1995
1/2/95: 8AM: ELABORATE dream of being sold a tour after looking through a paper store and asking about a tablet of 24- x 17-inch paper, lined large or small, and being told I could "move the platen so that the lines touched" for the smallest space-between. Then from 23rd Street up to 34th, where a mulatto took over and tried to sell me a NYC tour: to 22nd Street pier for garden supply shops, to another mall---"Is this a SHOPPING tour?" and he changes the subject. I picked up five fingers of bone or plastic and could FEEL them GRIT as I mashed them and they grew warm as I held them. A tall black was told he "looked yellow," with illness, and there was a vague hustler sense of selling bodies too. "Should I return to Pathmark for paper?" on 23rd, which is a LOCAL stop down from 34th Street (which is an EXPRESS stop) and I could always find cheap paper at STAPLES.
1/3/95: 10:15AM: 1) Last of a LONG series of dreams: I'm walking along a huge espaliered fence along a garden walk with a king who's making an exhibit of plants and trees, and I'm selecting leaves from dozens of types of foliage, examining them to judge if they are "original" (endogenous) or "imported" (exogenous). HUGE lush green leaves look like solid philodendrons, others are tiny like new budding shoots, others like silversword variants, others are common trees. 2) Prior to that one, I'm in Dad's old store on Thornton and Cling Streets, and some elderly employer, fat and round-faced but not Dad, recognizes me from years ago and invites me into the kitchen in back: a tiny place where two cute kids, Puerto Rican in skin tone, are chefs at two stoves for breakfast and brunch. "Can you do a mushroom-cheese omelet?" I ask, as I see they have a supply of tiny gray mushrooms, limp and wet, and I see packages of cheese on the crowded shelves above the stoves. "What kind of cheese?" "Bleu?" "For BREAKFAST?" "No, I misspoke, I meant CHEDDAR." "How about some nice Brie?" And I'd confused a UTILITIES list (gas, electric, water) on one elevated oven-door front for a MENU. 3) Before THAT, I had to get to a PLAY down a dirt-country road (like something from the Twilight Zone Marathon last night?) by 8PM, but first I had to get my ticket, which I had left in a friend's car. Get back to the hotel a few minutes before 8 to hear my name called behind me, and it's the friend with the car, who'd parked it up the road NEAR the theater with HIS ticket in the glove compartment too. So he suggests we catch a CAB rather than WALKING the fifteen-minute walk up the road. But as I scan the passing cabs, all have been full so far, and it's still not quite 8PM and plays never start on time, so we MAY make it, though the general tenor of the dream is one of FRUSTRATION and not being able to move FAST enough to get where I want to be. 4) Before THAT, I'd gotten out of a car---leaving two friends in the front seat---on a sandy beach to wander over the dunes, but when I go back toward the car, I see that I'm HIGH ABOVE where the car's parked, on a sandy ledge over the water's edge. Debate for a second that I JUMP down the cliff, but it's about eighty feet and straight down, so it's not even possible to slide, and I'm sure to break something even though I'd be jumping into relatively soft sand. Then I think to dislodge sand to hit the car-top so they'd come out so that I could shout down at them: can you BACKTRACK down the road to the switchback and come up to pick me up where I'm standing now, rather than my slogging through all the mud-footed sand to get back to them. [I'm pleased that I could remember SO MANY of the details of some of the dreams, but there STILL may have been one or two segments that I'd forgotten by the time I started recording them, which I finished doing by 10:25AM, JUST as Ken called for me to check out the Beard House listings for January with him, and I felt good to reserve TWO today!]
1/4/95: 9:15AM: John A. and I are staying in a large house in Paris just before arriving on our second round-the-world trip. At 6:03AM we meet two returning dykes who ask about our trip and we try to summarize it for them: the Tongareva Trench before Vladivostok, both sides of Lake Baikal, Samarkand and Baku, and we can't think of other places. Gradually the dykes change into two GUYS who compare gay places we've found, and one reads a flyer from a company which advertises $11.50 opal-shiny keys to the best places to eat, and I say that our secret from someone like Paul M. for dried foods would be WORTH $11.00. Many other exotic details prior to these I've since forgotten. Wake and think AGAIN of former round-the-world fantasy: take out $3-4 million in flight insurance, giving it to a pair of public-relations people like Carolyn and Lina to print, merchandise, and popularize ALL my WRITINGS.
1/9/95: 10:10AM: 1) Rita, as five-year-old, has a tiny whirling chicken that suddenly eats a blue fragment from the crumbled base-back of my watch-face, and I see the crystal in the folds of my shoulder bag, where it's fallen. I try to kiss and tickle her to make her laugh, but she refuses to do so. 2) Ken is working across from me. He's trying to identify the symphony I'm playing on a cassette player that the whole office can hear. He knows the plot, in three parts, concerning how time is confused before tomorrow, and the soprano is Obratsova.
1/11/95: 10AM: Fragments of an ENORMOUS dream of a stage production in many acts, scenes, hours, and playing venues: first I'm in the center-aisle seat of the first row, as if I were part of the play, and some of the characters are supposed to be gay, and there's the hint that the final tableau ahs the "husband" running off with his boyfriend---rather influenced, I would think, by reading Monette's Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll for the past two days, and looking at the scenes I KNOW from the opening-night televised program about Show Boat. At some of the intermissions I leave my seat, but can still hear the cast staying in character and doing little impromptu scenes throughout the large theater. Toward the end, I go BACK to see where my seat was, but almost all the seats in the front row have been taken, including mine, and I find a single seat between two large families, and the actors come off the stage and start from the center and try to find an appropriate patsy from people in the first or second row, and they obviously want a young girl, but I still have hopes! They try the dark-haired girl behind me, but she's so shy I think she might have a mild form of Down Syndrome (like the daughter of Gary H., about whose death I talked of last night with Suzie M.), and she won't really work out. Also a fragment about someone from the stage confiding in me, seeing that I'm gay, that the athletic team works out in a public rehearsal in a nearby gym, and suggesting I might like to watch the bodies tumbling about, which indeed I would. There was a SCOPE to the stage that Show Boat's set might have put in my mind, though there are operatic elements (lavish, period sets and costumes) too. A colorful, lively dream that I hasten to the computer to communicate even before I go to the john at 10:06AM, ready for a good day.
1/12/95: 7:35AM: 1) I touch and caress a woman's face while she's giving a lesson to a class as a guru, and she LOVES it. 2) A lesbian "head-guru" finally lets herself be caressed by me (she might be self-conscious because her back is COVERED with rubbery body-tags), and I fantasize our having Tantric sex and her giving birth to our NEW Christ. 3) I'm cleaning a kitchen floor that's a warped linoleum boat-shaped curve covered in green form-fitting sheets coated with grime and ICE, and the bedroom floor adjoining has a mattress underneath so it's SOFT to walk on. How far do I go in CLEANING this mess: replacing the whole thing? Just getting the surface dirt? (Upholster MY ceiling for W./D. quiet?) 4) I'm in MY apartment and it REALLY rains/ storms DENSE water against ALL my windswept windows. Only no snow outside YET!
1/15/95: 10:30AM: I've gotten two or three huge letter-packets, one from a travel agency with letters and postcards to Michael and Delores and Bobby from Africa and other countries, and another with packets and sheets of stamps that DAD had started to sort out, and I look at an Austrian set of actors, with "Burton as Macbeth," but it looks like SYBIL Burton. And there's an old CHRISTMAS tree on the bed to make things difficult when we have to put things away so we can eat dinner.
1/16/95: 6:30AM: I'm onto a train, go to the first car, and it's CUT OFF from the rest of the cars. To the final hill, and I must transfer to another train. LONG process of packing my trunk, which is EMPTY under three SUITCASES. My wood-frame (chest of drawers? sock-drying frame?) is open and there's also a TUB involved, to a spread bulked with stuff ALL new. Frustration (as is my effort to transcribe this brief note from only THREE days ago, but then I can't even remember my dream from THIS MORNING).
1/17/95: 1) 7:15AM: I'm a just-hired associate in a recognized new law firm, with only one client in October, having formed the previous January. We go into a meeting and my trainer whispers something I can't catch about what my notes (I ask a friend for a tablet for notes and it contains only one sheet of paper) must or must not contain. I write "1/17/95 Meeting" with a pen whose point is at a 90º-angle to the pen-body, and the ink is very thin and RUNS as if the page has WATER on it. "We had one prior meeting a year ago," it starts, and I wrestle frantically with the pen. 2) 10:20AM: I'm in a school for the retarded, and when I ask a teacher how many are in this room, he struggles and giggles "100,000?" There's a wall of slowly moving slides, but someone DOES have the sense to ask, "Why do we have to look at THESE?" I wonder how sexy everyone becomes jerking off when the lights go off for everyone to go to sleep.
1/20/95: 1) 7AM: I'm hugging a VERY large young man, and I RISK stroking the length of his body and he responds VERY positively by stretching out, raising his knees, and thrusting his groin toward a growing cock that I view from below erotically. 2) 9AM: Long saga of going into bedroom to use the john, lying down on the bed a moment, and dropping off to sleep when I should be getting back to a young student I left downstairs, but he comes up and crawls into bed, asking me for an explanation, and HE hugs me, and I wonder how far (and how slowly) HE will increase our affectionate touches, holds, and hugs. LOTS of other KIDS around in this segment of the dream.
1/21/95: 10AM: 1) I've got to catch a sailboat that's leaving for another shore on another island, so I get into a rowboat and cross the water only to see the two- or three-masted sailboat (interestingly, on MONDAY 1/23 Shelley shows me photos of HER two-masted sailboat in the Caribbean over New Year’s) on its way out across from me. I debate swimming or hiring another boat to get where I'm supposed to be. 2) A Chinese couple enters a dimly lit museum-room with a huge wall exhibit at the far end. The wife, with a squeal of joy, runs toward the railing for a closer look, so fast that the husband starts forward in alarm as the wife trips over the railing, pivots around on her waist, tried to hang on, but flips off and crashes about six feet down to the base of the wall. As he reaches for her, she scampers up, unbroken but bloodied about the face and whimpering in pain. I can do nothing but watch with horror.
1/24/95: 8AM: I'm returning from some big trip, back to a central depot, gathering my luggage for one last time: a shoulder bag with one book-size insert, another bag with camera equipment, a backpack with clothes, another strap with some fitted equipment and passports, and finally a rainproof coat (like one at yesterday's Broadway shop for $170) that folds into a pad-like shape in a plastic bag that I tell an acquaintance (a cross between Richard Attenborough and Matt K. I'd waved to overseas and met again today) to put into my backpack, thinking he'll fold it into the PACK, but he smoothes it out and unzips the "backpad against the back" area and I say, "Fine, make it smooth and put this flat side against my back." And I'm all set to go.
1/25/95: 9:15AM: I have an opera ticket, but the cluster of old-lady ushers insist that my seat is SO bad that I have to give them a couple of extra dollars to get a BETTER seat, but one shows a small batch of us seats that are VERY high up, and actually in the RAIN, though there are large umbrellas and canvases stretched to try to prevent the viewers from getting wet. She puts my ticket down on the end seat of the next-last row, and when I try to get my stuff together, the binoculars slip and fall toward the wet rocks below, which causes her to gasp in disappointment, but I'd hooked the strap around my wrist, so I just have to reel them back in, unbroken. The stage is VERY far away, and some of the curtain effects in the dream are obviously fragments of the American Cinema curtains on the tape that I watched yesterday afternoon. There's a familiar phrase of music, but I think, "No, that's from Fledermaus," and not from the unknown new opera that I'm seeing now. After a bit, a floppy yellow curtain lowers just in front of my seat, but stops JUST above eye-level, so that ducking down we can all get a slit-view of the stage between the heads of the people below and the lower tattered edge of the curtain. Then there's a scene with a strange strobe-light effect where in ONE blink the stage is empty, in another blink there's a pirouetting ballerina center stage, and with another blink the stage is crowded with a leaping chorus of dancers and singers, rather like a cross between a circus, virtual reality, and a Meliés film. The figures are so tiny that I marvel at the size of the opera house, and I never seem to think to use my binoculars. Weird.
