Dreams 1990
1/1/90: Marj Dettling (from Akron University!) is at Russell Schofield's Memorial Service in a pale-blue pillbox hat that contrasts strikingly in the midst of LUSH greens and purples and red-based violets of flowers or a fabric backdrop behind her. I say "You're strange in my RECOLLECTION but you're even STRANGER in your ACTUAL PRESENCE here!"
1/2/90: I'm typing (on a typewriter, though it does seem to have SOMETHING like a computer display attached to it) from papers that have to be wedged between my knees (and some tunafish-type cans on them) and the bottom of the desk at which I'm sitting, which is very like my computer-terminal desk at which I'm sitting NOW. I keep getting interrupted, like when someone cute like Ken Miller sits at my desk to pass time and I watch with horror as he casually stretches and then reaches down to type gibberish at the bottom of the page, so that I'll have to start that page OVER! He's only mildly amused when I shout back at him. I keep trying to get specifications (this is rather like my frustrations with the disk-request from Russ Till without any specifications at all!): do you want the page-heading at the top or the bottom of the page, with the page number on the right, or the left, or alternating right and left for a folio-recto-and-verso setup in a printed book. I think the title is something like Sex at Columbia University, but then I hear someone reading the letters that I seem to be transcribing and it turns out to be from a NUMBER of universities, and I sort of settle on the title "University Sex" except I don't know where to type it or whether to just use it as a title and not put it on each page at all. People around me keep reaching for a beer from the refrigerator that my computer console seems to have turned into, and somehow (this is a dream, remember) there's the "equivalence" that "if they drink all the beer I won't have any more paper to type on, and I don't have to worry about finishing AT ALL." There's some other fragments about typing format, like how to put the author-block at the top of the center of the first page, but I wake and find that it's 10AM already, having gone to bed at 1:30 with something of a headache from the food and wine at Sherryl's yesterday, and wake without a trace of a hangover, and then begin to rehearse the speech that I'll leave on Jacqui's phone message, in multiple units, if need be, and I type that out and then GET her on the telephone (see NOTEBOOK 529), and THAT phase is ended, and I DO have to get to the bottom of THIS page with a celebration of having typed CONSECUTIVE dreams around the end of the last decade and the BEGINNING OF THE LAST DECADE OF THE MILLENIUM, as is now PASSED, and I can get back to "normal" operation until I get some more INDEXING work and get into the new year in EARNEST. At least I'm finished with THIS page!
1/3/90: There were lots of sections that I don't remember: filling out forms or trying to get columns of items to agree---typical frustration-stupid stuff, but there was also a DISPLAY OF ANOMALIES. It was LIKE looking at Gould's "Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine" in a videotape or even live-zoo version: the figures MOVED before me either AS IF they were live or AS THEY WERE IN FACT live: there was a three-dimensional quality even if it was ONLY a representation, and there was the feeling I could reach out and TOUCH them if I wanted to--and that the actions they were performing were BEING DONE AT THE MOMENT, so that they couldn't be censored or edited out if they didn't agree with anyone's definition of "family fare." There was A) a "double runner", a monster mounted on the breast of another monster, as if in permanent sexual union, except that these were the SAME creature, just with two extra arms with fists clenched in running even though the legs for that body were wrapped around the "running body's" hips so that the delicate membrane connecting them wouldn't be shaken. B) was a "standing bisexual double", the one on the left having shadowy forms in the crotch, the one on the right brandishing a yardstick-cock with great pride and aplomb. C) was a "group-being", a double monster with a double-monster between each of its legs---clearly all four were alive, because all were moving---the older-and-larger more slowly, the children -and-smaller much more actively and spiritedly. I could see the shifting membranes that connected from the insides of the thighs of the older to the shoulders of the younger (which were at the same height), and saw that they were flexible enough through use that there seemed to be no danger of their rupturing as I looked at them. The figures were TEXTURED, as if the extreme cross-hatched shadings that Paré would draw at their edges to illustrate them were INCORPORATED into their orange-pink skins. The overall look was almost as if they were constructed from orange-painted pink Styrofoam, since none of them had any appearance of WEIGHT, though it may have just been their agility that made them SEEM light. I mused, on awakening, that I'd been visited by ETs!!
1/4/90: 8:15AM 1) Despite precautions the sub (in a movie or on TV?) ROLLS OVER three times WITH Jack Lemmon on bridge, but close-ups move too FAST to be effective. The submarine twirls again and again. 2) I'm on a quick-trip tour, flying from Hong Kong to Singapore---both of which I know I'd been to before, but this (in the dream) is the first time I was going IMMEDIATELY between the two, which are only 10-20 miles apart, rather than going over ANOTHER route with many other stops between. The passage between the two is in a canyon filled with enormous terraces up which we course in our plane, flying so low that I fear we'll crash in the trees along the terraces, and we can see the brick-work ground below us undulating in small steep hills that I seem to have been over before on a bus or car on the ground (I know this isn't consistent, but it reflects the thoughts as they came in the dream). The pilot laughs enormously as a helicopter flies so close to us that it spins "out of control" over the top of our plane. This trip also includes a very short ferry ride "across the bay" from Athens to Bucharest, the first of which I'd seen, but the second is a new town on my list and I'm pleased to be traveling extensively again.
1/5/90: 9:30AM: A trifoliate leaf exactly in the shape of the center-pulp of a lemon-slice turns out to absorb air (for inward-passing air) or fluid (for outward-passing air) GREATLY STRENGTHENS the central heart-valve or lung-valve for an important class of operative patients, and I wake about 8AM with a feeling of GREAT and LIVELY ELATION, thinking that I had done something VERY worthwhile AT LAST. There were other fragments of dreams before, and I'd expected something spectacular, because I'd gone to bed pleasantly muzzied with wine, pleased with the pleasure of John from Bensonhurst (see NOTEBOOK 529 for the start of my ad-response experiences), and thinking that I almost FELT READY for an OOB, and I tried putting myself in the right frame of mind for it, but nothing came of it at all---I probably won't be going to the next OOB classes?
1/7/90: 9:50AM: SPELLING test in school: two ARCS of students before the teacher speaking to the one on the right, but I see that MY arc is NOT writing the words, then they ARE, and I ask and we're both sets supposed to take down ALL the words. I ask her (she's black) to repeat and I write as FAST as I can, but I'm so rushed I lapse from PRINTING ("That Garbo film was like") to WRITING (Moonlighting), and she catches me on a sentences that involves the Gods lighting fire(s), and I make two errors in all, and she says "No, Bob, that's not that bad," and I guess I PASS. CROWDED blackboard and workbook that I'm writing on, and I have VERY sloppy writing---am I thinking about Mary Vilaboa on Friday night talking about writing between regular and shorthand for Actualism? Transcribe this to catch UP with the day at 4:15PM before Sherryl's.
1/8/90: 8AM: 1) Bob Dukes has a "smile patch" (eye-patch for his mouth), used upside-down for displaying displeasure, used rightside-up for mirth---though BOTH are false. 2) I'm waiting in a restaurant for someone to take my order and annoy people around me by taking three objects out of a leather wallet and looking at them and banging them against each other: a gold cylinder rather like a cigar, a rubber drumstick, and a plastic drumhead top. 3) A group of dancers being interviewed has a second-in-command who could be anywhere in age from 30 to 50, but the Judith-Jamison type says she's 30, and I think to myself "Once you say how old you are, they know how old you are FOREVER; you can no longer hide it." 4) Our sick leader, somewhat like Daniel Day-Lewis of "My Left Foot" a preview of which I saw on tape last night, says we must be ready to go (to court, it seems) in 10 minutes, and I share a bathroom with two women, and take off my shorts under my undershirt before it occurs to me that I'm WEARING the shorts I should be wearing, and have my other articles of clothing before me like my pile before my bed when I wake, so I KNOW that I can dress and be ready on time, but it doesn't seem the WOMEN will be, at ALL.
1/9/90: 1) I'm sitting in the back of a theatre like the old Thalia when the owner steps in front of the screen to announce that this "best print" of an old French film somewhat like "Les Enfants du Paradis" doesn't have any titles, but otherwise it's more complete than any other version. No sooner does he stop talking than two women against the wall to my right (and now the theatre is more like the Brooklyn Heights Cinema in its smallness) whisper loudly to each other so I move to the back row, where I'm standing on the seat, and a uniformed man (rather like a Sergeant-Pepper Paul McCartney) asks if he can stand next to me, and I've taken a HUGE coil of lukewarm spaghetti from a proffered plate, and some of the cheese-dip on my fingers is very gooey too. 2) I'm on top of a large building ACROSS from a city, watching what seems to be bombing on the far horizon, and the explosions come closer and closer, and I marvel at the "effectiveness of the models used" in this particular movie, but then there's a grating rumble BELOW me and the bottom's been hit and the building VERY slowly begins to topple, and I can watch the horrified faces of people on the NEXT building watching us go down. I think of all the ways to get out, but none of them work, and the building arcs down SO far that "my" roof actually seems to "double under" itself so that the arc from horizontal to vertical is more like 120 degrees. Never really "hit" the bottom, but it's a terrifying feeling anyway (see NOTEBOOK 531). 3) It looks more like a wind- blown CORNFIELD, but it turns out that I'm really looking VERY closely in a mirror trying to comb my WET HAIR, and it's just not WORKING: like a cornfield, there are clumps of what might be dirt (or, since the hair is black, DYE) cluttering up the "clean-flesh" rows between the clumps of hair (which look rather as if they've been TRANSPLANTED in place), and I keep combing it FORWARD to get a good straight line, but the rows OVERLAP somehow to not give the desired effect, so I try again and again, feeling very frustrated, fearing that no matter WHAT I do it won't look very good---is this from the balding Richard that I entertained yesterday?? Didn't help me in my feelings of TERROR at all!
1/11/90: 7:30AM: Mom and I have standing room tickets for a new Broadway play with about THREE people in the audience in orchestra seats. a) She sits on empty seats just before a bisecting walkway-aisle, so I join her with my head in my hands, so that we can both ignore a small white slip of paper placed on our laps which says something about not being able to sit in seats unless we've paid for them. b) We sit in other empty seats just off the center aisle, where a lot of others have staked their claims, while an usherette SHOUTS at us that we can't sit there and have to leave---all through this time the play seems to be going on, but none of the standee-sitters seem to HEAR or SEE anything from the stage. c) I wander down the center aisle, as if into the first-class section of a jet, and see VERY cushioned leather Mies-type chairs in shiny tan leather just BEGGING to be sat upon, and an usher whispers vehemently in my ear that "I'll get a PISCATOR after you." The play MAY be "Circle" which Dennis first said we could go to and then yesterday that Dana had only ONE ticket for so Dennis wanted to go ANOTHER time with ME. Or the dream could stem from my telephone conversation with the Met subscription office about my order for the Ring, about which I just wrote a letter to Jean-Jacques, thought of last night.
1/17/90: 8:50: INVISIBILITY! a) Erasing pencil commentary again and again from typed letter-bottom, using MOST of the eraser UP. b) Dancing so that STEPS become so fluid they VANISH. c) Drawing a car so that my "instructions" are executed so smoothly they seem to disappear.
1/19/90: 8:15: Inconsequential fragments: 1) Going for a train in what seems to be an upstate town and seeing waiting would-be passengers sitting along the side of what looks like the white side of a modern covered bridge, peering up-track, getting ready to go to track-side since they see a train coming. 2) Planning to meet someone for a play JUST at the center of the second row of the center section, marking the spot on a seating map so we're both sure where we'll be. 3) At New Jersey high school DEBATING offering myself as a speaker who would inquire about local acceptance of homosexuality, but I realize that NO one would have heard of the "Mattachine Speakers' Bureau," which would be my only "claim to speaking position" in this case. 4) Think of a little girl in danger of "catching on fire" rather like Miss Havisham in "Great Expectations." 5) I'm walking along a busy street like Broadway talking to someone rather fat like Irwin Stone from IBM, and he hands me a small packet of admission tickets to the theatre "as an afterthought," and I'm pleased as I try to count them with my fingers: they're combined doubles and singles, and as I count the pack seems to get thicker and thicker until there must be at least a dozen tickets. But somehow I go next door, which turns out, past clumps of people in casual conversation, to be a BATHS instead. I pass by cruising guys and towel-draped bodies (except that it seems to be bisexual in the "outer circles") until I get to the "heart" of the baths, which is the admission booth, as if you had to SEE most of the facilities to lure you into buying a ticket, and the attendant says "It's crowded, so there are no more lockers, there are only cubicles left at $7." He starts to explain exactly what a cubicle is, but I seem to know what they are, and anyway am impressed by the price no matter WHAT I got, so I'm willing to pay. Then I pass through what's rather like a street for a gay MARCH, and most of the onlookers from the sidewalks are STRAIGHT, though not showing any animosity, and I wake to feel horny and think that I might even try out the Wall Street Sauna one LUNCH. Then as I TYPE this I recall that yesterday at the gym (and bits of times before and after) it seems I went back to BADEN BADEN quite often (I think it started when I finished reading "The Coming of the Cosmic Christ" and Fox kept talking about lubrication and steam baths and sweat rooms), and remembered how lovely the two kinds of baths were THERE, wishing I could get back there without flying over an ocean, and DETERMINE that some of my CURRENT free time should be spent at baths or bars like Jay's so I can get back into CRUISING now!
1/20/90: A fragment centered around my HAIR: I'd washed and left it in a mass of babyfist-sized ringlets, over which a straight fall of blondish hair gave a cap-like effect. I was amazed at the FATNESS of these curls, and one even looked like a vacuum-cleaner-hose segment with plastic-like firmness of solid cylindrical curl. Not only my hair but my face was somewhat like "Making Mr. Right"'s John Malkovich.
1/21/90: 9:35AM: 1) Me and Mom are in an (English?) seaside town, driving past a green coast, up a hill where the road is only dimly seen as a track in GRASS, past summer cottages, to the main road past the bulk of the town, looking down on a lovely harbor that's more like a grassy swimming area. 2) We're watching a REHEARSAL for a pageant, and Mom's in a swivel chair on a camera boom in front of and ABOVE me, and kids run around seats in back, and BELOW us as (what looks like a huge) "head" raises from the orchestra pit. Someone shouts "lights" for a final apotheosis-effect, and the show STOPS because something blows a fuse and the show can't continue. 3) A Russ-Tamblyn-type dancer comments that we haven't gotten to HIS part yet, and stage director placates him. 4) BEFORE, dowager Marjorie-Merriweather-Post-type falls for a much younger man in a seaside romance, and she goes through a HUGE old house (duplex -level library lights up) and SELLS house to be with him "as an equal." They talk in bathing suits (she rather pudgy in black, he slim in racing stripes) as I look over a boat-dock plan for the coast, and her yacht is currently sleek at her own extra-long PIER. THEN it went to above-described #1; dowager NOT Mom!
1/22/90: 8:45AM: 1) TV ad with number below 1-800-DIAL DIRECT features a scene from an old bathhouse with jaded fags lolling around in white towels. 2) Troops of two armies (is this from the "Errors of Youth" movie last night that started with the RUSSIAN Army?) are mixed together in the lines and I start a pattern where everyone reaches across their COHORT next to them to shake hands with someone from the OPPOSITE army, so that the troops move from a state of animosity to a state of friendship. 3) 9:20AM: Mom has rushed off to work leaving a MESS in the kitchen---opened food packages that have thawed partially and are dripping water onto the floor, half-opened goods that ooze a paté-like substance that I mash back together again so it won't go stale, rotten, or air- dried, and an array of frozen orange-juice containers that I've tried to pout into very unequal pitchers so that all three are of widely-varying densities of juice, and I try to equalize them by sipping some of the water from the most dilute pitchers so that I can put in more concentrate, and mixing two other jars together to get some sort of "medium" that I can judge the proper mix from. Whole scene is lit as if from an open refrigerator, and I have to RUSH!!
1/23/90: 2:25AM (having gotten to bed at 11:25PM, after heavy Thai dinner with Shelley): 1) Go OVER dream at LEAST four times and MUST record it---but it GOES! Something MASSIVE, about translating? As Shelley offered me job? 2) Masses of men marching, as in "Aida", waiting for PATTERNS on floor to be painted checkerboard colors of black and white. 3) 5:55AM: Marcia Lipski is VERY concerned because of hair on her upper lip, but when she shows it to me, I think she's sad about a BIRTHMARK, which I don't see as BEING there. 4) 9AM: A Sunny-Simon-type socialite is entertaining me in one of her two huge Southampton houses, saying that "You need to put that in a laundry bag in the OTHER washroom," and when I go through corridors to FIND the other washroom, she's there telling me "Of course, you should have brought the laundry bag WITH you!" I wander back "the other way" and find myself stepping over HUGE GAP in timbered stairway going down to enormous living room, but it's the wrong HOUSE, and I wander across beach, meeting other people that a bus narrowly misses passing in front of them, and see the derelict SECOND house and go toward the palatial NEW house and look forward to passing these with friends and saying "I stayed there once." Also segment of SHITTING very darkly and copiously in a toilet that really doesn't FLUSH, but I know I'd flush it a SECOND time better.
1/24/90: 7:40: I'm late and lost in Florida, thinking of hitch-hiking when I find myself on a busy highway, and am picked up by a charming couple trying "to drive there the same day," and it's DARK already and I can't "make it to serve at Mass in Daytona at 4PM." BEFORE, I'd been late for a extra-fancy noon breakfast, where the buffet has three kinds of beef (thinking of Joe's boiled beef at Teresa's last night?), and I get rare-looking meat, wondering about the connection between this almost-raw and tender meat and the huge SLABS of charred meat being blackened over a barbecue-pit fire by bummy-looking men outside, using some sort of slathered-on sauce, and I'm lost HERE, too. UGH!
1/25/90: 8:55: 1) I jerk off sexy guy in an empty hotel room, putting a table up against the door for protection. I'm exciting him with erotic slides on a slide projector, and he sucks on MY hard cock (which I retain when I wake). He cums wonderfully and seems, like Richard, slipperily ready for two. A maid tries to come in to clean up, blocked by the door, and we dress quickly and get to a clothing store to say "We tried business," and "I showed slides." 9:20: 2) There's a HUGE house-party full of yuppies. I've just finished breakfast by myself, dressed in a sweater as I look outside to see tanned couples sunbathing on white-metal chairs and conversing animatedly together, and I get to the sink which starts covered with dirty dishes, but when I finish "putting things away" there's not really that many to wash, and then I take off my sweater and pants to be more fashionable in my shorts. I ask Dennis "What's the plan for the day?" and he shows me an index that he's editing, and "I'll give it to Don to take to Grand Central Station tomorrow," but Don might have left already. I have to go to the john, but can't find one on the ground floor, and remember FROM A PREVIOUS DREAM that there's an old two-story stairway connecting the new wing with the old wing (the one I "floated down" before when I found a central portion missing---and I'm aware in THIS dream that I might have trouble getting up over that missing portion!), and I find a Southampton-type enormous empty-of -people living room overlooking the sea, from the center of which rises a huge dark-wood staircase which is maintained perfectly until the "first-floor break" where it begins to rise between old walls to which the banisters are NOT firmly attached, so that the whole thing moves back and forth like a fun-house stairs, and I see that the floor above is totally dark and disused, so I figure I'll go back down, but wake before I can see anymore of the top OR bottom stairs.
1/26/90: 7:30 [Before] Magical, lyrical episode at [???thia?] short-run suspenseful? RAPPEL off 200-foot cliff, me easing(?)/playing on it! 2) Playful(?) "falling" on enormous multi-hinged contraption (like my previous BRACIOUS (?) seat ) that "unfolds" onto playing field or stadium. Elaborate "show" of athletes alternating in "aerobics" exercises. How DISGUSTING that I can't even READ my writing!
1/27/90: 8:25AM: Mom and I are traveling in Italy. I know we have only two days left in trip---we fly back tomorrow, Monday, and I have to go back because school reopens on Tuesday---but I realize with a jolt of surprise that I'm FINISHED with school this year, I can concentrate on WRITING. Mom wants to buy an artificial flower-arrangement for the center of her dining-room table, but she wants one that "the colors are better distributed in the flowers." So she goes to a far corner of the store, hoping to get it for a discount. I'm getting VERY angry with her because it's MIDNIGHT, and we have to get up VERY early tomorrow, and this is a GAY hotel---I suddenly discover a trio of hard- cover books on a table near the cash register, having the titles "Size," in which EACH printed page has a pornographic photo, painting, or drawing of statues or people with ENORMOUS penises on it, and I want to BUY it and jerk off with them in bed. As I wait frustratedly for Mom, I realize she's thought she's waiting for the checkout at the cash register, but she's been on a line for a disco ACROSS THE STREET (we're OUTSIDE the store now, and it's MORNING in an area like a reconstructed-American-hometown) and she's way up in line, now on a triangular park across the street from where she started (so she thinks she's making good progress) but STILL Across the street from the disco! I cross the street and pass a five-year-old girl crying broken-heartedly---and I guess she must be LOST and HUNGRY (from "Broken Blossoms" last night?) and she has a basket of toys or fruit from which she's placing things on the grass before her and sobs and I realize she's speaking ENGLISH as she complains about her plight, and I wonder if the Italians REALIZE what she's saying. I really feel SORRY for her, but I don't want to do anything to help her or even draw anyone else's attention to her problems. Sequence forgotten from gay hotel: there's a PIANO being played in a nightclub area, but I see a shirtless gay hustler jump up onto it to reach the bottom steps of a spiral staircase (like in "Network" last night, even though this is a free-hanging wallless metal staircase while the one in the taped movie was a wooden wall-enclosed one) to go up to the rooms above---my room-key has a silver medallion on the chain with something like 2HF on it, which is probably my room number on the second floor toward the front---and another humpy cutie is debating going upstairs, too, and there's the small idea that there may be a bar, or bath, upstairs TOO for cruising for a partner (this all seems ACCEPTED here) for the hotel rooms. I debate just LEAVING Mom to her own devices, or maybe she's even gone up to HER bedroom already, but I STILL feel frustrated, angry, and confused. Wake at 8AM with NO dream-memory, ALSO frustrated because I know I dreamed a LOT and it was NOT UNinteresting! Now I've noted these FIVE index cards full of notes by 8:45AM! Then at 8:50 note an additional recall: Another segment: walking on a hillside planted in rows of tomato-plants, needing to be CAREFUL because VINES grow across the pathways, getting caught, dragged, and broken by my passing feet, and some of them seem to be rosebushes, because they have THORNS in them which stick to my clothes and cloth shoes. I figure that the plantings are thinner up here, higher on the hill, and I'd better go back DOWN because the plants are BIGGER there, so the rows would be more widely separated and it'd be easier to walk, not to mention that the more people would have kept the paths clearer. It's more TOURISTED because the plants are larger and lusher down there, and I'm reminded of my description of "lush" for one of the wines with Bob K last night, which may have furnished some of the fuel for these dreams!
1/28/90: 8AM: Patient for operation will have spine stretched in three places and place TWO stretched "two openings" about two inches wide. 9:45AM: UGLY, hit him on back of head with WRENCH leaves LUMP. Go at his head with a cake of SOAP! WOMAN refuses to call police when GROUP gathers on next-roof to protest on DOGS. Tussle and hassle and he gets AWAY and woman GROWLS. I return to MY garret and CURSE with FRUSTRATION!
1/29/90: 9:15AM: Agate cross-section on metal support and linked puzzle pieces on scoring measurements, where "Good" scores add to 10. 9:25AM: BEFORE, got into elevator that first went DOWN, then up to 2A. I wanted to get to my apartment to write about Character A meeting Character B at last and they talk through their falling in LOVE.
1/30/90: 5AM: 1) I'm trying to get on a bus, but the driver insists on giving me change for my ten-dollar bill in six wrapped tokens and eight quarters, which I accept (being, NOW as I figure: $8.90, so my $10 gets $10.05 worth) or refuses my entry. 2) I'm reading a passage (on Alaska?) and change the words "last tape" to a whole interpolated STORY. Lots of PETTY bickering in recent dreams. I explain panentheism and a woman says THAT was the word she was trying to think of, and the program moderator comes to OUR back-left corner (of St. John the Divine?) and the two females (woman and moderator) laugh and use their mouths together so that I ask "Are you two mother and daughter," and they're like Judy Garland and Liza Minelli) and I'm acclaimed the "winner" in this "debate." It's a very POSITIVE dream, and Greg Bear's "Eternity," which I'm in the process of reading, enters in STRONGLY (as if did as I AGAIN think of "Aliens reading books THROUGH me" as I plow through "Quantum Theory" last night before bed). 3) I'm the servant of an East Indian who cooks lunch for himself, his wife, and me. For himself he has a classic omelet, but mine is "ashy" from the oven by being made second to his. But his wife's dessert is plain while my glistening red-cherry-preserve dessert is perfect and tastes as tart as cranberries, which my saying-so pleases him. 4) My "seat" in the bus is a BED in the BACK, but it JOUNCES so much I move toward the front, but all the seats are taken in the first four rows of three-seats-across except for the middle seat in the next-to-the-last row, and the middle section has a number of widely-spaced armchairs and side-chairs, but all of the unoccupied seats have either a jacket or a shawl thrown over the seats to imply that they're taken. The only unspoken-for seat is a narrow side-chair with its back to two small windows, so I head for it thinking I can look sideways out the windows at the passing scenery. I don't seem to know anyone on the bus (which has some of the elevation of a Vistadome train car and some of the compactness of an executive jet-plane cabin), and feel vaguely "out of it" because I don't know where we've been or where we're going---maybe this is a vague reaction to the low-flying planes which, coupled with the low-flying plane crash a few days ago on Long Island, made my jerk-off last night so affectless and started me worrying about flying even BEFORE I've made any plans to FLY. This has GOT to STOP!!
1/31/90: 5:20AM 1): Teacher shows me how to make salad dressing by putting my hand into a flimsy envelope, made out of two paper towels stapled together, and KNEADING oils and cheeses. 2) Before that, Spartacus shows a class by demonstration (like last night's Moscow Rock and Roll 1989 program) how to PREPARE your hands for this kneading, by asking questions, class shouting responses, and doing the demonstration. 3) And FIRST (in order of dreaming), Mary Vilaboa (who's DIZZY) and I are in the elevator with "11" and "12" floor- buttons BELOW the buttons for floors 1-9. 4) Some person (Dennis? Spartacus?) HAS a mystery book that I want. 5) 9:40AM: Spartacus and I are walking down a dark Brooklyn street, looking for a BINGO party where someone will tell us how to find someone or someplace we're looking for. The house is DARK, but he goes down a brick entrance stairway (crossing over wet areas on my heels so my feet won't get wet) and entry-light come son and it LOOKS like a Chinese-kid policeman is FRISKING him, but the short plump Polish woman welcomes us as if we'd BEEN there before. Someone in a yellow sweater puts her HAND up to my lips to be kissed, and I grasp it by the fingers to give it a shake awkwardly. And then my buzzer goes for a delivery.
2/2/90: Some guy is PUSHING an automobile and at the same time PULLING a bicycle up a double-wide-and-high flight of stairs. I PUSH past seated and descending people to get to the TOP of the stairs as the set of doors pivot shut and I'm in a CYLINDER of WORKS (can't read that WORD, or "works" that opens and shuts the doors?) up to POPE'S and he's wearing a WIG to make him look like Walter Matthau, and Pope RUNS out to "see what we're doing on February 27." Phone Pope now and he says he'll note 2/27; 2/28 is loaded, though!
2/3/90: 9AM: I SEE IT in sunlight under table (first I think it's a RAT), THEN it flies, low and slow, over MOM (who thinks it disgusting) and then a pigeon lands on MY LEFT SHOULDER while I'm in my PRESENT bed and I FEEL IT in REALITY! DISTINCTLY feel the claws hook into my LEFT shoulder (it's my RIGHT that now has arthritic pains, so I don't think it's HEALTH connected). Wake feeling ODD!
2/4/90: In "Washington" (that's a proper name, not the city or state) Baths where rather-muscular guys are in FULL (of water) bathtubs having sex, with LONG cocks going in and out of mouths, and someone (like a director) says, "Isn't this a bit strong for TV?" And I keep looking at the scene and thinking it's wonderful.
2/5/90: 1) A large projection TV comes on at 9PM with "Erotica Films" showing "Best Images of 1989." And the Satprem Film Company shows a black male Kali figure which is being "danced by a Bihari wrestler" plunging his chesty body through inky fluids which totally soak whatever Indian-type garments he has on his body so that they merge with his naturally-black and now ink-water-stained skin to look like a diorite sculpture come to ponderous life and sensuously writhing and dancing in an erotic manner. The eyes in the Buddha-like head are closed in pleasure, and there's a self-satisfied smile on his thin lips, but though the body is erotically muscled, the POINT of the dance seems more COSMIC than sexual. Now it seems that I'm more LOOKING DOWN at the body in a pool of inky water rather than looking at him swimming "in a TV fishbowl of fluids." 2) An old man hums as he strums his two- or three-string guitar, while his wife noodles tunelessly over the keys on her piano, which seem to be 3/4 covered with some sort of wood framework that only allows her to play on 20-22 keys, which she passes over with her ten fingers. As they finish, I dash to a two-johnned bathroom (I now recall that the dream I just typed for today, 2/7, also has a two-stall urinal in the bathroom---am I getting ready for a "significant other"?) to pee before I get dressed for the day's work.
2/6/90: 8:20AM: 1) Something for lost "HC" (High Colonic?)---though NOW I remember that on 2/5, when I was coordinating, Mary Vilaboa and I laughed about her Messages Book comment using the initials HC for Healing Circle, when I'd just read that it was used for Head Center or Health Control or some OTHER HC acronym---I'm EAST of Pelham Parkway (this MUST be from the ad on the subway for the School for the Blind whose address is something like "Parkchester Highway, NOT Pelham Parkway"), all the while KNOWING that HE (my destination, or maybe "HC" himself) is WEST of the Parkway, and they (the cops) agree to let me try to find him. 2) Another "earlier fragment" of walking NORTH in Akron at DUSK in order to see the SUNSET or a UFO, from an area past the last houses in the suburbs of Akron, where the trees leaving a clearing where the sky can be seen. 3) I race some guy to the front of the line at a MacDonalds in London (is this from the news about the new MacDonald's opening this week in Moscow?), and I see an advertisement for a "Tangential Floater" for $1.15, and I eat two OLD cheeseburgers that I'd bought on a previous day and taken along with me today so that I could eat them outdoors for lunch on my individual walking tour, while I wait for service. The waiter looks at me and comments in Hindi and makes some joke about my bringing in old food to his cook-friend in the kitchen. I can hear them through the open doors of the kitchen but I don't care what they think of me because I'm a stranger in the city. I find it interesting (trying to get to the bottom of the page) how many of these recent dreams seem to be concerned with MAKING A GOOD IMPRESSION on someone (and I'm now reminded of my conversation on the telephone last night with Gary Bywaters in which I feel vaguely embarrassed to mention my fear of flying when he talks of flying to Cedar Point for the roller coasters or going cross-country and ending up in Seoul in August---I feel that I've made a poor first impression, as I was concerned about the impression I made on Miles Groth when I met him through Richard Gourley at the Peacock last Wednesday), since my "don't care what they think of me" today is CLEARLY showing some concern about what first impression I make on people. Anyway, I'm pleased with this spate of dreams, though it DOES occur to me "WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH THEM?" when I think that some year I'll have to move into a smaller apartment and get rid of unnecessary junk from my life---as I'm thinking of FINALLY throwing away some stuff that I've collected in my "things to do" pile which I haven't done ANYTHING about in at LEAST two years: either DO IT or GET IT OFF THE PILE would be my thoughts!
