August thru December 1997
8/3/97: 10AM: I've just washed in a public john at a long flat sink, and for some reason I'm using small quantities of scouring powder to clean the sinks while the attendant waits patiently because he wants to scrub the baseboards and floor beneath the sinks when I'm done. There are three sinks, each with small driblets of reddish residue that might even be blood, some of which clean off easily, others of which seem embedded in the enamel of the sink.
8/5/97: 6:45AM: I'm walking in a familiar suburban area of comfortable homes away from the city-center. From previous memories of previous dreams (it seems), I walk slightly westward, coming to a familiar stream that acts as a border to the suburb and would ordinarily lead me back to a bus/train/subway station that I know will return me home, but THIS time it's been raining hard and the path I usually take is inundated by water sluicing off the small raised dikes along the riverbank. I turn to a steep trail leading back up to the suburban streets, to find masses of wooden tree trunks and even finished wooden planks like picnic-table tops clogging the chute upward, all wetted by the down-flowing cascading water. I push aside the weaker supports and find the firmly lodged underpinnings and manage to struggle my way back to the suburb. By some luck I find a house belonging to an acquaintance from school, a homely girl that I'd never really looked at before, and spend a few hours writing in my notebook or watching a small television in the girl's room before announcing that I'm about to leave, and the mother---a REAL character---shows relief that I wasn't going to be rude enough to want to stay for dinner. But by chance she's taking her daughter in for some night classes in town, so she'll be able to drive me back to the station, and I don't need her directions for a "more northerly" walking route that will permit me to avoid the flooded streambed track. Just before I leave their house, she corners me and gives me an enormous chain of bits of personal advice, and in an odd dream-touch I can see the script or printed TEXT of her long diatribe covering the top half of the left folio of a printed book in an uninterrupted paragraph: "You really should take more care of your appearance, since that's the way everyone will judge you and your eligibility for making a proper husband. Cut your hair shorter and wear it closer to your head so that you don't look so scruffy, and wear clothes that....."---and the clothing advice continues for seven or eight printed lines---"...and learn the names of the observable clouded galaxies in the night sky so you have something interesting to point out (and she hands me a sky-atlas with detailed photographs of all quadrants of the sky at all hours indicating the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds, the Milky Way, the Cloud in Casseopeia, and dozens of other wisps of star-dust visible from various latitudes), but of course only when the night is perfectly clear, because you can't make a fool of yourself by identifying a star-cloud when it's only a small bit of early cloud moving across the heavens in an associated position. You should take night classes, too, like my daughter is about to attend, so that you can make dinner-table conversation about the latest political and economic and scientific developments and impress the parents of your wife-to-be with your well-read and educated background. It's a good thing you decided to leave here when you did, which indicates to me that you have a basic sense of considerateness for the labors the mother of your future wife will need to expend on your behalf, but you should have been dressed more warmly because otherwise you give the impression of not being concerned about your health, which is very important to your future mother-in-law...."---and she continues until I wake and get up to pee and decide that this is detailed enough to go to the computer and type it in directly now to 7:05AM. No "remarking" in the dream that I'm quite a bit younger than I am now, obviously a marriageable prospect for a Jewish mother (she couldn't have been anything else, and I was musing that she might have "attacked" me as a leading character in one of my yet-to-be written plays---a comic relief from the middle-aged gay men of The Director, which I seem to be having trouble getting back to because of playing games).
8/6/97: 9AM: 1) I'm playing with a guy with a band around his cock-base, on a bus, and a THIRD person in the seat, a woman, shouts, "STOP that!" 2) Can't remember the details, but it seemed to have to do with traveling in Britain.
8/11/97: 9:15AM: Extreme-frustration dream first time in a LONG time: I'm walking in rather dense forest with a small group of tourists, and overhear some of them discussing where we are: "It's amazing that NYU has such a good reputation when the land-area is so SMALL and the buildings are so dated"---and it seems we're in a bit of scrubland ON the uptown NYU campus just on the edge of the Hudson River. Then, without transition, I'm about to enter the gates at the UNIVERSITY OF AKRON for another year's registration: I know I've done it before and thus have SOME hint of what has to be done in this most-important first day, and marvel that anyone here for the FIRST year can get anything done at all. At first I'm in the middle of a grassy quad retrieving an umbrella which I seem to remember I'd lost and then exchanged for another: still black, but my "replacement" one has red band-aid-type string dangling from the tip of each cloth-support rib. I'd thought at least it was functional until I open it when it appears to be starting to rain and I have NEED of it: the central shaft is terribly bent, but the rib-connecting jacket appears to slide over the angles limply and it could still protect me from the rain if needed, but now it's not raining and I can fold it back up and carry it along with the bag full of clothes that I have to put into my locker. I'm in some sort of shopping mall that I don't even know is IN the main administration building where most of my registration for classes for the new year has to be done, and I complain LOUDLY to the first young-girl attendant who'll listen to me that THERE ARE NO SIGNS telling anyone where different registration posts might be: at least they could do THAT. She seems willing to help me, but then she passes me a few moments later with some kind of rash on the side of her face (this is a memory of a movie review that I saw last night before going to bed), saying she's sorry but she has to leave for the doctor's and can't help me after all. I'm now in front of some kind of dwelling hall (maybe this partly stems from the new Pilcher novel I've started about a GIRL going through shopping and enrolling in St. Ursula's) that I recognize from last year, and think to find LAST year's locker, which I'd gotten but never USED. I seem to be talking to a kind of younger ALTER-EGO at this point, and HE (I, though younger) is VERY impatient of the idea that I could LEARN something by trying the old combination on LAST year's locker, but I insist, and there's some kind of ironic NOTE left to me because I hadn't checked OUT of the locker at the end of last year. I know I haven't even BEGUN to register, but it's getting close to 12:30PM and I need to get lunch, though I seem to remember the cafeteria as being extremely crowded with mediocre food, and wonder if this year I couldn't initiate a change and find an eatery "in the town" close to the campus and thus avoid, for the most part, all the other frustrated students; but then I have no CLEAR idea what the area surrounding the campus IS at this point, or even which edge of the campus I might be near and where a restaurant or coffee shop might BE from there, so I give up on that idea. Throughout the dream I'm trying to keep CALM and PHILOSOPHICAL about the frustrations of enrolling with no one trying to help or no map of the necessary locations or list of required steps, partly because I know I DID do it at least once before, that it IS possible to get it all done in time, and partly because everyone ELSE seems to be at LEAST as much of a disadvantage as I am---and partly because EXPRESSING the frustration would do absolutely no good at all. [AND this leads to the frustration I felt LAST NIGHT coming back from Queens and the games group, which occupied my mind for a large part of last evening, which I'll describe on NOTEBOOK:8/11/97 after I finish this page at about 9:35AM---at least doing THESE things is something USEFUL in a series of days when I've been frustrated about playing too many GAMES, not having enough WORK, and not having CASH to pay for my TRIP!]
