This is a blog I started several years ago to relate my dreams to a friend who might have been interested. Now it is a place where I can write about my current trip to Mexico. There's also a really sad post about the death of a friend. I'm just letting you know that all the posts prior to this one come from that time and are either painful or weird.
If weird is your thing then feel free to read on into the past.
Saturday, June 6, 2015
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Nothing
This post is for no one.
Leslie died on Sunday, July 6th at 9 pm. Tim and I sat and watched her take her last breaths. It was terrible and painful and I can't say much about it because everyone knows all about death and there's nothing much to say.
I can't reach into my chest and pull out the pain and show it to you. If I could, what would it accomplish? I can try to tell you stories about my life with Leslie, but the whole time I'm talking I sense that you are inching away from me. I can almost feel you not getting it. The stories are nothing. They are like ash after a fire, they convey not one particle of what was. They are a dirty residue without warmth, glow, surprise or delight. Like ash they can be caustic.
It was Saturday July 12th and we went to the studio for clean up day. As has been common lately I was hours behind Tim, but determined to contribute. I was overwhelmed at the griminess of the studio. The dust and debris that builds up everywhere if not constantly beaten back. Kim suggested I work on an old fridge. She had emptied it and what remained was a coating of brown sludge, thick in some places, and moldy filth caked into every dimple and crevice.
For an hour or two I cleaned the fridge and thought about Leslie. I thought about the many fridges she cleaned in her life. She moved a lot - so that's a lot of clean outs. She was a kitchen manager and professional cook for decades. What is the point of cleaning this fridge? Who will use it? Will the cleaning of it improve someone's life? Will our landlord be able to sell it and make a little money? Will the person who buys it appreciate that someone scraped a rag through every fold of the door seal? Does this make the world better or is this how life means nothing?
Where is everything that Leslie did in her life? How can our whole lives boil down to this powdery, dirty ash? I can't take you to a party in the late 70s where we were all wearing Leslie's glitter body cream and she had cooked an amazing array of treats and cocktails and everyone was laughing and fighting and trying to get high. Sharon showed up with her squeeze box and sang and played and everyone got into the pool which had a thin coating of glitter on the surface of the water so it spread to everyone like party herpes.
I can't take you to the picnics, the movies, the dinners. My life doesn't have a tenth of the shimmer of that great and uproarious fire. I am lost without it and empty. I am totally empty. I want the stories of my life with Leslie and Dad to fill me with wonder and glitter and music. But they don't. I can't recreate that beauty. I've lost the knack of great parties where everyone ends up in the pool at midnight singing and drunk and thinking about who they'd like to make out with. And what of those parties? Why do they loom so large? Is the best of those days just having fun? When everyone posts their photos of Leslie they are always of these crazy events and adventures. What of accomplishments? What of success? When I think of Dad I am not concerned with what he made or bought or accomplished, but with him; that man himself.
My dad let me look as closely at him as any human ever has. He let me look at the inside bits. He brought them out for me to see where they were damaged and how he'd tried to repair them. He tried to be patient with all my inside bits and never made that examination feel pointless or self-indulgent. Leslie made the simplest get-togethers feel like wild delights. She made you feel like her best friend, more interesting than the rabble we were always forced to serve at restaurants or work for at stupid jobs. Instead we were the stars, the muses, the artists who actually made the world an interesting place. We were the brightest shooting stars who created the glow of life with our laughter and conversation and joyful abandon. Without her it's all just ashes.
Leslie died on Sunday, July 6th at 9 pm. Tim and I sat and watched her take her last breaths. It was terrible and painful and I can't say much about it because everyone knows all about death and there's nothing much to say.
I can't reach into my chest and pull out the pain and show it to you. If I could, what would it accomplish? I can try to tell you stories about my life with Leslie, but the whole time I'm talking I sense that you are inching away from me. I can almost feel you not getting it. The stories are nothing. They are like ash after a fire, they convey not one particle of what was. They are a dirty residue without warmth, glow, surprise or delight. Like ash they can be caustic.
