1993
1/2/93: 9AM: 1) I'm kissing the chest of a bare-chested man sitting in a chair, and he stares at me deeply (but not entirely satisfactorily) and starts kissing me, and I feel my teeth and gums are OK for this minor penetration. 2) Running a computer "Conway-Life" program with WORDS that generate patterns.
1/8/93: 9:10AM: I'm traveling somewhere like Turkey, ready to catch a small ferry that'll take me across to Iran or Iraq, and I don't have any information about the town into which I arrive about 7:30PM after finding out I catch the boat at 5:30PM, which means it's after dark when I arrive and have to travel to a hotel that I haven't even chosen for the night yet. My friend asks me to look through his travel folders (he's a travel agent), but since they're all in Arabic, I have no idea how to select a folder for a city I've never been in and have no idea what it looks like! There was some very POSITIVE component to this dream: someone giving me something, or promising me something, but I've forgotten what it was at the moment.
1/21/93: 9:40AM: This time the opera's on VIDEO, because the theatre is completely packed and my seat is on the EXTREME left of the first row, actually without any view of the stage at ALL, as if it were in a little anteroom which had never been designed to see the stage. So an usher kindly shows me outside where there's a group of people sitting on folding chairs looking at an enormous (very clear) TV screen on an adjoining hillside, but which is obscured by drooping fronds of intervening trees! I move around until I find a good seat, but then the wind blows and tree-fronds still interfere. The second act begins in an ENORMOUS set which looks like an enlarged piece of plaster of Paris from which a finger has scooped a dollop, leaving a totally regular curved-in-all-three-dimensions cyclorama effect that looks like the inside of a cake-frosting cave with ugly greens and blues sprayed from the top down to look like stalactites, with a threadbare throne-room set uglily spread inside it. I think the soprano's Aprile Milo, but the sound's not that good, the opera's not that good, and then---the worst---people behind me begin commenting loudly on the action and settings and the sexual history of the singers, and I debate just leaving or taking the effort to shush them knowing that they're too boorish to shush and will just get annoyed at me.
1/22/93: 9AM: 1) I'm at a party and someone snuggles up behind me; I turn to see a handsome tall sexy fellow obviously interested in me, for whatever reason. I run my hands up and down his body, which without transition becomes naked, and he produces an ENORMOUS erection, fairly slender but capped with a pebble-hard head. We instantly find ourselves in a bed, and faced with that tempting schlong I can't resist going down on it, farther and farther until I've ingested its entire 10-11-inch length, feeling the cockhead far PAST my throat and wondering idly whether that would mean any HIV-infected semen would not even TOUCH any buccal lesions. No sooner do I get it entirely down when the whole length spasms and I feel a continuous flow---uninterrupted by pause---of semen into my stomach. He groans and strains and twists gloriously, and when we're finished he asks for me to search through his "tool-kit" for some poppers, and there's a kind of belt-effect with apparatus hanging from it, but I can't find poppers there, and when I open my little cigar-case, all that falls out is a smoldering thick cigar butt, which I'm somewhat embarrassed to find. Then I try to locate a bathroom, but the only one nearby seems to be in an anteroom to TWO parties: our gay male one and a straight one, so to the sound of female voices I try to neaten myself up in the bathroom, and exit to see a slender black woman (like the good skater at Ice Capades last night) leaning over to deposit a small reddish pool of vomit on the immaculate carpet. 2) I'm at a summer resort newly isolated by snowfall in the autumn, and we suspect we're going to have to stay here all year, which will be a stretch since we don't seem to have that much food. But then on the main street of the small village there's a BUS, and I remember that there's a year-round schedule of twice-weekly busses to New York, and I figure there's no need to be stranded here; I can get back to my apartment despite the fact that the other vacationers look down on me for taking such an easy way out.
1/24/93: 9:20AM: I'm in the cafeteria at the University of Akron, and as I'm leaving through a narrow door, a female student whom I'd tried to pass speeds up and gets to the door just as I do, and she refuses to let me pass so we both squeeze through at the same time. I try to pass her outside, but she takes the quickest route and gets to the top of a flight of stairs before me and tries to assist an old man with a cane who's already being helped by a woman who might be his daughter. I start down and find the stone stairs VERY irregular: as many as three have "folded in" so that there's only the narrowest 18-inch ledge for a heel-hold. I get to the bottom safely and then have to pee, so I go into a usually empty john to find a line of three or four waiting for the single urinal. Figure to go downstairs because I might even need to shit, but have a flashback to "St. John's" when I'd use (in dreams!) a smelly, wet, multi-stalled john, but I can't quite remember which stairway gets me to it quickest, and I wake vaguely frustrated, because I thought I'd been on the THIRD floor, but it was a wide roadway through a park, and how could THAT have been in the building when I'd come from the floor ABOVE and there WAS no road? Have to pee when I wake at 9AM.
2/6/93: I'm traveling someplace like Australia or New Zealand, and we stop our car for a rest beneath trees with enormous mottled-red fruits that my driver-friend tells me the name of before I take one off and bite into it, clasping it in both hands so that juice sprays all over me, the ground, and him. He gets uncharacteristically angry about this, and I respond weakly, "Well, you didn't TELL me not to get juice on you!" He's talking to another friend by the car, and I've turned from the surround of trees to the playground-like clearing framed by them, and notice two well-cleaned caryatids leaning slightly toward each other outside what I take to be a small museum, and wonder what culture had left these strange relics behind. But when I move closer to the "museum," I find that it's really only a divided outdoor lavatory, and I think to go cruise inside, but the two guys seem straight, and it's getting late, and I scuff the sand around the outside and see that it covers a glass-block ceiling of some rooms lit from below, so I decide that there are guardians or caretakers around, and it's best probably to just leave.
2/23/93: 9:55-10:10AM: [Unusual that I'm awake and note the time before having this dream.] I'm vacationing in a northern Scandinavian country that might be Sweden, and after I have a breakfast in my tiny hotel I'm told by someone like a bank clerk that I have to "learn the ticket." I ask what that means, and he shows me a thick wad of green slips that have numbers and names printed on them, like some sort of registration slips, and I say, "Do I have to know the names?" No, no, no. "The numbers?" No. I don't understand at ALL. "But how can I LEARN what I need?" No one seems able to speak English well enough. I fumble through the small coins on the table to leave a tip for the waitress, and go out of the hotel to see a bus driver exiting a tour bus. Some of the passengers seem to be speaking English, so I see that the driver's nametag says "Lis" and he might be Swedish, so I ask if he speaks English and he retorts, "Yes, I'm American." I go into a small souvenir shop, and a little girl is busy distributing slips like twofers onto shelves and tables and counters, and I think THEY might be related to the "tickets" that I should be learning. There are many white hanging hand-lettered signs, in green and red magic-marker letterings, saying things like "Die nich English" and "Sprechen sie Deutsch," so I figure I can't get English out of them, but maybe I could try my very rudimentary German to get information, but I pass them all by. Then I'm walking outside, but oddly, I'm more in the countryside, with suburban lawns and homes around me on the quiet streets, and I'm surprised that it's still DARK out; but I recall that I'm quite far north, and it's only 9:30AM, I see dimly on my watch, so maybe the sun's not come up yet. There are odd flashes of light on the streets that MIGHT be coming dawn, or sun breaking through dark clouds, but when I look into the sky there are lightning flashes, but ONLY when it's DARKEST, which strikes me as almost frighteningly odd, but I'm confident that when day breaks things will actually be quite normal.
2/24/93: 10AM: 1) Everyone in my gym class is going by in a line wearing RED BALLET SLIPPERS, with pink cross-gartering up to an AIDS-red ribbon at the back of their calves, and I wonder why I'd missed out on my pair. I know that I can look into the dressing room "in the back" and maybe find a pair, but a young and industrious "attendant" asks if he can help me, and I suggest he phone downstairs to see if my teacher has my footwear waiting for me in the basement rehearsal area. He mentions that "George Lashinsky (or Washinsky)," whom I know to be George H., has gone back to Ohio "for personal reasons" and won't be around the rest of the year. It sounds like some sort of mental breakdown to me. 2) I'm in my old bedroom on Dietz Avenue and am annoyed by the number of flies buzzing around the drawn shades. When I raise the shades (in the three---not two---windows) I find the reason: there are flowering vines which have attached themselves to the screens outside the windows, and the flies are attracted to the sweetness of the blossoms, but I still can't quite find how they've gotten into the room itself, now infested with dozens of them. 3) There was another segment regarding travel, but I've forgotten it now.
