DREAMS FROM 1979
DREAMS FROM 1979
Most of my dreams prior to the 1980s are included in my daily journals and my trip journals. Dreams are placed unpredictably in the 1970s.
1/1/79
SHIP AND OPERA
1) There's a view of a ship in a storm (rather like Tuesday's film of "I Know Where I'm Going") and there's a man overboard, so the hero jumps over but catches onto the side of the ship with one hand. There are large waves. Then it's dark and all three men who were on the ship are lying in a yard recovering, so no one was killed in the rather melodramatic dream.
2) I'm buying opera tickets for Row 4, seat 44, for "The Trojans," but I forget my tickets and take Marty's tickets for tomorrow as a guide, and though they're way on the side of the balcony, there's a good view of the stage for a funny sequence of soldiers marching off, and then men running for a bus on the street and walking alongside it, with "TV facing" girls performing, poorly, puzzle-patterns within bottoms of chairs---and I get ten tickets and 3 Wednesday lectures and I see that they'll conflict with the Actualism classes, but I know I'll be able to squeeze both in.
3) I lose the upper right of something I can't read in the notes, and I'm filing with a file and make a hole through, and I can't for the life of me remember what THAT was all about despite the fact that it was only 4 days ago and I took notes on it that I can't read now. Better than nothing, I suppose, but not terribly precise, and there's not even a good reason to fill up the page.
1/1/79
JOJA PAPA AND DEPARTMENT STORE
LAST DREAM: Paper that seems to be a combination of Soho Weekly News and Phoenix (maybe influenced by piling up the papers to take down to Dennis's yesterday, which I did today) has only 4 pages, but a photo that reproduced very darkly has a caption of "Joja Papa" (who I know to be another name for Joan Sumner, since I seemed to remember her talking about opening another shop) and Papas Frietas (Fried Potatoes? Sounds like a character I might have invented for "Come to Me---" (And in the dream I questioned the similarity between Papa and Papas, wondering if she'd taken HER name from HIM) in their new shop of old antiques on Christopher or Bleecker Street, and I put it aside because I think that I have to show it to Dennis, as the collectibles person.
SECOND LAST DREAM: I was walking in the twilight from Akron to Canton, and seeing a Bloomingdale's in the distance, I enter and walk through to the back, where I look for places that I remember but only see old woodworking on walls for the employee's entrance, and when I exit I'm in a foggy parking lot in the back of the building, but I'm around the corner and it gets lighter, and there's a business street that I remember, so I walk past lines of cars coming to work (like at the old IBM plant) and walk down the main street, I guess on my way back to Akron, and pass a house that's got a placard hanging outside proclaiming it "Strange House," and it has a curved stepped front upper-floor arrangement visible through windows [DETAILED DRAWING], and I think that it might be a strange setting for an interesting shop or bedroom, and I continue down the street, thinking of exactly how I'll be taking notes of the dream, seeming to go over the details that I'll be writing down, so that there's a TINY bit of wonderment when I DO wake that I MIGHT have taken down the notes before, but then I realize that THAT was in the dream, and think that's an additional fillip that I hadn't realized before, and hoped it wouldn't get to the point where I was REALLY confused, but that would be a bit over-frightening, unless I could advance to a Lucid Dream and actually control what happened to me in it. The brightness of the street and of the yellow-painted, white-trimmed "Strange House" was most notable.
1/2/79
DEPRESSING DREAM OF CLASS
DEPRESSING dream of engineering class with horrible teacher who seems determined that he'll weed out the dilettantes from the MEN. He says he SAID at the start of classes that it'll be rough, but I try to hold down my anger and he says it would do NO good to protest to the school authorities because everyone will be against "us," by which he SEEMS to mean GAYS. "Final question" is to "specify window construction---height---meaning CENTERED in height," he informs me snottily, and the "materials" are stacks of GROCERIES, cans of grapefruit juice, bottles of soda, packages of napkins, and other canned goods [DETAILED DRAWING], and I look at a top-heavy section and moving it a tiny bit causes the whole thing to fall, and then some of the rest of the class maliciously take various pieces of it, so it's impossible to reconstruct, and the teacher just gloats. There's also the oppressive idea that we'll be in danger or be attacked on the street outside by the other students in the class, too! I think in desperation of FINDING the book from which the teacher took the problem, and think to trace by working in the books in the library, but I don't know if I have the time. Take those notes at 8:15 and then do some lightwork to lighten up a bit, and doze to 10 and up with MORE DREAMS: there's a smoldering ash fire in a white Styrofoam musical instrument like a lute that had been used as an ashtray, and I blow it a few times while talking on a telephone and then finally douse it underwater completely. Then there are elevator banks---get onto one and it goes down to 2 and then back up to 7, and I leave my shoulder bag with some women inside and find the elevators through a glass lobby with signs of "Push Paltern" on the doors, and find those are "only up or only down" and there's the yellow-faced Bill Schmidt, or whoever, from IBM. AND then two of us are trying out for a part in a play, or for a part I thought I HAD, and I only have notebook sheets of the script and I don't even know which CHARACTER I was to memorize the lines for, and then the abstracted director, who didn't even look at us as he shook hands with us, seemed to dislike BOTH of us personality-wise, and again there was no method of recourse to correct the prejudice against us. Frustrating dream, which leads to even more frustrated note taking (see DIARY 13795).
1/3/79
TANNED BODY IN TRAVEL
Some relative stranger and I are planning a trip, and I mention to him that it's rather like the motor trip I took through Germany and Switzerland before, but I can't think of the name of the places we went, so I fudge with place names like Dortmund and Schweiz. I'm trying to jerk off in some hotel room when my roommate (who doesn't seem to like it) goes into the bathroom to shower, so I go to the sink and start to urinate into the toilet below it, hoping to jerk off before he comes out, but I'm startled to see this figure which is my reflection coming toward me: it has my body and the general cast of my face, but the chin is very square, the eyes are very dark, and the skin is VERY tanned, almost an East Indian brown-black, and I think how very well it looks with me, even making my hairline look down lower, but as I brush my hands through my hair I can see that there's a high-rise of white forehead back to the hairline, and I think that I'll have to keep that down so it won't look silly, and I'm starting to worry about the whiteness of the skin showing through the almost blackness of my curly hair, and I hope it'll stay that curly after it's dried. I like very much the masculinity of my new jaw, and the hair dropping low makes me look like an urchin of about 16, which is great. Then my fellow-traveler comes out of the john and I have to stop jerking off and make as if to urinate, and he says something, but that's about all I remember of that sequence. There was another section that seemed to involve Joan Ann De Mattia, but I can't remember what it was. Debated taking notes on the dreams this morning as I woke, but I thought of all the notes I'd taken before, so I thought to get right out of bed and type the pages, but since the radiator was on, I decided to get into the shower quickly to take advantage of the heat, and then when I hadn't finished my lightwork in the shower, decided to wash the dishes to give continuity to the time that I could think about lightwork, and then after I scoured the sink I phoned Virginia Martin and there didn't seem to be time to get to this page before 11:35, which it is now, by which time I had forgotten any of the details of the other segments of the dream today.
1/4/79
VALUABLE SUITCASES AND STAMPS
VERY fragmentary and episodic dream of myself in a strange town trying to locate a particular store or find a particular person, which means that I have to do a lot of running around and I don't want to carry my suitcase with me so I ask someone whom I don't know to watch it, and from a distance turn around and find that that person's wandered off and my suitcase, filled with what I start to think of as valuables and later fantasize as being full of money, though I never see the money, really, is standing there on the street all by itself, and I fear someone will come along and pick it up and run off with it. But when I get back to the suitcase, it's still there, and the vague people who are warning me to be careful can be flouted. Then there's a paper bag standing there, which turns out to be full of postage stamps (or something like S&H Green Stamps or Yellow Stamps, or perhaps postage-due stamps), and when I pick up the bag one of the corners rips and lots of stamps peel away from their neatly arranged stacks, and I'm embarrassed because now people know there are stamps in the bag, and I try to put that into my suitcase and that doesn't quite work, so I have to carry the suitcase AND the paper bag, and I'm aware that the rising wind will make it difficult to keep the stamps from flying out of the bag, but I'm hoping only to lose some very minor hundredth copies, thinking that the sheets and souvenir sheets are so large that they'll hold together and not be blown away by the wind. I'm in another position with ANOTHER suitcase, and this time it seems that it just contains my personal stuff, and it's not so much that it's valuable, it'd just be inconvenient to replace the clothes and shaving and tooth-brushing utensils, so I'd rather that my bag not be taken, and it might be a smaller version of the old brown leather bag that I finally had to close with a belt. But nothing was ever taken, I seemed to end up in the dream with at least most of the stamps, and all of the people who seemed to be warming me were paranoid, and the possibly larcenous passersby turned out to be honest people, so that though there was worry in the dream, it seemed to have a relatively "happy ending."
1/14/79
ISLAND / THEATER / FOURSOME
6 am dream notes: On island, watching sunset on shore with tiny lapping waves making the rushes rock back and forth, and people are asking me about a map of the island, which I seem to know, though I'm not sure where it is [DETAILED DRAWING]. Wander island and get into a house which turns into a very complex, winding-streeted Islamic souk and get lost, trying to move past divans to get out, and get finally out. Back where sunset is when I get told "there" and there it is. There's a ritual (as in Key West article) of watching the sun set, and a friend of mine (a bit like Mary Stanley) and I get a ride in a car and I join them, getting a ride up a hill to "mother's house" at the top, adjoining a garage which adjoins a garage from the house next door, and we're offered to see inside, and they leave, somehow. Out and down hill to watch a VERY wealthy man in a Rolls (Bill Fuchs yesterday?) giving a lift to a squalid Indian family, and he puts his saried fat wife in the back, grumbling. Then I'm in a grocery shop and watch island customs and litter on floor and a huge lizard hanging on a wall and LOTS of stuff on shelves, and a man breaks up a trifle or a cheesecake and passes it around and I pass it around and look at the strange pink-peach soft cake. Take these notes at 8:30: I COME at 6:00, then have WONDERFUL dream of Avi and Amy sharing an apartment with "sitting room" and they're having friends over and two kid-salesmen come in with Michael Sullivan and he start MAKING the kids, and I'm worried at first, but they strip and pull out huge cocks and they go DOWN on them, and Michael comes very quickly, and I think that's too fast, but his BIG-cocked kid comes too, and then Avi's partner shoots and Avi shows off and deposits semen before Amy and me and Maya and Michael and his friend and finishes off for himself, proud as can be, and Amy says she didn't like it (she SAID she had to expand her sexual feelings yesterday!), but I said she STAYED for it, and Maya is surprisingly tolerant, then there's LOTS of food: ice CREAM and whipped CREAM on hot-fudge sundae and its GREAT!
