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1999

1/4/99: 8:20AM: I'm supposed to be camping in the woods, but when I look for a place to put down my bedroll, all I can see are roads, driveways, backyards, and otherwise occupied sites. Someone suggests I can put up under a tin-roofed cabin (probably from The Indian in the Cupboard watched last night) to at least get out of the rain. Finally I come to a house built into the rocks at the side of a lake, with the huge king-size bed right AT the shore, making me wonder if there were ever WAVES, would the BED itself get wet? I go into the living room (anteroom, actually) of the house, and there are three kids dressed very much the same (like the three girls in the Bronx Botanical Garden back on 1/1), and somehow Mack and Betsy G. are there, too, and we talk about where I might sleep and I seem to have to pass muster with the kids before I can decide where that will be: a spare room, in some kind of adjoining cabin outside the main house, or sharing a room with one or more of the kids. A lot of talk, with no real conclusion, but I feel confident that I have a welcoming place to stay by the time I wake up, snuggling again into the warm blankets in a coldish apartment, which might have contributed to the "outdoor" feeling I seem to remember having in the middle of the dream itself, now recorded past 3:30PM Monday.

1/15/99: 8:50AM: I'm in a strange living room with three young men, and one of them is brandishing an appealing erection with a large-slit cockhead oozing transparent pre-cum, and he urges everyone around him, particularly me, to squeeze the tip and feel the slipperiness of his erotic production. I resist the temptation to taste the gleaming fluid, but I certainly want to feel the stiffness of his member. Later, when the youngest has left the room, the three of us are in a triangle of reclining bodies, and I tense my own erection so that he can feel that I have one and may want to see the pre-cum from THAT, but he doesn't seem to be interested. Then I gather my courage and grab his crotch through his trousers, but he's gone mostly down and the erotic thrill has passed, and he looks at me with amused puzzlement but I'm still hoping for some sort of sexual satisfaction with this hunky thirteen-year-old stranger.

1/20/99: 9AM: 1) 5:30AM: Mom and Dad and I (about twelve years old) have to move from a HOME to a bus to a 50s car (Buick, I think) which is only large enough to allow three to sleep in a tight parallel if the seats are taken out. I try sewing a pillowcase to my undershirt-sleeves while someone like Shelley is threading very thick white thread through very large needles to help in this body-armoring (possibly stemming from reading of Mrs. Winston's smuggling gems out in her girdle from the New York magazine article about the jewelers), and I find I can have my arms free to pick up my shirts (including my folded brown military-stripe shirt that's one of the last of that type that I still have in real life), and add the heavy green-and-black rag-loomed sofa-throw of Grandma’s that Helen so treasured, a colorful throw-pillow that had been sitting on top of a red-white-and-pink needlepoint silk shawl also used as a sofa-throw which I don't recall from real life, and other clothing, which we seem to be gathering on a moving bus, but the departure is easy because "the last stop on the bus is where the car is," and we can just throw everything that we want to take with us off the bus to "our new place" and let the bus leave while we have all the time we need to sort things out, though where we're going to store them in the tiny interior of the car is beyond any imagining for me now. 2) 7:30AM: My first day at work, and a co-worker shows up and sits on a desk to chat as the phone rings behind him. I pick it up and some man asks for someone I don't know. "He's not here," I respond. The guy on the phone starts to complain about some situation I know nothing about. "I don't know who you are or what you're talking about," I explain patiently, rolling my eyes at my companion. The guy on the phone continues to whine (maybe based on Vicki phoning yesterday EXPLICITLY "to whine"), and finally I have to say, "I have to go now," and hang up the phone. Without transition a number of us are being given an orientation about a past or upcoming job involving some enormous document (maybe like the Holt grade-texts) which is studied, and results of the study are entered on large blue-hectographed sheets that in some cases contain explicit instructions on how to make entries, in some cases have colored areas that are to be filled in mysterious ways, in some cases have room for a kind of summary to be done according to arcane unstated rules (again, maybe Vicki's conversation about her writing up a Sample Case from the "wrong model" for her possible new boss, who'd given her the "right model" and then complained about two mistakes she made because the office atmosphere was too oppressive to work in)---and it's like an enormous "responding to the text" exercise for some school-based task. I figure, "This was just a kind of make-work task so that the new staff could be billable, wasn't it?" and "Who put up the money for it?" and still am not clear from the explanation by this person---who wasn't the person in charge, somehow, who really didn't know what was going on---whether this was something that was done and FINISHED in the past, or was ONGOING that WE would be doing also, or that was only for the FUTURE and we had to make some kind of estimate of the amount of time and money that would have to be spent to COMPLETE the mysterious project. All dreams clearly based on my worry about "not being always jammed up with work."

1/21/99: 10:25AM: 1) 7AM: A woman is walking in an odd countryside, either in a video travelogue or a movie watched on video, but the colors and proportions of the vistas and surrounding hillsides are so brilliantly clear and "off" that I wonder if it's not some kind of new computer animation, or a stage set. She goes into perfectly natural-looking houses and shops, but it’s always the distant views that show up "pretty-pretty," maybe as shot through an intensifying filter. There's lots of debate in my mind until the camera zooms high into the air and it's clear that she's twice as tall as the thirty- or forty-story towers in the "midtown area" of a gigantic indoor stage- or movie-set, rather tawdry and faded from this height, as if it were a set for a Busby Berkeley spectacular in the thirties that hadn't been used or refurbished since its origin. THEN I start wondering how they got the sight-lines from her hip UP to the tops of the buildings, or THROUGH the buildings to the horizon-line: did they have a mat and film her against a screen filled with images from a tiny camera on "street-level," or did they manipulate visual distance so that she appeared small in the foreground, while the small buildings in the background appeared to be large? And then I start to question the entire dream when I wake. 2) 8AM: I'm in a strange country with someone tailing me, who seems to be accusing me of having done something wrong, and I have to be watched so I don't go off-course again. I try to convince them that, on an absolute basis, I did NOTHING wrong, so they should just go away, and finally I hit the little man on his helmet-head (that term comes from the Ally McBeal that I watched on Tuesday, where helmet-head meant cock) with an ingot of very hard steel, which makes a dull clunk that fells the poor creature, but he gets up and starts to follow me again. He transforms into a cube lying on the ground, which I hit again and again until it merges with the surface, and I think I've gotten rid of it, but a second "follower" grows OUT of it and starts all over again. I think I might have to KILL it! Feel AWFUL about the whole dream-scene. 3) 9:55AM: Try Actualism half-fruitlessly, but doze off about 9:30 and I'm in some elaborate Disneyland somewhere on the coast of California, to which I flew and went on a bus from the outskirts of a large city to this park in the suburbs, which I'm enjoying until I suddenly realize I've lost my shoulder bag! At first I think I've lost my wallet and binoculars IN the shoulder bag, but I think, "This is a well-run, family-type place where most people are honest," so I start trying to find someone to ask where the Lost-and-Found Department is. But there’s a confusion about whether I'm asking about the PARK or about the suburban locale-name or even the larger city, and I look in my pocket for a guide-map, and I find my wallet and my binoculars, so I've just lost the BAG, which is rather a relief. Oddly, also in my pocket is a Michelin-type book which is, somehow, a famous German novel translated into English that I know I picked up in the trash outside an apartment building on Hicks Street before I left on this trip, and later I find ANOTHER foreign-dictionary-type small book in the SAME pocket, and wonder how BOTH of them could have been in the one I thought was EMPTY. I open my guidebook, bought new, and the central gatefold map is TORN, so the book must have been used, at least in the bookstore, and I can't even get clear WHERE on the map I am. A guide tells me the Lost-and-Found is on Livingston Street, but I can't find that on ANY map: the small-scale has no streets and the large-scale is too large-scale and is almost a photograph of an unknown central area, from which I have no idea how far or in what direction I'm located. Someone points "over there," but I can't tell whether I CAME that way. Back through many areas I KNOW I've not passed before, coming to a Central Room where each door seems to EXIT from a "land”: one a medieval castle where people are doing calisthenics and a scullery maid chases me out; another a ride-exit where people are clearly leaving from where I haven't been, so I search for the proper door, but go down ANOTHER area I've not been and get MORE lost, demanding ANYONE give me directions back to the Central Room, so I can get back to the AREA where I lost my shoulder bag---there was a BEACH here, too, with a hunky daddy-body. LOST!

