January thru July 1997
1/4/97: 6:40AM: 1) I (as US Olympian) dining with British hosts; sitting sideways because I may be resented as interloper in the first course, half of which is American, half of which is British soup. Talking of British habits and history, dog-breeders and contacts. Wake feeling stuffed and having to pee. 10:05AM: 2) Indonesian feast, given on a rock beach, hundreds of guests, with talk of "Oronok on the South Island," and of other small towns. Back to crowded entrance, an empty passage under tan-curtained door, waitresses served drinks at the bar, and there were entertainers, but I forget rest of details.
1/9/97: 2AM: 1) Someone like Mom is sitting on a toilet and I have to take care of her, but she says, "It hasn't dropped off yet," and there's a HUGE elephant-foot of shit resting on the FLOOR as a PEDESTAL for the rest of it standing just beneath the toilet seat. 8:30AM: 2) I'm printing a Greek antiquities index, but I'm surprised to see it's on ONE side of MARBLEIZED paper colored PURPLE with CUTOUTS for shape and handles, and I remember DRAWING the vase-shape but am astounded that my laser printer can CUT it to shape AS it prints, but how can it be BOUND? And I'm also confusedly interspersing book-ms pages with index-ms pages (as I did NOTEBOOK pages amid the LIFELIST sheets yesterday?) and sadly have to go through and REPRINT again.
1/12/97: Two fragments remembered the next day: 1) I'm choosing between two men on the basis of some kind of gridded report-sheets on which there are arrays of lit rectangles like self-illuminated rows of VCR-remote buttons: small rectangles that can be depressed with a satisfying spring-back touch, except that I'm not TOUCHING them---I'm COUNTING how many more lit rectangles one "possible person" has than the OTHER "possible person." 2) I've finished a meal in a restaurant with Dennis (clearly based on my reports to many friends yesterday [Saturday] about Dennis's condition that I found out about Friday), and the waiter, as if to reward our choice of that restaurant or that menu, places two complimentary bottles of after-dinner drink on the table: a maple-syrup-bottle-shaped dark-glass elegantly-labeled liqueur in front of me, and a can of something like Coke or Pepsi in front of Dennis, and we seem to be saying that "That's all very nice, but we've had quite enough, please, and are ready to leave." Dennis seems well, as well as well-dressed, which is nice.
1/13/97: 9:30AM: Memory from a dream from which I wakened about 8:50AM: I'm on a cliff high above a pounding surf below, and I can see that the waves are eroding not only the seaward-side of a coastal road, but also have broken through under it, and are carving out chunks on its landward-side, so that soon huge sections of the pavement itself must detach and fall into the surf. From the corner of my eye I can see slabs of sand exfoliating from the seaward-side, so that only a sheer perpendicular face remains along one half-mile curve of road, and I figure this will be the first of the road itself to plummet. Then I'm on some sort of not-quite-closed drawbridge that the imminent destruction causes to widen and shorten its gap, so that a large (about 6’x10’) piece of metal is sometimes tenuously bridging a five-foot gap, or sometimes closing so that the gap is only a foot wide, which encourages me to leap across to look more closely at a square foot of some other kind of metal material, which has some sort of slight significance that I can't recall, and as the gap closes I actually DO leap across it on the bridging material, and my footing seems solid enough that I then jump BACK over the gap and resume my position above and to the side of the road to watch whatever may happen next. Wake and jerk off and shit and dress quickly to finish these TWO dream memories before starting a Monday. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 1/13/97).
1/17/97: 9AM: I'm waiting for some sort of natural disaster with a group of semi-fanatics who have gathered to be together in this time of stress, and the sky is ominous with signs, and radio stations have reported catastrophes and one by one have gone off the air to uninformative static. Some of the leaders begin shouting to everyone to go down the hill to the shelter, and at one point I'm riding in a bus (or viewing a television image of riding in a bus) across the north side of what looks like Central Park, with obviously hokey set-models showing skyscrapers tilted against each other, or even partially upended, with tiny glints of sunlight off what looks like mica in roofing shingles that were used in the construction of these models. Clouds begin swirling around the towers (rather like rain clouds gathering to the north of the Saint George that I looked out at yesterday afternoon) and the wind picks up (as it has been doing all morning, possibly my hearing it in my sleep: it's 13° when I raise the shade this morning). We're all gathered in a Plexiglas room at the bottom of a slope (lowest land being best to protect against the winds), but the room isn't very crowded although it begins to look like everyone who SHOULD have come in HAS come in. I crouch down in a corner, looking outside, where I figure I can see what's happening out there while being protected by the warmth of the people in here (part of the disaster is supposed to be extreme cold too), but toward the end it almost seems that it's already BEEN the worst and maybe everyone else in the city has been destroyed, but by taking somewhat simplistic protective measures we've managed to survive where those more scientifically advanced have perished. Emotionless.
1/22/97: 4AM!: The MAGNITUDE of the dream is APPALLING (having had 2/3 bottle of White Zinfandel with dinner at Greenwich Cafe with Charles, then bits of THREE bidis with jerking off, then bed at 12:40AM): I WAKE as we're stranded in "North" Inca village (QiPu hut), having "come off the boat" in the West and gone the wrong way when we want to find South, and I go "back" to "shuttling" around the enormous ship on bizarre corner-fitting stairways that rise and fall through the immense public rooms, FARTHER back to hearing "Bobby" as a group of us, just off the ship from, say, Amsterdam, walk through a DREAM-sequence night-field with the towers of Manhattan looming in the moonlight (as it is when I look WEST to see what the BRIGHT bar of light in my kitchen window is caused by: a nearly full setting-moon), and it's HELEN and JIMMY out for their evening walks in someplace like WESTCHESTER, and I try to introduce them (or really REintroduce them) to people like Sister Mary Alphonse who'd visited their place with me years ago and coincidentally met AGAIN on this trip, and back to BEFORE, where we're landing from some surreal plane-balloon on ANOTHER moonlit field on which I can see tiny lines of SHEEP running in ever-tighter CURLS of paths on a hillside as the plane zooms lower and lower in preparation for a landing on the GROUND, rather than at any kind of airfield, and this is the way it's SUPPOSED to be, because neither I nor anyone else on the plane is at all ALARMED that it's landing like this---maybe the feeling is more like landing from an enormous silent ZEPPELIN, because I'm looking almost STRAIGHT down from a window that's obviously slanted underneath as I remember from films like Hindenburg! I THINK that was the EARLIEST-remembered part of the dream: my wondering if we were going to land ATOP these tightly curled paths with bead-like (reading Glass Bead Juggle tonight at Village Playwrights?) sheep running almost in panic along their pathways, so well-trained that only VERY few tiny shepherds and shepherdesses can be seen or are needed, and the moundy hillsides go on and on as we glide lower and lower, and without transition we're all walking along a preternaturally green meadow with the back-lit Manhattan towers before us, wondering where we are and where we're going, but confident that the tour leaders are overseeing us from ahead or behind (or above), and I recall STRETCHING my legs over the greensward as I try to catch up with some group or other ahead of me, almost skim-flying over the gentle folds and dips of the landscape illuminated by reflected lights from the towers glowing almost like future-fantasies from the interior of the Perisphere at the 1939 New York World's Fair, conveyed with unnatural speed toward a distant fantasy-landscape. Then, from behind, the startled, definite "Bobby" and my surprise at TIMING this midnight transfer from one part of an elaborate trip to another with Helen and Jimmy's midnight walk (maybe with their dog---Alice? Maysie? MITZI!), and then almost SNATCHING passing passengers from the throngs surging past our shocked, stopped selves, trying to find the four or five that I KNOW have visited them WITH me many years ago (as if it were when I was still going to SCHOOL and visiting them in their unseen new quarters in this near-suburb of NYC), naming names, they recognizing some and not others, some of the nuns recognizing THEM, and THEN without transition we've just LANDED from a ship at a dock rather far behind us, and only ONE shipboard acquaintance and I are surveying this Fantasy Island where the ship has docked somewhere NORTH on the Hudson River, looking down at a ring of PAVILIONS around a central lake ("That's Aral Lake," my friend says grandly, but I already KNOW that this destination-spa was built around decaying piers on a riverfront out of which a lake in the river was created to have the name of the resort), maybe early-morning light enhanced with floodlights BENEATH the waters that glow upward on the Disney-like "Lands" built "on the rotting ships that had been sunk at these piers" as the companion preens his knowledge aloud at me, and I look for directions, recalling that the loudspeaker (OH, FORGOT the sequence, LENGTHY, on the ship ITSELF, when hundreds of us on ONE tour on this Leviathan were being transported in a "familiarization flight" on what could be called "flying escalators" which molded themselves to the walls and levels of the chambers through which we were touring, and I recall looking at LARGE NUMBERS of transitions from one chamber to another [or one ballroom to another dining room to some sexy crews' quarters described later] as the "moving staircases" soared UP walls and AROUND corners and CURVED AROUND elaborately decorated cornices at fourth-floor atrium level bordering shopping concourses, the walls of our self-contained [since we weren't WALKING] and self-containing [since we weren't really mixing with the OTHER passengers on this immense liner] transporter bending around corners with flexible lattices of multicolored enamels which flowed like projections over ornate frescoes and carvings, again and again---so that I was astounded at the ranges of colors, architectural styles, dream-sequence details and hexagon and diamond shapes of openwork latticing rounding inner corners of rooms and, projection-like, accommodating themselves to coffered ceilings before leveling to arcades in multi-tiered lobbies before escalating to a different height completely on this mind-bending tour. At one point, Charles was BEHIND me in a crowd (as he was last night in leaving First Floor Front at the Gay Center) as the tour swept down the middle of what looked like crews' quarters in a homosexual fantasy of a multinational ship (New Yorker article on Chinese crew killing Romanian stowaways read yesterday?), some of the crew showering in cubicles as in Art Deco photographs by Honingen-Huene, stretching out of their vaporous cascades as if watching, but really advertising their yellowy backs and buttocks to the passing, highly interested, hordes of dirty old men (like the grayhead talking to the Charles-described Jugoslavian hunk at the next table at Greenwich Cafe), and other groups of off-duty crew chatting or playing cards or preparing for bed---another excuse to remove shirts and display erotic torsos with shaved patterns of exoticism on their chests and tattoos on their muscular arms---and I said to myself (or back over my shoulder to Charles) "We've got to remember THIS deck and RETURN some evening." Our tour had indicated that OUR particular section of this hotel-spa was in the SOUTH, and I searched for directional indicators and saw a fleeting arrow to "West Tower," and looked at an unlit spire like a ruined tower in Mordor from Tolkien's Trilogy, and we saw the closed outskirts of some currently-unused settlements, and we continued in a ring in an undetermined direction until I saw signs on the pagoda-ed buildings in false Chinese (like the "THE" at the start of the New Yorker short story on death in Manchuria at the end of WWII), saying QiPu, which I recognized to indicate buildings in a false-PERU, which I knew to be in the NORTH of this complex, so we WERE walking the wrong way around, the whole group of us who were now wandering, tired, looking for our evening's quarters, and when one lavishly-dressed woman idly reached up to a cornice of a building along the street we were walking on, and drew down a wrapped chocolate that, when bitten into, revealed an over-sweet, possibly slightly over-aged macadamia nut mixed with sugar-cream frosting (from my carrot cake last night?), somehow proving to EVERYONE that this WAS the Peru-Land, and the companion who had SCOFFED at me when I had said we were going the wrong way around the perimeter looked at me and said, "I guess you were right, but I think it's too late to turn AROUND and go the other direction now," implying that we had to TRAVERSE this northern section, then the eastern complex, in order to reach the not-yet-named pavilions of the south where we were to find our night's repose. The Incan village was distinguished by its vaguely Turandot architecture and its predominantly yellow-green lighting, as the dark western section behind us had been primarily black, whether through design or through merely being closed. AGAIN, the "backward tracing" of the dream in my head between, say, 3:56 and 3:58AM as I debated getting the laptop from under the bed or GOING to the PC to transcribe the exfoliating chapters of this almost-psychedelic dream, refusing to relinquish the colors, details, coincidences, glories of lighting and scenic design in the multiple venues (maybe this is MY reaction to Jerry C.'s 9-month itinerary?) of the dreamscape---maybe I'll have MORE if I drink and smoke MORE? And I glance to find I'm almost at the end of the SECOND page, or even MORE, because I didn't HEAD this page! Finish at 4:45AM!!! 45 MIN! (RETURN TO JOURNALS 2/2/97).