1/26/95: 9:15AM: 1) Bathing at 1221 Dietz: water into holes, BIG bathroom; Mom in bedroom. 2) SEXY-bodied guy (like in porno) over whom I run my hands SLOWLY.
1/27/95: 7:30AM: FLIES (following ROACHES and ANTS!) when I leave back door open---AGAIN 1221 Dietz---and kitchen is full of flies that Edgardo says will come to his BRAWN and bother him in the morning. He sprays and "bombs floor," and suddenly ALL are ON the floor and only HALF of it, and it seems possible to CONTINUE and flush the REST of them away in the simple act of spraying!
1/28/95: 10:30AM: I'm in bed with a black with a huge hard cock, and I squeeze the shaft so hard he cums continually. It was so good he gets hard again and cums a second time. Then he's entered a skinny woman and I rub my hands down HER body with a feigned show of enthusiasm that succeeds at creatively getting HIM excited again, though he's not QUITE rock hard by this time.
1/30/95: 10AM: A large group of coworkers have gone to lunch at an elegant Mexican restaurant, and I find to my horror I've got no SHIRT on under my old blue bathrobe! We sit at a number of tables and Burt W. starts pouring water from a HUGE, tall pitcher, refilling glasses already full. I'm having no wine so far. People raise hands to examine some technological gadget like a transceiver. A kid speaks secret things about his mom, who's present, and she's aroused when I slip my bathrobe down around my arms and she sees I'm wearing only an undershirt.
2/4/95: 7:25AM: WONDERFUL dream of "getting to know" Tom Skerritt-type lover (cooking, running finger up knee and patting it while driving) at country house in woods where one could get lost and not CARE what happened to the rest of one’s life, and wake to find there's a LOVELY fluffy snowfall outside, actually the FIRST of this unseasonably warm winter! And maybe the LAST, also!
2/9/95: 9AM: 1) John A. takes me to a door "just opposite" the entrance to STRAIGHT sex club and it's a GAY sex club. 2) I try to find it AGAIN, but go PAST it and find an S/M FANTASY club, with MORE doors and rooms and cubbyholes that lead OUT to a ferned stairway around a COMPLEX of playgrounds and amusement parks around a commercial factory building that I say are "around Main and Market, Mill and State" streets in AKRON. 3) As I start waiting for a TOUR bus with Larry B., and there looks like only a SINGLE seat in the BACK, but 3-4 people get on and I see 2-3 MORE seats and we may ALL fit in, and Larry looks ALL the way to the front and finds a free double-seat JUST behind the driver, but entree is through a slot SO narrow I have to take off my backpack and must talk and prepare and leave my GLASSES behind (as in dream 2, I was sleeping under a bed in a back room and when I gathered my clothes, I couldn't find one of my bedroom slippers, and I looked and looked and left and tried to go BACK for it and find the street that LED to the locale of dream 2) and turned back and FOUND my glasses among other stuff atop my bathrobe, but the slot to the seat had narrowed to about 4 inches and I really had to SQUEEZE to get through, but Larry had NO trouble doing it, so I could too.
2/10/95: 10AM: I'm traveling with (or I’m a member of---maybe based on the odd men and women in Jane Austen's Persuasion that I'm reading) a group of large, strange (and strangely costumed---the "mother" has huge swept-wings of white hair in an updo, enormous "gunboats" [to quote from Strange Snow last night---a term for breasts], under white lace, a black sash that probably tops an enormous corset, and flaring hips like a Cycladic goddess, in a tight Victorian skirt---and when she faints at the end, she can barely bend enough to fold up, and is back on her feet, recovering, almost instantly) women. Other old relatives are subjected to makeshift subterranean amusement-park rides of the roller-coaster sort, plunging terrified in a modified "bobsled" car on tracks that plunge through pipes---like both plumbing and intestines in look, color, and texture---at one point banked away from a curve with a supporting wire-frame wastebasket. I, as a kid, am watched by my older self as I try a simulation OFF a track and watch myself crashing into tunnel walls with jazzy computer-animated explosions. The old folks seem prisoners in some way (Engineers of Death in holocaust camps yesterday on TV?), though the family ties and sentiments of resistance are large. I sort of remembered we traveled (pleasurably) through many towns and countries together, delightfully manifesting our individualities for the enjoyment of the whole cortege---very 19th century in feeling.
2/11/95: 8:45AM: I'm at Columbia University, first in a dorm, where I move my paperback from the BOTTOM shelf to a TOP shelf and a day later find someone's taken it. I go to the library, barefoot, to look in the catalog to see if they have a copy I can Xerox, but it's crowded and I feel self-conscious. Watch a TV program asking for donations for St. John the Divine by the daughter of a famous man who, she says, "Stood naked with his member outlined by the input slot of the old IBM system," and SHE'S naked, only at times covering her breasts with her hands, the top part of her blond pubic hair visible for those who would like to freeze the screen and see the rest of her twat by raising up the bottom of the picture. She shows a chart that indicates that even small contributions are important. The family income of those who supply the lowest 1/3 of donations is less than $20,000/year, and the display looks like the numbers that the chimpanzee "read" on Scientific American Frontiers that I watched on tape last night. [VERY scribbled writing that I THINK I got right! It's astounding that I'm transcribing dreams starting at 1/26 as late as 3/14, which only indicates my "lost" late winter due to colds, television-tape viewing, and reading---not even THAT many hours with computer games. But I AM keeping up with the MAJOR dreams, aware of fragments that I brush aside when I'm too weary to jot down notes I won't be able to read when transcribing.]
3/1/95: 7AM: 1) I'm traveling with Mom, staying in the same room, and she wants something that I'd packed in my bag, and I unpack and turn out piles of clothing and lots of paper supplies (yes, I remember, she wanted TISSUES, and there's a box of Key Food facial tissues, and toilet paper, and paper napkins, all of which she'd asked me to pack for her) and many many large bottles of expensive fruit juice which are almost empty, but then I remember that she had some of them to drink last night, so they were probably mostly full when I packed them, but now they're mostly empty and I have a fleeting thought about the need for recycling---wherever we are. She calls me into the bathroom, where there's a row of three sinks that are quite sandy from the open windows, or maybe from the people who'd been there before us who haven't been cleaned up after, but she points with triumph to the boat-shaped bathtub that would accommodate at least three people, about 7x3 feet, but only about 2 feet deep, saying that we'd have to travel to a foreign country to get a tub this big. 2) I'm wandering outside the hotel, and see a female guide walking inside a cleft on an enormous slab of rock across a tiny stream from us, and I ask her how far this trail goes, and she implies it continues for miles until the frontier with the next country. Without transition I'm out the next morning before breakfast to look at this same trail, and take a crosscut between two slabs of rock to see a feeding place for small bright birds of striking red, green, and blue, darting quickly off when tourists get too close, but singing furiously and pecking at food placed to lure them into camera view, one female of a young couple patiently waiting with a videocam for the birds to come into view-filling close-up. I know that if I cut through the next cutoff, I'll come to the stream and the tilted volcanic slabs I'd seen before. 3) I'm in a shop with a bunch of grinning non-gringos, and one asks me if I have small peso coins that he'll change for the proper amount of dollars, since he needs change for the machines, and I go into my coin purse and find neat stacks of two-peso aluminum coins that I can exchange for a ten-peso US-quarter equivalent, and there are enough ones and threes to make another, and I sort through what's left, looking at the more silvery coin to see that it's a three-peso "old-style" coin with the silhouette of the country of Mexico on it, just as a currency cop sidles up to us with a smiling inquiry and the peon proves that he's doing exactly the proper currency for a legal transaction, rather than engaging in illegal black-market money-changing that could result in an instant arrest. The cop smiles tolerantly and keeps a distant eye on us. I'm being charmed by these three episodes in a foreign land, looking forward to more sightseeing, and wake to glance at the clock at 7:05AM, then piss, and decide to transcribe all this directly to the computer while it's still fresh, finishing at 7:28AM, having started at 7:15AM.
3/5/95: 5:30AM: 1) In Akron, Edward has lost a son, and he's in DRAG in a silk dress and I look at him and he begins to sob and I HOLD him and he tries strange thrusts atop me as we lie on a sofa. Then I start sobbing and he DOES comfort me. 2) In NYC there's rain and flooding and we're told to EVACUATE. I go to woman's john and find storm-calm john and broken helmet to duplicate my face (WHAT? I TRIED to read this, but this is the best I could do!), and I see that the river's NOT too high---as SOMEONE says, "Not over 10 cm high"---but as I walk back I see that MOST streets ARE flooded and most cars HAVE left, and we STILL don't know if we'll leave or try to stick it out, even IF "streets will be so filled with rubble you can't drive half a block without getting a blowout" would be true.
3/12/95: 9:30AM: 1) I'm in last day of school, with class plan on two xeroxed pages, and stare across a hallway to outside views, but this class doesn't START, and I leave, by complicated ways, and I'm back to search for the room, find a smaller one that's too interior, but someone's laid duffel bags across 4-5 seats, and I figure I'll NEVER go where I should go and give UP in despondent FRUSTRATION. 9:50AM: 2) In theater showing cartoon a) guy in front of me sits to the LEFT when he glances back and sees me craning my head to the right to see around him, b) Express package deliverer to the right says "Zolnarsak" and I ask girl about it and she ransacks school and purchase (towels, shirts) bags to try to help me as c) department-store storage guys load aisles and SEATS with HUGE cartons of paper towels and toilet paper---are they trying to use this THEATER for STORAGE?
3/14/95: 9:50AM: I'm watching some kind of etiquette lesson on how to behave before the princess, who's a close-big-eyed blond in an enormous white dress, and a puffy-cheeked lady is pulling her rubbery face about, describing how you must smile and nod, because, of course, "Almost everyone isn't permitted to say a WORD to her, don't you know," concluding with a puffy-cheeked smirk that causes all the viewers to burst into embarrassed laughter.
3/15/95: 9:20AM: I'm working at IBM, AGAIN, and in an office where there are many new guys working, some of them as my aides, even though I just have a regular desk, and about the third time I go to my desk, I get the idea that THEY all have squeezed-together desks on the OUTSIDES of the central aisles in which their superiors have MORE ROOM, about 6 "outside" desks to 3 "inside" desks with their attendant chair and leg-room. I've applied for some sort of position, or submitted a proposal for a project, on which I've gotten the RESPONSE, but as part of my submittal there were two lists of questions that I answered or gave an opinion on, and the response seems ONLY to be a list of answers I SHOULD have given, or those that were preferred, WITHOUT any specific "yes or no" answer. So I have to find the original questions, which one of my aides supposedly has. He searches and can't find them, and when I try to find him again, he's not at his desk. In searching MY desk, I find a large shoulder bag in the biggest drawer, and as I rummage in it, there's a plastic box the size of a cassette tape in which there's a large-bite-size piece of FLUORITE: the plastic box is HOT to the touch, and the fluorite GLOWS in the dark, shedding light on surrounding objects with a Disney-like "glitter-dust" of illumination. I show it to the Chinese fellow at the desk next to mine, and he seems relatively unimpressed, even when I say, "Of course, you have to expect that, since it's fluorite." Then I seem to recall that my folder for the response might be in my TOP drawer, the push-in one, and I look there, but it's not there; however it’s in the drawer BELOW that, but I've left the responses at my aide's desk, so I have to go BACK there, and am just looking at some of the enigmatic notations when the buzzer goes and I have to trot down in my bathrobe to pick up another index, glad to have the work but sad to have had my interesting dream interrupted, even though it WAS 1:35AM when I went to bed, having gotten up at 8:20AM to pee and gone back to sleep quickly. [Just recalculated that, in a 78-character line, there are 13 five-letter words and attendant spaces, which I then reduced to 12 for random lines between and extra-long end-of-line spaces, multiplied by 58 lines per page for 696 rounded up to 700 words per page, for 42,000 words so far in THIS part of the DREAM chronicle (which started 11/8/92, so that's 28 months---should I try for 840 days for an average of 50 words per day? That's only about four lines/day, not good as an AVERAGE, though I'm sure some dream-days ARE as little as four lines, since 1/26/95 has only TWO lines---I'm also sure there are some two-page and maybe even three-page dreams), which is a small book ALREADY. And recently I've only been keeping the STRIKING dreams, since it's pretty clear that I'm not going to be so famous that this'll be wanted as a BOOK to explain my fantastic life. But the inertia continues, and even if I DECIDED to stop, I'm sure there'd come a dream that I'd have to include in NOTEBOOK because it was so spectacular, or evocative of thoughts or actions, that I wouldn't be able to neglect recording it. So this is THAT blather which I chose to include to get me to the bottom of the page so that I could print this out without wasting paper, before going on to the rest of the day, paying bills AGAIN!]