2/26/93: 1) 8:10AM: Clearly related to Missing in Action II that I saw between 12:40 and 2:20AM this morning, I'm a CADET officer facing a SENIOR officer trying to make me "cooperate" with the authorities of a Military School, rather than stand up for the Student Body. The officer tells me that probably HE would do as I'VE been doing if he were in my place, and I feel good about his saying that, but he insists I must change for everyone's good. 2) 9:30AM: I've had a young Spanish girl staying overnight in my bed---not quite the bedroom layout of 167 Hicks---and when I wake she's gone, but there are strange plant motions from the shaded window that are too violent to be caused by the air currents from the radiator below the window, and I get up to find that she's opened the window (difficult, since it has a flimsier version of my window-grille blocking access to the window) about an inch and there's an unaccustomed flow of fresh air into the room, though it's been warmed to a comfortable temperature by the radiator. Then I'm out into the hallway for some reason, and it's expanded into a park/cafeteria/public area in which the families from adjoining apartments on the floor are socializing, eating, and meeting friends, and I think what a good idea it is to design an apartment floor with a large central common area for eating or entertaining, that yet feels connected to each apartment, and which has a glass door with a lock, and adjoining plate-glass windows which can be covered for privacy or uncovered for incorporation into the festive feeling of the central court. I'm into my apartment by a back door (rather like Tennyson's exploring the rear entrance to Prime Suspect II's apartment when the cousin has just left) and find that the layout is very convenient, spacious, and neighborly without being demanding or intrusive, and I'm happy to be living in this expanded space. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 2/25/93).
3/12/93: 9:15AM: I'm sitting in the back of a bus, backing up, and a stream of crossing pedestrians is told "just keep walking," but the last, big, man is hit, glassy-eyed, and falls backward, and when I glance back AGAIN, his HEAD has been knocked off, lying about a foot from the top of his body, and I turn back in my seat, awed and revolted, and wait for what happens NEXT!
3/18/93: 10AM: Walking tour of Prague (?) bypasses museum, and I start to wait for john line but it's too long and I figure to pee in woods. Along shops, shore, watch tiny boats, get to another john, pee rushed to keep up with group, to reeds at the end of the beach, getting dark, and hurry back to hotel on hill, large banners, foreign feeling. Police state HUGE and forbidding.
3/19/93: 8:30: 1) Looking for cabins 3 and 4 on both sides of dining room (with cruise-seats!) and finally find WINDOWLESS large room. 2) In Hawaii at dusk there are horizon-rows of VOLCANOES erupting, and HUGE fire-spray makes me search for video camera which I think MAY be lost, but is probably still in SHOULDER BAG in cabin, separate from a pile of stuff I brought from SCHOOL seat to cabin previously.
3/25/93: 9:40AM: Long dream of a tribute movie to a famous quartet, like Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows and another famous woman and a younger woman that I think is the SAME as her CURRENT "friend" Diabla, but it ISN'T. Films of a house in Maine and people swimming in a pool where they can cover their floating bodies with black bottom-mud. I'm watching film avidly while others chat or NAP. Then funny SHORT of "man-powered shutter louvers," where an acrobat leaps off a trampoline, backward, sending ANOTHER acrobat off HIGHER, who launches a THIRD-stage acrobat into SPACE---VERY funny BIT, done convincingly on FILM in dream.
3/26/93: 10:40AM: Notes on 8AM dream (bed at 1AM from Beard House): in a World's Fair exhibit and see MY paintings behind "sofas." Look at modern ACTS (some pretty people) and Valda's VOICE comes from screen. Then room SHAKES and ROCKS now and there's the GREATEST simulated train with streets and buildings, other trains, skyscrapers, model people---like Red Grooms exhibit: GREAT!
3/27/93: 10:30AM: I go into a cafeteria expecting to find my "group of three," but they're not there---one is talking to two OTHERS and I don't want to butt in on them. Others I don't recognize. Then we're all on a TRAIN, maybe going east on Long Island, and Malcolm G. is talking about theater and eating, and I figure to join HIM since he'll just keep talking to his two entranced women-friends, but I really feel like sitting ALONE and watching the beaches and coastal scenery pass, rather than concentrating on conversations.
4/2/93: 8:30AM: Great bus-restaurant in TINY (Mexican?) town on trip, and girl befriends me and orders food and it's delicious and spicy and inviting, and I debate taking photos of everyone there and making the town famous in a Northern Exposure way (from article about how town reacts to filming there).
4/5/93: 8AM: I'm at an s/m club, women and men VERY into it, and KID takes to me, rubbing my front, letting me feel him up, but when he give me a CARD to fill out for next mailing (people murmur: "After only ONE visit," with approval), I can't get the PEN to work and HIS spelling of Zolnerzak is "Routledge," and I have trouble CHANGING it, finding pens and writing surfaces and making pens WORK.
4/7/93: 10AM: IBM cafeteria is serving VERY early dinner at 5:30PM, getting ready for a 3-D conference. I eat and get the LAST dessert, dipping my jacket-bottom into sticky punch that I suck off, and sit across from a Black to eat the pudding specially mixed by a waitress who looks like Dawn at Marty's video shop. Happy to hear that next day's events are in the Chrysler Building and I visualize a camera panning up the facade of the building and into the Cloud Club---probably influenced by Red Grooms's show I saw with Sherryl yesterday.
4/8/93: 9:45AM: I'm standing in line, applying for a job, and filling out forms, and a guy says I've been selected to be a guard, so I need my photo taken, and I have to put on a tie. I have two of them with me, but I get the ends on the wrong side, make too thick a knot, get one tie wet, get my fingers and the tying pattern all mixed up, and the guy comes back from lunch to find me STILL trying to tie my tie, and I wake with feelings of disgusted frustration, knowing that the job would only pay $100/DAY, though when I think of 250 days that's STILL $25,000, which wouldn't be bad if I didn't travel, and I guess I'm worried about getting more indexing jobs after a VERY slow season!
4/9/93: 7:50AM: 1) "Somebody" is emphasized to be GOOD as introduced in a play, and not just "ANYbody." 2) After having EXPENSIVE German meals, somebody like Ken and I cross a border and in a little French pub order a kilo of fries for 50F and a liter of good beer for 5F, knowing JUST the right "fries" and "liter" to be understood, and we're DELIGHTED to have such good basic food so cheaply again.
4/16/93: 9:10AM: I'm a writer for a math book, but my editor says I'm doing it wrong---I should study how SHE does it. She gives me a finished magazine with the front and table of contents MISSING, and there are huge blocks of ADS breaking up the text, and I try again and again and again and can't even find the PAGES she's told me to look at and REPORT on. VERY frustrating dream!!
4/25/93: 9AM: "Miracle-Mode" dream: Bus tour in Balkans, backpack, and friends and tours through old-town centers with golden cathedrals and squares and statues and ghettos. Writing for NEXT trip, going from village to village, talking with passengers, getting a pack with a torn strap that won't hold, climbing up to office to get a new one, forgetting pack, looking over my back and a "friend" sees me and KNOWS I want the pack (miracle!), and hands it up to me, and I get a new one. Wait on bus with sleeping tourists for arrangements to be made, and I feel GREAT, and WAKE to Don O.'s mailing.
4/29/93: 9:25AM: John A. and I are traveling upstate in a Volkswagen convertible, and we park right in front of a small library in a middle-sized town. John's doing his own thing and I decide to ask one of the two pasty-faced librarians whether I could quote three or four words from a book, like Pamela's Clarissa, as I think about it, and it's clearly related to displaying one still from a porno video without clearance, as has been on my mind the past few days. He says he has to check a reference book on this, and I go outside, into a park in the back, to roam for a few minutes before returning to the library. To my horror, the car isn't parked where it was, and the cars are now PARALLEL-parked, rather than being parked ALONG the curb. I go around to the side of the library just to make sure I'm not confused about where we'd parked, and I start fretting about what might have been lost while thinking it was so SILLY to have rented a convertible, since a thief could just hop into it and drive away. I think that I could reconstruct our itinerary from maps and little souvenirs I had in the bag that I had left in the hotel, but how awful it was to have lost my notebook from the past three weeks, which was in a small shoulder bag which I'd left in the car. How could I reconstruct all the notes, and WHY hadn't I just resigned myself to having my shoulder bag with me ALL the time? Go back into the library and it's more crowded than it was this morning: there's some sort of lecture going on in an amphitheater of folding chairs, and there's another grouping of mostly men in what looks like a CHURCH service, where I recognize John's head in the last row. When I get closer, it turns out he's EATING, which mystifies me, since we'd either just eaten earlier or had planned on eating right after leaving the library, but I get his attention and mouth "The car's gone." He dismisses my concern, saying, "Oh, we moved it to the garage to get something checked, don't worry about it." I feel immensely relieved and go back to the librarians' desk at the entrance to see if I can find the answer to my question, but now there are THREE librarians answering questions, and all of them look a LITTLE like the one I'd asked before, but I can't be SURE which it was, and I feel very self-conscious. [Wake and type to 9:32AM.]