(RETURN TO JOURNALS 8/11/97).
8/13/97: 9:15AM: THREE episodes: 1) I'm on a business trip to NYC from somewhere like Akron, and everything is paid for, so I go into the hotel restaurant for dinner and again for breakfast, making sure to order just up to the dollar-amount limit imposed by my company for dining-out expenses. I'm eating alone, but no part of the dream deals with the actual EATING of the food, only the thinking about ordering and the selection of restaurants. 2) After an early dinner (thinking of Vicki's request last night for 5PM today at the Oyster Bar?) I return to a friend's apartment, which is down a few stairs from the sidewalk, but not like Dennis's, in that I'm looking in a living-room window when I stand outside the locked door, I've been given a spare set of keys, but I don't know the guy very well (sort of like the ancient trick in Saskatoon) so I'm reluctant to USE the keys for the first time when he's not there, but just as I'm about to go back up the stairs he GETS UP out of the chair he'd been sitting in just below the partition in the next room, visible through the window, where he'd been invisible to me, and sits back down, so I feel free to unlock the door and stand just inside and call out, "I didn't think you'd be home at this hour," and we begin to chat about eating, and I starting by saying that I've had dinner already so he can make whatever plans he wants in his own apartment without disturbing my eating schedule. He seems to be a somewhat younger person, yet a perfectly possible sexual encounter that I'm looking forward to. 3) I've been invited to a dance-studio for the rehearsal of a new Broadway musical, and I enter at the top rear and go down stairs past bleacher-type seating with folding chairs and sit in the front row, the only person there yet, and the young male star,---looking rather like the idealistic doctor in the TV movie of And the Band Played On, the young star of the movie made from the book that was so famous (and I call Pope to get the name from his Maltin now at 9:30 and he's MEDITATING, trying hard not to be angry with me, and he'll call me back: it was Matthew Modine in Birdy, written by William Wharton.)---enters and looks over the shoes arrayed at the side of the small stage-pit at the bottom of the studio, surely notices that I'm there but professionally ignores me, and begins to warm up, and I'm pleased that it's like being in his APARTMENT watching his private life rather than in any kind of public space with professional overtones. But very quickly the other star of the play, someone SO VERY like Jason Alexander that it might as well BE him, enters at the top of the stairs and a small audience which has somehow magically gathered bursts into applause which he recognizes with a self-satisfied smirk, and I'm struck with the inappropriate juxtaposition of NO applause from ME when the TRUE star of the piece entered just a bit ago, and SOME applause for a terribly secondary actor-dancer who seems somehow to have made a NAME for himself that I don't really appreciate. Then a FEMALE superstar arrives, someone on the line of a younger, thinner Bette Midler, noted for wisecracks, and she is THERE rather than entering, and the audience is almost complete and focused on the stage, and though she's made an appearance so we know who she is, only her voice can be heard saying raucous witticisms in a sing-song rap style: "Everyone sit down, we're gonna get started here right away; let's get that spotlight organized or I'm gonna have a coronary." Everyone laughs at the wit of the "coronary," seemingly extemporaneous, but surely rehearsed, and there's a fuzzy spotlight lighting up a dark-red curtain which very gradually fades to black, and I'm extremely conscious of the darkening of the curtain, because JUST at the moment that the light goes out COMPLETELY, I'm jolted awake by the sound of my BUZZER going, and I leap out of bed and pull on my shorts and get to the buzzer when it's in the middle of a SECOND series of insistent buzzes, thanks to my note which the messenger’s obviously read, and by the time I'm at the door he's already on the second landing with the index from Spectrum. Since it's only 9:15AM and I'd gone to bed about 1:30 after too much FreeCell, I'm still tired and return to bed, but the memories of the three episodes (though the first is surely "some part of" the second) are so clear that I don't want to lose them, and get to the computer to find the DATE a week ago on this page, but last dream at 8/11.
8/14/97: 9:20AM: I'm touring somewhere overseas and have to take a crap. But my memory reminds me of a dream that I'd recorded PREVIOUSLY---on 7/31! So the details are gone COMPLETELY now at 1PM---got to get these down ON WAKING!!
8/21/97: 10AM: Probably instigated by my going back to stamp-sorting for the first time in MONTHS, I dream that I'm in a bedroom that's more like 1221 Dietz than 167 Hicks: my bed is separated from a three-windowed wall by a stack of stuff, with a bookcase at the foot of the window-wall, across from my clothes closet, and I think that the space between the bed and the wall would be useful for storing spare pillows (like the ones I put away a month ago in CURRENT time), blankets, sheets, and bathrobes---things FOR bed. I recall that I threw out the sewing machine (which dates from the early 40s!) on which I'd stored stuff on the treadle, but I've thrown out STUFF, so I have more room for storage. Intermingled with this storage-allocation, there's a tall fellow who either lives NEXT TO or above or below, or maybe even WITH John, who seems to be a former (or never-was) lover of me or John, and I look at him appraisingly---he's tall, with a fairly nice chest and dark curly hair visible under his open three top shirt-buttons---thinking he might do for a sex partner, and then in a mirror I can CLEARLY see John lying on his bed (his CURRENT bed, since he never had a bed across the hall at 1221), jerking off with enormous concentration and slowness, rising to his knees to cradle his bursting cock and inhale something that I can't determine is a popper or a bidi or a joint, and he's RED with stored-up sexual energy and I think that his VISIBILITY is a sign that I might start participating (just as I've thought recently I should try my leather jacket at the Spike, which I always remember as being so FRIENDLY and older-populated) in orgasm-teasing with him.
8/22/97: 9:30AM: Again, I've got to get a ticket for my seat in the Metropolitan Opera House, this time in the "Amphitheatre," which I know to be the level BEFORE the top (as opposed to the top, as it ACTUALLY WAS in the old Met), and I go into various doors (maybe like the unmarked doors at Ace Gallery yesterday with Charles) and find a ticket dispenser from whom I get a tiny white-paper chit with a seat-number on it. My watch says a few minutes before 8PM, when the opera starts, but I hope it will start late, giving me enough time to get to my seat. But there's a LARGE group of slow-moving people ahead of me going down a set of stairs that has little BLOCKS set into them which SHOULD make walking difficult but strangely DOESN'T; still, it takes a LONG time to get from one floor to the next higher. I reach "my" level and think that I should stop to gape at the enormous brickwork vault (somewhat like the entrance to the building housing New York City Center, as depicted in a drawing on one of its old program-covers) lavish with terracotta ornamentation that frames the side-door (the new Met doesn't HAVE side doors like the old) through which I enter the proper level just as I hear the opera's overture starting up and the lights dimming down. My seat appears to be in the next-last row, just off the middle, and the sharp rake of the last three or four rows would seem to make my future view a good one, but my dreaming ends as I survey the route which will take me into my actual seat, and I never really know what opera it is that I'm supposed to be seeing or how my view will ACTUALLY be, but it seems a step up from FORMER dreams in which I find that I cannot see any part of the stage from a number of stopping points on the way to my seat, and THIS opera-house seems more traditionally designed, from what I can see of it, than the limited-view monstrosities that characterized most of my previous installments of this possibly MOST-often repeated dream, unless it would be that of working at IBM and being late for a job---the typical "I've got a test and I haven't even been to a CLASS yet" school-anxiety dream being relegated to the now-long-distant past. But NOT yet passed is the urge to continue writing lines, regardless of import or impact, until the line count reaches the magic "Ln 10.33" and I know I'm typing the very LAST line!!