BEFORE that, I'm in huge audience, second row, for a Metropolitan Opera House production (something like Stanley Silverman's "Elephant Steps" or Robert Wilson's "Einstein on the Beach") in which EVERYONE participates: women to my left (like Margaret in class) hands up an inflated arm, plants in audience spread abandoned legs under painted faces (and they're in folding chairs, so I KNOW they're plants), and people stand alongside the wings and emote when asked. Then I'm in FRONT row next to a sexy guy who's part of the play, so he doesn't want sex, and a LARGE blond-wigged guy does an outrageous opera parody, and then the STAGE [DETAILED DRAWING] goes through incredible transformations and changes shapes, and then DENNIS drives onstage in a white VW, and I say "Park to the right so we can SEE," and he ALMOST backs off the stage watching the director's crotch, but then straightens out and parks correctly, and I'm FLABBERGASTED by the amount of DETAIL in the dreams!
1/14/79
LOEWS / BEERS / TEETH / PLAY / DISNEYLAND
4 dreams at 8:15:
1) The Follies Bergere took over an old Loews and the curtains opened to a beige stage-wall over a pink-plumed carousel, but the BACK walls went up and up into an ENORMOUS hollow ziggurat of IMMENSE dimensions, awesomely clean.
2) John and I were drinking beers in a bar somewhere and were charged $2.24, which I thought was a bit high, but included tax. I thought of Ohio.
3) My left upper teeth progressively curved DOWN so that I couldn't close my teeth and mouth, but when I finally pressed them back, there was a FLAP that formed across the back that worried me, and then I was in a bus terminal in which a man slipped and fell backward and hit his head on the ground (like subway gal).
4) Dee kin ai-je parle? was asked by a play-watching guy, and two actresses from the sides of the audience came over to help us, and one dragged ME backward and toward the stage and kisses ME fully on mouth, putting me into action of play. (And I CONTINUE to have a strange headache in "spur" on left-rear-middle inner-brain.)
2 dreams at 9:55:
1) Zoo-bus goes to the proper back parking lot, but it's closed by a rail sticking in the ground, and I say "But now we can't come back by that trail in the rear of the amusement park, near the bears and birds (thinking of the San Diego Zoo map, no doubt, that I got out for Dennis yesterday)," and he says no, but others start to argue and he stops beside a ravine and the car dangles over the side, somehow held up in his or my hands, and they're safe but scared.
2) There's a Disneyland-type series of rides, announced by laser-beam television pictures of roller coasters, but the lasers blink out and I say we should ride it, and go to the back of the line to find ourselves under zigzagging tubes above, containing other rides, including a single-capsule merry-go-round of dizzying speed, lots of enclosed funhouse tubes, and a funny elevator-lift ride that you step onto, rise speedily along a pillar, almost hit a white porcelain ceiling, and then a stomach-rising descent to the ground again. Lots of neon lights and noise and action, and it looks clean and modern, and I want to ride on this and that and the other, but don't know if we'll have enough tickets or time to do all we want to do, and the candy-stripe painting on the bottoms of the tubes was the most notable feature of all.
1/16/79
BARYSHNIKOV / BROWN STREET BRIDGE
1) Notes taken at 8:25: I'm talking to Baryshnikov after he's finished dancing by saying "Thank you for giving your dancing to the world," and he smiles and responds, "No, it is I who thank the world for permitting me to dance." I think of the article that I didn't read in the Times yesterday, and think it's a charming thing for him to say, even though it IS only a dream.
2) I'm walking away from my house, on Brown Street, and I come to the bridge over the railroad tracks, but the water is washing over it, and I go down beside the abutment and climb upward on tottery bigger-on-top-than-on-bottom rocks (as buildings were drawn in "Futuropolis" last Sunday night, and I think the water rushing over bridge, though MINE was freezing in parts, was reminiscent of the "spring through house" in the "Visionary Architecture" of Sunday night, too), and they start crumbling as I get to the top, so I make sure that I knock down all the weak ones, so that no one will get hurt (and maybe so that no one can follow me up), and a man looks down over the brink and extends a hand, though whether he wants to help me or warm me or threaten me I'm not sure, and when I get to the top the flow of water slows and people are beginning to put boards up across the center of the wrecked bridge and are starting to walk across, and passersby cheer the first buses that cross their makeshift repairs. I'm watching all this from somewhat off to the side and higher than the bridge, but I don't question my position in the dream, rather like on an island in the stream above the bridge.
3) Then I'm into a little house at the side of the bridge, and I seem to think it's the caretaker's house, from the look and position of it, and she's there, sitting in one of the rooms in a rocking chair beside a fire, and looking out one of the windows that looks out over the precipice the bridge adjoins, and we chat for a bit, comradely, as if we'd known each other before and I'm not just a stranger, or someone who's returned to his hometown after having been away for a number of years. In MOST dreams I have no idea how old I am, since I'm looking out from my eyes and don't see any of my body at all, so I don't even know how I'm dressed or what I look like.
1/16/79
WAR-WASTED CITIES / BAKU / REINCARNATION
1) I watch a newsreel of "War-wasted cities of the plain" in black and white, rather like "Unknown War," and then I'm standing on a shore of a lake where the water is churning with debris from across the water, yellow as if from streams of urine, and WAY across the water, against the pale blue sky, I can see two smoke-columns from two burning cities, and the one on the right is churning in the air, and since I know I'm so far away from the city, I wonder what it must be like in the inferno below, and since it's been burning for a number of days (though somehow I think it's a couple of MONTHS, since the movie's been made and processed and the fire's STILL raging!), and I think that it must be TOTALLY destroyed beneath. Then I'm walking down a boardwalk toward a dock with a crowd of people, and woman turns in the crowd and smiles at me and begins to flirt, and I hope she won't say anything, since I don't know Russian, and she smiles with thick, red-painted lips, though the rest of her face wears no makeup, and she walks close up to me and gently grinds one hip against my right hip, and she takes my arm and smiles up at me, and twists my head around gently to the right and parts her large red lips and gives me a kiss that lingers. By this time we're at the top of the T we'd been walking toward, and most are going off to the left into safety and I have to go to the right, and a child detaches itself from the crowd and runs wailing toward me, and I can hear it's pinched, longing voice crying "A Baku," and the cry strikes a chord in me so strongly that when I wake I think there MIGHT be some kind of reincarnation thoughts here somewhere. Annoyed with the electric blanket, wonder if there's been research on damage from them, though I doubt it, and think to change it only for PRE-heat, and then flare up and try to SEE energies in the hands with different energies, but none of them work, and I write notes after looking at my watch and seeing that it's 6:16 in the light of the electric-blanket control, which I turn down, and try to get some mystical thoughts going, but I just piss at 5:45 and get back to sleep, disappointed that I'm not ready for elaborate visionary experiences quite yet---but soon??
1/18/79
TRIRERA REYES / JOHN CASARINO / EDDIE
1) I'm sleeping on an open back sleeping porch at Eddie's, and I think it's on Horatio Street, and can sort of remember from a map that there's a blank area on the map behind it, but I don't expect this CLIFF with houses clinging to it, supports angled down to concrete stanchions. three to five stories tall, surrounding a patch of woods through which I can see the white flash of a sizable waterfall! I'm wondering if he ever gets mosquitoes, since the porch is open except for an awning overhead, and then think I might be at his place in Puerto Rico. Then the two next to me stir and wake, and it's only vaguely Eddie but it's definitely John Casarino, and he starts playing with his cock and round corrugated balls, and he starts to come up, and Eddie starts to come up, and John reaches down and finds I'm hard, so he gets hard and I put his short, sharply up-curving cock into my mouth and suck a bit, and when I wake I find that I'm about as hard as I was in the dream, and was pleased that John seemed to have lost some weight, too.
2) I'm in a small gallery somewhere, looking at a series of things that are going to be auctioned off, and some of the paintings on the wall are tiny and muted in color, as if they were modernistic but old, and they seemed to be signed "Reyes," not that I can read it, but I "know" they are. Then someone next to me points to the pillows, which have no slips, in the window on a sort of a floor, and I look in and there are cards attached to them that give me the impression---though they don't actually say that---that they're from the estate of Trirera Reyes, and I make some sort of joke about how she must have died, because there are all her possessions on auction as well as all her paintings, and I think that it might be a kick to get someone who's going to be so valuable so cheaply, and I remark, even in the dream, about her name, thinking that though her first name SOUNDS repetitious, the vowel sequence is i-e-a, so that none of them are repeated; there ARE a lot of r's, however. Wake with an erection and think about playing, but by the time the alarm rings I've gone down, and by the time Dennis starts stirring I'm completely flaccid, but come up with him.
1/19/79
BROTHERS / JOHN AND SPRAYING
1) Start notes at 8:45---don't remember how the dream began, but I was in some sort of class and some guy was helping out, and then I asked for directions to an address I knew about, and went in two directions and met a gay guy at his house. He and I chatted for a bit and who should enter but the first guy, from class, and I wonder if they're lovers, and it turns out they're brothers, yet I still don't know if one or both are gay. I have to get back to class (the first guy insists somewhat ruefully that he's only the ASSISTANT teacher), and get a bus in the right direction, but when I ask to be let off at Henry Street, the bus driver starts to point out directions, and then solicitously backs the bus (it's one of the smaller 8-10 passenger busses, but the other passengers are somewhat puzzled by his backing into the winding residential streets) to a confusing intersection and points out exactly where I should go. It MAY have been the second guy in his apartment that I remember the fragment of looking up at his VERY high ceilings and then he shows me a color photograph of himself standing in his old apartment, and I remark "You seem to like apartments with high ceilings," to him, and he hadn't observed it before. The old apartment had striking yellow and green colors, while the new seemed to go more toward the browns and grays in color, but both seemed newly decorated.