1/24/97: 7:05AM: Wake with dream I start transcribing at 7:15AM: I'm wandering along what might be the east bank of the Hudson River, upstate, looking for an address like 50 E. 53rd Street, but this is a countryside of farmlands and unmarked lanes, so it's not easy. I'm walking with someone very like a fellow I used to work with at IBM, whose name I can't remember, who had very bad skin and wore makeup which tended to be terribly orange, or sometimes greenish, but who seemed so self-conscious that it was impossible to ever ask him about his condition; he always spoke very precisely, smiled frequently but more out of nervousness than any innate sense of humor, and used his hands in a faintly faggoty way. We part on a main street and I call to him to follow me, but he seems determined to find the address on his own, and I have confidence that when we BOTH finally find the destination, we'll be there together. I turn west, toward the river, and go downhill through fields with trees on the left through which I can look down to the riverside and see what might be an old religious community: scattered communal buildings like mess halls and recreation halls and, directly below in a grove of trees, what looks to be a self-built two-story dwelling so old that trees that had been maybe ten years old when they were used as corner posts for a single room, quite close to the river, backed by a double-story pair of rooms farther back from the river at a 10-o'clock angle, backed by a triple-story set of rooms for the main house, the walls of which were now paralleled by the strongly grown trees that may now be one hundred or even one hundred and fifty years old: twelve trees all inclined toward the river because of the river-leaning walls which they formed the corners of, framing their decaying wood and small shuttered windows that hid whomever might be living inside. But the road ended at the riverside, and even though it was low tide, there were only damp rocks available to walk on, and I quickly decided that I had turned west too far north of the address I wanted, and anyway on the winding road downhill I had picked up a dropped flyer that was an announcement of a sort of picnic or fair that day, in a "Roman field," and I felt that had some connection with the address I was looking for. So I went back uphill to a small community and tried the NEXT westward-possible street, but ended in a white-painted colonial-style building that seemed to be the entranceway to a kind of exhibit of the history of this part of the river, and I looked at an old inside doorway which seemed to have been preserved from the facade of a house that formed the north wall of this pavilion that seemed to have been built where the old STREET was, so that the north wall was the south wall of a building facing the street, and the south wall was the north wall of the building across the street from THAT, and the number at the top of the doorframe seemed to be 10053, though later I thought it may have been a poorly marked 10E53. Asked the clerk behind a desk for the address I was looking for, and he handed me a card with 2 253 4 5 53, which indicated I should exit this building and continue along country route 2, which I was on, which would quickly join Interstate 253, which I would follow until country route 4 went to the next right, follow that to the intersection of route 5, and follow that until I came to the house marked 53, which was where the "Roman field" party was actually being held. I thanked him, left the building, and thought I might find my friend (to whom I keep wanting to give the name of Leo W., that fast-running only-friend from 6th grade at St. John's grade school) walking in the same direction, but didn't, and turned down Interstate 253 wondering what kind of people I'd meet at this party, having no idea WHY I was searching for this address, what I was going to do there, where I had come from, or what I was going to do AFTER I found the right address. The weather seemed perfect for walking, I was medium-dressed (as it didn't seem to be TOO hot though it seemed to be summer), and I NOW remember cars moving rather too close to me as I walked alongside routes 2 and 253, as if they were trying to frighten me into moving farther into the fields along the roads so I wouldn't get brushed by the cars passing at no great speeds. No worries about "it's getting dark" or "I'm going to be late"---just looking for the right number.
1/27/97: 9:45AM: AGAIN incredible details, first "at the opera" and then "on the elephant-ride back to town." At the opera, I'm in the first row of a section of seats that seems PART of the stage, so that when video cameras are turned on to record various scenes at what even may be pre-performance rehearsals, a frame of light FROM the video tube lights up the scene or the head of the person in close-up; and one particular head, toward the end of the sequence, is bald, with shaver-burns on the neck, and a stubby nose and fatty lips so lower class that I think "this must be a non-singing part, because he doesn't look like he could have any kind of operatic voice at ALL." I'm having problems in the audience too: the woman to my left has a baby in her lap, and there are cries and whimpers from small children in the row behind me, and at one point SHE turns and commands a two- or three-year-old in the row behind me and three seats to the RIGHT to be quiet, and I reach (with an unreasonable length of arm) back to her breastbone and PINCH (seemingly based on the cattle prods used to torture victims on the tape of Millenium that I watched last night) her, taking care to take LITTLE flesh between my fingers so I wouldn't really HARM her, only SCARE her into being quiet, but her face shows a tremulous border between frightened obedience and pained howling, and I try to make my VOICE push her to the boundary of being QUIET rather than making more of a FUSS than she's making now. Then the man sitting to my right, whom I'd noticed before when I was somehow detached from the audience and on the stage itself, starts taking too much floor-room with his left foot, and I forcefully push his foot over with MY foot until my foot is even with the boundary of my seat-space, and I'm thankful that he doesn't SMELL, because his pants are unpressed, stained, greasy, and torn, his raincoat is in the same poor shape, adding discolorations, and his face is gaunt, hungry-looking, and unshaven, yet his eyes are never removed from concentrating on the stage action. A number of processional scenes are started and stopped (I think during ONE procession that this must be Aida, but I have it in mind that it's not one of the four Wagner Ring operas [as addressed in my play on Tuesday], but a PREQUEL to them, which I'd actually seen before in person in this production, but still I want to see the rest of it. After another moment I look around and see that MANY of the children in the audience have been replaced by serious, opera-going ADULTS, and I wonder how the change was made so quickly, and then I see that the seat to the RIGHT of the vagrant to MY right is empty, and I wonder if I could slip over and sit THERE, on the aisle, and be more removed from the chaos of people sitting around me (though the row is VERY narrow, since I have the impression that the woman on my LEFT is on the aisle too, which would make my row only four seats wide). After I wake, of course, I'm reminded of the Scientific American Frontiers segment on dreams I watched on tape last night before going to bed, stating that the images that arise from the hippocampus are RANDOM, and our sense-making left brain scurries frantically to CONNECT these random images just as our sight tries to make FACES out of Archimboldo arrangements of fruits, vegetables, and books. Other scenes are lit, partially filmed, but never really SUNG, as if this were only a rehearsal of the CHORUS, except that when I LEAVE, I know that there is still about 90 minutes left of the production and I'm concerned about getting back to see the END of it, even though what I would actually SEE becomes increasingly tiny. Then, without transition, I'm LEAVING the production in a unique way: riding on the back of a baby elephant with a number of other "passengers" behind me who seem to drop off along the way until only I and an older woman somewhat like Mrs. M. from long-ago East 61st Street remain, with the mahout or elephant-prodder walking alongside or just behind us as we descend into a warren of stairs and tunnels from a location I think I MUST remember, since I'd been down here right near the Hudson River just about 57th or 59th Street BEFORE---maybe even on an elephant returning from the opera before---and the stairs descend in quick succession in varying (usually orthogonal) directions, very like some manic computer game: usually in only one or two directions, usually only four or five steps before coming to a small landing which usually has one or two little cocktail tables with two or three or four people sitting enjoying exotic drinks or snacks, outside kiosks with Oriental or Far East signs on them with Russian or Thai or Tibetan snacks and drinks, seemingly carved out of underground spaces, with the stairs crumbling (as they would be, with elephants constantly descending them) and slightly dusty, the kiosks manned with costumed invisible (I know) attendants, and khaki-dressed patrons as if this were a scene from some Indiana Jones movie taking place in the 20s or 30s. The elephant turns on its own from left to right, plodding carefully down the stairs, sometimes frightening children ahead so that they run away, and in one case a ten- or eleven-year-old boy takes quite a tumble down a flight of seven or eight steps, watched with alarm by a kindly old woman who hopes he's not hurt as he quickly picks himself up and runs away through an arcade to the right. I have to bend and clasp the elephant's head as we go through these low tunnels, and I can feel the bones not quite meeting in ridges around the tops and sides of his skull, and palpate spaces between his jawbones when I grip the lower part of his cranium, and I'm worried that I'm hurting him since his hairy skin seems quite a bit thinner than I thought a baby elephant's skin would be---he's only about five feet tall, but he still seems to know where he's going even though we seem to have lost his keeper in the maze of descending stairways and coffee shops along the way. Now he's treading with care over showcases in a department store, and at one point he comes to a decorative arch at the apex of an agglomeration of counters, and he pauses either with confusion over which way to turn, or with the difficulty of climbing over this arch with me on his back, so I get off and gingerly put my foot down on a multilevel display of what looks to be a toy-soldier battlefield: I can easily avoid the ships (OH, that reminds me of a forgotten section of dream: AFTER the opera and BEFORE the elephant-ride, a