foreshadowing

I saw this on the intertubes yesterday, and it inspired some weird, apocalyptic dreams last night.

I woke up with Hank Williams singing "I'll never get out of this world alive" in my head.

3/2/08: In search of Proust time

I think of it as "Proust time" in honor of the first few pages of Swann's Way which I've enjoyed many times despite never making it through the entire book. Proust does such a good job of describing that liminal state somewhere between sleeping and waking. I have learned to enjoy the weirdness that often results from that state. Sometimes I even use the snooze button on my phone to perpetuate it just to see what odd products my mind will conjure up.

This morning I found "Allan Coe" and "Allan Poe" conflated and came away with something like this (as best I can remember it). Sing along, you know the melody:

the sole occasion I know
I might expect to hear called "Edgar Allan Poe":
should there be a final judgment day.

I'll remain here as long as you will allow it
I shall content myself to wait here, even standing in the rain
you needn't call me your beloved, my darling
you've never once addressed me by my name.

I can see a novelty act/karaoke singer bit in this. But should it be David Allan Poe or Edgar Allan Coe? I'm thinking the former.

As much as I enjoyed waking up to that, I think last week's Proust time detritus is tastier. I came up with a sandwich. I remember watching it being cooked in my mostly unconscious dream state and it looked so good that I was able to remember it. I think of it as the "Louisiana Dream."

It consists of: one link of andouille sausage, split down the middle then grilled. Cover the sausage in a medley of grilled peppers and onions (red preferable to green I think). Top it with thinly sliced deli ham and provolone cheese. Dress the roll with creole mayonnaise (had to go and find a recipe for that), lettuce and tomato.

Every time I think of the Louisiana Dream my mouth starts to water up. So I went to the farmer's market and got the sausage and peppers, then to the deli for the ham and cheese. Can't really get a good sandwich roll in Atlanta (not at the grocery stores anyway--if they are to be found elsewhere I have yet to find them), or the South generally in my experience, New Orleans being the exception of course, so I've improvised with a baguette. Good deli meat can be hard to come by as well. At the farmer's market you order a half pound of deli ham and you get two quarter pound ham steaks. So I have to go to Publix and hope that the deli person actually knows how to cut deli meat. Got lucky this time. I'll let you know how it turns out.

In the meantime, my mother was just released from the sanitarium and I must go fetch her in my carriage lest she in her delirium stumble before an infernal steam engine train.

11/29/07: down in the belly of the beast

I don't remember the beginning. I am with my Grandma in Manayunk but in a place that is not her house. I am visiting with her for a few days. She lives alone it seems. We are talking. She is going to go visit Aunt Laura, I think young John is going to drive her. I am talking to her, happy to be there with her, but I realize it will be my last visit with her, my last trip to Philly before she is gone. I am nearly overcome with sadness but I don't want to upset her. I wonder what to do with the day. It will be nice to have some time to waste before she gets back from Aunt Laura's. Unclaimed time, always a momentary relief, after which I will see her again later in the day. I think about walking down to the river and I consider getting a pack of menthols. I have quit but the situation is a little upsetting so maybe I will smoke to soothe my troubles. Then we are together in some sort of small community center or meeting place or something where they have a lunch spread set out and the food is cheap. The sandwiches look like they are made with good Philly lunch meat. Grandma tells me to get some food if I want some. I am hungry but I don't get any food. Then we are outside and I think in a neighborhood in Knoxville, sort of a granola feel to it, off Broadway perhaps, and the community folks have some sort of a faux second line marching band. They don't get the New Orleans music quite right but they are enthusiastic and they seem able to sing on key. I have some sort of misshapen hard plastic drum to play. It is not conducive to a good sound but I try and blend in with the percussion. The community gathering is over and people are dispersing. Was there was an attractive young woman in the crowd? I don't need to be messing with that. As I leave I mention to the people that although I don't believe in such things, I have in fact experienced several hauntings in this area. Then I have to get back to Grandmom's. Do I fear a ghost, a haint, the darkness? Up on the top floor of her house a man nervous about arctic deep sea diving must go ahead with his dive. It's on the National Geographic channel. I am in the cold dark water deep below the surface but I can vaguely make out the shape of giant dragons, sea monsters beneath me. I must get back up the line to the surface and breathe. I make my way up and break the surface and tell myself to wait one second and breathe easy. Don't gasp for air. I open my eyes and all around me on the surface of the water is viscera, entrails, the remains of the sea dragon I realize I have just climbed out of. Like Jonah it had swallowed me and I had climbed out, somehow destroying it in doing so. Somewhere in the meat and muck floating on the surface I see a little boxer body, it must be Grace. The dragon must have eaten Grace. Who would want to dive again now? But the show must go on, it is for television. In the third floor room I regret that I will not see it as I do not have the National Geographic channel. But the dive must continue. Life is hard for a wide receiver in the NFL, if you don't play through the pain someone else will take your job.

dream come true?