1/23/99: 8:35AM: Odd animals dominated: 1) I'm dusting in an old bedroom that I associate somehow with Mom, though it's not like any bedroom that I've ever known: the frame around the bed is painted white, and it's easy to remove all the black particles from its smooth surface, but I get to a large frame, like a radiator cover, and the underside of the wooded top has holes that seem to communicate to a region of the cellar, or an outdoor area nearby, where cool air seems to "breathe" in and out, which might be good because it would furnish outside ventilation to this closed inner room, or might be bad because it allows dirt, pollution, and maybe even small creatures, crawling or flying, to be admitted from less-occupied parts of the premises into the heart of this sleeping chamber. I transfer my attention to the baseboard, which had been painted white at some point but was now mostly bare wood, dried and porous from lacking its protection of paint; however, when I rub it with a cloth, the light-tan wood takes on a dark richness that is almost a varnish, and I think I can make this baseboard look a lot better if I can remove all the white-paint remnants from it, which I proceed to do successfully, happy that I don't have to get any scraping tools out, and only a vigorous rub with the cloth will dislodge most of the white-paint flecks remaining. Without transition some of the baseboard is under water, and as I rub the white accretion (no longer paint, but some kind of fungal growth) it plumps up with water and peels off in chunks that might be succulent---in fact, might provide food for the fish that live in what's become a tilted fish tank with about one inch of water on the near side and four or five inches of water on the far side, where dwell eight to twelve tiny, but brightly colored and variegatedly finned, fish who are gulping the scanty water and staring in my direction, almost as if silently pleading for some kind of assistance in their Spartan habitat, and I cheer up as one of them dives to nibble on the white manna-like substance I had scraped from the baseboard, but after a brief taste the "food" is refused and I think there seems to be very little sustenance in this tank---nothing growing on the floor of it, nothing edible swimming in it---and I wonder how they'd managed to survive this long---possibly eating each other?---and retained so many species, though they seem clearly to be able to interfecundate themselves and retain a basic level of survival. 2) Apparently without connection, I'm riding in something like a golf cart over grass in what might be a college quadrangle, anyway a roughly square area of about an acre or two, surrounded by brick buildings edged with bushy shrubbery, and I look to one side to see what appears to be a dried-out corncob which can't be blown about by the air since there's no hint of wind on this protected lawn to scatter any detritus, but there are almost comic-strip puffs of gas coming from the hinder parts of the "cob," which propels it drunkenly about. As our vehicle comes around to one side of this ambulating object, I suddenly see that it's really a very old squirrel, with one closed eye and one blind eye, stumbling around in the open, in a dull desperation, seeking either shelter or food, or relief from its prolonged existence. "It's alive," observes my companion, a heavy-set snob a few years older than me, who somehow is only an acquaintance for whom I don't particularly care, and then he looks away to remove himself from the plight of this helpless creature. I think later that this might have some kind of personal reference: an old friend like Pope that I feel might be better off dead, or myself gone beyond any hope of retrieving any useful energy or activity as the years progress. I vaguely think that he might be caught and put into a cage for his "retirement," or again that he might be beseeching some predatory, carnivorous rodent or bird to see or hear his lurchings and make an end to his already startlingly preserved life: how had he managed to get food up to this time? He doesn't seem to be starving, but with the fur it's hard to tell. I'd thought of him as being alone in that entire quadrangle, but of course he could have been part of a community, or even a family, I now think in an effort to "put a better face on his fate." Now it's 9AM and I have to get breakfast and finish the Grade 7 index and start my DAY!

1/24/99: 9:15AM: I'm traveling with a small group in China, looking down on "the hardhats" (clearly a reference to the MAN party last night at a stage milliner’s; she had wooden blocks by the score, obviously hat forms) who ate in segregated dining rooms away from the regular Chinese. We then went to an outdoor restaurant where tray-areas were set up on trestle tables covered with palm fronds, and I tried to figure where to eat, not wanting to pair with an eager young girl who obviously wanted to talk with me, but when I went to one end I figured THAT was the area for the cooks, who looked at me quizzically when I surveyed their space, my tray in my hand, not yet deciding where to sit. There was something else about rivers of travel in the dream, but I forget now.

2/3/99: 10:30AM: 6:10AM: Charming dream of an older man, somewhat like Mark E., who tells our Zanzibar cook at an oft-visited home-restaurant (he cooks only for us) that it's "coke-based" and he seems to be served pure foie gras, which he says is GREAT. A prior scene has me running toward a parked car in oncoming heavy rain---I can FEEL the wetness of it---and I pass the car. As a joke, my friend doesn’t call to me, because car is parked out of the rain on a porch. Pleasant feelings of old-timey ease and comfort throughout the dream.

2/12/99: 10:45AM: 1) 4:45AM: Little-remembered dream SAVE that IN the dream, when I’m reaching for a fragile support to make my way across a path which has become a cliff-face, I tell myself IN the dream, "Oh, this is only a dream, so if it seems dangerous, it really isn't, and I don't have to worry much about it." 2) 10:10AM: Michael K. wakes me from a dream partly based on the French flier's halting English in Babes in Arms last night: I'm at a party of Italians who are playing cards, and the dealer shuffles an enormous deck which has a goodly number face-up, and he deals in clumps, barely counting, and when I get my haphazard stack of cards, I ask, "How many did you deal?" and he replies, "Thirty," which leads me to think, since we're a circle of at least seven or eight players, that we must be playing with almost that many DECKS, some of which have a red heart-pattern, and some of which have a black diamond-pattern, and I note when I roughly count mine that one of the face-up cards is an ace of hearts, which must be pretty good, though I don't know the rules enough to realize how I can play it while KNOWING what it is. I turn up my first batch of face-down cards and sort them into suits in order, since the game seems to be a kind of rummy, and when clubs are led I see that I have a number of small ones and a king and queen, and I figure to play the queen if no one puts out a higher card, so that even if it's trumped by the ace I'll have a winning queen next time, but I'm sitting slightly back from the circle of players and when it comes to my turn the young woman to my left rushes to put down a queen of clubs, so I draw back MY queen and ruffle my cards to put out my king, saying that since SHE went out of turn, she might want to replay, knowing that I would have played the king if I'd played in my proper turn, but she looks at me unknowing when I explain it to her, and I turn to a doe-eyed Italian male on the sofa and explain it in Edgardo-simple terms for him to pass it on to her, though it's not at all clear HE understands what it is that I'm saying. There was yet again a 3) dream between these two, which impressed me with its detail and richness, but I was too tired to reach for the note-card to record any of the details, so all of them are gone at this point. Wonder if I might not have been SAD, since one of the symptoms is sleeping too much, and I had gotten to bed just after midnight with my hot-fudge sundae from the Brooklyn Diner still in my stomach, wakened to pee after the first dream, and---ah, one of the dreams was a SEXY one, part of my anticipation of the coming of Paul, but I still don't remember the DETAILS of it---and seemed to have been WANTING to sleep nine hours and even MORE without getting out of bed, so I’d be feeling really RESTED. Then TERRIBLE leg-cramps early this morning made me worry about clotting from LDL in my legs which could release a fatal clot to my heart, having delayed my blood test two weeks from its January-end time.

2/15/99: 10:05AM: 1) 6:50AM: I'm staying with Ken L. at his apartment, and he has two kids and a sexy guy staying with him, too, and I wake one morning (this is clearly related to Paul's staying with me, leaving today) to find Ken lying on top of me! I wonder if he's going to initiate sex (which I would dearly like with his sexy friend), but he only kisses me briefly and cheerfully on the mouth and crawls off me, leaving the two kids still surrounding him looking down on me with smiles. 2) 8AM: Ken (wait, no, this was part of the previous dream!) had ordered me to write down some kind of trip-plan for his vacation, and he wants to go over my notes to make sure I did everything right, or that he can read them (not like Paul with my telephone number, he says), and I start by asking, "But your schedule has everything you wanted in times you can do them?" and he says "Yes," and I ask, "I didn't leave out anything you wanted to do?" and he says "No," but he says he just wants to double-check to make sure. There was something ELSE that was very detailed at the END, just before I WOKE for the last time, but now it's completely gone, so at least I remembered as much as I did here.