5/18/93: 8:30AM: 1) Four of us guys are vacationing on a Caribbean island, photographing birds, and one hawk raises a wingtip and looks upward as a signal to me. I raise my answering perch-finger SLIGHTLY up and he'll come LAND on it. Other guy comes home at dusk with photos of BRILLIANT red, white, and black birds like parrots and a bird in red, white, and BLUE plumage. I make a joke "We really shouldn't talk so much about Paul when he's not here," but other guys don't like my joke. Guy on sofa says, "I can't think between bartenders," meaning he's drunk. 2) Amy F. says something flattering to me and I joke "Look how she blushes when she lies like that," and then she REALLY gets embarrassed and begins to cry, saying, "Now I HATE you, Bob." But then her frown softens and she reaches out for my face and plants two VERY tender kisses on my lips and I FEEL the sensuality of them distinctly and wake vaguely aroused.
5/19/93: 9:30AM: IBM billing again: 1) Someone tells me the system will have to include personal expenses cards, so I figure just to have a code column and a separate program, except I recall I have to verify LEGALITY of all fields and numbers. 2) Someone like Ken L. (improbably) tells me that my system is STILL in use and has "billed a total of $13 billion dollars!" Influence of Dylyn Guy's Dream Play Night-Train yesterday! Concern on finances? Awful index yesterday?
5/20/93: 8AM: From a gym (or laundry) I get a package of shirts and socks I THINK I left 2-3 years ago and it turns out to have been 1983 or NINE years ago! Shirts won't even FIT? I wonder if I should get money back, suspecting that I might have PAID when I LEFT them?
5/22/93: 8:50AM: ANOTHER IBM-dream: I've written parts of six programs to do a billing function and it only just occurs to me to start testing them ALL at once, and I recall that when I did it before, the SYSTEM took care of messages after each try and automated the handling of test decks for each program, and I just have to "luck into" the method and I'll do it FASTER this time by flowcharting and code-reading to get the job done more EFFICIENTLY.
5/24/93: 9AM: I'm standing in the surf on the ocean, looking at John A. or Ken L. who is catching BIGGER waves than I am, so I try moving up and down the beach to get bigger waves myself.
6/3/93: 9:20AM: EXTREME busyness at IBM: Barbara C. has given me a huge job, and someone like Barbara B. wants a billing code for adding a field to a job card and I sort through my old numbers and confuse SERIAL numbers on job cards with JOB numbers, but finally am forced to concede that the 980-number is correct. At the SAME time, someone ELSE can't STAY for running a job that needs a CORRECTION card that I can't get keypunched because all the machines are tied up, and then he says that my FIRST card has been bent and needs to be DUPLICATED. Meanwhile, the cafeteria's about to close and I haven't had LUNCH yet, my phone keeps ringing, and people come up with questions to keep interrupting me, and I've got to go to the JOHN, as I need to when I WAKE---feeling frustrated about paying 6/11 Choice-Visa bill and 6/15 income-tax estimate while my checks haven't come in yet, I need cash, and must rely on the $100 available immediately from Macmillan and Springer checks.
6/4/93: 9:30AM: I'm supposed to meet Joe at his office so that we can go for dinner, but his office is at 60th and Park and the bus I'm on is going east on 57th Street, and when I take my nose out of my book, we're between Lexington and Third Avenues, but then I remember the bus turns north on Second, or First, Avenue and ENDS at 60th Street or thereabouts, so I figure (incorrectly, but this is only a dream) it'll be shorter to walk to Park from First than from 57th to 60th, and anyway I'm past where I could have gotten off. When I next look out the window, it's very rural, as if we'd gone into the past before the east side was built up, but there are two young male tourists on the bus and the driver is trying to give them a sightseeing tour of the town, though they're rather reluctant to appreciate it. So we look to the west and see the towers of Manhattan as if from Red Hook in Brooklyn---clustered against the sunset sky---and as we go north, they're framed by the foliage of enormous trees in the woodlands between the farms on some nonexistent avenue east of York. Some of the streets don't seem to come through this far east, and streets that do have signs carry names that have changed, rather like the Avenues change from numbers to names south of Houston Street. When I ask the driver to let me off on the extension of 60th Street, he drops me at the corner of Main Street, saying "That's as close as you can get from here." Without transition, I'm off the bus and into a subway-like entrance that suddenly has more people in it than were on the bus or in the rural countryside where I got off the bus. There are lots of shops on the ground floor, and I go up an escalator to two, thinking to find the entrance to the subway (sure: going UP to the SUBway!), and enter the balcony surmounting an ENORMOUS cafeteria-restaurant with serried ranks of tables with a seeming capacity of hundreds of people, many of the tables filled with well-dressed clientele, totally out of character with the "rural" setting just outside, but I somehow know that this is an undiscovered (by me) treasure that people from center-city come out to for a good "old-fashioned" cheap meal in good surroundings. Figure I'll have to remember this (I seem to be new to the city, so that the incongruities with the "real" city don't strike me very strongly), and again without transition find myself at the entrance to the subway, which branches into an "upper" roadway which seems rather wide and a "lower" roadway which starts wide but seems to narrow. Though both of them are literally tunnels that seem to be not painted or plastered but UPHOLSTERED with a purple suede rug-like material, I think that the "upper" roadway might have more of a view, so I take that branch. Immediately it dips BELOW the level of the "lower," which rises to my right, but then each tunnel becomes fully enclosed and the one I've chosen RISES steeply (though I have no trouble keeping my footing), and both of them have become CONVEYOR belts with a well-engineered concave curve to the tunnel-belt cross section that fits into the not-quite-circle of the tunnel itself with an almost seamless boundary at each side. The roadway I'm on comes toward a set of wooden steps that ends just a foot or two off the roadway, and I'm moving toward it so quickly (there are no other passengers on either roadway at the moment I enter or during the moments the roadways are visible to each other) that I can't quite see how there's enough room to the side so that I can pass, nor enough room at the bottom to duck under, but I seem to "know" that I can "pass through" it, and I effortlessly "lean" backward and my body either straightens out enough parallel to the roadway that I can pass BETWEEN the third and fourth steps from the bottom OR I realize I'm not going to clear all the risers and pass THROUGH them as if they were only holographic projections, or made of smoke, or simply dream-images. The tunnels continue their up-and-down progress, and I think "this ride is even better than lots of amusement park rides; I'll have to come to this station more often" as I wake.
6/5/93: 9AM: IBM again, but I'm NEWLY employed, and my desk is RIGHT at the side of the door from the elevator lobby, and I've got the contents of the "New Employee's Packet" spread out across the entrance as I sort out all the materials: office phone book, insurance forms, benefit books, personnel listings, index and Rolodex cards, pens and pencils and correction fluid and rulers. When an elegantly dressed group of customers exits the elevators, I condense my piles right near my desk so they can enter the office. Thank goodness my desk drawers are still almost empty---my to-be filed drawer still has room for my rolled-up winter overcoat! But I'll accumulate junk as I work here longer!
6/9/93: 9:50AM: I'm in some strange apartment with Mom sleeping in the next room (strange how "dream-Mom" is not as old as she ACTUALLY is, but some "middle-aged" Mom from years ago), and I'm starving for breakfast in a kitchen that's entirely strange to me. Start by pissing into a garbage bag that I think is a plastic one, but as my urine spatters about the Kraft-paper sides, I'm afraid it's just paper, and when it rolls over, there's a swash of water on the floor, but when I angrily swab the bag and contents around, it seems to manage to soak up most of the waste on the floor. I can't find the cereal I usually microwave, and the controls are a mystery to me, but finally I manage to hit one button that puts the unit in "Ready," and when I look at the labels on the other buttons, I see that I can just hit them and get to "the next step," so I hit "A" and a counter starts. I've looked into the "oven" (which is shaped like an enormous waffle iron, except that it's not essentially concave, but convex, like two astronomical-refractor lenses on the top and bottom of a garlic-press face) and there's a double fried egg that's somehow been left there, or maybe I did it before for myself, but when I touch it it's cold and I want to warm it up, and I also want toast, but even though I know it's more of a MICROWAVE than a TOASTER OVEN, I just put a slice of whole-wheat bread atop the fried eggs and SMASH the top lens down, knowing that I've probably broken the still-soft yolks, but I hope more adheres to the bread than to the burning lenses, and I'm concerned that there's no smell of heating or burning after a few minutes and I STILL don't know if I have the control set right to make myself breakfast (rather like my frustration with the FMTEST index specifications for the Family Medicine diskette, or the Internet introduction that Don O. sent me a booklet for, nicely timed for today's visit to David C.'s office for HIS introduction to Internet).
6/16/93: 4AM: A HUGE class of 80-100 is rehearsing my play (a comedy about interoffice politics), standing on a set of risers. They're laughing, as are other onlookers in an 8-10-person audience, but the "dramatic music" still doesn't FIT, and I feel there should be FAMOUS non-speakers just STANDING on risers, but everyone seems happy enough with it, and eight students grasp ends of HUGE silk quilt and spread it over 4-5 onlookers, me in center, directed by METICULOUS compulsive woman. All OK with me.
6/24/93: 9AM: I'm touring in a small town in Yugoslavia, and on a noon walk the guide says, "We're going on a bus to the next town, you should have brought your bag," so I turn back to the rural hotel, walking back up the mountain, pulling down stones to make a narrow pass more accessible, and wonder if I'll even have to change money here---maybe I can borrow money for lunch and pay it back in the next country, where I'll HAVE to get exchange.