2/7/90: 10:58AM: Just last night I thought, "It's been a long time (12/30/89) since I had a dream that FILLED MORE THAN A PAGE," and, whaddya know, HERE IT IS: 1) The "Gone with the Wind" of dreams! Me and my friend are both trying to impress a Barbara-Stanwyck-type woman that we're right to come south with her to work on her horse ranch! I take her to dinner and try to flatter her, but she pushes me off, saying only "If you can do it, you'll be OK." Me and my friend pass a HUGE tree on her northern property, which has been blown down by a windstorm, and its fallen in an ESPALIERED position on the ground at a crossroads: there are enormous loops of branches, twigs, and leaves, but they're separated into four distinct quadrants of foliage leading back to a dimly-visible central "trunk" which looks more like the root of a VINE than the felled trunk of a tree. We pass the felled tree at the crossroads (that sounds ominous, doesn't it?) to get to a palatial barn where her head horseman or manager is getting onto a HORSE (is this the first time I dreamed of a real HORSE?) to test it out and ride it around. When he comes over to the wooden barricade---that seems to extend the 80 feet to the top of the barn roof---to talk to me, I know that he's Spanish-speaking and try to impress him by saying "I speak Spanish, but 'Muy pocito,'" holding up my two fingers a millimeter apart, "but I'd like the job," and he dismisses me with HIS equivalent of "If I do the work, I'll be OK." I'm also trying to impress my buddy by "talking through the negotiations" with both of them, but because of their responses I'm not really succeeding. Could I be a MEXICAN? Another first in a dream? Or am I just "playing the role of a Mexican" in this "movie" with Barbara Stanwyck, also trying to foster my movie career? Write this at 5:58AM, to sleep 2:58AM. 2) That dream continues, or the next dream begins, with a VERY sexy body--or a statue--as a main character: he has the pure-white look of a plaster-of-Paris cast of the Farnese Hercules with the head broken off, he does MOVE, but with the frozen stylized sideways-always-front look of "L'Apres-Midi d'un Faun" or of the bodybuilders on the "Miss USSR" TV program last night. It's true that the Farnese Hercules has his head to the side, small in proportion to his body, but this Hercules (from "Hercule Poirot" in the series I've been watching?) seems to REALLY have had his head knocked off, because the top of the torso ends with a muscular neck-stump surmounted by a smear of blood that could be the lower part of a nosebleed (like on the Wendy-daughter in "Anything to Survive" last night) or, horribly, the only remains of his decapitation. He moves through the "transition" scenes with other characters, but I can't remember the situations because I was too groggy to copy them down as I woke and slept. 3) I'm roaming through my enormous apartment on the top of a building very like 309 W. 57th St. BEFORE the four apartment were cut into the nine on each floor: I leave my apartment through a door that I'm not familiar with and am in a hotel-hallway out of a 40s Hollywood movie: glass doors with curved Art-Deco handles, wide corridors, and elegant appointments. I even pass a triple-height meeting room with balcony seats like in a high-school auditorium. Somehow, as usual, I'm looking for a john, and I'm following someone who seems to know where he's going, and he rounds a corner to take a quick left into a dark closet-like pissoir with room for only two, and self- consciously I don't follow him in. When he comes out, I say that "I'm not that familiar with the rooms around my apartment," and I meet a guest of mine who says that "I'd better check the hot-water settings, because there doesn't seem to be any hot water left for the showers," and I have no idea where the water heater is, and I try to ask the guy casually if he'd like to help me find it as we wander more halls looking for other entrances to my apartment that I'd recognize. I've KNOWN this apartment from PREVIOUS dreams, too! Then we're obviously on street-level walking alongside a group of oriental-looking girls standing in mid-calf water in a "tank" (like in Sri Lanka) with watercress-type plants growing in neat rows just underwater, and though they seem to be speaking another language, I ask "What are these?" to the nearest girl and she says, possibly untruly, "They're flowers, of course." As we walk on beside the yellow but remarkably transparent water, swimming above the flowers is a HUGE flat-fronted shark (the shape, now that I think of it, is somehow reminiscent of the Stealth Bomber on the TV program last night) the color of a manta ray, and to increase our astonishment it's followed by a FLURRY of similar-shaped BABY sharks in a close-knit flotilla. They pass as we continue walking, and the pond "grows" in height as we walk beside it until we're suddenly in a CAR passing by it at speed as the sides begin to swell ominously, as if there were a tidal swell coming with a slow certainty, and rise above us as we pass by, and when I twist in the death-seat to look behind, I can see that the crest has now risen above the glass-rock sides of the pond and is spraying out to wet and possibly sweep off the road the cars about four or five cars behind us. Maybe this stems from the improbable spraying of the Disneyland Amazon cruise boat occupants, Tony Danza among them, on the 35th Anniversary show I skimmed through last night. I turn to the driver (again someone I'm trying to impress) and launch into a wild story about how my friend (I'm reluctant to call him my ex-lover because the driver is a new [and faceless] acquaintance who doesn't know I'm gay) (it's always amazed me about the quantity of "known or background data" that applies in my dreams) John A. gave seminars on "Forgiveness" (is THAT one of the est seminars I read about in getting rid of the mail yesterday?) to drivers who'd gone off the road or injured people while driving in high winds, in excess of 70-80 miles per hour. It seems I KNEW this wasn't true, and told the story simultaneously trying to impress and fearing he'd call my veracity and I'd end up being though of with contempt. Now we're walking back through the entrance-gardens of my apartment building, which now seems like one of the many hotels along Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, and I tell him with mock self-deprecation, "Here I thought that that fishpond and even the road was still on the top of my own apartment building!" He's walking ahead of me and doesn't react, and I try to attend to something that's become apparent in the "last few minutes" of the dream: I'm chewing on some enormous wad of gum which seems to be mixed with wax and other foreign substances. My jaws have become tired of ruminating on this stiff material (and I wake worrying about bruxism, though my WAKING jaws don't seem to have been used), and I put my fingers into my mouth to try to extract a piece with the most foreign material encased in it, and I take out a fist-sized lump without in any way reducing the gob that almost prevents speaking in my mouth. I try to conceal the fact that I'm fingering through this gob of gray-wax substance in my right hand, extracting an aluminum thermos-jar ring from around the body of the gob and throwing it into a mass of other garbage in the sandy surround (ah, yes, there was the Miracle Planet special on the desert, too) of a palm tree just in front of my entrance---the area is loaded with other debris, but I feel self-conscious about adding to the litter and hope the guy in front of me (or anyone, for that matter) doesn't see me do it. The amount of foreign material in the gob in my hand seems to be separating neatly, and I take out bits of wood and other matter and discard them, being left with a mass of wax that NOW strikes me as being very like the masses of wax-bottle enclosing a sweet syrup that I used to like when I was 4-6 years old in Akron, stuffing my mouth with the wax to chew out its last bits of sweetness before spitting it into the debris at the curbs of Brown Street or the dirt-margins of Dietz Avenue. Then I'm back in my apartment, finding the members of a family I'd forgotten were my guests, in a living room watching a TV program they say they're interested in, which makes me happy because I'd not been entertaining them myself, and I tell them something like, "I can tell you about those pilot-programs you've been watching," but they're not really interested, which is good, because I'm just making it up, and I tell them to look in the Sunday Times TV guide for the times of the programs they might like to watch, and I think AGAIN someone reminded me that I'd better check the hot-water heater settings, because they weren't left with enough hot water. So I not only had a FULL-page dream, but the dream has now extended to TWO FULL PAGES, a record since a LONG time back!!
2/9/90: 9:10AM: A famous artist is staying with me, and JUST as she's LEAVING, she wants to look at MY artwork. I visualize it in a big thin envelope, like I have my posters in, but I ransack closets, spare bathrooms (where Bill Hyde's suitcase is---he's eating nuts because it's past his dinnertime and he has to drive her to the airport before he eats), and I find greeting cards I'd kept with wonderful Persian paintings on them, with white cut-out "Don Quixote" silhouettes that I got from Bob Rosinek. But I can't find MY artwork! DRAT!
2/10/90: I'm in (later) Jehovah's Witnesses enclave (BEFORE, I'd gone over ROOFS down the narrow building-wing to get in PAST the guards), and I pass empty dining areas. Smiling guys and interesting passengers come BACK, woman passes out (?) or whatever (from elevator?) and I want to catch three to delivery on steps also (at noon): that old button man with a last name in order-in-the-alphabet consonants. [Well, that's the best I could read THAT!]
2/16/90: 1) Bird pecking away at mannequin's LEG, and mannequin gets scissors and chops off bird's feathers---UGLY in "prison" or vice-ridden neighborhood. 2) DONUTS may be FILLED and sugared, but SARDINES are filled with WORMS (like on subway?) 3) BEFORE, I'm trimming paper or cloth to 52B or shapes.
4) Before THAT, "Last-ditch" hitchhiker picker-upper picks up the TAINED(?) as three meserts(?) to "hilltop" entrance to school---down roads---I'm CRIPPLED and walk up slowly, but MASS is not yet over and I'm still FIRST into classroom. Odd Akron University-Toledo-in-Spain combination---one guy "climbs" railing, other on WALLS? Odd "singing" service that I SOLO at in JEST.
2/17/90: 8:40AM: 1) Walk to photo places? "Never the right pictures." "NOW to SET UP Turkey?" 2) Roaming all sides of stage, looking into closets for MY briefcase, and I can't FIND it. It's NOT in the hotel, and WHICH of last TWO stops did I lose it? (Umbrella? Antarctic trip-plan?) DESPERATE, confused by "But what did I LOSE?---I HAVE money and clothes and main suitcase."
2/19/90: All centered around ACTUALISM and ACTUALITY: 1) I want to jerk off BEFORE I go, and I walk around an apartment that seems to be MOM'S apartment, testing out the angles of numerous mirrors on the floors, closet doors, and walls in various multiples of numbers, and my cock is emitting LOTS of pre-cum drops of great clear fluidity, and suddenly MOM is standing there and I FLIP my bathrobe closed around my cock (reminded of Ackerley's underbelt holding up his obvious erections) and DREAD that she'll find it as she dithers about the apartment and I try to make excuses about why I'm not dressed yet. 2) I must return HOME between Actualism and "Rumors" for my TICKET, and I'm LATE and afraid I won't be able to subway to the Broadway theatre in time. 3) MOM must DRIVE me to be at Actualism at 3PM, and there's an older woman sitting next to her in front and a younger woman sitting next to me in back, and there's delays about getting into the car, and where we're going (and now that I think of it, some of the madness of Vicki is driving the car and getting distracted and talking about extraneous matters which is slowing our progress down), and it's getting close to 5PM and a) I open my suitcase and thumb through folded trousers to find pants that AREN'T blue jeans, which I can't wear to Actualism, and b) the woman next to me hands me something that I'd had in the back pocket of some OTHER trousers---maybe the ones I just took off?---and there's a $95 bill that I puzzle over: "I didn't know they made bills THIS high?" along with the blue-stoned ring that I know David Hoch gave me of his before he died, and I put the ring on (it doesn't fit the ring or middle finger, so I put in on my index finger, which it covers knuckle-to-knuckle, and it "goes with" the stiff cowboy-leather pants that I've selected to wear, though I have no boots that the pants are supposed to fit into, and c) I forgot the KEY and walk south from 62nd Street and Riverside Drive to 59th Street wondering WHO to telephone to GET a spare key (forgetting there's one at the desk) or do I BREAK into office?
2/22/90: I meant to jot a note when I woke after the dream, but didn't. Then when I woke for good about 7:30AM, I remembered that I had HAD a dream and tried to recall it. Quickly returned the memory of A LONG COCK, and I found the core-image of the dream: a foot-long, magnificently tapering sausage of a cock, descending from a tight nest of velvety-black pubic hairs, on a rounded tanned body of an intermediate white-Hispanic-black old-adolescent muscle-body gone slightly to fleshiness yet not yet to fat. The START of the dream seemed to deal with my mouth's totally engulfing this flexible dildo-fantasy until I could only come to the image that I was being completely filled without choking, absolutely sated without being suffocated or discomfited---that the flexibility of the enormous penis so maneuvered and collapsed and expanded that my throat and mouth and jaws had gratifying full-fillment and pleasure without being in the least measure discommoded. After my sword-swallowing, I disgested this cylinder and laid it between his hairless thighs with my worshipful hands, and it was dry with a thick-skinned matte tranquility that had no veininess of engorgement, no slime of orgasm, nor any diminishment of flaccidity, and I made some praising comment, more to myself than to him, about this miraculous member, to which he smiled slightly and shifted sensually and I was very happy.
2/23/90: I'm attending some HUGE convention in Germany, which seems to have the aura of some sort of award-ceremony, doubtless influenced by my skimming through the Grammy-award program last night from 1-3AM, and there are lots of fragments that seem disconnected: 1) A moderator staging an impromptu contest among the crowds before a bank of TVs, asking "Where in Canada was this scene filmed?" and someone immediately says "Quebec!" 2) Some guy strums the guitar to the tune of the "Ode to Joy" of Beethoven's Ninth and as others join in to sing (is this part of my tears from the song "The Living Years" last night?) I feel myself WEEPING with joy. 3) There seems to be a pattern to the pairs who have "found" each other: ugly rich older people gather pretty poor younger people about them, either for sex or glamour or publicity. 4) The TVs and live rooms show HORDES of people watching the results and showings of this conference-convention. 5) One television monitor won't work because it's not properly GROUNDED, or connected to an ANTENNA; another doesn't have any SOUND, another doesn't have SUBTITLES or VOICE-OVERS for translations. 6) One of the moderators who interacts with ME in some pleasingly elevating way looks like Marty from Brooklyn Video. BUSY and GRATIFYING set of non-connected images.
2/24/90: I'm at a party in a big house in SOUTH AMERICA (New? For trip?) and there's news of an EARTHQUAKE, so I go to pull aside blinds from windows but I can see only wind-tossed trees and black sky. Talk to Elizabeth Barber on the phone in California and say "There may be an earthquake," and SHE feels tremors THERE at JUST that time! Then I'm watching an elaborate plane that's a combination of Wright Brothers antique and glass-wall modern, with almost invisible means of propulsion, as it tries to fly in the high winds above the treetops, and it goes looping UP (below) to clear the trees, and it seems to retain enough control to maneuver to a landing. This is followed by a SEXY part at the end of a TV movie where a naked male observer can be seen to have an ERECTION, long and firm and veined and uncircumcised and matte pink, first outlined on the seat of his chair, and then just at the top of the screen as he stands on his head in the chair. We're all watching it, and I'd feel self-conscious to put in a videotape quickly to catch THAT part of the movie, but I hope they'll rebroadcast it so that I CAN tape it, marveling that they didn't censor it, thinking "Maybe they thought he just had a long cock, rather than an actual ERECTION." Wake just before 8, having gone to bed on the dot of midnight, still feeling fatigued from the cold and coughing gunk.
2/26/90: I'm studying a model of a house (or a temple entrance) with four columns so old they're ROTTEN in the middle. The stone is damp and carved so long ago that all of the carvings are highly eroded. The model is about 2x3 feet and lying horizontally in some kind of garden, and I wonder if most of the erosion isn't due to the model's having been laid onto its back. There are two statuettes, like fist-sized Chinese stone guardian lions, loosely placed on the front of the model above the columns, and when I move them I can see that the carvings below them, as if they'd been meant to protect them, are somewhat more preserved, but still the lines have been eroded. An old man is sitting in a chair nearby, and there's an article that I'm reading in a pictorial magazine stating that the tombs in "Lincoln" (Nebraska? The whole thing seems more like PETRA than the United States) are "believed to be the first ever dug," and there are crowds of people descending the ramp toward the entrance (which is rather like the Ming Tombs outside Peking) in the major photography. The dream also has a stray bit of me watching two SWEATING sex-partners moving around each other, and since some of the sweat may be semen, it seems to be AFTER their major encounter, and I content myself while watching them by reaching behind my back to the recumbent body of someone I'm lying in bed next to, rather like Richard, who hasn't called in too long, exciting his cock with my casual massaging. I wake excited, but the room is cold and I get up quickly.
3/1/90: The elevator comes, but MANY don't get on because it stops about twelve inches BELOW the floor level. Three of us go up to the second floor and the floor of the elevator stops about two feet from the TOP of the outside door, so no one can get out. Then up to the fifth floor, and the entrance is blocked by a RAILING. The elevator door remains open, so finally I straddle the railing and get OUT of the elevator (this is the floor I wanted, it seems), and the elevator goes back down in what appears to be a normal way.
3/2/90: 5:20AM: I'm talking to Larry Ball and another person, saying "Yes, I was in the Army for two years, and a greater WASTE of time and money I CAN'T imagine---" and at that moment a plane, rows of lights lit in the twilight sky, comes roaring overhead, and the wind is so strong (this is clearly influenced by Shelley Neiderbach's story on the telephone yesterday about her London conference being cut short because of the high winds in England, and the baffle of the rear jet coming off with an EXPLOSIVE sound AS they were taking off from the airport ("Thank goodness we weren't in the air," was her sole giving-in to the fear of the situation.)) that we can HEAR the snapping of the wings back and forth as it banks first forty-five degrees to the right and then rolls about one-hundred degrees to the left, and we all hope that everyone is strapped in securely. In the dream I think, "NOW I can't wait," and dread and reluctance for the upcoming trip begins to weigh on me.
3/8/90: 5AM: 1) I've just thrown lots of stuff into a trash can: bottles and clothes on hangers, including a charcoal-black Brooks Bros. suit, piling it up so I can push down the lid, and a BUM comes over to rag-pick. "Not here," I shout at him, breaking quart bottles to mess things up, and he's druggy and mumbles "Just a bit to drink," (from any of the bottles) and I stomp upstairs in disgust to 2) a tiny one-room airlines office in CHINA, and a clerk says "Air France," on the phone (obviously from my current air-fare concern), and I figure I can check on my itinerary, as the lights go off and all the women start running down corridors and stairways to the street. They're laughing, partly because it's SNOWING in the SUMMER, and I say, "Yeah, it snowed at home this morning, too." I'm outdoors and kids are throwing snowballs from the corner downhill toward us, but without malice, and a cute pudgy red-cheeked kid is EATING the snow with WONDER on his face, and I pick up a mushy handful and it's half ice cream and cotton, a lovely NOT icy MUSH, and I return HOME to my little room, smiling in amazement at the unseasonal happenings of the day.
3/10/90: (Note typed 3/13): 7:35AM, probably stopped by getting my key from Fethi who rang THIS early: I'm using an IBM program AT IBM to write a PLAY, and it's WORKING, but I shut off the computer to MOVE it to another storage medium, and in turning it back ON I don't "reset alarm" and someone SHOUTS that I have to do that before I force the clearing of the memory, and I rip off a casing and see a four-row array of lights, from bottom to top labeled: 0, ERROR, 1, 2. The ERROR key is BLACK, and he shouts at me to "hit 1010, and I figure that means "22", and hit ERROR by mistake, and he groans, saying that I've LOST all my WORK! I frantically try to find some way to retrieve it by "unediting" or processing the disk in some way to retrieve my work. Wake up rather frustrated.
3/11/90: 7:35AM: Dream.
Justin Prosper.
The new mympths.
"Whatever you think reality is, reality isn't that."
Following Faye Levy's muscular calves (so I know that's not reality) up a narrow flight of stairs, saying the above statement, was part of the dream.
The new mympths were comets of red and blue: firework commas of comets like bubble-chamber indications of sperm. Separating these were delicate webs of concentric circles, humming with vibrations, representing basic pulsating quanta of energy.
Justin Prosper was the name invoked as the bringer of the new view that all of us were looking for in the dream, though I almost typed "that all of us are looking for."
That reminded me of the infinite halls of glory in which I and another went, trying to find the ultimate physical sensations. Images crowd my mind now as I try to sort them out: we seemed to be underground because there were no windows to admit light from outside---our entire space was a labyrinth of rooms branching off rooms as in an Egyptian tomb, but the rooms of the tomb were furnished with fabric encrusted with gems---
This must be related to the Beijing Opera's costumes last night---
And the rooms were all lit as if these were shops in souks (the shopping areas in old African-Arabian cities) which the owners had closed for the night without locking their doors or turning off their lights. So we walked through a fun-house maze of shops selling luxuriant fabrics, perfumes, and tasty dainties.
We'd be walking down a central corridor, seeming to descend deeper into the maze of shops, and I'd look to the left and there would be an endless corridor hung with materials for saris: the Indian women's dresses comprised of yards of silk studded with sequins and sewn with threads of gold and silver.
Don't forget to mention the physical sensations on waking up: the earthquake shudder of the bed, the chill of the oncoming cold, the ache in the neck-girdle, the dryness of the nose, the thirst in the dry throat, seemingly all part of the "climacteric" sections of the book "Passages" which I'd read on the subway on the way home last night, but still connected to the sweep of emotions and images and feelings from the dream.
Back to the room hung with yards of silk, hanging from the ceiling thirty or forty feet above, lit with the jewelers' lamps that made the fabric shimmer with colors changing from ruby to sapphire and back to blood, glittering with pinpoints of light---
---that reminds me of the stars in the sky which went out as we looked upward from the highway, surrounded by people seeing the same thing so we knew that it wasn't an hallucination (why do I feel that I should use "an" before "hallucination"?): what we saw we first took to be the downward curve of a moon-rainbow: it seemed to be night, there seemed to be a moon (though both these elements weren't really VISIBLE), and the curve of milky smoke seemed to be precisely a skewed circle until we noticed puffs of dust being churned up at its base, and following the curve upward we saw that the curve bent in another direction, so that the image seemed that of a stationary cyclone biting into the horizon next to the highway we seemed to be standing on---a highway curving over the crest of a hill so that nothing from the earth rose above us---and then we saw other, identical, cyclones sprouting like lampposts, though not so regularly spaced so that we might be fooled into thinking that they WERE natural, and the sky was filled with soundless cyclones, milky white in the clouded sky, and we were all frightened.
Back to the room hung with silken fabrics: we'd find a divan covered with pillows, surrounded by tables furnished with stoppered bottles of perfumes: I'd unstopper a bottle and smear scent on the back of my hand, then rub it on the other's body, then get another bottle to sample its smell and mingle that stopper's liquid with the scent of the first.
We all seemed to be at some sort of consciousness-raising convention, all trying to "out-do" each other in our claims of having tuned into some higher reality, and the skies and rooms were filled with wonders which might or might not be fever-dreams, delirium tremens, or mass hypnosis.
"Look for Justin Prosper," as if that person were the magician of the moment. His show would be the most crowded, the most difficult to get tickets for, but knowing his name and the fact that you should look for him put you ahead of the rest of the rabble.
Was I waking or sleeping when my closed eyes beheld the "new mympths"? I was so aware that they contrasted in color and pattern to the typical mympths that, if I WERE dreaming, it would be a true example of a lucid dream, since I recognized a portion of the dream and questioned it. Part of the test would be to try to re-see them: the color and pattern of mympths have remained hardwired, unvarying, through decades---I couldn't IMAGINE them being different without SEEING them to be precisely the same, though sadly dimming in intensity and diminishing in length of time with passing years.
In those sunken silken jeweled rooms we seemed to be searching for a deeper dream, a more potent philosophy, or maybe just a more sensational orgy. I'm reminded of a book described in the New York Times Book Review section I looked through last night: "A Return to the 60s" with its fashions and psychedelia: produce a lavish setting with silks and jewels and attractive scents, and a pleasant trip will ensue.
Periodically I'd return to my conversation with Faye Levy as we tried to cut through the layers of reality to an understanding of the newest psychological twist that might permit us a glimpse of the mind's mechanisms. We weren't eating (nor were we fasting), and we weren't drinking (nor were we strictly sober), but we were searching, always searching.
The earthquake-tremors and the cyclone-silence seemed to forbode cosmic changes like the stars winking out. Yet these sequences would pass and find us calmly trying to decipher the mind's mysteries.
My neck hurts more now, as I type, and it's 8:13AM and I've gotten most of the fabric of the dream typed out. What's missing is the psychedelic sense of returning to previous sequences to repeat them in slightly enhanced ways (like in the marvelous movie "Zardoz"), as I've tried to capture in the Houses known variously as "Acid" and "AIDS."
I haven't yet captured the sense of open-mouthed wonder, the breathless rush of events that seemed to occur literally faster than the imagination could supply the images. So the images must, in some way, be REAL. Rather than inventing a world, I was VISITING a world that exists without me, that I only dip into for a supply of images like a paintbrush dips into a pool of color for application to the surface to be renewed with brilliance.
We (sometimes Faye Levy, sometimes a nameless male body) rushed from experience to experience, yet we were more carried along as if on a magic carpet through these Arabian souks of Dreamland. We'd turn from one corridor heavy with silken scent to a perpendicular corridor lined with Oriental carpets on vertical stretchers, suspended for display as if on the pages of huge fabric books for which the walls themselves were the spines. The rooms we entered seemed always to slant downwards away from us, as if we were being led deeper into cave-grottos of luxury: Aladdin's caves of richness. (Is Aladdin from Allah-din?)
Now at 8:23AM the magic has passed, the images have faded. The warp and weft have unraveled into linear fragments. But the memory of the intensity remains: it MUST have been significant; the FEELING must be important! The search ITSELF is attractive; even the failures are beautiful in their ways. Physical pains and conceptual dead-ends can't dispel the attraction to the continued search. Another piece might be jig-sawed to fit into the puzzle of life. THIS might connect with THAT, and another loose end returns to its place in the pattern. We can enjoy the pattern without real concern for the edges of the carpet.
I watch the pages print out at 8:30AM and the following thoughts occur to me: 1) the less I editorialize the more connected the images seem to be; 2) when the dream is caught in apocalyptic images I seem always to return to the jeweled rooms of sensation: the image of passing through death into another sensate life is hardly avoidable. I'm again reminded of my rephrasing the adage to "as below, so above": if the waves withdraw and return to the shore, different yet the same; if termite-colonies cycle through myriads of individuals to build one towering edifice; if different leaves return to the same branches every spring---wouldn't those cycles at least hold out the promise of renewed life after death? But, on the other hand, doesn't that indicate the EASE of IMAGINING such a return, without any possibility of verification that such returns HAPPEN or not?
3/16/90: (All notes below typed 3/22): 7AM: A ZOLNERZAK conducted the US Army Band in MARYLAND up to waves versus all---with uncircumcised COCK in MOUTH. 1) I want to DUPLICATE his concern, hoping I CAN, 2) After and now, I look at passersby through Christmas canes on Boardwalk under slushy snow. [GOOD as I can!]
3/17/90: 8AM: 1) I "wake" to find a 3/4" CRACK extending from about a foot to right of corner of bedroom wall, diagonal down to right to about center of south wall of bedroom. I sit up in bed and whisper to someone "And that's an OUTSIDE wall, too!" 2) On Dietz, Joe Livigni has died and his bier WAS in the top dining-room-buffet drawer but is NOW propped up against (inside) my CLOSED door, and in dim dark he OPENS the door, and goes to the JOHN, flushes, and RETURNS to closet. Later, two HEADS on wall open their mouths---black's mouth moves in a CRYING way but the white's mouth gnashes on cottage-cheese whiteness dripping down and they seem remorseless, sad, and totally HOPELESS.
3/18/90: Dennis and I are lunching out and see GEOMETRIC grid-patterns of SNOW falling outside the window. An omen? Or a preconception on my part? [I kept telling him it would SNOW after this, and he'd talk to the blooming daffodils, saying "Don't worry, he's just trying to scare you; it isn't going to snow!"]
3/20/90: 8:15AM: There's a PLAY rehearsal (Play last night; Dennis's rehearsal) of first NYC run-through of touring play with elaborate scenery and WATER (as in "Grapes of Wrath" last night). Three massed groups on grid, each will think of "How I got here," and the Turning Point for ONE guy is "New York is a lousy place to visit but a great place to live." There are problems with timing, lines, and scenery. I sit through the whole thing, and then talk to someone else, saying "Watch the guy who flew down from Toronto when she'd flown from Denver the NIGHT I'm introduced to his mother and sisters, and some hippy slut fusses about me (did I WRITE the play?). Very ugly scene in bathhouse, orchestra follows shower-stall problems, past baths, all in Ohio-like setting. VERY complex dream with FEW details recalled NOW. 10:30AM: MORE confusing plot-lines on misinterpreted song-titles, like "I've Grown Accustomed to the Quality of the Press." Rehearsal problems, casting problems, MANY details forgotten. [And even MORE words mangled because I wasn't WRITING clearly!!]
3/21/90: 8:40AM: Relativity of passing time: two people meet after 3-4 years and try to establish whatever "has happened in time" has passed for EACH of them, and finally one who's suffered and anguished convinces the other, who's had an EASY and CREATIVE time (time FLIES when you're productive!) that times ARE different for the two of them. Other, somehow, "adjustments" can be made for wars, growing children, illusions, etc.
3/22/90: 9:15AM: I'm attending a film festival, and I'd reserved two tickets but only need one, but I get two program-sheaves of information about the films from the box office, despite my protestations that I'm alone. I actually have three tickets, one only a stub, so I discard that, present one to the usher to have another stub removed, think to present the stubbed remainder but then figure I have to present the one with the stub removed to show that I've been legally past the usher. Take my seat, along one wall which serves as the screen, and I have to look through Venetian-blind like LOUVERS at the screen behind it, and the film seems out of focus or dim, so I try to slightly adjust the angle of the louvers by reaching out to one of the slats and twisting it slightly. A very slight adjustment makes it better or worse, but it slips back into slight maladjustment, and I vaguely wonder why I can't find the cords to adjust them CORRECTLY. There's a woman and small child sitting in the row in front of me, and the woman continually nags at her little boy to go to the john before he wets his nice new socks, and I can see the white-ribbed socks on his legs above his sneakers that he's pulled onto the movie-seat, and I'm now reminded that Spartacus was showing off his new white socks at the Feld Ballet last night. She keeps talking to the kid as if she were at home, and finally I tell her with some exasperation, "Just let him pee in his PANTS, for God's sake," and I'm a little concerned that she won't listen to my good advice, but only get annoyed that I've chosen to curse at her. After I fiddle more with the blinds, she turns to me in annoyance and asks "What are you DOING?" and I figure she's just annoyed at ME because I got annoyed at HER. There's a moment of darkness on the screen while they're changing the reels, and it's suddenly clear to me that this theatre is on an AIRPLANE: the entire cabin is now dark, and we'd been looking at the "screen" actually out the portholes on the side of the airplane, but when the "screens" go black, we can look forward to the cockpit, which has no wall between it and us, and see the silhouettes of the rest of the passengers and the two pilots ahead of us, and through the cockpit windows we can see the lights below from some enormous amphitheater with baseball lights surrounding it, just filling the vista from the windows, and I figure that for this festival they've put us all into planes which are circling around this amphitheater, and I close my eyes to try to feel relaxed, but there's a blaze of light I can see through my eyelids and at the same moment there's a loud "OOOOhh" from the audience ahead of me and the plane jolts sharply to the left, and I imagine that another movie-plane was headed straight toward us and we both had to veer to the side. I'm not TERRIBLY frightened, just that familiar feeling of exasperation: "HOW could they have been so silly as to put ALL these planes into such a small area---HOW can they expect us to avoid each other in such a small space? I DO hope the air traffic controllers have us all on their screens and can control us in our small patterns." All of this took place in just a moment of time, but I'd taken these notes just two hours ago (as opposed to the first of the dreams typed today, from 3/16, which is a week ago, which I couldn't read all of the words on), and the details of the dream are still fresh in my mind, and I can do my FEELINGS about them justice, as I couldn't with the ones before where I couldn't even remember the WORDS of the dreams, let alone the FEELINGS of them. And of course I'm aware of getting close to the bottom of the page, and not wanting to retype this page, and so I string out the useless words to COMPLETE the page, which may be a good compulsion for indexing, but it doesn't serve me very well when I'll be going through this to edit out junk from what should be published eventually!