2/20/99: 8:50AM: Wake at 6:15 with dreams of travel in Italy, passing through rustic hillsides, and at dusk or dawn we pass a small church with a procession just coming out of it, the golden light from inside reflecting off mitres and crosiers of the prelates contrasting with the dark dresses of the worshippers. Then we're in an open-top bus in the daylight, the guide pointing out the "famous monument to Romeo and Juliet" just behind us, and I rush to the window and lean down to see plaster-of-Paris statues with Barbie-doll faces and no crotches whatsoever. The guide then points out two other places of interest in the town, and I think, "This is the way to travel: you don't even have to STOP and you see everything there is to see." Then I'm in a movie house with a child who's somehow in my care, and I'm surprised that it's over in only 55 minutes, but then we have the rest of the morning free for "shopping at the local jewelry and food shops," and I wince, but I'm enjoying the trip overall. (Return to Journal 2/20/99).

2/22/99: 1) 7:15AM: I'm watching a Broadway play from many seats on the extreme sides of the theater, some even in the wings of the stage itself, and I can never get a full-front view of the lead actor's face, where his glittering eyes (like the eyes of the Zamfir Zancussinsic, or whoever he was who came out of nowhere and took a silver medal in the American West) reveal what he’s actually feeling while his body does something totally opposed: like hugging a "friend" in greeting and smiling in his being glad to see him, and then when his face is over his shoulder in a warm embrace, his eyes rolling up with disgust and active dislike, shown only to the audience in the center front and only peripherally to me at the extreme side. Other times he shows his malice with a flash of hatred while talking to some woman, or smiles evilly when he should be consoling someone on their tragedy. At one point I'm on the aisle seat of the center section when the guy who's clearly sharing my pair of seats leans forward to engage the couple in front of us, also in the same pair of seats on the aisle, with a conversation showing that he knows them very well and is asking how they managed to get those special-use aisle seats, maybe in a way he hasn't yet learned to exploit. Then I'm sitting in a stage-close balcony while the clues to the plot are conveyed by the kinds of dresses that the actresses wear, the MAIN clue being that there appears a SKIRT ONLY, with a tattered fragment of a bodice, which symbolizes either the heroine or the principal villainess, and then this is piled on top of a large double-stack of dresses whose voluminous skirts and underskirts have formed a view-obscuring stack of clothing at stage-front, and this bodice-less dress floats on top of the left stack as if signifying some great portent or completed train of reasoning so that those who follow this logic will know precisely what is meant by each character and action of the entire play, but I've seen only a fragment and have no idea what the whole thing means. One of the actresses, it becomes clear to me, is Diana Rigg's daughter, and an actor is Sean Connery's son, and this also has some significance to the plotting of the play which completely eludes me. I wake to write these notes, and then keep them by my side, since there seem to be a lot of dreams coming, and there ARE. 2) 9:15AM: I'm touring in Afghanistan or Kirghizstan or Samarkand, and our leader (who has the most INCREDIBLE Iranian multi-shaped eyes: wide and horizontally widening and narrowing and rounding and curving in, with VERY liquid whites and expressive irises that I wish to get an incredible close-up of to show their brilliance and beauty, but I can only think that I'll get out my video camera and photo a distant scene, and then zoom in as close as I can get on those deliquescent orbs without trembling) is trying to tell us some history, but I get separated from the group and try to sort out my belongings, digging into pockets to come up with fistfuls of crumpled American singles, which I try to put into my wallet without attracting the attention of the sharp-eyed salespeople and beggars and thieves in the crowds around me. I pull out a tiny beaded replica of a Japanese hanging lantern a number of times, and try to put it into a small plastic sack I've brought with me (like the stuff I carted home last night in the plastic sacks?) but it won't quite fit. People crowd around me, some saying, "But he's just a young man," and others saying, "You have to look under the hood of his coat, he's really an OLD man," without much tolerance to my mere presence. My wallet seems stuffed with other papers, too, and I can't free my hands to coordinate my belongings. Then I'm rushing INTO the bazaar only to find myself EXITING the main gate, and I turn around and re-encounter all those who were making fun of me before. I'm going up some English-village flat-block with incongruous (for the Mideast) slate roofs and dormer windows and chimney pots, when the fact that I haven't been taking ANY pictures hits me: I MUST start taking AT LEAST stills, which will lead to taking videotapes, though there's no HOPE of capturing the richness and the beauty and the foreignness of what I'm looking at, though I keep telling myself that I've had this thought in the past and THEN marveled at the color and shapes I'd retained and re-remembered when I'd shown the images I HAD taken when I'd finally persuaded myself to take pictures, and then usually condemned myself for not taking MORE, figuring I'd REMEMBER what I'd seen, yet had needed the reminders to evoke even more memories of the colors and places. (Return to Journal 2/22/99).

2/24/99: 9:45AM: 1) 5:50AM: Art O. and others and I watch some kind of sex-show, and a pale-skinned fellow emerges from a side door with his cock wrapped in a manila-colored substance something between paper and cloth, shaped like a blunt pistol, and so protuberant that it must be mostly padding. But as he gets to center stage he begins unwrapping the covering and there is truly an enormous cock, teased to the point of maximum veininess, and with a strange purple cap with a metal tip on the end of it, and when he plucks his fingers up and down the length of the 16 or so inches, there's such an excess of paper-thin flesh that I fear it might actually tear, and Art grumbles in his raspy understated voice, "That looks like a bit too much skin." When he turns to the side, there are definitely feminine breasts, and I shout out, "He's got tits, too!" He goes behind a glass door like a shower enclosure which has filmy curtains inside, and I fear there might be some take-away games, but he comes out with a woman who proceeds to tease him, however I'm now concentrated on Art, who's arranging something on the table in front of him and asking me to come to his apartment, where I'm sure he'll have a good supply of grass and we'll have sex as we haven't had in a long time. 2) 8:15AM: Another dream, something typical about being in a school hallway and needing to get to a 3PM class, but I can't read my schedule to see where it’s being held, and I can't remember ANYTHING about it, and feel that OLD desperate sensation of NEVER being able to catch up, and wake AGAIN relieved that I'll NEVER have to go back to school!

2/25/99: 9:40AM: The beginning of the dream is VERY shadowy, the ending of the dream more vivid, the aftermath of the dream is most clear, and will be described on NOTEBOOK:2/25/99. I'm traveling somewhere, with a vaguely military air, and a human holocaust of some sort is revealed because of a remark I make to a superior officer who's also a friend. This human disaster climaxes when I carry a dead body up the main aisle of a cathedral (which is also a trench half-filled with water, which makes it easier for me to lift this body's weight, though possibly the head is gone, the body is emaciated, and various violences have removed sundry other parts of the corpse). An investigation follows, which leaves me with twenty body bags, or clothing bags (coffin-shaped plastic bags that zip across the top to spill their contents out by the cubic yard) filled primarily---it seems from the sample one I open---with books, on the top of which are trashy paperbacks like the ones I scanned on the "final markdown" shelf in the basement sale-area of Coliseum Books before the ballet last night. The investigation ends and I'm returning to "base" (which is VERY like the driveway leading to the garage at 1221 Dietz) with my superior officer to my left in the back of a chauffeur-driven limousine, when over the sound system comes the verbal chapeau to a weekly information-series, or news program, about our "life" (as if it were a soap opera, or a television series, or a weekly news summary), which features my superior's voice saying, "We must investigate the [whatever] incident," which had led to my present possession of this mass of evidence, and I look over to my superior's handsome face (rather like the archetypal Henry G. from high school) to find it smiling ruefully but affectionately, and I hasten to interpose, "I guess I should apologize, since if it hadn't been for my remark, you wouldn't have started---" and he smiles and waves away my part of the responsibility, since he's taken over most of it: aided by whatever notoriety it caused, diminished by whatever bad publicity or lack of closure the incident's investigation had had to this moment. Then without transition I'm in a sort of backyard, opening one of the 20 body bags which I'm "saving" from the incident, and I realize that I return home in 14 days, and I can't possibly take all this stuff back on the plane with me, and I really can't just LEAVE it here, so I'll have to sort through and discard much of the bulk of it (I think to myself in the dream that at least TWO sections will be easy to discard: this mass of paperbacks which were only owned by the victims of this massacre, which have no REAL souvenir value even if a court reconvenes to consider the evidence and unsatisfactory verdict; and another mass of books in which only the photographic plates have true meaning), but what will I do even with the bulk of ONE body bag of evidence in a case which was doomed from the start, since only a few hundred people were killed (what is THAT compared with the MILLIONS slaughtered in OTHER atrocities throughout the world?), and in most people's memories the case has been DEFINITIVELY concluded (which I guess is the link to the "Holt-archive" question which is part of NOTEBOOK:2/25/99), and most of the actual physical evidence just hasn't any VALUE (the link to the "general-archive" question). I think, at the end of the dream, "I just have 14 days left here, so I can go through at least one bag a day, discarding most of what's there, but there will STILL be a lot of stuff left HERE which someone ELSE will just have to dispose of (as with me, after my death), and then how will I transport what's LEFT (as with me, thinking of storage space in my new apartment)?" My consideration of that final thought lingers in my mind when I wake, realizing with relief that the whole "incident" is only a dream, and I don't REALLY have to worry about the "evidence" or my impressions on my superior, or even the task of sorting through so much material in the last days of my vacation, when there will obviously be OTHER things I want to do ON MY VACATION which won't leave much time for the actual sorting-out of what should be thrown out and what should be kept, which furnishes the source-material for my subsequent (sad) thoughts. (Return to Journal 2/25/99).