It was Saturday July 12th and we went to the studio for clean up day. As has been common lately I was hours behind Tim, but determined to contribute. I was overwhelmed at the griminess of the studio. The dust and debris that builds up everywhere if not constantly beaten back. Kim suggested I work on an old fridge. She had emptied it and what remained was a coating of brown sludge, thick in some places, and moldy filth caked into every dimple and crevice.
For an hour or two I cleaned the fridge and thought about Leslie. I thought about the many fridges she cleaned in her life. She moved a lot - so that's a lot of clean outs. She was a kitchen manager and professional cook for decades. What is the point of cleaning this fridge? Who will use it? Will the cleaning of it improve someone's life? Will our landlord be able to sell it and make a little money? Will the person who buys it appreciate that someone scraped a rag through every fold of the door seal? Does this make the world better or is this how life means nothing?
Where is everything that Leslie did in her life? How can our whole lives boil down to this powdery, dirty ash? I can't take you to a party in the late 70s where we were all wearing Leslie's glitter body cream and she had cooked an amazing array of treats and cocktails and everyone was laughing and fighting and trying to get high. Sharon showed up with her squeeze box and sang and played and everyone got into the pool which had a thin coating of glitter on the surface of the water so it spread to everyone like party herpes.
I can't take you to the picnics, the movies, the dinners. My life doesn't have a tenth of the shimmer of that great and uproarious fire. I am lost without it and empty. I am totally empty. I want the stories of my life with Leslie and Dad to fill me with wonder and glitter and music. But they don't. I can't recreate that beauty. I've lost the knack of great parties where everyone ends up in the pool at midnight singing and drunk and thinking about who they'd like to make out with. And what of those parties? Why do they loom so large? Is the best of those days just having fun? When everyone posts their photos of Leslie they are always of these crazy events and adventures. What of accomplishments? What of success? When I think of Dad I am not concerned with what he made or bought or accomplished, but with him; that man himself.
My dad let me look as closely at him as any human ever has. He let me look at the inside bits. He brought them out for me to see where they were damaged and how he'd tried to repair them. He tried to be patient with all my inside bits and never made that examination feel pointless or self-indulgent. Leslie made the simplest get-togethers feel like wild delights. She made you feel like her best friend, more interesting than the rabble we were always forced to serve at restaurants or work for at stupid jobs. Instead we were the stars, the muses, the artists who actually made the world an interesting place. We were the brightest shooting stars who created the glow of life with our laughter and conversation and joyful abandon. Without her it's all just ashes.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Stop that!
The hardest part of last night's dream set was trying to get Collin to not buy pot from a couple of undercover cops. The opportunity arose because he was talking about how he was still sober and hadn't had any dope in a long time even though his sponsor told him that pot is not the same as other drugs and some people will let you make an exception for it. Hearing this the two guys ahead of us on the street immediately started trying to sell him this great pot that they had. Collin was totally taken in, but I could see they were cops. Blergh.
In other dream news I went to a restaurant with my folks that had great food, but there was a long wait. They also published a magazine cover (not a magazine, just the cover) which seemed dumb. I spent what seemed like 45 minuted trying to roll my poster-sized sheet of paper into a tube. Maddening.
Finally the food came, but I wasn't enjoying it much because we had people waiting on us somewhere else and this was supposed to have been a quick stop but clearly hours had passed. The food involved a revolutionary new use of fried plantains as some super-yum substance that made everything 1 million times better. This is stupid as I have had fried plantains and they are dry and kind of tasteless.
The seating area of the restaurant was sometimes an unending labyrinth in the basement that I could not find my way around without the assistance of various 6-year-old hostesses who would chide me for not doing things properly. I would leave with one of them in search of something and we would traipse around and I would end up back at the ever-growing table where people kept joining my parents for more fried plantain-laden food.
The people we were supposed to be meeting was a family that I had been traveling with in Europe. They had me and one child and to 'handle' us they had hired a maid, a nanny, and a tour guide. The tour guide kept making us do really complex activities like learning to tango at a lesson right in the center of some plaza in Seville. She also made us make our own surfboards out of cardboard, saran wrap and box tape.