7/6/93: 8:45AM: Spartacus and I are at a "new" Burger King/McDonald's and the BOOTHS are shared by two guys, but the backs of the seats are SO curved that it's IMPOSSIBLE to get enough CUSHIONS jammed into the BOTTOM of the back to get ANY lower back support without moving to the side against the WINDOW, which has no UPPER back support, but at least you can LOUNGE DOWN in that area. Then the MENU is awful, talking of "mini-burgers" and "hill fries" and chocolate drinks for $3.50, and then I look at a counter where pork chops are being AUTOMATICALLY dipped into a barbecue sauce and put on a CONVEYOR to a broiler and then a ROBOT places then on finished trays with lots of OTHER foods, and though the "assorted appetizers/buffet" is EXPENSIVE at $15, at least it gives LOTS of food and of the RIGHT kind, and Spartacus AGREES that it's the best thing to order! Very COLORFUL (menu and food) and DETAILED dream.
7/18/93: 9:15AM: Passing through the gym-bar I see Arno S. talking with someone, and since I haven't seen him in AGES, I kiss him lightly on the lips. He comically rolls his eyes and waves his hands around on limp wrists, and I say, "Maybe I shouldn't have DONE that?" He grins sheepishly and says, "Well, look what you've DONE!" I glance down and he's LARGE and HARD, and I enjoy touching it. His friend reaches down, further embarrassing Arno, and he GRABS his cock between his two palms---rubbing as if washing them---for 2-3 seconds, which seems to bring him off SO copiously that white sperm sprays out and he dabs some in his hair to get rid of it, LOTS of it, and his coming and facial expressions and actions are so beguiling I laugh out loud and wake up hard and reminiscent of his "modest" charms.
7/19/93: 9:30AM: 1) Beach flophouse---misplace bag and jacket and WALLET! Proper SLEEP is impossible. 2) Beach walk---waves over FACES---girl NOT suicidal---BEAUTIES. 3) GET bag back, to watch tape of Great Ballet of South America.
7/20/93: 9:40AM: 1) Buzzer goes when I'm in shower; dripping in bathrobe, I'm down to HUGE, busy, package-laden lobby and NO one will admit to having buzzed me in error. 2) Games group starts some HUGE yantra rite. 3) Many more, much detailed! [This happens to be the LAST day of my soaking the British STAMPS.]
7/21/93: 8:40: I'm looking through shirts (some like Don M.'s) to wear with jeans at 1221 Dietz with Mom, and some are TOO bright, too silky, or too short in the arms, and I've got to rush for a possible quiz in class that ends at 11AM and it's already 9:15. Find old tee-shirt with a Soap Box Derby sew-on ATTACHED to old pants with a belt that's started to DECAY, shaking off bits of dead leather onto floor at foot of old metal-bedstead bed. Glance at wall across and ask, "How do people perform all this MAINTENANCE if they have a 9-5 JOB"---because the wall (with a TREE and PLANTS on it) is COVERED with little roaches on the WALL and huge WATERBUGS in the tree, and Mom starts killing roaches, and waterbugs start to move sluggishly and I wonder WHAT she's going to do when she finally NOTICES the waterbugs and tries to get rid of THEM.
7/24/93: 8AM: Having taken Rohypnol at 10:30 and not getting to sleep by 11PM or later, I had the luxury between 7 and 8AM, I suppose, of a series of elaborate dreams about a seminar in Japan! It was only the second seminar, and the one about four years before had been very sketchy: hardly anyone spoke English, there were few sessions, and the hotels weren't up to snuff. But for this second one, the preparations had been meticulous: sessions were scheduled throughout the day, the Japanese all spoke understandable English, and the accommodations were luxurious. There were MANY details, but the only set left was the final morning's drive to the hilltop hotel: up a VERY steep hill built with narrow balconied buildings crammed next to each other, obviously the result of recent expansion of what I'd guess to be Tokyo, since many of the buildings were in the form of television towers patterned on the Eiffel Tower with an Erector-set base and a narrowing spire with a bulbous top. Each entrance seemed to be ours, but finally we stopped at a garden-pavilion entrance, past sumptuous lobbies with smiling geishas in modern silky dresses, and into an enormous hall just as I woke before remembering what the conference was actually ABOUT. Quite groggy, but I forced myself up at 8:10 to be more on Paul's schedule; he said he woke in the dark, went back to sleep, and rose at 7AM very close to being on schedule already.
8/8/93: 8:30AM: I'm taking a test in Hindu and Tibetan tantra, and have passed the vocabulary part and am about to take the shastra-identification section. The floor is heavily carpeted, and I have trouble getting the sitting-blanket and text-display sheets to STICK to the floor without slipping to the bottom. I talk to the teacher about the Runga-Shastra: "Isn't that in a Dover reprint with a bright-blue cover, translated by Arthur Avalon?" [The book I was thinking of was Avalon's Tantra of the Great Liberation (Mahanirvana)]
8/16/93: 8:10AM: There's a larger water-stain down a wall that at first looks like it's in my bathroom, but it then appears to be more a wall in some small future one-room apartment that's lined with bookshelves containing all the stuff from my life: when I climb on a chair and look to see if anything's been damaged by the water, I find old books with marks of PRIOR water damage on the edges, but they're dry now, opening easily and flexibly, and I glance at some of my marginal jottings from years ago. When I replace the books on the shelf, I see some mint-condition calendar booklets that I've used to record minute transactions that I haven't looked at in YEARS, and then I find a packet of blocks of American stamps in perfect condition and I look in delight at all the shelves around me, thinking, "I have it all, right here, and it's WONDERFUL!"
8/21/93: 8:40AM: Two guys talking about how hot and sweaty it was building a parade float, then playing a volleyball game afterwards, sitting at two tables while a THIRD guy tried to make dating arrangements with the one who is his lover, while there's a huge "bowling-ball" noise-rumbling outside and everyone rushes out to Broadway to look between buildings to the west to see "The big earthquake hit JERSEY across the Hudson with wall collapses and huge smoky fires, awful even from a DISTANCE."
9/4/93: 9AM: I'm traveling with a very rich straight guy, his ditzy girlfriend, and a woman-friend of mine who might be patterned after Magenta in the Channel 13 series Happy Tours or Offbeat Travel (OK, so it was Rough Guide). The first sequence has us on an elevated train that takes us over a collection of miniatures of famous palaces, castles, gardens, pavilions, and battlefields that I'd read about before (something like "Roadside America," and maybe this sequence came from one of the movies reviewed last night that was an animated Shakespeare starting with a wonderful Lionel-train-scale miniature village with houses and trees and slopes at the foot of a castle where Twelfth Night was taking place, peopled by puppets), and I'm ogling the fenced-off displays when we come to the vacant streets around the entrance boasting a sign with something like "Casco's American Treasury." I have the feeling we're in the outskirts of Washington, DC. All the sequences are very complicated and somehow hilarious, as if everyone were making a Monty Python sketch of life. At one point we've climbed onto a fence to watch something taking place in a public showcase, and when I jump down there's a hindrance under my shoulder bag, and when I lift it, I find that, in jumping down, I'd looped it over the head of a small female onlooker, who makes some sort of glib remark, and I shoot back a riposte in the vicinity of "Don't worry, it's not permanent." Before, I'd asked the fellow what his girlfriend's name was, and he smiled ruefully and said, "The only one I know is Cynthia." She strikes me as very like Rhoda, whom I've not seen for a bit. There are other segments about travel, involving stops for food with everything on the menu changing because we've arrived just at the turnover between lunch and dinner, involving renting a car that has something to do with exchanging credit cards and IDs that might be based on the Testarosa-driving sequence from Scent of a Woman that I watched last night, and involving elaborate sightseeing plans that have to be coordinated with hotel-room rentals and luggage, which might stem from my concern about the number of indexes to finish (and for that "finnish" typo I should have said "Finnish" to keep with the travel motif!) and things I have to do today---Saturday. Decide to get this page out by 9:12AM.
9/7/93: 7:15AM: A group of circus trainees have volunteered to put on a show in cramped quarters that seem like a sailing ship in a basement. One pudgy girl clambers up to a trapeze to try it out, and shouts, "I can do a blue-back," and from a horizontal curl on the trapeze-bar, she suddenly expands into a flung-out "X," resting against the trapeze-ropes. But then one foot hits a nearby guy-rope, STOPPING her suddenly, and she shouts, "Now I'm REALLY frightened," and I worry about supervising safety for all of them. [This is like a rehearsal for an AIDS benefit for the Bailey House.]
