beautiful, funny, sad & true

I’m with BoringFish, and she and I and her long-haired black cat have been traveling from somewhere in eastern Washington state. We drive through Yakima to see my mom and stepdad, but when we arrive at their house, no one’s home.

We walk around to the back yard, and let ourselves into the house through the sliding glass door. I sit on the sofa and play with her cat, while she goes and looks around the rest of the house.

Finally, everyone arrives, and by everyone, I mean everyone. My mom and stepdad, my brother and his wife, and even my dad and stepmom. They all come home and it’s instant chaos. We’re supposed to eat dinner, even though it’s the middle of the afternoon. Everyone is frantically trying to bring in these giant pre-made plates of food. Everything on the plates is muted in color–an unappetizing shade of gray–and it all looks the same. Scrambled eggs, potato cakes, mysterious tuna/chicken/crab mush, and sausage, and everything is covered over in white biscuit gravy. Finally everyone gets their own plate, and we sit down to have dinner together. BoringFish isn’t there. She seems to have left the house for some reason. I call her name, but there’s no response. I ask at the table if anyone’s seen her, but they all are ignoring me, and wrapped up in conversation with each other. I’m the only one who seems to think that it’s weird that this combination of people is sitting here eating together as if it’s completely normal, and I’m also repulsed by the huge plate of weird, grayish food.

Everyone is talking, and devouring their dinner. I sorta pick at mine and ask, “What is this? Tuna? Chicken? Crab?” My dad says, a little too loudly, “It’s Ecktote.” [That’s not really what he said, but it was some sort of food substitute.] I push it around on my plate and take a bite of the eggs instead. Suddenly everyone else is getting up to leave. I ask what’s going on, and everyone answers in different ways at the same time. They’re going to a dinner party–another one!–and again, they’re all going together. I decline, saying that I didn’t know anything about it, and I’m not hungry anyway. My dad glares at me, and says, “Well, all right, but we’ll be back in a little while to go to the next event, and you’d better be ready to go.” Everyone leaves. It’s only been like five minutes since we all sat down; it’s very strange.

I stand there in the hallway, wondering what to make of all this. I walk through the rest of the house to look for BoringFish, but I don’t find her. When I walk into my old bedroom, it’s full of Christmas decorations, with puffy cotton on the ceiling to look like snow, with little white Christmas lights poking out every few inches. I think it’s odd that there’s snow on the ceiling. I also think it’s odd that there are two women in there, dressed in green, wrapping presents and making little trinkets. They’re talking animatedly to each other when I walk in, and my arrival just means that they include me in the non-stop flow of conversation. One of them grabs a can of sticky stuff that they’re using like glue, to wrap the presents. She holds it up to show me, and says, “I got it at Erthler’s.” Another nonsensical, generic name, but this time it’s a store. I kinda laugh and say, “What’s ‘Erthler’s’? I’m from Portland. We don’t have one there.” I walk back out of the room, and as I do, I hit the light switch out of habit.

I poke my head back in and say to the women, “Oops, sorry about that.” and hit the switch to turn the light back on. The Christmas lights start to flicker, and they won’t come back on. I flick the switch on and off, and wiggle it around, and they eventually come back on, so I leave.

Just then, everyone comes bursting in the door. Again, it’s only been a few minutes since they left, but my dad sees me and says, “Okay, are you ready to go?” “No,” I say. “I’m not going.” I’m still wearing the T-shirt, boxers and beanie hat that I’ve been wearing the whole time. He starts to yell at me, saying how he can’t believe that he bought me this ticket and that I’m wasting all this money, not to mention that this dinner is for charity and all the food’s going to go to waste. I say, “I didn’t even know about it until now, and I don’t feel too great. I’m not gonna go.”
He continues yelling, and my stepmom is there too, saying to him, “Well, maybe he didn’t get the message after all? We should hear his side of the story.” I gesture to her and say, exasperatedly, “Thank you. I promise you that this is the first I’ve heard of it.” My dad is silent. I notice that he’s shaved his beard and grown his mustache out long, into a scruffy handlebar style. He also has what I thought was a wart next to his nose, but after I look at it for a second, I see that it’s actually a small screw from some sort of surgery.