I slept late and am still tired.
In other dream news I went to a restaurant with my folks that had great food, but there was a long wait. They also published a magazine cover (not a magazine, just the cover) which seemed dumb. I spent what seemed like 45 minuted trying to roll my poster-sized sheet of paper into a tube. Maddening.
Finally the food came, but I wasn't enjoying it much because we had people waiting on us somewhere else and this was supposed to have been a quick stop but clearly hours had passed. The food involved a revolutionary new use of fried plantains as some super-yum substance that made everything 1 million times better. This is stupid as I have had fried plantains and they are dry and kind of tasteless.
The seating area of the restaurant was sometimes an unending labyrinth in the basement that I could not find my way around without the assistance of various 6-year-old hostesses who would chide me for not doing things properly. I would leave with one of them in search of something and we would traipse around and I would end up back at the ever-growing table where people kept joining my parents for more fried plantain-laden food.
The people we were supposed to be meeting was a family that I had been traveling with in Europe. They had me and one child and to 'handle' us they had hired a maid, a nanny, and a tour guide. The tour guide kept making us do really complex activities like learning to tango at a lesson right in the center of some plaza in Seville. She also made us make our own surfboards out of cardboard, saran wrap and box tape.
I slept late and am still tired.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Shark Suits
Themes from last night: luggage, coffee, public art, dad, sharks, pregnancy, japan, friendship.
I was waiting in a huge line. Three or four people thick. I managed to escape the huge line and realized there were some nice benches and a big waiting area. We were waiting for our luggage. It was a large room with four luggage carousels as well as a flat luggage moving belt surrounding the room. And they were all connected.
The bell rang and our luggage started coming and everyone rushed to be near the spot where the bags come out. I went to another carousel figuring the bags would come to my spot eventually. I had a nice moment of mentally flying all around the luggage path - up one carousel, once around and then back down where it was passed to the next carousel. Around and down and up and around and down. And so on until it reached the outer path that circled the room.
Then I gave up on the luggage. What is that about - in dreams I search and search for things or wait forever, only to give up and realize that it's stupid or pointless. I'm glad I didn't have to spend the rest of my dream dragging luggage around, but why this sense of critical importance that just evaporates?
Next stop - wandering around a museum with my dad looking for a coffee shop. I was excited about getting a discount on the coffee.
And then, waiting for friends outside, walking through some big neighborhood. I found the friends (at times they were you and Ralph.) We were walking, driving, parking when I recognized the lines on the road as part of an art installation that we had all been discussing earlier. Ralph had a picture of it in his art book.
Even in the dream I know it was kind of a dumb project, but I kept defending it and trying to make it sound cool. This guy had gotten funding from the city to build a number of sidewalks or bike paths that went winding around a stream. But the paths were really short and each ended abruptly. There were four concrete paths with white lines on either side and they would sometimes get ridiculously narrow and other times would curve for no reason and just end. I said that he was planning to make them all connect so they would be a usable path. You said "why doesn't he just start the path in one place and build it until it's done, why build it in separate sections?" I knew that he wasn't planning on connecting them and that you would recognize that as dumb so I kept insisting that it would make sense when it was all connected.
You said - "How is that different from a normal bike path?"
Even in my dreams you bring the logic.
The point of his project was that the different paths would symbolize our disconnection from nature and it made me mad that I even knew this much about it. You then started asking me about his signs, but at this point you were Japanese and we were in Japan. But with the same dumb art project. Now I am defending the cultural aspects of this dumb art. I don't remember who the artist was, but I didn't really like him personally. He put up signs for a camp ground next to the path. They were the same ones you would see if you were camping and they just said "camp".
Japanese-you said "What sense does that make? For one thing it's in English and for another someone will think this is a place to camp." There was a moment of linguistic fun when I remembered that the word for camping in Japanese is 'kyampin'; and then me explaining to my now not Japanese companion that while the word camping is the same in Japanese and English the word 'camp' doesn't translate.
Ugh.
Next up - SHARK FIGHT!!!!
