beautiful, funny, sad & true

Yesterday was my mom’s birthday, and I called her last night.  We talked for a while, and one of the things she mentioned is that she occasionally checks in on my blog to ‘see how things are going.’  My mom reads my blog, and she’s apparently been doing it for some time now.

Great.

With all those posts I’ve written about Satan and feces and third grade memories, not to mention all the copious amounts of premarital sex weird dreams and my judicious but regular smattering of naughty words, she probably thinks that her real baby son must have somehow been swapped in the hospital for this devil’s spawn.

But the most egregious thing of all (for her, anyway) has to be my non-stop trash-talking about Yakima, which is decidedly well-deserved, but she can’t stomach it.  I have a kinda funny story about that, actually, which involves my niece’s favorite TV show, which we all couldn’t help but watch with her while we were at the beach a few weeks ago.

It’s a national show, which you probably haven’t seen, let alone enjoyed, if you’re over the age of ten.  It’s about PrecociousTeenageGirl, and it’s set in Seattle, where Niece lives.  The grandparents on the show even live in Yakima, where one set of Niece’s grandparents live.  The hijinks ensued in one episode when it looked as if PTG was going to be sent to live with her grandparents.  She didn’t want to go, and she kept making all these lame jokes about Yakima and how bad it is (“oh, the sweet smell of Yakima”, et cetera).  I kept waiting for them to actually take her there, and have some scenes set in the town, which I’m sure they would have filmed in Salinas, California instead, anyway.  It has the exact same feel and look as Yakima, except for the fact that Salinas has the brilliant John Steinbeck rooting for it.  Raymond Carver and I are Yakima’s vox populi spokespeople, and we have nothing good to say about the place.

But that’s neither here nor there.

I found that episode surreal and hilarious.  No wonder it’s Niece’s favorite show; the writers practically frickin’ wrote it for her, and set it in the two places she knows best in the world.  I couldn’t stop cracking up at the irony of the situation, so between my incredulous laughter and the show’s cloying laugh track in response to every generic joke, my mom got angry and had to go upstairs to get away from it all.

I couldn’t tear myself away from the stupid show, and I actually watched the thing in its entirety. You’ll be glad to know that PTG did not, in fact, get sent to live in Yakima, because GenXGuardian (her older brother?) came through in the end to prove that despite his slacker appearance, he really was quite the responsible young gentleman when it came to raising her.  Awww.  Wipe my tears and cue the organist.

I suppose I don’t have a real reason to feel weird about my mom reading all this.  She knows (pretty much) what I’m like, this is all real stuff, and I feel like it’s a good representation of me, slightly-glossed-over warts and all.

But it still does feel weird.  I’m sure you understand.

This morning, after trying valiantly to go back to sleep, I actually managed to succeed on two occasions.  Both occasions were entirely too short, but they were long enough to have two short dreams.

The first involved two large, flappy, annoying insects that were flying around underneath the covers of my bed.  They flew very close to my face, which startled me and made me throw back the covers in alarm.  Once free, they increased dramatically in size and flew around the room.  They flew next to my head again, and this time it woke me up.

I went right back to sleep, and had the second dream, which involved the girl I met the other night.  She, one of her guy friends (not the one I met) and I were planning a trip to BigCityNamedTwice.  She’s been there before, but I haven’t, and I told her that I have a couple of friends who live there, one of which we might even be able to stay with.

Last night I had a fairly short dream involving a plane crash.  I was on the plane, which took off out of Seattle.  It had some sort of technical difficulty, so it turned back around to head back to the airport, but it never got there.  It kept going slower and slower and slower, until we were forced to land on a wide street.  Miraculously, we didn’t hit any cars, but we did slam into a mall.  (No, JBJ, it was nothing like a mini-mall.)

No one on the plane was hurt, but I don’t know about inside the mall.  Immediately after that, the pilot backed the plane up and taxied down the street.  I couldn’t believe he was trying to fly the thing after slamming it into a mall, but then I guess he knew best.

Then there was a scene in which I was walking down the street in Seattle the next day, and I saw a pair of little kids (ages two and four) who had been on the plane with me.  They were sitting on a bench next to their mother, who was reading the newspaper.  There was a story about the plane crash, and it included a picture that had been taken by someone on the plane.  The two kids were clearly visible.  They saw the picture and said, exactly in unison, ‘Who AM I?  I mean who ARE we?”