busload of us are riding down the West Side Highway and pass a sunken aircraft carrier, only its stern sticking out of the water, so near the shore that I'm amazed the river is so deep here that it could CONTAIN the 3/4 carrier-length sunk at a 45-degree angle into it, wondering if I'd heard any newscast or article that explained this quite-recent sinking, and then after a quarter-mile there's a PASSENGER ship sunk to about the same degree at about the same angle, and I'm wondering to myself whether THIS might not be some kind of stage-set for some Ruins of New York movie in which I'd see a wrecked Statue of Liberty in sequence after two or three OTHER ships that we pass) and larger troop-carriers with my foot, but the individual soldiers, only one or two centimeters high, are so tiny and so densely placed that I can't help crushing two or three of them even if I step daintily on tiptoe. The older woman joins me at this time, making our way through the crowds in the department store to get to our "terminal," and I seem to consider that "Now that we're actually in BROOKLYN, maybe I should just go HOME rather than trying to get back to MANHATTAN to see the end of the opera," but SHE seems determined to return, so I ask her (whispering into her earring-dangling ear) if she'd like to share a taxi with me back to the opera, and she asks with some asperity if I actually thought we could get OUT of this shopping center anywhere NEAR a place where we could eventually FLAG a cab, and I look out some side windows to see streams of traffic going past, and realize we're now alongside the East Side Highway, so we'd have to go a number [and I'm having GREAT problems with TRANSPOSING LETTERS this morning!---about TEN so far, where there would usually be only two or three!] of blocks before even getting to a corner where taxis could STOP. It's about 2:15PM and I figure the opera will be over at 3, so since it would take us about half an hour at the BEST to get back, would it even be WORTH it? She dismisses my worry that our elephant, left unattended, wouldn't be able to find its way back to its "station," and I wake still undecided what I'll do, lie there in amazement at the complexity of the dream, and finish typing this at 10:30AM.
1/30/97: 7:15AM: Wake with a vividly detailed dream obviously inspired by my looking through the "Lost World" tour yesterday afternoon [up at 7:20AM to start typing at 7:22AM, depressed because I have to start jury duty at 8:45AM this morning and had to set my alarm for 8AM, for which it's still set]. In the dream, I'm with a group of Americans, sort of their guide, because after the "core" performance, I meet two women I'm clearly in charge of, and I tell them, shaking my head and NOT smiling, that either I've seen the death by fire of one of the patriarchs of a family or they have some of the greatest stage special-effects in the world. It's clear I'm watching SOMETHING in the line of a performance, at LEAST to the extent that they KNOW a small group of us are watching their every move at this time, and for a while they pass jugs of fermented drinks around with jests and silent-movie violence, which includes one young man throwing out a boomerang-shaped pipe which catches his father behind the knees and FLIPS him into the air to land with a crash on his back, and everyone, including the participants, are aghast at the FORCE of his landing and the QUICKNESS of his flip through the air. Then the tiny figure of the great-grandfather snatches a jug from his son, the grandfather, who's enormously fat and black-mustached, and the grandfather (all of this seems to take place in concentrated drunken silence) grabs the jug back, and they start a blustery show-offish standing rassling match whick quickly takes them back to an alcove containing a stove, which is moved sideways away from the wall, and there's a spark (again in silence) and after a moment a whoosh of flame envelopes the fat grandfather from head to toe, actual sparks appearing to surround (or even COME FROM) his head, obscured by the brightness of the flame against the darkness of the corner and of his complexion, and the back of the alcove seems to yawn open into a tiny flight of stairs up which the flaming body totters, and then there's a silent explosion and the back of the room "set" shows a back room in ruins---ceiling beams cracked and fallen into the wrecked room---and then the family seems to resume their life without TOO much concern that one of their lineage has just gone up in smoke. I leave the house dazed, to encounter the two women who have been watching some OTHER performance whose import I have no idea of, and make my shaken remark, certainly not wanting to THINK that I witnessed an actual immolation of a human being in flames: this couldn't happen with EVERY tourist visit! Without transition I'm in bed with a group of small boys, which seems the typical way in which to go to bed: two are beside me, both on their backs as I and my companion are, and they're smiling and jostling each other as kids will before sleep, and my companion atop me seems somehow lonely, and I sense rather than physically feel his arms wrapping more tightly around my arms around his chest, and my parallel legs are more tightly holding onto the sides of his body, so that my bones can feel the alignments of his bones, and I'm conscious that my cock is soft, but it's positioned so that IF it were erect it might seem to want to penetrate him from the rear, or at least intrafemorally, but that somehow seems to be an all-right custom among these particular Indians, and he's grateful for my implied backward hug and is showing it by clasping me below by tensing inward on his elbows along my sides and his parallel legs along MY legs. There had been parts of the dream BEFORE this, but I lie in bed solidifying primarily the details of the drunken sparring among four members of four different generations (though the two younger generations appeared more to be brothers [as they might at ages 17 and 32], while the older were more separated in age, the burning fat grandfather perhaps 50, the small and wiry great-grandfather in his 60s, yet still retaining a full head of black hair), and thinking of Schneeman and his beddings with various Amazonian males in their quasi-homosexual couplings, and wondering if anything like that might happen if I actually TOOK the 34-day camping trip through Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela with Encounters Overland. Finish this about 7:40AM, content that I've captured the most flagrantly awful episode of the dream, though not the complete context and flavor and tour-uncertainty of the whole set of episodes.
1/31/97: 8:45AM: Woke at 2:45AM with another IBM-worker dream: this time I'm in some high-power meeting deciding how to bill the remains of an extraordinarily large job to the client, and my manager seems reluctant to give details, but at last I ask, "Well, what PERCENTAGE of the final amount have we still not been paid?" and he responds "Ten percent." I figure that isn't THAT bad, because even if the total billing would be a million dollars, a TRULY huge job, the remaining amount would be "only" a hundred thousand dollars, so even if we split the difference and they only paid half, we'd only "lose" fifty thousand dollars, and at our very inflated billing prices, that wouldn't amount to TOO much of a loss, and I felt better returning to my desk and talking to my cubicle mates about the afternoon's talk about billing.
2/3/97: 8:40AM: 1) 8:10AM: I'm standing at the top of a crumbling bluff, looking down at a rocky base that's been reinforced by tar in some way to crumble no more (maybe prompted by the two areas of newly tarred roadway I'd passed yesterday), and they've dug a kind of ramp at a 45º angle to act as an escape-trail, first more distant---which was then stopped when it was clear that it wouldn't reach "the bottom"---then nearer where I'm standing, so that it had enough room to slope down, and there's news that someone in charge has volunteered to swim through the waters down there to the ocean (based I guess on the scuba divers in yesterday's tape of Incredible Suckers), and I think THAT would be dangerous and I'd like to stay around until he tries it out, but that doesn't appear to be imminent. 2) 8:10AM: (This was really some kind of continuation of the first dream) I'm in a gay bar in the Village or Lower East Side before it really gets busy, and I'm trying to entertain myself by a) watching two gangly kids trying to wrestle, but then they're approached by a group of 10-to-12-year-olds with cameras who are egging them on to appear to wrestle for their shots, and I figure there's not going to be anything erotic happening soon; b) picking up glasses and wine bottles that are lying around, hoping to appear either as if I'd bought drinks or maybe even as if I WORK there, but no one CARES what I'm doing and I take a few items from one place and put them in another place, and then I get tired of doing that and c) am attracted to some kinds of piles of papers and cards, and it looks like someone's brought in some souvenirs to act as a base for a "past-porno show," and there are obsolete greeting cards with personal messages inside at the bottom of a stack of clippings from old magazines and copies of HX and Next, and I sort things out on various piles when some old fart comes over and picks up piles of stuff to look at HIMSELF, and I think I've unfortunately attracted attention to this stuff, so I begin piling piles atop other piles to try to put them onto shelves or into corners somewhere to get them out of sight, and THEN I decide that nothing's going to happen here SOON to interest or involve me, so I leave and walk home, figuring I'll probably just jerk off when I get back around 8PM, passing THAT evening until I can go to sleep. Wake VERY aroused and figure I have to get up soon, but fall back asleep for the LAST dream: 3) 8:40AM: I'm wandering through a woods toward twilight and then pass a table set up near the entrance and figure there's some kind of benefit tour here this evening, because there are lots of people coming in and holding brochures that guide them around the different areas. Then I'm looking at a group of climbers up a hill and hear the growls of a bear. The climbers come from the right across a level trail to the sharp ascent up which I look, and they're rapidly followed by THREE bears, and I keep looking up, hoping to see the actual attack, but the climbers seem to be safe. [It's now 8:55AM and I have to have breakfast and get ready for this (Monday's) day of jury duty, but I want to get to the bottom of the page, so I'll observe the CLATTER made by my computer-tower, and Dr. Data STILL hasn't managed to talk to ME, and I'll be gone for who KNOWS how many days before the actual TRIAL starts, and I have to go to the JOHN, but have finally gotten to the last line and I can start the printing as I put on my Wheatena.]