3/4/99: 9:45AM: 1) About 4AM, something about travel complications, which I now forget. 2) 7AM, my STAMPS are blown away in stupefying layers from an enormous stack: envelopes filled with singles, stacks of sheets, even presorted ROLLS of common values from various large-issue countries that I'd painstakingly sorted are now totally disorganized. I can see them swirling in eddies in corners of the building where somehow both my company AND my apartment are in the process of moving, and we have to be OUT at 5PM, to the point where the LIGHTS were going to be turned out then and even the water in the shower, which I am taking somehow communally toward the end of this real nightmare, is about to be switched off forever. I can't figure how to gather up all this stuff (from gathering up all the rubber bands and ashtray and bidis and llama-pieces from my cumming last night?) AND my regular luggage at the same time. I get most of the bulk of it from one corner of the floor and go to the next corner, somehow aware that a kind of chimney effect has carried them up at least three floors above me, and I at least give thanks that some clumps which appeared to be water-damaged at least slide apart, integral still, when I pick them up, careful not to damage them any more than I HAVE to, but I seem to retain memories of my United Nations water damage, knowing that what HAD been an almost complete collection was now never to be totally recovered without a lot of work that I was simply no longer able or desirous of performing to return them to their original pristine condition.

3/8/99: 11AM: INCREDIBLE series of dreams, almost as if I'd been bidied: 1) I'm moving somewhere and have to pack, and have a little silver box filled with tiny treasures, which I sort through to make sure I have enough room for all of them, and some are tiny gold scarabs and beautifully carved onyx cameos and tiny coins, but others are very light, obviously plastic or throwaway-cheap material, and I vaguely wonder about the reasons for keeping them all together, but I find a small cigarette-pack plastic box with polished stones and have no trouble settling the pieces into and among each other so that there's room for me to nestle this last inclusion into the box. Other details about packing of materials elude me. 2) I'm at some kind of party with very varied people, some of whom seem to be sleeping off drinks or drugs, but I go into a room where people are starting to watch some kind of porno videos and I feel the atmosphere become highly sexually charged, with young men in partial dress and stuporous amorous positions of seduction. Wake at 6AM and return to these drugged dreams, and again at 8AM, and go back to sleep after a bit to continue, not wanting to trouble myself to take notes, so I've forgotten most.

3/10/99: 9:35AM: 1) About 4AM: I'm sex-partying with four other guys, one of them John A., and we're all getting excited with clothes on and I suggest, "Let's see which one is biggest," and John takes his clothes off to be typically hard; Guy #2 reveals an EXTREMELY red cock-tip, showing GREAT excitation, and Guy #3 is even BETTER with precum adhering to his discarded shorts, enormous and TOTALLY red and veiny; and Guy #4, somewhat like Dick D., with a slight harelip, from St. Mary's, unsheathes a true monster, so that when I move behind him (the champion), his thick cockhead literally reaches his CLAVICLE, and I grasp it and he gasps that he's about to cum, and I wake with a roaring hard-on. 2) About 8:30AM: I'm preparing some kind of audio/video tape to precise timing which will be played to instigate "spontaneous" behavior for some particular reason. All logic is totally convoluted (as with Pirandello) and aimed at "completism" (as in NOTEBOOK:3/10/99, which I'll type next), involving predicting people's reactions, figuring the time to get from one place to another, conjuring up "random" chat which will lead to very precise ends, catering to a number of unknowing participants and satisfying the purpose of some overseeing test-maker (maybe I'm applying for a job?) who grades not only the final results but each step taken TOWARD these results, and I note that EACH dream takes up TEN lines as I finish this page! (Return to Journal 3/10/99).

3/12/99: 10:25AM: About 9:55AM I wake from a dream of being someplace like the gym, though there are narrow doorways I don't connect with it, and one broad-shouldered fellow entirely fills a doorway when he passes through, and I admire the width of his freckle-covered back, and another even more tapered shoulder-to-waist fantasy passes through and stretches out his arms to the doorposts as if he were Hercules about to bring down the house. Then I’m sitting on a bench right next to another monster of a fellow (someone else had walked in front of me at least a head higher than I am, with a black chevron of hair on his lower spine) who playfully pulls a short passerby close to his crotch in a hug, so that the guy's chin is just level with the top of his cock erupting from his pubic hair, and they both smile as the guy’s cock begins to fill and ascend toward the horizontal. When it becomes full, the friend takes the red cap in his mouth and wants to make him cum, but there are just too many people around and the fellow stops him, but he continues to grow to full length and others join around to admire as I wake and want to continue the dream into real life. Start playing with myself when the phone rings (Vicki "complaining" she can't remember the number for her AT&T messages: "I've got the digits right, but I don't remember the order, and I dialed four wrong numbers already!" We laugh. "I just wanted to get a laugh out of it," she says before we hang up. Then, without bands or bidis I jerk off quickly, with great heavings of breath, and mark myself on my date-list and get up to pay Rita her $8000+ loan from my to-be-cashed $46,000+ largesse.

3/16/99: 1) 4AM: Running-in-the-mud-type frustration, details forgotten. 2) 8:30AM: I'm with Ken L., going to an 8PM opera at the Met, walking up a hill on the way to the subway station (though it's 7:50PM and I don't seem to be worried about getting the train and getting to the Met on time), and I'm thinking I'd better stop at the john there to pee before getting into the Met itself, which is likely to be more crowded. Aware as I am these days of the sunset coming later and later, I'm conscious of the fact that as we STARTED up the hill it was still dimly lit, but by the time we got to the steepening crest it's totally dark and it's only because I know there's a hump just before the entrance that I climb it with confidence in the dark and on the muddy grass without being totally certain where I'm putting my feet. The steep staircase at the entrance to the john causes Ken, puffing behind me, to comment, "I'll be glad when I get to the age when I'm old enough so that people don't even EXPECT me to be able to climb something like this: there'll just be NO QUESTION of my being able to do it." Somehow now I'm in the back seat of an enormous CAR that seems capable of swinging around in the entrance way, so that if I climb onto the leather-padded top of the back seat, I can just step off onto the platform leading to the john itself. There are varying gaps between the back of the car and the front of the platform, and as it swings in closest, I ask Ken (who somehow got onto the platform before me) if he'd hold out his hand and steady me as I step over the gap from the car to the landing, and he does so, but there seems to be no trouble doing it even though the back wall of the entranceway has a sofa all along it which is now crowded by lounging young men sprawled all over, taking up all the room, and I have to be careful not to step on their feet or legs to antagonize them, and there's really no thought of sex though they're all youngish (not unattractive) men, but I still have the marginal consideration that it's almost 7:55PM and we've got to be heading for the Met, though our punctual arrival still doesn't seem to be in doubt. Wake with a kind of a jolt and go to the john, feeling strangely dizzy, wondering if it's an aftermath of the ice cream last night and the reflux I'd felt, and though I have an index to finish and a video to watch before evening, I sit down to type this and sort through the stack of Compchro and medical and notebook notes and decide to type them up, AGAIN seeming to delay any final tasks so that the pressure-to-do remains high and I won't succumb to endless hours of fruitless FreeCell as something to fill my time!

