Tues. June 20 through Fri. June 30, 2023

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–06–20:

First dream. I pull open a carpenter’s tape measure, that also represents sound tape, down a ravine in mountains. I can’t hear what’s on the tape, but somehow I’ve determined where to splice out a bad place. It’s at 181 inches.

A pet cat feels compelled by it’s Klingon or Kzin code of honor to cross the ravine this way from a log on the other side, despite barely-substantial but dangerous territorial mountain wildcats living in ditches and cracks under the brush. I stand waiting, not allowed to interfere. Paying spectators, as barely substantial as the wildcats, stand to my left around what’s become a dammed pool. Some flouncy Southern horse-racetrack-whore ladies materialize/phase into the world and, as they do, they turn to detect me.

They follow me to a hardware store where the Pelican Deli used to be in Mendocino. Holling from /Northern Exposure/ is arranging goods. Two shifty homeless men are clearly about to steal a shovel. Holling says from behind them, “You can have that.” They put it down and scurry out.

I woke up with Thomas Dolby /One Of Our Submarines/ playing in my head.

Asleep again, next dream. In the side parking lot of Juanita’s apartment, Mexican/Italian workers are coming and going between their various work places, past a line of frame-enclosed toilets with a door on each one, where the dumpsters should be. I go into the one on the end. The toilet inside is not attached to anything. There’s no plumbing. There’s dirt in it up to three inches below the top, like a flowerpot. I piss in it anyway.

It’s a struggle to get my clothes back together and fasten the pants. Maybe they’re twisted. I pull them all the way down, straighten the cloth, pull them up, and now I can’t even get them up over my hips. With tugging and straining I solve that, finally get the zipper up and the button buttoned and go outside.

It’s much later. This has become the Community Center of Mendocino. I’m the hereditary executive of a business somewhere else that’s taken over this facility to make it profitable. I lay out fruit on a baking tray in several lines like representations of the planets of different solar systems, where the sun of each system is the biggest, orangest one, like an orange or a grapefruit. This feels like when Juanita is preparing for the Ren Faire or the Dickens fair, getting her materials and costume and things together, but it also feels like setting up an overhead projector presentation to sell a project.

The other people who work for the company come in. They’re all surprisingly respectful of my position as instant undeserving CEO. I’m confident I can fake my way through this; I just need to learn what our company does and how to do it… but I have to piss again. I go into the mostly-open toilet stall in the same room as the meeting. They can all see my legs and feet, and my shoulders and the side of my head. Hmm. Okay, if I’m going to be a leader I have to get over shyness about pissing in public. I’m talking while I begin to piss. I lose my balance and piss on the wall behind the stall, which is in view of the people around the table, to my right. There are noises of disgust, but not bad, so I continue pissing, and since I’m talking — why not? — I describe what’s going on, like calling a sportsball game. The toilet changes to be a wide rectangular trough in the floor that I’ve been pissing past, so I adjust to hit that target. This pissing business-metaphor meeting talk goes on and on until finally I’m finished. I still don’t know what the company does.

Next dream. Far in the future there’s the archeological discovery of a vast stadium-size underground factory/warehouse/mine-cavern space left over by alien kung fu tech monks. I go with my group exploring the top floor, a dim corridor of stadium penthouse rooms. The man in front of me is engaged in fighting someone I can’t see and is yanked ahead out of sight, doomed, probably. I run after him, fighting people in robes who were hiding behind things all along. Just a lot of dark punching and kicking and jumping blindly.

I’m the only one left. We had some dogs with us. There’s one, a Tramp-terrier, coming up the escalator across the space below me. It’ll get up here okay by itself. Another one, a clever-looking but frightened wiener-dog, is at the bottom, on the factory floor. I hurry to a down-escalator to get down there to it, but an ancient machine we’re here to retrieve is hanging from a rail near my path. I pull a long tangled bicycle chain (or dull chainsaw chain) to bring the machine this way on the rail. The chain gets twisted and tangled in the parts of the machine that roll and mill against each other when it’s moved, so I have to shake the chain and whip it around to get it unlooped and straight enough to be reeled in. (Pulling the chain works a mechanism inside the machine that makes it move this way, and simultaneously reels in the chain. It isn’t just being dragged this way by the chain.)