2/17/97: 9:15AM: Last dream recorded two weeks ago. Fragments from a more connected unremembered narrative: 1) I'm on vacation at some kind of Buddhist hotel, wandering through enormous rooms in which various Buddhist techniques are taught, such as meditation, walking and observing, and the last one I particularly remember: playing Go. At first I think it's a CASINO because of all the people sitting around circular tables clicking what I first think are poker chips, but then I see that they're Go counters which opponents place so fast it's like bettors rapidly covering sequences of odd or even or triads or quadrads of numbers. I vaguely recall learning the game long ago, and wonder if there are new techniques that involve putting down NUMBERS of tiles in one turn, weaving them around a central axis, or weaving A central axis along a previously unused line. Surrounding each pair of seemingly expert players are a circle of six or eight close observers, each with a little segment of Go board before them on which they put down experimental tiles in patterns echoing the patterns just played on the board (and only as I type do I think that this TOO might be a form of Glass Bead Game!), and in each corner of the larger circle are smaller circles of three or four players who are somehow playing subsidiary games which are yet connected to the central all-important game for that table. The room contains twelve or fourteen such groupings of players and tables, and I am one of the few onlookers, since most who come here have either been placed at a board according to their expertise or lack of it, or have left the room to seek a more exciting venue. 2) In the hotel room where I'm staying on this vacation, I'm sharing with a Chinese woman somewhat reminding me of Madge M., and (surely based on the tenant downstairs coming to knock on my door last night about the leak from my corner radiator bringing down large sections of her ceiling) I look down off the bed to see a trail of what appears to be MILK circling the room atop a carpet very much the color and texture of my living-room carpet, and I peer under my bed to see the trail entirely circling the room in a path between eight and twelve inches wide, seeming to be strongest flowing from one particular corner. 2a) In another part of the dream I'd tried to CLEAN this fluid from the rug by a dream-like paradox of circling the room with a square pan of water which I'd somehow simultaneously DISPERSE over the floor with a circular motion that would seem to SPREAD water from the pan ONTO the floor, yet at the same time COLLECT the milky fluid from the floor INTO the pan, and even though I have the vague memory that 2a) was dreamed chronologically BEFORE 2), I'm clear that the path around the bed was there BEFORE I circled with the watering pan, rather than AFTER---that I was trying to CLEAN UP the fluid rather than ADDING TO the quantity of fluid. 3) More shadowy sections I would try to reproduce by PRODUCING segments of dreams that included either waiting for a plane to land for us or looking down from a plane to see various destinations coming close over the low horizon. I'm sure the details of having to pay for the rest of the Lascaux trip, still debating whether to telephone about the Angel Falls trip, and talking to Sherryl and David yesterday about their possible presence in southern France the first week of July---or even meeting me for a couple of days at the end of June despite the fact that my trip was going to be totally inclusive of time, hotel, and meals during that period---have all entered into the basis for this dream. I wake from it at about 8:30AM, recalling 3) ANOTHER segment where I'm drinking something, or talking to someone, and I start COUGHING in the dream, and wake to find myself COUGHING in real life, a DEEP cough as if the moldy stamps moved into my bedroom (and the tons of mold which must have been forming behind my bathroom walls from the leaks from upstairs) (as well as the crud thrown into the air by my red-rimmed humidifier-mouth top) have infected my lungs with spores that are too deeply embedded to be cleared by a simple mucus-filled coughing spell. I'd wanted to come to the end of this page, coming up with 3) at the last moment, and now at 9:32AM pleased to hear the heat coming up in the radiator to warm the room in which the temperature reads 68° as I type at this moment.
2/28/97: 10:08AM: Waking about 8:30, I add a semi-sleeping segment to the following dream: I'm sitting around a table with a lot of younger women, moderating a session rather like Village Playwrights on "How to Write Fiction," and though I'm only supposed to be a participant, they seem to turn to me for advice on how to write, and I tell them that it's easier to DO than to TALK ABOUT DOING, like it's easier to DISSOLVE sugar into water than to DESCRIBE it: if you just dump the sugar into the water and stir it up, it'll dissolve easily by ITSELF, without your really paying attention to the MECHANICS of it. It happens almost AUTOMATICALLY, and they look at me in wonder, and after I wake I expand the lesson by saying to myself as if to the girls in the dream: It's not as difficult as injecting worms into wood, thinking to describe the difficulty of putting the flexible worm into an injection needle and sticking the end of it into a cylindrical piece of wood, like a cork or a hunk of wood that fits the inside of a glass so that one can watch "the injection," with the added difficulty of injecting it around in a circle, so that it'll be evenly distributed after the injection is finished---and then my mind continues with the lesson, thinking that the phrase "like injecting worms in wood" is simple enough to SAY (because I said it almost automatically) EVEN THOUGH it embodies the literary device of The Simile (which uses "like", as opposed to The Metaphor, which doesn't), and it displays Alliteration with the initial W's of Worms and Wood, and it displays a certain amount of Rhythm when the trochee (or whatever) of inJECTing "goes with" the dactyl (or whatever) of WORMS in WOOD. Finish, dissatisfied, at 10:17AM, desk full of things to do and a notebook page fermenting in my mind.
3/5/97: 9:55AM: Two main segments, of which the first was 1) TRIP: and I can't remember NOW what I'd recalled when I WOKE about 8:45AM, thinking it would be EASY to remember part a) about the trip, probably something about timing or arrangements or transportation, which I can't now recall, and part b) maybe something about food or hotel scheduling, which I can't now recall, and part c) about trying to cross a small river or large stream, looking down into the gray waters at partially submerged tree-trunks angling off on the right to make the waters look DEEP, and there's an L-shaped old trunk about two feet in diameter that it looks safe to stand on, which when I do, it moves farther under the water, turns slightly, and with a gasp I'm IN the cold water, moving in the center current far from either shore, and I calmly look around to see what I'm going to grab that will enable me to get back onto dry land. 2) concerned a porno video or movie in which a near-orgasm cock, pointing directly at the camera, is being tapped at its base to tease it into shooting right into the lens, and without transition the cock is MINE, and I'm tapping it, feeling the tensions mount, looking at the precum glistening at the cock-slit, thinking that I've tapped it a number of times now and I'm neither going soft from too-prolonged teasing, nor am I going over the edge that leads to ineluctable cumming, and I marvel about that balance and wake to feel my own stiff erection, debate a moment about following it up with manual stimulation, but drop back off to sleep, assured that I'll remember the three parts of the trip-dream that came before AND the two segments of the cock-dream that followed. Then I wake drowsily and debate taking notes, but don't, confident that the easy segments will remain in my mind. [Look at the clock at 9AM and 9:15, and finally at 9:35AM I get up and dress and raise the shade and sit on the john to defecate---having noted down the last three segments, now sorting through opera, bus-tours, plane-flights, meal-sittings, friends-traveling-with, arrangements-late-for, complications, confusions, forgettings, and the usual components of trip-dreams, fruitlessly trying to recall the missing first two episodes---and then sit at the computer and go through all these lines trying to re-jog the memory into the missing elements, but as I type these last two or three lines I realize that it'll never be completed, review the "why" of doing these pages in the FIRST place, but am glad at least THIS is done!] (RETURN TO JOURNALS 3/5/97).
3/12/97: 10:25AM: The "typical threesome": 1) I've entered a theater in which I'm going to see an opera, and the cheap seats are WAY back in the house, with many heads in front of my view of the stage, and I move around and try to take an aisle seat so I won't have anyone in front of me, and when the music starts many of the women who had been at a CORNER of a seating section, with a good view, had moved BACK for some reason to tables with their friends, so I could advance myself to these newly vacated seats and have a better---though still distant---view. 2) I leave a few people in my bedroom at 1221 Dietz and go toward the linen closet in the hall to dimly espy movements on the floor. When I turn the light on there are a NUMBER of large red cockroaches scurrying around the floor undeterred by the illumination. I'm so frantic to get rid of them that I kneel and begin pounding them in threesomes with my FIST, but they bounce back to animation, and even my foot isn't heavy enough to break through their chitinous armor to crush their bodies. From under the closed door to Mom's bedroom come streams of large red ants, and I'm wondering how they got in there in the first place when I get a large can of spray and use it so vehemently that I notice that I'd gotten the nozzle turned around and I'm getting it dripping over my hands, which I rub onto the floor to kill more of the creepy-crawlies. But then I AGAIN look down and find that there's hardly ANYTHING moving on the floor; I'd somehow misinterpreted something ELSE to be large numbers of infesting insects. 3) In a very elaborate Eisenstein-with-color movie (and I DO have the sense that this is a VERY early Russian experimentation with color filming, even though the film itself seem to be TOO well preserved to date from the silent era) two priests are bemoaning the death of Ivan the Terrible, who lies quietly on a bed, his thin face and graying beard silhouetted in the dim room. As in The Diamond Age that I'm reading now, the scene suddenly goes "reactive" and I enter it and admonish the priests by assuring them he's not really dead. They're convinced he is, but I bend over the sleeping form, which wakes, and suddenly he's looming over ME---supine on my back on the bed now---glaring down at me, his menacing face coming closer and closer, his tongue out, and suddenly I find I'm BITING on the end of his tongue, which is very thick and meaty, and he's shocked and so turned on that I brush his crotch and feel his erection starting, and as I continue biting sexily on his tongue, we start to grapple with each other and I grab his cock and stare lovingly at it as he holds, panting, onto mine, and I wake with a STRONG erection that quickly is joined by a slight pain in the prostate, and I wonder if the DHEA isn't finally affecting my body, recalling that one of the possible side effects was a problem with the prostate. But as my erection subsides as I lie groggily in bed, the prostate-pressure disappears, and in some interval in this trio Marilyn calls at 9AM precisely and says she isn't coming over at 10, but later, and I lie until 10:05 when I get up to shit after thinking about many problems facing me currently today.