3/30/99: 9:50AM: In tune with my birthday, I dream I've gotten a small stack of mail, and the top envelope is oddly addressed to "the friend who now lives in Apartment 8,” from someone I don't know, and I even reassure myself from the handwriting that it's NOT Bill H. Inside the brown glass-windowed envelope like those from stamp-approval companies is a clump of soaked-off used stamps, but in the middle are glassine envelopes, one of which is filled with a mint set of lunette-shaped colorful overprints from some place like Bermuda or Barbados, with the unusual top denomination of "24 dozens," and while at first I think the ornate script reads "1024," and initially I think to myself, "I GUESS 24 12s could be a power of two," after I wake I realize it's only twice 144, or 288, which isn't totally out of the realm of possibility. The stamps themselves are appealing, but I'm with someone who keeps asking about something else to distract me, and I flip through some of the other envelopes to see what's there, probably anticipating my LAST express package from Holt which DOES wake me at the dot of 9AM so I pick it up bathrobed.

4/3/99: 1) 7AM: I'm walking along an unpaved roadside in a park, most likely in one of the northern parks of NYC, and I look at a little mound of dirt on the left side of the road as I pass to see a small head poking up. At first I can't tell if it's a snake or some kind of lizard, but then the pointy snout is followed by a medium-length neck and two lizard-like front legs, and the whole thing is about nine or ten inches long when it finally gets most of its body out of the black earth, rather like potting soil. Then I'm looking over the bank of the stream that parallels the road, and (rather like the water that covered the bottom part of the tomb of Osiris on an Egyptian Discoveries Live tape I watched just before bedtime last night) through the greenish-dark in the shadows under a bridge that crosses the stream to my right, I can see one, then two, then three elongated shapes of very fat crocodiles suspended in the murky water. Someone to my left is also remarking to his companion, "See, there are three of them," as I discern, behind and somewhat below the three, four MORE lazily moving crocodiles, only propelling themselves forward enough to stay under the shadows of the bridge in the sluggishly moving stream. I vaguely wonder if many people know that these monsters exist in this stream. 2) 8:50AM: JUST NOW recollect this segment: I'm walking through a large department store, rather plainly Midwestern in style, not the overly decorated type of Bloomingdale's but more like Scott's in Akron, and in trying to locate an exit find myself in increasingly narrow rows, so that the hood of my coat brushes against shoulder-level overhanging trays of merchandise containing small tools and screws, nails, bolts, and other items, and one of these goes crashing to the floor, causing other customers to turn to look, and at last I see an "Elevators" sign at the OPPOSITE end of the floor, and brush off some other displays in my annoyance as I pass by, irritated at myself for being so annoyed. 3) 9AM: I'm apparently not a contestant, but I'm in the same area as waiting contestants for some quiz or interview program, and through three unmarked doors on a little balcony come various males, scantily clad or even naked, and I walk up on the little white ledge to try to ask if I can use one of these johns, but the secretary is suddenly called away---I can see her down a distant hallway directing some dignitaries to their destinations---and I try to edge around the ledge to get to the john, wondering whether the door will be locked---though none of the guys who come out and then return to their cubicles seem to have needed keys---and whether it's actually a john that they've been using or only a changing room. Few others are waiting in the same area with me, so I'm not embarrassed when I have to leave the room only in my shorts, and no one looks at me particularly and I don't have to go very far, and my shirt mostly covers my crotch, so there's nothing really to be concerned about, I tell myself, though I know there might be some difficulty if a store detective or a policeman finds me in this compromised condition, but I figure I can just plead innocence and get away with just about anything.

4/4/99: 10:10AM: I'm caring for a small boy and can't resist stroking his enormous testicles, feeling his stiffening cock WITHIN the rugose sac, and when he has to get dressed, his discomfort is so apparent that I feel I must give him some kind of relief, so I press down HARD on the top of the dark-skinned mass of flesh and a bloody penis pushes through the skin without appearing to cause too much pain, but I'm VERY concerned about this open wound and all the blood, thinking that it MUST be prone to getting infected and he'll probably DIE because of my unthinking attempt at kindness. Wake feeling TERRIBLY disturbed at such a destructive dream, but the feeling's diminished by the time I fully wake at 9:30AM, talk to Pope and Arnold on the phone, and type.

4/7/99: 9:50AM: 4:45AM: LUDICROUSLY detailed dreams of 1) reserving for a "wedding room" in a) a no-smoking room above a shop, b) a room with a shared bath, c) or in the 42nd Street area, and 2) I'm staying in a room where I'm told that the bathroom is down a flight of stairs, which puts me on the corner of a block at street level. The entranceway, at the foot of the stairs, used to be the main one, but now a curtained window on the door has a large hanging hook next to it which can be turned and put through a reassuring lock so that no one can come in, and the bathroom is surrounded with windows over which curtains on a shower-like rod can be drawn so that passersby can't see you naked. Above the front door are distant and near white porcelain hooks for hanging my towel, since the room will get totally wet, like the inside of a camper-trailer bathroom. There's a small back room whose perspective dwindles to zero in the distance, making the windows get smaller and pointed like the back windows of a tiny airplane cabin, so that it might not even be necessary to draw those curtains closed. I figure I can just about make do when I wake and take notes that I now transcribe.

4/8/99: 10:25AM: 1) 7AM: On a bus on the road to the airport to fly to Russia, I point out Dolomite-sharp peaks dusted with snow off to the right, but my teenage charges look at the scene as if it were a stage set, which indeed it does look like. I think about the long air-flight ahead of me both in the dream and after I wake, with some growing trepidation. Is THAT what my "completing everything" leads to? 2) 9AM: I mess up the end mail-slot on my row of about five slots rather like my index-file compartments: I have a slide-in tray with my specific type-font which is SMALLER than the one three to my left, so I figure I can just sort through and remove the smaller ones and replace them in my tray. But the mailman comes by just then, berates me, picks up a key from the tray to ask if it's mine (I can't identify it), and says that I should just leave a note to explain it to the guy whose slot it is. Somehow I'm explaining it to a young woman with INTENSELY green eyes (so green I wonder if they may not be contact lenses), with black hair and a freckled complexion, and she gropes around for something to say until I tell her: "If you want me to feel bad about this, I DO; and if you want me to say that I'll never do it again, I'll say that, TOO." She laughs in relief and then a plump BLACK girl who's been standing nearby (of no certain relation to either of the characters aforementioned) EXPLODES into pleasure and LOCKS her lips onto mine so determinedly that we fall backward onto the deck cushions that have been spread below the railing of the ship that we seem to have been standing at, and I'm very HAPPY to see that they're there, otherwise one or both of us might have been bruised with the sudden impact of the bodies on the hard wooden deck. Wake and take notes, trying to convey the REALITY of the snow-dusted mountain peaks, the INTENSITY of the green of the eyes of the woman, and the PRESSURE and TOTALITY of the lip-lock from the black girl, where the two sets of lips fit COMPLETELY together, though without any erotic charge on MY part, only surprise at this unexpected reaction. Finish typing this at 10:35AM, Hector STILL LATER than his 10AM-postponed-to-10:30AM visit as the radio plays in the background to drown out LOUD noises from upstairs. (Return to journal 4/8/99).