There are more ancient alien monks around. Forget the machine; I’m going to save the dog. I can come back and try to get the machine later.

My dreams from Sunday, 2023–06–25:

First dream. I’m on my way to fix somebody’s washing machine, but when I get there it’s a line of all different appliances in the parking lot of a time-flattened school in a flat dead land. Eight or ten people are here for the appliance-repair educational clinic I’m supposed to teach. Okay, but I forgot to bring my tools. /Can somebody get me a screwdriver./

A man gives me a long phillips screwdriver with a black plastic handle. I absentmindedly take out one of the screws around a lid latch.

Okay, okay, let’s do this. I get everyone’s attention and start taking screws out of the black plastic panel at the low-back of a refrigerator that’s also a console radio from the 1930s. Thumping comes from underneath it. Is the problem that there’s a raccoon stuck in there? As I get more screws out, the panel (and appliance) stretches and flattens out to be a stiff tarpaulin on the ground, holding down something enormous. I keep taking screws out. “Watch out,” I say. “You don’t know when it’s gonna jump up.”

Next dream. I’m in a strange old lady’s house to fix up various little things because she wants to sell it. I remove the right-hand door of a pair of cabinet doors to reset it straight, but once I’ve got the hinges loose they become articulated compound hinges and I can’t get them back together right. Parts and screws are left over… I go through the house looking for more hinges that work the same way, to use for a model. Here’s a cabinet in the bathroom. This door is already on wrong, as if someone else took it apart and couldn’t get it back together and gave up.

Back at the first one, that I messed up, now there’s a younger woman here and the house and everything about it is much older. I confess that I’m not a hundred percent, the way Jubal Early does in the last episode of /Firefly/. The woman says that’s all right.

Now two very old nuns live here, the house is a giant decaying Victorian pile, and the younger woman is the redheaded real estate person pushing for the sale. I’m at the top of wide stairs. One old nun is in a room farther upstairs to my left. The other old nun has merged with the real estate woman inside a slinky catsuit. She comes up the stairs to me all sexy and business-calculating. Somehow I am /Vin Diesel/ to her, but this all feels weird and I can’t get into it. I halfheartedly embrace her and she’s kissing at me, but… I try to convey that I’m more like Steve Martin or Garrison Keillor than Vin Diesel. She wants to fuck me right here against the rail or on the floor. I don’t want to. Sorry. She sees what I mean about not being Vin Diesel. Again, like with the hinge fiasco: it’s okay.

We’re sitting on the steps. It’s just the real-estate woman now. The regular old nun and the old nun part of her are gone entirely, out of the picture. I tell her about how the old nuns had stashed dead bodies in the soft rotted wall plaster and mushy floor of various rooms. Really, that’ll have to be remedied before she puts up signs and starts showing the house. She doesn’t think so. It’s expected. Lots of old houses have that.

A country cop walks us out away from the house, through tall grass of this sea bluff area. It’s swampy from runoff from the hills, like the place just north of the Albion River Inn. I tell the cop that the dead bodies in the house have nothing to do with this redheaded real estate were-nun (say wair-nun) witch. She’s out ahead of us a bit. The cop and I have a private-detective-and-cop-friend end-of-noir-film amused-rueful /It’s Chinatown, Jake/ moment about this. The real estate woman is getting away with so much else besides all the murders, and they were long ago. By the time someone could prove that she’s hundreds of years old, what judge would care?

Next dream. A Midwestern middle-aged woman is out on the flat sea in a dory with her only-slightly-older mother. Weather is fine but visibility is still low. Her mother vanishes from the boat. Not a ripple on the water. The woman looks around everywhere, calls out, terrified, “Mom!” (count a few beats) “Mom!” (count some more) “Mom!” I don’t have to keep watching this; she’ll be doing it for hours.

The woman has become an Uncanny Valley CGI version of Maggie from /Northern Exposure/, but seriously determined. She’s rowing the boat north to Mendocino. My point-of-view ghost flies out ahead and back, noting that this is another world than the one I think of as the normal one — somehow there’s a long shorefront road at the bottom of the bluffs south of Big River. I worry that Maggie will get tired, but she’s become insectile, her head up high on her vertical torso, looking forward from the back of the boat, long arms coming out of the back end of her body, stretching forward and aside, paddling fast, rhythmically with two canoe paddles, going about ten miles an hour. She’s fine, she can take care of herself. No need to worry about her at all.