3/24/90: 8:35AM: ELABORATE DREAMS: 1) Multiple-unit cars---Cadillac cabin pulled by Hudson car on long connector-rod, with a double-cabin Cadillac following (was this before or after I'd seen so many of the extremely long Cadillacs with the "bedposts in back"?). 2) I'm washing chicken pieces in a huge aluminum bowl, then filling blender-jar with stock and adding chicken chunks until I have to look through sections of drawers and cabinets in an ENORMOUS kitchen to hunt up heavy-duty plastic containers to CONTAIN gallons of volume---the kitchen has 8-9 shelf-high storage compartments with the largest and lightest plastic containers on the TOPS of the shelves and stacks of other containers. 3) I'm "upstate New York" at a place like Aberdeen Proving Grounds or Fort Meade (though it's PLACED like Camp DRUM) for a two-day training, and it's been ONE day just to DRIVE there, but as I LEAVE the place I debate RETURNING the next time by AIR, knowing I could use the ARMY'S non-commercial airport and Army's flights to cut the trip from New York City down to only an HOUR. Segments of stopping on the paved road and picking up a bag of ears of corn that someone dropped, but as we head toward the bag, some woman picks up the dropped bag and returns it to the SUPERMARKET it CAME from. I have to decide whether I want to drive back to NYC tonight or wait to start tomorrow morning.
3/29/90: 9:40AM: I'm TRYING to find the time to jerk off in a LARGE "summer house"-like "Cape Cod cottage" with lots of windows in all the rooms. I'm in the bathroom which is rather like 1221 Dietz, and I look out the window to see two sets of neighbors working on the side of their house (next door) and on the roof (two houses over), so I have to pull the shade to keep my privacy. Then it starts raining, so I have to go out (in my blue bathrobe) to make a circuit of the house to make sure the windows are all closed so the rain can't come in. Most of the windows are covered by porches (some remind me of the side porch at Bill's place in Houlton), and another is some sort of summer cottage the family must have rented a number of years when I was very young. and a back porch with an enormous round-corner roof arching around it which reminds me of the City Island house used in the filming of "Long Day's Journey Into Night." Rita's in one of the rooms, with another girl her own age (I think "Diane Hawanchuk?" as I type this). Still anticipating jerking off, I go into Mom's bedroom (like at 1221 Dietz, but there's an enormous chest of drawers blocking what would have been the closet door in that old house) searching for one of her brassieres to wear (as I looked for panties when I was jerking off in front of the living room mirror when I was 12), and I open the TOP drawer (about chest-height) to see regular arrays of black-necktied white-lace dickies, and I somehow "know" that Mom wears one of these each day that she goes to the office as a secretary as she did when I was growing up, and the next-down drawer is full of ANOTHER array of nearly-arranged clothing, maybe sweaters, and the next-down drawer is the one I want: there are three or four rows of "interlocked" brassieres in an assortment of pastel colors, and I pull out one that seems too small and carefully put it back in place, making sure that the straps are hidden behind the cups, as applies to all the others, and the right-rear of the drawer is somewhat less-neatly packed away, and I pull out a light brown halter with VERY tiny cups, more like something that a 6-year-old Rita might wear, and for some reason THAT one seems like the right one, and I take it carefully from the drawer and shake the wrinkles out of it and take it back to the bathroom to put on to incite me to greater excitement when I masturbate, and I wake before I can even get excited, perversely waking WITHOUT an erection, though I DO come in the next hour. Note that this is probably related to Tony's liking of wearing his wife's silk panties, which he told me to relay to Richard, and which I DID relay to Richard yesterday, when Tony told HIM to phone ME and I couldn't answer Richard when he asked "Why didn't Tony just tell me himself?" I'm glad to have gotten this typed out today, so that I could recall all the details of the room and my feelings---and today I got an ad for another of Rick Stack's OOB classes which I probably WON'T attend, since I've made no PROGRESS!
4/3/90: 8:35AM: 1) Elaborate color map of London is spread out before me as I try to plan my afternoon's and week's walks and tours, and I gaze at the isles, street and water patterns, and at a surrealistically-drawn amusement pier in the lower left corner, bleeding off the page, with many intertwining roller coasters and pavilions. In the upper left is a strange curve in the water, like a dam or dike, and I sort of zoom in, as in a helicopter, and see that it's some sort of seawall, maybe connected to the new cofferdams constructed to keep out high tides on the Thames. 2) Mrs. Robertson is furnishing me a BOX to store things in, and I'm asking her mentally "How LONG are we to stay here?" I'm in a bedroom with chests of WOMEN'S clothes and there are CUTE males on the floor. But orgasms have been relatively senseless and there have been NO morning erections since the time Tony had promised to be here 3/28 and wasn't!
4/4/90: 11AM! (Having gone to bed after 4AM after watching VCR movies and finishing the ELABORATE word-cross-out puzzle in Modern Maturity, which has a FEW travel articles, and will they WRITE to me about my proposal??) I'm waiting with Bob Karwowski in a nightclub which is going to show a male strip show, and I'm glancing at the metal stanchions erected at the edge of the balcony around the stage-floor, wondering if I could see well when seated just behind one of them, but there's a ring of 9-10 seats around the stage-floor on the floor itself, and Bob has occupied the end seat of the U-shaped arrangement and spread his papers on the seat next to him, clearly for ME, and then a group of ST. MARY'S students (brought on by my supposed recognition of Akron U's Fran Ryan as Mrs. Talmadge on the "Chances Are" tape last night?) enters on their way to the STRAIGHT floorshow on the SECOND floor, above the balcony, and a woman who looks like John Crano's mother, with blonde-tinged-with-red-and- purple frosted hair (like Linda Phelps and her new haircut last night at Actualism?), addresses us, saying "My job permits me to address groups like you, now that I'm a lawyer," and others in her group, reminding me of Larry Pamer and Joe Safko and people from that era, look near me and past me, and I don't seem to MIND being associated with a gay show (like telling Linda Phelps so openly that Shelley is a Lesbian?), and a knot of US stare at the know of THEM before they go upstairs, and I wake at 11 even before the show starts, sad!
4/5/90: I'm at some sort of consciousness-raising meeting in the country (like the four HIV+ and four HIV- in the country that I watched on TV yesterday?) and am wading in shallow water, bouyed up by fairly narrow logs, and then the logs have formed a sort of V-shaped crib in which I lay, concerned that the back of my black leather coat isn't getting wet in the water just below me, and one of the leaders lays on top of me to demonstrate one of the procedures, and he's QUITE handsome (either the humpy 6-3 guy with Mrs. Robertson yesterday OR Serge who's to visit me again next week?), and then two other women lay on top of HIM to participate, and then suddenly there's a pause, "to be continued," and I'm wandering among the buffet with a sweet roll in one hand, and I pick up another pastry: this one a star-shaped sugar-donut, wondering idly "If there are 60 of us and there are only 40 pastries, is it right that I take TWO?" but figure that I'm one of the larger people, more active too, so I should have more food. Then Michael Blackburn corners me and begins running his hand up and down my crotch with his peculiar intensity burning in his eyes, and I begin to feel him back, laughing that HE started this, and there's a WONDERFUL feeling surrounding the emotions in the dream, as if something truly astounding was about to happen, and I wake with a sort of left-over wonder at what will happen to me: the books that I'm reading, the TV I'm watching, the trip I'm planning, the friends I'm seeing, the future we're moving into both in Actualism and in the political and economic world, and I get out of bed to type this without having taken the trouble to take notes on it, erasing page 8 (cover letter) to get enough space to finish out this page, which had come to the capacity on line 50 and I HAD to finish out the page before typing it, hadn't I? So I DID!
4/8/90:To SLEEP at 2:50AM with "Mom, I'm gay" start unreeling for $500,000 win. 1) 10AM: Mary Vilaboa and Maya Bryant are teaching a beginning class in a school and I'm talking to the first-graders to INTRODUCE the two "old ladies" to the students: "They're both charming women, but one is even older than the other, and they both have LOTS to teach you, so RESPECT them and LISTEN to them." 2) 10:35AM: Two "double-curtain" dreams of theatrical BLASTS! I'm sitting in a wide-shallow (as opposed to narrow-deep) audienced theatre, watching a performance on a somewhat scanty stage set way off to my right or left, and suddenly there's a transitional projection (an old-fashioned train in the first case, the American flag in the second case) on the equal-area curtains IN FRONT OF ME, and then THOSE curtains raise to reveal a SPLENDID scene that takes up BOTH double-stage-areas with enormous audience impact.
3) 10:40AM: I'm sitting in a strangely empty Lutece and a WAITRESS (Lutece ALWAYS had only WAITERS) puts two plastic-covered menus in front of me, which I page through the see double-page spreads about the new woman owner, the history of France, and finally a tiny slip for the bistro-menu for the day, and I figure that even Lutece has switched to a bistro-format, though I figure I'll stay to see what the food is like anyway (is this from Rakel to Cafe Rakel switch and reservation?).
4) 10:45AM (though this part actually ELAPSED between 10 and 10:30---the other times are just other times I woke, and the dreams are fragments of dreams that I remembered after 10:35AM): I'm waiting for someone outside the French pavilion at a world's fair---seems like Canada???---and I'm wondering if I really TOLD her (the woman I'm waiting for seems like [an unlikely] combination of Cyndy Thompson and Elizabeth Barber) to meet me at the FRENCH pavilion entrance, rather than somewhere ELSE. Then it's about 3:50PM and there's the start of a LINE going into the main pavilion, and I wonder whether she'll think to look for me keeping a place for us in the LINE, but then I look again and the people are being let IN just about as rapidly as they get onto the line, so I don't have to worry about saving time. But then to my left there are six or seven posts, looking rather like entry-posts for horses at a horserace, outlined with flowered trellises, that are suddenly attracting waiting people, and I somehow know that the formal French gardens (this seems to be related to my clipping the article about the Duke Gardens in New York Magazine) will open for only an hour at 4PM, so I debate getting on one of THOSE lines. The woman never DOES show up, because without transition I'm in sort of a locker room, going into my laundry-bag for my newly cleaned lime-white jacket, encased in a stiff plastic wrapper, but I can't find my two pair of Army-style (loose) shorts that I'd also had laundered, and suddenly a group of three sexy young men to my right look over and exclaim that, as outrageous a coincidence as it seems, the laundry has confused OUR TWO laundries, and some of the stuff in MY pack is THEIRS, and they take out a large square array of dozens of brightly- colored shirts folded neatly which are THEIRS, and at the side are THREE pairs of shorts, none of them MINE, but they'll do nicely as SUBSTITUTES for my lost ones, and they hand me booklets, too, and mistaking their accents I say "But you speak English much better than I speak French," at which point they think I'm a naive traveler, but I see from a souvenir book they hand me (which I originally think if from New York City!) that they're Italian, and I ask where in Italy they're from, and thinking to daze me they rattle off names of VERY tiny towns, and I hit on the last one, Sciacca, and say, "I've been to Sciacca," and they clearly don't believe me, but I seem to remember (on waking) that it's in Sicily (is THAT Sizzily???), and I could rattle off names like Selinunte, Noto, Enna, Ragusa, and Segesta for their astonishment. Walk away from them with a pile of souvenir books, notes, and money of a strange currency, telling myself that I feel OVERWHELMED now because I'm still suffering from jet-lag, getting used to the language and currency, trying to get "everything" in on the first day without really having planned how or when or WHAT "everything" actually IS in this place. Talk to Dennis and figure this IS related to $500,000: Actualism, dining, travel, spectacle absorption: money!
4/11/90: 1) 8AM: In a futuristic society, some young people elect to die young, though some of these regret it when it comes to the DAY that they'll die, finding it difficult to live from hour to hour when you know it's your LAST day on earth, and many of the OTHERS don't like it. This centers around a particular young girl, seemingly dressed in black with short blonde hair.
2) 9AM: There's a HUGE introductory class for Actualism; I'm amazed at the number of people hanging around outside an est-like office, and then the door to the inner room opens and there are about a dozen people already in their seats. I enter the room and don't want to sit in the center section, but to the left of a planter-like room-divider there's a small wedge of seats faced by a moss-covered stool that I push out of the way and try to bring a metal folding-chair into place, but someone else pushes a sidearm-chair into place and I sit on that. People behind me begin introducing themselves by starting to talk about their problems, and the leader (who I never see) seems to be accepting whatever anyone says but trying to get them into only name-background answers. I introduce myself as "Bob, a freelance indexer (at which point a covey of three young ladies in the diagonally opposite corner break into a flurry of applause), and I've been a student for over 13 years." Someone in front of me passes out a set of booklets that look VERY much like the colored folded pages of Macmillan's math F&Gs, and at that moment the buzzer buzzes from downstairs with the Express Mail delivery of the F&Gs for grades 4 and 8!
4/14/90: 8:10AM: Someone LIKE Avi has given TWO Actualism intros in the last two nights; I've HEARD him and decide that TONIGHT, when I give intro, I'll CONCENTRATE on three kinds of AWARENESS as I give intro. Another dream MIGHT have dwelt on waking up at a specific time, as I do NOW to get to breakfast at 9:10AM at Chanterelle on this Good Friday when Alice is off work and can join me.
4/16/90: 9AM: When two well-dressed people, a couple who are either our bosses or our hosts in some sort of business meeting in their apartment, leave the room, a sexy guy and I KISS and HUG, and he says "DO me QUICK," and I go down on his quickly and after two or three quick sucks I SQUEEZE his taut red ballsack in just the right way so that he hurries into orgasm while exclaiming "We got to do it FAST before they get back." He spurts feelingly, and I'm just ready to come off his cock when I see them re-entering the room, turning toward the door to make sure it's closed properly, and I dash away hunched over, grabbing my pants around me, trying to keep his body between me and their line of sight, while he turns his back to them tucking in his clothing, hoping they won't see, and I dash into another room to tuck my clothing in, and though the couple seem to be right there, they either didn't see anything or are willing to ignore what they saw. There was a prior fragment that I've forgotten now.
4/17/90: 10:10AM: UH-OH! I'm working on the computer and hit some ODD set of control keys in error and there's a sudden flash of greenish grid in the lower right corner of the monitor screen and there's a distinct "ping" from the hard disk as my screen goes COMPLETELY black! It sit, chilled, thinking "It's gone" but trying to WILL it recoverable as I sit, getting up the courage to RESET and see if it REBOOTS successfully or NOT! Hope this dream isn't an OMEN!
4/18/90: 7AM: 1) I'm at some international TV roundtable class (girls in "Shirley Valentine" last night?) and all have one question. Some are stupid or childish, and I decide (but don't) ask "Why am I so CYNICAL that I'll believe NOTHING a politician says?" 2) An international CHEF is making us snacks, and she's unfolding large SAUSAGE shapes (like unwinding DNA on NATURE) in vat of boiling milk, and promises "better than onions" in Vidalia onions and walks far for a frying pan to make us SAMPLES. 3) I watch from afar as two kids follow red-winded blackbird to observe it fluttering awkwardly away from them on the ground. They shout that it has epaulettes or that it's been tagged by someone.
4/19/90: 6:25AM: 1) I'm about to fly halfway around the world, wondering how I'll feel in twelve hours as I get on plane for 12-hour flight, figuring that a nine-hour time difference will have me arriving at 6AM, so I MAY sleep on plane OR have whole day to catch up on sleep. 2) There's some sort of computer meeting with the guy who founded Radio Shack, who worked one year on a set of modifications to allow some special kind of processing AT THE COST of eliminating "core-to-core communication," and it seems to be an example of "even IMPORTANT people can make BIG mistakes." 2A) As sub-dream, a huge throng is looking at a STACK OF BOND PAPER which has become a sort of MONITOR: squeezing the pages and BENDING them "just so" FOCUSES the images on the sheets, so that a SEQUENCE OF PEOPLE appear to move as each sheet is removed. MY "set" seems to be working well; It's astounding people around me and photographers get behind me to take pictures of moving colored images while someone announces that "four-bit color elements in a 1000x1000 array requires only four megabytes core storage." 3) There's a huge set of visitors at some enormous Rockefeller Hotel or house with a central living-room of six stories high, surrounded by balconies in the shape of the New York State Theatre lobby. I'm wandering on the top, sixth, floor and the third floors, AMAZED at the size of the room and the idea of LIVING in such an enormous space. 3A) In a sub-dream, I'm writing on a bus at a corner gate to the same estate, hungry for a meal, and I look out to look for Dennis in a cluster of leaving weekend guests, but he's talking to people, others get in the way, and when he finally passes THIS way, he says he has a meeting with these three other people and isn't eating, and I listen as all these guests start to sing, play instruments, and tune loud radios, and I figure the weekend is going to be very NOISY and I'm glad i a) have earplugs to block noise, b) don't have anything important planned, and c) can sleep either DURING noise or AFTER it stops and they've left. LOTS of DETAILS recalled! Write, shit, and re-read notes to 6:50AM.
4/20/90: 9:30AM: Joe and I are watching TV from my sofa (where my COMPUTER is now), and there's a YELLOW candle that flares up intermittently on the coffee table, in our line of sight, and it leaves a ringed pool of BLACK wax in the saucer below. He blows out the flame, which TRAVELS to an empty potato chip bag on the floor under my READING stand, which is now under the WIRE WINDOW, and think I blow it out QUICKLY. There's a black scorch mark about nine inches around on the carpet, but I wake with the idea "surprisingly, it'll WASH out and leave the rug SPOTLESS." A 9:40 I recall the END of "Twin Peaks" last night: the CIRCLE of candles around a blackish spot in the concluding DREAM sequence!
4/22/90: 10:30AM: THOUGHTS of COMBINING 1) AIDS HOUSE, 2) "Mom, I'm gay!" and 3) Neo-Actualism vibrations into ONE "positive future" novel: Start: "Hellow, this is BXNY Therapy, Bob speaking." "I read your ad in Free Spirit, tell me about it." This thought obviously percolates subconsciously, because of below.
4/23/90: 8:30AM: I've found a new bookstore, possibly in Canada, and ask one of the two women (probably dykes) if they have Purdy. "In Crown," she points to the alphabetic listing of publishers over the shelves, and I look and one of the women climbs up on a radiator to say, "It's my favorite: only "Snooks." I say that I thought the ONLY one I hadn't read was a NEW one, and this (whose name has changed to "Dream") might be a redo of "69: Dream Street," and I look at it and it's OLD. "You must pay a few dollars deposit," she says. I debate buying it. BEFORE, I'd returned to the fourth floor (using escalators) to buy a suit from a SPECIAL sales section, but the sale was only for Monday through Wednesday, and this is THURSDAY. Section is now an elegant green-leather SINGER section: they're selling an elaborate vacuum cleaner that does walls and upholstery and carpets. I'm asked if I want to see a demonstration of the glossy things it does to leather, and I'm intrigued but want to get away---to another floor for the bookshop, perhaps? ALSO vague thought of "I haven't spent much money this month, so I can spend ALL $500 I have in my wallet," from Vicki's NOT spending money yesterday, saying she's LOSING $500 per month, sure?
4/26/90: 8:35AM: I'm lying in KITCHEN and see through the window a BIRD flying that turns into a vulture. Try to get my THERAPIST to "see the view" and go to two to three OTHER rooms, but he SCOFFS at what I saw. There was another bit with my holding [a word that looks like FRICTION; I thought it was some sort of RIFLE??] to SHOULDER, probably coming from my current reading of Hollingsworth.
4/28/90: 7AM (because Yama's here and waking me early): 1) A large group of us are moving around the windows of a large house, restoring frames from half-height for a party to full eight-foot height for day use. I don't know how to do 17 of them, but I follow the proper ways. 2) Someone like Joan Ann de Mattia says "You should always plan for a replacement in case your bath-partner cancels, but I have all five baths this week booked with Prince." 3) Then I'm OUTSIDE on icy pavements, and SLIP in the middle of a group of guys, but two on either side grab my upper arms and "angle-lever" me along until I can regain my footing without falling or touching the sidewalk.
4/29/90: 6:25AM: UGLY DREAMS: 1) Three copies of my a photograph of my face, two from different angles, help people trace me through streets and cab rides, up and down stairs, with an increasing feeling of menace and danger: They want to hurt or even KILL me. 2) I'm sitting on a railing and feel someone touch my wallet in my back pocket to take it. AGAIN I feel menaced. Wake uncomfortable and frightened. 3) 8:20: Stocky guy talks seductively to me and I start holding his thick, broad upper torso as he talks sexily as he twists and writhes his torso back and forth as I continue running my hands over his body, and we touch tongue-tips (his is DEEPLY cleft) and he takes a drop of my "body fluids" and "holds it up like communion", and I'm "relieved we're both HIV- negative." Hard to say how much these were determined by my hardly sleeping the morning of Friday, the 27th, when Yama slept through Thursday night in my bed, and then getting to bed about 11PM to get up when he gets up, at DAWN, needing only 5 hours of sleep per night---then feeling tired through the day!
5/5/90: 9AM: I'm traveling with a rather large group, seemingly overseas, and we're jammed into a little room waiting for our rooms to be ready, and a middle-aged woman is crawling all over me on the sofa, trying to seduce me, and I'm trying to be as nonchalant as possible, saying, "Usually on the BETTER tours, you'd get into the new place about half an hour before lunch, so you could go to your room, wash, then have lunch and be ready for a tour of the city before dinner. Then I pivot onto the floor and lever her with my legs to be ALONE on the sofa, to her chagrin. Then I'm sitting on the floor and a little black boy, bathrobe open to show his tiny penis which he clutches in his hands, keeps looking at my HAIR and murmuring "What's your name? What's your name?" and I laugh and say "My name isn't written in my HAIR." BEFORE this, there was something about a dance program put on in a gym-like room rather like Grace Church where Dennis was in "Send Me No Flowers." A TV camera panned around the stage area, carefully NOT showing how many people were in the audience, and two skinny men and four super-trained women-ballerinas dashed Russian-style onstage, where a woman in blue tights demonstrated steely perfection by AIMING her toe shoes and going into a double pirouette with great slowness and balance, and even when she began to topple, part of her costume included a rubber-bottomed POLE, like an enormous cane, that she used to prop herself on pointe against the floor or one of the side pieces of scenery. At one point (on one pointe), she even jammed the pole INTO the foliage of the scenery at the side of the stage and almost pole-vaulted into her next position. This may have been some kind of entertainment on the trip I was on "later" in the dream, but I seem to have KNOWN the place and even the people, and knew it was a LOCAL (maybe inspired by Brad, downstairs, advertising his role as a Go-teacher at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens Cherry Festival) production of little skill but as much charm as they could muster! To 9:10AM.
5/15/90: 1) 8:50AM: I'm supervising an Actualism LSD-trip (!), one of my first ones, and the sexy guy I've given the LSD to isn't feeling ANY effects, and he wrangles permission from me to go home, but then I glance at the clock and it's only 6:40PM, which means that he'd only taken it 40 minutes ago, and it might not have HIT him yet and he's out wandering around. I try to think what it would be like on the streets high on LSD, and the dream shifts to the next day when I ask him how it was for him, trying to see if he got himself into any trouble, and he said there were no problems, but "I'd rather not talk about the details," and I somehow in the dream figure that he'd gotten into some sort of sexual escapade, but since he's obviously straight, I'm not that interested. 2) 9:30AM: I'm in the back of a classroom and a) the teacher is playing some old movie on a TV to make the time pass until 5PM when we can leave, and then I'm to the front door when the clock says 5:05, though the class hasn't realized it can leave yet, and the teacher nods at me that I can leave. b) there are planes landing on a very SHORT landing strip right at the back end of the classroom, and about once every minute an ENORMOUS multi-wheeled jet swoops past the window with loud, but not VERY loud, noise and puffs of rubber-smoke erupt from the tires as they hit the ground, and the plane rocks to a rapid stop at the exit JUST behind us and I think, "There are SO MANY planes, and they all seem to land SO easily, maybe I needn't be afraid of them ANY MORE." c) I gaze out the window to my left and see fighter-planes buzzing past, some doing loop-the-loops (like the illustration in a book review I skimmed last night about how planes from the 1940s should loop DOWNWARD so as not to get shot at while lining themselves up to dive-bomb shipping in the ocean) right at the level of the window, and I marvel at their skills in piloting their planes. 3) 9:50AM: I'm watching TV with a friend somewhat like Malcolm Simmons, and I'd gotten the mail and pulled a few ads out of envelopes, but this envelope is postmarked Florida, and I pull, with difficulty, a five-page computer-paper printed letter from Midge Hillsinger, with an ink-line down the right margin with "Bob, 1990" written in by hand, and I start to read it with great flourishes, showing off my reception of this unusual letter to my TV companion.
5/16/90: 9:24AM: Typing note from 8:25AM: 1) There's a "Beatles Memorial Program" on "the station at the end of the dial," and I'm listening (and watching) as if goes off the air at the end of the program. The receiver, or the frequency dial, or the fine-tuning, is somehow based on the 007 James Bond technology from "Octopussy" which I watched last night, seeming to use the ear- tuning device he used and some of the intricate electronics invented for the purposes of the movie. Also that WFMU, or whatever, at 91.1FM, or whatever, program from the "Bang on a Can" Festival on Sunday seems to have influences. 2) A bunch of kids (based on a set even younger than the 17-18-year-olds on "Desperate Passage", also watched last night?), about 9 years old, are in waders and diving suits in a somewhat ordinary muddy pond or stream, and a fuss-budget inspector or land-owner is "pulling them up by their ears," and their brown diving suits seem more like "bunny suits" with (indeed) long fuzzy brown ears that stick up (like the swim-fins from the program?) even when their bodies are completely submerged. I wonder what they can SEE, but they're obviously engrossed with the least bit of fish, frog, or shell that they find underwater and bring up to examine in the murky late-afternoon light. He's making a terrible nuisance of himself (is this ME, later, fuming about the DOG, see NOTEBOOK 551?), and I feel like I want to (and DO) threaten him with a big yellow stick or CANE (is this ALSO about me fearing old age?), saying, "You're a SPOIL SPORT," and the kids only want to look at shells and critters with magnifying lenses (also seen on TV last night, but I can't recall why the old smooth-red-cheeked old man grabbed a magnifying glass and looked at "something" that was the TV camera so that we saw his eye greatly enlarged, unless it was the Nehemiah Pearsoff "guest" of the Data-android stealer on "The Most Toys" episode on the "New Star Trek," ALSO watched last night 10PM-3AM).Now 9:34AM!
5/19/90 (all below typed 5/25): 7:15AM: Dennis and I are having BREAKFAST in an IBM cafeteria, and we're BOTH ready to get SECONDS, and I jump up and say I'm going, which makes him FURIOUS. But when I GET there, that old red-headed waitress from Angelo's on 9th Avenue and 56th Street is JUST closing---she's made her LAST omelet, she says, and she has NO more eggs, so I take LAST two well-done pancakes and CRUMBLY two slices of bacon, thinking Dennis can have as MUCH as he wants, and I start wandering back to him and wake UP. 2) 9:50: I'm working in a huge public library and it's an ENORMOUS mess, and I interrupt my lunch to start carrying books and pillows and papers back and forth---and I try to find someone who knows when the damn ALARM rings. 3) BEFORE, I'd gotten into an old film with a PASS and search for a SEAT in the crowd. 9:30: 1) NO damn dog barking outside this morning! 2) DREAMS: A) FLYING (on concrete CURVE) over valley and crowded green hills of Guatemala and Nicaragua! B) LOVELY sex in British after-hours bar-apartment. LOTS of guys in orgies and LOTS of easy cocks!
5/20/90: I've been sent some kind of approval gift-package that I intend to send ALL back, but I figure to look THROUGH: 1) tiny plastic envelope that expands to contain some kind of antihistamine inhalator, 2) another envelope that's a pillow or a puzzle, and 3) stacks of folded cards with lewd jokes or greetings, and STACKS of other things like ads and samples and antiquities.
5/21/90: 9:30: Big election at Actualism and Mary Vilaboa is elected "National Administrator," and she's on TV saying how perfect she'll be in the job---and Joyce calls to seek energy for Maya's fallen ceiling and backed-up chimney. 2) 10:15: Cartoon of Myra Byrd pulling up her skirts and fucking Woody Woodpecker. 3) 10:20: I'm shopping in NYC with Mom, and they have some kind of appliance she's wanted for $19.99 (or less), at Tape House. There's a LONG line at the cash register and I find out it's BROKEN (like "No cash in cash machine" on Saturday when I took my check in?), and I say "Here's $20" and a SIMILAR cash machine prints "Just WRITE $20" on it, and we can GO." As we leave, going down narrow concrete stairs, I say to Mom "Imagine what YOUR mother would have commented about a cartoon that FUCKS." Mom laughs, and I say, "Oh, have you noticed my new scarf?" And I show her a white, yellow, green, red, and black STRIPED woolen scarf. She makes no comment. People are PILED up against the doors OUTSIDE the shop (like on Canal Street), and I PUSH doors open and woman holding a baby is LAST to move aside. We walk on sidewalk grumbling about "Crazy New Yorkers."
5/22/90: 9:40: I'm helping (with one maid) to clean up a HUGE mansion, where the man (like Mickey Rooney in "Words and Music") is ALWAYS smoking a messy cigar, and they keep leaving items to be picked up, like grapefruit halves as big as basketballs, in the halls. But I feel I have it under control for the nearing dinner-party, and I seem to be content in my job.
5/23/90: 10:50: I'm looking for the IBM entrance in some underground maze like Rockefeller Center. I descend dark spiral stairs that peter out to nowhere. I pass what I THINK are familiar exit doors and get lost. I find an information booth that puts me on a phone that asks my name and business and who I want to see, and I say in exasperation, "I'm LOST and I want DIRECTIONS to IBM!" A woman draws a VERY abstract map that I line up with a clock tower in a shopping mall, but I STILL can't find ITS relationship to the "red blob" marking IBM!
5/24/90: Wandering through casino/amusement park (computer hyper-reality?) in a JUDGING of exhibits where we can't TOTALLY indulge in games, but they try to lead us to THINK we're having fun. Self-policing of trials breaks down and we DO spend "all" out time in eating and drinking and having fun, but overseers or police are FOOLED into thinking we spend only LEGAL 10% of our time in games and fun. A very COMPLEX feeling dream.
5/25/90: Just a remembered fragment at 6:30PM: I was looking through bags for some SILVER objects, maybe connected with the modern-music instruments of Harry Partch in New York Magazine, just to fill out the page with consecutive dreams! [remembered 5/26]: AND had a TYPICAL "got to get UPHILL to SUBWAY and run and my legs hurt and JUST hear it coming in and JUST miss it! Agony!
5/26/90: 9:35: John A. and I are going downtown to 15th Street, far west, to "rich old family" that we'd visited AGES ago who own a BLOCK of farmland between 15th and 16th Streets and 10th and 11th Avenues, having an old farmhouse filled with antiques behind rows of growing vegetables and grains. John says "It's been in the litigation court for four years now, but the family hopes to keep it against the suits of the city." On the way down, at the corner of 14th Street and 7th Avenue, John enters a shop, and I follow just to get inside to keep warm, and go through a front room that's rather like a "front": filled shelves of not-moving products, to the back room, carrying two Sunday Times that I show to be MINE, by the raindrop-wet-spots on the outsides of the pages, by putting them on stacks of THEIR Timeses slantwise, so that the vendors know I haven't stolen two of theirs, and when I hear John flush the toilet I think I'll go just to be on the safe side. I'm back to see him pointing out the tiny shoots of "swamp grass" that HE told them to plant as a divider to shield toilet from the rest of the shop, and a girl on a bicycle rides up from my left (we're now more or less outside), so I TRY to be un-self- conscious and piss on ROCK formations to the RIGHT of the toilet, thinking, "Well, it just ends up in the sewer system ANYWAY," and they think I'm WEIRD but they don't stop me. Fragment of "Well, I have money for vacation THIS year, so I can keep on taking them, even though I've stopped going to SCHOOL. ALSO bit of "my HIP hurts because I can feel the BED beneath my THIN MATTRESS in a dorm-like sleeping quarters at night in some place like CANADA on a trip for a week or two, visiting places without FLYING to get to them.