Finally I escaped that area and was on a boat. There were a group of us engaged in a kind of shark fishing. We were capturing sharks by jumping into their bodies so we could control them. Then we would swim around really fast, get into fights with other sharks (for fun) and then shoot up out of the water and land on the boat deck standing. Then we would jump out the shark's body and it would fall down on deck and we'd go get another one.
Jumping into the shark's body was very cartoon - you had to head in through its mouth in a way where you didn't get eaten. You, Ralph, me and Tim were all having the best time. We were occasionally chased by bigger sharks, but we could easily out-swim them. Shooting out of the water and landing upright on our tail fin was totally exhilarating. Once we were standing on the boat deck we would push our arms out to the sides and that would free us from the shark body. This was not at all messy and didn't seem to hurt the shark.
After a while we decided to see if we could let smaller fish into our own bodies to control us. We weren't sure if it would work but you were OK with it since you had already had a baby and you knew what it was like to have another being inside you.
The end.
I was waiting in a huge line. Three or four people thick. I managed to escape the huge line and realized there were some nice benches and a big waiting area. We were waiting for our luggage. It was a large room with four luggage carousels as well as a flat luggage moving belt surrounding the room. And they were all connected.
The bell rang and our luggage started coming and everyone rushed to be near the spot where the bags come out. I went to another carousel figuring the bags would come to my spot eventually. I had a nice moment of mentally flying all around the luggage path - up one carousel, once around and then back down where it was passed to the next carousel. Around and down and up and around and down. And so on until it reached the outer path that circled the room.Then I gave up on the luggage. What is that about - in dreams I search and search for things or wait forever, only to give up and realize that it's stupid or pointless. I'm glad I didn't have to spend the rest of my dream dragging luggage around, but why this sense of critical importance that just evaporates?
Next stop - wandering around a museum with my dad looking for a coffee shop. I was excited about getting a discount on the coffee.
And then, waiting for friends outside, walking through some big neighborhood. I found the friends (at times they were you and Ralph.) We were walking, driving, parking when I recognized the lines on the road as part of an art installation that we had all been discussing earlier. Ralph had a picture of it in his art book.
Even in the dream I know it was kind of a dumb project, but I kept defending it and trying to make it sound cool. This guy had gotten funding from the city to build a number of sidewalks or bike paths that went winding around a stream. But the paths were really short and each ended abruptly. There were four concrete paths with white lines on either side and they would sometimes get ridiculously narrow and other times would curve for no reason and just end. I said that he was planning to make them all connect so they would be a usable path. You said "why doesn't he just start the path in one place and build it until it's done, why build it in separate sections?" I knew that he wasn't planning on connecting them and that you would recognize that as dumb so I kept insisting that it would make sense when it was all connected.
You said - "How is that different from a normal bike path?"
Even in my dreams you bring the logic.
The point of his project was that the different paths would symbolize our disconnection from nature and it made me mad that I even knew this much about it. You then started asking me about his signs, but at this point you were Japanese and we were in Japan. But with the same dumb art project. Now I am defending the cultural aspects of this dumb art. I don't remember who the artist was, but I didn't really like him personally. He put up signs for a camp ground next to the path. They were the same ones you would see if you were camping and they just said "camp".
Japanese-you said "What sense does that make? For one thing it's in English and for another someone will think this is a place to camp." There was a moment of linguistic fun when I remembered that the word for camping in Japanese is 'kyampin'; and then me explaining to my now not Japanese companion that while the word camping is the same in Japanese and English the word 'camp' doesn't translate.
Ugh.
Next up - SHARK FIGHT!!!!
Finally I escaped that area and was on a boat. There were a group of us engaged in a kind of shark fishing. We were capturing sharks by jumping into their bodies so we could control them. Then we would swim around really fast, get into fights with other sharks (for fun) and then shoot up out of the water and land on the boat deck standing. Then we would jump out the shark's body and it would fall down on deck and we'd go get another one. Jumping into the shark's body was very cartoon - you had to head in through its mouth in a way where you didn't get eaten. You, Ralph, me and Tim were all having the best time. We were occasionally chased by bigger sharks, but we could easily out-swim them. Shooting out of the water and landing upright on our tail fin was totally exhilarating. Once we were standing on the boat deck we would push our arms out to the sides and that would free us from the shark body. This was not at all messy and didn't seem to hurt the shark.