Now I’m a homeless person walking north on the shore road. I have some recycling in my hands: a tupperware bowl, some other plastic things, paper food-service waste. Every old row-house I go by has some kind of trash out, but I don’t want to get in trouble so I keep looking for a bin where they were careless and already mixed trash and recycling in something big and open I can hurry past and toss my stuff in unseen. This is all work-from-home tech housing — this neighborhood would be considered a slum in the last century but these people are stuck-up and proud of how relatively well-off they are. They do have houses. /I/ don’t have a house.

A cross between doomed reporter Ben in /Daredevil/ and writer James Baldwin is with me. As we go, he’s more and more disgusted with the recycling situation. Where the road turns inland toward the highway, and there are houses on both sides, Ben can’t stop himself from going up a house’s stoop and banging on the door to yell at the people inside for not caring about the environment. He’s all, the Earth is weeping because they’re irresponsible louts, and don’t they care what kind of world they’re leaving for the children, and yadda yadda. Like with clockwork insect boat motor Maggie before, I decide he can take care of himself. He has his own mission and personal power to carry it out. When the woman of the house opens the door and he /really/ starts screaming, I turn away to continue without him.

At the highway, the end house’s recycling and trash is like a little yard sale. Here are books and old records. Magazines. I can’t dump my trash here either, and there won’t be anyplace to on the highway. Oh, well. I look through a box of LP records but the jackets are decayed and bug-eaten so I can’t read them. And my hands are full of garbage so I can’t take records out to look at the labels on them.

The song playing in my head as I woke up was Billie Holliday singing /My Old Flame/.

—

My dreams from Monday, 2023–06–26:

First dream. I’m somebody, not me, of high school age. A girl I like, a cross between Honey (Duke’s assistant in /Doonesbury/) and Peppermint Patty’s sidekick Marcy in /Peanuts/, lives with her quiet Asian family in a claustrophobic housing court in a valley where the hill cemetery should be in Mendocino. I go to her house and pick her up to go out and have fun with my wild redneck friends.

Kids congregate at a clearing on a rough driveway-like logging road. I’m uphill spraying water/snow from a hose left and right, down around the curve of the road to dust it with snow so the snow that will come tonight will stick there and we can make a slide-ride out of it.

More of our friends come up here in their car to warn me that the bad kids are coming — the other gang of kids who hate us. Thanks.

I go downhill to the right, to the kegger in the clearing and relay the warning. We all pile into cars to leave for another party site somewhere else. Honey hangs back to clean her glasses. I pick her up, wrap us both together in a blanket and somehow also pick us both up to lie over everyone in this last car, across the top of the seatbacks, like a bridge. When we get down to the highway I’ll tell the driver to cross and take Honey home. I feel like I disappointed her, like I took her on a bad date. After she’s taken care of, if we go north I’ll go with them and continue being a juvenile delinquent. If we go south I’ll get out at Albion, go home, and go back tomorrow and apologize to Honey.

Next dream. There are squarish 1960s-Los-Angeles two-story pastel plaster buildings where Corners of the Mouth health food store is in real life. It’s a tribute-to-heroes day, a sad holiday, because the radio station was sold and it’s over.

The radio station is in a dream-familiar storefront shop. People go in and out and mill around, talking. There are some shelves of my records. Here are boxes of other things, some of them mine.

Outside to the west, between buildings, I see up past a little tree where a dried-flat papier-mache-like door-size dead fish goes by just above the roofs, pulled by a spiderweb rope. This is fascinating. The web goes around the peak of the next building. That must be where the spider is storing up its provisions for winter.

Another giant paper-light dried-flat dead fish goes by. I point this out to a man near me.

Now here’s the spider coming down over the path. It’s more like a ball of worms and grubs than a spider, but it’s a single creature. Lots of web mess comes down with it and near it. There’s a man looking the other way who’s dancing around trying to get the single web strand off that touched him. Should I get his attention, or will that just make him move directly into the spider? He’s all right. Leave him alone.