5/27/90: 6:50AM 1) Aliens take over building, killing people and DRYing them to eat their bones like candy, for a kind of messy/humorous death! 2) Computer- paper mayhem: paper SPEWS out of a vertical-rotary printer as high as my head, or gets stuck and SHREDS in high winds caused by the paper-movement ratchets, or prints WILDLY off-center onto the side-strips, the FRENZY of practice problems being ready, data ruined, paper flying, metal prongs BENDING: awful! But as in a MOVIE, not REALITY, so there's no REAL panic associated, only a kind of "show" manic activity, like a slapstick comedy in black-and-white. 10:15 3) At an exposition fair-grounds, eager to get back to amusement area, but I'm lost and get to an information kiosk and ask how much a detailed map of the groups is, and it's $9, so I KEEP LOOKING through my suitcase (and wonder WHY I'm carrying my clean AND dirty clothes AND souvenir BOOKS in manila folders at the bottom of my clothing), and I CAN'T find the map I THOUGHT I had of the area, except for a route-map of Pennsylvania, and buy a SMALL-scale map of the whole AREA for 50 cents, but the SITE is only an L-shaped area, and then the guide points to the paired white pylons of the "International Entranceway" ahead (looking like white temples from the Pagan-TV film two nights ago), and the white tower of an air-gondola ride into the site, and an old geezer behind me tries to sell me a map that I think he's stolen, and I close my bag, which is HEAVY, and prepare to walk north. 4) Then I'm near a dirt road and hear (and FEEL through my FEET) enormous BLOCKS being pulled, and this "parade" (with flags I can see from a far distance) is pulling CANNONS to a Civil-War battle-reconstruction, and fireworks overhead are simulating cannon-fire and battle, and I join a crowd rushing to the top of a hill to view the battle, but I try a short-cut through obscuring woods to bypass the crowds, but never get ANYWHERE, though when I LEAVE the dream the mock-battle hadn't started YET. 5) Small bit of waiting for a JOHN, and guys packed in behind two toilet-doors to the right, and they have to LEAVE before anyone else has room to enter, so they do, except for the last 2-3 guys, and then the rest of us, me in the lead, try to push in around doors to even get into the john itself. Hurry this before breakfast before Actualism meeting at noon, 11:14AM ALREADY this Sunday morning.
5/28/90: 7:15: 1) Someone tells me, to my amazement, that the "watering can" that's creaked up and down in your ear during a physical examination is a TAPE recording of the SOUNDS we hear, NOT an injection of medicine! 2) 8:15: Dennis and Spartacus and I have visited a group of people in a summer cottage at Portage Lakes in Akron. A NEW guy and I sit and wait at the cottage while Dennis WALKS to Dietz Avenue, THEN we drive---when we're halfway there, I say "We could have DRIVEN him, and we could THEN wait at Dietz." While cleaning up at the cottage, I'm sorting out wristwatches and groceries. I take a Haberule and a drawing tablet to our hostess to put away, and she says "I couldn't find your dry soap." It's a rundown but pleasantly crowded, musty vacation place. 4) 9AM: I've clipped an article from Opera News about how much money some POP singer has earned this year. 5) 10AM: In laundromat at Portage Lakes I'm told that my load will be ready in two hours. THEIR clock reads 5PM but my WATCH says 6PM! The owner tells me that the "famous" cottage which was written about in a recent book is "Coral Reef," which I haven't seen yet because "I've just been here for a day." I cross the highway, leaving the laundromat, debating whether I should STAY another day. Back at the house I can't find MY room, and my "roommate" says "I need you to sort out MY stuff," but I can't find HIM. All the rooms are FILLED with gay male and female couples. Outside, a NEIGHBOR came around the corner of his house dragging a long, long train behind his purple dress. I never DO see the end, though he's walked more than 20 feet beyond the corner of his building, and the train STILL hasn't come to an end!
5/29/90: 6:05: A kitten on a curb seems to take a nip at a passing fly (or maybe a tiny bird---it's far away), and then tries to cough it back up. But nothing comes up, whereupon the cat coughs convulsively, starting to claw at its distended mouth with its paws. Frantic, it struggles more grotesquely in the middle of the street as a car bears down on it. IN my dream, I visualize the impact simultaneously dislodging the choking object while breaking the poor cat's back, and killing it. I wake instantly, memories of PREVIOUS dreams evaporating as I write THIS. 9:30: The "energy-supplement" is being avidly advertised. I feel I'm coming down with a cold and use it as a cough suppressant, and woman next to me says, "You're REALLY going to be energized." Guy comes in wearing a "modular" $560 jacket. A BOOKSHELF of tapes, books, and products is set up front for the next segment---I HOPE it's a joke. It's starting to look est-y, but I love the taste and love my "director." Oops??
5/30/90: 8:50AM: John and I are visiting someplace on the mainland of Denmark, and we start in the bottom of what looks like a crater, talking calmly about our surroundings and making plans for the rest of the trip. At first the crater-bottom looks like some sort of natural landscape: a grassy slope down to a curving stream with a rising hill on the other side of the stream, but then when we turn around, it's suddenly obvious that everything is symmetric: all AROUND us is this grassy slope going down, with a depressed ring at the base of an equal rise which are the sides of the crater. We start to walk toward the depression, and I have a Wyeth-like vision of every blade of brownish-green grass bending toward (or having been beaten by rain toward) a boggy blackness that is expressed in muddy water---no, watery mud is more like it---when we begin to step on the edges of the water, and I warn John back, because it appears he's so engrossed in waving his hands to things around the edges that he's not looking down. As a sort of transition device, there's a large folded paper map (with the colors of the map-umbrellas that we saw two of last night while dining in the window at Woody's) to which he gestures, saying: "No, I won't drive down to Amsterdam," turning the map over and pointing what seems a LITTLE distance to the East, "I'll just go up here to Hamburg," turning the map to the "large" side and point what seems to be a LARGE distance northWEST, and I want to protest that since he's so CLOSE to Amsterdam, which he's never been to before, it would be silly for him not to take the change to GO there, but I know he'll never listen to my reasoning, so I remain silent. Then we're in a bed-kitchen in what seems like a bare hotel (this is not unlike the set of "A Quiet End" last night): I'm still in bed, looking over the edge at John doing something around a sink under a window to my right, and I'm aware of a scuttling crab on the floor which seems to have no legs: just a tan shell with a tiny fringe of chitin around the edges. There's also a starling with bright iridescent colors on his wings of green and tiny suggestions of blue and red and yellow, which seems to be "grounded" on the floor, scuttling about on too-short legs like some sort of rodent, every so often rattling over to the tiny chink between the door and the wall as if he'd want out, but there seems to be no panic or demand about the bird, only perky inquisitiveness. There's also a cat moving sedately about the room, all this visible from my low vantage from my side of the bed, using its whiskers like feelers to investigate the sparse furniture. Then the cat and bird meet head-on, and BOTH have antennae that brush against the other's antennae, as if they were delicately probing and smelling each other's breaths through long periods of quiet concentration, and I remark to John, "It's incredible to see a cat and a bird BOTH doing the SAME THING, without the cat wanting to eat the bird." John makes a noncommittal grunt and continues to fuss about the sink, possibly preparing food. The cat and the bird continue their placid sniffing for a long period of time, and it comes to me that the crab could join, riffling the chitin-shreds along the side of its body in the same way the cat is using its whiskers and the bird is using the delicate hairs along the sides of its beak. Then John slumps down in a hard chair near the door, looking suddenly gaunt and almost feminine, saying "I'm just so TIRED." I think again about the play last night, the thought of AIDS crosses my mind, and I ask, "Did you have BREAKFAST?" and he says yes, and I think that I can have a few pieces of whole-wheat toast with butter in a short time, and then we would BOTH have had breakfast and can enter with the same stomach-status the somewhat gray day that seems to be outside our bleak cabin in a far-north country that we're visiting, but in the manner of a gaunt couple from a Picasso blue-period painting: wan and thin and energy-less. Such vividness I feel I HAVE to record after the express-delivery roots me from bed into a cold room, finishing now at 9:10AM, huddling "thin and wan" in bathrobe.
5/31/90: 7:25: So elaborate I get up to type this. A group of us are being given a tour of a police headquarters, but everything seems to be going wrong. We're watching a TV program explaining how to examine the scene of the crime, but the commentator doesn't realize that the cameraman isn't helping him: he's describing the camera panning around the room for details, but the camera remains fixed on his face. I break through the demonstration to say that they're not really doing it the best way. "How should we be doing it?" they demand of me. "Show me the camera," I insist. So rather than panning the EXPLANATORY camera up to the camera which should be doing the panning above the explainer's head, they bring out a full-length mirror and show us the camera filming US. "No, THAT'S not the way, EITHER." Then they swivel the camera in front of the MIRROR so that you can't see the EXPLAINOR, and I protest that THAT'S not the way EITHER. There's a THIRD wrong way that I forget. As the "ringleader of the protestors," I'm taken before the CHIEF, who's a redneck sexy guy rather like Burt Reynolds who knows I'm good for nothing. His desk is full of photographs and greeting cards, one of which shows a Tom-like drawing of a police-officer with "ASS" written on his ass. To show that I'm comfortable I sit down on his desk, and when he tells me to get off it, many of the cards are swept to the floor. "At least I learned how to spell that word," I joked. "WHAT word," he asks accusingly, and the sexy assistant seems to know that the ONLY word displayed was the word ASS, and I was referring to whether it was one or two S's. The assistant gives a knowing grin, but the Burt Reynolds-type isn't in on the joke and gets more and more angry, but doesn't want me to know he's getting my goat, so he just acts more and more laconic. To 7:35. 7:50 added---he tells us how to identify INDIVIDUALS, then shows us a MASSED GROUP of people, and I say "one at a time," and then they go back to show explanation. 9:15: Now there's a TENNIS competition, and I have only a blanket (like in bed) that I try around waist then wrap WHOLE BODY, twisting ends to tie them together. Trainer if British, with name like Evelyn Waugh that people laugh at, which HE doesn't find FUNNY.
6/1/90: 8:30: Half-dream: some inviolable and inviolate essence of man:
philosophical scaffold
If nuclear holocaust came, MIGHT not spores survive in the miles-thick Antarctic ice-sheet, to fecundate a new world soon after the old one died? Or some captive THOUGHT on the moon, added to some detrital iota of man's visits, would colonize our satellites with LIFE. And I went on to write FUTURE NOVEL: Chapter Seventy-Five, currently on pages 136-137.
6/2/90: Spartacus and I are in the ARMY, on a bus going to next duty, and a young friend goes to Infantry school, which MEANS COMBAT, and he's excited but worried about it. I'm glad NOT to go. In new camp a sniper sneaks into camp throwing grenades and bombs around, and I grab a nearby grenade and hold the handle in place and wonder "What now??" THROW it and have it blow up then, or let a detonation expert TAKE it from me. Wake feeling not the happiest!!
6/3/90: 9:40: Kid is digging in one-foot-round circle and planting crocus-like plants that grow and demonstrate growing principles. Then he tears the plants apart, reshuffles the dirt, and starts over. Some feelings of "twice the effort for making final points." There was more, but I forgot by 9:45AM.
6/4/90: 7:50: Groups for elevator (to the 6th floor) are touring a wrecked site, and the people BELOW say they can SEE the balcony we're getting off onto sagging. Three floors of people sit on window ledges along the edges of this balcony in perilous safety. They then climb down by ladder. I climb down and tilt the ladder sideways to get off before climbing down the last HIGH steps. A worker puts the ladder back and pulls on a ROPE to get his booted feet planted on the steep slope and climbs up the high steps at the bottom of the ladder like climbing a cliff-face. Then a guy is talking in Spanish and I think about a "petite tostada por almuerza," which I take to mean "a little toast for breakfast," and THEN the guy SAYS it, and I say, "If it happens to you (such synchronicity), then you MUST believe it." But is that so in a DREAM?
6/5/90: 8:25: There's a MESS at IBM: Desks have been moved, the phones are ringing at various levels of volume, and a SEXY dazzle-camouflaged military man moves through the aisles handing out soda bottles with straws in them for a kind of a coffee-break treat. There's someone named Solano or Salano; I can't understand his Spanish accept, and he's NOT on the phone-list, which has the list on the front, and on the back of it and on the second sheet stapled to it is nothing but advertisements, that I find annoying. I pull on my telephone and find that the telephone cords are tangled up with the heavy gray IBM cables to the computers themselves, and when I pull HARD I can see the telephone cord uncoiling as it refuses to come loose from under an elephantine coil of cable. Then a passerby fouls me up with my own telephone in an instant, and I fume because I know that TODAY is the day that the NEW computer is going to be installed, but I take heart that at LEAST my desk is the one in the corner, though rather far from the windows in the corner since the computer cables haven't been put beneath the floor yet: they're coiled along the baseboards temporarily. But there have been so many mistakes in the moving that I can't think where to start fixing things up, and the entire impression is one of complete frustration. Note NOW (at 3:20PM) that I'd dreamed of someone speaking SPANISH yesterday, too, though I can't think of any reason for that; my only contact with Spanish is flicking through the RCA channels when I've finished watching a tape for the evening, but they're in a different order now that my NEC is in for repairs, so maybe that has something to do with it. But then I didn't realize that my character, Frank, in FUTURE NOVEL, wanted to GET OUT until I typed those words! At least I'm not frustrated getting to page-end!
6/6/90: 8:10 1) Companions of Journalists (CoJours) try TV ads in good taste, but legal status is uncertain and public acceptance is shaky. I go to a meeting and VIVID image of 20-year-old with lean tanned body who WAS a jerk, now seems FRIENDLY as we leave building and his SHORTS lower to the cleft in his rear and to the sides of his long, thick, down-bent cock in the front. When he becomes aware that he's about to walk out of his pants, he pulls them up by pulling them up in front, which lets me catch a glimpse of his uncut, taut, shiny cock-head. I practically salivate in the dream. 2) Tony Davis of Macmillan phones with a correction to the terminology on page 45 of a manuscript that he sent me that I don't have nearby, so I'm getting note cards from the side of my bed to write on, but then the phone is so quiet for so long that I fear we've been cut off. 3) AFTER talking to Tony, I'm lying in bed with jeweled necklaces, each comprised of faceted stones in distinct colors of gold, red, green, blue, and white, pushing at them with the tip of my pencil to see the coruscating color flashes, and two GIRLS fuss in the apartment next door, obviously curious about me, since they can see me from the distance about to the parking garages, through a door which has rotated 90-degrees from where it IS in my bedroom to the opposite wall. I'm glad I've not been jerking off, but I'm feeling sensual so I gather my bathrobe about me and CLOSE the door, so that now I can play! Out of bed at 8:30 feeling tired, though I bedded at 12:3AM, so I SHOULD have gotten enough sleep. Some eye-strain lingering??
6/7/90: 6:30 1) Four of us thought to bicycle and CAMP overland (is this based on Frank's travel by treadmill in Future Novel?) but the bikes break down and we can't find accommodations, so the GIRL says that we might fly from Buda to our next stop. I wait for the others' decision---will I be afraid of flying? I don't know. We are walking down a road and a dirty matted-pelt white goat with a dangling dripping penis is pissing on a tiny, yapping dog, trying to get it interested in being fucked. It isn't working. Someone says that his older sister, Maria, is STILL traveling by bicycle.
6/8/90: 7:10 1) I'm SEARCHING for Metropolitan Opera performance starting in an indoor parking lot at 7:30PM, moving into a plaza where I'm not sure where the Opera House is, to the top of a horse-drawn carriage that I think will take me there, but then it stops, jammed in traffic, and I jump off to find if I can get there on foot, to the "agony slow-dream run" where I WANT my legs to move faster but they're so TIRED and it's so much EFFORT that I just can't make good time, to a labyrinth basement like underneath the World Trade Center, where again I can't find my way, not even knowing how FAR I am from the auditorium, to an underground restaurant, knowing it's 8:05 and I'm past hoping that any late curtain will permit me to see the beginning, to a complicated wing-area where I'm climbing over pipes and dodging set-edges and spiral staircases still trying to find the performance, though I think possibly I can hear FRAGMENTS of the overture starting up already. TOTAL FRUSTRATION! 8AM 2) Marilyn Pappert tries to regulate TV viewing, and I want to do my OWN regulation of my TV viewing! 9AM 3) I'm running parallel to a roller coaster in its first loops and highest hill-ascent, passing over a kiddies' ride that's reminiscent of a HEDGEHOG, and I recognize that the ride ITSELF is nestled deep within this latticework (Dr. Bantellian's slat-latticework?) of pale sticks radiating way up high in the middle, backward toward the tail, like the form of a giant stegosaurus, and I appreciate the DESIGN qualities that would make this ride stand in people's memories, rather than the mechanics of the ride itself. And then from the top of the highest hill I'm ON the roller coaster, seated in a Loop-O-Plane seat which I can see in a shadow below, moving across the midget- auto racetrack, then across a real highway at the border of the park, and then the ride loops through trees and returns to the park to end. Am I thinking that I got a prescription for motion-sickness medicine from Dr. Chin yesterday? The thought: I guess I can test for motion-sickness now, WAS in the dream!
6/9/90: 7:35: 1) Enormous travel-odyssey---I'm a Black partway through---that I put onto COMPUTER with lots of repaginations and shuffling of quotation marks at paragraph starts and ends. 8:15: 2) HUGE TV-detective story in which I'm the audience and the father of a family (possibly played by Michael Gambon) is the main solver. Wife flits around blindly, kids ask all kinds of questions, and at one time EVERYONE says it's (the program's) accepted as a hoot because it's BRITISH. [Note remembered later:] I'm studying clues on notes which had been written on waxed paper, where the MAIN clue comes from a MICRODOT of WATER trapped in a SCRATCH on the paper that can be traced to NAME the KILLER. On the scribbled-on waxed paper are mirror writings, part-duplications of other clues, carbon-copies, backward writing, etc. There's ANOTHER sequence at the end of this, where I'm sitting in someone's LAP, and she says "I'm SO bored," and it's a Chinese woman, and I reach up and back over my head to encounter her head and the shape that turns into the buns of a tiny 2-month-old baby. I say she can raise this ONE kid and THEN settle into a life of self-indulgence, but THEN she'll wish she'd had more KIDS. Is this somehow "telling me" further material (or self-motivation for ME!) for work on the book? FROM this I deduce the material on PAGE 8 of FUTURE NOVEL. 9:10 3) Computer-program REPROGRAMMING (like my project of re-computerization?) based on tables of values of T66, highly condensed calculations where MOST of the pre-calculations are DONE and STORED in an array as values of 7C/48(A+C+D/E*F).components.
6/10/90: 8:15 1) Two sales classes; in one, we all get handout materials, in other, one guy puts two piles of material carefully at the feet of two of us ---something HE'S selected PERSONALLY. 9:50 2) No-elast(?) [Susan's] Rick coin-toss. I get a few, and when I say "The holes are big," then I miss the holes, and Dave Wladaver laughs. I almost hit a smiling woman. I say "Companionship is more fun that playing the GAME." 10:20 3) A batting practice game, with sign "This is like it was in the morning." 10:35 4) Sign: nothing bad should be said about the Jewish religion." HARD TO READ NOTES ON 6/11!!
6/11/90: 7AM 1) When the "train" which is made out of the letters of the word "Raduguamiento" rattles by on the screen, I remember that I'd seen "a review of this movie," even though it started as if I were IN the scenario. Me and a young man are touring Mexico; we're gambling, eating, touring, planning our last vacation day's activities, packing to leave, and on the "plane for Escuintla," we hear the pilot announce that "My son will be passing out bottles of fruit juice, so we're giving you one last chance to spend your American dollars here, and you also have a chance to win $1000 in the drawing that you enter when you buy a bottle." I wonder whether the prize is in Mexican dollars or US dollars. 8:20: 2) I stop to shower (with NO thoughts about nudity in public) at an outdoor plaza set of shower-stalls, putting my Brooks Brothers (which I wore last night) suit-pants on the ground in front of me, but having to move them when the girls at the NEXT stall WET them, and then I fold my coat in a neat way on my shoes when I take them off. I try to push out a girl who wants to cruise a cute guy that I want to cruise, but she ignores me completely and monopolizes the stall next to the cute gay. I glance to my right and see the enclosed area with naked men going into their lockers---I should have used them, but maybe I can cruise in there later. Then I notice that an earth-mover has dug up the plaza and my suit is GONE! I hope the authorities had moved my suit before they dug up the place, but I fear that the suit is really buried, and I look disconsolately at the metal gripper as it pounds the earth, wondering if my suit is just under the surface. I also wonder how I can prove it was a BROOKS Bros. suit when they have to replace it. I go around to closed buildings trying to find construction office, but only find colorful bars where sexy dancers (boy-girl, but I hope some are boy-boy) shake back and forth, but they don't even have the courtesy to applaud when the band stops for a breather. I feel sad about losing suit, how will I travel? Though I know I have an identical suit in my bags, and I wake to REALLY console myself with the hard-to-realize thought that it WAS only a dream; I DIDN'T lose my suit at all!
6/13/90: 8:45: 1) Man and wife playing basketball with their four-year-old daughter (as the BALL), and she's NOT caught when lobbed too high and bounces on floor behind the mother into an elevator shaft. The girl goes up and the mother phones the offices upstairs. She figures "If they're EVASIVE, she's passed that floor already; if they're DIRECT, she's not there yet." Girl is later seen walking on high ledges on high floors OUTSIDE building. 2) A large group of us are walking down snowy Brooklyn Heights streets, and I come to a brick sidewalk before a colonial house and ask "What makes BROWN snow?" I think it might be brick-red or SALT. As tire tracks leave from garage and go to ICY HUMPS in the street, I figure THAT car had left before streets were salted, so he had to spread his own, different salt. I look ahead and a tall bloody-nosed Italian causes me to think he might be a THIEF working a SCAM, but then he proceeds in a GRACIOUS Italian accent, at which point I would conclude that he's an innocent tourist. 3) 10AM: Spartacus and I are in Village, deciding where to eat, and (for sex) he tells me "Watch out for Sam's Spade."
6/14/90: 8:20: 1) Packed trainload or carload of us IBMers returning to NYC from upstate. We're shown the excavations for the Japanese Police Station and told about "the reactors in Somerset, NJ." I ask "Are the reactors there, here, or in between?" Then we pass a theatre where the owner kept the critics out by saying "There's a bug in here," and the door AND wall show a bright red and white and green stained-glass bug. 8:45 2) New Consulate-name sub-lists are being added in the phone book, and we wonder WHEN to add Japan and China, now or NEXT year. 9:15 3) The owl, now considered a wise authority, says not to add details of Monaco's police-force, or people will worry about fascism. 9:25 4) I'm vacuuming my living-room rug, which is in the bathroom, and Mom's noise from the kitchen drowns out the sound, but it's not picking UP, so I open the top of the canister and the bag is full to overflowing. I pull out gray dust- sausages clogging the HOSE, and with a burst of power, to my amazement, the hose disgorges three pairs of my SOCKS and two shorts, and two shirts. Hose roars freely and I wonder HOW I could have sucked up all THIS stuff!? 10AM 4) I'm in a crowded classroom, talking quietly, astounding and amusing the teacher (a young woman) and the class as I say: "I was caught smoking grass in Turkey, in Istanbul, and was told I was SMART to pay off the cops, since the jails were even WORSE than they were depicted in movies." Class gasps in astonishment.
6/15/90: 8:15: 1) There's a rehearsal (or actual performance) of an Italian hit-parade-type TV program, and two men sing with a woman, and BOTH MEN have large erections in BANDS of red, white, and brown skin (like circumcision bands, but they might be from the condomed cocks in "Gotta Have It" that I watched yesterday. I'm gratified to see that hard cocks can be shown on commercial TV, and then I'M in the cast, putting MY hard cock between the woman's thighs, and say "Tighter," but she's knock-kneed and though she tightens she still doesn't provide any CONTACT on my cock. 2) There's also a CHOIR rehearsal where two or three people always sing the same PART, so these talk-loops can be used to supply the source of sound for the film. I wake and lay, amazed that I've gotten up so early when I went to bed at 2AM after reading part of "The After Death Experience," and I'd wished I'd dreamed something about that, or out-of-body experiences, but I didn't. Then got involved in thinking all the things I had to do, and made out a list entitled "Concerns," which I transcribed on NOTEBOOK 554.
6/17/90: 8:35: 1) FANTASTIC piston-rod stallion "covering" (fucking) a farmer's mare, and I'm looking at PHOTOS of SITTING bull covering a cow. 9:30: 2) I'm out of town, phoning my former IBM boss to tell him how to get things delivered to me so I can start work on them on Tuesday, then I'm IN the office, getting special delivery of "time-chart book" I'm to program, containing many tables divided into TIME zones with NARROW lines that some woman says will be KERNED. How? "Usually filling up the lines to the end with trailing dots." I look at illustrations and say "How about straw flies to indicate lists of footnotes on another page which wouldn't have the narrow-column limitations?" And then I'm AMAZED when my red corduroy pants turn out to be OLD with 18"RIPS on BOTH legs!
6/20/90: 10AM: Movie-making budget course, large group---first LUXURY bathroom too NEAT, all in white, threading down to HALL bathroom---with a teacher sitting inside, saying "Gosh!" and LOUD music and RAT swimming up in the deep water in the SKIN, and it LEAPS on the back of my neck, where I grip his wet whiskers and TRY to step it from biting me on the neck, and I WAKE and probe about to see if it had been a COCKROACH scrabbling on the back of my neck. UGH! Then the damn DOG starts barking, but only for six or seven times, thank God!
6/22/90: 8:40AM: BUZZER as I dream 4) I'm cleaning a corner of my apartment that's a real mess: paper-scraps, dust, bits of wood, all around a radiator near a potted PINE tree (like an old Christmas tree) that I take top tinfoil off and see it SWARMING with spider-mites. Nearby is a gallon can of tomatoes. The pine-soil is dry, so I telephone John to ask if acid tomato-soil is good for pines (I have to call twice since he'd hung up when I told him too many details the first time), and he's responding that something will mulch something and it sounds OK AS the buzzer goes! 2) BEFORE that, a DIM fragment of someone falling, curled up, into SNOW, asleep, as I look DOWN on him, and I wake, curled up, cold and then I cover with sheet. NOW I think "look down on him"---is THAT symbolic of an OOB??? 1) Another CLEAR segment: I'm in a library that displays 12-14 volumes of gray-and-blue Columbia Encyclopedia- Dictionary in PAIRS along bottom shelves in displays between smaller fictional books. The library manager says :"The index should be about 2000 lines," and I ask how to SELECT, and he says for NAMES, only those born 1953 and after, and for WORDS, only those easily misspelled, and then he takes words from student volunteers in the class: maintenance, ukulele, and from me, syzygy, and other common problem words. 3) ANOTHER remembered fragment about taking a TEST, or assembling a job, where X(96)+Y(42)+Z(10) doesn't mean that the numerals are VALUES, but the NUMBER of values that must be SAVED before the SOLUTION is found, and I have a feeling of "be calm, don't throw the incoming data out, just file it in one of the three boxes (of X or Y or Z) and when I get ENOUGH, the problem will be solved and I'll have the ANSWER and now be so concerned about the ACTUAL value of the incoming numbers that will have GIVEN me the right answer. 10:35AM: Three MORE pieces: A) Lying in my bed next to someone like Tony who's sitting up, playing with himself. I haven't touched me, but quickly reach down to OOZING cock and SMEAR it over my cock-head with palm and GROAN and WRITHE with intensity of pleasure. wake and GRIND cock into BED! AH! B)Reminded of Don Leventhal when my friend snickers about my worry about nudity on my roof--no one's around to see, the new place next door has NO one at home, and WHAT if they DO? C) I try to STRAIGHT baths, though SOME women may be made-up men. I stuff pocket-things from COAT into ROUND GYM bag, and keep crumpled receipt that reads $10.10. Into locker area (SOME sexy guys, lots of OLD men) and can't read 85?, last digit on purple key ring. "Give me another." "That's the LAST one, honey." I think to look in AREA to find EMPTY, but can't find AREA. Surprised at a line of WOMEN waiting for a steam room and think "They must be from the HOTEL, or on a TOUR, and next time I should NOT come from 3-5PM when THEY'RE here."
6/23/90: 4AM [AT computer]: Some weird shit going on in there [my head]! 1) A group of us are being "treated" to a unique tour of Paris: someone has rigged up a set of guy-wires from a series of buildings, about six floors up, that enables him to hang like a spider from them and take photographs of the city. He's modified this "rigging" so that he can pulley-up-and-down an ELEVATOR CAR filled with tourists, of which me and possibly Jean-Jacques are part of the first tour. I'm taking photographs like crazy as we move up the side of a building, across a street, and against a large mirror so that we can SEE the photographer hanging from his knees from an intersection of his "network", and I can photograph US hanging there in an ice-tongs-type vice from his not-too- strenuously [I'm happy to see!] working arms! There's a partial view of the Eiffel Tower to one side, and as night draws on, the "Arc du Carrousel" has its name emblazoned in bright-red letters all across its top---looking rather like the Grand Army Plaza arch---and is this all related to the p.15 [or whatever] that I typed yesterday for the "outdoor world" phase of Future Novel? We've been up and down safely about three times, so we're "getting used to it," but I'm still taking about a roll of film on this "tour" and people are starting to laugh at me: I guess it's common for them and NOT common for me at ALL! 2) Now it's late at night and I'm sleeping in some large apartment building with Jean-Jacques in an adjoining apartment. I have to go to the john, but that entails going out my room-door, past his apartment, past someone else's apartment (they're both sleeping, it seems), up two flights of stairs and down one, to a sort of public john in the hallway where I don't quite remember where to put on the lights. I know there's a simpler way for me to get to the john, but I haven't bothered to ask for a "map of the quarters" so that I can find my way in the post-war bombed-out buildings and corridors. Toward the end of this phase of the dream, I pass his room and hear someone moving about and whisper "Jean-Jacques," and he whispers back as he climbs up the stairs, "Don't worry, I have to check in on the baby," who's clearly on the floor above, and I accept the fact that he's chosen to "take in" this child while I've remained selfish and not done so. Then "my dream" draws back from our building, and we [this gets VERY strange, which is why after I went to the john I decided it would be far easier to put on the computer to record these DETAILS faithfully] in our building, or part of the building, form one "cassette-base" with a rectangular gray "label" which melds with other cassettes---about four across and sixteen high---to form one "cassette-face," which displays some kind of label in the upper 4x2 area of a gray-blue color, some kind of picture in the middle 4x10 layer that shows some fairly large portion of Paris [large enough to somehow make it identifiable as Paris], and some kind of descriptive passage in the bottom 4X4 area (in which our cassette-base is in the upper left, or one next to it; I couldn't quite follow it as the "buildings" or "parts of buildings" became the cassette-bases which rotated into each other to FORM [this is all rather like in a TV advertisement, or better a black-and-white Movietone-news type newsreel] this screen-filling cassette-face somewhat in the nature of an ADVERTISEMENT. In the middle of this phase of the dream, Jean-Jacques has been [falsely] aroused by some sort of warning-signal and he's gone a few buildings down, to get to his machine-gun post, and he's ELEVATED his machine-gun into battle position (entailing lifting a net-camouflage section of building-roofs) BY MISTAKE, so that there're grumbles from semi-revealed neighbors who KNOW that his response is erroneous, and possibly dangerous, because "the enemy" can SEE the elevated roofing and is now making some kind of ATTACK, which Jean- Jacques' mistake has ENTICED them into, and the other "defenders of the city" now have to man THEIR adjacent guns and participated in this "spurious" battle. There were strong "detailings" in the dream that added verisimilitude to a post -Holocaust future-embattled city-of-Paris atmosphere: sounds of voices, radio broadcasts, crowds in the streets below our "elevator-car tour", other people in our "bombed-out building," rubble in the hallways, "previously read newspapers adding information in MY head so that I "knew" where we were in the context of my dream ITSELF. Now it's 4:25AM and I hope I can get back to SLEEP! 10AM: I return to dreams: "Lecture" to find it's a MOVIE. Up onto creaking metal balconies to sit behind guy sketching a scene from a movie--- small boats and ships caught in whirlpools. Movies seem to be serials.