3/19/95: 9:55AM: I'm in final dress rehearsal of a play, playing drag-daughter of "famous" drag-mother, and I stop to ask a directorial PANEL what my ATTITUDE to her is: awe? humor? respect? disdain? And finally they DEMAND I say my lines RIGHT and I say, "My script's in the next room," but as I enter it, it's been CHANGED: there's a funny two-layer curtain (like a two-foot-high shower curtain) across the back of my dresser/desk which changes the contents of its drawers and what was on its top, and I fumble through everything and can't SEE the particular print of the folded script that I know I left there. I even find myself thinking: "How awful, my worst dream is now a REALITY."
3/23/95: 9:20AM: I'm ordering breakfast at a steam table, putting cheese on my grits arranged around some young woman's bacon on two fried eggs in a circle, and she won't have her part because of my cheese, and the waitress says to me sarcastically, "That'll be $10, please," though the food is supposedly free in any quantity, and I say caustically, "So you'll waste a $7.50 egg and bacon because I'll not pay for $2.50 grits?" I look to see what else is available, and what I first take as three or four large rolls turns into loaves of thinly sliced bread, of which I reach in and take two, finding it's one white slice and one wheat slice. I sit at a table and make the entire dish into a sandwich between the two slices of bread, which have suddenly grown to the size and thickness of a hamburger bun to accommodate the whole plate of breakfast, and as I'm eating and reading, a HUGE green-eyed horsefly sits on an uneaten corner of my sandwich. When I try to brush it away, it doesn't move, even when I fan the air quite close to it, and when it does move, I WIPE it away with some goo from the sandwich, so that the fly sticks to the side of my thumb. I try to scrape it off on the side of the wooden table, and find to my disgust when I bring my hand back that almost half the body and some sort of transparent hood over the eyes has stuck to my thumb, and I scrape it again, worrying about the eggs laid on my sandwich or the germs from the fly's feet that have been left on my food and wake with a vivid memory but not as much disgust as I might have feared, so that it really didn't seem like a nightmare, only silly.
3/26/95 (typed 4/1): 8AM: I'm to roach-spray someone's apartment, take 3-4 guys with me, do two MAIN rooms and side bedroom/storage rooms and a high HUGE furniture-packed storeroom, and Ken sweeps dusty floor, saying, "Thank goodness it's only DUSTY, and not ratty or roachy," and my spackle-dispenser-type spray container is nearly empty as we swing into final wing and a door to understairs opens and a bunch of black servants, followed by a large older man in dignified Southern-belle drag, obviously the owner of the premises, sweeps in and I brandish the now-broken-in, empty can to show I SHOULD have been here, and wait to see if he's annoyed that I have FRIENDS with me to do the job. In the dream I cough at the dust and when I wake up I'm coughing still.
3/30/95: 1) 9:45AM: HAD been dreaming something interesting when the buzzer went at 7:47AM(!) and the mailman deposited my huge box of hanging bookshelves, and then I got back to sleep before Susan woke me again at 9:35 (to cancel, of course, today's trip to the Cole exhibit), interrupting a VERY detailed and colorful dreamscape: riding with two women through gothic back roads to get to a new nudie gathering in the country (maybe in Arcadia---which play and countryside-set beauty Charles and I saw last night). It's dark, and the headlights first picked out blobs of color at an intersection, and I said, "Oh, dahlias" (again from the play, even though as an afterthought I knew they were purple-tipped white hydrangea), and then played over yellow-rutted unpaved roads leading through a labyrinth of woods (Alice in Quantumland waiting to be indexed?) posted with necessary signs to show we were on the right track (maybe also the track of the Duke Gardens, scheduled for Sunday?). Then without transition we were inside, moving around and through groups of attractive naked men AND women trying to find the registration desk. As I stepped over a trio of youngish women, they gently crunched my genitals through my jeans, and I glanced from side to side, taking note of the locations of particularly humpy gentlemen of a certain size. Other rooms seemed to offer food, and maybe there were even gym-associated shower and steam facilities which would make this an exciting new venue, though now that I think of it, it would be sort of a pain to have to rely on someone else's automobile to get there each time, but it was an experience that I was looking forward to when the phone rang and jolted me out of the springtime freshness of the country air and the delicate flesh-tones of well-lighted orgy-rooms on bodies sprawled in appealing positions and interlockings. [So now it's 10AM, time for breakfast, package-opening, and museum exhibits before the restaurant C.T. tonight finishes off my birthday celebrations!] 2) 11AM: Remembered a fragment from the first dream: I'm rooting around in my refrigerator, knowing there are eggs in here somewhere, and I look under packages of cold cuts and salad ingredients to find an open container with about eight eggs remaining of the dozen, but most have been knocked in at the top so that the whites have flowed down through cracks in the side and permanently welded them to the carton, and even some of the yolks are broken and leaking out. I pick out one and smell it and there's no overwhelming sulfurous stench, so they might still be good if I can pick out the shell bits and salvage the still-liquid parts and maybe make an omelet (like the one I was momentarily tempted to have last night before ordering the hamburger at Diane's?). [This came to me as Pope was giving me my birthday-chart on the phone.]
4/1/95: 9:50AM: I'm sitting in a subway station with a woman to my left. When she leaves, I see some gloves and a coat on the seat to my right, and for a moment think I should pick them up and run after her with them, but then it occurs to me that I was BETWEEN the two seats, so she could hardly have left HER possessions on the OTHER SIDE of me. John A. shows up and grumbles that we have to subway downtown to get to the theater, and I say, "There's a downtown subway waiting across the station, all we have to do is rush to catch it," but he responds glumly, "But we're going to the Chicago Theater, which is down on the EAST side and 22nd Street," and I suggest that since we're already at 34th Street, we just might be able to WALK. As we get up to go, I try on the coat from the seat next to me, asking if it's at all wearable, but I look down and quickly see a stain on the front, like a leather scuffing, and can see my right thigh through the material since the lining on the inside right has been torn and the coat material itself has worn thin. "The lining's torn," John wearily points out, so I take it off and leave it. There's another person waiting whom I can't identify, nor do I have the slightest idea what we were going to see at the Chicago Theater downtown.
4/4/95: 5:50AM: Huge, detailed, step-by-step rush (with hurting leg) to catch an elevated train that Rita's already on and (hopefully) holding door for me.
4/5/95: 10:10AM: Kevin B. (I did see him at Village Playwrights last night) is staying at "my" place, which is a combination of 1221 Dietz in that he's staying in the bedroom that my mother had had there and some place like the top rear apartment at 35 E. 61st Street with its unplumbed dirty corners, but I only go into his room after he's gone for the day. And WHAT DO I FIND! First, in the middle of the room, a dried-but-bloody carcass about the size of a deer: an outer layer of matted fur and sinew, an inner layer of bone and putrefying organs, between which an ENORMOUS (I mean 8-9 inches long!) beetle-shaped scorpion-deadly insect is burrowing and eating fiercely, among hordes of ants and handsful of maggots (like the maggoty carcass on the trail on Sunday in New Jersey?). When I start to chase insects away, larger creatures that I'm amazed to identify as otter and pangolin---and doves, pigeons, and a few other kinds of birds---scurry away. Wet-wash is hanging, a lit candle is under a curtain, colored boxes fill the bathroom, and a moldering carpet grows onions.
4/14/95: 9:40AM: 1) I'm tracing "arcs" on paper, thinking about which direction to follow them, and most seem to be "determined," but I look at a large one, an arc with more degrees than a semicircle, and see that it should be followed counterclockwise, and extrapolate that discovery to a smaller arc in the lower-right-hand corner of the paper, and someone looking over my shoulder (as a tutor) congratulates me and tells me that the method of handling the smaller "will be known as the Zolnerzak arc" in my honor. 2) I'm in a plane trying to fasten my seat belt, and it seems not to catch properly, though the cover of the belt is a flexible piece of tape that can be bent around the clasp to fool anyone looking superficially that the belt is closed when it isn't. I try and try, wanting to keep my left-hand window-seat without having to move, and when the Chinese steward comes past, he glances at me and moves back up the aisle. As the plane's engines rev (when I wake I find that the bed is "vibrating slightly," from some mechanism downstairs? which might have influenced the vibration I felt), I look up the aisle and see from the steep slope, and the small number of passengers, that this plane is only about twice as large as a DC-3, and I wonder (since I know it's a last-minute substitute plane) if anyone really KNOWS that this plane has the range and fuel to actually cross the Atlantic? And if it hits any weather conditions that cause turbulence, will my seat belt hold me safely? But I feel "wearied" and decide that I'll probably sleep through most of the flight and there'll be no problems with me anyway.
4/26/95: 8:45AM: 1) I'm revisiting a household (Rita's?) that I haven't seen in a long time, and after petting an affectionate kitten under a table, I see a small animal writhing in expectation of greeting me, and when it comes closer it seems to be a combination of a mole and a spider, with a small furry body that it hunches down to be scratched on the back of, but then it has a kind of soft beak that I stroke and it shivers with delight and oozes a sort of yellow snot down the front of my hand that's completely embracing it. 2) John A. is chatting with a friend with his arm in a sling, and I can see that his left hand has been amputated, leaving a tiny wrist-point at the tip of the stump. I'm obliged to stick a pin through the stump to help attach some piece of cloth or article of clothing, but I get the prick too near the tip and it slices through the delicate scab-like ending and it begins to ooze watery yellow pus, but by this time it's so disconnected from John that he's not there to react in any way to the exudate. From Shelley's endocarditis call? [Concerning which, when I follow up this morning, she's been RELEASED from LICH.]
5/4/95: 8:25AM: 1) I'm watching a small group of South American Indians as they clear away the brink of a very high waterfall they use for some ethnic purpose (like mining garnets or washing ceramic figures): they "close" the falls each year, so that when they return and want to "put it back into operation," they must dislodge the lip-cover in two-foot-square sections, partly over the brink, and then tumble the macadam-like substance over the falls into the gorge below. They start by moving sideways, all five or six of them, along the lip, holding onto a large log, which I surmise they carry to steady themselves so they won't be tempted by the vertigo of the brink to fall over the sides, though when they're dislodging the squares they seem to have no fear of approaching the edge alone. I watch as some huge rocks leap into space and splash in the river below, which is shallow so I can still see the tops of some of the rocks yards out from the near shore, and wish I'd brought my video camera so I could record the fall, time it, and thus calculate how high the falls actually are by the time of fall to the splash below. Even at the end, though, no actual water flows over the falls, so there may be another step to their yearly "opening" of the energy-source to their maintaining efforts. 2) I'm in on the climax of some grand festival, though this is more like an event in some stadium like the Rubber Bowl, and I've moved back a few rows to get a better view. There was a segment where the guy next to me tried to get me to masturbate him with my feet and legs below the level of the audience's view, and I tried doing so, thinking that his attentions to my chest and body made me seem more attractive to the crowd, even though he was old and fat himself, but he never did get off and the segment faded. Part of the "favors" of the festival was a sort of hat which was "readied" by taking off two panels on either side, revealing a "parade float" or "stage set" inside comprised of miniature figures, backdrops, set-pieces, curtains, and swatches of gaudy fabric which could be composed in a number of ways into a miniature tableau inside a hat which seemed to grow increasingly large. When we were about to "leave our seats," there was a scurry of passing hats back and forth to correspond to the seats we left temporarily after "dressing our hat-sets." Then it switched to a point in the dream where I was braced against another precipice, still inside the stadium, worrying about the slight purchase my heels held on a narrow brink covered with slippery silks, and over this brink I was trying to disentangle two enormous billowing swatches of material: one a fraying plastic-like cord similar to my bedroom window-shade pull, only with a thickness of a little under two feet and a length of dozens of feet, so that the end-length fell into the precipice for a long time and then "straightened" with a tug on my precarious footing, threatening to tug me into the depths below. After I finally got the "cord-swatch" disentangled, there remained a very slightly looped length of rust-and-silver glittery metallic-luster veil or scarf, three or four yards wide in a bunch, and fifty or sixty feet long, which swirled gently in the wind---I knew I wanted to take this home, but I had no idea what I would do with it apart from draping it somehow from the center of my ceiling into a fabric-tent as I've often fantasized for my living room or bedroom, to add color and movement and dazzle. When I finally got it untangled, it seemed to fold into a somewhat more manageable packet that I could carry, but there were still too many objects I wanted to take back home that I needed someone to help me carry. I tried to enlist various hefty Spanish-tinted women to help me, but most refused, though some few seemed to be willing to cart objects at least back to the bus that was waiting some hundreds of feet away in the parking lot. I had some sort of tote bag or backpack into which I managed to cram more than I had thought possible, and some of the other things, like the large green-knobbed presentation box or computer component which started about three feet on a side which gradually diminished to about the size of a computer keyboard, and another box which I thought would have taken a separate person a special trip, which shrank until it fit neatly as a single parcel under the "keyboard." And then I woke about 8:10AM and lay thinking over the dream, and then had to get up to finish this by 8:45AM so that I could watch Forrest Gump before going over to Pope's by 11:30 to watch Hoop Dreams at Spartacus's. [Now to SHIT!]