In another building of sad-holiday revelers, it occurs to me that /Hey, my records and things are still in the radio station/. (This will be just like when that shithead Claude Hooten bought KMFB and declared that everything in the building was his, when we all used the place to store things we needed to do our shows, and what a nightmare he made that! Why have I allowed myself to be caught in this situation again?) A wiry, mean-looking blonde man says angrily but resignedly, “My truck!” He means, in this world, he let me use his truck to move my radio things last time and he’ll do it again, but he clearly doesn’t want to. I half-remember a white pickup truck… I’m like, /Well, if we’re gonna do it, let’s do it. Bring the truck around, I’ll start carrying things out./ (But this time there’s no new radio station to move it all to. There’s no room in Tim’s garage.)

The song playing in my head when I woke up was /He’s Mister Bill/ from Saturday Night Live

My dream from a nap Monday night:

I’m roll-sliding down an inclined indoor maze, like a huge ski-slope bumper-pool table that, at the bottom, is a table of toys in a storefront preschool. I sit on a bar stool resting sideways with my eyes mostly closed, and eventually force myself to get up and put some toys back on the pool table, that I and others knocked over onto the floor.

Outside, it’s a deserted flat-state theme park environment. I and someone else fly across a lake, walk around in empty carnival places on the other side, step-slide down an incline to fly like waterskiing barefoot back across the lake and curve way up to stop, fall deliciously back and curve up again, avoiding an area of performing animatronic sharks (or porpoises). Just zooming around in the blue smooth air. I don’t know who the other person is.

I woke up with a frenetic hillbilly-calliope version of /Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow/ playing in my head.

—

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–06–27:

First dream. I’m in a miles-long room lined with movie-set-like half-rooms on both sides. The floor steps randomly higher and lower. Groups of people have colonized the different styles of rooms. I come to where two young New York Latinas are screaming angrily in each other’s faces. (One of them is like the pilot in the first year of Star Trek Strange New Worlds.)

Gangsters have begun to take over and monopolize power up and down the whole place. Here’s an example: a plastic-fur blanket has been sewn up around a bundle of animals to confine them in place. Some little duck heads and chipmunks and things stick out holes in the top. The main, biggest animal takes up most of the bag. Its squarish muzzle is forced into the corner on one end. Is it a pit-bull dog? No, it’s a capybara. It strains mightily against the cloth but the cloth is too strong to tear. I should find a kitchen in one of these movie sets. There’ll be a knife drawer. I can free these animals, and also I’ll have a weapon in case the gangsters come around. /Though I’d rather use anything else for a weapon. I don’t think I could cut someone with a knife even to save my life./

Next dream. There’s a solemn society-wide attention on an awaited announcement from what’s left of government, that we expect to go well but there’s doubt. I’m with a dream-only just-this-night girlfriend, working our way down through the crowd in a dim big theater to the main-floor theater seats. We get there and it’s not seats but some side doors to the back way into a hotel restaurant kitchen’s prep rooms. The girl vanishes. I go deeper into stainless-steel appliance corridors. Dead end. Go back around the last wall, avoid a worker running a gas-powered floor polisher.

I come to the open end of this way and fly out into a vast natural cool cavern. Turn, fly up a wall of earth and rocks. Near the top, where there’s snow, here’s a living life-size diorama of a village of Alaskan/Himalayan mountain people. The kids have made a rough luge run to ride their kayaks down. That looks fun. I think of them as Eskimos, and that’s funny because I know you’re not supposed to call them Eskimos anymore; it’s just the first word that always comes to me for people who dress like that.

Next dream. It’s night. I’m in an indoor-outdoor hillside maze of rooms in like a Norwegian mansion-house that’s also a Wild West mining community. I’m carrying too much in one load to the car, to get out of here: a big duffel bag, cloth suitcases, boxes… A mummy-like character follows along behind me. He’s dropped his burden, which is a refrigerator-size package of the parachute-cloth or trashbag-plastic ribbon of material he’s half-wrapped in, so it’s spooling out after him from the box left behind. Tch.