4/10/99: 9:05AM: 1) I'm walking through the corridors of an old high school, patterned on St. Mary's, except that they're lined with lockers on the floor for the seniors, and I think, "What a good idea, preparing them for the lockers of college by letting the seniors get used to them in high school." The halls are dark and I seem to know that by going to the end of THIS hall and going down THAT stairway, I'll find a passage to where I REALLY want to go, though I'm not clear that the dream contains the purpose of the actual destination. 2) I'm vacationing in the country, though it's not clear if it's in the United States (though everyone seems to be speaking English) or abroad, and an older though still sexy fellow seems to be physically interested in me, which pleases me. He wants to show me a particularly deep hole in the pool of a stream below our hotel, and to do so we clamber onto a swinging wooden gate which pivots precariously below a wooden-fenced observation point high above the pool. The clear water with its weed-covered rocks at the bottom seems about four to six feet deep in most places, but as our creaking amalgam of nailed-together tree-branches swings around to the front of the platform, the lime-green plunges to a deeper, darker, murkier green where the bottom sinks to fifteen or even more feet deeper, and I figure that even if the gate onto which we're clinging wrenches free of its rusty nails and hurls us into the waters, we won't be dashed onto the rocks but will fall freely into the deep pool. 3) This same resort is feeding us dinner, and when everyone leaves the table for the varied desserts being prepared specially at stations around the periphery of the dining room, I find a pan of "apricot newtons" (though I don't question why they're "right" as apricot rather than FIG) and select four or five neater-cut pieces from the edges of the pan and taste the first one---irregular in shape, as if cut from a circular piece with variable radius and cutting-circumference---and MARVEL at the freshness of the apricot-taste and the crispiness of the newton-texture, thinking, "THIS is the reason for travel, to taste the ordinary of an EXTRAordinary quality." I go to one of the dessert stations to see what appear to be dinner rolls, almost brick-shaped, cut through the middle (as the fellow at Frank's did for my late brunch yesterday) so as to become a Frank Lloyd Wright brick in flatness and relative area, and these rectangles are broiled to a crispness which appeals, only to be covered with various toppings, one of which is chocolate of a thick matte appearance, and another seems to be from a preparation of caramel-corn which is somehow ground in a mortar to a liquid which is spread over the bread. Other stations produce additional goodies of which I'm aware, and I think this is a marvelous place indeed---clearly the dream reflects my preoccupation with coming up with an itinerary for Ken's and my trip in France at the beginning of October, when I now think that we can TRAVEL together but see DIFFERENT sights during the day (when he insists on seeing places like the Pont du Gard which I've SEEN before) and eat in DIFFERENT restaurants at night, where he can eat in a less-expensive place while I pick through the delicacies in a two-star nearby.

4/19/99: 11:11AM: 1) I've got to get a bus going somewhere very specific RIGHT NOW, and as part of my trip I have to traverse a hanging sheet like a thick-wired fence over a chasm, and I can easily swing from handhold to handhold, but when I get across the expanse I realize that the bus stop is STILL at the other side of a large park, and I can't possibly get there in time to catch a bus to get where I have to go in time, and it's EXTREMELY frustrating, with that "kick something, hit something, scream and tear one's hair" grinding, tearing, agonizing frustration that can happen only with computers or in nightmares. Wake with a great sense of relief that that's NOT precisely where I am now. 2) In bed with a sexy guy, and I can feel my erection lengthening against his side, hoping he finds it appealing, too, and then I take his cock DEEP into my mouth and STUFF it in, mauling his prostate to get it all ingested, but after I find he has BLOOD on his NECK (like African Nights character yesterday?) and I fear my GUMS are bleeding again!

4/21/99: 11AM: EXTREMELY elaborate bidi-dream, and it’s the SECOND one that I remember: the FIRST was colorful and vivid, but was totally supplanted by this second, waking from it at 8:45AM, even much of THAT gone: I'm sightseeing in a Russian town on a small tour, and it's the same tiny village that I'd seen described on a recent (dream) PBS special on the life of Tchaikovsky, showing a black-domed white dacha on a remote Russian lake which was his retreat from busy Moscow, about sixty miles to the north in unpopulated countryside. Old bent babushkas pass dressed in black, trying not to stare at the unusual tourists, and a large open-sided motorized tram goes by, trying to look prosperous, but its eight or nine rows of four seats across a narrow middle aisle are occupied by only a few old couples, three or four old crones, and five or six schoolchildren who seem clearly to be props on an advertising run of this bus-like vehicle, hoping that the tour-group will hire it for its rovings around the few village streets. Without transition I'm visiting a family's kitchen with three or four other tourists at my side, looking over a small railing at an array of canned goods and jars with Russian AND English writing on them, and I try to ask the seven-or-eight-year-old, who seems to know how to understand English, "How many other houses in town would have labels that used English," trying to prove that this was a "setup" for the tourists to make us think they were more cosmopolitan than they really were, but she seems terminally shy and refuses to understand my question, though I rephrase it repeatedly in simpler and simpler language. Then we're sitting on a sofa and I try to reach out for her little hand, and she lets me simply hold it, as if to warm it, but she herself doesn't warm up to me through her hand. Then I'm outside, talking to a woodcutter, and magical flakes of snow begin to fall from the sky, lightly at first, then so densely that more of the air seems white than background colors of forests and fields, and we look down at our feet to see a pheasant, scarcely more than a beady-eyed head and small beak as a brooch from which extend straight-back thinly-festooned feathers over a practically nonexistent body and feet, and we all have the idea that the bird must be cold in this snow and I bend over to see if it will perch on my extended hand so that I can pick it off the cold ground, but without its pecking at my hand with its sharp beak. It seems both attracted by and frightened of my extended hand, and from the other direction comes another, more substantial (with a seeming body and scrawny feet under its stylized feathers) pheasant with a somehow more domesticated eye, and it consents to jump onto my hand and then onto my elbow and shoulder to get out of the cold wind. Again without transition I'm in a toy theater looking down at a miniature stage on which are posed six or seven tiny figurines as actors: some at the edges are clearly colored-cardboard cutouts, but the three or four central figures are as large as two-inch chess pieces, seemingly made from carved onyx in the characters of a royal family and attendants, though some of the rudimentarily-carved faces are obliterated by what looks like pink wax, as if they'd been illuminated with pink candles which weren't kept from dripping onto their faces, and I debate reaching out and scraping off much of the wax with my fingernail, but I fear this will trouble the caretakers of this exhibit, who seem to be standing behind me, and it might be taken as disturbing. Again the little girl seemed to be somewhere nearby, and I want to show that I tolerate her presence without trying to make any overt moves that will either frighten her away or cause her adults to think that I’m trying to make some sort of sexual advances toward her, since she does seem more than usually adult in her recognition that tourists can make improper advances on the slightest provocation. The bright colors of the figures on the stage, the distinctness of each flake of snow as the snowfall increases in density and beauty, the ruralism of the village streets with people passing by as the tourists observe them like exhibits in a department-store commemoration of village Russia of a generation past---all these obliterate the details of the first bidi-dream, completed by 6:15AM when I get up to pee.

4/25/99: 9AM: (Note transcribed 25 hours later): LONG hunt for OXYGEN mask for larger meeting room. Found "side check" in "psychologist's" office. No idea what these mean at this late date, and don't remember 4/26's dream, either!

4/29/99: 7:20AM: I've been working for IBM for a number of years, and I suddenly realize that I'll GET my vested-retirement which I'd lost previously, and I feel SUCH a great sense of relief and pleasure that it colors the rest of the dream, most of the details of which I've forgotten now at 10:40AM. I get off an elevator opposite a facade like an old circus entrance which I intuit is the Science Museum in Boston, and when I'm trying to return to that, I'm running along a railroad track (more probably, a trolley track, down the center of a busy thoroughfare) and slip and trip and fall, grasping the side of the rail where a series of VERY sharp steel teeth penetrate the tips of my fingers, particularly my right index finger, and I get up and squeeze the tip to get the blood flowing, and I see distinctly the crimson fluid mixed with my saliva running along my fingerprint-grooves, much like the spilled water from the flower saleswoman at the corner of 57th and 9th while I passed an hour waiting for the start of Exact Center of the Universe after dining at the Westside Cottage after seeing Sideman on the Wednesday matinee. FELT pain!