8/30/97: 10:30AM: Dennis and I are waiting on-line for a new type of amusement park: we're standing on a kind of dam looking over two bodies of water enclosed in an enormous cofferdam maybe 100 feet in diameter. I think the water flowing past us must be fishless, but as I look, I can see tiny glints of silver just below the surface, and as I look harder, I can see more and more shapes of big and little, fat and pencil-thin, silvery fish in the water, and I say, "Dennis, look at all the fish" just as the whole dam-side on which we're standing begins rotating toward our backs, so we can see the swirls of the wake before us as we withdraw from the water ahead of us like the huge leaves of the painting-boards in Philip Johnson's New Canaan painting gallery that I watched on tape last night. We start at a moderate speed, but suddenly accelerate to a truly amazing pace, and I think "If the waiting line is so technologically advanced, the show must be REALLY something." We swoop around to a 180° position, which I think is a clever way to assemble one group while the second group is entering the amusement-ride. We're all led into a large assembly room where individual guides give separate parties instructions on how to buckle themselves into their seats with a particular kind of granny-knot (possibly inspired by the knot-drawings in the paperback I'm reading: Proulx's Shipping News), and I tell the guide that I'll take the instructions, because I know that Dennis (had thought of him yesterday when I passed the lobster advertisement outside Slade's, and thought to ask Pope if he still thought "I must tell John that," though his best friend John R. has now been dead over two years) doesn't get involved with technical instructions. The group next to us is a Chinese family with a lot of doll-faced kids, and their faces become more and more masklike, reflecting my surfing through a dreadful Peter Cushing At the Earth's Core with its bird-masks when they meet some Jurassic holdover, and I wonder how they'll enjoy what I'm hoping will be a more-adult, physically demanding adventure ride. In the meantime, I'd put down my black mackinaw with my navy beret beside my chair, but I've moved away from that and forgot to bring it along, so I worry about how I'm going to locate it when we're finished. Now the whole group is led out onto a series of balconies overlooking a "virtual Wild West town" and we, being in the front, are urged to take places at the extreme left of the railing, but I look and see that a raised viewing platform will actually obscure our view of things taking place below it, so I try to move more to the right to get a more central position. I'm delayed because one of the managers thrusts a flowing, silk-lined sheepskin overcoat to me, asking, "Is this the coat you lost?" and I shake my head and again describe my black mackinaw and blue beret. At each position on the railing, like assigned places at a standing-room barre, is a prong-like set of double-acting binoculars (one set for people with glasses, another without glasses), and when I glance through the non-glass set I can see that the people below---who look like they're battling air and being lifted on wires---through the glasses appear to be battling Virtual Reality aliens and being lifted by alien claws and space-ship grapples. Neat idea, but I look at the hordes of people in the buildings around this central square and see workmen still putting up plywood walls (like the couple last night next door to Carolyn's), kids looking forlornly out the front windows (un-made-up Chinese kids who could be relatives to the made-up kids next to our group), and masses of people who will be gussied up with video and blue-screen imaging in the climax of the display, and I think these "actors" must be WELL trained to mesh with the images without "interface," but are probably POORLY trained because there are so many of them and this has only been tested before opening for a very few days. But I'm still looking forward to the spectacle after I complain that my with-glasses lenses are broken, and I'll need a new position to enjoy the show. Don't actually SEE much of it before I wake at 7:10AM to piss and check that the gas pilot light is still on in the stove, so Brooklyn Union Gas hasn't changed our building to the new line yet---still hasn't now at 10:53AM: building not accessible?
8/31/97: 9:30AM: I'm back in school, though as a gray-beard, and I can't recall if this is my last year of a series of years or if I'm starting after a hiatus of a few or many years. As usual, I can't remember what classes I'm supposed to be in, where they are, or what time they are. I'm sitting in some kind of office at some kind of desk, and pull out a briefcase which is so old that the leather has worn off the sides, and a floppy brownish bag with a leather-covered board remaining across the top closure and handle. Inside are folders that seem familiar to me: class-names, writing assignments, and even a packet of unsoaked stamps in the back that I'd forgotten about and look forward to soaking. Somewhere I find an index card written in red ink that has a class schedule, even though I'm not sure whether it's current or from a year past: it starts classes at 1PM, and I remember being pleased that I was able to schedule them this way. Also have a vague memory of the 1PM English classes being actually over, so that all that's left are a few later-in-the-afternoon sessions that don't repeat every day of the week, with an even MORE vague memory that the time-consuming Physics labs which HAD been scheduled in the morning have been taken off the list some time ago. But the card gives no idea what YEAR the schedule is for (nor do I have ANY idea what year this IS), and certainly doesn't give classroom numbers. I wrack my brains trying to think of where an office would be in which I could verify my current classes and their times and room numbers, or where I could telephone to find this information. Somehow I decide I don't need the bulky briefcase and that I can only take notes in a bright red diskette-shaped handbag with a bulky black handle which seems conspicuous even though it's quite small. In the dream itself I'm curious why I still seem to be going to school though I'm clearly middle-aged or older, have no memory of what classes I would have taken just BEFORE these (and whether they were last semester or years ago), and a disturbing feeling that things are slightly different THIS semester than they were LAST semester and that THIS semester is just beginning, so there's no HOMEWORK due, but since I've never shown up for these classes for the FIRST time, I couldn't have any memory of where they were, who was teaching them, how I got to them, and what time they were. It's getting past 2PM as I wonder what to do, and I figure even now, at the best, I'd only be getting to my first class AFTER it had already started, and I'm feeling unhappy and uncertain. Wake and think I must LIKE to torture myself or I wouldn't even have thought in a DREAM to go back to attending classes and having homework and sweating out tests and competition from people smarter than myself. Out of bed about 9, feeling horny and I jerk off without bands and with new swatch of llama-cloth. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 83197).