3/18/97: 1PM: Having dreamed them about 9:30AM, gotten out of bed at 10:30 having forgotten them, and then reminded of them when speaking to Pope about HIS dream at 11:30, I record them: 1) I'm riding in an open car or a small bus past a display of "quality" chicken coops on a farm famous for its eggs (is this from my wanting an omelette last night, but ending with pizza?), and as my conveyance allows me to scan the slow parade of pampered feathered hens, I can see them with flowers strewn on their wire floors, and one even HOLDS a flower up to its critical eye; and the food includes muffins, sweet rolls liberally dotted with raisins, and even FUDGE, on which a red hen cocks her head down quizzically. I idly wonder what a dozen eggs sell for from this Eden. 2) I'm in a room with three enormous cats, and I have some sort of portable cat-petter, like a gentle Dust-Buster, which I draw over their pelts to bring out a sheen so intense it seems almost fluorescent---deep black with highlights of green and even purple---and they crouch down to enjoy my ministrations, rather like Samantha dreamily luxuriated in my head-scratching at Susan's last night. I enjoy puffing up the pelts and wake overheated in a spring-like room.
3/21/97: NOON: 1) I'm participating in some enormous pageant (seemingly based on some SPONGE advertisement I watched last night with the skating program) in which I'm one of the four QUADRANT-POLES of a display-Earth, there are a smaller number of SIDE-PIECES who are adjacent to the four of us, and then there are a larger number of FILLER-PIECES: all of us wear boxy, bulky, blocky "costumes" which fit next to each other to form a continuum of the map of the world. Some director in the center tells us that this is going to be the final shot, and everyone links up arm-in-arm and starts whirling in a circle so that the map will "merge" and look like a real spinning globe if everyone is in place, and I want to SEE it from the outside, and I try to sneak out BEFORE my slot closes, but I see a guillotine-type block of green-forest area swing down and OBLITERATE my slot so that I have no place to push back into, and the whole thing gets out of control and I can hear the director shouting, "Stop, stop!" and know I'm responsible for ruining the shot and feel very bad. 2) The bad feelings continue when I'm at a desk rather like mine, but it's piled with drawers and contents and equipment rather like Spartacus's apartment, so I don't have room to work, and also my computer is "out of place" like on my table waiting for repairs, and I go through a package of materials and find to my chagrin that what I thought had been ONE index was really TWO indexes, one of which was supposed to have been finished in a week and I hadn't even STARTED it yet, and I wondered if I could finish it today and get it out, and so I tried pushing stuff off the table and giving myself a temporary workspace so that I could get the job done quickly, and woke feeling pretty awful, and devoted a lot of the morning to talking about Dennis's condition (in NOTEBOOK:3/21/97).
3/24/97: 10:30AM: At 9:30 I wake and jot down notes on two dreams: 1) I'm in some sort of airship---hardly moving--- while looking down at a seacoast from a great height (probably somehow connected with Captain Nemo's superior view of the world in last night's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), talking to the pilot, and I look down from a horizon-to-horizon viewport into a dawn-or-twilight half-light, surprised to find that I can SEE the descending capsule? below as a tumbling round-square shape the color of copper, and I express my surprise by saying, "I didn't think I'd see it so CLEARLY," and the pilot smiles some kind of unspoken appreciation at the clarity of the air at this time, and as I watch, not sure how far the ship is from the ground, a landing light is turned on, and, from the narrowness of the illumination near the nose of the ship, and the fan-shape of the headlight itself, I can see that the ship is VERY near the ground, orienting itself near the beach on a TINY airstrip obviously too short to lessen the speed of the descending capsule, and it swings out onto a nearby coastal highway, so that I think there must be some kind of traffic-control so that no automobile traffic can impede the landing, and then without transition 2) I'm walking along the seacoast near the landing area, seeing that I'm on some kind of neck of land with a road-loop in the center of it that I can identify on a map that I have which is labeled "Root “Root 5,” and the direction I want to go is identified at the map-edge as "Root 4," and I have a dim memory of gathering lots of maps from a pile of stuff on a bed as I was packing for this trip this morning, and I search through the papers I have and find that I DO have a "Root 4" map, and somehow I identify this "neck of land" with the strip of Panama as it connects North America to South America, and I seem to be coming FROM North America, south to a desert (knowing that it really should be an impenetrable jungle) at the southern part of Panama before it expands into the bulk of the northern part of South America, and MAYBE this previsions the ACTUALISM session I start at 9:30 and finish at 10:20 which expands the bulk of the PLAY I'd worked at on Saturday to page 32, writing six note cards of hallucinogenic obsession on All and Everything which I'll include in the play, first getting this out of the way by 10:45AM, getting a call from BELLEVUE to update their records on Dennis from two years ago, needing to water plants and eat breakfast and WRITE PLAY! (RETURN TO JOURNALS 3/24/97).
4/1/97: Merest fragment about combing my hair, which stands up on each side of a distinct part in a HUGE hedge-like wave, which I then comb down on either side of my head to make a more normal appearance. Vicki called to say she dreamed about strangers and HER background friends at Dennis's memorial---to which Leroy was late---in an enormous eight-bedroom apartment. Rather unusual.
4/7/97: 10AM: Carolyn wakes me at 9:45AM in the middle of a play-dream: I'd been asked to be in it, but I figured I couldn't memorize the dozens of lines I'd have to say in the two days before it was being given, but I had a first-row seat at the "reading," and the first episode was delivered by a handsome long-haired actor who kept nodding his head forward so that his thick, shiny locks would brush the countertop behind which he strode back and forth mumbling his lines, and I debated "ad libbing" a line in the play to him as "Speak up, young man, you're mumbling!" but I didn't. As part of the climax, a number of safety-belted young men were creeping outside a large vertical skylight at the top rear of the stage, and there was a projection of snow falling---so convincing that most of us in the theater thought it was ALSO snowing for REAL just outside that window, and even coming around the sides of the back wall onto the stage itself. But I thought I could see, from my seat on the extreme side, the 8-inch hose from which the artificial snow was blown onto the actors making their way along this cliff edge that the window-ledge at the back of the stage represented, and the whole outside was thick with atmosphere almost as if they were operating underwater. Though I thought this was just a reading, or only a rehearsal, there was an elaborate special-effects apparatus that projected something that, in the darkness, looked like a gigantic horizontal stalactite or ice formation being ponderously moved from the far side of the stage from which I was viewing this, all across the open space of the window, showing buttresses and ridges of snow or ice or rock, accompanied by a vibrating machine that caused the entire building to shake with the grating immensity of the roaring progress of this huge concoction which was pushing the characters off the right side of the window. In the whirling dimness I thought I could see that some of the men were dressed in skin-tight trousers, which might afford views of some nicely stuffed crotches, but I couldn't quite make them out, and the audience was reacting so strongly to the sound and vibration-feel of this effect that the wonder of it far outweighed the sexuality of the people involved. I wondered how, and for how much money, this small rehearsal was being accomplished, and then the phone rang, waking me from whatever apotheosis might have climaxed the dream had it been let run to conclusion. Possibly it was caused by my concern over the staging of The Director for a Village Playwrights evening, possibly on April 29, because I refused last night to accept Ken's invitation for some old-music program at Alice Tully Hall on the night of April 28th, since that would be the night of the final rehearsal. Then, by coincidence, Carolyn's call was to say that I was joining her in seeing a play on Broome Street put on by a friend of hers a week from Saturday, April 19. I was groggy through the entire conversation, then thought I had to shit, but sat without producing anything and decided since I was definitely UP, and wanted to record the salient details of the dream directly, I came to the computer and entered this, now at 10:10AM wondering if I should finish to the bottom of the page with things that are essentially NOT connected to the dream, but I CAN remark on the total REALITY of the curls on the head of the actor, attractively long and trimmed around his head, not with the stiffness that I associate with the curls of Don M.'s wigs, and how he made a point of repeatedly lowering his head while talking so that the curls brushed the top of the glass counter behind which he was walking when he spoke or mumbled his lines. The noise and vibration of the horizontally-projected special-effect ice-or-rock pinnacle was most noteworthy for amazing the audience with its effectiveness, and I wondered if something in my REAL world had influenced these facets just before the telephone rang and I woke.
4/10/97: 9:40AM: I'm working for the census again, and come to a street-level entrance to what seems to be a private house on an East-side street that turns into an enormous compound of property headed by a kind of overseer who, when I encounter him in the middle of a mustering room, is surrounded by literally dozens of servants, chauffeurs, cooks, maids, security forces, and heads of whole phalanxes of service personnel who are milling around him taking orders for the day, week, and month. I search through my portfolio for the proper questionnaire for this kind of household, and find that I seem to have forgotten to bring ANYTHING that would show that I was currently an official census-questioner, but the capo seems so swelled with himself that he's willing to answer almost anything, and I start by wanting to satisfy my own curiosity about the size of this work-staff and the income of the head of this household, but begin by asking the actual size of the core family who inhabits these palatial suites. I know that I have to thread a narrow corridor between innocuous questions that will reveal nothing interesting and pointed questions that he might suspect no census-taker should be required to ask, leading him to ask to see the form I'm filling out, revealing that I'm only jotting phony answers in the white-space of ads in my current issue of New York magazine. I've gotten him isolated in a robing room of some kind, and he seems at ease in a large executive-type chair, yet there's a quality of suspicion and protectiveness about him that I know I have to placate. [Wake with no known stimulus about 8:35, and doze until 9:35 when I know I must get dressed to receive the two indexes that are scheduled to arrive today, hoping still that the buzzer works well enough for them to let me know they've arrived downstairs. Work in a living room darkened still for Norman's play-tape watch.]