2) I'm at some sink (rather like Arnie's bathroom) washing some odd noodles that split down the side (like corn husks around Mexican cornmeal tamales), and John comes over from across the hall and says "Is she spraying for ROACHES up there?" and I listen, not able to smell the smell as much as he seems to be able to, and I can at least hear the sound of spraying coming from up there, but I can't think of why he'd come to me or what we'd say to her, since she's doing it in her own apartment. Interesting emphasis on the SENSUAL: the colors in the first, the sounds and smells in the second, though smell only in the sense that I DIDN'T smell, but at least the CONCEPT of smell entered in---as well as food, which I don't remember as being a common theme for dreaming.
1/20/79
LEMON SHERBET / PHILADELPHIA / VISITING
1) A group of five of us are sitting in an ice-cream shop, and Dennis, across from me, and I have a lemon sherbet that I TASTE with surprise and say "Oh, it's nice and creamy and lemony." Waiter produces a "magic cream" for someone who's sitting outside the booth on a chair to my right, and I look to the side to see this slightly wobbly floating plastic container of cream, but then someone breaks the "wire" and it spills to the floor. There's another illusion that messes up, too. We're enjoying ourselves and eating.
2) I'm visiting whom I take to be Bernie Mazie in Philadelphia, and Pope wafts in with his nose in the air, and there are other VERY tall guests (I am as tall as they, but I'm standing on the beds and hopping back and forth between two of them), and then I'm out walking down an alleyway and a HUGE whistling wind comes up. I look at what I thought were brick houses on moving platforms of rusting rails and wheels, but the wind blows them over away from me and I see they're only hollow frames of insul-brick, which falls with a satisfying crash and they tumble over each other. I look up to the top of a hill and see a blue-painted house that I think must be the house from dream 3, which must therefore have come first chronologically.
3) I'm visiting a girl who lives next to a roller coaster, and we look out one window and see the lower supports of a dip in the track, but underneath is a casino, and we can look down, helped by a spotlight that seems to be coming from one of the windows of the house that we're in, since we can't see the shadows the light casts, and gamblers look up from a green baize table with about 8 areas marked, like a craps table, and back in the room the girl remarks she can look out the window at the ocean that "stretches on the west to Japan and on the north to Alaska," so we're on the Pacific, and I say "I know what I'll do this afternoon," thinking of the roller coaster, and then we're on the front lawn and I'm thinking of lining up pictures which would on the ONE hand show this house with lawns going down to the ocean, and in ANOTHER picture show the roller coaster built right up against the back of it, and there are lots of people in the pictures who I'm not sure who they are.
1/28/79
ARMY / PUPPETS / SKATEBOARD
1a) I'm getting out of the Army, and everyone has to have a countersignature on some roster, but I don't have it, but I'm explaining that it's not the PAPER that gets me out of the Army, I just GO and that's all there is to it.
1b) I'm leaving, with two others, on a SKATEBOARD, and they're in front moving it along and I'm just riding along in the back, so I crouch very low on my belly and spread my legs apart to improve my center of gravity and have no trouble staying on it. At times the front reverses position with the back, and I'm looking at everything from a TV camera from VERY low down.
1c) At the end of the road with the skateboard is a LARGE pile of garbage blocking the way rather like the boughs over the stream I remember someone having to break in something in Dennis's New Yorker yesterday), and I look to the left and see a concrete-block house being constructed that we could easily step through to get down to the lower level, but I say "The cops are there, and their job is to say no, so they won't let us go." So we have to survey the stack, and I can see from the side that it thins out just inside the entrance on the center, where the street would have gone through, and I figure if we all bend VERY low on the skateboard we'll be able to push our way through the garbage and get to the other side of the intersection, where we'll be out of the Army camp at last and independent.
2a) There's a series of TV shows, and there are plush puppets on people's heads and shoulders who are riding oversized tricycles, so that it looks like these stuffed animals are riding trikes, but you can look below and see one foot pushing the velocipede along the floor in intricate designs.
2b) Then on the same TV show there are a troop of kids who are doing acrobatics with very elaborate headdresses on, and it dawns on me that there are OTHER kids inside the headdresses, which means they have to move around on top and bottom to reestablish their balance after a somersault or a cartwheel, and they do it so well that the audience is quite surprised when the kid on top jumps off the shoulders of the kid on the bottom and the number of entertainers suddenly doubles, and all in silky tight costumes.
2/3/79
SCANDINAVIA
1) First, however, there's this strange demonstration of flipping a square of silk so quickly that it sort of resonates, goes into very rapid, very tiny sequences of vibration that causes it to stiffen like a sheet of tin, making a strident whirring sound, and it can be manipulated at various angles to make a sail-like structure, a topological illustration of the gravitational field around a planet (a tablecloth with a depression in the center), or the contour of a rounded hillock. Everyone's amazed at the demonstration, but it seems to have been something I always knew how to do and thought was common, like my balancing of two forks on a toothpick and then burning the ends of the wood to the glass. The cloth was bright red swatches.
2) Then I was in a triangular apartment that was cut into three rooms [DETAILED DRAWING], saying that I had to organize the furniture in it, again mostly in red, so that it didn't appear to be so cluttered. Then Dennis and I were in bed in that place, and there was a silver bas-relief (we've been talking about this term for the past two days) of a woman fellating a man, and he said it was a kicky thing to have as a room decoration, and we started to have sex.
3) Then I was on a ship (both these last two seemed to be in some Scandinavian country) that was a cheap tour, and lunch consisted of cold cuts and a buffet being loaded over the side of the ship from shore, while the tourists wandered around the decks, paper plates in hand, eating with plastic forks and looking rather depressed with their choice of vacation.
4) Then Dennis and I were in some sort of outpost, and the guard was out, but his little cubicle was marked DUT, which I took to be "short" for "duty," and there was a sign saying that "Muduri" were stored there, and I thought it strange that guns and ammunition would be available to the casual tourist for the mere taking. Also, there were colorful brochures with peasant women in white lace hats and blue-and-white embroidered skirts and aprons smiling in the streets of a place called Borti, but the I had TWO dots over it, and I knew it was short, like the I in IT, and I felt pleased that there would be tours that we could take even though we really didn't know much about the country, but all the information we needed was in the hut, which Dennis wanted to leave before having sex and being interrupted by the guard's return.
2/6/79
GREECE AND TYPEWRITING
1) I'm taking some sort of vacation in what I know to be Greece, but I'm staying in a tiny two-room house occupied by my mother and some small child who I guess is Rita in one tiny bed in one room, while my bed takes up almost the entire second room. Yet I'm only a tourist, sitting in my room reading books while I know I just have five days of my vacation left and vaguely wonder why I'm not touring the town. I sort of know that I've become weary of seeing the city sights, but I know that if I go to the seaside there will be marvelous surf, maybe some snorkeling, and more pleasant scenes than in the city, yet I sit and read. Then inspectors come around twice: the first time I'm hiding in some sort of basement, so I'm not found (something about the building capacity, not more than two people allowed per building), but the second time they come I can only hide behind a door which doesn't allow me room to conceal myself, and the officer sort of bends his head and I try to shrink away, but he bends farther and I'm revealed crouching behind the door, and he finds me and my mother looks distressed, though I think of her only as the kindly woman who's put me up (is this from Kozinski's comment that he's "staying in a private apartment" when he visits in New York? Vague feeling of apprehension and mystery throughout.
2) There's some sort of building-skeleton going up (probably based on the Spills and Thrills from the short-subject program on TV last night), and a camera is attached to one vertical girder as a small lift with a man sitting at a typewriter, typing busily away, is elevated along the side of the building, while the camera, which I'm manning, zooms up alongside him, and there's some sort of power cable attached to his typewriter that swoops up from behind me, and I have to duck my head quickly or I'd be hit or swept off my perch, and there's the vague crowd noise of "Whew, that was close," and he continues to the top of the building, drawn by a cable alongside the girder that might have come from the sea-scoops described on Nova last night for bringing up manganese nodules from the ocean floor. There were other fragments that I can't quite remember, either, but at least these are here.
2/18/79
DON MALOOF
1) He serves a paté (probably stemming from Dennis's comment about the tuna salad being like a paté when he had it as an appetizer before the chicken last night) that's mediocre, and I say it's good, but he says "No, it's not," with his marvelous authoritative finality, and there's nothing I can reply.
2) We're having a party in his large apartment in Brooklyn, and I know he has another place on an island somewhere, and still has his Manhattan apartment, and some woman's showing us photos of how his Manhattan place used to look---like a showroom with racks full of dresses and various other kinds of clothes down the centers of the floors---and she points to a lamp and says "That's in his Brooklyn place now," and I sort of nod, though I don't really remember anything specifically about it or where it's located now.
3) He's hosting a brunch at a beach-type restaurant and someone who looks like the dark-haired, bearded, earringed, jeaned fellow I've seen on the subway a number of times with a blond lover who lives in the Heights---he's ahead of me on the cafeteria-type line and he turns a plate of limp butter upside-down on a trayful of ice, makes some remark about it being too soft, and then pulls down sections of a stack of upside-down blue-doughed rice pizzas, telling me to take some, they're good, and in the melee there falls onto my plate a yellow napkin, a green placemat sort of braided like John's, and a chartreuse thin seating cushion, and I make a joke saying "This is enough for me to eat" and he glares at me and gives me a blue-doughed pizza off which most of the rice has fallen through the tray-grille to the floor.
4) There was an earlier fragment of wandering around southern Manhattan again and going up a side road and finding it ends in a white-fenced funneled quick-perspective POINT, and I look down at various roads and truck routes and garage areas rather like the view from the road leading to the Lafont-Latour Hotel in Paris looking down over the train works. So much of Don is involved since I'm planning now for a week to get back the 4 boxes of cards he's gotten delivery of from Indexstrip which will save me about 100% of the cost of the cards, and I can still sell them more expensively to friends.