5/4/99: Bed 8:40PM, now 11:30PM!! [EARLIEST dream EVER??] 2) I'm in the military and we're sorting clothing to go into cartridges or bombshells that will be shot at the enemy. At first I'm counting little labels which are somehow bits of ammunition, and at first I say there are 8, then count again and there are 12, and then there are at least 20, except that some are duplicates of my name labels, obviously not "qualified" to be ammunition. Then it switches without reason to clothing: four T-shirts, six dress shirts, four pajama pieces, and a number of khaki shirts on hangers, which I count three or four times, each time getting a different number, feeling like the lieutenant will be very unhappy with me if I come up with a different count AGAIN. One pair of bloomers I hold up, he says, will be sent as a warning shot on a parachute at the beginning of the barrage. Then I hold up a pair of pajama-bottoms with a large elastic band, protesting, "This won't even FIT into a rifle barrel, sir!" As I say it, I instantly think of the four bombshell-casings that also have to be filled and know that it WILL compress into THAT volume. All this is done in seriousness, but when I say, "There are forty-four," and I forget what number I said, and my co-worker tells the lieutenant, "He must have meant forty-four, since he said 'farty-fart,'" and I say, "You can't even trust me with the half the word that's the cognate---or is it the agnate---of ’four,’" and then, trying to be profound, I say, "I will never underestimate my energy to appear to be right when I actually don't know what I'm saying," but it's somehow misunderstood and no one laughs. Prior to THAT 1) I'm in a movie theater [And just now I remember, prior to THAT I'm walking along the base of a rusticated-stone wall, knowing I can just make it up the steps if I hear a subway arriving upstairs, and as I get to the base of the stairway I DO hear a train coming, and I PROPEL my feet from my ankle-pivots, with my toes splayed out to the side, and climb like a windup toy, effortlessly, from my ankles, just as the train pulls up alongside me.] with Charles, and the curtain isn't open but the two people who are supposed to be performing are actually reading from their scripts and someone reads all the stage directions and I say, "I didn't know it was a reading." The large curtains should be DRAWN, I think, to make it easier to see. I tell Charles that this is an AWFUL performance, but then realize THOSE were at a place like the Vandam Thalia, and THESE, once a week, listed on the back of the program I have in my hand, at the Provincetown Playhouse, have really been of somewhat better quality, and I've actually attended about one a month each of the 3 or 4 seasons it's been going on, so I HAVE taken advantage of this wonderful opportunity to see these unusual cheap off-off-Broadway productions. (Return to Journal 5/6/99).

SCOTLAND TRIP DREAMS

5/22/99: Dream of climbing rock-steps 1) past a hole with a nest of bees, birds are mating, 2) breaking off a dead branch that pins two scrawny rabbits to ground, and ONE picks other UP in arms to carry reproachfully away!

5/24/99: Dream of touring "barrack-type" home of an architect who puts his trash out for taking, with lots of index-card box tops. Make bad joke to old woman with a kid, "Oh, the train LEFT already."

5/29/99: Joe E. and Charles and I are visiting Chicago and we're renting a car. Joe: "I learned how to drive." Me: "But you did BEFORE." Then we're in a room filled with curious rats and they won't CHASE away, so I take my dinner knife and FLICK them away, wondering if I'm getting GERMS from them, and marveling at their TAMENESS.

6/1/99: Store manager perversely wrapping bananas and a chicken in PAPER bag.

6/3/99: 7:05: I'm in the Army, camping in barracks with newspapers over water puddles, then cruising a park and a GREAT cock cums in my mouth and I spit what looks like applesauce into a sink. Debate not going back for last four nights: trip!

6/4/99: 3:20 dream: Threatened by someone in pain, I put my foot on his chest and demand, "Chill out!" and he does.

6/5/99: Dream: Mrs. Bloodheart, it's ME---it's ME!!! 1ST part forgotten, save it involved an older woman, 2ND part VERY melodramatic: climax has a few simple words from me reuniting an estranged older woman with her daughter, in such a way that when I wake I think: "That would make a GREAT play." 3RD part involves a SIMILAR-looking older woman with a SIMILAR name [though now it sounds Tales of Hoffman-ish!] who takes off white wig to reveal a face that's clearly BASE for other two, proclaiming me "the One, the Master, the Guru."

6/7/99: 7:30 dream of frustration in Japan: traveling with older man who's made plans for us. I try to get luggage from "main department store" but it takes TIME to get there and go through luggage check. KNOW it's on floor 3, but can't get BACK to it from other floors: Floor 1 is being redone, Floor 4 has cars going BACKWARD because they can't go where they want. I have YMCA room, but have no idea how to get there.

6/8/99: 4:30, dream of 1) sitting in front row of an amateur play and watching duo try not to laugh as audience applauds his "tic" of swinging his arm back and forth when she flirts with him, and 2) lots on streets, and I have to leave a paper in my room, up the block, and I take a shortcut through a factory-lot that I scan a plan of, when a long-handled-ax-bearing "guard" swings at me and I say, "You wouldn't want to mess up your area, would you?" and an official hints I may have "some kind of job" if I talk with him.

6/9/99: 6:20 dream of waiting in line with Joe E., and Frank M. sneaks up behind and tickles my foot. Each is with someone else, and when I try to combine the groups we get so confused we can't remember WHICH Italian restaurant we're supposed to eat at but later he says, "The Supper Club, on Bleecker, probably."

6/10/99: 6:40 dream: I'm in a helicopter that MUST stay in traffic, not above cars, passing on hills like a vehicle.

6/12/99: Dreams 1) of a sex-scene with everyone (including Bette Midler) with three naked BACKS to the viewers, but after I move away and turn around, a LARGE group has gathered, and I look lengthwise to see naked male genitals being prodded and poked, and ONE guy with a Tom-of-Finland thick cock with a TAUT BLACK head is being teased so effectively that I wake with a hard-on. 2) I'm in a group and ask if anyone knows about John Walsh, or Welch, whom the Dutchman on the minivan mentioned, coming here to finish "The Training" (from San Diego), and he and a shorter guy that I "recognize" raise their hands, then I'm in a basket hung from a helicopter being taken over a river, and he makes TIGHT turns that send me over the edge with shoulders looped around basket-ropes, but I CAN'T muster the strength to pull myself INTO the basket. Then I'm on a stairway with a group of people waiting to descend and exit, but those below me start to sit, and I look out a window to see that it's raining and wake to find it IS pattering on my tin-roofed window loudly.

END OF SCOTLAND DREAMS

6/19/99: 4:45AM SECOND dream: Trying to give MASSAGE introduction with problems shopping around in public for real garden-benches.

6/25/99: 10:40AM: Was awake at 9:30AM, then dozed and woke at 10:10AM with this GLORIOUS dream: 1) In a large room, testing a quiz program (probably from my call from the opinion-taking woman yesterday about Las Vegas), with instructions on a densely printed single sheet of paper, and at the end of the testing the evaluator asks, "Anyone with a general comment about the format of the instruction sheet?" and I respond, "I'd like it better with serifs." Most don't even know what I'm talking about, and I excuse my preference by saying that I work with IBM, and I deal with serifs all the time, and I just prefer anything I read to have serifs on the letters, that's all. She wants to talk to me in detail, and she turns into a woman who follows me out of the office building, trying to come along with me to my next appointment, which is a dinner somewhere on West 38th Street, and she flatters me endlessly to get me to invite her, but there's just no chance of it: I'm supposed to meet a predetermined group at 8PM and I look at my watch 2) and (without transition this "second [and best] part" of the dream starts) it's 9PM! I look up into the still-sunny sky and marvel that, here in NYC, it's THIS light at 9PM, but I reflect that this IS around the longest day of the year, and the sky is TOTALLY free of clouds, so maybe it COULD be this bright (or, now I think, maybe the sky of that multicolored luminosity Sherryl and David and I encountered over Manhattan returning from a boat trip up the Hudson when [could I POSSIBLY remember THIS accurately?] there was a summer-aurora-borealis display over the city). The woman and I enter a hotel-bar entrance to find out where we are, and we're told that the hotel runs between 28th and 29th Streets, and we're on 28th Street but can't go through the hotel because no public hallway goes THROUGH to 29th (as Shelley and I took the hallway through the Mansfield---or whatever---Hotel going between Closer on 45th and the Broadway Grill on 48th), so I know which way to turn from the hotel entrance, and look back to find that the woman hasn't followed me, and I continue on my way alone, figuring to join the group (dinner was supposed to start at 8PM) late, anyway. Walk north (I know this because I look west and see too-close buildings on what I KNOW to be the New Jersey side of the Hudson) along a street that I've never used before, something like the diagonal streets that lead to Abingdon Square and Little West 12th Street on the lower west side, and I try to get the name of the Avenue so that I can come here AGAIN, and see the MOST QUAINT little one-family houses with white-painted wooden siding and lace curtains in the sparkly clean windows, interspersed with half-timbered older houses in great states of repair, and just up a rise I see an extraordinary gingerbread facade for a building which would be about a dozen floors if each layer of windows represented a floor, but the windows look too SHORT to be an actual floor, and when I walk closer and look in at chest height, I see that these are FALSE rooms, with nothing in them, with TWO tiers of windows for each room, each about a foot high, and when I draw back for a wider view, it's a wooden construction built atop a house-trailer with lots of gingerbread trying to disguise its house-trailer boxiness, like an ornate cockscomb on a white-elephant house-trailer. Then I see a LINE of these drawn up on a sunken road overlooking the Hudson and think this would be a GREAT place to live, and feel SO happy that I start to think of MUSIC to accompany my walk, and come up with the "DAAH, da-da-dee DAAH!" that I associated with one or the other of the Kitaro records I played before I left on the trip and can never distinguish one from the other. Feel VERY happy walking uptown here, knowing that I have to walk from extreme west to get to where I'm going, but I look over half-houses that look like bridge abutments joined by the curved span-indicators which make the two half-houses one-in-fact, and other historically accurate reproductions of quaint row houses or individual cottages or the tiniest of bed and breakfasts on an English-looking street that I'll SURELY want to bring friends to see, and wake AGAIN with that feeling of beauty-immanence and personal-specialness that characterized the "three women" dream on my trip that I've not got around to transcribing yet.