5/5/95: 11AM: Woke early, then drifted off to sleep to reawaken at 10:30AM with the vivid memory, possibly Olympic Game-thoughts inspired, of being part of a welcoming "pointer" in a Danish pavilion, being handed a plastic folder that fit into my pointing fist, saying "Keep to the left, please," which I first by mistake hold in my left hand but am told I must hold in my right hand, but as I look at the maps and directions enfolded in the plastic, it becomes slightly wrinkled and moist from the heat of the surroundings, and I think I should ask for a fresh one before the crowds arrive. I'm the last of a long line of these "pointers," and I figure they must be expecting enormous crowds who'll be gentled by human directional signs. A bit later, having moved into a souvenir shop in a corner of an ill-demarked (in my head) building, I'm crowded against a showcase with a few sophisticated ladies when the entire room seems to tilt slightly, and then more extremely, and we all think in a panic "The building's not been tested and it's falling OVER!" I have no idea how far up in the building we are, and tense my body and close my eyes and try to think positive thoughts about striking the bottom in a cushioned way, or out of the way of most of the debris, but the room comes to a halt at about a 45° angle and that dream-sequence ends. Then our "rehearsal" must be over, because I find myself going down a seldom-trafficked stairway past what looks like a hyper-modern hotel suite: the door is arched, almost Moorishly rounded, and the entire suite looks to be carved out of yellow-orange marble with white veinings, and there are colorful bedcovers in enormous-flower patterns, velvet-upholstered Regency chairs, dark-carved cabinets and dressers, and swatches of silks and brocades covering probably false windows, since we seem to be slightly underground---the whole lit with floor lamps and table lamps all turned on. I peek through the door but don't see any sign of occupancy, so I take the chance to enter the rooms to look more closely at the strangely rounded room-corner design, but in a distant bedroom I see a workman or a guard moving, so I exit quickly and find myself on a sandy bank, having to clamber up tree roots to exit the area, and the guard comes up behind me, and though I know he doesn't speak English, I make some remark like, "I don't remember it was this difficult to ENTER this place," and he mumbles some good-natured response. We find ourselves climbing a tree, old and rotten and semi-burned black with the bark flaked away, and I'm looking around the vista for the canals and streams and pavilions stretching vaguely out into the distance, when suddenly the tree, overburdened by the group of people gathering below me to look at the view, starts leaning out of perpendicular and falling toward the ground, and I grit my teeth against the impact but the roots seem to be holding the tree into a gentle descent and we're placed on the ground with the impression of having jumped from about three feet in the air. Almost instantly I'm distracted by a police-vehicle screaming past on the river: it had been a pavilion of three or four connected rooms, and the two outlying rooms are whipping back and forth in the wake of the speeding boat like badly tied dinghies, and there's a rough microphoned voice shouting sharply, "Move out of the way" to other river or canal traffic as this official (and officious) boat charges to whatever fire or accident or theft it's been called to control. I wake and think various thoughts which I'll write into NOTEBOOK. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 5/5/95).
5/13/95: 3:45AM [typed at 5:49AM!]: 1) I'm clearing out my current refrigerator, and in the bottom crisper-drawer, way in the back, almost afloat in defrost-water, I find three baggies of VERY old steaks that I'd put "to save" ages ago, with addresses on the baggies from DC, and they're so rotten there's not even a DEBATE about throwing them out. Then I'm in a bedroom with wads of old material that I was thinking of throwing away, they too being wet from some kind of cleaning-out process I'm doing, but I see that they're really very nice colors, and I separate out a pale sea-green fabric that turns out to be a curtain or a very light drape, with intact seams, and I shake it in the air to unwrinkle it and partially dry it, and lay it over the canopy of my bed to dry it completely, and decide to repeat the process with a light violet swatch of cotton material, and will save pieces in rose and white too. 2) Look out through a theater curtain to see some rich man's SON looking appreciatively at 18-year-old Rita as a ballerina, knowing he ALSO sat rapt in the first row for a cute MALE dancer who had possibilities both as a performer and as a sex-object, and I figure he's a budding CRITIC, sitting there at attention with his head of graying hair at only seventeen years of age, rather than being possibly gay. I try to get back to sleep, but ideas course through my head so that I write another note transcribed into NOTEBOOK, and I've been worried about getting to the YMHA by 7:30AM tomorrow morning, but I can't get back to sleep at ALL, so here it is at 5:58AM on Saturday morning, light out with birds singing for half an hour already, and I'll clean the apartment so that John can start transcribing TODAY while I'm out at the ASI lunch and MAN tonight, and can eat breakfast soon since the pasta from 7PM last night is long gone from my digestive system and I'm now at page-bottom.
5/16/95: 6:45AM: I'm watching some kind of church service, and Mom (this is NOT "death full moon" [Pope told me some old wives' tale about someone dying that you thought about or dreamt about during the night of the "death full moon"]---that was YESTERDAY or even SUNDAY's dream) wants me to leave, but I go to the next-last pew and stand clutching kneeler top in front of four kids, and she TUGS me into middle of aisle but I'm staying through a review of a STAMP showing HITLER leaving church, saying it was AFTER he was exposed, but all of SWABIA supported him and then I RETURN to church from "stamp-series" and Mom and LEAVE---for all I care, I can take CAB back to hotel while she (at 10:45AM) can have BREAKFAST if she needs to. And it's FOGGY out at 6:55AM!
5/20/95: 5:45AM: I'm at an S/M meeting and crowd is VERY small until 8:25PM (it started at 7:30) when leather-clad hunks arrive en masse. The president of the club gets me to wear a backpack-like pad that he attaches to my back with SKEWERS as a form of torture! But the skewers only GRAZE my skin and I stand up to show him it wasn't REALLY attached to my back, and he says he has to try it again, sharpening skewers. "You'll probably puncture a protruding lung lobe and I'll bubble and die," I JEST, and he replies, "That's what I'm counting on for a good HOLD." Sensuously I pass a turd and ask for his private john, covered in paper towels, and start to PISS out water and I wake and have to urinate. I end with a note I can't make out, something like "making friends."
5/22/95: 9:15AM: I'm at my computer and try a CD but the screen fades and something's wrong, and notice that monitor is LOWER and pointing slightly DOWNWARD toward the keyboard and see that someone's STOLEN my Bernoulli disk-unit! I look around the living room in panic and see the VCRs are missing too, but the TV and other stuff is still there. Someone pushed open my unlocked door last night and ROBBED me! Out "the back door at 1221 Dietz" and there in the driveway is my green chair with seat cushions torn apart and BURNT. I look to left and see flocks of small sparrows flying across the sky (from TV and Nature last night?) and landing in droves in our and neighbors' backyards. Wake at 9:15, feeling depressed, and hear John tapping away at computer and am relieved at the feeling that it was just a DREAM caused by my worry about leaving my door unlocked so he can enter to start typing at 9AM each morning.
5/29/95: 10:30AM: [start typing 10:38AM]: ENORMOUSLY conversational and circumstantial and intellectual dream: I'm (again) a STUDENT in a school, and my project is with mica and stone and mineral samples on drawings---I'm late with the project and it should be finished at the end of class today, but (as I later explain) I thought I'd have more time DURING the day to finish, but everything took more involvement than I thought, so I'm not really FINISHED, though it turns out that I actually did things BACKWARD: looking at the diagram to "see" that the square chips at 1, 2, 4, 5 of figure a): [REPRODUCE] had to BE mica, and the diadem on the head at 3 had to BE a stone, rather than looking at the whole DIAGRAM and "reasoning" that the special qualities of the stones DEMANDED that the arms be "represented" by mica and the head "by" the stone, rather than the other way around. Then I hadn't even really STARTED dealing with project of figure b): [REPRODUCE] except in my "backward" way having already "identified" the stones and amassed them loosely on the diagram, so that I didn't have to SELECT them anymore. My teacher is a small, intense woman who reminds me of someone I can't quite place, though somewhat like Jane Roberts without the "dark" quality: my teacher is VERY bright, dark, pretty, well-spoken, and somehow inclined to think the best of me, even when I confess to the WORST possible way of thinking about my projects or presenting my ideas, and even though I try to "snow" her with my "good" reasons for doing stupid things. The conversation in the front of the classroom is mostly exhausted with the critique described above, but in the transitionless second part of the dream we're in a car, continuing the discussion in which I'm trying to impress her with my general knowledge, reading, and acceptability for a passing grade in her course, but now she has a male friend of even MORE stupendous and off-putting knowledge, which makes me even MORE desperate to impress BOTH of them: they ask if I've read The Triumph of Reason by some female philosopher who (again) reminds me of (the writings of) Jane Roberts, and I say I only started with Oversoul Seven, and they react like I might not even have cited the author's actual WORKS, and I frantically try to change the subject by saying that I'd ENCOUNTERED Seth on my single visit to Jane Roberts in Elmira, which rather impresses them, but then, misjudging some tangent of their conversation, interrupt to say, "I met Ramtha too," but they shake their heads between them, confess that they hadn't heard of Ramtha, and are beginning to conclude that I have NO idea what they're (or I'm!) talking about. Somehow the "man between" has gotten OUT of the car, and has been running behind for a few yards, and then is sitting BEHIND me in the car, now on a darkening, possibly icy, descending mountain road along a river like the Hudson upstate, and we pass someone on an outward swinging curve which, HAD it been icy, would have plunged us off the road, down the hill, into the river; and when the guy mentions, "I confess to liking the dramatic," I almost shout that that CURVE was a good example of the dramatic, but it seems not to have affected them with the same idea of danger, and again I feel inadequate and strive to come up with some other incident (had I told them I'd been to Antarctica?) that might impress them personally even though it had NOTHING to do with the current topic of conversation. AGAIN, even in the DREAM, I conclude (even verbally, hoping to impress them with my "artless" candor) that I'm not NEARLY as intelligent as I once thought I was, yet they gamely accord me the mundane excuse that it's a sign of GREATER intelligence, especially when older and more EXPERIENCED, for someone to say they DON'T know much, rather than to continue to insist on one's breadth and depth of knowledge. But nothing I say seems to INDICATE that to me, and I'm reminded of Alvin S.'s comment when I said, "Oh, I TOLD you I was only free Thursday for rehearsal (for my part as the Cardinal of New York)? I didn't know I was that smart": "Oh, you're pretty smart." Many other CONVERSATIONAL ploys I've forgotten now, both in the classroom and in the car, but it's now 11AM and I'm still dressed in bathrobe and slippers for my "early-morning" direct dream transcription.