2/18/79
ARMY DUTY
Someone who might be Larry Ball is following me through the night (and how many dreams take place in fields that are so dark that you can hardly read the writing on the signs on fences that you can dimly see against the dark sky?), and we're on our way to our Army duty, and we get to a wire-mesh fence with a sign, and I think that we'll have to find some way of climbing over when I go a bit to the left of the sign and there's a door, like a screen door, in the fence, behind which is the little office of the Officer of the Day, and we're into either a lit office or the dawn came up quickly, but in either case it's not COMPLETELY light and I can't figure out if this is going to be AWFUL or EASY: I've lost my shoes, and I look down to see the shine-less tops of some bedraggled bedroom slippers in brown leather, and wonder how on EARTH I can say I lost them (the loss seems connected to another fragment: I'm swimming in a lake and there's a current to the side, to what turns out to be a dam, and I have what I think may be stamps, but they may be shoes, in a box (which I hope doesn't get wet) that's floating in the water, and I see it go over the lip of the dam and it falls open and spills its contents underwater and I see it being swept through a sluice at the bottom of the valley, so I know whatever was in the box is NOW gone), and think that I could say I stepped into some cow dung (Earth Point?) in the field and just had to leave them behind, which I feel they'd believe. So I ask what time we have to be up after they ask US whether we want to start today (it's about 3 am, it seems) or tomorrow, and the officer says "We get up at 11 am," which I know sounds strange, so I'm wondering if he's just joking with me and tomorrow the crunch will come and it'll be just an awful experience, OR, after all, I AM an officer, and maybe I CAN get to the PX to get a new pair of shoes, so I say "I'll start today, then, might as well," since 8 hours' sleep would be enough, and I don't see his reaction, but I'm hoping it'll be favorable to me, since, though I don't know how long I have to stay, I'm hoping the stay will be as pleasant as possible even though it IS the Army, but it might have gotten easier since I'd been in in the 50s.
2/18/79
FAMILY GOING TO DRIVE-IN / OUT-OF-SORTS FEELING
I seem to remember a LONG detailed dream of going to a drive-in movie (in the daylight, or at least twilight), with this family of a mother and a father who sat in the front, with me in the middle, and various kids in the back seat, and we're at some sort of omnibus film in which the first portion is about gay guys, and in a short intermission the father turns to me and demands to know what it's all about, and I have the feeling that they know about my sexuality and I'm sort of there to talk them through their problems. They don't quite understand why I would WANT to be gay, and finally, as a last resort, I turn to the mother and ask "What if your son had to leave you in order to be with a man?" and I wanted to show her how good it would be for him to be INDEPENDENT, rather than dependent on her, but I get the feeling she's not going to answer the question as I'd like her to answer, and I'd better think of something else fast. Somewhere under here I get the idea that this MAY be some kind of school that I'm going to to investigate EXACTLY what it means to be gay, maybe for me to learn how NOT to be gay, and I wonder now if this has something to do with my increasing distancing from Dennis, who tries with anecdotes and sweetness and cooking to make me feel pleasant, but I still talk about the pressures of indexing, the need to catch up with my diary, my feeling like I'm coming down with a cold, my feeling "out of sorts" as I put it tonight, and then sneezing to "prove" that I might not be feeling very well. Anyway, tonight I offered to go to a film, and he sort of accepted, but when I called there was nothing we wanted to see close in time, and he brightened when I suggested we could do it tomorrow after his French lesson, so maybe he DOES feel sorry for my position and is willing to let me be alone and catch up with things so that I can feel like I can spend more time with him. But his SEXUALITY isn't interesting anymore, and he ASKS me last night why I don't go out with more guys, and I said I WANTED to, but I didn't think I had the time, but I KNEW it was something I had to devote more time to, and he said he thought I should, and it was nice to see that HE knew there was something here to think about, though how much is merely related to the WISDOM energy I'm working through is hard to know. Sort of wonder why BRUCE hasn't called to chat about it, either?
2/21/79
SEX AND PARTY HOUSE
1) Two guys are sprawled naked in the front row of a movie house, and the other two seats in the front tow, to their right, are filled with what look to be leather suits or wrapped parcels that are obviously reserving the seats for two other guys, so I sit in the middle of the second row, delighted to see that if I sit up straight I can see over their sunken heads and look down over their chests and cocks, which all appear to be rather small, and legs. Then they start playing with themselves, obviously not caring that I'm watching them, and there are four now, and some of the cocks are starting to grow, but two on the sides go down on the two center ones, so I don't get a very good view after all, and things are just about to start happening when I wake.
2) I'm traveling cross-country alone, though I've only made it so far from Akron to Youngstown, and there I meet some people who invite me to a party and when we get there it's back in a suburb of Akron again. There's a party in a modernistic house with LOTS of people dancing and talking, and then it gradually gets quieter as people fall asleep where they're sitting or lying on the floor, and the night passes quickly, because soon there's a record playing rather loudly and it moves through the house and outside through the louvers over the windows, which seem to be open, and I go outside to see a square rather like in the main city of a Caribbean island, or on Key West, with one side to the water and three sides for houses, and the house I came from is on one corner, but it looks dilapidated and unpainted from the outside, and I figure it's to show people who might want to rob it that it's not a very expensive place, as it is inside. Tourists have gotten up at dawn to come to the square to watch the natives dancing alone, in pairs, or in Greek-like chains and square-dancing groups in the square to the music, which the house-host doesn't appear to realize he's providing, and the tourists chat back and forth about how colorful it is, and I'm back inside the house and the host has awakened and is stretching and saying he has to make plans for the continuation of the party throughout the day, and I seem to have no thoughts or movements toward leaving, and it's tropical and lazy and nice and increasingly sunny---the night didn't even get that dark, so it may have been a full moon, or it may have just been lighted artificially.
2/22/79
ARABIAN TRAVEL
EXTREMELY elaborate dream, with detailed insets: starts by walking in the desert outside a walled Arabic city, seeing an old man bathing in a tub near a small entranceway, and we enter and walk down a long street, and since the souk is so intricate I try to find someone who'll draw me a map of the city with the name of the street we walked down, so I can retrace my steps, because, as I ruefully explain it, "I can't expect to see the same man taking a bath at the same place each time I want in." It seems I'm to meet someone to find my hotel for my one-night stay in this town, but I don't know where I'm to meet them, except I hope that I meet them in the hotel in which I'm to stay. Get involved with a family, but when I try to ask them where I am, they slip away through walls and down hallways and outdoors, and I go "outside," which turns out to be a larger INSIDE (as a souk appears to be inside), and I try to locate a distinctive doorway or place name or street name, but there's nothing, and I find I've gotten lost already, even though I took care to circle out with the smallest increments of space. Now I'm wandering down white-painted halls, looking in, wondering who speaks English, trying to find a sign somewhere, and I look to one side and see that this is only like a road-scaffolding around a huge central (if it's that) cavern-like room (inspired by the prisons of "Fidelio" last night?) with levels and darknesses and slanting ramps up and down, with no one there. It's now dark inside, and I stand at the top of the stairs and they begin sliding down, because this section of about 10 steps is a sort of escalator, and I marvel at the ingenuity of the transport: lots of people can stand on it, find their place on each step, and then it slants down (like the gate in "Fidelio"?) and glides down on oiled rails to a much lower level. I step off and it goes back up automatically, and I try to find a button to press for it on the wood-paneled walls of the shops here, but there are shop bells and apartment bells and traffic-light buttons, so I can't really find anything distinctive. Look across a tiny square and there's a nightclub with the sign Sarita and Clive, and I figure at least I can find my way to THAT, and some white-powdered lady (Lady Booby?) is giving a show for kids in the same costume she'll entertain the men with belly-dancing in later in the night. Now that I've found a PLACE, I lose TIME for a bit, and come back having spent a large part of the day in the company of a young male guide, who at length brings me back to his shop to buy something in lieu of tip for his time for the day, but I can't see anything that I want in the spun-glass, candy-like pendants and brooches and necklaces he's selling: ribbed-white confections of boats and birds and tiny houses, but they're glittery yet clunky and I don't think Rita would like ANY of it. Think to buy something to eat, but they only sell drinks of unknown quality, and I can see them whispering about how much I'm going to pay them, and I don't want to merely TIP, yet watch people taking count of various commissions, and I won't BUY, and then I need a jacket and the young guide gives me his double-breasted blue jacket, which I put on under my silky brown neckerchief, and it FEELS obsessively heavy, though not SWEATY or ITCHY as I'd expected, and he assures me I can bring it back to him, so AGAIN I have to know where I am, and AGAIN they all slip away before I can get them to draw me a map. So I'm wandering through the alleys of the city, stepping on and off curbs around the garbage-water of the city, and pass an old man who seems to be cruising me, but I think he may only want to rob me, and when he helps me across a street I look for one of my mesh-bags and look to see that HE has it. He returns it, all apologies, but I still think that he's trying to get the best of me in some way, and I can't think of what hotel to ask him for, but I'm not terribly worried about finding my friends: it's as if I know that I just have to find the best hotel in the town (rather like finding John in Manali) and I'll be directed to them, but it's getting late and I'm beginning to feel slightly hurried, and I go off down another street, thinking that I'm silly not to ask, because MOST of these people would speak English, being in Arabic countries that had been administered by Britain for years, but I don't even know where to ASK for, and anyway I have confidence in my ability to find my place just by serendipitous wanderings.
2/23/79
JAPAN AND SUSAN
1) I'm studying Japanese genetic diseases, it seems of females only, and I'm going down my list and there's a "KBO"-type woman who's standing there with her head down, very shy, rather like Meg in class, and I sympathize with her by saying that "things were chancy with you, you could have 'gone out'" and she smiled shyly and nodded her head to indicate that she knew it.
2) There's a party somewhere with Actualism people around, and Bruce was sitting next to me, but when he moves as we all leave the table, I look down and there's SUSAN, and I ask why she came back so soon, and she sort of shrugged and said "I'm back, that's all" and the party faded.