6/24/90: 9:20AM: I'm walking with Spartacus along Amsterdam canals at 9:45AM BEOFRE shops are open, which are just adjuncts to their HOMES along the canals. I espy a kitchen that was used as a setting in some TV or travel program, and I sit on a step to watch the farmer's life, pointing to what I take to be SCREENS with paintings on them, but as a woman starts explaing in English, that "The main square is back that way, and we're thinking of moving because this canal is dying." I recognize they're HOUSES as seen through their living room windows. Dogs bark about getting petted, and I'm disgusted as an American group starts singing our National Anthem on the BIS back to THEIR hotel, and I'd gone along (I'm not on a tour at all) thinking they'll take me nearer to the center of town, but then I panic as I think they'll take me to their distant hotel and I'll not know how to get back to where I want to go. 11:05AM: Woman with two kids said to "have low energy today," but she'll be better when we all go touring tomorrow." I try to ask about tours that would go out TODAY, but I can't get any valid information.
6/26/90: 9:45AM: I befriend a small furry gerbil/hamster that gets caught in multiple compartments separated by screening in base of wall near doorway or window-frame, and when I scoop it up in my hand and bring it gently out, it runs up my chest and nestles affectionately into my neck, and it feels GOOD!
6/27/90: 6:40AM: I'm ending my vacation in a rustic house, and Bruce Jaffe is drinking from a full cup of coffee and gently says "No" to my pouring more coffee into his cup. There's a young girl, about 10 or 11, clinging lightly to my head, effortlessly, with her two hands; her bent arms keep her feet easily above my knees so she doesn't interfere with me when she walks, but I can look into a mirror and there she is, dangling almost weightlessly off my head, and other compliment how effortlessly she clings to me. An older sister, looking like a young Paula Gannon, is also quietly present and somehow devoted to my presence. It's the last day of the vacation, so I pile all my dirty clothes from my duffel bag into a large-basined toilet, thankful that I've kept everything together so I won't have trouble packing everything into my bag, and then I piss on the clothes with a wide-spread spray, wetting them completely before I pause to think, "Should I have transferred them into the washtub before pissing on them?" But it seems to be OK. Before, we were four men sharing a cabin like at Hemlock Hall at Blue Mountain Lake, and when the thin, stern guy from the gym (with the swallow tattooed on his shoulder and back) climbs amicably into bed with me, I'm a tiny bit embarrassed to find wet spots on the sheet: had I pissed a bit or are those post-cum wetnesses? Before that, I'd shivered slightly and covered myself with my light-brown blanket, finding the morning breezes from the open window somewhat cooling. Gil Messenger is smiling as he walks around the cabin, putting his hands onto the chest of a younger, sexier someone who could have been a cuter George Pierson, and someone like Michael Blackburn seems to be there, too, but other than Gil, the identities are somewhat obscure. There's a nice warm feeling from having been together for about a week. Actualism retreat-idealization? Before THAT, we were riding in a bus in the country, looking at people streaming down off the nearby hills to walk in columns down the country road: boy scouts, children from school, couples arm-in-arm (like from "Desire: Sexuality in Germany" film?), and a boy on a bicycle pedals past as the bus goes in wider and wider circles so as not to interrupt anyone's line of march, and the boy spins out of control and is tossed off his bike, so everyone stops and rushes out to pick him up, and I'm standing near a group of HUMPY men who all seem BIGGER than I am (am I child-sized?), hacking away at a tree-stump about five feet across with axes and hatchets, bodies muscled under plaid shirts and dirty blue jeans.
7/1/90: 9:50: 1) Phyllis and I are hurrying to what promises to be a GREAT dinner at the NEW Akron University building called the University Club---which has attained a world-famous reputation very quickly over the past few years. 2) I give a subway-like token (that I paid $2 for) plus a dollar bill for entry to an exhibit reporting about AIDS, and I'm standing at the entranceway debating whether I should check my shoulder bag for $1: either it's too heavy to tote around for the day in the exhibit, or it'll be handy for collecting handouts and brochures from the exhibit. It's the old, tattered bag that I've since discarded, and I'm wondering whether it's not too ratty-looking for this.
7/2/90: London walk/rolled plans/Dave Wladaver playing and singing/Dickens-type serialization of Future Novel in The Newspaper? At 8:25AM I start typing because any notes wouldn't capture the elusive quality of aimlessness that characterized these. 1) I'm walking through streets lined with richly-detailed buildings (probably patterned on the European streets epitomized by the bombed- out streets of Berlin in last nights "Foreign Affair" on tape), and though the weather is nice, the sun is shining, and the buildings are fascinating with their balconies, cornices, stone-faced floor-details, shaded tones of gray and dirty shadows and sunlit highlights, I'm aware that I DON'T know the names of the streets I'm walking on, I have no idea how they fit into the overall map of the city, and I don't know where I've come from or where I'm going! 2) a) I've gotten into some kind of meeting-area for an organization that I don't know, where various sub-organizations (committees?) are convening in different rooms, and I sit in the midst of a discussion group that quickly agrees they don't know who I am, don't recognize me, suspect I don't know where I am or what I'm listening to, and the animosity builds to such a point that I move away from them, hurt, yet knowing that, at base, they were quite right: I didn't know what they were talking about, didn't appear to have much in common with them physically or mentally, so was only taking up room (is this a reflection of my current wondering what the POINT of some of my days is?). b) I wander into a sort of office-area and am handed a roll of plans, on large sheets of paper with squares rather like my diagramless-puzzle sheets, that I listlessly thumb through: they're architectural plans, plot diagrams, plays, and engineering drawings in an indecipherable combination. I try to make sense of them, but I get the feeling that I'm just passing time, and try to hand them to someone who seems better qualified than I am to know what to do with them. c) There's another area, rather like a doctor's waiting-room, and I look at people sitting in chairs along the walls and know that I have no reason to be there, no purpose for sitting down, no purpose for moving away, no reason to talk to anyone, not even any qualifications or right to ask anyone for directions, instructions, or information. 3) I turn to look into a glassed-in area where people are starting to laugh, and there's Dave Wladaver, looking as plump and enigmatic as he looked at SBC, playing on a guitar and singing songs that have such a CURVE to them that people laugh without really knowing what they're laughing at--at least I can't figure out what they're laughing at, but I join in just to participate (is this, I think now, a reflection of the laughing-at- the comics final scene of "Sullivan's Travels" from LATE last night?). I wake at 8AM, thirsty, and debate writing notes to try to capture the elusive quality of directionlessness, lack of purpose, lack of CONNECTION (is this connected, to supply some of the connection that's lacking, with my depression the last few days that people never call ME to ask ME to do anything with them [unless Vicki asks me to movies that I refuse, Spartacus to tours that I refuse, or Pope or Dennis to watch TV programs that I do only with great reluctance?], and I feel that I have to make all the efforts or I won't be doing ANYTHING?). 4) As I lay there, thinking about "Future Novel" and the writers-group meeting tonight, it crosses my mind that I could send a proposal to THE NEWSPAPER with the first dozen chapters of the book, suggesting that they start a fiction SERIAL, as with Dickens, to try to "hook" people into reading the paper with more regularity---and of course making a name for myself as a writer as well!
7/6/90: 8:50AM: Two dreams: lobster reproducing and two-floor artists' lofts, cause me to get up after less than 6 hours' sleep, to tap out these notes:
1) Dennis is sitting on my lap, and I have this ENORMOUS erection, and I wake to find that it's perfectly true. Then when I drift back to sleep, we're touring new artists' lofts, probably in lower Manhattan, and the building has been reconstructed so that the openwork stairways have been CLOSED only on every other floor, and it strikes me as being so intelligent that they put the doorways not in the MIDDLE of the flights, but at the TOP of the flights, so that it's perfectly clear that the LOWER door is the responsibility of the apartment ABOVE it for its own security. It also seems to be connected with dancing (like the Dance Awards that I watched yesterday on TV?), so that some female like Molissa Fenley, who's showing her works of art on all the walls of her two-floor loft, also has two beds in side rooms for her two main male dancers, and AGAIN there's a segment that I seem to remember involves me with a stiff erection, trying to find someplace where it won't be so noticeable. The neon-lit and neon-produced colors flood the volumes with purplish, greenish, and pinkish lights that flow into each other in an almost VIBRATING way. One bed is RIGHT in the overhang of the staircase, and I think it an intelligent way of using an awkward corner of space, and again think that this lower apartment is then responsible for keeping those stairs CLEAN (so things won't drop down on the person sleeping in the bed below) right up to the locked door that demarks the limits of the apartment above. 2) I'm watching a lobster methodically producing babies: dipping into itself and coming out with a little blob of white, capped with a little fingernail-curve of red shell, looking more like a tiny red-frosted white cupcake than a tiny lobster, but produced tirelessly at the rate of about one per second. I somehow make a connection between the lobster's ability to REGENERATE parts of itself (I guess confusing it with the CRAB that can regenerate a CLAW if one is snatched away, and a WORM that can regenerate another END if one is ripped off) and its reproductive process, and then the TV camera, through which I seem to be watching the whole process, zooms in for a back-lit close-up and I can actually SEE that the claw is reaching down to the tip of the tail, which has been shredded away until a clear area where the tip HAD been is revealed clearly in the pictures, and the quivering, blunted tip from which the pieces of flesh are being torn is clearly in view, something like a "cup of material" ABOVE where the end of the tail would have been before it had been cannibalized for reproduction. Then the camera pulls back to the full view, which seems to be just me looking down at the actual lobster, and the claw continues to methodically dip into the tail, do a tiny twist of adhering a piece of shell (from where THAT comes isn't clear to me at all) to a piece of flesh, and calmly bringing it out into the bowl of baby lobsters, the extent of which isn't clear, but it's beginning to reach the proportions of about 1/3 the size of the lobster itself. I'm amazed that no one noticed this self-cannibalization AS reproduction before, and NOW, as I type this at 9:05AM, it occurs that the connection which had fluttered tantalizingly at the borders of my mind has now been made clear: it's like WRITING: I take bits of myself from inside and bring them outside to develop with a vitality of their own: actual bits of my OWN life which, in miniature, form the embryo from which complete, living, vital creatures develop to survive outside myself. I think of the doctors of the hospital, and maybe Frank can have a DREAM which duplicates this: first the doctors formed parts of him, and THEN he HIMSELF formed the DOCTORS, adding another level of complexity to the outside world, where outer (hospital)-imposed test-hallucinations no longer operate, and HE has to supply his own tests, helping to take him BEYOND which even the IMAGINATION of the doctors could supply to help develop this angel, but in ANOTHER way from the self-development-into-angel that De'Evilam followed when SHE was developing the Gain-Radio frequency-bands, proving that there ARE more ways to do it, and that De'Evilam, who THEY think is evil, needn't contribute to the development of "she who is not yet named." IS it the WIFE??
7/7/90: 7:45: A couple like Fran and Joy drag me with enthusiasm into an art- furniture emporium, and we pass chairs and tables covered with burlap, and beds with people in them, to a dining room/family ensemble with two bratty-looking kids cemented to two end-chairs. The chairs are also CEMENTED to the table so that "people can't pull them apart." I'm aghast, but can only say "That's INTERESTING!"
7/8/90: 1) 12:20: I've just watched a movie like "Superman," eating a box of popcorn and a chocolate bar. During intermission I piss a long time at a urinal (and feel my very heavy bladder), and buy a box of buttery PRALINE that I'm looking forward to eating with ENORMOUS box of popcorn for the SECOND show, apparently a CONCERT with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway about Folsom State Prison. There's a LINE for tickets as the movie STARTS, and my stomach is SAD when I awake that it's only a DREAM. 2) 7:10: I'm on a British tour of a school that's very elegant, and I'm shown a 40-foot ceilinged dance-PALACE that crowns the central building, but there's the attitude from the administration that this tour shouldn't be taking place at all: it's too high-class to be toured, particularly by this group of loud Americans, though a boy sidles up to me and whispers sexily, "I like you the best of all the tourists." I'm abashed to look down and see that I have my old black (greenish) woolen Army-boot socks on under thin-strapped sandals. Some of the tourists are blind, and they expect me to be blind too, but I'm not, which surprises them as I pass them in the narrow hallways. Somehow I've lost my yellow shirt, which I picture draped filmily over some ladder-back chair that I'd become too hot sitting in. 3) 7:45: notes for Future Novel: Cetch is ANDROGYNOUS beast; as Zinovia becomes more pregnant, the FETUS kills her, for which Frank feels GUILT. "She" is wife's CLONE, NOT in coma, and he must give her up as PAST---then he goes BEYOND time and space to CREATE universe. Cetch is male/female; Frank must EMBRACE evil/DeEvilam. ALL dualities overcome, EVEN past and future!
7/9/90: 1) 8:25: FOUR musical motifs---one TUNNEL, one INTRO, one MAIN, and one CLIMAX, and once audience gets used to TUNNEL, we can have many PASSAGES of music, and I drew these "diagrams" of the music: BEFORE, they're building a huge hotel-restaurant complex, and Terry Kornak is rating a test meal which others prepare, but they won't serve me because I don't work for the company. Later, I find I'm on a PLANE, but when that "fear of flying" comes, I console myself that THIS plane is not actually flying, but it's only the decor of the restaurant. 2) 8:40: Thought: the purpose of a funeral is to both celebrate the past of, and mourn the loss of, the deceased. But the DECEASED doesn't get a chance to do EITHER. As I lay, FEARING the spot-removal in just five hours, I feel like CRYING, for ME, and think "How THERAPEUTIC it would be to periodically MOURN ONE'S OWN COMING DEATH, for ME to celebrate my past and mourn MY loss---and get a HANDLE on THOSE feelings to permit a LARGER LIFE! You can only have as much pleasure as pain (mourning) has hollowed you out. 3) 8:55: Coming economic debacle per FRIENDS: Pope has LESS money, does NO shopping; Vicki, AT $40,000 looking at $25,000 REPLACEMENT jobs; Rolf: everything's going bust; Me: Fewer indexes; Government: S&L ENORMOUS debt; NASA: Space Telescope not working through incompetence; U>S>: Can't help Russia because WE have no cash. Plus environmental and health/disease catastrophe---and Lindblad had to close!
7/10/90: 8:10: Another IBM-busy dream that parallels life: I had a FLOWCHART directing me to work on one of five projects---I'm NOT doing Accounting Program (as I'm not writing Future Novel), I'm down to LAST box of IBM 80-column cards (as I'm down to last 13 pages of single-ply paper), and BEHIND on lots of things (as I'm behind in testing disk conversions!). There's the feeling, as Dennis puts it, of "there'll be a test": I don't have an IBM boss, but I have ME to rail against my laziness and lack of productivity when I have TIME to write!
7/11/90: 1) 7:30: FRAGMENT of UGLY dream ending with three rotting shrunken heads being taken out of a clump of cold, wet earth---obviously from "On Ice" last night about cryobiologic storing of bodies for possible future resuscitation. 2) 7:40: Remembered bit about feeling around under my ass at the tops of my inside thighs at my old woolen suit-pants, and feeling the frayed material and the HOLES which had formed there, and worrying that people could SEE that my seat is thinning out. And now I'll have to buy NEW pants! 3) 8:35: I'm on a subway platform with a heavy suitcase and my overcoat, and a pretty woman passes from ahead of me, and I think she asks me directions, but she's actually telling ME that I haven't yet gotten to the platform where the train comes, and it's like the Boro Hall Station where you can see that the train is coming in on an ADJACENT platform, so I run in the direction it's going and it curves around NOT on a track, FAR from the platform in front, but in back I open a door and get in, to look for the token-box (as on a bus) beside the driver in the front left, then the conductor behind him, who ALSO doesn't have the token-box, and then the trip-planner on the LEFT has the token box (and it now strikes me that it's like the three pilot-crew teams in "Die Harder" yesterday). I look for a seat, but am amazed to find that the compartment is SQUARE, with only about eight seats, all of them full, and I figure this is a new car-configuration. The thin door next to a male passenger flaps open, and I help him close it as we get started. I figure someone will leave at the next stop (as the two Spanish guys announced loudly on the subway yesterday afternoon), and remind myself to take my suitcase and overcoat which I'm guarding on the floor in front of me. I know it's the F-train, and I get out at 14th Street to try to look for a map to find how to travel where I'm going farther south (and this is clearly related to my telling Don Maloof that I don't know how to DRIVE to Tribeca Grill on Greenwich and Franklin, but that he should just take the Number 1 train to Franklin and walk WEST!). People seem to be waiting for the bank to open (as they were waiting for the library to open as we waited for the Urban Park Rangers bus just before noon on Sunday) and a long-nosed boy is very cute, and I think that the length of the nose is proportional to the length of the cock. Other waiting guys are sexy (like the crew at 11AM at the gym on Monday), and I recorded a statement that seemed to be broadcast at the bank: "The age of self-imposed governors is coming again!"
7/12/90: 7:50: ENORMOUS dream of "walking through Europe" (like a board game), in which certain icons (player's-pieces) have to be put (by the sense of touch, only) into niches in tunnels under internationally-famous sites. I finally learn the last step in proper positioning: there are UPPER and LOWER niches in each "final" position for "maximum score." The end of the dream is in a barbershop, but then I have to pee. I go through a back room with HORDES of people in it, and I ask "Is this really the ONLY place left open (to pee)?" Men and women are supposed to go to different doors (this is like last night's basement johns in the yellow-painted drab hallways under Tribeca Bar and Grill), and while there are women in line outside the women's room, all the men have gone through the door already. I hear someone saying, "For a group, just lift up the facade of the scene and go inside." I go alone, lying on my back and pissing into the water below my feet, hearing it splash, proud that my cock is semi-hard and LARGE. The guy after me "flips the scene" and other people WALK in, and a messy waiting guy says to me, "Don't drink after 10PM," and I take it to be a POWERFUL omen to be listened to outside the dream in my own real life.
7/13/90: 7:15: I'm indexing lots of SEA-terms: swimming, surfing, diving, trawling, and there are paragraphs of sub-sub (HA!) entries that have to be "made readable" with the sub-entries, which are single words FOR each of diving, surfing, swimming, trawling, so I have to figure out how to take out the FIRST word of the sub-sub and make it READ INTO the sub-entry and main entry above it, and I reluctantly come to decide that I'm the expert around here!
7/14/90: 7:40 1) An oriental woman is charged with killing her husband. In order to "defend" herself, she a) writes an article that shows her brain-damaged daughter's head as a flower in a vase with HER head screaming above it, while another photograph of her looks sardonically from one side, and b) has put three "flowerpots" on her convertible automobile, showing her getting married to her husband. I comment "This's not the way we do it in the USA." 2) Mom is telling me (in my bedroom at 1221 Dietz) to phone special numbers for graphic descriptions of what they're showing at the porno movies, but they have to obey the LAW, so they can only be hilariously elliptical, like the TV "dating" services that are really for sexual encounters. I can't even tell if the films are GAY or not from the descriptions, and say, "Mom, this is really SILLY."
7/15/90: 10:05: I'm sitting in some kind of classroom, and a white-faced woman (like one of the singers on "Friday Night Videos" last night) keeps looking at me as if she thinks she's met me before, and finally I say across to her, "We worked together at DTW years ago," and she breaks into a smile of recognition, but seems to be confusing me with Art Bauman. Then we're in the middle of a rehearsal for a dance program that seems to be set in a department store. The choreographer is a stern-faced handsome young man, sort of a combination of Jeff Duncan and Bill Hyde, and when we want to fix up the room we're in for some kind of reception afterwards, we're told to leave. "I was just thinking of clearing the dishes off the two center tables," I said to the choreographer, and he gives me an icy glare and says, "Someone else will be directed to do that at the proper time." I stand in the doorway for awhile, watching the people (dancers) moving quickly across the floor, and then the girl and I try to get out of the way, but when we get to the periphery of the action, there are phalanxes of chorus-men moving back and forth like a Bob Fosse-inspired military drill. They're all wearing different street-clothes, but they all seem to be in black and have particular kinds of Homburg hats on. We move to the left, they move to the left, but finally we sneak through to a glassware- sales area near the elevators, and I'm impressed by the futuristic look that the reflected and refracted lights through strips of colored plastics from the store decor, thrown onto the black clothing and matte-white faces of the dancers, gives the whole scene, and I find myself thinking, "Maybe there WOULD be something picturesque to like about the televised performance of this dance." Then I get up to shit and decide to type this directly by 10:12AM.
7/16/90: 8:30 1) Planning travel-days, and figure to divide them into three periods for tour-eat, tour-eat, and tour-eat. These are formatted neatly into pre-printed itineraries. 2) John A. and I are looking at my white-painted ceiling, and we decide that I have to wash it AGAIN, because in the sunlight, or the reflection of the sunlight onto the ceiling, we can see that it's streaked with soap-lines, and I also poke at shiny white lumps that seem also to be of soap, so that another washing will smooth the whole thing down nicely.
7/17/90: 4:50 1) I'm dictating words that seem to be some form of index-entries to unruly schoolchildren who refuse to think enough to see how the words relate to each other and to their appearance in the final index. 9:20 2) There was some sexually-related dream that was VERY appealing in the dream: something about me tugging gently on my cock to excite myself, teaching others to excite themselves the same way, and their growing pleasure reinforced mine. I woke with a delicious erection that I promptly rolled over onto, because I was still fatigued from sleep, and remembered fondly the time that I would jerk off each morning almost as a matter of course, and now I seem to need the stimulus to taped pornography AND the pressure of a rubber band around the base of my cock to even get to the point of feeling like an orgasm. The sad advances of age! It's about time that I typed out this page now that I've gotten to the bottom!
7/18/90: 5:55 1) I'm working in Dad's store, only Bruce JAFFE owns it! I have a clipping for Trimbach wine, but NONE are in the stacks in the basement. I ask if I can talk two beers instead, and Bruce says, "Trimbach is in the refrigerator, you didn't know?" I said, "It was never ONLY in the refrigerator and I begin to wonder if we're not having FINANCIAL problems, because we can't afford to keep enough on stock for reserves. 2) I'm outside the store and pick up an empty beer bottle and walk toward the rear of the store to get back inside, aware that it's now late evening and I have to be worried about safety (this probably stems from the TV report last night of the murder in "safe" Tuckahoe). A gang of teenagers comes down the sidewalk toward me, jiving and talking louder and louder. I try to make myself small and hug the right side of the sidewalk, but suddenly GROUPS of the teenagers have CLUBS and come perpendicularly to the sidewalk to force me into the side of the story; as they get very close I think I might make it, but then they shout "FUCK!" and then brandish their clubs at me and I FREEZE with fear, knowing that I'm not continuing calmly as I should, and WAIT. HOW UGLY, and I wake with a fragment of the frozen fear still around me. 3) 8:05: I'm at a party at Marty Sokol's (and I wonder if I can work and write for his opera-company as HE worked and wrote about it), and there's an "act" on a tiny stage, and a man and woman get out of bed and the audience CHEERS, and the woman (who's rather like Aprile Milo, but I don't associate that name with her in the dream) is clutching her blue bathrobe in front of her (the guy, who looks like Marty, isn't very attractive and has his pale yellow bathrobe so bunched in front of his crotch that it seems clear he's hiding full-cover shorts), but it's slipped down in her stagey "emotion" so that one tit is showing and the other is almost completely bare, and the audience cheers louder, and I wonder if it's going to turn into a sex-scene, and she throws herself onto the sofa next to me, and I'm appalled to look down at her spread legs to see her shaved cunt spread before the audience, with even a nubbin of clitoris showing her excitement. I, right next to her, fearing to be seen by the audience as seeming to like this, roll over onto my stomach, making sure that my bathrobe is covering my ass, and try to dissociate myself from the whole ugly scene. 4) Somehow I'd gotten a job with IBM AGAIN, and I quit AGAIN to go to Graduate School AGAIN. The registration form (patterned on the Pompeiian wall-paintings I looked through at IBM yesterday?) has room for THREE main courses, which are something like Advanced Physics, Advanced Computers, and Nuclear Science, and I've added a FOURTH in an optional area at the bottom of the page (some vaguely extra- curricular course like writing or music appreciation), and I wonder if I'll have to spend ALL my time STUDYING, will I really enjoy being back in school, won't they look at me funny for being 55 years old, and did I really HAVE to register for so many courses to take advantage of the full-paid fellowship I've been awarded? What if I have to drop out AGAIN? But I figure, in the dream, "They've already PAID for my time and the registration and school fees, so I can do anything that I really WANT to do; it won't matter WHAT I do." But I feel depressed---if I DON'T stay in school and CAN'T return to work at IBM (and even in my dream there are the little question marks: how did I manage to get ANOTHER job with IBM? Hadn't I tried to get a job through Madge Mao before and it DIDN'T go through? DID I actually work for them a third time and somehow FORGOT it?), I'd have to make my living by WRITING, and I might be tempted to KILL myself if I don't sell my writing and have no money coming in. This is, to be repeated, all in the dream, and I wake up to feel a certain sense of DISORIENTATION, as if my life MIGHT be taking off in a direction I can't quite put my finger on (partly, I suppose, though my "shifts" in writing Future Novel and partly my depression about getting older: WILL the slight pain in my hip continue or get worse? WILL my itchy eyes signal the advance of some disease that might leave me in blindness, so I'll be rushing through the few last days of light left to finish transcribing all the writings I'd want to get published before I go blind? Not a very happy feeling, but then the DAY turns out FINE!!
7/19/90: 8AM: I'm at a boy-saint festival in an Indian temple. There's an ENTERTAINMENT of a dance performance of Hindu dance, on inner steps, televised so we can see stop-motion close-ups of dance, and a cameraman wearing a tiny red-orange tent as a "disguise" (so he won't distract from the dancers) shoots pictures of US, watching. I lean back on my floor-seat with a reclining back (like at Japanese tatami-restaurants) and thereby probably vanish from the pictures. Dancer DANCES from power to "abstract Indian flames," and the set changes in ways that we can't see. "Is the BOY still on display?" asks an English tourist as she's almost run down, and I laugh. I'm leaning over, my ear almost touching a trolley-rail, to look down the street past the corner of (now it's) a CATHEDRAL to see a glimpse of the coming parade. It's HOT, as it is in my BEDROOM when I wake.
7/20/90: 7:05: I'm jerking off in a strange seedy-hotel-type room, looking down with great content as I handle my stiff cock that juts out directly from my body, and I get to the point of coming, though not quite there, and look down to see small gouts of white that's thicker than pre-cum but not quite an orgasm, and I think "This is wonderful," and I direct the repeated flow onto the black pebbled-marble/slate top of a dresser that I'm standing in front of, probably because there might be a mirror on top of it that I'm looking into. Then I hear someone from the next room, or it might be from the hallway outside the door next to the dresser, though there's some bit of the small-child guilt that "Mom's bedroom is right next door, and she might hear me or come in unexpectedly and surprise me." Then I start REALLY shooting into the air, and try to scrape it off the wall so that it won't stain, and I have HANDFULLS of cum that I juggle back and forth like cum-hot-potatoes, hoping that it won't stain anything, maybe it'll dry, isn't there a LOT of it?, and hope no one comes into the room now! The dresser pulls away from the wall, and I think that the newly-disturbed dust will be a give-away, but maybe I can drop it onto the floor in back of the chest, which hasn't been moved for years, and I wake with an enormous erection that I finger and then jerk off, drying myself in the humid morning air, and then get lots of idea that I transcribe to FN 21-25!
7/21/90: 9AM: Doctor laughs at patient in a study-group and rejects him because he's not sexy enough.
7/22/90: 10:10: Mom's flying a plane---well at first, then lower and lower until she's practically street-level. I protest, she waves up to greenish sky and says there's a temperature inversion, so she's been DIRECTED to fly down here; I shouldn't worry.
7/23/90: 7:35: 1) I'm in Europe and get a package (which must have been left in my hotel mail-slot PERSONALLY since it's not mail-addressed) which is a manuscript of mine folded around a ROCK---on the outside there's an ink-note: "Customer doesn't want to publish this now" 2) I've walked along a road from my hotel, looking for some place to eat, and come to a ritzy restaurant neighborhood with real MANSIONS on the road. I have no MAP and don't know where the center of the city is, and feel FRUSTRATED. 9AM 3) Three of us are driving BACK to a Canadian hotel from a day-trip, and the entrance to the city has A) a HUGE truck-high, new-stone, brass-trim, and wooden entrance, then B) area of IMMENSE rubble, like from an earthquake, stretching to the horizon in an enormous bowl-shaped area; and a BOAT overturns in "street," (which has now become a LIQUID surface), and a canoe pulls an exhausted swimmer-survivor over to the "curb," (which is now like the tiled edge of a swimming pool). C) A HUGE NEW stone-still-to-be-carved CATHEDRAL, which I wish we could stop to see now or return to after it's finished, next to torn-down highway that, with bridges, looks to me RATHER like an OLD cathedral that I wish I'd SEEN. We hope that our exit highway, that we'll take tomorrow, is NOT torn up like THIS.
7/24/90: 7:26: 1) I'm going to visit Gene Adams in "Adams Gardens" which seems to be somewhere in the Bronx or Northern Queens, and in getting out of the subway at the bus station, a couple behind me talks about taking "Bus #50 to Adams Gardens," and I figure I can dash across the street and ask the bus driver of the bus that I see standing, waiting to pull out (though when I get in front of the bus, I see that there's no driver, reminding me of the elevator that arrived downstairs at the Clark Street Station last night and the guy that I took to be the operator, because the CHAIR was in the elevator-car, just walked out of the car to take the train!), whether the bus goes near enough to 138 Adams Gardens for me to take his bus. 2) I listen to Arn Fabricant talk about Richard MacGrath---"He's 14 years older than I, but he's in great shape, earns a LOT more money than I do," and I wonder if Arn would KNOW him, or about him, in real life. Should I phone him?
7/25/90: Listened to music 12:45 to 3:45, so that when the buzzer went for an index-delivery at 8:45AM, all dream-remnants left my mind instantaneously!
7/27/90: 5:40: 1) I'm staying in a Russian HOUSE, wearing THICK red bathrobe, and I tell myself to REMEMBER this because it's so unusual. 2) 8AM: I'm eating with the Russians, then motion that I want to go to the bathroom, and they give me a key. I go upstairs, but I can't find it. I ask "Gde?" of the father, and in perfect English he says "In the BACK, halfway down the corridor." There's an episode with rather cute KIDS who are impressed with me.
7/28/90: 7:20: John A. is showing his chess-playing strategy to a new chess-club judge, who's written a little judging pamphlet. John insists that his variation is to be played in PUBS only, and "R. Rothermeyer," who's the judge, smiles and says "It'll then be a good test for my methods as described in my pamphlet, as it should cover ALL combinations and circumstances. So John gets ready to start as I look on as his opponent in the first game.
7/31/90: 7:35AM: I'm playing with a GERMAN Monopoly board, and the red-colored properties have become "Southern Terrace," and a guy wanting to build for $900 can't figure how many $150 houses he can buy, talking ignorantly about "$60 for mortgage going nowhere," and we never do make a move in the game.
8/1/90: I wake suddenly with the daylight at 6AM in Greenport, so I don't have any dreams in my first night away from home in AGES (first since 2 nights in Greenport 10/31 and 11/1, 1989; 2 nights in July, 1989, in Long Beach; then the last OFFICIAL vacation in January, 1989, now over 18 months ago!).