Weird.

OneYearAgo

This morning I had a beautiful and strange dream, which, I suppose is par for the course for me.

* * * * *

I’m driving through the English countryside in a sort of race, but it isn’t really a race so much as an homage to a Victorian writer who packed all of her belongings into a smallish buggy and traveled around England with her cat, Imogen. There are about twenty of us, each following her route across England. Some are taking this as a fun little trip, and others are trying to actually mirror her trip as closely as possible, dressing in Victorian-era clothing. There are even two buggies that are replicas of hers, which are quite impressive to the group, as you can imagine. Two or three people, myself included, bring a cat with them on the trip. I have a small cat the color of cafe au lait, whose name is also Imogen. She rides (mostly sleeps) in her cat bed, which is on the passenger seat of my red Honda, which they allow me to use in England even though it’s left-hand drive. Isn’t that nice of them?

The group is traveling sort of together and sort of separately. We’re not in a caravan, but we meet up at various points along the route to eat and talk, and at those times, the two buggy owners will take the participants for rides. All of the participants are either married couples or single people. There are no tour buses or large groups on this trip. I suspect it has something to do with the writer herself, a solitary but free-spirited person whose writing inspires wanderlust in her readers, as she encourages them to shake up their lives and not to be lulled into the trance of everyday living. She was far ahead of her time, and all of us who are on the trip feel a very close kinship both for her and for each other, despite the fact that none of us had met prior to this.

In the middle of the afternoon, we arrive at the main stopping point along the way, a large and grassy park near the ocean, with tall, leafy trees scattered plentifully throughout. The buggies are polished and gleaming, and the people who dressed in period clothing are out in all of their Victorian finery, laughing and talking near the buggies. One man is wearing a monocle and a pocket watch, and another man is wearing an elegant black suit, and his wife is wearing a long, white dress. Another woman shades herself underneath a parasol. There are about ten or twelve people wearing antique clothes, some of whom changed into them only for this part of the trip. I am wearing modern attire, jeans and a button-up shirt, with a gray, European-style suit jacket over the top.

My mom is at the park, volunteering, serving food and refreshments for the participants, but she is unfamiliar with the writer in question. She loves to volunteer for things, and she knew that I would be a part of this event, so she signed up. She walks over to one of the buggies, runs an admiring hand along its side, and makes a somewhat nonsensical comment about how ‘compactly’ people used to live back then, which makes a few of the people around her chuckle. The buggy’s owner is standing next to it, and she asks him to tell her a little bit about this writer. I pick up Imogen the cat, climb into the front seat of the beautifully restored buggy, and place her on the seat beside me. She sits in the sun and purrs, clearly enjoying herself.

* * * * *

This was one of those dreams that was very beautiful to experience, but when I tried to write it down, I found that I had a hard time capturing its mood at first. I laughed just now as I re-read the first sentence; it’s just so strange and funny. Each of the individual words is completely normal, but there’s something about the way they are strung together into that particular sentence that is instantly both surreal and hilarious. A moment like that is why I think it’s so much fun to write out dreams and share them. It pitches you right out of reality in a very satisfying way.

Last night I got home from a gig and just completely crashed. I slept for eight consecutive hours, and during that time, I had the longest dream I’ve ever had in my entire life. I don’t remember it linearly enough to tell it all, but I do remember most of it. It was comprised of many scenes; each was very long, with a different cast of characters (many of whom I know in real life – there are too many of them to explain, so I’ll just mention them as they appear, and you’ll have to just roll with that, I guess), and all of the scenes were all linked somehow.

Scene 1:

A couple of my neighbors (Skip & Susan), my mom and stepdad, and my work friend Val and her three-year-old son are all outside talking in the around-the-corner part of the yard of the house next door. Everyone is talking; Mom and Stepdad are sitting on the grass next to each other, Skip is sitting on the steps kinda near them, Val is standing on the sidewalk talking to Skip, her son is walking from person to person like three-year-olds do, and Susan and I are standing in the street, a bit apart from the group, talking to each other but still paying attention to everyone else’s discussion. Val’s son walks over and stands right next to Skip’s shoulder, which makes him very uncomfortable. He asks Val’s son to back up a little bit. The kid laughs in a high-pitched and obnoxious way, and continues to stand next to Skip. Val doesn’t say anything to her son, but continues to tell a story to Skip and my family. Skip is becoming visibly agitated, and quickly rolls and lights a cigarette. The kid is still laughing and standing next to him, so Skip finally reaches around and gently pushes the kid away from him, telling him to please step back. Val steps behind Skip, grabs the back of his collar, pulls it tight and starts to berate him for ‘throwing her son around.’ My mom steps over and starts to yell at Val about how she should have ‘handled her son.’ She pushes Val, who makes a show of very dramatically tripping down the stairs and falling into the street next to Susan and me. She starts to cry and yell at my mom, but once she realizes that we all know that she’s not really hurt, she stops.

Scene II:

I am on a chartered bus, with a group of fellow actors, filmmakers, film crew and various supernumeraries, all traveling to a film shoot that is taking place in a large Victorian house out in the remote hills near Livermore, California. The group consists of myself, a few people from the play reading group, Jen B and Jason R, an older guy who has long black hair and wears a black top hat, and quite a few other people. The bus is full. We arrive at the house in the early evening and set up our gear. There are broken black clouds in the sky, creating a threatening feeling, which some of us comment on as we walk from the bus into the house. The actors (I’m one of them) walk into a large room to talk and rehearse. Sarah C comes in from the other room (she is one of the production assistants) to tell us that they’re just about ready to start filming.

Scene III:

The filming has begun, in the main part of the Victorian house, and it’s going well. Sarah C is standing near the door, holding a clipboard and watching us. There are two cameras, each of which is on an opposite side of the room. There is lighting gear and all sorts of cabling everywhere. They are filming from down low, so the floor can be cluttered, because it’s not in the shots. Suddenly, a group of anarchists (I don’t know what else to call them) bursts in to the room where. There are about ten or twelve young men and women, mostly men, in their early twenties, and they are dressed in a mixture of styles, somewhere between paramilitary and punk rock. They appear to be hyped up on drugs. They have all sorts of knives and guns, which they make no attempt to hide. Two of the guys grab Sarah and one of them holds a knife to her throat. A few of the actors are pulled aside also. Some of them are pushed to the ground and threatened, and others are taken into the next room. Sarah somehow gets free and turns around to try and calmly talk with the group’s leader. A wiry, wild-eyed young guy, wearing camouflage pants and a bandana, grabs me by the arm and pulls a very large fork out of his pocket. He holds it menacingly next to my right eye. He is watching his friends wreak havoc on our group and steal our gear and belongings. His hand is shaking with adrenaline. I am very frightened, and I tell him quietly, ‘Please don’t. . .do anything.’ He laughs and moves the fork even closer. Finally the anarchists seem to think that they’ve done enough, or that they’ve gotten what they came for, and they start to leave. They load a bunch of the film gear and and a bunch of other stuff (like small but expensive pieces of furniture from the house, and some of our personal stuff, like cell phones, wallets and digital cameras, and even clothes) into their battered old SUV and leave. The house is a disaster. Just about anything that they didn’t take they either knocked over or destroyed completely. We are all a bit dazed, but relieved, and Sarah is taking stock of the situation, making notes on her clipboard about the extent of the damage. Several of us stumble outside to get some air.

Scene IV:

It’s the middle of the afternoon the next day, and I’m riding on DogBus. No one else from the film is on there with me. Each of us went our own way after the incident. I was taking the bus to Yakima with a smattering of random people, including a heavyset Native American man in his fifties and AlcoholicUnionGuy from my old job. There is an open area without any seats near the back of the bus, where the Indian guy and I are sitting on the floor, making little jokes and counting quarters from an enormous pile of them that is there, inexplicably. I keep having to start again because I always put them back into the same pile, instead of setting them aside into new piles. The bus reaches its destination on C******t and 55th (around the corner from my childhood home). I almost ask if someone can drive me to 60th and L*****n (my family’s current home), but I decide not to ask, because I don’t trust or want to spend any more time with the people from the bus. I tell myself that I’ll get myself there, and that ‘I’ll walk if need be.’

That’s all I can remember, but there was much more. I really wish I could remember how everything linked together, because it really did flow from strange scene to strange scene. If you stuck with this story all the way to the end, I applaud you.

OneYearAgo