9/2/97: 10:15AM: Only a fragment remembered from 8:30 this morning: I'm eating out of a plastic or aluminum tray, like those from which Lina and I shared our Japanese dinner last night while playing Scrabble, but it's so gloppy that I'm not even using utensils, simply scooping up fingersful of food and stuffing it into my mouth. It's mostly potatoes in some kind of tomato puree or sauce, but at the end I poke through a mass of glop and find a thick slice of beef lightly rimmed with fat, and I bite through the rim and chew off hunks of the meat itself and figure that there's really more left than I'd thought. I seem to remember feeling rather full, but continuing to eat while food remained. Other people WERE around, but either they were so far away and oblivious of me, or I was so "far gone" that I was oblivious to them or their reaction to me for eating with my fingers. I have no idea where---either in NYC or on a trip, or even in a restaurant or someplace like a school---I was, whether it was lunch or dinner, or what the occasion was for such a strange meal. No recollection of how I was dressed or even of the formality or informality of the surroundings. Then tried for almost two hours to do a lightwork session, but essentially failed, thinking about all the other things that I'll record on NOTEBOOK:9/2/97 when I get to the bottom of this page before getting into everything else that I have to do today before Village Playwrights tonight. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 9/2/97).
9/3/97: 9:10AM: Odd "science-fiction" dream: I'm watching a program or a movie (though I'm IN the room and feel a slight sense of danger) about a researcher near some kind of "atomic pile" that produces a type of radiation that no one knows about, and, from the center of a glass chamber containing what appear to be metal pith-balls, two tiny globes enclosing a spark of light-energy float free and circle first inside then OUTSIDE the chamber, and they seem to be a combination of free quark and soul-light, extremely potent, and I'm glad they're not circling near ME, and the other guy in the room draws back as they nestle into a pile of blankets he has on his lap---blankets which are wrapped around a number of phonograph albums---and when he unwraps the blankets, the albums have been "scoured" in a peculiar way: all traces of paper have been vaporized, but metal tags and labels are lying neatly atop the disks where they'd been placed on album-covers and record-jackets, and we both didn't know that the insides of album-covers had metallic-foil catalog-numbers or anti-theft devices or tracing-elements, and the remnant of each "simple" cover is a neat foil-thin "deck of cards" of neatly-printed "leaves" of now-separate material, and we both think of this as VERY odd, wondering how this effect was caused by the floating globes, what OTHER effects they have on human tissue, and just what the heck they ARE. Wake feeling mildly scientific-philosophical.
9/7/97: 10:45AM: Wake at 8AM with dream of MADGE M. lying in bed with me, rather poorly aged with narrow sunken tits and black-ringed eyes, trying yet again to interest me with her naked body, urging me close to her, rubbing her hairy pussy against my flaccid hand, kissing my neck and ears and urging me to kiss her back. Though I feel uncomfortable, I can't work up the courage to actually push her entirely away, so we lie for long uncomfortable hours, it seems, dozing off and waking up with her still valiantly trying to get some kind of passionate response from me. I can't remember any words from her puffy lips except periodic chanted "Bob"'s. All in all, a reasonably depressive dream!
9/10/97: 7:55AM: 1) Rita is about 5 years old, and she's very uncomfortable and squally because she's enormously pregnant! Someone says to put her to bed and they'll call the doctor, and as I lay her down she goes into contractions and the baby spurts out into my hands, about as big as a fat kitten, and I simply hold it, waiting for someone else to tell me what to do next. 2) I'm checking into a huge rustic hotel with Jean-Jacques, but he's vanished and I've been waiting in the bar for a long time, looking out over a terrace with a thatched roof (like in La Mangeoire on Monday?), verifying that I'm on the next-to-the-top floor by looking at an adjacent photograph of the hotel and verifying the angle and composition of the sticks and rushes that make up the pitched roof. I debate climbing up one floor to see a better view (this could even be an animal-viewing hotel in Africa or India), but decide to go down a small stairway to see where the lobby is, and pass a tiny coatroom-like half-door in which two men are working. I ask for the room number of the V. party, and one calls me his “lover" to the other one, and though they seem to make a joke of it, they're not really homophobic about it (watched the Siskel and Ebert review of Kevin Kline's In and Out just before bed last night), and I felt that we've come a long way toward acceptance (as I felt about the review), until they started making even more pointed comments, like calling me "Mrs. V." and using the term "queen" under their breaths. Then, at a fuzzy ending, I think Jean-Jacques even came into the lobby at that point and told me what the room number was and gave me a set of keys, but I woke and calculated that I'd spent almost 7.5 hours in bed and STILL felt sleepy, wondering whether the hay-fever season was affecting me as it was affecting Eric and Alvin of Village Playwrights, or if I was still suffering from the side-effects of the Bonine I took five days ago (doubtful), or if something is really going WRONG with me (more probable) that I should check with the doctor about (as well as a dentist about my broken tooth) before my China-Tibet trip.
9/15/97: 12:40AM: 1) Talking Abdomen dream: I'm in some kind of theater where a woman comes up with the idea of having a fuzzy-edged face superimposed on the wooly sweater of a young woman. She narrates a tale in which this young woman with a talking abdomen is involved in some sort of police thriller, ending in a police station with a supervisor talking to a cop who suddenly goes berserk, causing the supervisor to pull out a gun to stop the cop, while the cop also pulls out a gun, and they both fire at each other as the camera zooms to a close-up of the abdomen-face, leading me to think at first that one of the bullets has shot an innocent bystander, but then the face melts into tears of agony, saying, "That was a TERRIBLE thing to do, because we had empathy for BOTH characters, rather liking the supervisor, and to think that now we're going to have to judge the supervisor as a possible cop-killer is much too emotionally laden for us to deal with." I'd gone to bed just after 10PM, again feeling tired from a not-too-busy day, but had some trouble getting to sleep, though I tried lightwork finally, which did the job, maybe as late as 10:40PM. Then woke with the memory of the latest dream (above) only to have the lineaments of a SECOND dream, which was either interwoven or came first, come to mind: 2) Cruising Son dream: I'm on an odd motorcycle which I drive by looking into some sort of rearview mirror and drive BACKWARD, but I come to a particular traffic situation (after moving left when I see that the person "following" [but actually ahead of] me is moving right in order to take an exit) which seems too dangerous to be taken "in reverse." Then I'm following two men on motorcycles, seeing them sweep around some kind of obstruction from the right, and they get onto the highway when the light at the entrance is green, but it's red when I get there so I have to wait. Onto the highway and again involved with odd mirrors and angles, and now there are leaves of trees or bushes in the way of my view, but somehow it's clear that ONE white station-wagon or sports utility pickup has a gay guy cruising from it, and I get off the highway and follow him until he gets out of the car and starts walking down a wooded path. I'm following him, when two men come toward me and I realize that it's my father (a very much younger version than I normally remember) and a friend of his, and we sit down at a picnic table and talk about inconsequentials when the topic of what I'm doing here seems to arise, along with the realization that someone on the walk may be cruising, and I feel acutely uncomfortable. THEN there's a section in which I'm reading some kind of jail-house newsletter and come across a reference to "You were really great, Cell 2intR" and I kind of KNOW this is a reference to a gay encounter that took place in a particular location revealed by the code "2intR." Somehow I'm connected with this, and a young black man who looks like the tall handsome black "discovered" in the Helen Mirren Prime Suspect series who's now appearing in a love-murder movie under his own name, which I've forgotten, is the person writing the note, and I wonder if my father will recognize the coding, the participants, and connect them with me. A luxurious sensuousness pervades both these dreams, as if the talking abdomen is supposed to be some kind of turn-on, and as if I had actually participated in these police-station or jail-house sexual intrigues in a much more direct way than my rather elliptical dreams would indicate. Lie for a few moments trying to decide whether to get up and transcribe them on the computer or just make a few notes to be transcribed at daybreak, but my stomach is distended from the meal at Teresa's that ended at 8:15, though I watched TV until 10PM---almost two hours---and I feel the immanence of gastric reflux, so I decide that sitting up will make me feel better, so I switch on the light to see what time it is (it could be as early at 11:30 or as late as 5PM as far as my judgment could be), puzzled that 12:40 isn't any easy multiple of 45 minutes from, say, 10:15 (11, 11:45, 12:30, so it COULD be THREE intervals from 10:25PM: 11:10PM, 11:55PM, 12:40AM); and then type this full page and STILL feel bloated now at 1:05AM, rather surprised that typing this page has taken so LONG, and make myself a note to print the page this morning.