3) It might be in a Japanese-style hotel after the party, or maybe only the attendants are Japanese behind the hotel desk, or maybe it's not connected with the party, but I'm leaving this public place and look behind the desk to see an array of small satchels and briefcases, some of which are hidden under hanging coats which they pull aside, and I have a tag for the briefcase that I brought, glad to know that it was checked because I have the change of clothes that I need in it, and then they suggest that I look farther under the desk and collect my shoes and socks, and suddenly I'm aware that I'm barefoot, and I try to think that it doesn't matter and handle it calmly, but maybe it's only my shoes and rubbers underneath and I've been wearing my socks because it's the Japanese style to eat without shoes under the tables on the tatami mats. Maybe THAT'S why I thought it was Japanese in the first place, except that the darkly-dressed attendants seemed to be Japanese both in their faces, skin color, and in the constant bowing and smiling obsequiousness. Recorded this at 8:50 am, thinking that if I went into lightwork I might doze off and have another set of dreams, but the lightwork went so well (see DIARY 14113) that I jotted down another note at the bottom of the sheet about the panels being CREATORS HERE NOW and that I should add such thoughts into the Actualism article, and now that I have time to write, it seems like all KINDS of things are coming up to be handled by writing.
3/16/79
VARIOUS MOVIES
1) Watching movie with Paul McLean, but he has to leave and I stay, then decide to go wherever he's going, but he gets a cab which I chase as it turns left, then it turns left again, and I think he might be going around the block to pick me up, so I run BACK to where I started but he continues in his direction, thinking I'd stayed in the movies, so I go BACK inside.
2) There had been a "No entry after leaving" sign (as in the St. Marks) as I left, so I stand in the lobby which turns into an upstairs hallway, and since people pass and go downstairs into the small orchestra-seating section, I figure it's OK to try sitting there, but people are talking in all the good-to-sit-in corners so much that it would obviously do no good to tell the entire PLACE to shut up, but I'm actually back inside the theater so I can now go back upstairs where the people were more seriously interested in watching the film and it's more quiet. Rather plush, carpeted theater.
3) The movie "The Blue Blob" starts with streams of water flowing down a drain (obviously inspired by the bloody-water-down-drain scene from "Psycho" on Hitchcock's celebration Monday), and patterns of blue and turquoise form when the water drains off, forming the "basis" for the blob, and then the remaining "basis" goes to the drain and pulls junk up from the drain, which becomes a silvery-gray figure of a man who goes BACK to the drain and pulls up what looks to be the skeleton of a FISH, and the figure lays on it with its head aligned with the tail and it merges into some NEW kind of monster [DETAILED DRAWING].
4) Now IN the movie, which starts with a bright light on a hill, then the "blue creature" circles around just outside vision, and I'm inside some sort of Lego block-like building where I can look out windows to see what's happening, and there's something BIG AND BREATHING just around the corner that I can't quite see, so I keep looking out window and there are some kids now outside and I ask "Did you SEE where it was?" and the kids outside keep looking UP, but I can't see anything because I'm still inside, and I feel there might be some danger but I'm not particularly worried about anything dreadful happening, I just don't want to be suddenly and scarily surprised.
3/19/79
OPERA
Had the dream at 7:15, took notes at 7:55 on Thursday, but by Monday I can hardly read the notes and a first reading recalls NONE of the details to me.
1) Opera about domestic squabbles in many acts, each of which has a book (?) lamb (?) look (?) that seems to be going up for auction, each with a tally quoted. Lots of curtain-up hustle onstage, announce 40 units (?) daily, and guy and I start talking. Books (?) of (?) in auction.
2) Left with 6 white sheets and a light gray-green one (?)---deciding about (?) which to work with. THIS WILL TEACH ME TO WRITE BETTER AND TRANSCRIBE EARLIER IF I WANT TO REMEMBER ANYTHING!!
3/22/79
LEG FLESH AND SWITZERLAND
1) ODD "complete fragment" of looking down at my legs and the skin at the front of the ankles, really BELOW shins, above feet, are DRY AND SPLIT, with slow-healing YELLOW scabs under drying flaking skin, and rest of leg skin is dry, except on BACK of knees. At the top of an overly defined calf, there's a soft, tongue-like bulge and when I move the skin OVER it, there's fluid that bubbles back and forth like on wrapped beef roasts. Ugly and rather depressing dream, and I wonder how it got that bad and how to cure it.
2) Then a FLASH of sitting on a subway and there's a flash-buzz as we're ready to leave the station and a FUSE has blown, and I wake thinking a REAL flash-buzz has come from my kitchen, but my bedroom door is almost closed and I WAS asleep at 4:10 am. Sleep then and remember ANOTHER fragment:
3) Seems I'm on vacation in Switzerland (Winston?) or northern Italy in a private house and the woman of the house ("halfway between," in appearance, Mom and Helen) sells stamps for 3.25 francs or lire and a female visitor is leaving and the hostess buys stamps back, saying they're no good after March 30 (thinking about Dennis's birthday party for me?), anyway, since they go up to 3.75, but she can get a refund at the post office and I know that I'll be out of the country (and back in the US) then. There are black letterings down the sides of the stamps that say how long they're good for mailing, rather than the stamped dates of ISSUE on some of the stamp sheets I got from Rowland Hill. VERY brief fragment.
4) Then, as I write THIS at 4:25, there's a flash-buzz for real, that dims my bedroom light, and I check kitchen, thinking the broiler might be on, or that the light burnt out, or that the toaster shorted; then the bathroom, thinking the pipe might have shaken something loose or the electric toothbrush shorted, and then the living room; where I stand and wonder until I notice that the clock is stopped at 4:10, and I go to find the extension cord sparking with a slight smell, and I pull it from the wall just as the extension plug cracks off, and clock still works. Write this after setting clock at 4:30.
5) A conference of the kings of Africa has many SHORT kings, and the taxi driver says they're all either very SHORT or very TALL, and some of the TALL ones I think might be sexy, but I don't see any of them. Instant dream.
3/25/79
POLLUTED RIVERS
I'm walking in some fairly level countryside beside a small stream that starts brightly bubbling over rocks, but as I move farther toward what might be some upland plateau, walking over green grasses with trees moving in the breezes nearby, I glance down to my left to see what I think might be fish swimming, cylindrical shapes rather like floating loaves of French bread in the translucent water, and I at first take them to be turds, but then am relieved to see they're regular in shape like submerged floating sapling trunks which had been cut off and left to gather mosses underwater. Then the dusty road to my right comes closer to the river, which gets wider and wider, and it turns into a wide shallow canal in which I'm walking, but the yellow-green water becomes coated with something that's rather like melted butter on top of a soup, which cakes into little yellow pellets around my bare legs, and I start to walk faster, remembering even in my dream that nightmare quality of walking upstream in Kentucky and coming to the stench of the rotting eggs that had been thrown into the waters, and I begin to run, more like skimming over the surface of the water, and I look around from my slight elevation to see that the rivers are widening out and taking more of the land, that I'm coming into a swampy and boggy area in which I can't help but get my feet wet, and there's the threat from the landscape that the water IS polluted. I skim over a stream-mouth going off to the right, rather startled when it seems that I'm more like flying or skipping like a stone over the water's surface, rather than running and muddying my feet on the bottom, and I think that it would be SILLY to be infected with "some malignant form of hepatitis" (as I thought of it in the dream) and be ill for the remaining 40-odd years of my life simply because I went wading in a strange stream at the age of 40-odd, and again I weighed the benefits of current experiences and "drive" against possible aftereffects of disease or fatigue or breakdown, and I knew that this MIGHT be dangerous, and still I continued forward rather than turning back, and before the mental states escalated to crisis, I woke and marveled at the DETAIL that I remembered, that remained even now at 4:35 as I type this page.
6/23/79: 1) There's a little pushy old lady (like the pushy mother of the kids at "The Enchanted Pig" last night) who INSISTS on sleeping in my cabin (and bed!) but I put her on a small SOFA, or what looks like the top of a baby carriage, and insist she'll be just as comfortable there, since the tiny twin bed won't be able to support us AT ALL, but I wonder if it's a SYMBOL for my being put to some Zen-like test that I'd fail because I went by APPEARANCES only. 2) I'm in the Army, sharing quarters with a pleasant fellow who seems to know all about it, and he gently reminds me to put on my uniform for the 3 pm drill that I'd forgotten about, and then I leave the room to piss with a hard-on into a leather-lined pissoir, but the piss comes out of my MOUTH with a warm sweetness and I SPIT it into the toilet, reminding myself that it's pure and clean and untainted. 3) A company makes some sort of little widget for $14, 500 in something that seems to be wood, but doesn't make it in plastic, which I say can be done in the same MOLD as the metal ones, but it just takes a different material.
EARTHQUAKES THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN!
6/29/79: Flying watch in a helicopter over brick smokestacks grouped over factories, and I suspect they'll crumple and totter and topple in an earthquake, but they DON'T. Fly along a fault: sharp edges with the slight depression between filled with deserty-dust, maybe a couple yards wide, and I THINK I should see the dust moving, the fault widening or narrowing, the dust falling into newly widened pits, but I seem to have just MISSED it, or be just a bit too EARLY, because though I EXPECT something to happen, nothing DOES. Is this a way of diffusing my thoughts about earthquakes, or will one just not take place when I'm around, which would be an encouraging thought? Tell Dennis about it but he's not even listening to me anymore, which brings back Amy's concern when I didn't seem to want to talk to her, but NOW she knows I can mistrust her VOICE but still love and care about HER, not taking it personally that she's trying to pull a fast one, which would make her fall even MORE inside the sheltering barricades of her new hairdo, which she wanted me to talk about and I did, surprising me, but saying that I now have a REASON for my developing nonjudgmentalism: I HAVE to be nonjudgmental to LISTEN to her experiences.