The year of peculiar weather continues. The entire Atlanta area is under a tornado watch and flash flood warnings have been issued. This means that all over the metro area the root systems of trees will be loosened and those trees will fall over onto houses, cars, and, occasionally, people. This has already been going on for a few weeks now. It is common in the summer time here when it rains very hard, very fast, sometimes for days on end. Normally it is too hot in July for there to be a real tornado threat, but the summer has been quite mild. I can remember long brutal summers here...day after day of triple digit temperatures and humidity to match. But it's been a while since we've had one of those.

So maybe on my way home from work tonight I'll be swept up in a tornado. After years of strange, forboding, occasionally apocalyptic tornado dreams, it seems only fitting.

volunteer slavery

"Why do you keep asking me about this? The world is full of assholes, idiots and fuckwads. I don't know why they do what they do."

The last words I remember of the dream I was having when the alarm went off at 6:38 in the a.m. I was sound asleep and then I was not. For a minute that old feeling of dread at waking surfaces but I tell myself it's ok, and it is. And the feeling is gone and I take note of this because it's rather novel.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk's "Volunteer Slavery" is looping in the back of my head as I get up and start the day. "Ladies you wanna know what it is to be free? You wanna know what it is to be free? You gotta spend all day in bed with me." Then the tune slides into the soaring horn part from "Hey Jude" that Kirk borrows to great effect.

Volunteer slavery. For assholes, idiots and fuckwads.

It's ok.

dream hangover

Working six days a week makes me plenty tired but put fresh clean sheets on the bed after a long week and I will sleep as though dead, a luxury as pleasant as it is rare for me these days. So the day starts with the snooze button and another episode of Chinese Fire Drill dreaming: ready, set, dream. Corn, something about corn. Then an arm on the beach, clearly coming from the finger in the chili business. Survey says I am 85% existentialist and perhaps 15% hedonist. Hedonism is for the weak. Two days ago I was Joe Strummer, yesterday I was Captain Beefheart. Wake the fuck up already. How can you kiss someone for the first time when that crackhead you know is scratching at the window of the car? Wake up, you're going to be late for work. Write the chords before you forget them: G minor, A diminished, B flat augmented, E flat, D. Write out that blog entry, you'll forget it when you wake up. Sing-a-ling, I saw it comin. Sing along, sing-a-ling, sing a song, take wing. Key change: A minor, appregiate. Wake up already for Chrissakes. I am left feeling unsettled but can't quite remember why. A dream hangover.

funereal karaoke

So I woke up this morning with the melody of “Sins of the Father” running through my head together with the line “God said don’t send me your tinhorn prayers” and stuck on an image from a dream: There’s a secret door in the top of the freezer that leads up to some sort of attic but one has to climb up into the freezer and this is complicated because it’s frozen over and everything is covered in frost. The attempt to chip away at all this cold white stuff reveals a woman underneath it all, upright in the freezer. Is she dead and frozen? I don’t think it was related to the other image I can remember: standing in the railway yard working on my vertical leap while waiting for the big volleyball match with Duke to get underway. Oy.

When I get to work I read this essay on changes in American funerals by celebrity undertaker Thomas Lynch in the Times:

For many Americans, however, that wheel is not just broken but off track or in need of reinvention. The loosened ties of faith and family, of religious and ethnic identity, have left them ritually adrift, bereft of custom, symbol, metaphor and meaningful liturgy or language. Times formerly spent in worship or communion are now spent shopping or Web-browsing or otherwise passing time. Many Americans are now spiritual tourists without home places or core beliefs to return to.