9/19/97: 9AM: Multi-episodic dream of travel and pleasant-feeling-making friends and acquaintances: 1) I'm packing for the next stop in a multi-stop trip, but feel that my swimming trunks are wet under my walking shorts, and I have to take them both off and put on long trousers for the bus later today, but the dormitory-like room is so full of people (like students packing up after a camping trip) that I can easily pull off my underclothes under my long T-shirt without exposing anything (not that anyone really would want to look). Some slight concern about "where everything is" and "will I get it all into my bag before we leave," but the main feeling is delight. 2) Somewhat connected to the first (in that Carolyn and a friend of hers seem to be IN the group of students waiting for the next trip-departure): I wander down a gorge of rocks over a cascading river, and round a curve so that ONLY the river and the gorge are to be seen, and I'm awestruck by the blue-green of the river rushing over rocks smoothed by ages of water that have formed actual RINGS of rock that rise above its surface, producing an incredibly beautiful sheen of fabric-like silkiness that glints in the sun as the waters gush through, over, and around these "pull-tab lids" of rock jutting up in three or four places in a vista available only to my eyes. I wish I had something to record them, feeling slightly disappointed that I have only my still camera and not my zoom-in video camera, but when I make my way back to the dressing room (all episodes seem more-or-less intertwined time-wise) I see that my camera AND my camcorder are there on my bed waiting to be taken into my shoulder bag, so I COULD go back and film them. I even tell Carolyn, "You don't have to wait for me: the walk isn't that dangerous, the rocks are easy enough to climb on, and you can't get lost in the canyon, go off and have a look for yourself while I finish packing and I'll meet you out there," but she shakes her head no and indicates she'll be perfectly happy to wait for me. 3) I'm leaving some kind of crowded performance that may be in a brightly lit church in an evening, and I find that my young-woman friend has brought along a school chum of hers: Demi Moore, who seems pretty but physically remote: I'm sort of holding my friend by the hand or around her waist, but Demi is aloof and always separated by a slight distance and perimeter around her. We exit toward the door of the church and some of the performance-attenders draw back in awe: "It's Demi Moore!" At the door, two guys start to move in toward her, and I wonder if I'm going to be expected to act as the chivalrous knight who's going to protect her from the inroads of her fans, but she sort of folds in on herself and they leave her alone. Then we're out on a darkened street, with people rushing past in pairs or alone, and still a few recognize her and try to move in for a touch or an autograph or some simpering words of recognition and praise. We move toward the dormitory in which we're all staying for this evening and I wonder if she'll come in, so that people I'm actually traveling with will recognize that I know someone who knows Demi Moore. But I'm not called upon to make physical protective motions around her, and I just feel good that it's ME that she's with and lots of people are noticing who she is. There was a BRIGHTNESS in the sunlight on the waters in the gorge, and a GLOW to the night-street after we left the performance, and a THRILL of emotion about being in all of those places that lingers after I wake from the dream. Surely they're connected with my thoughts about the upcoming trip to China and Tibet, not to mention the drunken conversation among Ken and Fred and Janet "Turdy" and me at the Beard Foundation last night when the table for four turned AGAIN out to be the liveliest and loudest table at the dinner. But then the gloom of my usual days settles around me: I'm still tired though I've been in bed about eight hours, my teeth are beginning to hurt in places where they were fine before, WHEN will I see a doctor to investigate the two week presence of the pain in my right side, WHEN will I go back to get my China visa, WILL I get the pages for the large index in time before my departure, WILL I be dressed and finished with my shit before the buzzer sounds for ANOTHER after-9AM delivery, and WHEN will they finally fix the drippy leaking sink upstairs! (RETURN TO JOURNALS 9/19/97).
9/24/97: [recorded 9/26/97]: Sexy fragment about fellow lying on top of me in a crowded room, but I feel his erection through his black silk trousers and try to jerk him off without getting the attention of anyone around us, though I feel the bed beneath us rocking rhythmically, and he actually COMES in my hand, and I feel intense pleasure, he curls up around me in contentment, and I debate wiping my hands inside the sheets that wrap us up, hoping the wet won't be noticed, and wake with a lovely erection, thinking I haven't jo'd in while.
9/25/97: Going through desk-top top-niche and find an unrecorded dream 2/6/97! 7:40-7:50AM! WILD: at Beard-like restaurant, and ENTERTAINERS fall on floor, decking patrons, and they call and they joke and PESTER everyone. Then woman serves ice cream (when page tries to CLEAR UP used glasses and dishes and drinks, I tell him STAFF does that) and other server JUST appears with PLATES, and she PUNS on "honey brittle" and HALF my ice-cream threatens to fall off the plate, and I GRAB it in two HANDS and stuff it into my gaping face-bottom and say, "What else could I DO?" and COLLAPSE in aghast LAUGHTER!
9/26/97: Fragment I "should take note of,” but didn't, and forgotten at 10:10AM.