After a while we decided to see if we could let smaller fish into our own bodies to control us. We weren't sure if it would work but you were OK with it since you had already had a baby and you knew what it was like to have another being inside you.
The end.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Drink
I haven't been able to remember much from my dreams this week - just snippets.
I was at a party at Dad's. It was in his Ellsworth apartment (dream geography house #3.) I realized that it was a dream at one point and that all of the things he owned when I was a kid would be there so I went back to the second bedroom (the one I had shared with my brothers growing up.) The room was full of various things that in the dream held nostalgic significance although none of them were actually from my childhood. I just believed that they were. I hugged a chest of drawers at one point because I was so happy to see it again.
The room was like a really tightly packed showroom. Everything was arranged nicely, but there was so much it was hard to move. There were things I couldn't get to. In the back I came upon a bar area. There was a tiny porcelain vase shaped like a trumpet flower. It could hold a quarter ounce at best. I remembered it and realized it was a special glass and that since this was a dream I could get drunk.
So I looked around the bar for something to drink and all I could find were Chinese liqueurs. I tried a sip of one from my tiny glass and it was pretty bad. I was so mad that I could finally have a drink but there wasn't anything good.
In real life my father once bought one bottle of Chinese liqueur called Ng Ka Pay. It tasted terrible but he kept it for the cool bottle and it became one of the great jokes I shared with my brothers. We always kept it in mind as a standard punishment or dare.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Furniture
I was staying at a friend's mansion. Ownership variable. At one point it was Tim's mom's house. At another it belonged to Joe DiGiuseppe (one of the guys who runs our studio) and his pal Jim Siebert (a guy I knew in Dallas since high school). Even later it was my grandmother's house.
I was sleeping in one of the many upstairs bedroom suites when a horrific noise woke me up. I was scared and screaming. Terrie, Tim's mom, came in to see if I was alright. We went into the hall where other's were gathered and Joe was examining a large antique armoire in the hallway. It seems the house has haunted? infested? with vaguely malicious antique furniture. Each night as people slept the huge wooden pieces would move around the house, some disappearing for years, others refusing to ever be opened.
The sound that woke me was a heavy furniture dragging on a wood floor sound - but they never left any marks! (That's how you knew they were evil. But I think that actually makes them kind of considerate.) Joe had been tracking one particular chest of drawers for years - big game style. He was obsessed with the contents of the bottom drawer which he was never able to open. When I saw it, the chest had been located behind a locked iron grate so we could touch it through the bars, but there wasn't enough space to open the drawers.
I asked him what was in the drawer and I think it was a bunch of pre-war Japanese kimonos.
That dream rambled on for a while what with all of us packing to leave, trying to figure out what to do with our soggy towels, a phone call for me and Joe from someone in Europe, and my continual discovery of another piece of clothing I had forgotten to pack in every room of the house that I went to.
In a later dream Tim was hunting down the man who killed his girlfriend in a drug war-related shoot out. Florence and I were helping as was another guy whose name I didn't catch. Oddly Tim and the other guy were pug dogs. This made them very good at gang infiltration. But I had to be close by in case he needed to be picked up and put up on a table so he could face off against an adversary.
In the end we found the bad guy in a club, holding someone else hostage, but we just waited until he fell asleep and dropped the gun.
After he got out of jail the bad guy went on to get some very effective therapy that included making really elaborate airplane models that were kind of frustrating his shrink, because she didn't have enough room for them all in her office. She put tiny speakers inside them and had other people who knew the bad guy call in and talk through the speakers to him as a part of his therapy.
I was sleeping in one of the many upstairs bedroom suites when a horrific noise woke me up. I was scared and screaming. Terrie, Tim's mom, came in to see if I was alright. We went into the hall where other's were gathered and Joe was examining a large antique armoire in the hallway. It seems the house has haunted? infested? with vaguely malicious antique furniture. Each night as people slept the huge wooden pieces would move around the house, some disappearing for years, others refusing to ever be opened.