I say again that I’m not going, and my stepmom says, “Well, I guess we’ll pay for in calories what we paid for in money” or something weird like that, to fill the awkward silence. They go outside and drive away.

That’s when I woke up, not at all rested. Boy, I wonder what that dream means.

I’m late for work, dang it.

My first dream of the New Year was short, but far from sweet. I had just awakened in the morning, and rolled over to go back to sleep, and as I did, I had one of those short little dreams that you tend to have when you’re in the in-between stages of sleep, and fading off again.

* * * *

I’m riding my mountain bike on a grassy double-track road across a field of foot-high yellow wheat, and there are farms on each side for miles in every direction. I ride along the road, and I notice the dirt and rocks and sticks, and I avoid the larger obstacles. The road comes to an end, and I come to an open gate that marks the edge of someone’s property. There is a barbed-wire fence separating this property from the adjacent ones.

I dismount from my bike and walk toward the gate. A thin, grizzled farmer in his late fifties walks up to the gate, greets me, and says, “That’s about as far as this road goes. You can get through this way [he gestures toward his house], but it’s probably better for you to just go back the way you came. Be careful, though. The most dangerous part is right up there.” He points at a spot about fifty yards up the road. I didn’t notice anything unusual on my way in, but I nod and keep my mouth shut. He seems to sense my disbelief. “There’ve been serial killers near here,” he says. “Good luck to you. See ya around.” He turns and starts to walk back toward his house. He gives me one of those little over-the-shoulder waves without looking back, and I turn around and walk my bike back up the road, in the direction from which I came.

As soon as I get to the point on the road that the farmer had gestured to, a man comes running toward me at an impossible speed, firing blast after blast from his gigantic shotgun.

That scared the hell out of me and woke me up. Nice way to start the year.

Dream 1:

I should have written this one down the minute I woke up, because all I can remember now is the end of it:

I leave the building I’m in and walk outside, where I walk down a path made of impossibly colorful rocks that are flat on one side, but when I pick one up and turn it over for a closer investigation, I find that it’s jagged and sticks down about eighteen inches into the ground. I set it back down into the path, and walk back into the building to look for the owner so that I can buy one of these beautiful rocks, but I don’t find him, so I turn and walk back outside.

* * * * *

Dream 2:

I own an antique shop in a weathered, two-story little building with dark cedar siding in a small town on the Northern California coast. There are six or eight different businesses in the building. My shop is on one side, in the front, and there is a small bookstore on the opposite side, and there is a dark but cosy little brew pub between us, right in the middle of the building. There’s a lady who sells little touristy gifts upstairs, and there are two other symbiotic–and similarly archaic–businesses up there too. This is not a high-tech building, and we’re all proud of that.

The woman from upstairs comes down and buys a replica of a small Rodin statue from me, which she breaks not long after the she buys it. Rather than come to me directly, however, she complains bitterly and endlessly to the owner of the brew pub, who takes it upon himself to expose what he thinks are my dishonest business practices. He puts up huge signs in every one of his windows that say things disparaging my store; how all I sell is ‘junk’ and how I’m a ‘crook’, and that sort of thing. I walk over many times to talk with him, but he’s never around. I walk upstairs to talk to the woman, and she’s irate. I ask her why she didn’t just come to me first, and we could have sorted it out. She cries and yells something like, ‘How could you sell things like this’ and seems incapable of carrying on a rational discussion, so I leave.

I turn and walk around the corner by the bookstore at the far side of the building, and just then, time seems to jump forward. It’s now about twenty years later, and the building looks exactly the same, except slightly more weathered. It’s been turned into a kind of museum now, with huge interpretive signs everywhere saying this is where such-and-such happened in the feud, and this is where the brew pub or the book store or the antique shop used to be. Apparently our little disagreement over the statue turned out to be a huge event in the life of the town. It’s as if the town is trying to be another Monterey, California, with all the canneries and the Steinbeck references and the interpretive signs, except that this town isn’t Monterey, and no one has ever written about it, and therefore it comes across as what it is; a third-rate, sleepy little beach town that’s trying to attract attention in any way that it can.

As I walk around the back toward a restaurant in a new wing of the building, there is a large and colorful mural in the corner, painted directly on the wall of the building, which tells the whole story, but in a trumped-up way that is both pathetic and comic, trying to portray it as a historically significant national tragedy. I smile to myself, thinking that this town needs better things to commemorate, and that I’m so glad I moved away from it when I did.