4/12/97: 9:30AM: 1) I'm traveling in some possibly Fascistic country: Spain under Franco, or one of the newly independent SSRs, and I'm lost in a multi-level setting somewhat like a hospital, or maybe an offshoot of the "Center" so mysteriously described in Powers's Galatea 2.2 that I read before I went to sleep last night. I'm pushing a folding bed down flights of stairs, trying to get "to where I belong," though my feeling is more one of "I've got to get out of here." There are whispered conversations among the attendants that new "Volunteers" for some kind of grounds-labor force are going to be recruited without their knowledge, and the prime candidates are the "visitors" that I seem to think I'm numbered among, and I try to get confirmation of the rumors and at the same time protest that I've PAID my way to get here, so I'm certainly not going to be put to work against my will. An attendant that I think might be trying to help me smuggles in a small medical bag, crumpled more like a bag of candy, and I rummage inside to find something for my "room/cell mate" to eat, and for me a hypodermic needle labeled 10V01 that is described as causing attacks of seizures---which would exempt me from the work, maybe discharge me from these holding pens, but probably be terribly uncomfortable, so I refuse to even THINK about injecting myself. I force myself into a roomful of suited men talking into microphones (maybe based on my looking around corners in galleries yesterday to find curators sitting at their desks, sometimes with clients) that I debate disturbing with my problem, but I think maybe I'd be making too much of it by doing that, though I'm relieved when the rubber tubing lengthens that seems to be connecting me or my bedstead to the complicated wall outlets, and I can move around more freely. 2) I'm sitting in the first row of a rehearsal (my play's influence?) and one girl astounds the audience by turning her head 180° over her ass, another gets into position and waggles her tail experimentally "to see if it works," and all the girls have enormous paddles with which they propel varied-sizes of rubbery bubbles out over the audience's heads, where they light up (the bubbles, not the heads) if they're struck properly, though some of them need repair, and I wake to think of flinging flame-globes at MY stage for diversion and take notes so I won't forget details of this current-event influenced dream. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 4/12/97).
4/18/97: 8:45AM: An older woman is a masseuse who asks for volunteers for her massage, so I stand with my hands raised against a wall, which is rather like a white chalkboard, but the people to my left decline and a young blond adds himself to the volunteers by standing to my left. She talks, aggrandizing herself, and shows a video clip of herself being towed in a kind of shallow-sided canoe down a stream, and there's a comment from the watchers when a close-up reveals that she's only wearing a string across her breasts, so is essentially topless, and to advertise the goodness of her body, she's allowed the water to push down the tops of her swimming shorts so that her pubic bush is gleaming wet just under the surface of the water, showing that her body, though older, is still perfectly willing and able to have sex with anyone who wants it. Without a break, I'm finishing my breakfast in a tourist hotel in Switzerland at noon, and check with the tour guide to find that the train to my next destination (the only one that day) is at 2:46PM, so I debate taking a quick tour of Lake Geneva, where I'm told to ask for the Karte Zraly, and I look at a map of the area which is imprinted on a tablecloth under the table I've just left, filled with dishes from a multicourse meal so that it's difficult to make out continuities in the roads, rivers, and lakes of the map, but I can tell it's current because its logo reads "have exciting 1990s." I thought there were other memorable details, but I couldn't think of any to add to the note that I wrote when I woke, which I now transcribe at 10:30AM.
4/21/97: 9:30AM: A rocket, green, looking VERY like a flying floor-model Electrolux Vacuum Cleaner, buzzes lower and lower around a GROUP of people CONVINCED it's a UFO (rather reminiscent of The Godsend?), and in a sparkle changes into a shirtless kid falling off a BICYCLE; an illustration of how COMMON objects can be ELEVATED into uncommonality, or GLORIOUS objects DEGRADED into triviality. [Part of the weekend that got my imagination back to reworking The Director as indicated in NOTEBOOK:4/21/97 note from today. Now noon.]
4/25/97: 8:45AM: It's about noon with three of us on a visit to some foreign city, and my "regular" partner, somehow a combination of Ken L. and Jean-Jacques---even though he's back at the hotel waiting for my return for an afternoon tour---is going to be jealous, I figure, that I'm wandering the streets with a younger, more attractive tourist who seems to be content to explore with me, looking at me out of calm eyes under long dark hair. I can see a bit of the river, or lake, or ocean, between buildings that seem to be on the horizon (a combination of Vicki's and her son's, and daughter-in-law's, and my walk along the Hudson River; and some undetermined Germanic hill town), and my companion makes some reference to a map he'd seen (like one I looked at yesterday of the Riviera---from National Geographic) in which the town we're in stretches linearly along the waterfront: "If we just walked down Main Street, we'd cover the entire town." I suggest we walk toward the river, but where the road should go down, affording a view, it goes UP to an exclusive area built on a hill along the waterfront (like the abandoned houses in Diamond Sea at the Gallery 303 on Wednesday), and I bother diners at a restaurant to look over their shoulders out the windows at the back of the buildings to see elaborate outhouses like carved-wood painted icons distributed across an estate lawn, all beneath a towering eight- or nine-story castle-like main house, which is good, because when I get to the actual gate of Wolfenstein or Archenstein it's opaque and nothing can be seen from the entrance itself. It had looked like rain to this point, and I excused being out because probably an afternoon tour wouldn't take place in driving rain, but now it's clearer and I'm wondering what I'm going to say to my hotel-waiting friend when we return, possibly too late to take the scheduled afternoon tour because of my detour. Handsome friend, though, and I feel flattered that he's willing to be seen alongside me, since everyone will envy me his good-looking company. Wake and feel chilly and cuddle in the blankets before getting out of bed to shit and write this down.
5/1/97: 9:08AM: Dreamed at 6AM, noted at 8AM: two fragments: 1) A woman in an enormous ALLIGATOR costume is dancing down a main Manhattan Avenue, and I'm following her, marveling at how well she operates her tail and how the long limbs seem appropriate in the green-embossed costume. 2) Forgotten. Then a long UGLY-detailed dream in an office, where the males constantly harass the females, getting to the point where they're physically abusing them and actually undressing them. This appears to be a TV show of some kind that I'm watching on the set, though there's no evidence of special lighting or of cameras, yet my dream-logic doesn't extend that far. When the women's clothes are stripped over their heads, their torsos seem to be protected by some sort of thick mesh-work on which are crude pasties covering their nipples and genitals. The men are obviously drunk, smoking cigars, and two of the worst offenders---just inhumanly cruel and evil-looking---get out a tubular BONG of huge dimensions, into each rounded end of which they insert their HEADS to better absorb whatever controlled substances are being burned in it, and they laugh almost to the point of crying when their heads (one out of sight of the main part of the screen in the lower left, the other out of sight under the edge of a foam-pad sofa---rather like Dennis's if it were raised off the floor so that a head in a bong would fit underneath it) EXPLODE with an awful mushy bang which fills the rounded ends with swirling redness, some of which splashes out to give the final touch of horror to the TV picture---and I get the idea that these hideous men REALIZED their malevolence and chose suicide rather than handle their dastardliness. An ill-assorted bunch of extras, worse even than the inadequate characterizations on the Metropolitan Opera stage, come sidling into the room to observe this "justice"---an older woman leading the way with bugging eyes peering out from under an obvious gray wig that has twisted on her head so that one eye is almost covered by lank grayness, huddling with her lower-class neighbors as some of the officers from the company come out in their prim suits and proper ties to look fastidiously at the scene to attempt to figure out what happened and why---and I have the idea that this is a rating-grabbing try by an awful soap opera in a closing episode that just isn't working: it's too ugly and off-the-wall to be effective at all. Wake to find my cold somewhat better, but still insist on 9 hours in bed.
5/7/97: 8:35AM: Note from 8AM: Peter R. and I are among 15-20 guys, many young and rough-looking, who are competing in a bizarre game: we're all in a circle, and the contest is to see who can push everyone else out. I figure a neat way of calmly walking around near the edge of it, while everyone ELSE tries pushing the others out, and by judicious side-stepping and unexpected pressures, I trick a number of guys out of the circle, but at the end (perhaps influenced by my stage-direction readings last night at Village Playwrights, in Don's play when a character "steps behind another character and puts his hands on his shoulders and leans forward to say something to him"), when I think I'm alone in the circle, Peter sneaks up behind me and says something in his typical mild-mannered sneer like, "You know you're NOT going to be the last person left in this circle, don't you, buddy?" There's a time limit in this contest, and now there's a wall and benches in the circle that weren't there before, so I sit on a chair with my back to the wall and maneuver two backless green-painted benches up onto my lap. They're heavy and quite long, and I can't imagine how Peter could possibly get me out of the circle while I have THESE on my lap. It DOES pass through my mind that he could INJURE me while trying to physically wrestle me out from under them: my legs could be broken or severely bruised by the hard wooden under-edges of these heavy six-foot-long benches, but somehow I don't think he'd resort to violence with the judges having only the two of us to observe in the otherwise empty circle. Wake and write the note at 8AM, noting that I've slept only 6? hours, but Paul's coming today, and will be sleeping and rising early due to the time changes, so I get up and start the day closing the French door.
5/14/97: 11:35AM: Fragment from last night or a previous night: I'm sitting at a dinner table rather like at the Beard Foundation Table 1, and I'm talking about having a tooth extracted, and I put my finger in my mouth and pull it out and look at it and there's a tooth-shaped BLISTER on the tip of my right index finger, which I stare at, then think it must be an aftermath of filing at the French-door lintel a couple days ago, and palpate it meditatively and decide that's not quite dinner-table conversation, so I change the subject. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 5/14/97).