OVER-ELABORATE DREAMS
7/24/79: Wake at Dennis's a few times during the early morning as he seems to shy away from the light and slide down and over to my side of the bed, and each time there's the fragmentary memory of some fantastically DETAILED dream, mirroring what I feel to be overmuch in my life: phoning Allegra's question to Garland and doing the Fiber Optics index; getting Dennis going on the Calcified Tissue index and phoning Linda with the schedule; really DOING the two teachers' guides I have from American Book and phoning Ronnie with any questions SOON; redoing Holt-5 and doing Holt-7 by Tuesday; looking forward to the O-V AND the coordinator's training at Actualism (with a surgery and Allegra's mother's dinner waiting on Monday); scheduling for Don's tonight WITH Edgardo getting into town, maybe wanting Arnie's keys; worried about Don's having ordered the cards, Barbara's wanting some more, Sherryl's coming over to check her Thoracic and getting the rest of Exhibitionism; and wondering when the end of Dennis's huge Obstetrics index and my English Handbook will be. But the dreams were these: in one I was looking at a test that seemed to be patterned after some of the grade school texts I'd been working with, seemingly simple (2 2, what's the pattern?; oo o ooo, what would follow?) but actually fiendishly sophisticated. As PART of this test, I had to construct very detailed stage set-like dioramas with great care to perspective, tiny detail, harmony of color and shape, with scrims and curtains and proscenia (prosceniums?), of which there were at LEAST two that I'd finished with a great deal of satisfaction, but when they were being checked for accuracy and "lesson-learning" there was only one left, the teacher was placating me because she knew that she'd seen the other one around SOMEPLACE, and I vaguely wondered if I hadn't done some others that had gotten lost in transit. No feeling of PANIC about it, just vague concern and hope that everything would work out for the best. In the other dream, I was traveling in Mexico (AMY!!!) with women vaguely like Maya Bryant and Mary Stanley, who had all their shit together while I got up from a cantina table and KNEW that we had two more weeks of vacation and FEARED that I'd left home thinking I was only going away for an afternoon, with only about $30 in my pocket, and wondering how on EARTH I was going to have enough money to get home with. So I pulled out my wallet and, in the side pocket where I keep the MacDonald's (Burger King, really, which shows how effective advertising is with me) discount, I find strips of elaborate little colored coupons, rather looking like the postage stamp-format magazine discount stickers that the sweepstakes people send out, but these strips were good for my return trip, nights in a hotel, meals in restaurants, and even cash allowances for souvenirs, drinks, and clothing. So I HAD brought along all that I needed, I felt with a sense of relief, and then turned to join the people I was with with the feeling of NOW I can find out where we ARE and where we're going NEXT and why I seem to have felt so dissociated from them up to this point. There were other dreams last night (and others during the previous weeks) when I woke with the sense of having had very DETAILED, REALISTIC dreams that I could have jotted notes down on right THEN and come up with a CHAPTER on the remembered detail, but if I slip back into sleep (replacing the memory with a fresher memory of a new odyssey) usually the traces of the old ones are lost EXCEPT for the definite recall of SOMETHING that was highly detailed, elaborately colored, intricately thought-out, richly conversational, and possibly of enormous importance. Yet I don't have a PANIC, neither worrying about keeping all these details in control in the dream NOR about the NEED for remembering the details so that I can retell them, or write them down, or remember them beyond the morning. Yet their PRESENCE is tantalizing, wonder-making, and rather pleasant. LEFT Dennis fuming about my not answering his questions about Obstetrics, but talked to Rachel, found there was NO limit on the subject index, got an extra week to work on it because it came in a week late; Dennis found the sheets I'd been missing on the Calcified Tissue indexes so I don't have to search for them; finished a section on the indexing book that used Knight and Collison; put everything away in preparation for working on the American Book books, and even got a call from Ernie saying that this evening was probably cancelled: when I get pressured, EVERYONE calls it off: no NEED to make 40 hours this week---now I just have to aim for the total of 80 hours NEXT week.
DREAM/WORDS TO SONG/NOTES
7/31/79: 7/29 pm: WISHED I could have a sexy DREAM of a nice body, at LEAST, without HAVING one.
7/30 am: Woke very erect with the memory of a VERY sexy dream: I'm sitting somewhere at a desk "recruiting" and this cute young blond comes in and I'm "reluctantly" thrust forward until my nose is nudging aside his dance belt-like shorts to poke at his hardening blond-haired cock, and then all is given to abandon as I grapple him into a 69 position and SQUEEZE his yoni while his cock grows long and sinuous and harder, and then suddenly we're on a bed in 69 with another 69ing couple, and everyone starts to shoot, my blond COVERING his chest with thick gluey come, and I think I will have missed the excitement, but I look down to find MY cock shooting cum from my clenched fist around it, and I HAVEN'T missed the fun, and look over to find a very spaced-out puzzled-looking BRUCE LIEBER looking up from the other pair, but I ask him about it 7:30 pm and he remembers no dream, and I of course don't ask HIM about the subject matter, and Alice says I can "get the experience" of challenging by just DOING it, even to the memory of it.
LISTEN TO TCHAIKOVSKY'S "Journey through the Snow" from Nutcracker (at 3 am after coming last night and then listening to the second movements of Beethoven's Eighth and Harold in Italy) makes me think of a solo and then a chorus of voices singing something like the following: "We are your love / Moving through time / Your friends and sons, lovers and loved, all in one. So join our throng / And sing along / One Voice, one song; one life, one song; all now are caught in the JOY of everlasting life that ebbs and flows like the tide and the time. / So join our throng---repeated ad lib to FABULOUS music.
INDEXING A PAIN: 5 thought to have to do, finish first AB Readiness Monday morning, then redo Holt 5 in about an hour before going to Bruce's, then THINK (but Priscilla tells me NOT so the next AM) I don't have Holt 7 yet, which makes me feel GREAT and lets me MARK AB:CDE until 2 am, feeling GOOD about this, since all I have NOW to excuse is the justifiably delayed-for-a-few-days Fiber Optics, and Rachel says this morning I can leave Allegra's author index until when I bring in the SUBJECT index on Friday, and Priscilla says Holt 7 would be fine before the 10th, so now I'm just waiting for a call from Ronnie Kaufman.
STORED STUFF THAT'S TAKEN
8/2/79: I'm in some public-like building that later turns out to be a public library, down in something like a storeroom or basement, and there are boxes that contain BAGS of stuff that they say I'd LEFT there before, and I paw through large grocery bags filled with grosses of wiener buns, canned goods, and wrapped vegetables, which I root through to find my SHEETS from the Chinese laundry (with mark 1483, too!) at the bottom of, and there are other packages of things, and there are two strange trays of roast chicken that sort of merge with each other under their Saran wrappings, and I lay these things all out on the tables in the reference room---where I'd earlier been eating a cake which was very crumbly, and a woman, like from Walker Evans' photos, scrawny and poor and drawn, comes in pleading for scraps to make something to eat, and I see her gathering crumbs from my cake, then go back to my treasures to find a book with a false inside cover which loosens to produce an envelope with GREAT impastoed Polish stamps of new, colorful design on cut-off pieces of cardboard, and they look rather high-value and I'm delighted to have them and the others crammed into the envelope, then I put all of it down and some time seems to pass and then I'm back to the room to find that everything's MISSING, and I dash out the door to see if I can spot that woman carting everything away, but I can't see her, and then I try to console myself with the thought that these were all new acquisitions or things that I hadn't had BEFORE, so why should I feel so desolate that I don't have them NOW, but I wasn't THAT much mollified and tried to think of ways of getting it back, talking to the head librarian, who MAY have been some combination of Helen and Alice, who kept telling me that everything would be all right and I didn't have to worry about it too much whether I got the stuff back or NOT, but some part of me kept saying that maybe it SHOULDN'T make that much difference, but I'd seen the stuff and wanted it and I DID want it back, despite the fact that it wasn't really necessary, and woke to tell Dennis that I had a VERY detailed dream, then went to sleep and had another doozy, but the impact of THIS remained while the memory of the SECOND vanished.
DREAMS WHILE DENNIS IS SICK
8/4/79: Yesterday I repeated a sexy dream: this time someone like Jack Wrangler was listening to some kind of commentary and his cock, lazily dangling between his legs as he sat sprawled naked in a chair, got thick and drippy, so that (not so much Jack Wrangler as Fred Halstead, as I recall) he took it into his hand and lathered it up from the juice and displayed it to me with Dennis's aplomb. Then I zeroed in on it for a close look and he tightened so thoroughly onto the shaft of it that the head got VERY hard and so red that it verged on the purple. I looked and looked and looked at it, fascinated by the hardness and the redness of it, aching to take it into my mouth. Then today there was a dream of somewhat more menace: it was sort of a detective movie or play in which I was supposed to be killed and everyone was being investigated so that the guy wouldn't get to me, and then the guy turned out to be a WOMAN, and there was the expression of surprise from everyone that it had turned out to be a woman, and I felt a faint questioning sensation like "And why did she want to kill ME?" and had the sympathies of everyone around. There was much more to the dream---as if it took place in some Arab country, and there seemed to be a scene in a theater or a movie house, and there was some kind of unmasking and disguise going around. But through it all there wasn't any WORRY on my part, just a sort of hurt curiosity as to why someone would want to kill me.
COINCIDENCES
8/13/79: Woke in the middle of a number of complicated dreams about travel and wished that I could dream about a sexy guy, and promptly went to sleep and dreamed about a sexy guy, rather like Ken Miller, who seemed reluctant for me to put my hands around his tender fragile slender cock, but it immediately started pulsating, engorging, growing, and hardening in my fist until it became long and red and bursting with fluids, and I took it into my mouth and sucked around its flaming flaring red head until it seemed on the point of shooting, but I teased and he seemed to want it teased, and again I woke. Forgot the dreams before, but the force of the COINCIDENCE REMAINED in my brain, as did the coincidence last night when I told Dennis that I'd be down, at first, at 10, then when he phoned I said I'd be till 10:15, since I was cleaning, and then didn't bother to put the phone on the service: "Let it ring if it wants to," I remember distinctly thinking, and then at 10:05, when I was vacuuming the bedroom, Edgardo phoned "to say goodbye---hello" from California where Sandra talked about having too much "wine---Wind---WINE" in Golden Gate Park for a jazz concert. So IF I'd gone downstairs at 10 or IF I'd put on the phone machine or IF I'd been out of the bedroom, I probably wouldn't have heard the call at all! Increasingly the thought of the energies being something you HAVE rather than something you DO seems more and more real for me: I don't have to light the food with my HANDS in the right position, by harmonizing with the food it will BECOME lighted. I don't have to GET into particular energies to handle particular situations, I'll have the resources RIGHT NOW to handle things the proper way. And though I'd planned to "waste" yesterday by doing the puzzle and jerking off, I ALSO put away the Eleventh Edition of EB before scouring and cleaning and dusting the vacuuming the apartment before getting down to Dennis's apartment for dinner, even making HIM come back up here for the maple syrup he forgot to ask me to bring down when I did take down the wine and his comic book clipping for a cousin, and I fixed things up this morning, washed a blanket and the bedspread, and watered the plants and typed this by 1:40, a busy day already, waiting for the messenger to deliver my next American Book index.