6/5/95: 10:25AM: I'm in some much-younger person's apartment, playing a video game with a floating "Sargon" that one gets from a CD-album by a current singing group like the Moody Blues, and all kinds of adventures are possible while listening to the music and playing with the adventure-game framework. I remark, "It's rather like getting stoned and listening to the early Moody Blues' work," and they don't really understand what I mean. Almost as part of this apartment is a food counter which has illustrations of the foods served on posters above the counters like icons on a ribbon strip, and I'm recommended to get the "special frank," which is pictured only as words above an icon of something that looks very much like Polish kielbasa, and I figure this is the better special-order choice, now at 5:30PM, for the dinner-service which will start at 6PM, and the place is going to be jammed, so I'm glad I have my reservation in early. This is all probably influenced by my concern about the itinerary of the trip with Charles starting the day after tomorrow, about eating in Akron, and returning to the scenes of my childhood for a week. There seemed to be many more colorful computer-details of the game in my dream, but I don't remember them now, and I want to transcribe other dreams. [When I finish those, I'm so near the bottom of the page I fill this out with other influences: cooked chicken yesterday to finish THAT up before leaving, and find the last bit of kielbasa I have to cook up so it won't go bad during my week away, and it passes through my mind this might be the LAST dream transcribed if anything bad happens on my driving-trip to Akron this week.]
6/6/95: 7AM: Two gay sex performers are shaving and checking their semi-flaccid cocks for bruises and rub-abrasions, allowing them to stiffen or relax as they fondle and examine the edges of their cock-heads, the sides of large veins, under the foreskins, and the back of their meatuses. I watch it as if they were in a TV documentary, and I'm interested and want it to go on and on, but I wake and it ends; drat.
6/15/95: 9:38AM: Wake at 9:15, tired from the climax to an elaborate dream: I'm some kind of railroad assistant whose main job seems to be filling with water the thin radiators on the front of the steam engines. I take one radiator off and make a kind of a joke of drinking from the central inlet to the unusually light amalgam of turns and twists, rather like a funnel cake. Then I go back to the faucet to fill it completely and return to find the entire train backing out of the station without its radiator. Obviously, I have to get to the radio station to get the operators to broadcast the news of the missing radiator to the next station up the line: I have no idea how critical the piece is to the operation of the engine, what indicators they might have in the cab (besides the obvious: temperature) to tell them not that the heat is not being cooled but the REASON for the lack of cooling, and whether there are even replacement units at each station up the line, or how often the train is scheduled to stop (whether it's a local or express). I double back through the crowd, realizing I have a complex U-shaped route to travel to get to the radio station, and the first part goes fairly easily until I come to a pair of stairways, both of which look as if they're under construction: the one on the left has no railings and looks more like a trestle for a train rather than a pedestrian stairway, so I choose the one on the right, which looks from a distance like it's missing four or five consecutive risers, but when I actually get half the way up, I find that there are rough-hewn railway sleepers loosely positioned so that a careful climber like me doesn't have any real difficulties climbing to the top. As I get near the end, my progress slows to the agonizing "try to hurry but can't move fast" characteristic of nightmares, and I seem to be moving through an atmosphere of mud or syrup that impedes every attempt at speed. Finally I reach the tiny stairway up which is located one of two entrances to the radio shack, am happy to find the door unlocked, but am greeted by three operators who seem to be in the middle of their relief: they're bright-eyed with drink, eager to include me in the conversation, and seemingly uninterested in technical details. I'm presented with a cup from which to drink and a snack to eat, and I'm engrossed by the blue eyes of the youngest apprentice, standing across from me and seemingly entirely interested in everything about me. I'd like to pursue this adventure, but in a long-awaited lull in the conversation I say, "I have to report something." Talk stops and everyone looks at me with amusement, and I say, "I'm supposed to fill the radiators for the engines before they leave, but one left before I could put a full one on. Can you report this to them?" I'd taken great pains to remember the departure time, but realized halfway there I didn't know what TRACK the train had left from, and I hoped there weren't two departures scheduled for the same time. Rather like my relatives and friends the last two days reacting to my "dreadful" week with my mother, they made light of my "mistake" and implied that the radiators were largely ornamental, didn't carry that much water (so that the entire absence wouldn't really be noticed), didn't protect any vital element by their presence, and would be routinely checked for any absence at the next station, which wasn't too far away, and they were usually missing anyway. Without transition I was out on a village street, lots of people gathered as if for a fair, and under one tree was an enormous jagged-limbed branch containing about a third of the foliage of the tree, looking like it had been torn off by a windstorm and not yet removed, and the rest of the foliage was gently dropping some sort of seedpod coverings that littered with street with delicate green. Then I was in the air, passing a second tree somewhat like the first, except that every possible leaf was covered with a delicate fuzz which the wind was blowing into streamers in the quiet air, almost like a stationary fireworks display of sparks of color, and I wondered what kind of tree would produce such a spectacular growth-phase (which I guess stems from the dandelion-like fluff from unidentified trees that totally filled the air as we drove into Akron and during Marion's and my drive through the Akron suburbs on Sunday). [Finish typing now at 9:56AM.]
6/16/95: 8:05AM: Obviously influenced by my downloading less than 7 hours ago programs that will let me see the graphics on WWW, I'm looking at the innards of a computer with the view of installing some physical component which is represented by a stiff-paper mockup with red-inked connections, resistances, capacitances, screws, and other information that I don't yet understand. I suspect there are manuals (with inadequate indexes as described in the 70+ messages from INDEX-L that I skimmed through last night) but I don't actually see them anywhere. A couple of people are trying to help me, but I understand marginally more than they do, so I can explain more to them than they can to me, yet the whole thing isn't fitting together yet: has the mockup been pushed out of shape? which components have to be connected BEFORE other components? and there's the suspicion that I have to get some sort of "basic functioning" operational before I can ADVANCE to more complex functioning that others seem to be hinting that I should be aiming for FIRST. There's another fragment later that involves my coming up to my "back door," on a tree-surrounded back porch: right next to the door lies a small stack of items which the mailman has delivered while I was out (in Akron?) (or is THIS meant to be in Akron?), and there are pages for indexes I'm working on, computer components in solid little cubes that might relate to the previous dream, and little gift or sweepstakes offerings that I can't wait to get inside to unwrap. Though there was a general air of frustration about the FIRST part of the dream, the promise and anticipation engendered by the LAST part of the dream tickled me.
6/17/95: 8AM: I'm doing some kind of Actualism session, and someone asks me to explain "enlightening awareness," and I describe it in the following bizarre way: extend along your lines of awareness, say, forward, and bring back the line of awareness and CLEAN it of all the knots and crud and presuppositions from that direction, and then do the same backward, and upward, and downward, and to each side, and then extend that in a sphere around you---and I realize that I haven't done EXACTLY what was wanted, but the group seems content and doesn't seem to mind---maybe they even enjoy---my explanation.
6/22/95: 7AM: I'm caught by police in OTHER person's room, odd keys found in pocket for MY room, and I WAKE to CONTINUE excuses and apologies and unvoiced protestations. Irked by Pitney-Bowes call, thinking it might be Edgardo.
7/6/95: 9:50AM: Playing rummy with an ick like Larry B., with a folder of "workers and servants, generals and corporals," etc., and MY idea of PAYING chips for an array of three-by-four hieroglyphic-like card-configurations.
7/11/95: 7:44AM: 1) I guess inspired by Shelley and the busful of children on Monday, I dream of Bernice surveying, cajoling, and photographing a group of adults who are the final ten jurors on the O.J. Simpson case, and children who have been allowed to be in the jury room because they are dependent on their sole parents, who are jurors. Everyone is talking or sleeping or getting ready for the day's hearings as Bernice tries to do her duties AND show me around. 2) I'm being taken up to the 30th floor of the tallest building in Pittsburgh to be shown the A-line apartment, one of the most expensive of the city, and I think I might be able to find 5-15 people to share it with as I look down on floor plans (inspired from my staring at the map of the gardens and dining areas of the Beard House last night?) that seem to include dining for about 20 people, and enormous public rooms surrounded by plate-glass windows looking out over the entire city, and we're in an ELEVATOR that's a modified amusement-park ride that soars around the outside of the building as it mounts to the rooftop level, affording views of the insides of all the luxury apartments at the top of this internationally-known architecturally unique building. 3) We're somewhere along the coast of India or Bhutan, looking for a place named Mona or Mone, and I'm joking with someone to look in the INDEX rather than try to find its location on the map itself, and someone like Susan is NOT amused by my constant nagging on that point. I get an indication that it might be a small island way up the coast, and we're looking at a crowded ferryboat interior that would furnish pretty miserable accommodations for a 3-4 day trip to this out-of-the-way destination, and finally I survey a colorful, pixel-perfect, detailed map from a spy satellite of the ice-covered islands with oriental names, with a legend "This area has been requested not being shown in detail but we know there's a school and various factories too."
7/15/95: 1) 9AM: I'm playing George in The Madness of King George in a READTHROUGH with the BOOK, and I REFUSE to go ON to MEMORIZE it all. 2) 10AM: I'm working on a LONG IQ test, using a dictionary to find EXACT meaning of a term which is NOT in the "Helpful Tips" section, which has FEW subjects, like an encyclopedia for teenagers, and it's 4:20 and I'm only about half through and finishing up at 5PM---should I quickly look ahead for EASY answers?
7/27/95: 9AM: 1) Doubtless influenced by Palliser's Betrayals reading yesterday, I'm high on a cliff (in summer, though; in Betrayals it was in the midst of a winter snowstorm), searching for a way down. Below I can see the stream that I must cross to get back "home," and at a narrow part there are three gray boulders that would seem to provide a very easy stepping-bridge across, so all I have to do is get DOWN there. Think about this, but it's really more a PICTURE than a DREAM, because later 2) I'm in a castle (maybe like my forecast for what the castle in the book will be when they get DOWN from the cliff) with a minor part in a play, except that my script is in three parts, one of which is obviously just a summary or cover page; another part on thick yellow paper has been torn in half since it seems clearly to be useless to me in my part; and the third part comprised two or three sheets of different size, color, thickness, and typography: one of which is more a layout of scenes than anything like a verbal script, another page doesn't seem to have my part name, which is something like "Mulch" or "Monck", on it at all, and another which is so complicated, written in sections in different orientations, some in handwriting, some typed, some printed in Gothic or Germanic characters, that I can't make any sense out of it. The play is rather like Tamara in that the characters move from place to place in the enormous castle-setting, and it may be a final dress rehearsal because, although everything seems to be "finished," I can't locate an audience anywhere, unless they're ranged on balconies looking down at us without interfering with our movements or actions. In one scene, the main character---the king or prince or lord---is fainting or dying, and we've been instructed to form a human fan about him, directing attention to him in the center, and we all spontaneously turn our heads downward and our arms outward, which I think must be a hugely effective sight viewed from above, and we "underlings" smile back and forth as if congratulating ourselves that THIS must be a good scene. In another act, in another part of the castle, I have a moment to ask a fellow-actor to peek at his script to see if HIS script contains MY lines, but it still seems to be a couple of pages before my few lines and all actors only have pages with THEIR lines on them, so I can't find my name there either. In the confusion of acting, too, actor A might speak actor B's lines when B doesn't seem to be in the vicinity, and then C might cover for A when two of A's and B's lines might be consecutive---though this might be an invention at 9:17AM as I'm transcribing this, because this REALLY didn't happen in the dream and is MORE like the staging and speaking in Travels with My Aunt at yesterday's matinee. But, in the dream, the play never seems to get to a place where it needs my lines and doesn't get them, nor do I ever see someone like a director or a stage manager who frowns at or chides me for not moving or speaking when I should. And was it just yesterday (or the day before) when I summarized my Village Playwrights experiences for Kevin (who was talking about when HE was an actor and a radio scriptwriter), saying that I KNEW I couldn't memorize the large number of lines for the part of the grandfather in Neil Simon's Broadway Bound. So again a recurrent dream, having gotten to sleep about 11:30PM last night, peed at 5AM and 7AM, and was surprised to find light coming from the living room where Kevin had put up the shade to start his day by 8:30AM, unlike yesterday when he slept in till 9, after I'd had breakfast and read for a bit in the bedroom.