5/15/97: 9:15AM: At 8:45 jot down notes from two dreams that I'd had before 7:30AM: 1) I'm trying to see a particular movie, and to find information about it in a kind of tourist office for movies, and the owner is too busy to help me personally but gives me a tiny key on the end of a safety pin and says, "This is key 1a2" and directs me to a back room. I expect to find an array of mailboxes with key numbers designating them, but a seemingly real postman is back there when I enter and I ask him about box 1a2 and he simply waves to a stack of brochures piled in a corner, saying, "It's all over there." I look through the stack and it's largely advertising folders about merchandise I'm not interested in, but I file through lots of Village Voice-type newspapers entitled Vista, and I figure to find the issue for the week my movie came out, and maybe I could read the review from that. I see that there are lots of OTHER movies that I didn't know about that are showing nearby, but I console myself with the thought that THIS movie has been around for a while, so I should see it before it closes, and I have time to see the others which have just opened. I think I should call for the schedule, even though it'll take me about an hour to get to the theater and there are three or four hours of show time before the place closes this evening, but then I get the random thought that it may be showing there (or even someplace else) with a double feature of something that I'd like to see also, so I really SHOULD phone, and maybe I can get the phone number from Vista (thinking about area codes for Madrid to mail the fax Ken sent me yesterday for the Madrid restaurant reservation?). 2) I'm in some kind of countryside and look down to see what appears to be an elaborate model of a village street at my feet, but what I think may be plastic models of people seem to be moving, and when I look closer they must be either projections of a movie or some kind of video virtual reality, because they appear to be real people (maybe influenced by the possibly-computer-generated backgrounds and motions in the Internet Cafe that I watched for the first time at midnight on Channel 13 before going to bed), but it turns out that I was looking at this scene from a hilltop and this is all REAL, because it's like a fairgrounds with a reconstructed "past in the country" group of sets in tents. I enter the first one through what may be an EXIT, because there's no one standing guard, and there's a young man sitting up in a bed which is enormous, and I look under it to see that it's a tent of some kind of light green-and-white plastic bubble-wrap suspended over poles, and I think maybe the teenager in the bed is a projection because the supports don't seem sturdy enough to support the weight of a real person. Out the window behind his headboard is the constant whoosh and roar of a phony fireworks display that erupts from a haystack periodically like some Disney laser-fireworks show. I move through other exhibits to the entrance, where guards are charging $1 for entry, and I pat my back pockets to find I'd left my wallet in the hotel, and tell them I have no money, at which the guard, who could have been menacing, gives a tight smile and says, "Then I'll have to let you go free." I hear the phrase "Cornhuskers" and think this must be a life-size diorama of growing up in Iowa, with houses and picnics on Sunday afternoons (though I have the idea this is "one evening only" for a traveling show which must be rather expensive to set up---but since this IS the mid-West, labor is probably cheap and there's nothing else to do on an evening, so this show will probably succeed. Have some trouble recalling second phase of dream as I shit, but manage to get this all recorded by 9:30AM, and start day!
5/20/97: 9AM: Note at 8:45AM when I wake groggily from bidi and cuming last night (and late will-writing, too): I'm touring with a group, stopping at a very limited coffee shop for a rest, and the driver leads me out of the shop and down around to the back where a man at a hotdog (obviously a memory of a hotdog commercial on TV last night) stand is rewarming hotdogs that he'd cooked before, and they DO look better than anything available from our original stop, but I can't figure why they're at this godforsaken corner rather than at some more posh rest stop. Into a john to adjust my clothing to get back on the bus, and wait for some unseen person to vacate the toilet, and get in to find it raised and covered with some kind of cotton batting that I push aside to sit on the wooden throne and tend to an odd set of shoelaces on some lace-top shoes that I've recently bought: they start from a point above the toe and go directly to two eyelets at each side of the tongue without threading any of the intermediate eyelets, but on looking at it, the material is too flimsy for any real support to the laces, the shoe fits well enough not to NEED any tying-up, and if threaded "properly" the laces would then be too short to TIE into any kind of bow. Then I'm faced with the same kind of threading task with a vest that I'm wearing under my suit jacket (probably remembering the bulky double-breasted suit that Lance Fredricksen wore on the David Letterman Show this morning), and this problem is solved when the lacing goes down the sides of the vest-edges, pushing the little purple caper-points of the laces through the soft slits of the row of buttonhole-like lace-entries along the edges of the vest, and "fits" somehow into my waistband or belt to hold the vest-edges in place neatly. I hear the horn of the departing bus, and don't have time to retie my green-and-yellow-striped rep tie, and figure to fold it neatly and put it into my pocket or shoulder-bag along with a razor blade that's somehow been used in my operations, and I have to get everything together quickly or the bus will leave without me (I hope not a preface to my upcoming bus-tour through northern Spain and south-central France with Ken in just three weeks). In the dream I seem to be touring England, near some waterways that are said to be somehow connected to the distant Arctic lands to the north. Wake and get out of bed to receive Fethi between 9-9:30AM, at 9:15.
5/21/97: 8:10AM: 7:15AM note: 1) I'm in college, talking with a footballer: "When we leave early today at 3PM, do you wait till 6PM to start practice, or do you start early and leave early?" "We start early and play till the same time." And I feel sorry for him. 2) I'm soaking in shallow bathwater cleaning my TEETH, and I KNOW I'm going to be hollered at by MOM for spending too much time in the bathroom---and even I am wondering WHY I'm lying in the bathwater cleaning my teeth. Except that in REAL life my teeth DO need cleaning already!
5/22/97: 2:30PM: 7:40AM note: John A. is typing for me, and I can't find a REAL form for him to use to set tabs and margins for the report he's doing. I look through pages that look like computer core-dumps, non-compiled programs with error messages, and finally find what looks like my indexes-done list and he NOW says he knows how to set up the page. A supervisor-like person observes that "not all 120,000 entrants will use these, but at least half will, so you'll have lots of data to work with." Not the clearest memory of this dream.
5/24/97: 9:10AM: Fragments of a terrible Civil War-type battle scene, with men in trenches being blown up and limb-fragments flying through the smoky air filled with screams. A circle of men fire at an escaping prisoner of war and HIT him a number of times, but he still gets up and continues running, until the last three or four shots quiet his decreasingly struggling body. A series of bayonets stand silent as tombstones, held by their dead arms, but one revives momentarily, rattles along its neighbors in defiance of death; more grenades and bombs drop into the trench, bloodying the bodies even more, but the last bayonet continues to frantically rattle until a final cataclysm stills it.
5/30/97: 9:47AM: 1) 6:30: I've been given a basket of fruit to count, but I only root through it, eating first some small cherries, then a few tiny strawberries, then an enormous Japanese-imported cherry the size and shape of a red bell pepper. THEN I come across a booklet listing the types of baskets and the fruit-counts for each, so rather than giving excuses for NOT counting it, or trying to guess at the numbers, I decide to dump out the ears of corn in a corona atop the basket and actually count each item and report the result. 2) before 9:30: I'm watching an omnibus film by Stephen Spielberg that includes an INSET movie starring Madonna, and I think that's such a good idea: put something into a LARGER commercial movie that can be extracted as its own self-contained entity and played on TV and in discos. This is even MORE special in that Madonna is actually IN the large apartment I share with a younger, bigger, handsomer sex-partner, and she goes through a re-enactment of the movie with such panache that I actually have to remind myself (in the dream) that this is not a dream, even though no one will ever believe it. After she leaves, I'm continuing to watch the movie but observe that the sound has been turned down (from the TV without sound at lunch at the Upstairs Cafe with Shelley yesterday?), so I ask my lover to turn it back up, why did he turn it down a few minutes ago? And he responds with puzzlement that it's been turned down for the past two hours, and hadn't I noticed it then and what's wrong with me? 3) 9:30: possibly in connection with the improbabilities of the previous dream, someone about my age and myself are in a large modern building which could be either an office building or an apartment building in the middle of Manhattan, and I make some kind of joking comment about the building moving or "even turning completely around," and he remonstrates with me for saying something so extreme, and we both look out the window to see, in horror, the surrounding buildings beginning to pass in front of our vision from left to right as the floor judders and objects topple from shelves and from atop furniture, and the rotation continues until with a tremble of relief the building settles back down to its rocky foundations, having rotated through a complete circle. We suspect the ground floor is ruined, but the supports seem not to have bent and to be still supporting the superstructure of the building safely. We're astounded that such an event could have happened.
6/1/97: 9:50AM: 7AM note: I'm watching a porno film that is introduced by a sexy couple in front of their nude older therapist, blonde with small tits, a doughy-but-blemishless-and-wrinkleless body, her fingers mashing into her pubes as if to hide them, sometimes scrubbing her face and short hair with her hands as if in sexual anguish, surprisingly open and sexual, rubbing her crotch upward to show blonde hair and reddened labia. 2) 7:10, I note a PREVIOUS dream of comforting two sad mourning lovers on the loss of a good friend, and I actually FEEL the sympathetic tears on my face as I hugged and consoled them, feeling good at this opportunity to get close to them in their sadness, but feeling an enormous sexuality toward them as I did, manipulating their sadness to get kicks for myself. 3) A bit later was a fragment in which I was lying naked on a bed, feeling intensely orgasmic, looking down at my engorged cock and pushing the stiff shaft down toward my feet to feel the pressures at the base of my cock, thinking that just a few jerks would suffice to bring it off, but I so enjoyed the pleasure of the moment that I wanted to prolong it, and actually thought in the dream that I might jerk off when I got to wake, so that when I did wake I thought for a moment of jerking off, but it was only 7:10, I was still tired, having an afternoon with Marilyn, and having noted on the calendar that I've begun keeping that the last time I’d jerked off was 5/19, a dozen days ago, and promised myself that I'd do it this evening, after finishing my last index and watching some TV, since it was best to go to sleep particularly after numerous puffs on the bidi which has again become an adjunct to jerking off with intensity, though admittedly less intensity as time goes on, regretfully, though the pre-cum pleasure is still totally great!