9/8/93: 1) 7:15AM: I'm dining with Mom and a friend of mine like Vicki, and Mom is making me SO mad I take some food from a plate and rub it in her face! Friend is appalled, and thank goodness no one else (including waitpeople) seem to be in restaurant yet. Later, however, I PUSH her face into a vitello tonnato (probably based on Chevy Chase face down in cement on his Channel 5 premiere last night) and everyone, including me, feels AWFUL about it. 2) 8:15: I'm challenging a VERY quirky chess-player to a game in his private club, and I don't even know that the flanges on the piece-bottoms go INTO the soft balsa of the board-surface, because then ALL the pawns are FACE DOWN and you have to REMEMBER whether they're black or white! Worse, MAJOR pieces look like they've been punched, lace-like, from beer cans, so they're ALMOST the same color---HIS queen can be told from MY queen only by POSITION. As if this were on GRAPH paper, there's also a MISTAKE in coordinate-fixing made progressively worse by one-eighth of a square-width (which is the measure of the "gutter" between squares) so that the FINAL squares are actually OFF by a WHOLE square. We play a few moves that he condescendingly doesn't whomp me on, THEN he insists we must drink water-cooler-size bottles of wine in a wooden rack that CAN'T be lifted off the floor, only TIPPED, implying a very undignified scramble onto the FLOOR to drink from the lowering lip of the bottle---but at least HERE I score one by asking someone for a GLASS that I insinuate under the lip and manage to fill without spilling a DROP---which is somehow ALSO part of "his game," and he's impressed by my winning THAT point, at least.
9/9/93: 7:55AM: I'm directing a bunch of kids from a classroom into a dining hall, even though they're only 1-2 years old. One TINY guy fits into my encircling hands as on a TOILET seat, and he shits a smelly turd and an accessory carrot and piss. Hostess tells me I should have expected it. Shouldn't be surprised---now clean it up!
9/12/93: 1) 2:35AM: I'm visiting the Charlie Chaplin Film Archive in someplace like Mineola, Long Island, and the film ends with a plea to "see more of the archives: 7500 hours of film," and I get the idea HE'S the projectionist and this master has been FORGOTTEN and no one comes, but I wake to remember he died VERY rich, living in Europe, not even in the United States. 2) 4:50AM: Rolf is showing me the "steam valve" casings on his wall outlet beside the bed, and we're having AFFECTIONATE sex---now that he's GONE from the state!
9/14/93: 7:15AM: I'm traveling with someone like Ken L., and he wants to see an old Army officer of his on a post that somewhat has the "feel" of Fort Meade, though neither of us really recognize it, even though I'm the one who insists we're in the right place when we see the barracks of yellow brick being constructed in what had once been an open field. Without transition we're walking in front of a line of officers' headquarters, with the name "Foley" with an arrow around the next corner, and Ken complains that most of the offices look closed. I say we can at least take a look, and as we walk down to the fifth door in a row of locked doors, Foley's office is indeed open---as a bank---with two clerk-NCOs inside, and Ken can transact the banking business that drew us here in the first place [hope that means that the long-awaited checks arrive in the mail today for BOTH Dennis and me!!].
9/15/93: 7AM: I'm in a completely different apartment, sitting at a table, writing in a notebook, when the wall above my table "opens up" like a roll-top desk, revealing another room across from me---this one with a huge picture window; and I think to myself, "That's why my room was so dark, it's actually part of a larger apartment that was split in two: and the other side got the window"---it all seems acceptable to me in the dream. Another guy is working over there, and in a few minutes he puts out a plate of food on one side of his table. I think to myself that I'm hungry. Matter-of-factly, he puts a second plate of food on the other side of his table, and swings the section of my table to the left around and under (reminding me of my typing stand, which can be swung around in the same way under my desk-kneehole), leaving a pass-through between my room and his, to which he gestures and says to me, "Be my guest for lunch." He's read my mind! There's a transition to a few minutes ahead, when we've finished lunch through a pleasant conversation, and he unfolds a square of silk with a woman's face painted on it in a Japanese-y way, saying something about "my girlfriend," and I think to myself, "Shit, he's straight, what a great start of a shared relationship THAT could have been!" (RETURN TO JOURNALS 9/15/93).
9/18/93: 7AM: I'm in the Wall Street Sauna, and a guy comes up behind me as I'm standing behind the seats watching porno videos and he insinuates a NICE stiff smooth cock into my hands, saying, "Me and my friend are blind, do you think you could invite us to your place?" I ponder this---probably stems from the "blind date" Mark is trying to get to my place with Tony (since Mark lives with his parents after his auto accident and losing his job) before I SEE him and evaluate what he looks like at the MAN brunch on SUNDAY. Wake VERY aroused!
9/22/93: 6:40AM: We're traveling in India, eating lunch on a patio, and suddenly everyone notices a swarm of black flying insects, like beetles, darting about, filling the visual space under the awning and above the ground. Then we all exclaim aloud as a close-knit flock of tiny green birds flits into the center of the vision, followed quickly by a flutter of bright-BLUE birds, a clump of tiny yellow butterflies, then masses of BROWN birds, all feeding on insects, marvelous. Then another couple is asking a family to take a tour with them, and the couple modestly says "No," and then the man of the couple insists, "We'll even pay your way!" and the Magenta-like wife says, "Why CHARLES, of COURSE we'll come with you," to EVERYONE's delight. How charming!
10/1/93: 8:15AM: I'm taking some kind of technical editing test, but my magazine doesn't seem to have pages 108-109. Could I have clipped them out for an ad on the other side and thrown them away? Ask my instructor to look at HER magazine, but she suspects I'll take out HER pages. But finally she relents, saying that I can NOTE DOWN what I'm missing and make sure she SEES that her pages are still there.
10/2/93: 7AM: Many details, many lost: 1) Staying in Britain with older fellow setting up a party in the late evening, and I can't remember the address in "North Brighton" where my hotel is and he says I can stay THERE for the next few days, and I feel pleasantly accepted. 2) Riding in back of a tour bus with three or four gay guys, and fellow NEXT to me seems definitely interested in me, which is pleasant. We glance out the right window at what looks at first like an eye-level snowdrift, but I look down to see it's really only a light coating of snow on an earth embankment---all obviously created to talk of snow at Garnet Hill and arrangements for happy hours and dinners there. Bed at 10:30 and up at 7:10AM.
10/5/93: 2:35AM: A black is driving a car south in some African west-coast country, like Morocco, and drives slowly through a gas station where the men have to draw in their legs, feet, and pump-hoses to get out from under our wheels. Then, slightly beyond the stations, he halts comically and says, "We'd better get gas if we're gonna GET there." I wake and sit on the john with an upset, constipated, nonproductive gut and think THIS can be turned into a comical play with a fairly stereotypical blackamoor comic, but now at 8:50AM when I take this note, all productive thoughts about it are gone from my head---LAST full day at Garnet Hill and THANK GOODNESS!
10/6/93: 5:30AM: At Met, sitting ONSTAGE as curtain rises for PHALANX of trumpeters and drummers for GRAND symphony climax, someone like Tai Babilonia comes on crowded stagelet to toe-dance. Two guys nearby initiate sex in full view of audience, which is standing and craning heads in all directions to see full stage. VERY sexy blond lays his head on my crotch: I'm proud to be seen liked by him.
10/7/93: 5:45AM: I'm working on a HUGE IBM project for housing in Hawaii, and we're NOT supposed to name prospective TENANTS who are famous: politicians and movie stars and wealthy foreigners. I almost found myself naming names in telling UNDERLINGS not to mention names to their LUNCH partners. Try to follow Maria L. and Dick H. to the IBM cafeteria to overhear their conversation, but get shown to different green-tunnel setting in bunker-like cafeteria where two guys are trying by cellular phone to get THEIR seats changed. Back up on an elevator which I leave EARLY and have to TUMBLE across landing when I exit before it stops moving. Then to STREET for PLAY depicting HISTORY of project, and Leslie M. has let us use her apartment: she's dressed in period (1800s) costume with flaming red wig, talking on telephone as HUNDREDS of dignitaries climb her stoop to her GREAT parlor-floor apartment to see a scale model of the grounds of the housing project, and through the door I can see that the ceiling and walls of her apartment have been REMOVED (and I wonder HOW they did it, HOW much it cost, and how much they're paying her to RENT her apartment on Third Avenue and 12th Street), and inside find that the THIRD-floor button on her building-elevator has been taped over, and the WORKING model has been relocated to be on display on the BACK WALL of her apartment, and not on the floor above. And I MARVEL at the number of people attending this display and wonder HOW I'll keep EVERYONE, myself included, from blabbing about the names involved here.
10/9/93: 7:30AM: I'm packing in Don M.'s apartment (he's not there) and dash into elevator to find I've got HALF a suitcase---won't HE be surprised when HE finds the other half there? To last class of an art course that I have to leave early for ANOTHER course, and teacher coos, "I DO hope you'll call," when I ask if I can, and ask if I can take a MAKEUP class, then DASH to street and ask where 43rd Street is, and I'm only AT 17th! To "English Way" for private cars (debate hitchhiking), but NO cabs to be seen. I'll be late again!