INSTEAD of dead Methodists or Muslims, we are now dead golfers or gardeners, bikers or bowlers. The bereaved are not so much family and friends or fellow believers as like-minded hobbyists or enthusiasts. And I have become less the funeral director and more the memorial caddy of sorts, getting the dead out of the way and the living assembled for a memorial "event" that is neither sacred nor secular but increasingly absurd - a triumph of accessories over essentials, stuff over substance, theme over theology. The genuine dead are downsized or disappeared or turned into knickknacks in a kind of funereal karaoke - bodiless obsequies where the finger food is good, the music transcendent, the talk determinedly "life affirming," the accouterments all purposefully cheering and inclusive and where someone can be counted on to declare "closure" just before the merlot runs out. We leave these events with the increasing sense that something is missing.

Lynch is right, I suppose, but he seems to miss the point. The problem is not, as he says, that we have abandoned an older set of rituals for a new inadequate set, but that culturally, on some level, death itself has been removed from life. For most of us, it’s the visceral reality of death that is missing. We’ve got plenty of representations but it’s not the same thing. But this did not happen because we've swapped sets of rituals. That's a confusion of cause and effect. Funerary practice in America is just trying to keep up with the realities of culture and the market.

a little sleep game

We remember our own lives, Schopenhauer wrote somewhere, a little better than we do a novel we once read. That's about right: a little, no more.
Michel Houellebecq


The sound of men mumbling in Spanish outside my window woke me up bright and early today. Then an engine started and a minute later the house was under attack. That's how it sounded anyway. It seems my landlord had hired two men to pressure-wash the house and they got started at 8:30 am, beginning with the window above my bed. Did he think to let us know beforehand? Nope. Pressure-washing is a loud process. At one point I was certain they were going to break my window and the water was going to come bursting into the room. Why did the landlord need to have the house pressure-washed? Because the county had sited him for "excessive peeling paint." Translated: make that unsightly dump look presentable you old white trash cracker. Yes. This is my new home. I'm not even going to mention the lack of central heat which engenders the growth of mold--Atlanta is a very wet climate after all--which turns my eyes a dull blood red that scares small children in public places. Nope, not going to mention that. The house does have a certain charm however: I have lots of space and I can make a racket. And it's cheap by local standards.

So I found myself awake early this morning after just a few hours of sleep. I read for a bit, did some laundry, and when the house washers moved to the other side of the house I decided to play a little sleep game I like to indulge in occasionally. The snooze button on my alarm clock guarantees the snoozer exactly four minutes of uninterrupted bliss before the alarm goes back off. Yes, four minutes. I'm not sure how I came to own the world's most sadistic and vindictive clock, but I do. Through years of difficult experience (I know, I know--why don't I just throw the fucking thing out and get a new one--well that says something about me doesn't it) I have learned that with the aid of my four minute snooze button I can have a long series of mini-dreams. I never manage in those four minutes to attain any kind of deep sleep, so the dreams just sort of float along very close to the surface of consciousness. It is a very different sort of compositional format for dreaming. Sometimes each short dream is different from all the rest; sometimes they all seem to be linked thematically. The sleep is so shallow the dreams often have an unusual lucidity. But more often than not, they fade from memory almost immediately. This morning's game featured travel, New Orleans specifically, and Muffalettas, with a changing cast of characters. That's about all I can remember, but one thoroughly unremarkable moment retains the clarity of an actual event. I imagine that someday I will remember it and mistake it for one of many such trips, forgetting altogether that it was a dream.

If you ever find yourself with an hour to kill, and can devise some means to wake yourself up every fourth minute or so, I suggest you give it a shot. Or if you're ever staying in my peeling, damp, mold-infested house you can borrow my clock for a while.

Had you slept?

Are you dreaming? Or have you woken up?

He gets up in the middle of the night and finds a pen and some paper and starts writing.

I am a mystery to myself.
I have a life's worth of circumstantial evidence
but I cannot prove a thing.

My mind goes a million miles an hour
but you might not know it to look at me
sitting quiet and stoic.
I don't often let anyone in.
Glimpses here and there.
I suspect that for those who know me
it is a slow accumulation over time.

And it seems that I see a light,
see the way clear.
You have to let this thing out.
Here lies your salvation.

It's in you
And you gotta let it out.
Don't let it die in there.

His head begins to clear
hold on to it though
don't let it fade
tears dry up
he tastes blood and realizes
he's chewed a small piece of his lip off

Getting to that place is its own reward.