8/2/90: 5:40AM 1) I'm writing notes on cards, as I'm doing NOW, but I make a DELETION that shows up as a LINE being saved, as if my NOTES are COMPUTERIZED. 2) 7:50: Some Actualism student produces another kind of FORM that I sign, and he files it in the bottom drawer of Mom's chest of drawers in her bedroom at 1221 Dietz Avenue!
8/3/90: 5:50: 1) VERY odd dream: from bug-spray-poison hallucinations? I'm on a bus in a city that's a combination of New York City (traffic-networked and huge) and Akron (long-unfamiliar to me). Bus stops at the end of the line across a bridge. I think I might go BACK OVER the bridge to a store I'd wanted to shop in, something like a combination of Bloomingdale's in NYC and Polsky's in Akron, but the bus driver reaches up and changes his routing to B#, and I say to him, "I don't know how to get where I'm going." He tries to be helpful, but I think, "This city is laid out in a huge GRID, so I can go on THIS bus until I can transfer to a line that I know." So I say to him, "Does this connect with the 2, 3, R, N, A, or E?" He replies, "No, only the G, L, P, J, M, and S." So I think, "Oh-oh, a three-transfer trip; I wish I had a ROUTE map." I ask him, "Do you have a route map?" "No," he says, getting oddly seductive, which is rather unpleasant, he being rather like Richard MacGrath, "But tell me where you want to go." "Do you know where GARFIELD is?" "Yes, I can get you there," he says, but then I blush and look down, confused, and say, "I MUST be confused, feeling like a child, because I LIVED there as a child, but I'm not there any MORE, and I think of an area someplace like GRANDMA's on CROSBY, and can think of no landmark that's near. As I try to think, and IN DREAM think, "This is all because of the bug-spray in the closed room last night," he starts getting smarmy: holding my hand, coming close to give me a kiss, trying to grope me in Richard's shy, overdone way---and I'm sexually excited but think that he's trying to take advantage of my strangeness, and I FEAR him and RESIST ---thinking at ONE point that he seems to be sincere and I MIGHT like to trick with him, but then he gets TOO gross and pushes at me from the REAR and I pull away in fear, and he starts PUSHING me, and I wonder what the PASSENGERS are thinking, all sitting in seats, steadfastly looking out windows, and I don't KNOW what to do, and I wake, erect and confused, and I hope to REMEMBER the oddness of the feelings in the dream, and get up and gaze into the still-closed living room, pee, put on light, and sit and write this till 6:07, feeling that my body is dry inside, clammy outside, with a sore nose-and-throat tract, sore writing fingers, gummy-eyes, and will drink water and try to get BACK to REFRESHING non-poisoned sleep! 7:30 2) I'm looking to piss in a hospital, knowing there's a john just inside a doctor's office, but someone else is in there, and a third guy comes in, hot for sex, and opens door to find first guy masturbating a lovely cock, and whole office dissolves into sex. 8AM 3) A friend and I are waiting in LONG line for lunch at a world's fair, and the service is SO slow that I say "They'll NEVER serve all of us by noon." Then an attendant says "PWAs and SAVE people in here," and a LOT of OUR group goes into a BACK private dining room. Then some DOCTORS seem to succumb to despair AT THAT TIME, crying and wailing and VERY tired. A large blond couple collapses, HE crying at his limits of endurance---was he THIRSTY? Then SHE collapses and starts to moan, and we stand, looking at them, appalled, and I WAKE appalled!!
8/4/90: 8AM: [Start typing this at 8:25AM]: I'm checking out a program that I've written that DUPLICATES photographs or drawings, and when I get back a test that I left to be run the previous night, I'm rather amazed to find that what I'd taken to be a SINGLE sheet submitted as test turns out to be a PACKET of items, but as I turn the pages that first PHOTOGRAPHICALLY reproduces the samples, and compare them with the pages that the COMPUTER scans and prints out, it ALL works, even to gold-tones on items that I hadn't realized I'd given to be tested, even down to details in the hair of a Japanese samurai depicted in a tiny ad for radio batteries from Japan. People gather around my desk to exclaim about the results of the test, and I realize that the program has been DEBUGGED in just two or three test-runs, quite different from what my past history had been at IBM, and wonder if it was just luck, or if new programming systems were so much more "natural" to use. [When I wake, I muse that I'd worked THREE DAYS on the line-length-change program in BASIC and got essentially NOWHERE; programming systems HAD to improve after that!] Someone like Chuck Coe has been submitting tests in parallel with me, and I wonder how HIS progress has been. Also wonder what I have to do to QUANTIZE the success of my program: just put in the input and say "It's done all this, so it MUST be debugged?" Someone like Phyllis Hjorth is putting items back into a little plastic bag, and I realize that THAT'S where I'd gotten the items used in the test case. She's talking with someone who's just starting to work, and this is a kind of orientation package, and I sort through the things on my desk, finding the many looseleaf-size, personal-letter-size, index-card-size, and even smaller, ad-insert-size, bits that I'd run through the test, and separate them from the penlight batteries, tiny compacts, and a roll of toilet paper that I give back to Phyllis to return to the bag to give to the new girl. Wake and debate copying down the details, but lay for a bit and transcribe this by 8:35, before breakfast and even before transcribing the five cards from 8/3/90.
8/5/90: 6:10: Dennis and I are trying a restaurant in London, but he goes inside, to the back somewhere, and I can only guess he makes a pass at a waiter, because he comes back lugging a HEAVY box and looking miserable, surrounded by either waiters or policemen, and obviously he's being punished, and he knows and accepts it. In the restaurant itself, lots of clients complain, service is poor, and I find a magazine that says this restaurant is OATS, and a wooden sign above the door has the simple figures $248/2. I leave without him [I recalled then that the entrance to the restaurant was through a series of white entrance-hallways in a row of Georgian townhouses on a typical British Crescent.] and sit in a FRENCH restaurant. "Do you want to sit near a window?" the hostess asks, and sets me on the floor level (away from the windows that seem to ring the balcony which is in the shape of an amphitheater) of what seems to be a dinner-theatre, since there's a semicircular stage covering half the floor. A woman with heavy makeup, who seems to be part of the show, winks at me, but I know, and tell her, that she's just making out with me because she doesn't like two BRITISH sailors who are trying to make passes at her. I THINK I see Dennis lugging a HUGE sideboard through the dinner-theatre, and then lying down next to it and being miserable, but when I call "Dennis," it's not him, but someone shorter, with much blacker hair. Then two guys sit at the next table, and one turns his back to the audience, facing the wall, and very quickly starts to jerk off, while his friend glances back at me and grins conspiratorially. Then the guy shoots, hidden by his back, gets up quickly, thrusts his throbbing cock against the fabric of his rough jeans, and leaves. It's an amazing episode, and I wake very excited.
8/8/90: 7AM: I'm shopping in a department store like Bloomingdale's, which is somehow on top of Penn Station, watching the visible subway platform for what might be the end of the line, though I pass ANOTHER "terminal" like the end of the shuttle as viewed from the subway going north from Times Square when I'm going for the train, and I think I have to take a subway to the station, but when I get to the tracks I see two trains pulling in with the announcement "Two trains to Poughkeepsie will leave in ten minutes," and that's where I'm going. I don't remember the train ride, but I get off, walk down a slope, and there's a cliff that I have to walk along that gradually gets steeper and steeper, but I see that the handholds have been carefully engineered (am I thinking of the deep-carved footholds on the palm tree on Satawal on "Adventure" on TV the night before last?), so I feel safe until I come to a section that swings FREE of any support, and I think it looks SHAKY but SAFE. As I swing, apelike, along, I see that it goes near a small window, like an apartment's bathroom window, and I can hear conversation within, and think this must be a great imposition on the people who live behind this wall that the vertical (both perpendicular to the ground but ALSO with the RUNGS perpendicular to the ground) ladder traverses. The SECOND window has been broken, out of its frame, and I figure that maybe that's why this section is swinging free. I look down on a sleeping boy curled on a sofa, and suddenly I'm in a living room with a bald sculptor (rather like a bald Paul Cadmus, or his fat porch-sitting subject) talking to his black female patron, saying "His member in blue jeans will form nice lines," and when she protested "But won't the critics say it's too overtly sexual?" he replies, "Not if it's done right." Two naked self- portrait full-length statues confront each other, one in a bathrobe. I'm aware that I don't have my overcoat, and I wonder where I lost it, but think maybe I didn't bring it with me this time. I'm talking with the sculptor, and he thinks I'm talking about someone else, but I expostulate, "Io, moi, me, I," and on that a beautiful tanned woman wearing a tooled-leather (I don't precisely know what that means, but it's partly repouss$e-uncut and partly tiny -pieces cut out like lace, in a light tan leather that's obviously staggeringly expensive), says "Aye," as a pun on "Hi!" and I laugh with her at the greeting. Take only NOTES that help me get this detail in by 8:35AM, ready for the day!
8/9/90: 5:35AM (after getting to bed at 12:30AM!): Pope and I are walking on Flatbush Avenue Extension (where Suzie and Sal and John and I drove yesterday) and see Susan waiting to drive her BUS. Pope says hello and she answers cordially, but when I try to speak to her she strides away angrily. I ask what's wrong and she turns to face me, the WHITES of her eyes GREEN and touched with angry red, and she says, "You couldn't even call to see if anything was wrong!" (Which, I now recall, was ESSENTIALLY what MOM said when she called me last night!) She went on to say, unclearly, that Rick had threatened her with a GUN, and I couldn't ask her ANYTHING about it. I figured to phone her today!
8/12/90: I'm in what looks like a train station, and I ask someone who may be a foreigner where the bus station is. She directs me "straight ahead and then turn to the right," but that leads me out of the train station and into a suburb-like area of two- and three-story elegant-development dwellings which seem to have no commercial possibilities. I walk into a corner office something like a loan-shop in which there are three windows with rapidly-moving lines, and I get in the shortest line and ask the man behind the wicket where the bus station is. He asks me where I want to go, and I assume this is a legitimate question because there might be more than one bus station for different destinations. So I open one briefcase and find masses of papers, maps, and brochures, but I can't find my bus tickets. Open another suitcase and there are stacks of folders and souvenirs that apparently I haven't yet separated into my usual "finished with" and "still-to-come" stacks and plastic envelopes. I feel that my time is running out, that the people behind me in line are becoming impatient with me, and the clerk behind the window thinks I'm totally unorganized. Open yet a third receptacle and find it jammed with stamps, ticket stubs, sorted-by-size bills and receipts and train-stubs and used fragments of all sorts, and as the sense of frustration and search mounts to a frenzy, I half-wake and think to my half-sleeping self: "You went to est, this is only a dream, so MAKE it happen that you find it," and my waking self vaguely thinks, "I'd keep my NEXT ticket in a JACKET pocket," and as I start taking a very small packet of "next-item" papers out of my jacket pocket, I'm so thoroughly awake that I can't think to influence my dream anymore. Frustration!
8/16/90: I'm fooling around with a black guy with 18"! It's long, knobbed, with a cleft-flesh end, and he whips it around and up and down and it's WACKO!
8/17/90: 8AM 1) I'm at a summer camp, and I don't remember any other details. 2) In someone's car I realize I forgot my SHOES. We align our feet, and except for lumps on his toes, his feet are as long as mine. I try to figure out an anagram of a sentence about wanting to meet on Choseuil Road.
8/18/90: 2:30AM 1) I burp UP (and even without coffee!) and wake up, and recall a dream of MOM being sick, and I go to bed wondering if I'll have to phone 911 if she has some kind of health-threatening attack at night. 8:15AM 2) I'm riding up an escalator to the IBM lobby and the guy behind me puts his arms high up around my sides, as if "steering" me by putting his large, firm, fleshy hands warmly on my sides. I "flow" backward into him, hoping that he'll continue his attentions to me as we get off the escalator, and he turns me sideways and asks, his face close to mine, if he can help me in ANY way. We stand there in the crowded lobby, people pressing past us on all sides, but none of them appear to pay any attention to us as we talk with our heads together, almost kissing, and I have that wonderful warm feeling that I've fallen in love AT LAST, AGAIN! Wake up with an EXTREMELY positive feeling, and only now that I'm typing this, at 7:15PM, do I tie it in with the Homogeniuses meeting tonight at Fred and John's, and maybe there's be someone NEW there that will put his hands on my sides with the warm strength and loving power of the man in the dream---his face wasn't handsome, but, in loving, it was wonderful!
8/20/90: 8AM 1) I'm talking to Mom and see that THIS semester (as well as the semester I'd just finished) at Akron U. I ALSO have an 8AM class today, Monday, which is "Performance" in Weidermeier Hall. She drives me to the campus, and even though I'm about ten minutes late, the class is JUST signing up, and it looks pretty empty, but on the second meeting it turns out pretty full, even though this class is taught by a younger, substitute teacher. On Wednesday I get there even LATER, and people turn around to stare at me as I walk in. 2) People are sitting on the floor talking, with all the students mouthing the words, so that it's hard to see who's doing the actual TALKING and who's just a student mouthing the words in synchrony. 3) At 1221 Dietz Avenue, I have a small combination-lock money-holder on the chair near the front door, but when I pick it up and turn the dials, like the hands of a clock, they're "caught" at 8:20, so that I just TURN it and it CATCHES at the place where it opens, both for the OUTER case and for the INNER case-door, and my $200 is GONE, which I'd put into it just yesterday and thought to take out today because of its closeness to the door, where people might notice it and steal it. I push my finger inside, into the back, feeling the outline of my fingernail through the thin back-material, so that I know I've opened ALL the doors and that the money isn't somehow "hidden" in the back of it, and I feel stupid for leaving it there and frustrated and angry and HURT that the money's gone, and I could have USED it! Wake and take down the notes and figure to loaf till 8:45 and up at 10!
8/21/90: 9AM: A dignified woman who looks like Maina Gielgud is with four of us at the start of a Great Adventure-like ride. She describes the "energy" from all of us that she sees interacting with the others of us. She's masculine, and I THINK we're in British Columbia, and she brings out a map and says that "It doesn't indicate streets." There's a girl handing us candy who makes a joke that involves lines like, "With the car, you get no clothes; without clothes, you can't go to the john." And one of the other women wants to pee as she says, "But it's OK for any of the other five, but not for ME." I lie down on a large white-sheeted bed as the woman starts up the ride. She leans in a window and adjusts a few levers, and parts of the ceiling click into layered place like stacks of thick cards being shuffled or layers of gingerbread being added in fast-motion photography. As dormers and ceiling-borders click quickly into place, a tiny constellation of blue stars comes out in a corner of the ceiling, which is obviously the signal to start, because the whole train of beds RUSHES us headlong into a darkening tunnel of the start of a FANTASTIC amusement-park ride, and I SO look forward to the ride that I'm disappointed that I don't SEE it, but I just wake up. I want to STAY with a CUTE guy who WON'T ride on any of the rides. We pass quaint rows of cottages with signs reading "India" over them, and I figure they're minimal shelters for poorer peasants who have come to the International Fair from their poorer countries. Then I have productive thoughts about Future Novel (see Future Novel 27)
8/22/90: 1) 8:45: I'm washing dishes ACROSS from another guy, and we're both drying them on the "common top," and then he's cooked a steak (and his friend has another kind already cooked (maybe from Mary's and MY steaks last night at Michael's Pub?), and he wants to relay his garbage over to me to put down my sink, telling me to dry things elsewhere, and I think he's silly, though I don't trust him to take my suggestion with good grace, to keep on talking all the while his delicious-looking steak is getting cold on the plate before him. 2) 10:25: Fragment of a dream about a music-video set-turntable of great elaborateness that can carry 160 people and an enormous stated weight in tons, and yet remain totally programmable and flexible in the shooting of the video. The colors in the dream are mostly a seductive blue, with shadows fading into purples and reddish-pink tones, which is what the background seem to be, and the people ON the set already have the expressionless beautiful faces of models who are accustomed to being looked at as the video camera whirls quickly by them.
8/23/90: 8AM: 1) I'm looking for a PARTICULAR page 51 in someone's notebook (she's a cross between Barbara Lea and Susan McMahon), and discover that the notebook was bound out of ORDER, so we have to make a Table of Contents with all the page numbers to see exactly where the original page 51 now is. 8:15 2) I return to my apartment to fix things up for someone who's an Azak-Dennis combination to come and show MY slides while I'm gone over the next weekend. I look around my apartment (which is more like E. 70th Street than any later ones) to see clothing hanging from hangers hanging from lighting fixtures in the center of the room, wilted flowers in a glass vase on the coffee table, an unmade bed in the bedroom about three feet off the floor as opposed to the properly covered sofa bed in the living room that's only about one foot off the floor, and I'm also concerned about the ORDER of the slides in my cabinet, but I figure that Dennis should know the narrative-line since a) he heard ME doing the shows many times and b) HE "did the cooking for most of the meals," as I think of it. 3) Remember a PREVIOUS bit about taking a BUS from the West Village uptown to W. 86th Street to transfer to ANOTHER bus to take me uptown to the Columbia University neighborhood. I ask the driver for a transfer, and the driver says "You could catch THAT bus at Grand Central" (because he seems to have NO transfers available on the front-window ledge to the right of his steering wheel), but I reply, "But I was HERE, and NOT at Grand Central," and while I was talking he was busily writing with his left hand behind his back and he pulls out a RECEIPT (like from video tapes) that should SERVE as a transfer, and I return to my seat to look out the window at the interesting north-bound streets that seem to have been built into Central Park since I last wandered through it when I lived on 57th Street (lots of OLD apartments here!).
8/24/90: 7:35AM: Some guy I don't know, who now seems to be a friend, and I are looking for the EXIT to an EPCOT-like park after we'd waited 45 minutes for a RIDE to start and then they said we'd have to get OFF, as it wasn't FIXED yet. (Could this be from my frustration with the incessant stopping at Whitehall Street of the N which says that it's going all the way into Brooklyn, as it did last night on my way home from the East Village?) I look at a book of maps that's part of my souvenirs from the advertising material for the park, and the first page shows North America, the second narrows down on western Canada, the third outlines British Columbia, the fourth shows the environs of the park, the fifth outlines the park in detail with sub-areas marked out with outlining lights, and the sixth gives interpretive drawings of each pavilion and ride so that I can see exactly where we are: between two Guggenheim-Museum-like spirals representing the ride we just came off of and the one across from it, and we're to go down a series of interconnecting paths that gradually descend to ground level which leads to an exit to the west parking lot, where I know we've left the car. The paths are strangely devoid of people, as if it were late at night or early in the morning, after or before the crowds of midday have built up.
8/25/90: 7:15: I'm FAKING lunacy, hear that one hundred people have been killed, see people SHAKING, and BOMBS are going off: awful! "Run away" to ATTIC headquarters, but it's HEAVILY infested by FANATICS. Middle East concern?
8/30/90: 4:10AM: Wake to pee to memory of a fat waterbug walking some distance away, AS I had dreamed of one walking on my COFFEETABLE on 8/28 or 8/29 before. 7:45AM: I'm in an Army BOQ, there are THREE bed-sheet sets and LOTS of luggage all over, and my PILLS are spilling out and dropping into SHORELINE muck, and as I juggle junk in my arms a KITTEN comes to look inquisitively. A REAL FRUSTRATING MESS! I don't have time to TRANSCRIBE it that day for indexing!
8/31/90: Fragment tempted me to write it down, but I didn't feel like moving, so when I got out of bed at 9:25AM it was gone, and there's NO memory of it now at 1:45PM as I finish this page.
9/1/90: 8:05: 1) Turtle crushed and its insides twisted about, and I'm brushing off grasses and mud on the sheets of a bed that seem to become a street edge. 2) I have thoughts/dreams of turtles walking/swimming WITHOUT shells. 3) Barbara and a tall gray-haired Valda Satterfield-type woman are dancing at a "space" party, and then they DROPPED to the floor, leaping up, turning, kicking and falling in silence, for a sensationally nonsensical dream.
9/2/90: I CAN'T keep away from a CUTE kid's cock, and he LOVES me for it, and we seem to be in Philadelphia, and I look startled at a clock and think it says 4:20, when we're supposed to be at a 4:30 play curtain, but it's really only 3:15 and we DO have time to get there in comfortable time.
9/4/90: I must add two words to the LEFT of some "pre-written / text" and four words to the RIGHT of it, which reminds me to retape that parts of "Siegfried" which I didn't get right BEFORE returning Rolf's 2 tapes to him on his return.
9/13/90: 10AM: St. Mary's Gwen Fisher (now in Actualism) has died, and we must schedule a memorial service for ANOTHER important student who's died; no name is associated with SECOND dead student. Is the whole ORGANIZATION going??
9/16/90: 1) Lois does memorial session for Barbara Lea. 2) I work on all Actualism men. 3) Mom and I set up Scrabble game to play at 1:30AM.
9/17/90: 10AM: Dennis and I sit in all the WRONG places ON an outdoor set for an opera or play: a) In the upper-floor decor of carved-wood chrysanthemum petals, b) IN a field next to the ditch which is the center of the scene, and c) In the living room, where I wonder "How do the OTHERS view this at ALL?"
9/18/90: 9:50AM: Someone like Roger Evans (my SHIP partner? I suddenly get that idea as I write the note) and I had to LUG a heavy two-shelf DESK up a hill and into a storage room in a HOTEL. MUCH hauling and pulling, but HE just slogs along. There were more details about this, but it's now 9/20 and I forget.
9/20/90: Something about Mary Vilaboa; something about closing down. Obviously about Actualism but I can't remember the details less than 9 hours after dream!
9/21/90: 6AM 1): Waiting for Art Ostrin in his building lobby (I'd gotten in earlier but he said he had to eat), and it's still 5:40 and I'm to wait til 6, and I debate going to basement cafeteria, where he's probably eating, but just go to john that's familiar and step up to a STALL and piss a THICK 1" stream into an almost-overflowing SINK, and wake with great pressure to pee myself. 2) 8AM 2) Behind large dunes, having a beach picnic, we look up to see the sand crumbling and water coming over, and we turn our backs to see two HUGE waves wash completely over us, drenching us with the "body" of the wave after the crest passes over us, and I hold onto the table so that we can at least EAT! 3) We're going upstairs to dine while a competing restaurateur ties with every wile she can muster to lure other customers away with charm and free courses (this is clearly based on my spate of ACT-40%-reduced-priced restaurant-going). 4) I'm watching a play with Marty Sokol (any significance to his being dead?) with a LARGE earthquake scene that shakes the orchestra-floor like Earthquake, the movie, and metallically-lit ceilings and balconies to our upper left buckle and waver against the artificial sky of the ceiling, and there's a laser-lit illusion that the back rows of the theatre have collapsed and there's a flickering image (like around the body of "The Flash" last night on TV) of a woman with an enormous PLANK through her, and as the third act starts early I dash down the left aisle, across the front, and am surprised that we're now sitting in the FIRST row, where the right stage has opened into a life-like scene, and I can see on the left, naked men waiting to come onstage to perform.
9/24/90: 6:15AM: 1) VERY TV-like dream of dentist's office where doctors seduce nurses and men MEAN to women. "You slipped with SUCH a smile on your face, you're fired," says someone who comes across a man bent low over a woman. I keep looking to find where I seem to know a CUTE dentist is. 8:10AM: 2) I foggily THINK I'd written this at 11AM and at 8:30. Secretary can't come to phone because of sexual harassment. Before that, there's a sign above a table saying that daughter "Eureka" was born on September 3, on the soap-opera named "Tender Enchantment." Some man is to be replaced in a main part in two weeks.
9/25/90: 9:55AM: Playwriter-director (noted for a piece where everyone falls in love with his main guy) has a new DTW-type performance piece in which everyone is drink and falls down. I'm to join the group on opening night, having had no rehearsal. I fall down, stumble, as others do, and it seems I fit in until the end, when they exit en masse down the aisle through the audience, and I follow them at the end blubbering, "Wai' f' ME," and hope I get a good notice. But the NEXT night the cast SINGS and I don't know the WORDS, and some associate director indicates me and says "It's not good."
9/29/90: 7:35AM: I only hope I can capture half the richness---a FRACTION of the richness---of the dream. I woke feeling that a mosaic of elements was being rearranged in my physical chest, producing an intense feeling of physical joy characterized by a rapidly beating heart, a gathering of tears in the eyes, and a sense that---many times in the past---such feelings of joy had been (and will continue to be) connected with joy of such an intensity as to be transformative: I was literally, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually not the same afterwards as I had been before. A period of a sentence and of a thought-thread---and was there a reason that I had typed "in error" thought-threat before---and so a reason why "a reason" lines up as thought-thread had lined up twice before---and how can I make sure these all add up on the final printed page? Well clearly to produce a camera-ready book with these typographical niceties intact. Back to the dream (as in the transcription on a dream before I've said "Back to the --- something: [I know where the pages are; I can get them]. I must feel freeer [that MUST be the way that word's spelled: Freer is the name of a gallery in Washington, so to be "more free" must be free-er] to end sentences earlier, even if they are incomplete---though there is the wonderful heartening feeling that these words, now computerized, can be more easily retrieved, re-displayed, and re-edited, than they had been when I was ["can" I had typed before, in place of "was" there now, and it seems significant to be here-now {though how much will be tiresome verbiage read anytime afterward?} {but I can cut and edit, can't I!} {and there's ANOTHER typo, which I'll leave to illustrate the possibilities---I had wanted to type, three lines above, "it seems significant to ME here-now" and I find that I've typed, "in error": it seems significant to BE here-now, and I can take significance AFTER I've typed it, and I can produce significance BEFORE I've typed it by, two lines above, after "typed," wishing to type some few characters that would line up the 2 it-seems-significant lines (and now, with an interruption of two lines, four IT SEEMS SIGNIFICANT lineups 1) in quotes, 2) without quotes, 3) hyphen,4) it seems significant capitalized, and 5) underlined, so I'll aim for 6) more [it seems significant] bracketed entries though it makes a---no, I was about to write "lie," but it really doesn't make a lie out of "four" four lines above, because it WAS 4 when I started, but I saw the possibility of more, and so I ended up with six different formats of itseemssignificants, of which of course THAT, [edit in arrow] is the seventh.
Also showing interpolations, possibly wasting time, though that precise "waste of time" might be the FINAL game-piece, or score-point, or configuration of detail that enables the final physical transformation from "what I know" into the transcendental "what I don't know" while in physical form, so it can be recorded, rather than taking place after death, where, I fear, it can't be communicated to anyone. Why this interest in communication? As in the dream, yet barely begun to be recorded/communicated, communications or sharings of information are vitally important, though some are reluctant to admit it, for the successful conclusion of the Game of Life.
Back to the dream: THE START OF THE DREAM: I was entering a house in which a party was being held. I knew some of the people in attendance and others were strangers. I was somewhat younger, in the dream, and surely ["Don't call me Shirley!"] more attractive. Unlike my feelings when entering many parties, my feelings on entering this party were positive, joyful [though in a far smaller sense than that feeling will develop to mean], and expectant: it seemed like a physically (they were attractive), emotionally (they were also either joyful or capable of being joyful), and mentally (they were intelligent and weren't hampered in their displays of their intelligence) appealing group of people varying in age, gender, costume, volubility, and nearness to whoever was the "I" in the dream. Either before my dream started [has that mechanism of "knowing what the background was" in a dream even been explained---or even addressed?] or as I entered into the "puzzle" aspect of the party, I had solved some elementary admittance-puzzle, and the pieces of the paper-mosaic which I had rearranged on the sheet had melted off to the sides to disclose an engraved invitation to the party itself, so in a sense I validated my legitimacy at the party. This legitimacy produced in me and in the "choice" people around me a slightly elevated sense of the joy of being present at this particular party.
At first the party seemed normal: I wandered with expectant excitement from room to room, seeing faces that were more and more familiar, with that delicious sense that each of us has experienced so seldom, yet with such delight---that growing suspicion that brings a blush to the face: could it be that this party is somehow for ME? Is this a surprise party for ME that has succeeded so well that when everyone turns to face me with presents and presence and presented shouts of "Surprise!" that the joy escalates to a physical thump of pleasure by the heart that physically expands the chest with an ecstatic intake of breath? Then I noticed someone else working on a word-puzzle of some sort, and when they solved the puzzle there was a little flurry of additional excitement: brighter eyes, wider smiles, congratulatory greetings from onlookers, nudges among participants celebrating "Another contestant has reached the next level of play."
The "level of play" is an important component in the dream. At first my level was elementary. I was playing (or not playing) as everyone else in the party was playing. But I searched for more of the puzzles, searched for those who were interested in puzzles, and "by accident" [but the nature of such dreams, or such life, is that nothing is only accident, {like my search for the "only" after the "is" that lined up an extra "accident" (as I've done again) in the second line above}] I find myself in a room with people who are ACTIVELY, rather than merely passively as "ordinary" attendees at the party, interested in pursuing the game, and I realize I've entered an inner circle of devotees to games in general---how we delight in finding each other!
Probably AFTER this point in the dream, but it could happen anywhen in here, I begin to wonder "Who's set up this game, and for what purpose?" As the interlinking of the phases of the game seem to become more complex, [and I guess as a necessary component of the specialness rather than the randomness of the elements of the game] I wonder who'd listed the components, produced the individual puzzles, produced the individual puzzlers, thought up the ascending levels of difficulties in the linkages of levels, and seemed even to take into considerations the very thoughts I was having as a component in the levels of recognition and award in this intricate game.
A game in which everything seemed to be connected. A player would wave his hand up and down, and I would know and recognize that this not only WAS but beyond coincidence IT WAS MEANT TO BE RECOGNIZED AS [and punctuating ---or not punctuating---sentences like this seems to be part of the puzzle-solution] the specific configuration of three successive loops of a roller coaster on which I'd ridden years before; and my recognition and explication of that configuration (and even possibly the realization of a higher significance of that geometric shape) would elevate me---propel me!--- into a higher level of game-play.
More of the dream, please. I had entered an "inner sanctum" in which players of the game recognized themselves as being self-selected from the "ordinary crowd" attending the party. There was status, accomplishment, and joy in being IN the room, but it also gave me the opportunity to encounter those who seemed more advanced in the game: they had been awarded tokens of merit, ribbons of accomplishment, prizes for progress toward some unimaginably distant-and-complex GOAL in the game. It reminded me strongly of the game "Transformations" in which one wins "awarenesses" as one progresses in life-levels from physical to perceptual to emotional to mental to spiritual (the game-boards changing in color and the awarenesses progressing in desirability). It reminded me of other games that I had played, and excelled at, and I felt that I had "found a place for myself" in which my particular skills made my participation more pleasurable and appreciated, which in turn make the participation of others more keenly competitive and directed. "What have you found out?" "What is your technique for advancement?" "Do you know which room would offer the greatest opportunities for progress?" "Who's ahead and how did they get there?" "Would it be better if we cooperated and pooled our knowledge and helped each other out or is the point of the game only an individual advancement from level to level?"
THE MIDDLE OF THE DREAM involved a rapidly escalating frenzy of activity, a recognition of and identification with players at higher levels, and a heightening sense of my own value as a player, emphasizing my previous travels as "tokens of advancement" in this particular game: I'd played roulette in Niederbronn-les-Bains, I'd bathed at Baden-Baden, I had twelve tokens of previous attendance at Great Adventure, I knew the answer to that conundrum, and I'd wrestled with that particular koan before: I applauded myself with one hand. Even planned trips were connected: my physical presence would be felt at the same huts inhabited by Scott and Shackleton before their dashes to the South Pole. That "ineluctable trace" of my paths around the globe, which I'd envisioned as wormholes of light around a dark planet, became part of my value as a player in this specific game at this specific time.
How I've wanted, through the years, to design a game like this: at first rather on the order of the war-game correspondence-networks I've now seen advertised in magazines, later as computer-terminal chess-move-type competitions, and most recently as compact-disk interactive-player challenges of the Super-Adventure kind. "Future Novel"'s Gain-Radio was in a sense described as a facilitating token in this hypergame, enabling shortcuts from one level of the game to another. Esoteric schools add completion points: levels attained which would become permanent parts of one's 201-file of life.
