My dreams from Saturday, 2021–01–30
Parting out. Alternate Caspars.
There are old barn-like industrial warehouses in an East-Coastish 1980s mildly economically depressed Fort Bragg (CA). An alternative once-richer version of the 1980s Mendocino Community School has recently failed or been sold and the dismantled parts of all the departments are in big bins laid out like animal pens at the Cow Palace. Bargain hunters wander around silently picking through it all. There are different kinds of amplifiers, console-furniture panels of switches with wires dangling, old radios, a broken-open giant recording studio mixing board with at least thirty channels — that’s what /I/ want, but how can I carry it?
This all starts over and goes through three or four flavors of the same situation. In one, I run and jump to fly up to the beams under the roof and turn to bump the roof harmlessly with my shoulder and back. In one, a separate theater or fight enclosure is inside the big barn. I go as a contestant, just to get in. I’ll see what parts and things are available in there, fight if I have to to keep up the imposture, and get out.
Somewhere in this mess I go out to my car but it’s not where I half-remember putting it, and I can’t remember what kind of car it is. I think it might be the little faded green Datsun Juanita had for awhile in the ’90s, before it failed and she bought Oasis’ Honda car. But no, this isn’t the right world. No car here can be my car. I came here between worlds, not in a car.
Next dream. I’m in the air, in Caspar, in a vehicle driven (flown) by a generic high school boy cab driver. Juanita’s with me. We fly over a five-story (counting half-sunk basement and attic) dead-dry old gray redwood blocky house, rather like Noah’s ark but not a boat. I point at the section of roof under a wooden door/window at the peak and say to Juanita, “Remember going out on the roof there?” (In the back-story of the dream, we used to climb out onto the roof and sit there and talk.) She’s like, /Yeah, so./ I don’t think she remembers.
Now I’m in bed in our old pink Caspar house. The bed is against the front-south window, where it never was in real life. Juanita’s moving around all through the house, getting ready to go to work, getting dressed, picking up all the things she needs. I call her in to tell her the horrible news: I just remembered, after we’ve moved back in here, that I never asked Michael if we could, and I have in the back of my mind that this house doesn’t even exist anymore — it was torn down in like ‘94? ‘95? I say, “And Michael hates us.” But she has to go to work anyway; that doesn’t change that. She has all her stuff together. /Bye/.
I get out of bed and look around the house. There’s fresh sheetrock and new paint in the kitchen (somebody painted over Piper Snow’s mural), and the little room at the back door is gone but there’s a nice porch instead. /Somebody else lives here and they’ll come back. Shit./
Next dream. I’m driving in Mendocino. I go north into Caspar directly, on the library street, as if Caspar is right behind the Mendocino Art Center. I see ahead: there’s an old rotten-wood four-or-five-floor housing-project apartment block where the white church should be. Scruffy people are living in little campsites on the sides of the street. Here’s a hippie living in a tiny wooden house-thing on the back of his truck, the way lots of people used to. I’m not in the car anymore; I don’t have a car. Here are some other street people having a furtive argument in the middle of the road, in front of the metal building that used to be Joe’s Garage. I know that one of them is named Marco. I shake hands with him. Are these people malicious? No, just anxious about survival and trying not to give away any advantage they might have. They turn away from me, back to their argument.
The pink house is gone. The real-life house that replaced it is here. I don’t belong here. I walk up to the highway. There’s a rusty old single-action slide projector in the ditch. Do I want this, just for the expensive bulb? No. Turn north, walk toward Fort Bragg. Maybe Juanita will be in Down Home Foods, and if she isn’t, and if she doesn’t exist in this world at all, /oh, well./