Don't forget.

blogging below the surface

for those who check in here on occasion but may not bother to have a look at the few comments received, I would direct you to the comments for the entry "A Plague of Robins." It is a blog entry in and of itself. TheSheCreature psychoanalyzes the troubling products of my subconscious in such an entertainingly ruthless fashion it would have made old Sigmund himself reach for both his blow and his boner.

a plague of Robins

This afternoon there were dozens of Robins in the parking lot scurrying around in some sort of agitated state. It seemed to fit the forbidding weather. The winter dreamtime weather is still in full effect here: Wednesday was a beautiful day--68 and sunny, a mere 48 hours later it was 35 and freezing rain was beginning to fall from the sky, making a brittle little sound when it fell.
And speaking of dreamtime, I am left with three peculiar dream snippets from this past week:

In a dream I became convinced that I needed to open a store, really more of a trendy boutique, called "1 and 2." My merchandise would all be related to the bathroom and its corresponding bodily functions. I would open it in Manhattan of course where such a thing might actually go over. Then I got paranoid about letting anyone know of my plan, lest they steal the idea and beat me to it. Don't steal my idea.

In a second dream I am in a northeastern city, not sure if it was NYC or Philly, and I can see into Jersey. Tornadoes are on the horizon, coming my way. This has been a recurring motif in my dreams for years. I get the usual worry: shit, what do I do? Then I am somewhere akin to a carnival or a fair in a field and the tornadoes are fast approaching. Before I know it they are bearing down on me, but strangely I realize that the tornado closest to me is emanating from a man casually walking across the field in my direction. He gets up quite close to me and I can see this tornado pouring from his head and shoulders, spiraling off into the sky. It is pretty fucking amazing. I am pondering...am I being tricked? Is this some sort of elaborate visual illusion or am I seeing something unimaginable?

Lastly, I am off on a trip to Denmark. Or I will be shortly. This is probably the single most common setting for my dreams--getting ready to depart for a trip (as I've mentioned before in this blog). In fact it was the second dream of the night with the same scenario. In the first I was with my ex-wife who in the dream was still my wife and we were visiting her mother who was showing us how they had dyed their little dog blue when I realized that our plane would depart in an hour and we would probably not make it. But in the second dream I will be travelling with br'er Bunni and a good time will be had. I am packing and in a bit of a hurry. I realize I have several shirts I was not aware of owning. But all my usual shirts seem to be in the laundry along with...all my pants. How will I go to Denmark with no pants? Damn. Then the dream went in a very different direction involving a woman I know named Jezebel (really her name) and I can't repeat the rest, but I never did get to Denmark.

dreaming and writing

Just a snippet this morning: in some kind of rough boat, in Greek waters. I'm with someone else I think but not sure who. The threat of impending...something, war maybe?, hangs in the air. The seas are choppy, churning, the sky is grey. We wash ashore on some sort of muddy land that turns out to be ancient Greek burial mounds. There are some kind of hippyesque backpacker types living among them. That lesbian looking one is interesting...

I wake up with a civil war song, from one of the Irish brigades, going round in my head:

He'll lead us unto glory, oh
he'll lead us unto glory

In preparing to do my first grading of the semester, or rather, in trying to avoid doing my first grading of the semester, I reread Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". Great stuff. Of course whenever global affairs turn tumultuous, pundits on all sides break out their pithy Orwell quotes, and the debacle in Iraq has been no exception. There was an interesting piece somewhere, maybe it was Christopher Hitchens, about the dangers of using Orwell for partisan purposes. Actually, now that I think about it, there were several articles recently about the enigmatic Orwell and his political leanings. I think our inability to easily fit him with one of our increasingly narrow political labels is a fine testament to the worth of his work. But politics were not the impetus for my rereading. Old George offers fine advice for anyone who writes or otherwise uses the English language. Here are his specific guidelines for writers (just thinking about them has made me rewrite this paragraph a couple times only to just accept that it will have to be mediocre):