10/6/97: 9AM: 1) 6:10AM: I'm crossing a border from China to "old" China; the women have been separated from the men, and the man-group is told they will have to "sleep here overnight," because the office is closing soon and won't process us. We go down three flights to where we'd entered, then go down another flight and see cubicles with bare pallets that could be sleeping accommodations, and we end up on the ground floor that turns into an inner court, over the side-roofs of which I can see lights from an amusement park only a couple of long blocks away: the lights on the spire of a parachute-jump-like ride are being overshadowed by intermittent fireworks that overtop the rides but that are far enough away so we can barely hear the explosions, and the intervening trees often interrupt our view. I wonder if I can take a picture, both from picture-taking-permission point of view and from lack of ambient light. In this dream, but somewhat disconnected, is a cute naked guy that seems to be hanging around me "for protection," and when I press my legs against his, he seems to return the appetizing pressure, and he even seems EXCITED by my attentions, which is a real turn-on. 2) 8:30AM: Another guy, seemingly unrelated to the guy in the first dream, is naked in a bed just above mine, and he also seems receptive to my graspings, and under the blankets I can feel his cock getting hard, and he presses against my hand and even seems willing to kiss me. People have been going in and out of the room, and we're right near the door, but I still think we can make it "look innocent" if someone comes in who doesn't like what we seem to be doing. Someone comes in to report "It's being closed down, we can get OUT on our own if we want to," and then another Chinese guy tries to climb up into the bed with us and I try gently to deflect him by putting my bare foot into his supraclavicular notch and pushing him away from the bed, trying to keep him off balance when he is about to pull himself up to join us. I suck my pal's cock a few times, and can literally TASTE the sweetness of his shiny-slimy pre-cum, even though thoughts of AIDS-danger slip through my mind at the same time. VERY sensual dream of great body offering itself to me and wake aroused.
10/12/97: 8:45AM: Merest fragment of a VERY erotic dream: I'm playing with a delightful cock and sucking him off, and he comes VERY excitedly and I WAKE with almost a ROAR of excitement and eroticism, quite hard, feeling very delighted about the emotional pleasantness of the dream. Encouraging that I've had NO ill omens from anything about my trip starting tomorrow to Tibet, and I feel particularly relaxed this morning (after my six-and-a-half hours the night before), having gone to bed just after 10PM and getting up just after 8AM, a solid restful ten hours before the three-day ordeal of getting to China.
TIBET/CHINA DREAMS 10/13-11/5/97
10/16/97: 2AM: Bill P. reads awful plays where he tries to seduce young man using his AWFUL voice and innuendo and describing himself as a woman.
10/19/97: 1:40AM: Mom is in decorating business and allows me two new overflow customers, for which EACH and EVERY cake and pie FLIPS upside down onto floor while messenger from ONE customer waits MOST impatiently as her SUBSTITUTE dessert flips upside down onto floor. Ludicrously awful! 2:50AM: Dancers mimicking dwarfs---VERY FUNNY.
10/21/97: 2:30: Lina M. asks me to read and punctuate her book, and my "masterful" explanation that "even IF I find the book poor, it won't affect our friendship." 4:15: Sexy guy "with amazing abdominals" looks forward to sex with me, and JOAN S. tries to get me to fuck her but it doesn't work. Odd combination! I'm also entertaining a group in my "newly cleared out" apartment, serving a Chinese-style dinner.
10/23/97: 5:35: I'm walking in New York City, realizing I'm actually on a trip in ITALY and can't POSSIBLY be in NYC. My apartment door (on West 57th, but not 309) has a new lock that I can't lock. I'd gotten a piece of porno mail that REALLY turned me on (I had a shorter, MUCH stiffer cock) and I wanted to j/o in privacy. BUNCH of guys come in, including a swarthy hooded-eyed guy who keeps saying, "No," until I address him: "I don't know the history of this, and I don't WANT to know, so would you please leave my apartment!" He gives me a malevolent stare and he and his cronies all get up and leave, but I feel I have to FEAR for my safety and will be MUCH intimidated by them in the FUTURE. VERY real dream.
10/25/97: 2:50: Visiting a sound/TV studio where they've HEARD of some computer-generated film I have a COPY of, but I've never SEEN it (Gregg Toland is the film-maker's name). They might have copies of tapes I've been seeking for YEARS. ("Mystic" leanings toward Dunhuang?)
10/26/97: 6:15AM: A guy asks, "Do I REALLY need a passport?"
10/27/97: 3AM: Dream-knock on door and fragment of 1907-1909 food being sent to rooms. 6:50AM: I've put on some eggs to cook for last few seconds but have to LEAVE with two people to OTHER house. Woman keeps insisting she wants TEA (like Jenny), and little boy wants to stop, is tired, but doesn't want to be carried and finally HE starts to demand tea. It's finally an HOUR later, 9AM, and we're STILL far from place which I feel is AFIRE from incinerated EGGS on low flame so long. I say, "I'll just LEAVE you to do what you WANT," but of course I CAN'T because I'm responsible for their safe conduct.
10/28/97: 5:45AM: Awful dream: Helen is helping me get a scholarship to Columbia and writing me a letter of introduction. She tells me she leaves stuff in her work area in another building. I go to this building, open the door, and sit on the toilet to shit, but people come in and I realize this is NOT a bathroom: my toilet is just SITTING on the floor. A woman gets angry and demands I be arrested. I show her the letter but she dismisses it. She says that I could have written it. I try to get away but they grab my legs. I try hitting them off but they cling like glue; finally I break free and run away with a dream's awful "glue-pad" run when legs are weak and just won't MOVE. But I elude them and wake musing.
10/31/97: 2AM: Untangling vacuum cleaner input nozzle, obvious reference to nasal problems. 4AM: Four guys acting, one blond takes off shirt, wears leather pouch, and Ken says, "Look at him flexing his legs." I remember a reviewer saying there WAS flesh exposed onstage, but I can't get BACK after intermission. Climbing on ROOFS and boy jumps onto a pair of FENCES and hurts himself and CAN'T find a good stairs down and I can HEAR second act starting and HOPE I'm not missing nudity. 6AM: Diane INSISTS "afect" is proper Scrabble word, even though it isn't in dictionary.
11/4/97: 6:30AM: Riding in left front of sightseeing bus which hits the back of a truck entering highway from left. I turn my head and feel a dusting of dirt on the back of my neck. The windshield's unbroken, but Jenny is limping off between two women, saying her leg has been broken, which I think is just her hysteria.
END OF TIBET/CHINA DREAMS
11/12/97: 2:25AM: I'm at a post office trying to SEND six rolls of film WITH a manuscript, and getting a note "no more holding companies," so where IS package sent to me from CHINA? Man waiting so long that he says to clerk, "Sorry, I'm not being childish, but my trains won't be running ALL night---I've got to GO."