9/10/79: 1. Dad in a white-silk-lined coat being removed by Henry (I realize that they were brothers-in-law just as DENNY and I am!) as Henry helps me hold him up, in his white shirt, as he recovers from a stroke that felled him. 2. Mom is a maid in a house, and we WERE going to lunch and I pause at 2:45 and she's disturbed but says "anytime" and I can continue with the robbery inquiry. 3. WHY DID I open the door? I'd thought of Pope's tales of the paintings of Nathanial Brandon or Newton or someone inside the downtown townhouse, but this is in the country house uptown next to the house Mom works in, and the doors are locked, but I open the SCREEN and the SECOND pulls open, too, and I see there's no alarm (though I see the button, wondering if it's an electric eye) and then PUSH the door and it OPENS, only a small frame-door inside obviously ajar. I'm mortified, then pull the door closed, hoping to finish before the caretaker hears the alarm inside, and turn a white-painted hand-lock, then close the door, but am JUST gathering up my blankets and briefcase when SHE (a combination of Joyce Ostrin and Agnes Moorhead---JO in AM??) flings open the door, says "How could you KNOW you had to open the outer door before you could unlock the door?" and I say I'm not a thief, want to return my stuff home, talk to Mom and think to tell the truth, I just went step by step with NO malice, no theft in mind, only a cultural curiosity. 4. Amy (?) and I are looking at sheets for some GREAT initiation and we're discussing them when Dick Hartill (!) enters, not so advanced, and so we have to cover the sheets. A monk is teaching me sounds, and I realize that his Ai-in (not QUITE my Ah-Yim!) has the same SOUNDS, a bit different from AI-MIE, and I wonder if we tend to meet people whose NAMES we can call and in that way earth special vibrations inside ourselves. NAMES as mantra-practicing!
9/27/79: 1. Bob Hope's hotel in Washington, D.C. is rather cheap, but when there's a television interviewer talking about the street on which he lives somewhere in Canada, the street is full of marvelous old Victorian mansions overlooking a lake or river from their back verandas, and they say he has to WORK more to get the money to pay PR people to get more publicity for him now in life. 2. I and a woman are in an expensive restaurant without a menu, so the waiter has to confide in us that the bill will be "about $75" and he cuts off a tasty rare inner bit of filet for me to eat, having carved the roast very nicely for us at the table, and the waiter and a captain gather around the table and we start to have sex, and I grab the waiter's cock so hard that it and the balls come off (detach, rather) in my hands, and he's excited when I let him suck on his own cock, and I wake highly aroused from this section. 3. I'm taking a shower in what seems to be my old 70th Street apartment, because the bathroom has no window, and they're replastered so heavily that the walls and ceiling are lumpy, bulging in on the bathtub, and when I take a shower I can see the white plaster falling away into plastic-like chips in the drain and like marshmallow foam around the tub, revealing the old orange paint underneath, and it just looks DREADFUL. 4. There was another dream, very elaborate and positive, that I remembered before the fourth-in-sequence, sure that I'd remember it when I woke, but then much as I thought about it, I couldn't remember it, and I'll have to take GOOD notes in the Adirondacks next week, since the air will cause better dreams than I have here in the city. And I note that these notebook pages are really DISTANT in time one from the other!!
SPACE BLADDERS AND CHEST BLOW
11/12/79: I'm looking through the porthole of some sort of space station and across a BLUE sky I see a delicate bladder-like space construction, shaped rather like a prophylactic-material finger-dangling glove revolving slowly in the firmament, and it's hit with some sort of weapon and begins discharging a reddish blood-fluid from the fingers which drifts languidly through the air like liquids would drift into a water solution. There's slight comment in the space station about what's happening, and then another bladder is punctured and the fluids drip (or flow in slow motion, to be more accurate) beautifully down, and then there's a clown or teddy-bear shape, though it seems to be far away and huge, and when it's hit it proceeds to do graceful swan dives in the air, flipping head over heels in languorous ease, but it starts to come toward our "saucer" and I lean forward into the visiplate to find it coming right toward ME, and its head sort of curls up and ducks down and hits me full in the chest with a blow that takes the air out of me, and it sort of vanishes inside my body. But it seems that I'd been AWAKE for the last few seconds, so that when the blue firmament and the cloudy-white body vanish I feel that I have been winded, taking a deep breath, and the thought FIRST comes across me that I've been INVADED by some sort of extraterrestrial, and I flash on Walk-Ins and dismiss that, and then on a more physical level wonder if I might not have had a slight heart attack, and remember Saturday night when my left pumped and pulsed after my orgasm, as if there were giant blood clots pushing their way between vein walls, but I knew I thought madly, since a few circuits through the legs would have to take them through the heart, where they would foul the valves and cause great pain, but I flashed on one of those giving me a slight stoppage of the heart, and I could feel my body tingling, my mind wondering if I might not have had a stoppage of memory or reasoning, and I lay still, hoping to still have time in which to enjoy life, and then began moving around and the impact, in two senses, of the dream faded and I could think about getting up and continuing with the day, though making sure that I'd write the dream OUT for later.
CHAOTIC BEAUTIFUL DREAMS OF FUTURE
11/14/79: Bed at 10:30 and sleep about 11:15 and typing this at 9:45 with no hope of remembering the layers. At 7:55 I woke with THREE dreams to remember, a brief thing and two more elaborate ones, but I figured three would be enough, and went to sleep for another elaborate one, which I thought I'd remember, and then drifted off again to Walt Disney fantasy: Arnie lived in Danny Siladie's house on Dietz, and a parade from Walt Disney Productions passed down a new-improved Dietz each year (as I reminded him, the first year a large group of people in umbrella-capes in rainbow stripes used his house to dress in so that they could dash out onto the street and join the parade when a particular float passed, last year he was away on a trip, and this year he was there). We went to MY house, right beside a glorified Rubber Bowl where the extravaganza took place, projected onto the sky, announcing his new film, and this involved balloon-incinerators for souls which streamed out through the holes at the tops of balloons (shaped rather like bedpans), to be taken up by the balloon at the next level for further "purification" and this life-saver-roll of rings continued into the darkening sky, to culminate in a firework display of rockets leaving the apex for their trips to distant planets (for repopulation?) and everyone agreed the effects THIS year were the best ever. Then there were lakeside displays with almost-naked men (that I scrambled to see the crotches of) carrying bathing beauties decked in feathers and sequins (then the beach displays of colored naked wrestlers displaying their prowess before their sex objects), and I tried to get "out" through the schoolhouse paths blocked by light wires like at the Canadian pavilion at Expo, and people told me I couldn't get out that way, so I went through the schoolhouse to have many adventures, and everything was in brilliant color and such a wealth of people and detail and sound that it would be impossible to describe every detail, just as complex as the thoughts during the Olfactory Nerve surgery yesterday (see Actualism 31), which may have brought up SO much stuff that it's foaming over in my dreams, or else my work at night has become SO elaborate my mind falters and bubbles in transmitting it.
CURRENT DREAMS
12/5/79: They accumulate so fast I have hardly had the time to record them recently: Yesterday the dreams of leaving a suitcase behind at some summer resort and mounting onto the sail-struts of a narrow schooner and wondering how it stays upright (and seeming to know that a very deep keel would support it), and look down as we back up to see it bumping solidly against bumpers and bouncing off, so it's well constructed, and then swooping through the water in curves which cause the DECK to eel back and forth in the water, so it's enormously FLEXIBLE, and I have a grand feeling sailing away on the ship. Today the strange dream of Larry Ball and I doing something to a ceiling fixture, and then I'm sitting NEXT to Larry Ball in what seems oddly like the garage back on Dietz, and I'm telling him (in the dream) about my dream and realize it was HIM, but as his hand creeps embarrassingly close to mine I avoid telling him anything which would seem to make him important to me. Other fragments were buzzing around but I've forgotten them already, but know that they were MANY, so that I'd wake in the night and know there were three already lined up for recording, and then drop back off to sleep to dream one or two more, and then by not writing them down, manage to forget all of them, except for the memory of large numbers of incredibly detailed, richly colored, and for the most part very optimistic, dreams.
11/16/79: There's a sermon in a HUGE cathedral with a woman preacher, and I'm moving along aisles looking for seats, finally finding some, and then without transition I'm in a lakeside house, looking like a drawing by Hildebrandt for some fairy tale, and I fall in and through the shifting waters of the lake I see the blue foundations, like timbers petrified into slate-like stone, lit brightly but shiftingly with yellow so that they go WAY down into the seemingly bottomless lake
11/17/79: I've moved into a new apartment which is newly carpeted in bright red and black, even unto the bathroom, and I wander around looking at the accommodations and have to walk down to the kitchen by the OCEAN, and outside to see the incoming tides washing over rock steps so that I have to time my jumps between incoming and outgoing waves, and on a plateau to the side I see SEALS with rooster-tail feathers leaping up and down to "entrap" tiptoeing birds like sandpipers who don't know enough to get out of their way.
12/8/79: I've traveled to Mt. Carmel with Carl Spring. We're staying in a big family house, belonging to vague relatives of mine, and we're ready to leave on the next-to-last day and I'm packing, but have to get some overcoats, but can't get around where I should go, so crawl up past a black man lugging boxes down a fire escape-like stairway to find myself on a large porch, from which I leap onto a pile of junky boxes and when I want to get back, the porch has turned into the deck of an aircraft carrier that will topple if I jump back onto it, so I jump down to squishy boxes of junk and squashed beer cans and get FEET wet but have boots on and get back into house (followed by workman who doesn't BELIEVE this character belongs there, but I do) and find the overcoats. Then out for "one last walk" and see candy-apple red limousine rushing down slushy-with-snow streets past Ezcert bakery and I think "I've come here for YEARS and I'm still TOO busy to buy anyone anything though I've been here seven days," but partly it's being with Carl Spring. I debate ONE LAST trip to the amusement park and the GREAT roller coaster, after all it's MY vacation---and why can't I EVER do what I want and I wake at 8 am and write THIS.