...one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

1) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

greetings from Dreamland

So the song this morning was "hell's bells." No idea. Last dream before I woke up: I'm at home, though it's a home I don't, and have never, lived in, and it's real early. The sun has yet to rise. I should try to sleep some but realize I'm already way too anxiety ridden over time and will be unlikely to sleep, so I think fuck it: I'm going to go somewhere and eat a good breakfast. A good breakfast is a rare and sort of leisurely thing for me and feels kind of like thumbing my nose at the stressful day ahead of me. I decide to call my buddy Big Country cause he'll be up this early and we can go to the Pot and Pan on Monroe. Then, he's already there in the house and we go outside to our cars which are in the parking lot in Little Five Points, in front of the liquor store. Only now it's not pre-dawn, it's late night and the parking lot is crowded with typical area riffraff. Big Country says Hey someone's in your car at just about the same time I notice it myself. I am surprised for a second as anyone would be. Then I am baffled. Why would any self-respecting car thief steal this car? It's a complete piece of shit. But there he is sitting in the front seat apparently trying to steal the car. He seems to be in cahoots with some guy in the car next to mine. Maybe they're stealing cars together. I walk up to my car and calmly, even with a little amusement for the world's most clueless car thief, tell him to get the fuck out of my car. Instead he backs the car out of the parking space, intending to drive away with it. I hop in the back seat, trying to grab him and make him stop driving. I pull out my knife and tell him This is my knife and in about one second it's going to be in you. But although he doesn't stop he is thrashing around a bit trying to keep from getting stabbed. Then I stab him in his right buttock. Things are a little fuzzier after that, but I do remember wondering whether I should dispose of the knife, then thinking, No I did nothing wrong and should call the cops. I woke up thinking oh my I'd better call Dr. Freud, he'll make short work of this one. You know, man invading territory, knife as penis, veiled threat of rape, display of power, all that sort of thing. Or maybe not. But I do immediately recognize a few things that served as impetus for this dream: the neighbors leaving their trash in the parking spaces in front of the house rather than taking it the extra five feet to the dumpster (it's a long story and not very interesting), and an episode of the Venture Brothers in which Brock Sampson stabs a polar bear.

As I get older I have much greater recall of my dreams, have occasional lucid dreams, and more significantly have much greater agency in my dreams. Threats rarely come from the external world (at least not to the same extent), and I rarely suffer physical violence, though apparently I inflict it. Last week, I shit you not, I had to wrestle a small (maybe four foot) alligator to defend myself. An outside, natural threat perhaps, but one which proved not so fearsome. I also had another flying dream: I was walking around the streets of Philadelphia holding a skateboard trying to figure out how to fly and meeting with occasional success. That same week I also had the worst nightmare I've had in a long time. Our country was at war, we were being bombed, the landscape was devastated and my loved ones had been killed by the bombs. The convulsing and sobbing I was doing in the dream woke me up. Sleep and I have always had a difficult relationship.

travel, death, flying dreams

"the dying might think of travel, but do travelers think of death?"

An excellent question, furnished by Br'er Bunni, that has knocking around in my head for a couple days. Certainly in literature we could find important examples of travelers thinking of death, but for the most part I've been wondering about my own experiences as a traveler and how they might have been linked. A number of my trips have explicitly involved graveyards, which is straightforward enough, but I'm thinking more of meaning and metaphor. This line of thought was prompted by the aforementioned article in the LA Times coupled with an increased attention to my dreams in the last few years. Travel is probably the most common theme of my dreams. The thought that this is somehow linked to death feels like an epiphany to me, but one whose meaning lies just outside my grasp, much like the memory of a dream.

Bunni has rightly implied that perhaps I am death obsessed at times, but it's not altogether unhealthy. I did have a dream that I was flying the other night; bumping around the ceiling in an enclosed space. I think that's my second flying dream this year and I take that as a good omen of sorts.

travel, death, dreams

An interesting article in the L.A. Times today about the prevalence of traveling themes in the visions,dreams,hallucinations and speech of the dying. Travel appears not simply in the most obvious sense of death as the end of the journey, but involves planning for travel and the actual means of travel, like planes, trains and boats. For instance:

Though very weak, Kenny, 45, intermittently recognized and chatted lucidly with family gathered by his bedside. But he would drop in news of his varied travels: He had gone skiing one afternoon in Australia, he told us, stopped by North Carolina another day, and more than once had been "stuck in passport control."

At first, our family dismissed these journeys as confusion; we would laugh through our tears about the various places and modes of transport he had been taking. It must be the painkillers, we thought. Or maybe hypoxia, the oxygen deprivation in the blood that often contributes to delirium in sick people. Or that the cancer now was destroying his mind, just as it had racked his body.

But then our cousin Lynne mentioned that her parents had done a lot of similar traveling in the last days of their cancer battles. Uncle Larry (Lynne's father) had insisted that his passport and fanny pack be kept by his bedside; he was intent on keeping an imaginary 3 p.m. appointment with the emperor of Japan, where I was living then and where he had hoped to visit. He too had asked for a map — of Japan. Aunt Lois, who had died four years before, had talked about needing to catch a train, asking Lynne to buy her a ticket.