11/17/97: 8:10AM: Carolyn and I are riding in an elevator to see what we can see from the top of an apartment building that appears to be in the vicinity of E. 96th Street. I have the idea the roof is about at the tenth floor, but we're puzzled because the buttons only go up to #8. So I push the button for #8, thinking we'll have to walk up a few flights, but as we're moving upward I notice two auxiliary buttons for "M2" and "4" at above the button-panel, and I push both of them by accident. We watch the floors going by through a crack at the bottom of the elevator door, and stop at #8 to see what appears to be an attic with no view of outside. We shut the door and continue upward for what seems an unreasonably long amount of time, but the door opens next on ANOTHER closed-in area, though from a distant window we can see a promising skyline of buildings that would appear to block any distant views even if we GOT to the top of this building. I visualize that we're ascending in a sort of water tower which has no floors except the top, but we never really REACH the top before I wake up.
11/22/97: 1AM: After cumming and bidi-smoking, I have a HUGE pot-like dream of dozens (well, 24, anyway) of guys asleep in enormous living room of a party-house, wakened in the night by a girl-maid bringing 1) lime juice in wine glasses (John A. takes two, then hands me one, with ice), 2) tiny bite-sized sandwiches in rectangles, 3) itty-bitty hamburgers on toast, exuding grease and tasting great, 4) "special" fudge, like dog-poop with macadamia nuts, and we ask for MORE of the fudge, but she's making 5) toasted baguettes which she cuts with a knife down the side and butters with melting yellow butter which JUST hits the spot of what we want to nibble on in the middle of the night. Everyone who wakes is lively and charming, the maid is pert and sweet and, though knowing we're all recovering from an orgy, wonderfully eager to please and innocent of what we've been doing. A great sense of SHARING permeates the dream, and I wake NOSTALGIC for the days of the past when such delights were possible. We all seemed so NATURAL together there was just no question that we were all safe and warm and pleased with this unlooked-for attention by someone we may have HIRED for the evening, but we've all been so flagged out by sexual adventuring, drinking, and pot-smoking that we've lost track of what's due us and what isn't, so that what we GET seems an incredible gift, made more appealing by our vulnerability and nakedness and sinfulness, pleased that someone ELSE, who hadn't participated, could be AS PLEASED AS WE with where we were, what we were desirous of eating and drinking, and could serve us un-self-consciously with good humor and acceptance. A truly idyllic dream stretched to the limits of memory and well-being by trying to get to the bottom of the page while being sozzled with lunch Kir Royales from 200 Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, being driven in Shelley's Mercedes---and SHE liked it too!
11/29/97: 8AM: Having slept VERY little with Paul, he leaves bed and I doze to VERY detailed dream of leaving ONE section of a men's baths with ticket stubs that should let me free into the OTHER section of the baths. Go through a gate and down a stairway that I don't remember before, and a family trio is moving away while the husband is looking at the entrance, and the wife seems to know what's inside but is willing to let her husband investigate if he wants to. I go through a door and down another narrow flight of stairs to meet two hair-dressers who simper and move away from me, and I think there might be NO entrance-check at all. I move through hallways that I vaguely remember, with cubicles without doors opening off to right and left, some guys hanging around in the doorways, and down a few more steps to a smoky area (I wonder if there's phony piped-in fog for effect) where two bald-headed men are fucking with seeming awareness of the contrasting pictures their gleaming heads make in the light and the fog. (From "smoke and mirrors" from the Secrets of Magic Revealed that I watched on tape yesterday?) There are other furtive activities taking place in the corners, but I just walk past and observe. Wake and have ANOTHER dream in mind when I wake again at 9:30AM, but I forget it.
12/5/97: 8:30AM: 1) I'm vacuuming a rug in Dennis's OFFICE (my thought: "And I thought he had died!"), progressing from only the end of the hose to finding an attachment which wobbles as it works. Then I sit outside waiting for him to come back. 2) I'm filling out an expense account for DTW in Goa, for $60,000, for 9 people for 6 days, but that's still over $1000/day. I'm with Mary V. and we're thinking of going to a takeout restaurant for dinner in her car. Both these from ANCIENT history, PRELUDE to smoking with Carolyn tonight?
12/13/97: 7:45AM: Merest fragments: 1) Jim M.(!) carries Mary V. (what an UNLIKELY duo!) from my bed into the kitchen for some morning coffee, passing a naked friend who's so fat that his belly hangs over his genitals, so that there's no embarrassment from Mary when she has to be carried past this naked person. 2) A friend and I are moving in the early morning from one part of Central Park to another, and I look at the direction of the sun's rays and say that we should be going southeast to keep in the warming sun which will beam between two slab-like (not roundish Petronas tower-like), tombstone-like apartment buildings which are the northern parts of a U-shaped building (it’s actually one building). 3) Maybe the same friend and I are in a crowded hotel lobby looking for the "Indexers Associates" meeting (ANOTHER blast from the past: only as I TYPE this do I realize that that was the NAME [specifically, of the old group of me, Dennis, Marj, Sherryl, and Barbara that Marj or Barbara mailed out to numbers of publishers] with SIGNIFICANCE that we were looking for) and I see that hanging from a shingle outside a meeting room just across a crowded hallway, and as I pass a woman sitting in a chair with somewhat large boots jutting into the passageway, I kick her foot and try to drag my foot past while she glares up at me for kicking her and I glare down at her for blocking the passageway, and I suddenly wake with a growing cramp in my left calf that I try to work out before it becomes such an agony that I MUST scramble out of the bedclothes and stand to relieve the screaming muscle-agony. Feel VERY tired still at 7:30, having gotten to bed just after 1AM after a LONG subway wait after Charles and I dined at Julian's until just after midnight after leaving the E.S.T. four one-acts just after 10PM, and I change positions and get coldish around the shoulders before getting up to pee and take a glass of water and put Vicks up my nose---which yielded one almost adamantine booger---before deciding it was warm enough with the newly opened radiators from yesterday's heat adjustment to turn on the monitor (finding myself almost inexorably drawn to click on the FreeCell icon and play another six-seven hours of games) and record the fragments before they left my memory, and type to the bottom of the page so that I can print it out and clear the printer of the 18 Christmas pages I printed but didn't mail out yesterday. Um!
12/17/97: 10:10AM: Fragments: 1) I'm cleaning my bathroom sink and see a squarish object and ignore it, but when I look back I think I see a tiny flurry of roach-legs from the back of it, and when I actually pick it UP it's grown to the size of a small TURTLE, and I think it's actually too BIG to put into the toilet to flush down because it would clog it. 2) Leave my house with someone and see that I have a pair of ROLLER SKATES waiting for me, so I put them on, tightening one with a bulky white skate-key, but we move because someone else is standing on the sidewalk and when I look back I can't FIND the key. Look and look, knowing that it's too loosely fitted to my left shoe so I couldn't wear it without tightening it, but JUST CAN'T find the key on the leaf-strewn sidewalk. 3) I'm sitting in my front room reading and a large roach or water bug slowly walks under my bedroom slipper, sitting about a foot away from me on the carpet. I put my foot on it, wondering if it's already slipped away under the chair, or if the shell is so hard that it'll still be alive when I lift the slipper. Not the most optimistic and pleasant of dreams!