10/10/93: 9:45AM: I'm at a consciousness-expanding group and ONE practice is to "see" an assistant (with a GOOD body) turn into a plantigrade! He gets "thick" and has a plate over his butt, and THEN the leader hands ME a net-wrapped object, moving slightly. I grit my teeth, unwrap it, and turn over the "bottom-less turtle" with phony-plastic-looking exposed heart and lungs above a jewel-like carapace, and I dip it into water to revive it and there are hand-painted features that I decide to ignore. ODD commentary on Actualism and Chi Gong?? Earlier part (about brain or arm transplant or part of an organ, is hazy now, but very detailed in dream. There are three segments between the end and the transplanted "head" of the organ.
10/12/93: 8:45AM: JUST like my index-page stacks, I'm arranging two sets of shelves in another one-room apartment, and a set of shelves ABOVE one shelf-set in a closet alcove is TILTED and I have to check that (like on my new videotape shelves) boxes of shampoos and lotions and perfumes are at the SUPPORTED "off-angle" so that they aren't in danger of spilling forward. One stack involves clothes, and the SECOND set of stacks---on top of a dresser---even has a "top surplus overflow" of 2-3 in a "penthouse" of receptacles where I've temporarily overflowed my SYSTEM---like I've overflowed my dining table with unpacking since October 6 and my DESK with stuff for DAYS!
10/15/93: 7:45AM: I'm giving Michael P. a VACCINATION, and though the needle is VERY fine and short, he twists and groans, and I'm appalled to see VACCINE leaking out and dripping around his upper arm in HUGE saliva-like quantities.
10/16/93: 8AM: Ken L. and I are taking some kind of comprehensive medical/math/English exam with questions like 15) Does W signify the Well from which verb tense springs? and 23) Is had had had had had had?
10/18/93: 8:45: I'm programming two systems at IBM, still doing the BILLING program in MACHINE LANGUAGE, and starting to think HARD about RESTARTING it in FORTRAN or a HIGHER-level language, because I'm WAY behind (seeming to put INDEXING's "can do five weeks' work in three days at end" talents to PROGRAMMING, at which I wasn't really as good or fast). Then I wouldn't have to remain PROFICIENT in two languages, either. Seems the NEW computer is scheduled and billed AUTOMATICALLY, or just as a UTILITY, so I don't have to worry about AMOUNT or TIME of billing anymore. Stems from Helen's asking me the day before yesterday about pension from IBM? SAME OLD feeling of PROGRAMMING INADEQUACY and frustration patterns.
10/20/93: 9:10AM: I've just finished dinner with four friends in a very "in" nightclub in Manhattan, and I'm first in the waiting line for seats for the show, while the others are strung out in line behind me. I wander down a hall where waiters and chorus girls are rushing about, and the maitre d' tells me to get back in line, but finally he says I should follow him, after asking how many in our party. "Six," I say, "and they're HERE, because we had DINNER here," and he starts stepping across the decorations on a balconied wall. I don't quite see where he put his feet, and find myself gingerly trusting my entire weight to a cord draped from the ceiling, which comes loose from one end of its mooring, so that I'm swinging above seated diners as if on a loose trapeze, making comical "Oh oh" noises as in a Harold Lloyd movie. I transfer from the cord to some cake-icing decorations on the ceiling, at first trying to find some solid support, but finally just risking grabbing a handful of sequins and ribbons and hoping the support will hold. There's no sense of my actually DEPENDING (both "hanging" and "relying" senses) on these flimsy handholds, but this IS a dream! I make my way to various heating and cooling ducts, not even aware that I might be dropping glitter into the food being consumed below, and see the end of my travels and travails ahead, and wake up.
10/22/93: 9AM: Two phases of FRUSTRATIONS: 1) I've entered Crossland Bank from the Montague Street entrance and a white Scottie is padding around the lobby trying to get into the bank. I seem to remember a "No Dogs in Bank" sign, so when I go in one door, I put my shopping bag in front of his face so he can't enter before the pressurized door slowly swings shut. Then there's another door to enter, and somehow he's there too, and again I frustrate his entrance. 2) I'm vacationing in what I take to be a German town, and I've hung my bathrobe in a ladies' room (like I hung my coat in the men's room for Chi Gong?), and there are fragments of memories of wandering around in shorts and tee-shirt while everyone else is dressed, but I try to remember frustration of wandering around naked, but can't in this dream. But when I get into the bathroom just two hours later, all the clothes have been removed from the hangers and placed on shelves around nearby rooms. I ransack shelves and corners for my blue bathrobe and can't find it. Finally I encounter the manager of the room and shout to him, "It was less than TWO HOURS AGO (like my checks, late for MORE than seven weeks?) that I left my robe here; you MUST be able to tell me where you put it!" He waves his hands as I follow him across a field, and suddenly the field is filled with little figures and he's VANISHED! I throw my hands in the air in SHEER frustration, screeching "WHERE IS HE?" while I wander streets of great picturesqueness---antiquities softly lit---in AGONIES of frustration! (RETURN TO JOURNALS 10/22/93)
10/25/93: 9AM: 1) Trimming off HUGE plate, about 1/3 the whole nail, from big-toenail, and contemplate eating it like a slab of hard white chocolate. 2) Wearing a VERY nubbly light-blue jacket with LOTS of lint that I keep picking off, happy that I have gray woolen trousers with "built-in" lint so I don't have to pick as much white lint off my PANTS too.
10/31/93: 10AM: AWFUL dreams: 1) A monster-imp child whose face I crush, out of spite about his toys, which annoy me greatly (they are armies of plastic flies with threadlike sticky legs that totally cloud the air as some of us try to look at the view obscured by them), 2) I'm IN the tour bus, first as a conductor of the car, sitting in a seat that's even with the driver at the left front, then as a passenger in the left rear, and the right-rear passenger is SMOKING, and he SHOUTS at the people in the front of the bus NOT to open their windows because that ruins the views out over rice-terraced land stripped with pools that reflect the clouded skies, and then we're on a hillside that looks down over fields and villages below us. 3) I'm off a tour bus in France and down awkward steps that seem to get more & more uneven---narrower and narrower with wider and wider gaps both horizontally & vertically---to unknown streets, and then back UP to find I left my shoulder bag with ALL my cameras and money and valuables BEHIND in a place we're not going to return to, and I CAN'T remember the way to get back to it, or WHERE we tour people were told to wait for the bus to pick us up for our next destination! This is a REAL nightmare!
11/6/93: 9:20AM: I'm vacationing in Norway, and I just got off the plane or train in a new town, and I'm walking below someone's house to try to cross a stream that's flowing out from under it. Below the house it's narrow and deep-looking, flowing dangerously rapidly, and I decide to cross near the base of the falls because the many rocks and gentler flow makes for an easier passage. Just as I'm stepping over the first rocks, the babushka-ed woman of the house calls down that I should backtrack and cross over a bridge I can see behind me; otherwise I'll have to slog across a large puddly muddy area between the back of her house and the main road. I can see this from her porch: it looks like an old riverbed which has been converted to farmland. I look back to see people crossing a high-arched bridge and it seems vaguely familiar, as if I'd been in the town years ago and used the bridge before. Then I'm to a restaurant for breakfast served by a very accommodating young waitress, and I discover I don't have any Norwegian kroner. I ask where to change money, and they give me elaborate directions to pass the doorman downstairs and go left, then right, then backtrack, for "Blind John." I almost forget to retrieve my sweater, the pockets of which are loaded with gloves and bulky items like my jacket that I doffed at Red Shoes last night, and as I leave I marvel at their trust: I haven't paid my bill, haven't left anything behind, but they trust me to return and pay. In a small town square where I'm sort of lost, an American guy from the restaurant catches up with me to brag that "I robbed them easy." I turn with irked amazement to listen to him, and he boasts about taking a condom (I think that he really didn't steal that, they were offered to anyone who wanted them), a chair, and food. I look across the square and see a kiosk with the sign "Blind John," and the man inside stares aimlessly with watery eyes. I ask if he changes American dollars, and he says that the rate of exchange varies, and I comment that I'd like a good one, please, which strikes nearby bar-sitters as the funniest thing, at which they all laugh out loud. I feel pleased: I might have fun being here. He says it's five kroner to the dollar, and my wallet has four twenties and five singles, and I decide to keep the singles for later, at the ends of other countries, since I'll be here for five more days and will use about $80 per day in expenses. A sighted man behind him handles most of the cash for him. Decide I should use my credit card more often to make my cash go further. I'm pleased to be traveling, but I have little idea of my itinerary, how much money I have with me in all, or even about my trip-purpose.
11/10/93: 7:15AM: Mom (who is about 55 and chipper) and I are driving in northern Florida (looking more like California) and we're told to price a Spanish-convent- type resort on a hilltop. I get out in a white cement-block court and think it may be closed, but a black woman like Eartha Kitt comes out and says we can LOOK at a guide, but it has no price. MAN comes out and says if I KISS HER, HE'll give me the price. Her red lips kiss me HARD and I unfold brochure to see $1268 for 2, and I thank them and go down dirt road to see Mom parked in our yellow 60s Ford across the way, and she drives dustily to the fork, so I have to walk down to her since she won't back up to pick me up. I figure we SHOULD be able to find a DECENT place for under $100 a night with food with no trouble. Sunny nice day.