Apparently these motifs are well known to hospice nurses and those who attend to the dying. What struck me about this was the connection between travel and death. We are all familiar with shopworn metaphors for death, but I had never really stopped to think that travel itself was somehow symbolically aligned with death. In other words, we've all heard that death is a journey, but perhaps a journey is a death of sorts. Now that I mention it, it seems, mythologically speaking, quite obvious, but in reading this article it struck me with some force, mostly because many of my dreams are about traveling and sound much like the reported visions of the dying. hmmmmm. I need to think about this a bit.

thirsty monkey

ok. I have spent the last couple weeks drowning in a sea of student prose, dutifully grading exams and research papers. I have shed tears, I have cursed my fate, I have smoked many cigarettes, and I have stared down the existential dread that comes with reading the first sentence of a ten page paper so bad that it makes me despair for western civilization. An exaggeration? If you only knew my friends. But the worst, I think, is over. For me anyway; things aren't looking so good for America's future.

I am at work, it is a beautiful day, and this is the first chance I've had in many days to take a deep breath and reflect a little. Indulge me if you will while I figure out where the forty-five dollars I had last night actually went.

5 bucks (four and change but I'm rounding up): at the Quick Trip for smokes and Iced Tea. 40 left.

7 bucks: Target on socks and a pretzel. I actually went to get a bookcase but decided I didn't feel like carrying it because my lower back was really sore from doing deadlifts earlier in the day. I need a new bookcase because my roomie is moving out and has moved his books from the living room, so I now have space for one and can get rid of the piles of books that clutter every available surface in my room. The socks were on sale and the pretzel was cooked in the microwave and coated in so much salt that I felt dehydrated for quite some time. 33 left.

3.50: High Life and a tip at the Earl. Went down fast after that pretzel. 30 left (rounding again).

5 bucks: given to Big Country for the three Black Labels (buck and a half a pop) he put on his tab while we played pool at the Gravity. I shot quite well once I had the requisite amount of beer in me. There is a golden window of opportunity for optimum pool playing somewhere between two and five beers. I almost ran the table at one point. Our playing was interrupted by the arrival of two intoxicated yuppie couples. One couple was quite friendly. She was drunk, he was doing blow in the corner. They had a night off from their two little boys. I beat her at pool and we went on our way. 25 left.

8 bucks: a round of High Life for me and Big Country with tip at the Flat Iron. A nice time chatting with Dave the owner, and Wade, the least gay gay bartender in Atlanta. 17 left.

5 bucks: beer and a tip back at the Earl, the last stop of the evening. Left at two a.m. with one cigarette remaining. 12 left.

8 bucks: lunch today on the way to work. When did lunch get so expensive in Atlanta? 4 left. And the mystery solved. I was convinced that I'd managed to lose some money somewhere last night, but no. All that cheap bear adds up. Paid for six, someone bought me one. 7 beers and a pack of Marlboro's: the cost of unwinding from two weeks of grading.

What else have I been up to since last I blogged?

A few dreams of note:

1) after confrontation with angry street person who pulls a very realistic looking BB gun on me, I am forced to move into a new apartment that is already home to a very thirsty monkey.

2) enter a punk-alternative store in a mall (I had read the day before that such things now exist) and find a curious small cast Iron skeleton in a top hat and overcoat thing. It reminds me of Dooley, the Emory mascot. Then I remember that I have to wake up and finish grading papers. I immediately wake up and realize the skeleton referred both to the aforementioned existential dread that comes with academia, and my desire to sleep forever/death wish.

3) at a truck stop in some rural part of the south, I get off the bus I am on and start looking at hats. They have hats with extremely obscure regional references that pertain to my friends. I have to look at these hats and choose some to buy for my friends. But I have inadvertently spent too long looking at them and realize the bus is leaving without me. Bunni and Sherri are on the bus and now I will not get to New Orleans with them. I must find some way to get to New Orleans, and my worry attracts a parasitical grifter who claims to want to help me but is clearly trying to exploit me for some nefarious purpose.

Finished reading a novel called the Dante Club. A mystery/serial killer novel with a literary historical setting. Prominent 19th century literary figures in Boston try to solve a series of murders based on Dante's inferno. To the extent that it draws on the historical and literary stuff, it's kind of interesting, but in the end it comes off feeling like a heavy-handed Hollywood idea for a movie: what if we crossed Seven with the post-civil war literary scene in Boston? Serial killer stuff for people who fancy themselves too smart for it. Of course it is the author's first novel, and I will keep an eye on his future books.

