

I’m Owen Wilson now. Apparently it doesn’t matter that the women’s husbands are sometimes home. But I /don’t like this woman/. She’s clingy and seems demented, trouble waiting to happen. I disengage and start trying to find my way out of here.

Earlier (or later) in the story, I’m a boy in a family of rich people in another sprawling concrete modern-art-museum-like house. We’re all back home because of a family event. Maybe somebody died. Maybe it’s Thanksgiving or Christmas. I don’t belong here and I hate it here; I’m the one in the family who never comes to these things, but I did, and I need to elude the mother-person and the others and fly out away and be someone /else/ in the story. My dream-only sister is sympathetic; she knows I can’t be who I’m supposed to be, but she wishes I’d stay.

It’s night. I get alone in a courtyard, get up into the air and — to remove myself from this whole other-world situation/, not just any one part or family or tryst of it — wherever I go from here, I’ll have to go back the way I came, all the way back to the beginning of the story, which is already impossible, but least I can ensure to get back /here/. I imagine putting some kind of big indicator on top of the flat house. Fluorescent theater-mark paint? Where would I get that. Start a trash fire here and use the ashes? Nah, forget it, just fly away. There’s a lit-up carnival Ferris wheel peeking up around a house-covered hill on the black horizon. Go that way.

In another rich concrete house I’m (Owen Wilson is) here to have sex with a large miserable lonely but hard and mean woman who’s all cream-colored, hair and skin and fingernails, everything but the brown eyes. I try to get involved, but I don’t feel anything for or from her. Kissing her, touching her nipples, it’s a mechanical process, not something I want to do. But getting away from her makes her angry. /Her/ husband is home. He’s a construction company owner who’s shaped like Fred Flintstone. This house becomes a maze/puzzle that’s hard to escape; it seems like /this/ way must be out, but it brings me to where I have to sneak across a big open wall past the Fred Flintstone guy, where he might see me and shoot me. I give up on trying to figure it out and just start zooming through the spaces, from room to room, to solve it by brute force. Ah! Out! Up in the air! Except, where is this? It’s an endless landscape of modern-art concrete houses in every direction, and no magic Tarkovsky’s /Stalker/ path back through the story. Oh, well.

There’s something here about a college (modern, concrete) where I’m a teacher explaining to a student who needs credit from a particular class he hasn’t attended at all, that the semester writing assignment is due in three days, on Monday, and he can still pass the class. I illustrate this by breaking a bundle of dry spaghetti in two, close to one end, and so fit both resulting bundles perfectly into an L-shaped white cardboard box (that’s like a model of a room in one of the houses, before. My secretary in the next room, listening, smiles about this. I’m such a softy. I let these kids get away with anything.

— — -