The little restaurant is surprisingly great, though. It faces out onto a courtyard that’s in the same corner of the building as the mural, which very nicely makes the restaurant a de facto part of the tourist attraction. There’s a large, high tree in the middle of the courtyard that provides shade for the entire area, so the restaurant is in about as idyllic a setting as it can possibly be, at least for this particular place. I sit outside at a little round table under the tree with a sandwich and a glass of wine, and I look up at the afternoon sun shining through the leaves on the tree. As I finish eating, I find myself hoping that this little building does well for itself in this strange town, especially now that I don’t live there anymore and don’t have to deal with it. But I can certainly come visit any time I like, and enjoy it for what it is now, and I can also leave any time I like.

In this dream, I’m walking through a Beatles museum. It’s a round building of a very modern design. It consists of a long, curving main hallway with a multitude of small, separate rooms on each side of the hallway. All the walls and floors are white, but each one is decorated in a slightly different style.

Each room is crammed full of pictures, and some of the rooms are devoted to clothes that were worn by the group. Others are devoted to guitars. Still others are filled with vintage four-track tape machines which visitors can use to listen to rare recordings, and make their own remixes (for a steep extra fee, of course).

As I’m walking by myself through this museum, I turn and walk into a newly-built room that is filled with only a few smallish pictures on two of the walls, a large blackboard on the third wall, a white tile floor. . .and three of the actual, live Beatles. It’s John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, looking as they did in late 1964 or early 1965.

The three guys are sitting on the floor, leaning back against the blackboard wall. They are talking with each other and laughing, as a group of about eight or ten children sit on the floor and color. In the middle of the floor there is a small, round white viewing table with a glass top. The table spins slowly, thanks to a small electric motor inside it. The kids’ teacher walks in the room, so I sit down on top of the table.

It is only then that we all notice what the kids have been coloring all this time. They’ve been using their crayons to color the individual tiles on the floor of the room. They have also written a bunch of short phrases and letters all over the white table top. The teacher is horrified, and she starts to talk very seriously to the kids. She grabs the little cardboard box and starts to collect all the crayons, but the Beatles are actually impressed with how beautiful the multi-colored floor looks now, especially compared to the stark white of the rest of the museum. Ringo tells the teacher to “let ’em keep at it,” and Paul starts to theorize about how “in a million years, this room will be the most famous room ‘ere, ’cause it’s our favourite” and because “we actually hung out in here and all that.”

The teacher seems to think I’m a member of the Beatles, so I decide to play along and pretend to be George Harrison. Since I’m still sitting on the table, she asks me if I’m the one who wrote all over it. I say, in a very distinguished-like Liverpudlian accent, “It might appear that way, but it wasn’t me. I only thought about it.” I point at one of the kids. “He’s the one who wrote it all.” Everyone in the room laughs. I leave my arm outstretched, and as the table spins around to the kid I pointed at, he grabs my finger, holds on, and runs around the table like it’s a merry-go-round.

It’s a very sweet and hilarious moment, and that’s when I woke up.

* * * *

p.s. – I don’t know why I’ve had so many vivid and strange dreams lately, but I’ve certainly enjoyed them, and obviously I’m happy to keep posting them here.

p.p.s. – It’s snowing!

This dream starts at my mom’s house, which this time is my childhood house on 55th Avenue in Yakima. I’m in the dining room, looking through a bunch of old boxes, and I find a box of Christmas cakes and pastries and breads from the year before. They aren’t wrapped or anything. I yell to my mom, who’s in the kitchen, “Hey, mom, is it okay if I throw this stuff away? It’s old food, that’s been sitting here for a year. Obviously you guys aren’t going to eat it.” She hems and haws, so I decide to leave the stuff for her to go through on her own.