Finally, some stuff going on in the world: In Russia a popular uprising against the "Barbification" of the world. And nearby, in the Ukraine, the world's tallest man is having a tough time of it. Take a look at the pictures; he really is a sad case.

deflowering Winona

I am in a house that is familiar, but not quite right. I am in the den of the house where my best childhood friend lived. A mother and daughter are here too. They are Cher and Winona Ryder, in their roles from the movie Mermaids. The mother asks me to deflower her daughter. I am intrigued, but stop for a moment to wonder whether this is something I ought to do. I do not know how the daughter feels about this. Maybe we kiss. Then I am outside looking for her. Where did she go? It is dark and the house sits on a small hill and there are trees. I hear someone coming down the street. I look that way and see a figure that looks like humpty dumpty, with a huge egg shaped head, coming down the sidewalk at the bottom of the hill. He has not seen me. I have a vague feeling of foreboding and hide behind a bush. I watch as he passes, walking with a strange, bobbing gait.

no one was hurt

The fucking car has died again. It is a poorly made automobile. I know this, but my gut says it’s my fault, I didn’t take proper care of the car, I should know more about cars, I should have been able to keep it going. But now I have to push the fucking car up a serious hill. I can do it; I had to do it a few weeks ago. Had to push it up an incline in a parking lot while simultaneously steering it into a parking space. It was not fun, but I did it, and got a strained calf for the trouble. But I can’t leave the car where it is, and I’m not going to let it roll backward down the hill, so there’s nothing to do but get to pushing.

And I do push it up the hill. I may not yet be ready for those shows on ESPN where impossibly large Nordic men with too many consonants in their names strap jet planes on their back and run obstacle courses, but the fucking car is on top of the hill. All I have to do is hop in and steer the car gently down the hill and hope there’s a place on the street for me to leave it.

Only, I don’t hop in. As I’m thinking about this, I realize I have in fact pushed too hard and the car is going to go straight over the top of the hill and down the other side. I have a split second to contemplate what a terrible, terrible thing this is before the car does in fact pull away from me and start making its way, driverless, down the hill. Even as I watch in horror, I am amazed that thus far the car seems to be staying in its lane. By the time it gets to the intersection at the bottom of the hill it has picked up some speed. It runs right through the red light and miraculously does not hit the two cars already proceeding through the intersection. It veers to the left, goes up over the curb, and begins to roll over. Strangely I do not hear the sound of metal scraping and twisting and glass breaking as I watch, stunned, from the top of the hill. Luckily the car has gone over the curb into a muddy vacant lot being prepared for new construction. No damage to anything but the car, and sweet Jesus, no one was hurt. Fuck the fucking car. No one was hurt.

I’m asleep in my bed. A restless, troubled sleep. Not uncommon. And considering the car episode, not so surprising. The phone rings and I am inclined to let it ring, but I remember the car and figuring it could be important I answer. It’s my mom. She has that tone she often has on the phone: she doesn’t want to bother me, but I can tell it’s important and she is trying to be reassuring. She’s saying something about the state of the car, totaled I assume, how could it have been anything else. Then she says: and they buried your dad. What? My mind starts trying to rouse itself from slumber. What did you say? They went ahead and buried him now she says, we’ll have some sort of service soon. What the fuck is going on? My dad has a million ailments and complaints, but he’s fine. I talked to him a week ago. I feel panic rising in my muscles. Mom says he was in the car. What? He was in the car. It’s ok, it wasn’t your fault. But he was not in the car, I was in the car and he was not. Mom’s tone is trying real hard to keep me calm. He was in the car and he didn’t survive. She is not kidding. I cannot describe the physical sensation I am feeling. I am picturing the car going over the curb, flipping and rolling, twisting and tearing, thinking about what it would do to someone inside the car. Every muscle is my body is tense, ready to explode, I cannot see. Please tell me I am having a fucking nightmare I cry into the phone. Please tell me I am having a nightmare with tears streaming down my face. But here I am in my bed awake. How can I be asleep when I am in bed on the phone? I don’t sleep well, I don’t sleep much, my dreams are very vivid, often lucid, my brain seems to work overtime to keep me asleep, to keep me from waking up. And now I am awake. And now I am awake. And convinced my father is dead. I look at the phone afraid to touch it. I am awake. No one was hurt.