In conversation with someone else here, maybe Juanita on the phone, I find that I was careless when I ordered materials and fuel for our mission of mercy to a hospital in the wilderness or something. The three big things on the list are all in numbers of 150. 150 gallons of gasoline, 150 [somethings], and, oh, fuck, oh, no: /150 gallons of milk/? Juanita says, “Can’t you cancel the order?” No. It’s probably already here. “What are you going to do with 150 gallons of milk?” /I/ don’t know. Give it to the hospital?

For some reason I turn and go downhill into a mine tunnel, and then down stairs…

I’m in a dark underground field with a little cat. My job is to monitor some function of the cat, using a mechanical timer and a big box camera. The next time to take a picture and a reading? Four a.m. (It says 4am in chalk on the chalkboard against the camera.)

Now I’m in a desert under open sky, with another worker. We’re moving along parallel to each other, pushing garden carts of materials. We put down a shoebox-size metal trap near a ditch of holes that a machine probably came through here and dug automatically (each of us has his own ditch), pour a little powder chemical attractant, and move on. We have enough materials for miles of this. In this world, some kind of invasive underground animal has multiplied past all reason and it’s a regular job for people to catch them and destroy them.

Next dream. This feels like the same desert as the previous dream. I’m the worthless grown man in a family in a compound of houses near an empty highway. My dream-only old-cowgirl mother and her mother (or lesbian lover) are on the porch of the next house, dealing with the renter lady from the house in back of these two. I stand in my pyjamas in the window of my place, watching what’s going on.

The renter lady keeps bringing pet cats she’s found for Mom’s inspection. They’re all over the ground, sitting, lying down, staring in different directions. She’s done it again — brought another cardboard box of several cats. Mom says /No more/. The women all start swearing at each other. I put my pants on, go over and explain that I’ll get a box truck and take all the goddamn cats to the pound and that’ll be the end of it.

I’m amused in a kind of stoned way by the confidence I have, that I’ll be able to just 1. walk somewhere and suddenly have a truck to use, 2. that there’s a pound somewhere in this empty world, and 3. that I’ll, what, open the door of the truck, stand there and say, “Come on, let’s go,” and all hundred kittens and cats and whatever other animals will run inside and I’ll shut the door? And then there’ll be gas to drive somewhere? …But threatening to take the cats to the pound got the women to stop screaming at each other. My mother is not in the best of health and doesn’t need the aggravation of that all the time. (I’m more loyal and caring about this imaginary person than I am about my real mother in real life.)

Next dream. I’m in a house that must have once been a doctor’s office, in a place that has the feeling of the previous dreams’ desert. Some people are talking in another room. I look in a cupboard. It has an unpacked case of a dozen or more plastic bottles of, what? Ensure? The top of the bottle in front has its cap partly off. I shake it. It has some liquid in it. How long has it been here open, unrefrigerated? I think about smelling it — no, it’ll be horrible; just throw it out.

A nine-foot tall man knocks politely and come into the office from outside. He waits patiently, bent over sideways, at the counter. (He’s like Karl in the movie /Big Fish/.)

Out in the desert, the L.A. River is fenced off. A societal choice you can make here is, you accept a box of one bottle of the liquid from the cupboard and a little steak knife with a yellow-white plastic handle, drink the liquid, then go through a gate into the world along and down inside the concrete riverbank. I try to convince a girl not to do it, but she’s so bored she’s barely alive. She’s going to do it. It’s her choice.

Now I’m in the river place at night. I have the box with the knife and the bottle, but I haven’t drunk the liquid; I just went through the gate anyway. People are out and moving around now — in the daytime it had seemed empty. The world in here is just like the world left behind. I see that the whole purpose of the system is to have there be a choice so no-one changes anything. If you’re outside and you don’t like things, you can accept the drink and the knife in the box and go inside. If you’re inside and you don’t like it, that’s your own fault — you accepted the deal.

—

My dream from Thursday, 2023–06–29:

I’m driving a strange car somehow from both the front and back seat, and my passengers are my mother and Jerry, a friend of hers who’s been dead since like 2012. We’re somewhere in the middle U.S. I’m trying to get us home to California.

Everywhere there’s a decision about turning off the freeway or not turning off, my mother becomes fascinated with a map that I can see magnified as she bends down over it, tracing lines with her finger. She’s fascinated by the names of tinier and tinier places. I’m like, “What do you want me to do, go home? or go over there?” (meaning take the offramp).