12/18/97: 8:25AM: 1) I walk through a small doorway (maybe my bathroom doorway that was leaking from above last night at 6PM?) covered in dried leaves through which poke crocus-like purple flowers (hope?), and cross a bosky courtyard in which a large moss-trunked tree is growing gnarledly, and seem a tiny bit surprised that I'm living in such a rustic house/office, because when I get inside, about 7-10 clerks are working---mostly in the living room like at 1221 Dietz---at small desks with their backs to a table-like bed on which there are sheets and blankets that can be pulled off at last because Mom "isn't there anymore," and I can go through the house and get rid of OTHER stuff that will make working conditions for the workmen much easier and spacier and cleaner. Then without transition I'm wakened in the bedroom by my distant boyfriend (young, fresh, and certainly not Paul C.) coming in with a smile to hug, kiss and lie with me, bringing a straight young friend who suffers me to hug him from the back, but he gently pushes me away, saying he's not really "that way," but is content to lie in a threesome with us and I feel VERY content IN my place WITH my lover-friends. 2) Someone like Abby B. has left me an old game of hers to try out, and I rummage in an old crate to find a "position spinner" with some kind of mechanized "object spitter" that, at random, spits out a small sphere onto a kind of ruler that shows what distance each player's marker can travel on a series of photo-drawing maps in a kind of a Search game (is this from my attempt to see Clue with Charles over the weekend?). I fumble through the rubble in the crate, past colored wooden marker-houses somewhat larger than those from Easy Money, and find a few odd-shaped pearls and even more asymmetric corn kernels, and wonder if these were used for the objects spit out to indicate distance-to-be-traveled, made even more random by the non-sphericity of the objects. Unfold large sheets of paper on which are variously scaled maps, including a schematic of New York City with large characters and houses and apartment buildings around the periphery, but shrinking in representational size as objects move toward the center of the map somewhere in the middle of Manhattan. Other large sheets represent the world, or at least the State of New York, and now as I type I'm reminded of the Mandala show at Asia House the day before yesterday with its "representation of the three-dimensional mandala" with computerized images. There are also schematics for constructions that were built to represent locales for self-made versions of the game, which I, in the dream, never recall playing, but look forward to reconstructing and playing when the Games group next comes to my apartment. Went to bed at 11:35PM last night, having felt tired, and tried Actualism but got to sleep before very long, and didn't wake until AFTER 8PM, MORE than 8 hours sleep certainly, which I MAY have needed because I'm possibly coming down with a cold: left nostril feeling sore when breathing through it, slightly sore throat that led me to take 2g vitamin C and 2 garlic pills after I shit the good shit this morning and finish this by 9:10AM--GOOD!
12/26/97: 1) 6:30AM: I'm having sex with Peter Martins, who unfortunately had had an accident with his penis, so the base of it was severely lacerated and scarred, if not actually cut off and reattached, but he's semi-erect and tolerant of anything I can do to stimulate him, and when I squeeze both cocks together and tease the heads at the same time, he gets quite hard and I go down on him and lick off each bit of precum, concerned about AIDS but considering that he's probably negative because he's been so busy working and has had to use his cock so sparingly. Wake with a pleasant erection that I silk-touch and fur-rub and squeeze to celluloid-string emission between 7AM and 7:45AM. Piss and back to sleep. 2) 9AM: I'm in a house owned by a woman very much like Norma E., and someone's running water in the kitchen sink which had been leaking, so I get a sponge and wipe up the water before it soaks into the dining room rug into which it had flowed from across part of the kitchen floor and along a baseboard, as at 1221 Dietz. Then look at the sink and find that it's filled to the brim with the drain-control-knob out, so I push it in and the water goes down quickly without too much draining onto the floor, and when I look at the piping underneath, there's a jury-rig of strap-buckles and metal gizmos like suspender-clasps and a few rubber bands holding some things back and some things forward, and the whole thing has slipped out of adjustment (rather like the metal prongs at the back of my TV when I tried to get better reception), and I try to put things back into some kind of working order. Without transition the place is full of people, mostly women of a heavily made-up, artistic type, and I find that the apartment is now a tchotchke-shop open for inspection by the trade, and I ask someone who seems "in the know" how my friend's shop "is,” and she says, "Well, she should go to the Spring Armory Show," and when I ask whether she means to ATTEND it or to have a table or booth AT it, she stares at me like I'm speaking Martian. Try to go into the kitchen to find Norma to tell her, but there's a labyrinth of screens (probably a reference to the panel in the lobby of the Hotel Pierre that Mildred said she wanted to take home with her) and panels, and she's obviously not available. Decide to go to a john (or this was ANOTHER dreamlet) and get behind someone like Paul C., who tries the door of the john and finds it locked, and he rolls his eyes and indicates masturbation with his pumping fist, and I see an open door (blocked by an open ironing board) leading to another john that's empty, but Paul says that that's a private apartment, and I look at a small grille to the right of the door and can see a female occupant with blonde hair going about some task. Back to the display room to see small DOLLS automated to march along shelves above the reach of long arms TAKING small figurines and statuettes and model ceramic houses off the shelves and STEALING them, and I'm disgusted by the behavior of this "arty" crowd. But maybe Norma's familiar with this and is willing to suffer the losses as some kind of advertising. Into a crowded bedroom and look down on an open cot (my bed is still unmade in a corner of the room with three or four other unmade beds, and I toss something across the room that I want to put away later) and see that two icicles that had been there for at LEAST a day, melting from within an elaborately patterned seashell, were being broken off and sucked on by someone who was too lazy to go into the bathroom for a glass of water, and when I broke off a piece of the ice for me to suck on, I remarked, "It's really incredible, these have been here for two days and haven't melted yet" (this clearly is a reference to the celluloid-string that I dangled from my thumb after orgasm, waiting for it to dry, but it remained sticky and moist after twenty minutes and couldn't be preserved) and the people stare at me as if I can't possibly know what I'm talking about. Wake and think about that for a while and Sherryl phones at 9:45AM, waking me from another doze, asking if I'd like to try for the Monet exhibit today, and I say yes, but she calls back at 9:55AM saying they've been busy, she has to go to the doctor's, and I should try calling them, so I type this until 10:22AM, trying 1-888-44-MONET intermittently on redial, and it's STILL always busy!