The sound that woke me was a heavy furniture dragging on a wood floor sound - but they never left any marks! (That's how you knew they were evil. But I think that actually makes them kind of considerate.) Joe had been tracking one particular chest of drawers for years - big game style. He was obsessed with the contents of the bottom drawer which he was never able to open. When I saw it, the chest had been located behind a locked iron grate so we could touch it through the bars, but there wasn't enough space to open the drawers.
I asked him what was in the drawer and I think it was a bunch of pre-war Japanese kimonos.
That dream rambled on for a while what with all of us packing to leave, trying to figure out what to do with our soggy towels, a phone call for me and Joe from someone in Europe, and my continual discovery of another piece of clothing I had forgotten to pack in every room of the house that I went to.
In a later dream Tim was hunting down the man who killed his girlfriend in a drug war-related shoot out. Florence and I were helping as was another guy whose name I didn't catch. Oddly Tim and the other guy were pug dogs. This made them very good at gang infiltration. But I had to be close by in case he needed to be picked up and put up on a table so he could face off against an adversary.
In the end we found the bad guy in a club, holding someone else hostage, but we just waited until he fell asleep and dropped the gun.
After he got out of jail the bad guy went on to get some very effective therapy that included making really elaborate airplane models that were kind of frustrating his shrink, because she didn't have enough room for them all in her office. She put tiny speakers inside them and had other people who knew the bad guy call in and talk through the speakers to him as a part of his therapy.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Awful
Terrible dream last night about being put away by my parents in a kids jail-camp with this evil woman in charge. We were all teen-agers and I was a boy (possibly gay). The woman in charge tortured us and our parents didn't believe us.
In the worst sequence a girl was kidnapped and put in a body bag and the other kids were bullied into beating her with baseball bats while she screamed and cried. I tried to look away and close my ears. The woman in charge blamed me for her beating so I would be locked up for the rest of my life. In the end the girl survived and knew I had not beaten her and there was one other person who didn't participate.
All of the kids agreed that we had to convince our parents that what was happening was illegal and each kid promised that when they got out they would convince their parents to investigate. Over the years kids would 'graduate' from the program and get out, but no one ever came for us. By the end of the dream there were three of us left - the girl who had been beaten, the guy who hadn't participated and me. We were in our forties, but still couldn't leave. We still played with toys and games like kids.
No one had ever come for us and our parents believed we were criminals who couldn't be saved. I felt like I was choking when I woke up and looking back on the dream there was no one I had recognized. But the place where it happened was a dream version of my grandmother's house and the final three kids were two older blond boys and a younger brunette girl which is the configuration of me and my siblings. My stomach hurts.
After going back to sleep I tried to re-dream it and did have some success getting saved by my father who believed me this time about the abuse. But it couldn't replace the previous dream entirely.
blah.
In the worst sequence a girl was kidnapped and put in a body bag and the other kids were bullied into beating her with baseball bats while she screamed and cried. I tried to look away and close my ears. The woman in charge blamed me for her beating so I would be locked up for the rest of my life. In the end the girl survived and knew I had not beaten her and there was one other person who didn't participate.
All of the kids agreed that we had to convince our parents that what was happening was illegal and each kid promised that when they got out they would convince their parents to investigate. Over the years kids would 'graduate' from the program and get out, but no one ever came for us. By the end of the dream there were three of us left - the girl who had been beaten, the guy who hadn't participated and me. We were in our forties, but still couldn't leave. We still played with toys and games like kids.
No one had ever come for us and our parents believed we were criminals who couldn't be saved. I felt like I was choking when I woke up and looking back on the dream there was no one I had recognized. But the place where it happened was a dream version of my grandmother's house and the final three kids were two older blond boys and a younger brunette girl which is the configuration of me and my siblings. My stomach hurts.
After going back to sleep I tried to re-dream it and did have some success getting saved by my father who believed me this time about the abuse. But it couldn't replace the previous dream entirely.
blah.
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