6/2/97: 8:25AM: Odd combination of "false memory" and "recounted dream": I'm telling some unknown person about EITHER a dream I'd had OR a "false memory" that is curiously compelling: I'd had some kind of heart attack while I was working for IBM, and I was actually being hospitalized in a small office at the company itself, so that no one had any way of knowing I was very ill. They were trying some kind of treatment (that I narrated as "of course impossible," but the person to whom I was narrating [possibly Charles, or possibly Arnold, but there was no real personality associated with the person I was talking to] said, "Oh, no, there really IS an experimental treatment available of JUST that sort") involving DRINKING or TAKING INTRAVENOUSLY a kind of liquid that contained micromolecular components of HEART VALVES to remedy the failure of whatever heart component had made me so sick. The CRUX of the "illness" was that Herman W. was leaning over me, much more awake and aware than he seemed to realize, saying, "Just let go, Bob; it's OK, just let go and die peacefully," while I was thinking vehemently "But I'm not that sick; I'm going to get better; my condition isn't that serious; I'll be out of here in no time." And that, of course, had occurred, since I hadn't died "while in office" and had outlived my IBM working-experience by thirty years at least---though I just checked to see that I quit IBM in September of 1968, so it won't even be twenty-nine years for three months yet. Half-sleep, half-waking condition while "dreaming" this "false memory" almost led me to ignore this as "a dream to be recorded," but the memory was so sharp as I got up that I did.
6/4/97: 9:40AM: I'm looking at a thick sheaf of IBM printed reports from a set of programs I'd done, and someone's asking about three "miscellaneous" entries in the table of results: who were the entrants who "fell out" in these three unexpected places, what had they said on their forms. I thought of a number of ways of finding those answers: first, a laborious manual run through the program to find what the profile would HAVE to have been to have produced those particular positions in the final reports; second, if the original cards were there, simply looking at the identifier for the entrants and filing back through the (hopefully alphabetized) input cards---these seem to be TEST results rather than something that happened in a real-life production run---to see what the original input was; third, if those failed, it might be necessary to write some kind of original program which would indicate how these results could have taken place. I felt a kind of self-consciousness being questioned in this way: was there an implication that my program was WRONG in producing such anomalous results? Hadn't I put in enough consistency checks on the raw data to flag these entries before producing such results as output? Would I finally be caught out as a poor programmer by my supervisors and demoted, or even fired? Could I maybe blame these results on people who'd worked with me---and now comes to mind that Madge would have done perfect work, as would have the team of Judd B. and Jan W., but I could probably blame it on the slow, grumpy, ignorant-seeming George C. On final analysis, the entries to be checked seemed only to be asterisks on the final reports, so it wouldn't have been easy to find exactly WHICH input form produced these anomalous answers. Incredible that after almost thirty years of being away from IBM, even longer being away from my actual personal programming experience, that I would still be having dreams about IBM, even though it WAS my only actual professional big-business experience, and even though I still have dreams (though with less frequency recently) about 1221 Dietz, which certainly made an impression on me as my first and only dwelling for my first twenty-one years of life, as IBM had been my first ten ADULT years of life. The dream was so definite in my memory that it was complete when I woke at 9:35AM (pleased that I've slept almost the two hours since I came with lots of bidi-smoke at 2AM), remained complete even though I jotted a note to help my memory, and came out with additional details as I finish typing this now at 10:17AM, having resisted typing the time I STARTED typing this as being immaterial to my dream.
6/9/97: 4:05AM: I'm working very late in a large office building, and I know I don't have my pants on, but I have to go to the john and every area is so dark that I'm not afraid of being seen. I ask someone where the john is, and they say I have to go back down to the main floor. I fumble for the button for the elevator (whose entrance looks more like a closet), but the door slides open and I see that I'm on the 47th floor, which means I'll have a good view when it gets light out tomorrow morning. There seem to be other people on the elevator car, but when I press the button for the lobby I'm relieved to see that the light level is quite low, even though there are some people still moving about. When I get into the central lobby, it's quite bright, but I look down and see that under my white shirt are long white long-john trousers, so I don't REALLY look quite as undressed as I'd feared. I see a sign picturing a man walking upstairs, and I go along a corridor, intermingled with women who seem to be on line for something else, so when one woman looks at me suspiciously as I step in front of her, I explain that I'm on the line to the men's room, so I'm really not getting ahead of HER. She seems to accept that. I look up on the stairway and see a long line of men waiting, and someone leaves the end of the line, protesting that he doesn't have time to wait on such a long line. As I move into the end of it, a group of eight or nine men in the front of the line are waved forward, and suddenly I'm in the NEXT group of eight or nine men, so I'll be going in quite soon. Chat with a cute fellow next to me, but suddenly he's gotten into a car and driven off. Our part of the line is called forward, but I wake and check to see that it's 3:50AM, so it's time to get up.
6/10/97: 3:50AM: I'm slogging through spots of mud on a hillside that I'm climbing to get back to the hotel/lodge where a group of us guys are staying, and I step into a particularly quaggy place and find that four or five inches of the bottoms of my tweed trousers are totally encased in mud, but I figure when it dries it will just cake and fall off without actually leaving the trousers dirty. I seem to be going back to change for breakfast with the guys, ONE of whom has a LONG cock that I'd noticed favorably before, but the possessor doesn't like it when one of his companions, with a smile, refers to him as something like "Long Dong," but I have the feeling he wouldn't be adverse to a SINCERE appreciation of his endowment by the right person: me! (RETURN TO JOURNALS 6/10/97).
CAVES TRIP DREAMS 6/10-7/8/97
6/12/97: On CAVES trip: 8:45AM: 1) Sexy guy shows pissing erection I stare at. 2) Meg H. kisses me passionately.
6/14/97: 7AM: 1) Chinese girl (like woman at Zalacain) saying she and friend were making banging noise as I was talking with someone about transcribing my old journals. 2) I'm knocking over dresser through VCR-monitor combo by trying to play a tape I wanted to see. All vague frustrations.
6/16/97: 8:20 AM: 1) Set of THREE young sexy lovers I turn on by loving to touch and stroke their bodies and cocks, always hard, groans of pleasure ("You always do that---[make me hard]!"). LOVE lying next to them clutching cocks! One small-cock cums too quickly and I get mouthful of cum that I spit on rug and get sponge to wipe up, fearing AIDS. 2) Trio of "superstars" drinking at bar (Germans from crew, one with short white-blond hair), I take SIP of their drink and they spill rest on table, looking at me in disdain, and I fear "If I get AIDS from this will I REMEMBER it and how long will it take to AFFECT me?"
6/17/97: 7:25AM: I have to collate new names with old directories; a start of transcription of old directory has been made on three sheets of 8x11 cut and stapled into two sheets of 8x16, but new interpolations may change even that, and I must consider how to sort additions of names and businesses so they can be merged in sequence.
6/19/97: 7AM: Sexy dreams making me wish I were alone to jerk off.
6/28/97: 7AM: INVOLVED dreams: Charles friendly with Phyllis H.; a three-year-old who needs to shit into her diaper to release herself; and a large travel-guide slide cascade.
6/29/97: 7:30AM: 1) Susan goes into water, climbs seaweed ladder, does smiling underwater dance. 2) Older man has erection in crowd, goes down, I watch. On ice he and woman can love in sensual diner and she lies under seat and takes his dribbles of semen as he cums with legs splayed and he rotates for all to see his thick-veined cock. Slight hangover.
6/30/97: 5:25AM: Male dancers auditioning for play, including a small Peter R. and pudgy Ken L. "Pick" does not do well, so director asks ANYONE to say lines and audition for part in play AND movie.
END OF CAVES TRIP DREAMS
7/20/97: 9:15AM: I'm sitting in a car, naked, and people are coming around to escort us to a technical meeting, and I pull on shorts, but find myself in the meeting fully clothed as representatives of the new customer grill my subordinates about job details, and I'm amazed they all respond so very well, even though one woman splays out her legs like a ballet dancer at a barre while talking. I rehearse in my head a speech I'll make thanking them all for their expertise, hoping I don't sound like the densest one there. 2) Another part of the technical dream seemed to involve more personal interactions with my coworkers, but I forget details now. 3) I'm studying for a new presentation with a five-part protocol that starts with gathering data, organizing it according to neighborhoods, and then apportioning resources to grids drawn on a map by which I'm supposed to draw sub-grids to calculate the ratio of resources by street-area, and I can't master the mathematics which consists of repeated applications of the Pythagorean theorem, but I figure to simply count the sub-grids and approximate portions of them, add them up, and come to a close estimate of the final answer. Product of sleeping 11PM to 9:15AM: 10+ hrs!
7/21/97: about 5AM: Staying with Avi and cute young roommate and he lights up MANY pipes of grass and passes them on to me, and I smoke and smoke and feel VERY high, and wake to feel SO crazed with bidi and sex that I fear my mind may have GONE and I lie there thinking how STONED and CRAZED I feel for hours.
7/22/97: 7AM: There's an earthquake when I'm at the top of the Times Tower, and I DASH down and run upstairs in a building two blocks away to find my "safe-deposit keys" are in a CRUSHED but SAFE triple-layered box.
7/30/97: Transcribed 7/31: I'm organizing an array of round-soap-shaped, or large-laundry-soap-pellet-shaped, soft plastic or even SOAP disks which have carved incisions on one side, and I console myself that IF I make a mistake in incising the proper symbol on one side, it can either be scraped off and a new incision engraved, OR I can turn it over and incise on the OTHER side, making sure I "cross off" or "x out" the "incorrect" symbol on the current BACK side.
7/31/97: 12:05PM: Wake about 9:45AM (having gone to bed after 3AM), dream of having had a soft turd slipping out of my anus and rushing to a ship's or a dormitory's bathroom to try the fourth-and-last cubicle to find it has no DOOR that I can close, then try the third-last and find the door is splintery and only covers the top half of where it would usually cover, but it's better than the other. Sit on the pot and observe that the toilets are actually situated BETWEEN BEDS, and I think it might be a kick to lay here and watch CERTAIN people naked on the pot. Don't have any particular urge to shit when I wake, so I can't really think of any objective CAUSE or PURPOSE of the tawdry dream.