11/13/93: 6:45AM: I return to a "hotel" I come to every year, and go through a first room full of guys (it turns into an army-type barracks) and down a hall to "my" room, and there's a COVER to keep the RAIN off (aha, it's a CAMP!), and I look under the cover to see that "my" bed against the near wall is EMPTY---but it's only made of two pillows atop a bent-back black leather OFFICE chair (which someone INSTANTLY wants to TAKE, BATTLING me for it by saying it's NOT mine!), and I look to the INSIDE to see a guy (looking at me, is he GAY, I wonder?) on a sheet on SAND, and maybe that's more comfortable on a small hillock, but the WIND is blowing the sand---I can put up a chair as a wind-screen---and two Arabs chat loudly and it may be near dawn with LITTLE sleep left in the night, but TOMORROW will be better, I think, and I WAKE.
11/15/93: 7AM: I'm sleeping with a young co-actor (obvious links to The Persian Boy) whom I'm to display, naked, by wrapping his sexy young body in a sheet and lifting it to show his form beneath, then sliding the sheet off. I push my face into his crotch to make him hard and use my hands to make him shoot. Our "caretaker/mother" enters too soon after, and I'm sure SHE can smell his semen, but I pretend to be waking up and ask, "How's the weather this morning?" Later, outside, she says I shouldn't be "using her son" and says we'll start sleeping in separate bedrooms.
11/21/93: Visiting black-dressed poor lady KNOCKS down bookcase in cadence, and the white-dressed owner demands that she LEAVES.
11/22/93: 9:15AM: "Murder Mystery Dream" 1) Envelope "received before case started." 2) Envelope "with murder." 3) Me in car, watching a) woman from the house due "north," sweeping CAPE (Drosselmeyer?) around face, smooth-walking (like Christmas angels?) around corner to "west" car for "escape," b) woman to LEFT side of car, and c) Arab boy weeping at RIGHT of car as cop finds smelly body in TRASH CANS to right front that various NEIGHBORS have USED!!
11/25/93: 10:25AM: I'm sleeping near the back porch on the driveway-sidewalk at 1221 Dietz, just dozing as in reality, and hear someone coming through the backyards from the direction of Johnson's store, nearing through Lear's back yard, and I try to crane head around to see who it is, fantasizing it might be a beautiful possible trick, then Stephanie phones about Saturday's restaurant.
11/26/93: 7:50AM: VERY elaborate, detailed, busy, POPULATED dream: visiting island LIKE Gozo on Malta, off cruise ship, losing Joe in crowds down rocky stairs, hearing from Maya about older woman who "went away in '54, so she wasn't in OUR class when I went to St. Mary's," and woman native tries to explain why my friends WOULDN'T rent a car, so I needn't follow up on BUSY road to hilltop town, but could take local dusty rutty road to top to see what restaurant our group will be eating in or where they've gotten tickets for a cultural event after dinner. Lots of kids, cars, buildings, people, places, and cluttered terrain on FULL Thanksgiving-dinner stomach after Beard Foundation.
12/2/93: 9:15AM: I'm working at IBM, taking off my tie and putting on my coat and beret, and Mary V. comes in with a huge smile and asks me to come visit someone, to surprise them, before I leave from the afternoon's work.
12/3/93: 5:25AM: Like a REVELATION of a TIMELESS tale: I'm on vacation, wandering lost at dusk, and see little ferret-like animals move AS IN ANIMATION, on SKATES, wearing CLOTHES on their thin upright bodies, moving in to steal crops from the fields. I turn and there are HUNDREDS of them racing past me, TALKING and giggling, and as it gets dark I wonder WHY I don't have my CAMERA to photograph this MAGICAL scene. They single out a plump smiling GIRL as the MALE LEADER of this pack, their fond regarding smiles LIGHTING UP in the NIGHT on her dress of red and silver as I watch their midnight revels in AGHAST AMAZE! I'm watching a REAL-LIFE fairy tale, and wake with a JOLT, earplug having fallen out of my left ear, to WRITE this "would-be-lost" middle-of-the-night DREAM-VISION. I can almost HEAR fairy-stringed strains of Mendelsohn's Midsummer Night's Dream THROUGHOUT dreaming and writing about this to 5:30AM.
12/5/93: 10:25AM: INCREDIBLE fragments: 1) A vomit of a pulpy hand that turns into a turkey that herds other living protoplasm into a baroque spaceship---formed of colored file-folders that expand and contract like a 3D kaleidoscope---that takes off for Saturn. 2) A hunk whispering to another (in a soap opera?) that the ("straight") hero REALLY is a great FUCK. 3) I'm at a huge party where ONE cute guy is found in an immaculate bedroom with a sweet young widow everyone hopes would find a father for her children. 4) I'm chosen as a sex-god and all flock to me---I'm only sad I'm YOUNGER, so it's not REAL. 5) Stamp-values become CURRENCY that makes me RICH. 6) Forests and travels and wondrous psychedelic drug-sessions of color and form and tastes and beauty. 7) Driving in FLORIDA through a tree-arcaded bayou in which my hands can play in the water on BOTH sides of the car, marveling at the speed the car can make even though it's actually a boat on the water in a cypress swamp, exclaiming through my tears, "LOOK at the LIGHT on this MAGNIFICENT VISTA!" as the dawn-haze draws the slanting sunlight through delicate foliage and flawless trunks of mossy trees woven with Spanish Moss in the golden-green air.
12/7/93: 8:55AM: 1) I'm being driven through Germany, and as we bypass a spur of rock on which a modern shopping center of bright brassy boutiques has been built---meanwhile passing through old vine-covered ruins---I spy a muscular fallen St. George with a huge crotch that we're speeding past and I shout "Wait," but the driver takes YARDS in which to stop, racing another handsome chauffeur to a moist, rock-faced tunnel before halting, but there's a road which my driver can back into in order to turn around and get back to the fallen statue so I can take a picture or even a videotape of it.
12/8/93: 9:40AM: 1) I'm walking on a hilltop with Rudy Giuliani, and fireworks start popping in the twilight sky. Some men stop him to talk, so I stand quietly by, wondering how we've gotten into this and talking with an animated painting to our left. 2) I'm trying to rinse the soap off my face in a ship's cabin that hasn't been made up yet---my dop kit is on a cot that has to be taken away, the beds are unmade, and there's stuff in the wastebaskets. My friend, Art O., sits in a breakfast nook and grumbles that the red-flowered upholstery material on the bedspreads, curtains, wall hangings, dresser-tops, and tablecloths is a BIT too much, but I think we can take the throws OFF the beds and tables and leave bits of the WHITE sheets and tablecloths to brighten up the place and relieve the monochromatic red coloration. I'd had to sort through plastic wrappers, strings, washcloths, and other floating bits of rubbish in the sink's rinse water as I tried to wash the soap off my face. I remember a bit concerning my complaints about their charging BOTH our cigars to HIS bill, when in fact I'D paid for both of them in whatever currency was acceptable on board.
12/10/93: 9:20AM: FRUSTRATIONS: 1) I'm working in a borrowed office at IBM, at two desks and a sofa, and I KNOW I left my major project---a black notebook with yellow separators that contains all the documentation for the project on which I'm working---somewhere here, probably on the sofa, but there are so many other objects and papers and notebooks associated with the project cluttering up the spaces that I can't be sure where the important notebook is. Then others start filing into the room for a meeting---dressed formally---and I ask the group "I guess you've been assigned this room to have a meeting in without my permission?" NO one has the courtesy to respond, and I think vaguely that I have to visit Herman W. and get him to understand that it harms HIS project when I'M disturbed at my work by other people meeting in my room, chasing me out---where, I'm not quite sure. But as I'm gathering up all my belongings, my search for the important notebook temporarily forgotten, they begin filing OUT of the room, saying that "Schrader Hall" around the corner is larger and better suited for their purposes, and then I have to ask them to make sure they take only THEIR belongings and not any of MY work by MISTAKE. 2) I'm leaving the building at the end of the day and find myself between two sets of heavy metal doors, and the ones leading to the outside don't have handles on the inside. I'm trapped there with two women, one of whom seems to be in charge of these doors, and I ask her if she can't let me out, even though I know the doors are supposed to be locked at 5PM. "I can't do anything more than you can," she says with disdain, motioning to the lack of handles, "so you'll just have to find your own way out the building as I will have to find my own way." 3) I leave one office building, thinking that the one I want to walk to is just down the midtown block, but I'm first lost in a labyrinth of tunnels just under the exits, and then think I take a wrong exit, and might have to go around a block or so to get where I want to go, but it soon becomes clear that I'm out in the country: there are few tall office buildings around as there would be in midtown; there are strange silo-like structures with odd square overhanging rooms added to the narrow pinnacles of the buildings, rather like the balconies atop the ILGWU apartment buildings in Manhattan's 20s; and I'm walking alongside an icy area with scuff-marks down the middle and sides that makes me think it might be a frozen river or pond that's used for ice-skating. I try to think of how to ask for the office building I want to walk to, but figure that no one around me will know, so I walk along a ridge-road from which I can see some taller office buildings in the distance, thinking vaguely that I might be able to take a subway or streetcar or bus if I'd only brought my city map along, and why am I not concerned when I travel to a European city that I don't know, but I console myself with the thought that IN a new European city, I stay close to the central area, HAVE a map along, and most city-centers aren't as LARGE as this city, which might be New York or London, seems to be. 4) I'm attending some kind of recital or concert with a lot of women JAMMED into the back corner of a room, and so many bodies are crowded in that I'm horizontal, atop other bodies and chairs below me, and an elegant woman---like Lily Tomlin's suburbanite in black--- smells my crotch-smell and makes some remark to her neighboring friend, and I try to ignore her and think she won't identify it as coming from me, since I'm dressed nicely and there are so many OTHER people around us. 5) Dennis is complaining about the ending of the movie An Officer and a Gentleman, where the godlike narrator addresses Tom Cruise and says, "You were supposed to be a minor character, but when you made your character more important, there wasn't enough TIME in the movie to explain properly the relationships that had been established and resolve the conflicts set up in the early part of the movie." Dennis grouses that the director should have stepped in with a comment of his own, and not let this narrator have so much importance, and I'm convinced that he's confused about which movie he'd watched, since MY memory of An Office and a Gentleman had Richard Gere in it and Tom Cruise wasn't in it at all, and anyway I didn't have patience with these modern movies that stepped outside the narrative to offer odd opinions. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 12/10/93).