THE END OF THE DREAM came in another, even-more-inner, room, in which I was surrounded by people resembling the staggeringly significant Archetypes that I saw around me the first time I smoked marijuana, and then another entire participatory level---the drug/hallucination/"high" level--- fitted into place as another puzzle-piece in this enormous, life-wide, jigsaw puzzle [is this mixed metaphor of levels and pieces something that needs clearing up later, Bob?]. Their attentions centered on me, there in that room, and I felt them assisting me in my advance to a higher level, from which I could assist them in their game-play, and I felt again that tearful, melting, ineffable joy of being surrounded by "people who understood," by "those who loved me and wanted to see me progress as far as I could so that I could help them to progress as far as they could," by peers [as opposed to peeers] and supeeriors who KNEW, as I did, that everything was important, that everything contributed to the final end, that everything that happened HAD to happen so that everything else could happen, that (rather than being random and insignificant) each act had IMPORTANCE and MEANING: in a sense solving the paradox of determinism and free will by demonstrating that all actions chosen by free will were NECESSARY in the final advancement of the human race from the primitive to the divine.
And now at 9:05AM my stomach is getting hungry, my body is getting cold wrapped only in my blanket sitting at my computer hoping not to disturb Mom in my bedroom, though I can feel my pleasure at getting down these few words, though realizing I haven't touched on all my writing, Bob's reading my writing, Mom and my going to the play last night and starting with the Zinfandel at the Broadway Grill and the spectacle of "Aspects of Love" as the NECESSARY preconditions for these very words on the computer screen [though of course they'll be on paper for the NEXT reader, even if that reader is only myself]. The books that I've read [and, in fact, as "Thousand Nights and a Night," that I AM reading], the travels I've made, museums seen, the paintings absorbed, the food and mushrooms and drugs ingested, all the input produce the output here displayed, and there are more pages, and more connections to be made, touching on the physical AURA with which I felt myself surrounded as I lay in the bed, reconstructing the dream, thinking that I must be on this cot so that IT can move off like a bumper-car in the funhouse of life, physically move off across my living room into a hyper-real dimension of enlightened awareness in which relationships with my mother, Dennis, Sherryl, Bob K, Bob R, Tony, Shelley, Louise, Pope, Spartacus---each of whom is connected to my past and future life---are clearer, more precise, enabling them to qualify as merit points and "awarenesses" in the game of Transformation of Life that I see as my purpose for living, trying to avoid that paranoic-schizophrenic [but remember, it's not even SIGNIFICANT if I go "crazy" or not, am committed or not---only so long as I am committed-to-communicate] system in which everything that I read, see, and write is "for" some super-being that profits from my perceptions as needs be done since that super-body isn't "earthly" enough to participate in earth's physical riches, tastes, flavors, aromas, joys. Myself a game-piece in a hyper-game of Snakes and Ladders, counting up cosmic brownie-points to lay on God's game-board to be crowned King with the halo of true knowledge. Whatever that is, depending on the level attained, and AGAIN I've got to have breakfast before my stomach does a fit, and I'd like to get these pages printed before my computer breaks down---that's the nice thing about a well-designed game: EVERYTHING matters!
Oh I CAN'T resist, at 9:15AM, adding the component that when I GOT out of bed to type these words at my computer, the PHYSICAL CONFIGURATION OF MY ROOM became an enigma to puzzle out: my open cot prevented moving my coffee table back far enough to allow me to slip my chair in front of my terminal, so I had to gingerly avoid the clock-cord with the chair-legs, bent at a very specific angle, to slip the chair in front of the computer---while counting the 60 seconds after turning on the hard-disk before turning on the monitor---and then found that I didn't fit into the chair. But I wanted to leave the bed open in case I wanted to rest more before Mom woke up. And then I saw that I could slip the coffee table to the SIDE to give more room for my chair, and my joy was as of one finding a second meaning to a word, another element in the Community Chest card in a game of Monopoly, or attaining another level of enlightenment, and I tried to think how to write all this to be the finale of "Future Novel," but decided at length that all I could do was type it in MY voice, probably to give to Bob as a NEW-PIECE, and a NOW-PIECE, and the temptation, looking down from the previous line to see that I was on line 54, to finish the page, and THIS is truly an example of padding, but even THIS padding fits if, for example, only when I complete line 60 of THIS page am I to die, and like the dead veteran of the Civil War in whose pocket was found, dated the day he died, "On this day I died," what I do now is the NECESSARY prelude (and then there's all the MUSICAL connections!) to my moment of death! Now at 9:55AM, finished with breakfast and "together" for the day, I can hear Mom moving around in my bedroom so I'll soon be able to print out my completed pages (269-272!). What have I missed so far?
THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF THE DREAM, in which I lay in bed, trembling with a PHYSICAL reaction to the "shifting mosiac" in my chest at the end of the dream-connecting-with-wakedness that felt as if a PHYSICAL change were actually taking place, equipping my body for its next phase of existence. Was this possibly the beginning of the sickness Alice said she experienced after our meal at Toscana on Tuesday? Could this be a presage of my imminent demise, precious thoughts that I would wish to pass on before I passed on?
I started thinking of the difficulty with words: the task of choosing the EXACT words to convey the sequence and sensation of the dream. Where would I start; would it be sequential or experiential, schematic or slapdash? "I know some books you should read," said Bob in his message; maybe I could get them at the library today? Would those words, in those books, connect with the words that I want to type this morning to convey the dream I had before I woke?
Is this my type (pun!) of answer to the question "Why am I here?" I'm here to do precisely what I do in order that some enormous, unknowable, important task can be accomplished, fostered by my every action, no matter how random it might seem to me (or to those who might accuse me of wasting my time?). Is this the way I try to impose order (MY order) on the actual chaos which may (chillingly---both from the entropic and from the motivational points of view) be solely that which exists?
Then there's the extension to these pages, this computer file, this computer-conversion task (now all I have to do is bring in Actualism, which is easy since it's an EXPLICIT consciousness-expansion esoteric school, to complete the tally of the stacks of things to be done that lie on the coffee table that had to be moved, next to the sofa bed on which I had the dream, so that propinquity may have had causation, as the emotional load I piled on these stacks flowed over into my supine body on the adjacent mattress), with its editable pages, CD accessability, linear-yet-random-access jigsaw of ideas and words. Back to my LSD experiences where "Everything is connected." My lists of operas seen, ballets watched, TV tapes scanned and excerpted onto other TV tapes: these too nearby in this room. Next to the electronic (sentient?) circuits of my computer, hungry in its way for the completing, filling, saturating charge of the linked word.
Catharsis after no writing since my Mother's arrival on Wednesday? Yet this is only Saturday, and I've gone longer, recently, without transcribed words, yet not since the Transformation "transformed setback" of recognize that "slowing down need not be taken as retreat, but may have value in itself," as the abstinence from sexual activity adds delicious pressure to the next activity. Possibly just something to do until the opera this afternoon, and the excuse of eating breakfast early, according to my own physical schedule, rather than according to Mom's much different physical cycles.
Not close to the end of the page: what have I missed? The external joy of being ABLE to get up when I wish to write what I wish, even though the accomplishment might not be as accomplished as I might wish. The explicit identity between puzzle-solving and consciousness-expansion, each supporting the other in such detail of pleasure of challenge, struggle, breakthrough, completion, and contentment with completion.
Imagine the audible connections when CDs link music, lecture-tapes, applicable quotations, synthesized sound-bites, and cycled repetitions of mantra of puzzle-and-solution. Yet being built on the past dreams, fantasies, details, and catalogs of previous experience. And Mom clicks in the hallway, giving me permission to set up the printing, so that even the COMPUTER can collapse and the pages could be input to the next generation to be processed, interwoven, edited, and printed out, even if this were the last word right HERE! There must be more, now at 10:25AM! Is this joy related to the sense of impending doom as I watched the last few hours of the 12 of the Civil War until 1:20AM this morning? Words, sensations, joys, tears linked through the hours, days, and years. But how much of this is empty, informationless poetizing?
Or delay until the printer finishes through 272 so I can print 273? Then to phone Rolf and Joe and Sherryl, get groceries, mail bills, transfer money in accounts, get things done before "Rigoletto" at 1PM. Is there significance that I won't reach the bottom of 274 right now? Or that Mom is looking over my shoulder?
9/26/90 [typed 10/1]: 8:05AM: 1) Bands of lozenge-beads in rubber strips, which are being sold to bidders, MAY fit INTO circuits that appear functionless and perform "miraculously." 2) I'm paired with a FABULOUS body and GREAT cocked guy, and I pull and poke and look and suck and FEEL GREAT, HARD in DARK.
10/3/90: 8:15: At desk: Notebook: 2:30PM class on Staten Island. Briefcase, pen, pencil, papers, schedules, notes. Ledgers in back: "They're mine." Walk without cap or helmet, with rifle upside down. In rain to truck exit, people passing in columns. Final: a fast alert; I'll NEVER make it. Frustration!
10/9/90: 9:30: 1) Nuzzling small bear, which shits in the hall. Tel cleaner to pick it up and then look for it and can't find it. 2) I shit and wipe myself in a car sitting next to Matt. 3) I'm lost in London; lighted buildings on horizon; in a canal-wet area; then the bus comes and seems to go where I want.
10/14/90: 6AM: Paul McLean and his brother and I look for more blankets. Mom complains and tries to help, since we're at Dietz. Five black grocery deliverers insist that I phoned and there's mad because we won't let them in to phone. Dick volunteers to DRIVE them back. I think it's a scam; I'm against it.
10/15/90: 8:45: Susan and Rick had helped me dress in the back of their car for a performance, and now I'm leaving, next to two dykes who are talking in the back seat. I'm searching for socks, which I finally find two layers of, as in deepest winter, and clothing, and various folded umbrellas (is this related to my search for my burgundy jacket Sunday?), and even come across dusty phote albums piled one atop another at the bottom of the stack, and there's a lot more junk UNDER the seats, which have suddenly become enormously spacious.
10/16/90: 9:15: LOVELY blond with HUGE cock backs away from bed so we can both enjoy final strokes, and AS he says "I'm gonna CUM," his cock jets thin spurts that I clamp my mouth around with pleasure that drains him. THEN I think "JOYI" means "Play with your I until it cums to maximum pleasure and productivity and BEINGNESS, just as your COCK is at maximum exultation at orgasm.
10/17/90: 1) 8:45: Mom's gotten a BIG new house, BUT a) NO working toilets in the bathroom I'd known at 1221 Dietz, b) lots of floor depressions that collect WATER in them, c) lots of basement rooms that look OLD before they've even been finished: water-damaged walls, grossly uneven floors, d) huge manned furnace, and I almost slip while jumping over a gap that a furnace attendant wordlessly helps me across by grasping my elbow firmly as I leap, e) ENORMOUS atrium entranceway with a fountain and japanned red Torii-gates that COULD be beautiful but AGAIN there are puddles gathered in depressions in the concrete floor that will be a BITCH to correct, f) narrow plaster-chip and broken ceramic-pipe filled passageways belowstairs that by their SMALLNESS will never really be functional. 2) 10:05AM: Musical sequence: a muscular guy sings "People like my pecs and sex," but he's really INSECURE, and another couple wear really odd SUITS. Tag line: I'll get back home to Jackie O, we live in the same place: Manhattan!
10/19/90: 6:35AM: 1) Dream. 2) Building. 3) Cum-substance. 4) Telepathy Ray.
1) Dream probably ends at 6AM. I'm sitting in a chair in an enormous public lobby, but I've made it into a kind of bed---maybe it's a double-seater with enough room for me to lay down---with a blanket that I'm careful to pull over myself even though I'm dressed in undershirt and shorts and socks as I'm wearing actually in bed AS I dream. It's early in the morning, and maybe THAT'S synchronous with real-time as my clothing is synchronous with real-clothing. I guess I've been there all night: it may be a hotel lobby in some large Australian town (because of the Building) that didn't have room for me that night so I had to sleep in the lobby; it may be a theatre lobby for which I have a ticket for some morning presentation that I didn't have time to actually check into a hotel before seeing; it may be a business-building lobby in which I have an interview scheduled at such a time that there wasn't enough time for me to check into a hotel and have a sufficient sleep before my interview. WHATEVER kind of lobby it is, I HAVE slept (though possibly not quite enough, as I'm synchronously-tired as I WOULD be at 6AM if I'd gotten to sleep at 11:45PM, as I actually had), but I'm not quite ready to get up yet. The chair (or double-chair) in which I'd slept is raised quite a distance off the floor (about twelve feet) and seems to be part of a useful lobby-sculpture comprised of two or three chairs at a lower level (about six feet off the floor) in a sort of pyramidal structure of chrome and narrow access-stairs, and either my double-seat either the single culminating point, or one of two or three culminating points, the others of which are so distant (8-10 feet) that they (and anyone in them) are not really part of my near-environment. My building-lobby vantage-point is elevated, so that the Building, enormous as it is, is actually BELOW me (which brings up the possibility that the "lobby" that I'm in may actually be some duplicate component of the Building that I can see on the city-slope below me, complicated by my observation that a Greyhound-type BUS that passes by so close that it might be INSIDE my lobby [like the Monorail at various Disneyland hotels] actually INTERCEPTS my line-of-vision to the Building below). It's a rosy dawn in my dream (meaning that if it's synchronous in time with my reality, I must be some thousand miles to the east, because that kind of "rosy dawn" won't be over NYC until something like 7:15 or 7:30AM) and vermilion-magenta stripes line the sky behind the Building, setting off its transparent walls as if the Building were a titanic jewel in a red-lit vitrine or a valued art-object in a back-lit exhibit gallery. Early-morning pedestrian-traffic has not yet begun in my lobby, nor are there any newsstands, information desks, reception counters, or concierge kiosks visible on the expansive marble floor below me. But I do seem aware of the possibility of onlookers so that I'm careful not to expose too much flesh as I roll over under my blanket in my aerie. I suppose, synchronistically, I've got a piss-hard (to quote the quaint-English of Clive Barker), because I'm conscious of its pressure and aware of wanting not to shock a casual onlooker with it. I sit up to marvel at the construction of the Building, and notice that an early-morning performance-artist has begun her program on the lobby-floor beneath me: she's dressed in red-sequined tights, rather Rhonda-Fleming-like, and strides in a kind of dance from one architectural element to another: running her hands up a diagonal chrome accent set into the rose-marble of the wall beneath me, and pulling it back to look at the smutch on her fingertips with dismay, saying or implying "They don't dust up here, do they?" She retains this ironical self-reference as she moves beneath my chair, it seems to me pointedly ignoring my presence, and I wonder if I can jerk off with enough variety of pressures to accomplish my end without setting up telltale resonant vibrations in my chair's sculptural structure. The bus passes, the light doesn't change, and I wake to marvel at the simple grandeur of the Building and the clarity of light in my lobby, which must itself be enclosed in transparency so vast that I have no awareness of its boundaries, yet which is so climate-controlled that it cannot possibly be comprised of exterior air with its winds and moisture variations. 7:05AM: 1) Dream. 2) Building. 3) Cum-substance. 4) Telepathy Ray.
2) Building, unmoving two or three miles away, is "known" to be a University with some sort of Cultural Center on its rooftops. See attached note card sketch. It's down a hill-slope from my building-lobby's vantage point, seeming to be set on an access-plain of parkways, tree-lined boulevards, reflecting ponds, grassland, and esplanades along a body of water like the one between Kowloon and Hong Kong, the one forming a backdrop for the Sydney Opera House, or the one stretching from northern Staten Island to southern Manhattan. There may be liners and freighters anchored on that water, but there appear to be no people moving about: possibly they're all dwarfed by distance into invisibility. The University itself is enclosed in a roughly cubical (it may be somewhat less high in its least dimension) transparent structure, and when I wake (after I cum) I muse whether the transparent sheets are of glass (which would have to be floated on gigantic mercury-ponds constructed specially on the site and tilted into place with multi-support machinery careful to introduce no breaking torques into the mile-long expanses), plastic panes (which would have to have been extruded like transparent toothpaste from mile-long extruders constructed along its perimeter, with one long "score" along the top of one side to flip down like a lid onto the other wall tops), or (since both previous solid panels would have to be cleaned using unimaginable technology, and be protected from breakage or wind-damage by inconceivable safety devices) monomolecular Mylar sheets which could be "unwrapped" from endless rolls at the bases of the four walls (taking care to cut in access doorways after the "unwrapment"). Then I expanded the last idea by determining that there would have to be an "outside wrapping" and an "inside wrapping" so that the interior volume would never be exposed to the outside atmosphere. The outside would be replaced more often to eradicate bird-droppings and raindrop-evaporate deposits while the inside would only have to be changed due to controlled-environment soots or other internal-magnetic deposits unavoidable with human and mechanical traffic in the University. I tried to think of the wrapping-separators needed at each of four top corners of the pentahedron: diagonal struts through which monofilament plastic ties would be run to keep the inner surfaces taut and parallel to the outer surfaces, fantastically finishing a gift-wrapping effect by culminating in an enormous invisible monofilament bow floating over the presentation box of the University-Orchid inside, drawn onto the diagram for position only, since it wasn't visible in my dream. The multi-level University was boxy and relatively undecorated in its lower classroom five or six levels, but the Two Towers (whether from Tolkein or Central Park West) were decorously elaborated: multi-faceted transparent canopies enabled fabric draperies to be swagged from highest pinnacle to lower peaks to crowning elements so that the gently-moving silks would convey impressions of sails on supernal schooners. These fabrics enclosed, though partly revealed, flexible theatre-spaces with modular stages, seatings, and performance areas for two interdependent Great Halls in this Southern Hemisphere Cultural Center. I dismissed the technical aspects of construction: within the climate-controlled Greater Pentahedron the auditorium-shells could be of glass or webbings of transparent silks.
3) Cum-substance. I jerked off for the first time in a week, gathering up the cellulose-capsules forming around my long-kept semen and crunched them between my teeth until the moisture was removed from inside and outside, and I continued to chew until they deliquesced into a cheesy substance that slid finally down my throat. I'd thought to say more, but that about does it.
4) Telepathy Ray. I thought of the difficulties of "seeing" what had happened to me, this morning, in my room, 500 years in the future. In its simplest form the "Akashic Record" of my actions would be visible by following the light-rays from my actions as they're perpetuated at the speed of light in every direction radiating from my actions. Ah, but then I look at the details of its more-complex form: a) THEY move, and b) I move, and there are c) floors ABOVE me that would interfere, and then the d) MAJOR problem of COMMUNICATING the vision from the future back to the past---or, taking the Crucifixion as another likely point of interest in comparison to my jerking off in the present, from the past into the present: its future. To look at a): THEY move. So they would have to be OBSERVED BY AN OBSERVATION SCREEN MOVING AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT (c). No minor problem, that! To look at b): I move. So I would have to be observed AS I move (from the bedroom into the living room, as I did, for example), so there are now FOUR dimensions of manipulation of this c-moving screen: [1] orthogonal to the "point of observation"(poo) at the speed of light ---and of course there are an INFINITE NUMBER of these orthogonals in any of the three dimensions surrounding the poo; [2] the three dimensions of freedom that I have to move around: from room to room, floor to floor, city to city. To look at c): that orthogonal to the poo has to remain with the poo, not be confused by the changing layers above or below the poo. But once the poo is found, it would seem that the screen would lock onto the poo and be relatively unconcerned with PRECISELY WHERE on the orthogonal the poo actually is, regardless of the number of levels between the poo and me present observer--- which takes care of the problem of the "second orthogonal" of where the OBSERVER is in relation to the "level-shattering" movement of the c-moving screen. To look at d) COMMUNICATING the vision from the future or the past, THAT brings in the 4) Telepathy Ray! The observation screen MUST move at the speed of light, because by definition that's what the edge of the Akashic Record IS: the wave that moves out from any and every event with the speed of light. So there are infinitely many Akashic Records, accessible at infinitely many points, which must be relayed back to infinitely many observers. Not TOO many parameters here! You must observe A record, at A point, and relay it to AN observer. The RELAY must be OUT of time, needing a new energy (or dimension, and NOW it occurs to me that there might be some deep RELATIONSHIP between energy and dimensions, or time and dimensions, or observations and dimensions, so that dimensions in a sense DETERMINE or even ARE energies or times or observations) which I just picked the name Telepathy Ray for, since Telepathy is the only "pseudo-observation" which has any contributory basis for the idea of ANYTHING operating outside of time. Namely, if a person is telepathic, why not assume that the telepathy can reach even a different galaxy in "no time"? So those infinities of choice are reduced to A screen following A record at A point and that image being transmitted via Telepathy Ray to AN observer. So what's so difficult about that? And it's now 8AM, the sky outside has turned blue without any observable transition (from my point of view at the monitor) from the gray of pre-dawn to the blue of full-morning, and I don't FEEL that I have a cold, but I go to stick my thermometer into my mouth, and I AM happy that when I came in---AN HOUR AND A HALF AGO!!---to the living room to put on the computer, there was the hot-dry sense that the radiators had come on, warming the early-morning-cold room, so that I was comfortable to sit in my socks, undershirt and shorts (of the dream) and my bathrobe. I'll keep the card attached to the previous page, and depending on my temperature phone Michael and Dorothy and say that I WILL drive upstate with them PROVIDED they can bring me to the train-station (much more convenient to ME than taking a train and meeting them up THERE) for my return to town if my cold gets so bad that it discommodes me or them. Temperature precisely 98S, better than the 87.8S of yesterday, so I guess I DON'T have the flu, and maybe the booze (WHY does that seem to be the most effective component? Maybe only because it zonks me to sleep so that I don't WORRY about being sick, or about how sick I am?) has gotten rid of what had to be gotten rid of. And after moaning to Vicki and Sherryl last night that I haven't written anything for a month, here are three entire pages this MORNING, some with good writing, though how could I REALLY show them to Bob K to "evaluate as my writing" (though if he likes "person 3" better than persons 1 and 2 it's a possibility!), and now at 8:10AM I can type out the three pages---and then?---back to bed? Stay up? Hm??
10/21/90: 8:30AM: I'm in London, at something like Picadilly Circus, and ther are so MANY PEOPLE waiting to cross the wide street I can't even see the stoplights. Off to the side and ask a bum how to get to Child's Restaurant and he motions down a GRUNGY street and says "You'd have to go through Cheapside; it's too dangerous." And I agree. Then downstairs and someone says "You have to take a TRAIN" and I say "I walked BEFORE" and they retort "OK, but it's a LONG WALK." I go downstairs again, and the maitre d' at the entry hassles me. I wander back and forth, getting closer and farther away, and I'm worried that the elderly couple I was to meet have EATEN already. There's a second, sexy, part that I don't remember, and I NEVER get to the restaurant in the dream.
10/24/90:6:30AM:I'm lured to their apartment by two Indians. They strip for pool as other sexy guys run into the halls, and I get fondled in my shirt as I disrobe.
10/27/90: 9:15AM: I'm with a friend that I just met in some kind of class, who's impressed with a layered cut-vegetable salad and a "head" of lettuce that's been rebuilt from selected trimmed lettuce leaves, and we're waiting for Spartacus and his friend to join us after they've been shopping at Bloomingdales. A young guy sits across from us at the four-person table with a tray of food that he starts SPITTING and DRIBBLING down his chin and, when rebuked, crying streams of phony air-jet mustard-colored false tears. I say "How old are you," and he smiles gloppily and says "18 going on 13." I can't get the attention of the waiter to move us to an empty table way in the back of the restaurant as the place fills up for lunch, and I continue to cut my way through tough black sausages that seem filled with over-liquid stuffings that ooze all over my plate.
10/28/90: 8:40AM 1) See ad for Schenley Brandols. 2) Riding down elevator with 4-5 others (NOT like my lonely trip from Homogeniuses last night) and I say "I've got to bo back up, I forgot my BERET."
10/29/90: 8:30AM: ENDS with "Thompson-sort-louvered-product" for introductory VCR reel, AFTER elaborate Actualism initiation ceremony where BL, ECB, PS, and others enter onto a STAGE in GOWNS AND GLOVES, and a TALL woman I must "look up to chin" of, in red, GREETS me in the audience and breaks up the ceremoniousness of it all. LARGE dinner at tables outdoors behind City Hall, and I enter and leave on narrow steps of Turkish mosque (alarm semi-silent as I walk by main doors) and try to find SEATS NOT about to crash backwards onto screaming kids. ODD!
10/31/90: 7:30AM: I'm staying with a couple who have nurses, kids, and huge glass-walled house with GRASS growing inside---REED grass that I lay down and START at: its colors, shapes, textures. We're eating, talking, and a kid cries and they tend it. Another note I couldn't read: something like "Black cruising?"
11/1/90: 8:50AM: I've joined a programming group, which has a new assembly to do, and we're drinking champagne in celebration (CLEAR image of swirling liquid in glass, listening to clink of ice cubes inside) and tall thin guy lays down in street to relax, and I wonder how much wine can be quickly drunk, but it's late in the afternoon and we'll be quitting soon anyway.
11/3/90: 7AM: BL is saying that Philip Vitelli is an EXPERT writer, "The way he handles words, phrasing, and commas," and I say, "Too bad he's DEAD!" 7:20AM: I feel I MUST get Frank BACK to the hospital. He can FEEL his PARTS: Andressin, Bartellian, Cetch, Dar---CALLING for him as their UNITY, RETURNING for diversity and he knows the fulfillment of his mission/development is THERE! He gets BORED with trees of varying shapes and colors, TIRED of crossing rivers by destroyed bridges, floating trunks, or SWIMMING with Zinovia tethered to his waist by a nylon rope. On lakes too long to skirt, crossing by endless paddling of derelict canoes. The PRAIRIES don't interest him with their nature-closeness ---he wants to get back to STIMULATION of hospital, having out-grown THESE TOO!
11/5/90: 8:30AM: 1) Two blisters on my AGED fingers and 1/2" pimple (multilobed but CONNECTED) on chest. 2) Endless plane flight with me SLEEPING on middle bunk bed, and realizing I have as much sense of SAFETY on a plane as in an EARTHQUAKE---the "ground" is just as reliable and tremulous! 3) Fragment of some kind of opera with 60 pieces of gold. Note for stamps/batteries/insurance payment.
11/6/90: 8:25AM: 1) Walking NEAR 1st and 14th and see a half-block between (sort of North of First Avenue) called GLENDALE, and it has a BOOKSTORE with great displays of old bindings, kids' old books, and old game-cards and poster-bills with reasonable prices, which is across from a manned policeman's booth that reminds me of the booths from the Whole Life Expo. I make a mental note to return when the bookshop's open, and I feel the OWNER may be LOVER material, too! 2) Some intriguing combination of "Fifth Advanced means I MANIFEST" and "Getting something PUBLISHED" and "Finding a lover" seems intriguingly near, yet JUST out of reach. Phone Marj (leave word on her MACHINE!!)? Finish FN??
11/7/90: 7:50AM: 1) I'm in some new-age seminar and my head is in some white- bodied totally shaved young guy's crotch, and I ask WHY I've got to keep one hand on his right FOOT. Instructor says, "Otherwise, we fear, in that position you'd be tempted to hold onto his cock." "THAT'S an idea," I chortle (and laugh AGAIN as I recall the hero of "A Little Night Music," that I watch THAT SAME NIGHT, grabs onto the STATUE'S cock to help himself onto the pedestal!). 2) It's 11:25AM and people file in for a class on "thought." I MIGHT have signed up for it, but I (and 500 others) have to go down LONG CROWDED hall to get entrance-pass, and lots of KIDS jam ahead, and woman starts an end-run around two stuffed chairs jammed against the far wall, but the kids thread through first anyway, but I'm relieved to see that the line's moving FAST.
11/8/90: 4:15AM: I'm rubbing some of those tiny flecks off the front of my hairline and, moving just back in a bit, they get fewer but bigger, and I scratch off a BIG one and it starts to bleed, and I get a mirror and somehow I've shaved off MUCH of my BACK head-hair, with a FRIZZY topknot that hides a BIG blood-dried scab that pokes through the center front of the topknot. I'm horrified, and at each new look and viewing angle it gets BIGGER. I stare and stare at it, and finally it's a blood-pyramid that BREAKS at the bottom and red blood begins to run down my crown as if from the bottom of a blood-filled BAG, and it felt AWFUL, and I felt awful on WAKING from it; but the dread passed.
11/9/90: 1:12AM 1) The word "MONEY" is almost AUDIBLE in my ears as I wake from my near-sleep (or HAD I dozed off?), and I think LOTTO #s 1, 9, 11, 12, ??, ??? 8:40AM 2) Sexy guy on Fire Island tried to suck on my cock, but his face is so contorted that I say "Do ONLY what's FUN for you (after I'd refused to let him fuck me)." We try to find HIS place, but we end up in a nice restaurant with no place to let us have sex. 3) Mary Vilaboa and I are sitting on opposite BEDS (as we sit on opposite sides on the COUCHES in the teaching room at the Center) while others are having a session in the room BEHIND us (where there IS no room in reality). She's describing how my "insides go sideways" when I work with a particular energy in the wrong way, and then she seems to gasp as if from a minor HEART attack, clutching the left side of her chest momentarily, but when I ask what's going on, she just brushes it off as if nothing were wrong.
11/10/90: 8AM 1) LONG sequence in which I'm pricing PARTY halls in Brooklyn for Actualism. Most of them are too large or too small or wrongly prices, but a "live one" near Boro Hall seems somewhat too big. But a woman tells me that they're CLOSING, so I propose that, since "November 20" is so close, it may still be possible for us to rent it at $540 per night. LOTS of addresses on a red sheet of paper, many eliminated for various noted reasons, and I'm tracking down the LAST few possibilities, wondering how many MANHATTANITES will protest against subwaying to Brooklyn, and maybe they can rent CARS to get them here. 2) I'm in a balcony at a Met-like Wagner-like opera, when a soprano, center-stage, is singing an ORCHESTRAL passage something like the Valhalla theme: "da DA, da, da-da, da-DAHHHHHH" and I glance away for a SECOND and when I look back the LIGHTS have gone out in the forestage area, letting only dim lights from the wings silhouette the previously brightly-lit stage and proscenium, and her voice flattens to a strangled AGGH which is comprised of enormous fear (of darkness, maybe of impending fire or earthquake or assassination) and an ugly voice-failure or gargle of anger and rage which I can't dissect, and in the dimness it seems that a figure of a man comes from center-downstage, as if the prompter crawled out of his box, or someone clambered over the footlights from the front rows of the audience, and walks menacingly toward her in the side-lit gloom as she flees into the wings, looking backward over her shoulder in panic, leaving her and the audience SHOCKED, as I feel PHYSICALLY shocked when I wake and record a note instantly. 3) 9:20AM: Pretty woman gets DISGUSTED with me for doing something that I didn't have any choice in. 4) I'm coordinating in a MESSY basement Actualism office, and I feel tiny crawly things on my legs as I sit at the coordinator's desk in the middle of the paper/book/cabinet/garbage-littered room, and I get up to see a tiny moving trail of orange-red down one corner of the white-painted walls which has a boxy construction jutting out from it, as if enclosing a pipe, and I figure that we're underground and that the wall behind the enclosure for the pipe is open to the ground, because tiny red ants have come through a crack in the enclosure and jiggle down the wall, over the arm of a pattern-covered sofa against the far wall, down under the seat cushion, and pool in various dense areas on the floor where obviously there had been some food or grease-droppings, and the tiny column flickers across the rug under the desk where I was sitting. I hurry to a littered backroom, with lots of bottled and boxed supplied on metal bookcase-shelves, but every time I pick up a bottle with a spray-top that I think might be bug-spray, it turns out to be furniture polish or floor scrubber or window cleaner, and I can't find anything against insects at all. Then Chrystal calls me from a slightly-elevated balcony-like area that seems to lead to an upper floor, asking me to help a worker at the Chemistry Union Office which is located in the sub-basement, just below us, to get some chairs downstairs. He hands me the first one, an elaborate gunmetal gray construction that seems part desk-chair and part giant auger (as seen in "Body Double" the night before?), with seats and turns and metal flanges, with swiveling parts that make holding onto it somewhat hazardous. There's a second chair like this, but the rest seem to be X-shaped campstools without the cloth top, and some of the Xs have come apart so that the "chairs" are simply loosely connected rectangles of wood, so I pick up one of them to throw them across to the guy, who now seems to be standing across the room near a stairway leading down, and my throw goes so wild that the two rectangles shatter off the wall feet from where he's standing. "Sorry," I say perfunctorily, and prepare to throw a whole ARMFUL of them, but he shouts, "Please walk over with them," so I do that, to find myself in the downstairs office, looking at an array of trophies on a bookcase with the name Louis Giacome on them, and we talk sexily. 5) 9:40: I'm SCHEDULING at Actualism, but Barbara and Mary are too BUSY to set the actual TIMES of the classes. On the side are three boxes, two of which are about the size of wrapped Manhattan telephone directories, one for Barbara and one for Mary, and the third, on the bottom, is about three times the height, almost a cube, but I can't see who it's addressed to, though I have the feeling that I wish it would be for me, as some kind of award for working. There was another segment that I'd wanted to write down, but as I was writing the previous episode the other went out of my mind instantly. I debated sleeping even longer and recording even more dreams, but I was getting tired of it and got out of bed about 10:15, thinking AGAIN I was clearly on 25-hour day-cycles!