8/5/95: 7:10AM: VERY detailed dream: I'm staying with Susan and Rick in a LARGE house with MANY people (among whom is Dennis, who's still sleeping in some kind of "middle bedroom" while about 7-8 others shout to each other in rooms around him), and I thought Joan S. and I were supposed to leave at 9:30AM for some event like an automobile-model premiere in midtown that starts at 10, but she snottily insists she's not going to LEAVE until 10AM. Rick supports her, and Susan has ordered the maid to pour champagne for everybody, giving a large glass to the old man on the sofa who's not supposed to drink, and the maids (now two of them) have been spilling so much that there's like two inches of it in the bottom of the silver bottle-bucket one is carrying to the kitchen, and I'm tempted to ask her to fill my glass (which no one has filled yet) from THAT, but it's probably warm, gasless, and somewhat dirty, so I let her pass into the kitchen with it. I debate trying to start proofreading some kind of guidebook that I was SUPPOSED to have finished for a woman rather like my old clients from ACC or Birnbaum, but that I haven't STARTED yet, and I can't very well go in at 2PM and say, "I'm ALMOST finished, but just give me an hour or so (during which time I MYSELF could do the entire set of work) and I'll just finish the very end of it" without having ANY pink slips in place at the typos, which I'm DEBATING doing NOW so that I CAN say that to her, rather than calling her NOW and saying it has to be delayed until TOMORROW, ruefully thinking that I hadn't PLANNED for the weekend just PAST (in the dream) (which is rather like my weekend COMING UP: namely, spending the entire day of Saturday, today, with Vicki and Joe and Vicki's son's wife's mother (Sharon?) and another friend, driving and picnicking upstate, and tomorrow with Lina playing Scrabble and having dinner) being spent with my doing ANY work, and I haven't finished some OTHER project that's due this afternoon which ALSO has to be "excused" (how do I SPELL the VERB-invention of the NOUN "excuse" [which rhymes with "juiced"] so that it doesn't SEEM to rhyme with "used"?) somehow, and I wake with the RELIEF that NEITHER of these jobs has yet to be done, and I still have almost two hours to doze before needing to get up for breakfast before leaving for Vicki's about 9:10AM, echoing the TWO indexes that I expressed off yesterday that WERE slightly delayed and much agonized about this past week. AND almost forget segment in which RICK shouts from HIS room that I mustn't forget to tell DENNIS some kind of SPORTS detail that Dennis had told a JOKE about that Rick, in his drunken way, took SERIOUSLY, and I hope his SHOUTING doesn't WAKE the sleeping Dennis. But the dream is so detailed I crawl out of bed in a bathrobe to face the air-conditioned-cool living room while I ache to pee, finishing by 7:25AM, relieved soon in BOTH senses of the word: having typed and having peed!
8/7/95: 9:40AM: I'm starting to jerk off in the same room with my younger brother, about the same age-difference as Rita was, and I'm setting up the mirror to watch myself turn myself on, and the kid says something about "Telling people about it," and I think how STUPID I'm being and wake stunned.
8/8/95: 8:45AM: 1) I'm again late for an opera, so I have to wait, searching for absent usherettes, and finally a long-skirted one shows me my section of two seats, situated as if in a crown with a good view in an upper tier with mostly obstructed views, but they're both occupied, and I harangue the interlopers until one admits that the other just arrived, so when I show him my proper stub, he leaves and I can sit down. At the start of the second act, the section of seats moves out the back of the auditorium and through a side street which tells me what's going to happen; I ask my seatmate, "Have you ever entered the back of the stage and exited through the audience?" He says no with a puzzled expression, and I tell him we're going to have LOTS of fun. 2) I'm participating in a rehearsal to see how things operate, and leave with Larry P., who has to return to work, but I'm meeting someone at a nearby restaurant, so I say goodbye to him and then have to bend to get under construction ropes stretched across parts of the street that are being repaired, and I see that I'll have to step across a rushing torrent of water over a slippery yellow-mud base, and I can PICTURE myself slipping and getting awfully dirty, but I wake before I actually cross the streamlet for lunch.
8/10/95: 10AM: I'm at some small country house and go into a bedroom and see a small white motion in what I think is a shoe, and as I look closer a fairly large mouse peeps out. I call, "Rita, Rita," wanting her to come with some kind of roach-spray-for-rats which I think she can get for me while I stand guard to make sure it doesn't get away. But she doesn't come, and finally the mouse turns and runs away from me in the shoe that turns into a Lucite tunnel that I think only exits at the back door, which is closed, but as the mouse, which has turned into a white rabbit, reaches the far end of the tunnel, there's an unlatched gate to the right of the door, opening onto the garden, and he zips out of there as I wake up in frustration, thinking I've finally caught the little mouse that inhabits 167 Hicks St.
8/12/95: 9AM: Sleeping at Dick H.'s, I dream (first in LONG time) of IBM: I'm in an office with a number of people with whom I share programming responsibilities, and there are two jobs which should have been completed by this time, and I still haven't documented the one and finished testing the other, and the third remains to be completely specified. There's not real PRESSURE behind any of these jobs, but they're like indexes whose deadlines are next week but the customers are all saying they'd like them THIS week.
8/13/95: 8:30AM: Paul is back for the first night of his second visit, and I stayed up until 1:30AM with the difficult crossword puzzle, and wake about 6AM uncomfortable in the heat and humidity with the memory of a dream whose details have completely vanished by the time I get up at 8:15, shit, and type.
8/17/95: 9AM: Rather like Paul next to me in bed, there's a person who might be straight lying next to me somewhere else, and we're making a big point of not quite making the first move, but as we turn nearer to each other, I put my hand under his thigh as he lies on his stomach, and he doesn't move away, and we lie there, sort of mutually testing each other, and it seems that in a simultaneous move he edges closer to me while my arm moves farther under his body, and I find my cupped hand holding his entire mass of genitalia, which is sufficiently engorged that he must be SOMEWHAT excited at the prospect of this kind of movement going even further, and I feel pleased with these beginnings.
8/18/95: 9:15AM: Probably influenced by the 6'6" young hunk at the gym yesterday, I'm confronted by a young man who IS straight, but we're engaged to interact in a budding sex scene for a movie or video or stage play, and I rub my hand across his retreating chest, feeling his tiny BB-like nipples, and he doesn't move away and AGAIN I feel growing excitement and pleasure in the scene. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 8/18/95).
8/24/95: 9:35AM: Two odd fragments: 1) I'm talking to Paul M. and telling him that "When my monthly check comes in, I just take half of it and put it in my spending money," and he's astounded that I'm so lenient with myself. 2) I'm watching a TV show of a star like a neo-Jerry Lewis, and he's visiting an Arabic country like Morocco, and when he gives the signal to begin something, he shouts "Ready, Set, Go-and-wheeooo-gurgle-babble-unga-unga-wheeble-whizzle-wabble----" on and on, while the audience goes into GALES of laughter, and even I, sitting at my fuzzy television set, seem to find this IRRESISTABLY funny as he goes on and on, making fun of their culture and language and system of communication---which doesn't translate at ALL in this recording!
9/2/95: 6:25AM: Mom is driving our rental car for two whole days in Japan, and I suggest we stay where we stopped for dinner for 347 yen. We leave restaurant to walk around and old woman chases me to sign the bill, an elaborate five-piece thing that a younger interpreter helps with, mentioning Cissy W., and I ask, "How COMMON is that name?" and she giggles and says, "Only one like her, you know her." Mom has walked into park part of town, up steps on hill, but comes down rather than my going up, and a group of strong people corral her into singing, then whisk her away to "Mafia" jewelry shop where NO one will hear my shouts for help. As a result, she "has signed an ironclad will, so that when she dies, half of what's left goes to the Japanese Liberation Fund to help them fight for freedom against tyranny.” I forgot a section: I asked for the exchange rate and am told 30 yen per dollar, and a nautilus-shaped toilet with a whale-lip-shaped top that stands as a chair in a corner of the room, but the lid will NOT stay up against the wall by itself as a design bit.
9/3/95: 8AM: I'm in some kind of military reserve for two weeks of summer training every year at different colleges, and THIS year it's at Akron University, and I feel I SHOULD know where I'm going, but MISS proper entrance to an overpass and go UNDER it to a building I don't recognize, and go downstairs to a dorm room. Ask both trainees if they have a campus map and neither does. I imagine Simmons Hall must be at the SOUTH side and I'm on the NORTH side, and why isn't there a map at each corner's telephone kiosk? In the dream I "remember" that I'd gone BACK to college for two years to COMPLETE my doctor's degree, but I couldn't PASS the last 3-4 courses, so it was ANOTHER waste of time (like my year at Columbia without a degree), and here I am BACK on campus in a frustrating search that I can't quite understand or finish or get proper credit for. I wake and think, then shit and jot down these notes.
9/5/95: 7:20AM: Someone and I are chasing Marty S. into a subway station, and we’re late for a performance, and it's 7:55PM and he's NOT on the elegant train we finally catch (after PLOWING through people who are LYING on the stairs leading up to the elevated station). I go forward a car (which is not allowed) and woman attendant tries to stop me. I argue and slap her face, she bites my hand hard. I collapse a revolving door on her TWICE and wake to "solve the problem”: Marty, as a JOKE, slipped the tickets into my WALLET, and they're $5000 charity tickets to a special concert starting at 9PM. ($5000! Who's conducting? BERNSTEIN [who's dead, of course].) We also got on the UPTOWN train, when we figured we were going to see Aida at the Met, so we would have to transfer to go back DOWNTOWN (to the platform where Marty had disappeared, rather than back to the grave where he belongs, also being dead) to Madison Square Garden, where the PERFORMANCE is, and we'll be meeting him in time for the overture at our SEATS, so everything will be OK.
9/6/95: Got to bed early, and exhausted, about 11:15PM after returning from Colors and a walk through brightly lit Grand Central Station, so it wasn't TOO surprising when I woke at 7:15AM (it WAS 8 hours) and decide to get out and JUST catch bus at 7:30AM for Prospect Park Club and SHELLEY H. and SERGIO!
9/7/95: 8:30AM: We're in a old-fashioned bar, and a woman sitting in an old orange-taffeta costume on a bar-stool asks for a "commixtuous drink," and when I ask her what that means, she leers at me as if I know what it means but am only trying to tease her, and says, "With a woman." I look in OED and find that meaning 2 of "commixtion" is "sexual union, copulation," obsolete, with examples from 1450, 1526, and 1673. "Commixture" is "mixing or mingling." Nothing new about words like this in the Supplement to the OED. Rebirthing?
9/18/95: 8:10AM: A double header of incredible teeny-tiny detail: 1) I'm going back to work in some enormous building (like 580 Broadway/112 Crosby walked through for the MBM Gallery on Friday?) and find myself in a "childen's toy" cul-de-sac where I pass counters and shops and company stores with clothing, games, and toys for children centered around an interactive miniature city in which children of shopping mothers can play (and scream that they want to play longer so that mothers will have to buy more): the central city has narrow streets and crowded ghetto-blocks with intricate parades, playgrounds, and street sweepers past families on stoops (like in the tour of Hamilton Heights yesterday?), viewed from above so that all the alleys and tortuous streets are visible as if on a map, surrounded by rolling hillsides on which playing children have placed herds of cattle, phalanxes of war-machines with tiny puffs of smoke from cannon and other artillery, all indicated by the tiniest plastic play-pieces, baroque in their detail of wheels and legs and eyes and hands, colorful in their side-coding primary swatches of color, some stuck into grooves in hillsides and fields so that they won't fall down, others sturdy set pieces of buildings and factories that stand by themselves in positions around the central river over which I jump, careful not to step on any crushable delicate pieces, knowing that this is the exit from the children's section and around the corner should be my IBM office, but what I next get entrapped by is the beauty-parlor section (like the crowded nail and hair salons along upper Broadway yesterday) in which I get further confused, turning left to warrens of dressing rooms, drying rooms, fitting rooms, lecture rooms, and more parlors and shops in THIS corner of the building, from which I quickly exit, knowing that IBM's offices are just around the NEXT corner, and find myself in the lobby, crowded with people leaving, and I transact one tiny piece of business before I find myself transferred to ANOTHER, totally different, dream: from the modern enclosed urban floor space of an office/shopping complex I'm in 2) an old rural shantytown, living in a ramshackle decaying apartment with an enormous commune, and a crew of washerwomen are shouting out a call for "the third load of laundry" which is the last for this evening, and I picture that I'd just put away a shirt (which has to wait for the Chinese laundry) and a dirty pair of shorts and a pair of black socks, both of which would be better washed by these women, so I dash back to my bed, which is now occupied by someone I know vaguely: a cripple who's just broken one foot and is now using my bed in which to recover, with his foot elevated just above my under-bed drawer, his red-haired head and beard covered in pain or sleep, and when I open the drawer a pillow slips out and lowers his body so that he tosses fitfully, not yet accusing me of torturing him, and I search through my dirty possessions for the shorts and socks and can't find anything there, so I go to a different part of the room and find that my bag has broken open and mingled its tiny, detailed contents with those of my near neighbor, and all I have time to do is hand-brush all the tiny chess pieces; toy-city units of houses, animals, and miniature people; scraps of papers, ticket stubs, and other detritus---all into a neater pile under a table nearby, finding the thick-piled carpet dirty with dust and what looks like flecks of tobacco which I pile up for clearing out later. Then transported to a kitchen/bath area where a leaky showerhead is dripping on a wall with rusting pipes and tubing, so I push it closer so that the water leaks over the wall soundlessly, rather than splashing into lower dirty sink. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 9/18/95).