My mother points /go there, go there/. Jerry is disgusted with how long the trip is taking but he doesn’t want to cross my mother. Whatever. I take the offramp.

We’re in marked lanes in a parking lot. I say, “Now where?” My mother hesitates. I take us through an opening in a chain-link fence, into a field of tall grass next to an interchange of rural freeways, and stop. “Now where?” My mother and Jerry look around, they don’t know what to do.

Okay, I’ll pick us up into the air and fly west. That solves that.

I woke up making plans for magical powers to use in case I fly us over restricted airspace and they send F-16s after us. I can teleport miles this way or that way. They’ll never catch us or shoot us, though they might get pictures of the car, and that will be a problem.

—

My dreams from Friday, 2023–06–30:

(Throughout all of this there’s a sense of banal, unfair, nebulous but overwhelming forces arrayed just out of sight against me. It I could address them in the open, one at a time, I could prevail, maybe, but that’s the way it works.)

First dream. I’m untangling and pulling out a hundred-foot black microphone cable, dragging it on the ground between buildings to a recording studio or radio station in like a 1950s housing development house. Now I’m in the control room, having hard-wired the cable inside an old mixing board. I show the impatient man here to /not tug on this/. He sees it goes around fragile parts inside the board. Okay, he knows. Close the top.

Things change. I’ve been sitting on the couch, talking with someone standing, about various things about the studio. A roadhouse R&B/Country band is warming up to record or broadcast in two adjacent rooms — no, they’re already recording. I’m embarrassed for talking over it.

The house changes so now it’s a much bigger, much nicer house of a rich family. The two little boys’ rooms are in a hallway to the left of the couch. I realize that the whole time I was yakking, the boys were in their rooms, right there, and they could hear everything. I don’t remember what all I was talking about, but I’m afraid it was the sort of thing that those rich boys will be disgusted with me for, for the rest of their lives — I am so low-class and I never belonged here. The recording is over. Just get out and go wherever stupid poor servant-class tech people go. /Their mother used to like me, too. Another relationship I blew by not being able to pretend to be someone I’m not.

Next dream. I’m being examined haphazardly by my doctor. She writes something on a clipboard, looks like she’s about to leave the room. Hey! I point at a bull’s-eye rash on my ankle. She goes, “Yeah, that’s…” She points her pen at it, tips her head this way and that. Good thing I pointed it out. Probably a toxic bug bite. Antibiotics? I look around carefully on my body. /I/ have to find what’s wrong. Why even go to the doctor and get charged $500 for this?

Next dream. I wake from sleep in bed in a big Saturday-or-summer-empty school classroom. There’s the echoey sound of people talking somewhere else. A small, dark-haired young man has woken me up to address whatever I’m here for. I struggle to get untangled from the blankets and get up. Wiggle my hair and remove and put back the rubber band in the back. The man walks backward as we talk so I have to go with him to keep talking.

He /gestures/ and says something peeved about how a story I wrote just came in over the transom and /they/ don’t know what my problem is nor why I’m causing them such trouble. We go past a display of a book open to a page that says I somehow cost them $2000. (My fifth-grade signature is at the top of an open letter.)

I realize this is about KZYX, and I feel the angst and general dismay over all the KZYX stuff for the past more than thirty years of them treating me like shit on their boot-heel, but I’m prepared to discuss it. The little man has maneuvered us so he’s sitting with his back to a wall and I’m crouching on my heels before him. I say, “Let’s start. How much are you paid.” He smiles to someone behind me. /He’s fixed it so it looks like I’m bullying him./ Focus. Focus. Pick a direction to a point and make even a single case… But what’s the use, really. This isn’t even the manager, just somebody they sent in to trip me up.

Retroactively I was at a meeting about the station at some other time in this same empty school. A man at the front of the room looked /significantly/ at me, like the repair counter man did at the Toyota agency in 2013 or so when he was giving me a chance to say /No/ rather that pay the $400-plus dollars they were cheating me out of and I didn’t grasp that until afterward.

(More and more, everything in real life feels like that. Missed chances to be present and prevail. An endlessly mounting garbage heap of regrets and things not possible to follow up on before it’s too late.)