11/11/90: 9AM 1) JV nestles into me as our arms brush silkily as we work at the same desk, but then he peers at my scalp (I admit to itchiness) and says I should use "Fisher's Gold Standard" that I can get from "our" pharmacy at Broadway and 137th Street. 2) I'm trying to drive a HUGE unwieldy Buick, and seem to have NO left-right coordination for accelerator/break or steering usage, and I'm trying to come out from the curb onto the road and I LURCH across traffic (other drivers, passing, steering clear of this MANIAC in the Buick) and turn a complete revolution in main intersection before I get to a train-crossing bar, which lowers in front of me, and I wait, debating going through the crossing since I can see the Long Island Railroad cars passing through a TUNNEL under the road just below me, and to the right a tractor is setting a gas-fluid fire to the yellow undergrowth, and the tractor is trailing a singed COW, which is moving gingerly over the blackened burnt areas, its black and white hairs scorched, and I visualize a giant cow-barbecue with bloody hunks of charred meat. ODD!
11/12/90: 9:45AM 1) Traffic jam, frustration as usual. 2) University class from 9:30-11AM, and the teacher is sarcastic when I ask too-basic a question. Lots of stuff (like case studies) to read, but not ALL are used in class and it's difficult for me to think that to do next.
11/13/90: 8:55AM 1) I walk up the right-side aisle and see a woman sitting on the aisle in the next-to-the-last row on my left (thus in the extreme-right section of the theatre), so I walk around the vacant last row of three seats to get to my middle seat in the next-to-the-last row. There's an ELABORATE opera being staged (is this from reading the New Yorker's review of the enormous set for "Ballo in Maschera" yesterday?), but as the conductor starts the first act, the entire set and stage moves BACK through the audience, gently pushing all the seats on either side of the center aisle to the sides, collapsing the side aisles against the side sections of seats, which in turn are gently pushed against the walls, eradicating the extreme-side aisles. When it reaches the back of the theatre, I stand up (since I wouldn't be blocking anyone's view) and gape at the red-painted overlapping-metal plates that mark the extension- arm of the stage-platform down the center of the auditorium. The conductor (who now seems to be partly electrician) stands in the spotlight (and the mechanical problems of beaming the spotlight to the BACK of the auditorium didn't occur to me until I typed these notes) and seems to be giving a lecture about the purpose and functioning of the five metal consoles he has arrayed in front of him that look rather like five xylophones on which his pointing mallets play notes as well as identify the components of which he speaks. I feel pleased that my seat is so far back in the auditorium that I can see him and the consoles very clearly, and wonder at what point the entire construction will move back to its proper place in FRONT. 2) There's an ENORMOUS traffic jam (obviously stemming from "The Big One---The Great Los Angeles Earthquake" from last night), and I'm trying to figure out how to get AROUND it. There was more to this, but I'd forgotten it by the time I got to writing the note.
11/15/90: 8:50AM 1) I'm clearing out drawers of my IBM-desk, not that I'm leaving, but I feel that I have to make things more ORDERLY. I've thrown away lots of papers and clipped many items together as I do on my to-do shelf, and I'm left with a lot of loose objects that I pull out and find to be ROCKS: there are smooth ones from beaches like those from Newfoundland, others rather like lava from Hawaii, and one crystalline structure (maybe like some of Sherryl's stones) that draws me down into a conical vertex to the outer side of something like a geode. 2) I'm looking at programming lists and clearing THOSE up, rather like editing an index for clarity and conciseness. 3) I'm getting to work late and thinking at 10:45AM how I can excuse myself to go to the cafeteria and eat a late BREAKFAST without generating too much commentary.
11/16/90: 6:05AM 1) A bunch of people are standing in front of a raree-show, applauding, and I observe that those who paid second- or third-class tickets applaud MORE than first-class ticket-holders. The show is some kind of courtroom drama like "A Few Good Men" last night. 7:10AM 2) Shelley Hooe is making breakfast for three of us in her kitchen, since we're only THERE part of today. She gets two slices of bacon out of a drawer (as in "Jeeves" last night), and I feel a frankfurter and a half-frankfurter and they're warm. I add those to my plate and divide it among us and sit down to eat. 7:30AM 3) Joyce Alaya is teaching class and mad at us because we're talking, not working. She urges us to kill clicking insects whose noises annoy us. 7:40AM 4) Someone's mad at us for something. 7:50AM 5) We're watching SPROUTS grow in class. 8:20AM 6) I'm returning home tomorrow after a trip, stuffing my clothes into my luggage, finding someone's pocketbook that they left, tying packages, consolidating souvenirs, and rewrapping Mom's JEWELRY case, if that's what it is. 9:30AM 7) I'm STILL agonizing over packing; I find stuff in a two-drawer dresser, but not the stuff that should have been there, and I wish I had more storage bags, and one seems to be missing. "I'm not going to make it," I moan, hoping that someone will help me.
11/17/90: 2:55AM 1) I'm explaining to an astounded family (husband, wife, and kid) how my watch-face shows the world, our location (as marked as "SUN" for some reason), and the sunlight terminator, with the rest of the countries in light or dark. Then I look so closely at the watch-face that it's as big as a television set, and say "Shut the lights off," and a scene becomes lit INSIDE like a Paris nightclub-show! ????AM 2) I've ridden down in an elevator to a basement shop to develop a roll of film, and the guy, who follows me to the shop and goes inside, looking over his shoulder seductively after I drop off my film, and I didn't TALK to him and again wonder and worry and feel frustrated by my shyness in sexual situations. 8:40AM 3) There's a LONG multi-segmented sex-dream: Lots of guys gathered in a room, most straight but a few gay, and there are movies, some of them of male pornography, and everyone seems very accepting, though not actively participating on the sidelines. Someone with Scott O'Hara's cock and a nicer face climbs into an upper bunk with me, ignoring the people visible on the second floor at our backs through a plate-glass window beside the top bunk, and we kiss VERY wetly as I think of AIDS in the dream and feel comforted that my gums have been good lately and I don't feel that there's much risk. We play with each other, and I seem to be adequately erect, and he curls around to suck his own cock, which seems to have developed a right-angle bend in the fleshy end of it. Then we figure that it's getting close to morning and we have to pull down the blinds separating us from the room next door, which supposedly has windows to let in the sun (though I see neither windows nor sun), and we chin ourselves to the drapery-top level to see metal pieces that look like stage-curtain weights supported by iron cables and hooks at intervals along the ceiling, and though there are cords that look like they might be used to suspend drapes from, I can't see any drapes, and instantly the scene changes to him down on the floor looking through various cassettes to put on a player for either background music or noise to shield our sounds from the people who seem to be trying to sleep on the floor or in chairs below us. He rattles off a number of titles, and I don't give an opinion, but THINK that the "German Classical Music" might be the nicest, and then he's holding the cassette-cover up for me to see, and it's a red-and-gold-foil cover with an embossed white Polish-like eagle in the middle, with Gothic script indicating, in deed, "German Classical Music." Then we're busy throwing off clothes after he gets back into bed, including a pair of pants that seem ludicrously floppy, and some shorts that get torn as they're removed. Wake with a nice erection and cum to videos after I get up at 9 and get THAT out of the way by 10AM, and type this page by 11:20AM, morning GONE!
11/18/90: 9:25AM: I'm sitting in the coordinator's chair at Actualism and Barbara Lea comes in with a student, implying that I should go to another room while she teaches HERE. Mary Vilaboa is around too. Something about students' files, too (probably due to Friday evening tape-class). Another segment about glass-walled rooms at the top of a structure with the shape of an ocean liner's smokestack.
11/21/90: 4:45AM: 1) I'm DASHING for a British train, with a NIGHTMARE miss as I cling to the top of a door that refuses to open after I slogged up a hillside and across a platform in a glue-footed attempt to catch the departing train, and then I'm on line for tickets but I know that I have NO British currency, which I hope to exchange for a few American dollars I have with me. "Which train do I take to London?" I ask. "This is the NORTHBOUND line," someone retorts sarcastically, and I seem to recall having seen a sign to that effect, but I'm still not sure which platform I should go to. 2) There's a British SHOW, with a variety of jokes and dances. Colorful old women are joking, and they're bored with their repertory. 7:50AM 3) A three-year-old mentally retarded boy is a character on a TV series, and he peeps slyly at the camera, knowing his mental status will get him forgiven. He pulls down his pants in front of his "mother" until just the cock-start point, seeming to know that she'd not the right sex to show himself to, and the MALE lead seems to be trusted as he starts undressing him, but still the boy is very wary of sex. 9AM: 1) I realize I left an electric DRILL to be fixed at a shoe-repair shop at 6th and 53rd, and try to talk to various clerks to GET the drill back from when I left it 9-11 months ago. 2) I'm working at 9th and 58th and can SUBLET part of my apartment at 309 W. 57th at LESS rent than I paid when I lived on E. 70th St. 3) I want to see a double-feature (as now at the Brooklyn Heights Cinema?) at 11AM, but it's only 10:15 and I look at lobbies and see LOADS of black men in a Grand-Central-Station-like (the movie house itself is near Bloomingdales) TV lounge with adjoining CROWDED tiny men's rooms. I wonder if I need to buy my ticket in ADVANCE, or will it be sold out if I just start in at 11AM. 4) I tell someone that an octagonal vacuum-cleaner plug can be oriented by the raised DOT on one side of the plug. 4) a CUTE guy on the subway plays kneesies with me and seems to be ready to fall in love with me. Nice ending to series!
11/23/90: 5:40AM 1) (bed 9:40PM!) I'm in Detroit waiting for a plane to Chicago in a crowded waiting room that gets MORE crowded when people waiting in halls are ordered in so people can wait in line for MOVIES that line the halls outside. Then it occurs to me that I should check DEPARTURE times, now at 2:15PM, to try to get there by 5PM, in daylight. Out door into wooded indoor courtyard, down cellar hallway to travel office, then somehow BACK to elevator up one flight that someone who enters WITH me knows he has to use his body English to prevent the elevator penduluming and thus not working properly. 2) A guy like Charles Grodin in a DATING service decides to try two MEN rather than two WOMEN, and distressed secretary TRIES to look casual as she goes to men's files, but spills packets of photos all over her desktop. 7AM 3) I have a frustrating try to guess a quiz-program solution with a competitor who says I should go as far as I can and then HE'LL try. I make a few stabs and he always corrects me. But I make good progress until my constant smell of MY GARLIC (from last night) starts to throw us off. I keep FARTING in bed, too! 8:35AM 4) BIZARRERIE: I'm struggling to get PADDED TRUNKS off beneath an information kiosk in some Florida town, my blue T-shirt down to my knees (after passing through odd pay-shower rooms with separate johns and baths, with a shower RIGHT AT narrow-low exit-door), and information-girl insists I'm naked and should get more clothes, and I ignore her, walking fast to beach, where EARTHWORMS rear and race and chase each other rapidly in a puddle, and then they retreat from a family and their dogs, then SNAKES cluster in trees, silver heads toward me, and a PANTHER races past below and tries to climb a tree near our fence, menacing passersby, and I whisper "It's a PERSON," and someone says "It's an awl-in-aul" and someone else: "BOB knew." And the costumed man begins to beg money from us!
11/24/90: 4:20AM: [That blank "WHAT did I dream?" is SO complete before the knowledge of dream-content returns. How CONTINUINGLY odd!] I'm waiting for the elevator in my E.61st St. building (which didn't have one), and the couple that I know lives above me (though I lived on the top floor) is just behind me on a largish line, as if of a group waiting to get into a private club somewhere downtown. One of these is a BEAUTIFUL guy with AIDS in a wheelchair, and they take three HOURS to send the elevator for him and his wheelchair and his roommate. There's a piece where we're all lying in the hallway on some sort of futon, and while I'm aware MY head is just against the wall, the AIDS patient's head is on my lap and safely away from banging on the wall as he breathes while he sleeps. Then without transition I've gone upstairs to clear their apartment, and it's like the LIVING room at 1221 Dietz! As I pull a vacuum cleaner toward the kitchen plug, the cord is twisted around the base of the handle, where it's connected with the machine, and it's so complexly tangled that I have to lift a whole loop over the handle to get things clear. After I plug it in, I hear two diners who are up a small flight of stairs to my left (where the china cabinet would have been in my dining room at 1221 Dietz), and I recognize their voices. They haven't seen me, but to make a joke I say loudly, "Take good care of Maureen (Duffy), Peter (Ream)," and Peter says in his flat, semi-amused/ semi-irritated voice "Whozzat?" I figure he can figure out that it's me, and I go into my living room to vacuum, and there's a lot more furniture beyond the middle of the room, toward the front, than there was when I was there, and the tables there, like portable side-tables with tin tops that slip into opened x-shaped legs, are very dusty. I try to blow off the dust, and then wipe it with a cloth, but the dust has become gummy with age and sticks tightly, so I try spitting on Kleenex and wiping off the crusted dust. It works only in streaks, and I figure it's going to be a harder job than I thought. I'm dry-washing an ornate glass blue lamp with a shade like a fluted cowboy hat what has dirt specks like large fly-specks that are hard to scrape off. As I'm doing this, Maureen comes into the room, making me uncomfortable since I've been naked during all this, expecting to be alone, and I hunch down so that my genitals are behind one of the higher tea-tables, and I casually pull out a Kleenex from the box to cover my pubic hair. Maureen is oblivious to my nakedness and in her whiney voice says that Linda Klau is back in town and trying to exchange business with other bodyworkers wherever they meet in private or in public: "You know how they like to exchange their night-club cards." I don't know what she means by night-club cards, but I'm reminded in the dream of Barbara Lea's folded name cards that announces she's a singer, actress, and Actualism lightwork teacher. Maureen says that Linda's trying to get a body-work group going and she's "doin' OK, but she talks about more than she actually does." The dream had no real ending; it just stopped there. [And I just now note the coincidence that FN is on page 384 and THIS is 284!]
11/25/90: 6:20AM: Decide to stay overnight in Manhattan, and leave Fred Sun in traffic at 53rd and Lexington to try to find a cheap hotel---maybe a baths? Guy tries to make out with a young woman going into a porno flick and she ducks away from his hand. Maybe I sleep in overnight movies? Next morning I end up at "Gramercy Park Theatre" looking down over huge mid-city lake and woods, and a TOUR is about to leave of a WORKING farm with wheat fields, wood lots, and horse teams. As a visiting smart-aleck says "You can't tell me they PLANNED it this way, they just STOPPED time right here and said, 'Hey, let's develop this.'" Then I'm into someplace like the Open Center where I know there are two Johns, but first "toilet" has only a sink, so I exit there and grab for the doorknob of the NEXT one before another guy can touch it, and urinate into a simple paper-clogged floor-drain as yellow piss swirls slowly down it. Then wake and pee; I'd gotten to bed at 12:45AM, and up at 7:15AM, only 6.5 hours!
11/26/90: 7:30 1) A detective and student trap an under-floor robber. 2)Friend's trick steals ALL my stuff from my desk in a hotel room, but I can't follow him.
11/27/90: 5:10AM: Shelley Neiderbach is teaching a military tactics class and reciting an Indian Chief's farewell address, in the Indian language! Packing bags after class on May 22, deciding that LAST class must be next week, May 29, and what will I do AFTER? Like today, having finished FUTURE NOVEL?? 8:35AM 2) Joe Safko-like guy is sharing my 1221 Dietz home, and dishes are piled in the sink and junk is all over. I clip my big toenail, and it's about three inches across and one inch high, and I put it under my bed on top of my suitcase to save it as a prodigious souvenir. 3) Flash of driving through a complex intersection and slamming head-on into an oncoming car!
11/29/90: 7:20AM: I'm driving toward the ocean and my BRAKES give out. As I roll down last hill, thankfully trafficless, I debate putting it into REVERSE, but fear that I'd strip the gears. Roll into cloverleaf-like series of small curves at the bottom and car comes to a stop. Into my beach house with a woman troubleshooter/insurance agent and her male assistant. Blinds closed and I do things like put things away when she says "Let me open these shades---oh, you're on the right (beach) side!" "Right," I say, and go downstairs to pee and a HIGH tide wave comes in splashing OVER my basement barrier, and I look out through my HUGE windows to see WATERFALLS from surf cascading into my "back canyon," and look out at rocks and surf and sand and all its grandeur with awe.
11/30/90: 8:30AM: I'm eating in a cafeteria as it's getting ready to close. I've consolidated TWO glasses of milk into one so that the table-cleaner can take away all but my one glass and one plate. Later, ANOTHER attendant with a container of MILK looks at my glassful, thinking it may go to waste and he should save it, and he pauses, debating, so that I can read his intentions, and I reach out to take a big sip, so he knows I'll drink all of it, and he moves away contentedly. And now it's the end of NOVEMBER---time, indeed, DOES PASS!!
12/2/90: 9:50AM 1) I'm taking a test in a University basement room, trying to figure out how to get a solution to (28x + 56y +287z)/184xyz to allocate books to shelves in a room. 2) I'm waiting in a long DOUBLE line for a bare kiosk on a lawn---we ALL go TO the kiosk, my bag is full of cards, visa receipts, bills, notes, and $7 for check deposit. a GUY leaves and at 2:35PM I WALK AWAY from the line, and a HARRIDAN keeps her hand on my shoulder as I hunt for my lunch at 3PM after the cafeteria has closed. 3) My mnemonic "S" for this forgotten!
12/3/90: 8:15AM: I have some awful blood-blister HEMORRHOID between my ass- cheeks, and try to WIPE it away without BREAKING it. Just an awful picture!
12/4/90: 9AM 1) There's a mad car-race to a Long Island ferry dock JUST as the ferry leaves, then I calmly go to the end of the line for the SECOND ferry to leave about half an hour later. 2) I'm writing an essay for class. 3) Forgot.
12/5/90: 5:03AM: WAKE with earthquake-rumble? In AWFUL dream of PIMPLE inside left nipple, which is white and SQUIRTING pus without any pain to me. 9:10AM: Mom and me are attending a VERY inept "Comedy of Errors" in seats 1 and 2.
12/6/90: 9:10AM: I'm waiting in a subway station like Rector Street, and a train passes UPSTAIRS and no one goes up, but I begin to suspect NO one KNOWS what to do or where to go. Two guys off to my right make as if to kiss each other, and as I turn away there's a sound of a SLAP in the face. ANOTHER train comes in and I dash upstairs to a LOCOMOTIVE, and try to catch the single car it's PUSHING, and JUST miss it! DAMN! And it WAS a #1 train, which I wanted!
12/7/90: 9:45AM: I'm showing MY copy of "Potemkin" to a LARGE group of kids, but film comes OFF reel and I CAN'T find START of the film to REWIND it onto the reel. I SEARCH and search, kids getting impatient, and I finally have to ANNOUNCE they won't be seeing it. A guy says it's a GREAT pity, since this may be the first OLD GREAT film the kids would EVER have seen. In repacking (to throw AWAY projector and film), I come across my TRIP slides and think to show THEM, but I have the wrong PROJECTOR, and I'm VERY frustrated. BEFORE, there was some kind of GROUP (like for watching Bradshaw on TV?) in a room with chairs, and they say "last time group was 21" and I count and THIS group is 21, 13 of us in ONE row in which I'm sitting, and LAST year a group of 51 met in a room down THERE----and I look and see a LARGER room and I say "They WOULD have fit THERE (am I concerned about Actualism's large and small teaching rooms?). We were READING our own stuff and here it was NOTEBOOKS that I'd lost which were frustrating me, not FILMS. Something about POETRY or STORIES or ACTUALISM rather than films, but I was impatient with my FRUSTRATIONS in GENERAL!
12/9/90: 8:45AM: REPEAT of dream of going through "Rockefeller Tunnel" from Rockefeller Center to slum-depression in Village or Harlem. The large distance is needed to "come down from the bridge." The worst parts were the crumbling black fence-posts wired together outside balconies far above the streets. ODD!
12/10/90: 3:40AM: I've managed to put old books on shelves and in boxes, bought two already that are back in my room, and have found two others that I mistakenly pile BACK into boxes, and I try to find them and can't, but come across boxes of NOTES! Have to get out by 11AM and it's close to that now. Lots of old, WET German books. Thoughts of "I can check them out for two weeks and then RENEW them if I don't read them in time," though clearly I'm BUYING them. There's just so much confusion and frustration in my dreams lately!!
12/11/90: 9:10AM 1) I'm watching some sort of ballet like "The Nutcracker" where there's a time-consuming prologue without any real dancing, and when the curtains come down, there are enormous Christmas trees at either side of the proscenium arch, so that I'm glad I have a vaguely-center seat, because those on the side are going to have their views severely restricted because of the enormity of the trees. I go out on the left, wondering why everyone from my row has left on the right, and find that the exit on the left side is very small and only lightly used. We're all looking forward to, and commenting on, the coming "more dancey" act. 2) I'm in a large group of people gathered in a neighborhood that I don't know, and (maybe based on Dennis's comment yesterday that about half the "poor extras" in the filming of "Black and White" were black) there are a large number of blacks in the group, but they're more Moroccan or Tunisian than Harlem-black. I'd come with a woman who's rather like Amanda Plummer (thin and fierce-looking), and SHE'D brought a friend that the neighborhood doesn't seem to like, because they're encircling her and darting at her some distance away from me, and when she runs toward me, I can't decide whether to protect her (by letting her escape) because she's a friend of my friend, or to share in the crowd's enmity for her by catching her as she runs through the part of the outdoor square or place (how do I distinguish the French-sounding "plahce" (which it is, in my dream) from the American-sounding "playce" (which it isn't?) that I'm standing in and partially blocking. Then there's some kind of violence going on at the OTHER side of the place-division at which I stand, and a small group of people seem to be FORCING peasants to contribute to a lottery (which thus seems like simple extortion rather than a true encouragement to participate), but the bystanders seem to want to protect the freedom-of-purchase of those being hit upon, so the chief lottery-seller, who has something like an enormous TOASTER slung over one shoulder that's somehow the "kitty" for the lottery, begins to walk next to me, and I try to appear neutral as I ask, "Just how does this lottery operate?" and he's simultaneously friendly and menacing as he implies that it would be impossible to explain it simply or quickly to a foreigner who doesn't know anything about it. As I turn back to him, he seems to have grown to an enormous size, or I'm on my knees or shrunk considerably! and I'm reminded of the midget salesman in the production of "The Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story" last night), and I don't exactly feel TERRIFIED of him, but I note my tiny relative stature and figure I'd better be careful in what I next say to him. Wake at 9:10, bit early since I'd gotten to bed about 2AM, debating whether I should have brought my laptop to my bedroom to transcribe this on, and type 1st in 11 days since 11/30!
12/12/90: 12:42AM: The detached clove-head rested against the base of the quadrant-crown, all so moist and connected that the base of the crown took on the look of a stiff penis, with prickly crown-hairs, and the head as moist raised testicles. Debated photographing it, but it would have been too small.
4:18AM: 10-15,000 men working to dig a tunnel, but THIS part of it is VERTICAL: the Chunnel? Guy in "tuna can" digger goes straight DOWN to pre-dug lower level, and I have ALL kinds of questions: where does dug dirt GO? How is the can supported when it breaks through into the next level? How does it not just FALL through? But it sure works its way through the dirt with remarkable ease!
12/13/90: 8AM: A group of us are going through a very mild earthquake tremor in VERY heavy rains that make everyone run inside in a panic. It's SO light a quake that I'm not frightened, and I try to calm everyone else. This comes after a series of classes on writing that I THINK were very detailed BEFORE I forgot them, and even now, not even 10AM, I've forgotten what I wanted to say.
12/14/90: 8:30AM: I'm at a huge JEWISH party and don't QUITE know how to behave when I LAY DOWN for some religious ceremony and photographers come close to the windows to take pictures of the four of us. Then the rabbi gives me a LARGE host and I bite into it, break it in two, and he says "Are you THAT hungry?" and I realize HE gets a piece of it too. Then I'm cleaning up with MY black and white towel and the host gives me a CLEAN one, but it has an evil spirit in it that's activated by WATER so I have to be careful not to get it WET.
12/15/90: Some elaborate dream about a baby at 8AM that's gone at 9:20AM typing.
12/17/90: 8:30AM: I'm waiting on a long line in a restaurant and owner shouts across to chef as some emergency causes the chef to slam a carving board down on a table and go running down the back stairway. Then one of the kitchen help is instructed to wash dishes so that he can sing some kind of bluesy kitchen- dish song for the entertainment of the diners, and I recall this singer had been warming up surreptitiously, so I realize that it's all a rehearsed put-on show.
12/19/90: 8:25AM: Bob Rosinek (who phoned yesterday) is lying on my bed, fingernail-bitten fingers moving his foreskin (which he doesn't have) up around his cock-head like Dennis does, saying, "This makes me feel REALLY good," and my hand, slick with sticky remains of my cum, moves over to his stiff cock-shaft and HOLDS ON as his juices boil, his tension mount, his comments intensify, and his cock readies to shoot its sweet spunk, which it never does in the dream.
12/20/90: 9AM: Influenced by "Soviet Sex" tape last night, I start in a porno theatre that's JAMMED with people including KIDS with their harassed mothers. Chairs slope backward (like on airplanes) and the woman ahead of me annoys me so that I push upward on her seatback, as I annoy the person I was crowding behind ME. Then I'm in a sports arena on a seacoast and the increasing comment around me indicates a dark WATERSPOUT coming toward us in the grandstands. I grab my camera, having trouble getting it out of the case, then snap pictures before the waterspouts dissipate, trying to avoid the pillars blocking my view, but manage to get 2-3 shots of swirling dark columns while having trouble with empty clicks because I'm forgetting to advance the film. Take a final shot of small green islands in CALM waters. Then go to john as woman in next seat keeps an eye on my stuff on and under my seat until I can get back. Calm ending.
12/21/90: 9AM: A little kid, maybe Japanese (like kid at gym yesterday, asked if he spoke Japanese, replied "No, Koreano."), doing some kind of report or art-etching that has a highway bridge over woods, and he may be reporting hitchhiking plans, criminal kidnappers, or pickups as things he feared, with TYPED reports like "Near Intrbro Highway, dropped off at JY4739459284502847" and "Near Trbro Brdg, going toward West 3947502 St," where the kid is either too dumb to know the correct letters and numbers or too smart for the public who wouldn't know it's an artistic piece and thus impressionistic rather than realistic and not meant to be accurate. Then the UPS guy comes ALL The way up my stairs because I thought he said "Gasman," and he goes back down grumbling.
12/22/90: 6AM: I'm riding on a big bus with three women, one the driver, and we all know each other and are chatting back and forth. As the driver turns to talk with us, I see the road turn left and we immediately SAIL off the road through the air over a valley heading toward a far-distant hill, and I think with not TOO much panic "This is the end," and regain consciousness inside a fairly intact bus, all of us alive, but the driver reports that her legs have been broken in the smashed front end and that the cat in the seat next to him (now) had also been killed. Then I think of the gas in the tank and explosions and figure we'd better get out fast rather than sit around and talk! Though the purport of the dream was disastrous, there was no REAL sense of danger present.
12/24/90: 9:45AM: I'm evaluating IBM-type job-cards for MUSIC of some kind--- singers or performances---and I'm questioning whether "value codes" (a one-digit "appreciation" code from each person) are punched onto COMPLETED cards on punched DURING the punching of the performance and other descriptive information, using the old-fashioned keypunches Ann Jensen used at SBC.
12/25/90: 11:50PM: (How seldom I remember a FIRST-round dream: bed at 10PM, sleep at 10:20 about 90 minutes to 11:50!) Bob Seaver (got letter from Janet today) is fixing up his glass-windowed roof, singing a little ditty for each piece he puts in, like "Here I put a bit of white." Janet is trying to cheer him up because he bid $60,000 on a house that sold for $600,000 and was sad. I tried to disparage the house, saying, "Well, people could see whatever you DID in it from the street," but he dismisses that, saying you could close the shutters. Then I leave, an angel-wing piece of glass and a nail still clutched in my hand. I walk toward Riverside Drive at about 86th Street, knowing it's derelict to 87th, and when three chain-y motorcyclists sweep into view under distant streetlights, I think to defend myself with the nail and the glass, but THEN I reconsider and turn abruptly and walk back toward Broadway. I can HEAR them considering attacking me, but they continue on their way, leaving me relieved and unmolested. It's NOW midnight, so Merry Christmas!! 2) 10AM: Lots of resort-hotel businesses in lobby, even a cool lounge, tour information, passersby, singers, jugglers, and information brochures. Busy and cheerful.
12/26/90: 5:20AM: I'm walking on a city street that's either in Harlem or the South (with Blacks) and we come to a cemetery and talk of Donald McKewn, a Black dancer, and someone said that a critic like George Jean Nathan ALWAYS reviewed admiringly the dances he made because Nathan was hot for black cock. 2) 9:30AM: HASSE, a name for a cleaned corncob; and someone falls to the rooftop two stories below. Had wanted to remember more, but not now.
12/27/90: 9:30AM: Jerking off VERY feelingly, worried I might ACTUALLY cum and blunt the edge off Bob Rosinek's visit! But DON'T cum, and intensity is quite gone when I DO wake--and the visit by Bob is a DISASTER, I flailingly cum limp!
12/28/90: 8:05AM: Odd fragments: 1) Matt (who called last night) asking "You don't want to look at the label?" (of the wine he's serving), and I respond, "Oh, I was so interested in the FOOD you're serving me." 2) Find a small stack of thick Sunday Times at a kiosk that I was afraid had already sold all of them.
12/29/90: 8AM: "Pre-cum (high-tone), pre-cum (low-tone), pre-cum for spiders" is what it SOUNDS like she's having us sing at a party, this Italian woman with a great voice, who seems to be singing some operatic aria beginning "Praecum."
12/30/90: 6:05AM: Odd fragment, from before (when I thought I got NO sleep this morning), of Mrs. Robertson (to whom I must write a note as I pay the rent bill IN HER name this time, saying that I HAVE no air conditioner to pay $5/month for) escorting a VERY spiffily dressed Mrs. Johnson through the halls, ringing bells to "introduce her" or "to say goodbye to her," I'm not quite sure which. Will Mrs. Johnson die soon?12/31/90: 8AM: At party, black cop raising eyebrows behind glasses when I say, "Maybe I'd like her husband, too," and I know I could hitchhike to the place on the island where the hotels are nicer.