10/9/95: 3:20AM [Next three notes typed 11/18/95]: Charles and I are going through an elaborate computer document of a catalog of PLAYS (like ASME catalog?) and picking the ones we want to see. Carolyn calls and wants to come along, so I just say, "We'll send you a copy of what WE want, and then you can order what YOU want." 9AM: Closing a front door much too small for its frame. Sitting slouched in a chair while some young trick acts like my body's attractive, though I can see my legs aren't apart enough for him to see any lesion between my upper thigh and crotch.
10/13/95: 8AM: Andy M. (and this is on a FRIDAY, not even NEAR a Tuesday when I see him at Village Playwrights!) plans a two-hour camping trip with me. Truck rode on trail I haven't traveled, low water in lake.
10/16/95: 6:15AM: Odd dream where Larry B. is teaching me some exercises to prepare me to KILL someone, and he give me "one last chance" and I excuse my leap by stooping in a side-twist and I tumble him around and try to throttle him upside down, and his throat feels VERY vulnerable, and he says, "I have money in my pocket," and a wad of bills almost falls out as he tumbles to the floor, and he says it's "a stock dividend my father sent me," about $750, and I wonder who's kidding whom, and did I pass the test, and WHY am I DOING this??
10/19/95: 10AM: I'm in a bedroom very like 1221 Dietz's, and there's a large box that seems to be rocking back and forth under an upright sewing machine, so I figure it must be a mouse. I pull the box out a bit and can see a gray blur scurrying around the bottom perimeter, and then it makes a leap for a top corner fairly near me, and I shout and jostle the box, hoping to bump him back into the bottom so I can take him out and dump him. Notice a green-and-red tinselly package stored under the sewing machine, and other Christmas-type tchotchkes on a bookshelf nearby, and figure I can put all these things on a separate shelf in a closet and get them out of the immediate way. Then there's a flurry of movement off to one side, and a large gray shape moves somewhat slowly in the shadows, coming into the light to reveal itself as an enormous, mangy-looking, large-penised, cat-sized rat, walking with a halting limp that definitely implies he's not at all healthy. Feel no sense of fear for such a bedraggled creature, but I want him OUT of the house, and feel happy when he goes near an open door, even though there's a closed screen door preventing his exiting to the yard. I shoo him into the corner of the doorframe and two kids passing outside see the creature and shout, "Hey, what you got there?" I figure to quickly shut the door and someone to open the screen door so he'll be out of the house completely. Wake and FORGET this dream till later.
10/23/95: 9:15AM, [yet typed 12:45AM 10/24]: I was walking along some kind of amusement arcade on hills right at the ocean, and in going from one side of a ravine to another (I remembered some details of all the pavilions when I woke, but I’ve forgotten them by now) I had to walk down to sea-level and try to carefully judge the incoming waves so that I wouldn't get terribly wet. I thought the water was quite shallow, but I was surprised when an innocent-looking wave washed in with a surprising smoothness and covered my shoes and wet the bottom part of my trousers, but I was pleased to feel that the water wasn't that cold, so I didn't really feel uncomfortable with my feet submerged, and I was relieved that I had my old sneakers on, so that I wasn't damaging my shoes by getting them wet. I stood and watched the strange "hump" of water out toward the horizon, as if the globe on which I stood was tiny enough to manifest its circumference to my sea-level eyes. The water was rather opaque, but without floating matter it seemed quite clean, so I wasn't even worried about the smell of any remaining residue when it dried.
11/17/95: 9:30AM: I'm working in my home office, which seems to be a larger version of my apartment at 320 East 70th Street, because I have a pair of windows facing north off my living room, but there are two or three MORE rooms behind me, which would make it larger than my two-room apartment of more than 30 years ago. My desk and computer are sitting in front of a small cardboard partition of sorts, and I reach forward to find that there's frost along the top edge, and as I try to scrape it away, it turns out that this piece of cardboard is ineffectually sealing up a window which is actually OPEN onto the fire escape outside, and I think to myself "So THAT's why it's been so cold in here; I hadn’t realized that the window has been OPEN ten or twelve inches all this while!” I look at the sunshine on the blackness of the painted fire escape for a few minutes, and then my position in the room seems to shift away from right AT the window to somewhat distant from it. There are other people working around me, and I'm sitting somewhat away from the left window, toward which I look to see my coworker at his desk talking to a young woman in a bright-red suit, and though that woman is leaning back against the window sill and is haloed by the sunlight streaming in, I can make out a familiar face just as she looks to remember me, and I say, "Could that possibly be...?" as she says, "That looks like..." and it's Sue L. from the old IBM Cobol-conversion project. She comes over to chat, and I ask her what she's doing for an occupation now, and she says she's handling some kind of engineering standards for fire-escapes, or wiring, or electrical circuits, for which she has a portfolio of government-sponsored white-paper blueprints detailing tables, designs, and descriptions of whatever the components are. By coincidence I'd just come across my old copy of one of these in what looks rather like an old aluminum-foil box, but she hands me a stack of 4-5 crisp new white ones to replace my outdated, yellow-edged (foxed), single copy. Without transition we're somehow sitting, chatting in a lunch-area just outside a tenement building, when the ground starts shaking and rolling and people look at each other, realizing it's an earthquake, and I stand and shout, "Get away from the buildings!" and run out into an open area where the pieces falling from gables and overhanging eaves of nearby five- and six-story tenements won't shower down on me, and other people are running into this vacant lot, some looking up to dodge larger pieces visibly falling toward them, and I just look where I'm running, figuring I've avoided getting hit so far, most of the pieces are more like snowflakes than bricks, and that the rather common head-sized and rarer valise-sized pieces aren't hitting anyone anyway. Then it seems to be over and we're all looking around in a confused way, and I seem to have run out along a riverbank that I have to make my way BACK against, and look down the slope to the river at my right to see that some black-trunked trees have been uprooted right at the water’s edge, though whether the just-concluded earthquake or water-erosion had done it in the recent past isn't clear. I remark to myself that the trees and shrubs along this sparsely-planted slope seem all to have been chosen for shiny-black trunks that would appear spectacular from tour-boats passing up and down the river. I look to my left and see that I'm passing rather elegant cottages built along the riverbank slopes, wondering if they'd only recently gotten permission to build here on the edge where an earthquake might easily shake them into the river. Look at one doorway in detail, admiring its darkly carved wooden door, iron-work fittings (like those around the doorway of one of the restaurants Don and I passed on lower West Broadway last night), and a nameplate with a name in characters I can't quite read, as if it's encoded. I figure these are only summer residences of wealthy city people, vacant for the off-season or during the week when they're working and not vacationing. The pathway along the top of the riverbank is increasingly bushy, and to make my passage easier, without transition I find myself INSIDE one of these homes, trying to move from one to the other without going through regular doors, finding myself clambering atop bureaus and chests, stepping into open boxes without knowing if they contain anything that might break if I trod on them, hoping no one will enter and find me trespassing. I reach an impasse heading toward the city and decide I have to double back to make progress, and find myself creeping along an enormous living-room window that seems to overlook the atrium of a hotel or resort: elegantly-dressed people are moving in and out of a large lobby with bellboys, clerks, maids moving industriously about, and I pass out one door to find myself (again) in the middle of a large field of milling people, and figure that I must have somehow entered a prison, or the compound of some militaristic sect, where entry is forbidden and exit might be equally difficult. A stricter version of Jehovah's Witnesses seems more accurate. Workers are heading for lunch at the huge cafeteria to my left, but I see a gate up ahead to the right through which workers are passing, and I think I might be able to sneak through in a pack because I know I should have some kind of cult-identification and I don't, but I despair of explaining exactly how I DID get inside here. I walk toward the gate with some confidence, but then two guards grab me from behind, with another interloper, and taunt us with their knowledge of our trespass, and I try to make excuses, but they shove what feels like a blunt knife, or a sharp billy club, a couple of inches below my shoulder blade, a couple of inches back from my right side, and I look across to the face of another caught person to see that it has become blurred, or masked, with their pain, and I find all the faces around me distorted and begin to be really worried, and the pressure of the point in my side increases and increases until I feel I can't really process it, can't really stand it without my skin being pierced or bones being broken or lung being punctured, and I gasp with such pain that I actually wake and wonder for a second if I'm having a heart attack, except for the location, and I'm lying in a rather awkward position where my RIGHT arm is more uncomfortable, so I figure there's no REAL physical connection between the end of the dream and any position I happen to be lying in as I wake at 9:10AM, then immediately get up, shit, and finish these details by 10AM, annoyed by someone buzzing the buzzers in nearby apartments to get in, and by someone upstairs rocking back and forth on a noisy spot just above my head.
11/18/95: 9:20AM: I'm touring Moscow, having settled some kind of map misunderstanding by manipulating two triangles of traffic-roads, and we've just finished an afternoon's excursion and the group is walking faster than I am, and with growing panic I see it turning a corner two blocks ahead and try to walk faster with that frustrating legs-in-quicksand dream-drag building my fatigue to exhaustion. I crackle glass-pieces in a previously dreamed treasure room with mosaics on the floor and icons on the walls and stained glass dropping shards from the ceiling. I find the river and know we're meeting on a bridge, but can't decide which way to go since the bridge seems to be more of a railway culvert paralleling, rather than crossing, the river. Just when I think they've all boarded the bus and left, a fledgling female guide hooks a finger into the fabric of my coat-elbow and motions her head in the direction of the tail end of the group. I feel gratitude toward her and walking's now easier.
11/19/95: 9AM: [Prodded by talk at MAN of massaging to orgasm last night] I'm being massaged by thin avid young man who hovers above me while massaging me, and I feel his cock tip soft on his hard shaft, and I start "obstructing" it as he works, so that it gets harder, and he seems to enjoy it, so I gently start brushing and touching and teasing the tip, which hardens, and feel his balls, which are gathered into a knot, and his body splays across my vision in a way that can happen only in dreams, and I feel that he and I can't help but be entering into a most wonderful relationship, and wake hard. How much longer can I fantasize about meeting and going to bed with someone without actually accomplishing that while still holding out the hope that one day it'll happen.
12/2/95: [Typed 12/9] 10:30AM: I'm flying to Europe, wondering whether we're halfway there yet, checking my watch to see what time it is and trying to estimate what time we'll get there, and then in the next waking moment walking on a tour of a town I don't recognize, and I FINALLY ask someone where we are. "Surrey." "We're in EUROPE?" "Yep, we arrived at 11:45." I don't even know whether this is AM or PM, though it does seem to be foggy-light out. (HOW, when our over-ocean speed was only 280 mph in our propeller-driven plane?) I've slept through an airplane LANDING (not to mention disembarkation) for the FIRST time! There's another bit about adjusting my space on the last seat at the bar, where I'm writing while waiting in the airport.