I go outside and start working on my Honda, fixing the windows because someone tried to break into the car, and now they won’t roll up correctly. [This is the case in real life, too, incidentally.] I walk inside to get something, and my mom walks toward me with a screwdriver pointed at me. I get startled and confused, and I step back from her. She says, “No no. . .you’re misunderstanding me,” and she puts a few of those small alcohol-soaked medical cleaning cloths on the end of the screwdriver and then starts to clean a place on the front of my neck. I think it’s ridiculous for her to be doing that, but when she’s done, I thank her and then go back outside to finish working on the car. I finish one window, but the other is cracked and broken on the bottom. I think to myself, ‘Great; no window at all on this side of the car. What am I gonna do when it rains?’ I get mad, throw down the tools, and storm off down the street.

While I’m out, I run into Jake [Jacob Ray from the Young Immortals]. I tell him I’m just out for a walk, but he’s welcome to join me. I have a pretty heavy backpack on my back for some reason, with a bunch of my stuff in it, including a change of clothes, a whole bunch of CD’s, and a couple of microphones. We start walking and talking, and this scruffy red-haired street kid in his mid-twenties starts hassling me. He’s wearing a jacket with patches strategically placed all over it. He’s talking to someone else, but every time I move to walk away, he blocks me. I try walking away from him, and he walks over to stop me again. I tell him seriously, “Dude. . .I’m leaving now.” Jake is nowhere to be seen, so I turn and walk away. StreetGuy ends his conversation with the other person and starts to follow me. I step off the sidewalk and start to walk in front of a huge yellow four-wheel-drive pickup truck that a fiftyish woman and her adult daughter just got into. They start it and pull out, and I almost get run over, but I jump up and grab onto the hood. My feet are about a foot off the ground, and I’m holding myself up with just my arms.

I yell for the driver to “Stop, dammit!” She speeds up and says loudly, “I’ll have to anyway, right up here.” I realize that it’s a good way for me to put some distance between myself and the street guy, so I wait until she comes to the stop light, and then I jump down and run off. I’m next to the light-rail train tracks. I can see the guy about two blocks away, running toward me, so I run along the fence, on the opposite side of the tracks from the passenger platform. I’m having a hard time running because there are metal wires everywhere, holding up the roof of the platform, and because I’m wearing the huge backpack. StreetGuy continues to gain ground on me, so I climb over the fence and jump into the canal. The current moves me along nicely for a while, and when I get to the main part of town, I swim over to the edge and scramble out.

I’m still wearing the backpack, which now weighs twice as much as it did when it was dry. I take it off, unzip it, and rummage around to find my phone and call Jake, but the phone is freaking out because it’s been in the water. I turn it off and on again, but it’s still not working right, so I start to walk in the direction of the town’s main square. Jake is there, and he sees me and says, “Ohhh, buddy, I was really worried! Glad you’re okay.” We walk across the square and go toward a smallish basement bar. I tell Jake, “I want to leave as soon as possible. I can’t stay very long; that guy’s still after me.” He agrees. Waiting in the short line of people are the pickup driver and her daughter. The daughter recognizes me and says, “Hey, you’re the guy wh–” but Jake and I push past them, walk past the door guy at the bottom of the stairs–who is so intent on the people in the line that he doesn’t even look over at us–and walk into the dark bar. The lighting is very subdued and cool, with white Christmas lights around the edge of the ceiling and candles throughout the room.

Somehow we get separated instantly. Jake disappears to talk to a woman friend he sees, and I walk through the dark bar into the big, bright adjoining room, which has fluorescent lights in the ceiling. The seats are arranged in rows, like the waiting room at a hair salon, except every other row is facing the opposite direction so that people can socialize. In between the rows of chairs is a row of low wooden tables, covered with magazines of all types. There are a bunch of people in there, sitting and chatting and having drinks. I see my old roommate Rob [from Yakima], who I haven’t seen since I left there. He’s dressed very strangely, in a navy blue mesh shirt and black jeans, and he’s a bit thinner than he used to be, but other than that, he seems the same. He introduces me to a girl that he just met. She’s Asian, and she’s pretending that she hardly speaks any English because she’s not interested in Rob. I find this to be hilarious, and when he introduces me to her, we shake hands and share a knowing smile. I tell her it’s great to meet her, and tell Rob that it’s been good to see him, but that I have to go because “there’s this guy who keeps following me and stuff.”

After that, there was another long section which I can’t quite recall, and then I woke up.

Oh my gosh. . .I got up at 6:30, and it’s now 7:30. It took an hour to write all this down!