12/14/93: 8:40AM: Esoteric holiday camp! 1) Walking down a dusty road, knowing there's a parking lot at the end, I climb up to the teahouse on the right hill, past a car full of nuns. 2) Barbara G. (the actress from Village Playwrights) wordlessly passes me her billing form: $1100 for last night's water ceremony, and lots of bucks for preparation charges, but I seem to have wandered in FREE. 3) Blue-water-into-popcorn ceremony produces a SMALL bowl of VERY WATERY popcorn, but an aide has a HUGE bowl of fluffy-dry popcorn that he's willing to GIVE us, and then the head guru calls MY name and seems to imply a) that I'm special and have been admitted free, or b) I'm special because I promised to pay a lot. 4) My BED-headboard is covered with jewels, and that's very important because there are three in a row, vee-shaped, charming and lying. 5) I have FANTASY (IN dream) of caressing a naked BODY---biting and scratching and twisting and sucking an amorphous muscular protoplasm, and it turns into Dennis with his hard-soft heavy cock coming with PLASTICKY gray-yellow strands as he freezes with an INTENSE look on his face. 6) Lunch in a huge hall, and AGAIN Barbara G. passes me her pencil-entry-filled bill so that I can see what SHE'S paid, and I still seem to be coasting through FREE!
12/15/93: 9AM: Pope and I are working at IBM, and he's nervous about talking with me while I'm leafing through a magazine and a coworker of some authority is in and out of our office---at one point even pointedly CLOSING our door as if to indicate it SHOULD be closed. I'm worried that I have NO work on my desk, and I'd gotten a notice that I should be putting in MORE hours in ANOTHER office that's somehow connected with a CAR I've rented and should be returning soon---I guess it's ALL connected with ALL the stuff I SHOULD be doing in my apartment, and NOT doing by wasting so much time playing computer games!
12/19/93: 10:30AM: I'm a kid in a class that's being taught by a new method involving THICK lesson books of text, drawings, tests, quizzes, computer applications, artwork, and tear-out homework and class-study sheets. MY copy has just been dummied and it has many small screens, forms, outlines, and templates pasted, stapled, and glued to thick paper. Everyone has to fold and tear off the upper-third RIGHT sheet and the lower-third LEFT sheet to fold the remaining paper into a very specific form, but my copy is on SUCH thick posterboard that it tears with VERY ragged edges, so there's no chance of my folding it as neatly as everyone else can. This strikes me as a very "old (in time, since I'm back in school) and new (in method, since I'm using hypermodern teaching techniques that haven't been invented yet) dream.
12/20/93: 10AM: I'm on a line for a series of roller coasters, most of which have been in use throughout the day and are crowded with youngsters, but when I get to my turn the managers take the cover off an old "classic" coaster called the Green Streak (which is somehow painted a light blue), and I'm strapped in by myself, and the chain of cars rockets straight upward on its track, spiraling around very rapidly (the TV program I watched about this type of track-design must have been AT LEAST two or three weeks ago!), and I'm amazed to see the horizon swinging around my head in a full circle with NO obstructions from any other tracks or coasters or hills in view, and I think that if this were filmed and put on single-frame slow motion, it'd be timed so that each frame could be clipped and printed to show precisely the complete arc of the sky, with no overlap or omission between the edges of each frame. Then the coaster-track plummets down and around and feelings of weightlessness alternate with high-gravity forces of sharp curved turns for a totally thrilling ride. I try to figure how to attach a video camera to my chest or hand or part of the car so that this could be filmed, with the screaming sounds, without the danger of the camera being whipped out of my hands and dashed to bits from the great heights attained by this [again? see 12/19] "new and old" (new in construction-technique, but "classic" from long-ago) coaster.
12/23/93: 9:30AM: IBM office is VERY jammed---tiny room has five rows of four desks leaving only the narrowest aisle. Each desk has a lamp, and my chair lamp in library is jammed in my row against the wall, and MY seat is at aisle. At lunch break someone talks to me and I dig my earplug out and HAND it to him, lastly picking it back up and it's stuck to pieces of ticket, paper scraps, and it's gotten CRUSTY. Someone asks me to see their rehearsal for Midsummer Night's Dream with interracial cast to see how a good director helps them. Another asks me to a party in the "slow" week between Christmas and New Year’s, and I'm pleased at a Christmas of all wonderful things.
12/25/93: 9:30AM: I need three buses to get home, and the last one pulls out JUST as second comes to the corner. Two other people are waiting, so I go into a shop and watch for them to go the curb, with rumors that there are NO more busses. There are some loaves of bread that should be on sale at a store near where I live, but I think to buy ALL the loaves HERE and take them home to make a profit on them by selling them at full price. False alarm when I think a STREETCAR is the bus I need---again, frustration! But then I think, Even if I CAN'T sell this bread, I can still eat it MYSELF by putting it in fridge to SAVE it.
12/26/93: 10:30AM: I'm working on a kind of bibliography that starts
Bob Courland/ Bob Courland Title
Bob Bourland/ Bob Bourland Title 1
Bob Bourland Title 2
and wonder if BOTH are the SAME name, stemming from ONE typo of C above. I ALSO get to write a three-page biography that will be so good I'll be hired as a WRITER for this publication.
12/27/93: 10:45AM: Review of The Definitive Motion pamphlet with sentence on page 254---much ad-area nothing---paragraph to one observation---that changes to a LESSON for Rita's writing, then to my stamp collection---involving which ROW should be on automatic-updating diskettes! My PEN is going!
12/29/93: 6:15AM! EXHAUSTING marathon: Lady Mary Downer is Queen of England, and she and her lady-in-waiting, Mary V., and I are leaving the palace for a secret trip around the world. We're leaving NOW and I have to get my LUGGAGE, which is my blue shoulder bag, which I'd left in my COTTAGE in the COUNTRY! DASH there along Adirondack roads and rush to to a rambling country inn to get my uncle Henry (who's DEAD!) and Marion away from a meal they're eating with others to tell me that MY room is down a LONG hall, and I GRAB my bag before it can fall through the wide-spaced floorboards of the room (which seems to be moving on tracks as if it were a freight car on a moving train), and I DASH back toward the palace on a mountain trail, chasing a truck for a ride, but Henry's driving MADLY away, saying, "I've just GOT to take a SHIT," and he whizzes away down mountain trails WITHOUT me, racing behind to TRY to catch up! To a LAKE road---I think, "This must be Blue Mountain Lake, WHERE is the palace?" Try to get a taxi, or hitch a ride with a truck, and take a "shortcut" through a HUGE DEPARTMENT store, getting LOST in displays, back storage rooms, designer showcases, and across TOPS of display cases, finally FLOATING down an inner six-story atrium via chipped-paint PLANTERS on the WALLS which I grab with my fingernails. Out ANOTHER wrong door and figure I'll NEVER get there; maybe I can FLY to France to catch up with their imperial yacht, or at LEAST commandeer a royal SPEED boat to RACE out to meet them in the Channel. FAST-moving, detail-crammed, frustrating exhausting nightmare-struggle along roads and through buildings in AGONY to get there FAST, wristwatch showing me STARTING about 2PM, boat leaving maybe 2:30, but I don't KNOW, maybe Lady Mary can have boat WAIT for me? VERY tiring and exhausted and drained and muscle-sore and throat-clenching with SCREAMS of frustration!! AWFUL!! To 6:26AM and back to sleep.