12/7/95: 9:15AM: Two VERY elaborate dreams (with a middle piece that's forgotten): 1) I'm in some kind of law library where Ken L. works from an enormous box-like structure as big as a room atop which he sits and maneuvers a huge collapsible-extendible grabber-arm quite independent of the operations of the library itself. So when I take over his chair in the middle of this contraption, I feel like an imposter, which is made even worse when I start moving the whole thing around and begin scratching walls, nudging people, and making other library-users uncomfortably aware of my strange presence. After a particularly bizarre careering about the library, I'm on my way out when a passel of workers rush up and begin dismantling the grabber-arm, pushing the room-base out through a series of corridors with an aim to relegating it to permanent storage. What will Ken say to me when he returns tomorrow? Wake briefly to comfort myself with the fact that it's only a dream, dip back for a forgotten episode, then wake (and NOW recall that the forgotten link had something to do with waking from a dream in ANOTHER dream, but I've still not recalled more than that) on a bench in a beautiful countryside where a large number of people are enjoying something like a company picnic: friendly groups of individuals, some family groups (like the cute guy with another man who just might be his son, with a young girl who could be the daughter of either of them), and some who seem to want to get to know me, primarily an Emma Thompson-type woman who fusses about me with a shy air of embarrassment. Then the fellow next to me, whom I'd thought was quite overweight, got up and in a sense posed in front of me so that I could see he had a nicely-shaped chest and surprisingly narrow waist cross section. I glanced down to my right to see the butt-end of a stream in which small fish and possibly other interesting creatures like snakes or frogs or toads rumpled the water's edge with varied glitters that I wanted to stroll down to investigate, and then I looked up to my right to see that the roiling clouds in the sky, and the crossing of small planes under and over them made a fascinating echo of the moil of the stream-end, which looked like it might have been the landing-slope of some large flat-bottomed garbage scow being drawn out at the end of its travels. An air of sunny friendliness lit up the people, and I wanted to stay there awhile, but woke---ah, ANOTHER fragment of the middle section returns: I HAD "gotten up" and was preparing to eat with Mom in the kitchen, and it turned out to be 1PM, when I’d been SURE it was earlier than that (the reverse of yesterday when I’d been taking the time from electric clocks which had been stopped for 10-20 minutes after the electricity had been shut off by the workers downstairs), and I puzzled about the lateness of the hour, and the discomfort of being with Mom, and AGAIN realized that my "waking" had only been into another dream.
12/9/95: 9:40AM: Just a wish-fulfilling snippet (to parallel the wish-fulfilling ACTION when I bent to pick up someone's lost "Absolut"-labeled glove in the subway a few weeks ago to obtain a match for the untwinned "Absolut"-labeled glove I'd saved from last year) of finding a PAIR of "Absolut"-UNlabeled gloves in the dust on the floor under the exposed faucets of an old-style bathtub in a bathroom that was more 1221 Dietz than 167 Hicks. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 12/9/95).
12/11/95: 8:45AM: 1) I'm sucking off a cute guy, but when he seems to be ready to cum I back off to look at him as I jerk him to orgasm, and he leans back voluptuously and stares me in the face and smiles adoringly as he spews his jism all over the place, and I wake briefly to an erection from the eroticism. 2) I'm in a car and I've just dropped someone off, and I'm watching them safely cross a street while my car is coasting backward, and then I figure I'd better turn around to see where I'm going, and find that a group of 4-5 cars have halted at a stoplight at the intersection about 3-4 car lengths behind me: I've looked around just in time. I try steering backward for a few seconds, but somehow in the dream the car is facing forward now. I look down for the brake-pedal and clearly see the three pedal-shapes below my feet, but they seem to be encumbered by my trousers or overcoat, or are involved in some kind of cramp, because I can't quite move my right foot out from under me to get to the brake-pedal, so I turn the steering wheel to redirect the car out of the traffic lanes onto a gently sloping field to my left, where the rough ground and stones slows the car (never moving very fast) considerably. I micromanage the car from one curb in front of a row of shops, thinking I could come to rest against one or the other doorjamb safely, but the momentum carries me onward over another few bumps which I figure will stop the car, and manage to avoid hitting anything until the last few inches-per-second speed is stopped by gently bumping against a square rock close to a house-front. I get out of the car to find myself enclosed by a parallel row of trees that moves uphill to a grassy meadow filled with children playing, and then the kids start pointing upward, and I look back to the left to see the sky filled with squadrons of cage-mounted single-engine World War II-vintage fighters flying by in formations of twenty or more, layered methodically across the sky. Interspersed with these slow-flying planes are bee-like speedsters that someone identifies as "no-wing jets" that look like stubby buzz bombs that swoop close to the heads of the crowds of which I'm a member, before pulling out and flying up the corridor of trees to my right. Again and again a far dot resolves into a zapping, spitting, smoky jet that sweeps down and loops over our heads with a diminutive roar, making the crowd laugh and applaud for more. I don't recall waking before any of my 3 following episodes. 3) I'm sitting in the left bank of pews as a church choir, hidden behind the wall to my left, starts singing a long "Gloria" or "Credo" part of a mass, and the congregation sits raggedly until only a row of women behind the communion rail are left standing, and they seem to be talking or chanting in strange opposition to the stately Gregorian chant from the choir. They seem to be angry and reporting some situation, or rebelling against some statement, and at last one old woman goes screaming down the aisle in ultimate rage. Without transition I'm at some meeting of the same church people later, and the priest is talking with a group of us and the old woman, previously screaming, now seems calm and accepting of his presence; has she forgotten or forgiven him? 4) I'm with lots of others in a bar (Irish?) with a quiz-master asking "What famous avalanche stopped after 71 seconds on which famous island?" and it turns out to be Arran (answers from yesterday's puzzles), with more "very easy" questions coming for some medium-size prize nobody seems able to win. 5) I'm traveling, and go to my hotel-room bedroom to find stuff from my suitcases (helping Don move yesterday evening?) spread over the floor, including a pair of trousers like Army pants, and shirts and suit-coats, and I pick up a new pair of shorts to find that they're MUCH too big---coming up even farther than the bottom of my ribcage, flaring out whitely to the side---and then notice that putting the waist-tag on in back puts the fly in back, so I have to adjust how I put them on, and they're size 1-J, which may be some foreign kind of sizing that I'd translated or converted in error, but I guess I CAN wear these, and maybe they're designed to cover the belly to keep it warm in this very cold weather we're having (14° last night and this morning) which put me to bed at 11PM last night to make up for 4:20-10:20AM yesterday.
12/12/95: 6:30AM: Cum when I wake hard from what was probably a forgotten dream. 7:50: I'm attending an indexing convention in a large building in Akron which was once the building that housed St. Mary's High School. My first view of the interior, in a basement, includes pavilions of "local" religions, some based on Hinduism, featuring abrupt perspectives of phalanxes of dancing figures in colorful dhotis vamping back and forth in adoration of their jeweled gods who are presented like dolls in department-store displays that have animated figures mimicking distant dancers for an effect of chintziness and opulence, density and sparsity of figures at the same time. The floor in front of some of these displays is covered with chalked and painted sentences and equations that seem to be explaining Hindi grammar: things like "a loop on the an can mean 'limit' or 'pudding,' while no loop on the in can mean 'dog' or 'wistfulness.'" And mantras repeated in slightly varying rows teach new users the conjugations of verbs. Go up a couple of flights of what were once, say, the west stairs, but find they're blocked off after two flights, partitioned into classrooms behind the doors of which I can hear classes still being held. I walk into an obstructing office to ask how I can get to the other stairway, but some secretary is too busy to pay attention to me, and when I try to exit I find what appear to be trees and wastebaskets blocking the obvious way out as some sort of "directed learning" that I'm not willing to countenance, but when I move forward to push my way through the obstructions, I find it was only a trick of perspective: that WAS the way out to the central hallway. Pass an enormous entrance to a well-proportioned white theater, totally empty, that I tell myself to keep in mind for Village Playwrights when I get back to NYC. Down a hall to find that Mary V. is there as a sort of maintenance person, but when I talk to her she has to go find where she's working. Groups of people pass with pink-stickums showing their name and organization, and I ask if they're from ASI, but they're not. Lloyd M. passes and give me a large paperback to look at, about the same size as the one that I'd been reading before I got here and which is encumbering me with my heavy coat that I can't find a place to check. Another large group of people seems to be indexers, but I don't see anyone that I know when I'm faced with a group of five or six young men of 6'10" or more, animatedly chatting among themselves and seeming to want to send one of their number out to buy drugs. I'd like to meet some of them, but as I move into their number a woman who looks like a short Nanette Fabray emerges from their midst and hugs me enthusiastically, pressing what feels like a dildo into my legs, and when I puzzledly push her away she sweeps aside folds of cloth around her waist to reveal a turkey-baster-like dildo with a flared mouth and plunger which when pressed sprays a fine mist like someone's demented idea of pre-cum. Finally in one corner I find a small group of guys who are pushing coats and parcels into low boxes like bookstore book-check roomettes, but they've not gotten their claim checks organized yet, so I go around a corner to find Mary V. again, this time in a small closet like the coatroom at the Beard Foundation, where she implores me to "go out" for her if they demand that she "go into town" to buy something needed for the party that her duties would compel her to do. I want to help her, but feel reluctant to leave: how would I prove that I should be able to get back in? Back to mingle with some fascinating-looking people mixed with refugees from the school downstairs. 9:20AM: Second dream even weirder: I'm walking toward the steps of what looks like a building at Akron U., and down the steps comes a plump figure with a gray-green sweater on that looks like it could be a homely red-haired boy of about 16. He has a message for me which he passes on, but that seems to make him fatally attractive to ANOTHER plump figure with a gray-green sweater wrapped around his waist, attended by two other fatties wrapped with gray-green sweaters as part of their apparel. The "boss" obese one orders the two underlings to "get" the fleeing first figure, and I follow her to think it MAY be a female with rudimentary breast-blobs somewhat larger than the waist and belly-blobs, and then think that the gray-green sweaters may be the uniform of some fraternity, so that anyone WEARING one, rather than having one wrapped around him, is a woman who's interested in guys from that fraternity. The mincing of the "female" and the aggression of the males are right out of bad TV sitcoms in their exaggeration and ugliness.
12/13/95: 8:25AM: 1) I'm watching a TV documentary on a river in China, watching workmen swimming so deep that they hit the bottom-mud and surface streaming with yellow clay. Then I'm holding my still camera over the edge of a metal box on a crane from which I'm taking elevated shots, taking care that my arms and camera-body don't extend over the edge where my conveyance is being brought up something like an elevator shaft and taken close to other cranes hovering over the river. Then MY crane drops my box, and I have an eerie sensation of free fall before hitting the water, and I'm worried that my camera won't survive getting wet, but feel somewhat quieted because the water at the surface isn't filled with mud: it's somewhat translucent and grayish, rather than mud-filled and yellow. 2) I'm visiting Vicki to stay overnight for some reason, and she wrinkles her nose in a funny way and says, "Take a shower first," I suppose before eating and playing Scrabble before going to bed.
12/19/95: 9:15AM: I'm trying to keep my credit-card authorization at a supermarket rather like Key Food, but back in some offices that I've never seen, and some officious skinny manager is trying to say that I never use it, though I know they have records that I use it at least once a week for the past ten months, and then she tries to say that my balance is too big, though I know (and figure they must be able to verify, if they'd only look in the right place) that I pay my bill promptly each month so that there's NEVER a balance. Now I recall she reminds me of Susan Lucci in one of those TV car ads where she tries to appear smart and with-it but is really totally incompetent. I get directed to various offices where I have to re-explain my situation, and I'm rapidly losing patience with the whole thing. Wake fatigued, as if something might be wrong gastrically---maybe I'm getting an ulcer from this past three months of almost constantly pressured work! Or what exactly ARE the possible developments from a hiatal hernia? [Up to find it IS snowing outside, as Pope feared for his doctor's visit today, and I continue this on NOTEBOOK.] (RETURN TO JOURNALS 12/19/95).