11/30/79: Is there any significance to the fact this is the morning of Russell's talk? 1. Entering Akron large building (Jack Seelye's talk of Monticello?) and hallway has hanging plaques along the walls commemorating the founder (1869-1934) and successor (1900- ), body female, of this strange pseudo-religion. The woman SMILES a lot but I don't trust her, and marvel at the HUGE building they have, but decide it could have been bought long ago and is tax free now. 2. We're waiting for the procession of extraterrestrials from their rocket and an interpreter says we shouldn't be alarmed at their third arms, which they hold in front of them. They walk out in pairs, swathed in black (I finished reading "Lord of Light?"), then they're holding something and then I see they have bare faces with large fish-like lips and tiny noses, a lovely tan, and darker colors, hair with slight sheen, and THEY smile a lot and talk about THEIR religion. 3. Larry Ball and two others and I are spies in China, and Germanic-type soldiers let us into the country and we enter house or office and begin rifling a desk for secrets that we steal and push into a suitcase, keeping leaves wrapped in papers, and we KNOW it's dangerous and there's the sound of an alarm in the room and we look around and I wake to write this at 5:15. 4. Helen and LOTS of kids and Mom and Rita and me and Dennis are in a FANCY hotel in Paris or Rome, checking in, getting rooms, waiting to EAT, and they all sit around a SMALL table and I say I'm NOT sitting there, but everyone's so eager and clean and pink and rich I don't want to leave, either.
STRAIGHT-MAN SEX and LESS IS MORE
12/15/79: I'm camping along a river's edge with Bill Hyde, and we're talking about how high the river's rising, and I crawl back into the tent with someone I don't know, and Bill waves a caution to me not to do anything because he's straight, but I get close to him and have some excuse to cuddle with him, and all of a sudden he's kissing my neck, and as I brush his crotch he's quite hard, so without thinking about it I grab him hard and he grabs me back and we're getting into QUITE a nice session and Bill pokes his head in and I wave something back to him that would translate into "Don't make any rash preconceptions," and woke wondering if it might apply to Ken Miller.
LESS IS MORE: Coming from ABUNDANCE (of travel, of experience, of life, of memory), I can throw OUT souvenirs and travel LIGHT. I had to SAVE everything because I feared each trip might be my LAST, or that the only "souvenir" I might have of someplace was a CLIPPING about it. But now that I've GONE to most of the places that people write about, I can look forward to going to MORE, read the people's critiques of OLD places with increased knowledge, and know that travel is SO easy now that if I want to GO anywhere, it'd be FAR better to go to their country's office and get ALL THE GOOD NEW ONES. Maybe it was as if I thought of myself as living on a desert island and having to keep EVERYTHING rather than as living in the middle of NYC and having everything AVAILABLE.
GUIDING TOURS
12/18/79: I appear to be guiding a bus tour for the guy whose cards I have from the Champion Spark Plug job at the Plaza (brought to mind by throwing out some of the Plaza Hotel souvenirs?), and there's a German-Hungarian band on one side of a stream competing with a U.S. band on the other side of a stream, both bands under the pier of a huge BRIDGE, and this part of the tour is rationalized by saying "We let them see the UNDERSIDE of the city, too." Tourists press out of the bus and look at the waterfront and hear the bands from behind an obstructed chain link fence, but they don't seem to complain because they don't seem to know better (and it was LATER THAT DAY that I saw the airport limo filled with drably dressed tourists that pulled up in front of the St. George, and if I can stay on the Lido di Jesolo for VENICE, they, poor travelers, can be put into the St. George on their NYC tour), so they vaguely enjoy it. I leave during the concert (I'd heard it all before and I had to change clothes) to go to his apartment, and when I go through all the bags I've brought with me, I find that I've brought the wrong pants, so I have to dress the same way I came in. I look out the window and find they're ready to leave and I'm not ready to join them, and I get that familiar "I'll never make it" panic. Then back down to find someone who could be Dad (which could have come from my getting rid of some of his stuff last night) there saying I should have taken them to various STORES and encouraged them to buy there, because I would have gotten a commission for myself and for him, and I don't want to do it but he has more power over me than I can deal with. I wake very early and jot down the notes, remembering (I think it was the night before) that I jerked off and fell asleep with the light left on and my bathrobe still on, waking up at 4:30 remembering fragments of dreams too inchoate to write down.
TRAVELS AND DEAD DOG
12/21/79: 8:10 am: 1) At Hemlock Hall-type resort, sitting at TINY tables in hallway next to the kitchen, and when I realize I'm FACING the door and the others are sitting with their back to the wall, I turn around, and when I'm talking to someone I see a motion as I stir my soup and look to find a tiny DOG there, which I spoon out with a lot of slop, but the poor pallid beast is without breathing movements, so I gather him up in two paper napkins and take it into the next room where there's a strange toilet in the floor that opens into a sort of open cesspool visible beneath the holey floor, and as I leave I pass a sign that says that "the thermostat should be kept at an air temperature of 72." 2) Then I'm at a VENICE-type resort, and a party of us get into a motor launch which turns out to be on wheels, and we veer through a huge room, taking poor aim and bumping first into the side of the doorway, and then we gain speed and rumble through the baroque next room, paintings on the walls and carvings over everything, and then I have to duck as it goes through the doorway, thick, with a polished wooden top that my head just misses (is this back to the canals of Bruges?), and as we move faster and faster the images of the rapidly passing room from my ducked head's point of view go faster and faster until the chair rail becomes a permanent streak and the paintings have strobed into a single image, speed so fast that everything's stationary (like reality???). 3) I'm in a rococo carriage, on top, sitting in narrow seats across from a cute young Ken Miller-type, legs intimately intertwined, then a guy, older, leaps OVER us, saying sarcastically, "You don't mind if I get ahead of you," and he glares at us disapprovingly as we link legs intimately AGAIN, finding it VERY sexy and I'm wondering all the while how far I can GO with him. 4) Somewhere in the middle there was a fragment of ANOTHER full conveyance close against where we were sitting (brought on by the subway creaking out of the 14th Street station on the Lex when the platform extensions wouldn't retract?), and we're all SO happy that no amount of discomfort shows through.
TRANSVESTITE BETTE DAVIS
12/26/79: I meet someone who sort of looks like her, though I think it's someone impersonating her, at a party, and she leads me to go to bed with her, and she tries to get me excited and sits on top of me writhing as she pulls off her clothes to reveal tiny black nipples and slightly swelling tits that aren't of an aging woman but a hormone-injected Puerto Rican young man. She comes on me, wetting me and the blankets and the sheets of paper that are scattered about the bed, and I put my hand onto her crotch to remove the wetness and there's nothing to feel, so I figure she's NOT a boy in drag, but when I see her naked body, her shoulders have been bleached to show as a fetching tan atop off-the-shoulder dresses but her torso is the black of a Negro or a dark Spanish person, with incongruous bathing suit lightenings around the groin. There's cash somewhere (which probably came from the cash prominently visible on the table at Adam's early yesterday, as the transvestite idea probably came from the idea that Googie Gomez might be a transvestite in "The Ritz" on TV yesterday) and I pick it up, and stuff LOTS of change into a bulging coin purse, and people pour into what now seems to be a HOSPITAL room, and I leave after gathering up my stuff and encounter a doctor of whom I ask "I don't have to check out or anything?" and he says "No," and now it turns into a SCHOOL and I get out and move toward a subway that'll take me to a movie that's scheduled for 10:30 pm that I can just make on the uptown train.
12/27/79: 1) There's a stock called FARANTZ, brokers tried to buy some, yet there's "none available" through his company, and I wonder how I can get some (later call Rolf and find there's nothing like this name on the boards).
2) Man and woman pull a huge wooden wedge to block door and they go into the trees where they take poison (?) to commit suicide, and I yell "Play" easily and look at them in bewilderment as they let two children (from "Something for Joey" last night on TV?) slowly die.
MASTURBATION AND BICYCLE RIDING
12/30/79: It seems that Edgardo called JUST after I'm RUBBING and RUBBING and RUBBING my cock RED and RAW and SWOLLEN between my legs in my bed on Dietz, and I fear JOHN will come in and surprise me, so I get my swollen cock, greasy from rubbing, under the blankets and shut off my NEW YORK lamp JUST as he comes into the room JUST as the phone rings at 7:30 with Edgardo (see NOTEBOOK 184). THEN I'm on a bicycle at a tiny three-way intersection (lots of this came from the 70's summary from the Times until 4 am this morning), properly waiting for people to go on "WALK" sign, then it changes to GO and I push forward, BEFORE the line of cars to my left, and find myself pedaling between MERCHANDISE in a DEPARTMENT STORE. Deftly steer between piles of sheets and toweling and folding chairs and finally dining chairs that take up almost the whole aisle, which is now starting to look like a corridor at the baths with DOORS, rather than counters, on each side of the passageway, and as I pass heaps of nested plastic paper baskets I hear the drivers of the cars behind me cursing: they'd started cursing that I'd gotten ahead of them and they'd have to slow down behind me, and then it's the fact that I could get through without stopping and THEY had to stop their cars to move the merchandise so they could get through. Look at a large map of the store and find I can go WAY back to a NEW area (in slatted black on the floor plan) for "Centennial America" and find people there, but I knew about it, rather like knowing about "Dungeons and Dragons," and then turn to the left for plans for a new "religion shop" and it's a cardboard model that's being weighted down by booklets describing what they'll have, and it's all about "Venice" with a cardboard model of the space, (which I debated whether Arnie had given me already) and page through it to see maps and sailing charts of various scales and carvings and drawings about modern and medieval Venice, and mock-ups of large stained glass or plastic about "Holiday in Venice" with snowballs and "Thanksgiving in Venice" with large-gowned ladies around English-looking groaning boards with turkeys and spices and candles, and I wake amazed at the profusion of detail and COLOR in the mock-ups of the displays.