7/16/99: 9:25AM: Woke about 7AM with VIVID memories, most of which have faded by now, but the essence involved me and an older woman who seems to be a combination of Mildred and my mother, in an elaborately furnished mansion that we don't own, but we "have the run" of the place, and in leaving (my most vivid recollection is) I have to pick up the remains of a color-palette on a table-top which has somehow melted, or sublimed, so that what was ONCE a set of oil-paint blobs is now a drippy set of tiny containers of something very like a pudding dessert: of the consistency of the chocolate pudding I had for dessert at Carolyn's Wednesday night, and of hues that I have the idea are FADED or PASTEL versions of the originally primary intensity, but are not watery pinks, pallid blues, and off-shade violets and blue-greens. I don't think that my simply gathering them up into a plastic bag will have any HOPE of retaining their individuality or their usefulness, but I meticulously pluck lumps of color off the surface and try to put them neatly into a Key Food plastic food bag, even to crumbs of DRIED color that I think I might be able to reconstitute with water when I want to use them in the future. Another part of leaving is packing a suitcase, as at the latter part of an elaborate trip, where I have "modules" of almost the same size that I have to fit into my suitcase in a particular way to optimize the storage-area and shapes: notebooks of photographs that had somehow gotten wet and are now vaguely limp and shedding color---but I figure they will dry in the suitcase and not run over other items in plastic bags. Possibly stamp albums, souvenir booklets, and other memorabilia comprise the valuable items I’m refreshing my memory of HAVING, as I pack for my next phase. At the end, we’re at the doorway, in a rather cavernous lobby or entrance hall, and I have to get some kind of costume out of the closet at the end of the hall, and the woman is waiting with some impatience as I sort through the items and decide what I have to wear in relation to the weather outside (it seems to be dark, but still warm) and decency of clothing my body so that no one will stare at me because I’m not dressed properly. Somehow I've missed describing the LUXURY of the surroundings and the WELL-BEING associated with the items that I'd collected during my trip and that I was packing to return home with.

7/21/99: 8:15AM: 1) Forgotten elaborate bidi-dream. 2) I'm trying to sleep on a board in a concentration camp, but when it's not raining onto my thin coverlet, splashing off the board, I'm looking at a mist of hovering mosquitoes and getting so frustrated with them that I rise and clap my hands in the air so many times that my palms are covered in black and I can FEEL the stings of some of the dying ones, and wonder how itchy bites in the palms of my hand will feel the next day. 3) I'm waiting on a platform for a change of train after having left a previous one with people looking at me curiously as I transfer my binoculars, wallet, and notebook from one shoulder bag to another, relieved that things I'd thought I'd lost, like pens and notebooks, are in the bag transferred TO. After standing on the platform for a LONG time, a train finally arrives, but when we're waiting for it to start, there's an announcement that "This train will be going the 6th Avenue route, not the 8th Avenue route," and I figure I'll just go back HOME, since I'm too late to get to wherever I was going, anyway, and Charles and I look at each other in resignation. Then, as we're traveling, I reconfirm the configuration of the crossing of the bridge with Sherryl: we circle around and go OVER the lake at the NEAR side of the bridge, then over the bridge, and UNDER one rim of the lake at the FAR side of the bridge, getting a quite different view, and I debate getting out my video camera to take the transitions from "over to under" in a panoramic sweep, as opposed to taking stills from various angles which would have no KINETIC connection between the photos, though I COULD possibly take a few stills DURING some of the more CHANGELESS moments BETWEEN the transitions photographed by the camcorder. Up to pee and decide to transcribe this DIRECTLY to computer by 8:23AM rather than just taking sketchy NOTES.

7/23/99: 8AM: I'm at a party to which I've been invited by a fashionable-looking woman (whom I know either from IBM or the Beard), and I'm introduced to someone who "likes me," with a pale round face that carries traces of makeup surrounded by tightly-curled blond hair, the head over a feminine body in feminine clothing--- so we get into bed. I'm not really attracted to this "girl," but there's affection and kissing and I put my hand onto one breast and "she" seems to appreciate it. We continue necking and I reach down to the crotch---to find a stiff cock! Thoughts of transvestites and hermaphrodites course through my mind until I realize that this really IS a fairly athletically built guy whose pectorals have softened into feminine breasts, yet whose muscles can be appreciated for themselves, and I find myself pleasuring him with my traditional "start at the buttocks and run my fingernail up along the side of the body, under the armpit, and out along the arm down to the fingertips" caress, and he really gets excited, so much so that he calls his light-skinned black friend into bed with us, and I reach down to find that on this slender feminine body is also a thin but highly erect cock. Then others come into the room and we have to get ready for breakfast, so I ask where the john is. I'm pointed in a direction and go down to an end of an ell to open a door to find an office-size commercial-type bathroom with a row of four or five sinks at one end and two pairs of stalls on either side. The stalls are separated more by shoulder-height office-floor partitions than regular john-walls, and the toilets look more like barber's chairs than anything else, with their rotatable footstools and segmented back-rests, but I climb onto one just as this area of what now looks like the larger hardware section of a department store starts to fill up with customers. Still under the illusion that this is a john, I shyly back into a chair and take my pants and underwear down with a self-conscious air, like the guy in Automatic Earth last night, and find that my weight in the seat causes it to slide backward down the aisle, and then sideways along the rear wall, until I'm somewhat secluded in a corner, which makes me feel pretty good except that I suddenly realize with this "traverse" that this isn't REALLY a toilet seat because it's not connected to a SEWER in any way! Glad that few of the "customers" can see me now, I get out of the chair, pull up my pants, and trundle the display-piece back to its original position, finding that I'm guided by a rope-like tether that has moved along the ceiling in a predetermined way so that I can look up and see notched slots in the corners which show exactly how I transfer the tether from one room to another around an L-shaped slot in the ceiling-beam. I go to a kind of prescription-counter ledge behind which a number of women are moving, and see a familiar face, so that I again ask where the john is. She thinks a bit and seems to have trouble directing me to the stairway, since the john is on the floor below: "This is really an amazing apartment," she says, and I instantly think that to have what seems to be at least a two-floor-through duplex on Park Avenue in the 60s implies a very wealthy family, and I never DID know what the parents of (and I know this doesn't follow, but it's a dream) Leslie M. did for a living, and I feel lucky to have had the son (who looks like the rough blond building-owner at the gym) of this wealthy family appear to have fallen in love with me. She tries to describe this toilet-complex on the floor below, and I, trying to help her out, say, "If we're more convenient to the elevator---" assuming that an apartment this large would only as a matter of course have an elevator, and it might be a townhouse on its own standing anyway. I wake about 7:30, having gotten to bed about 10:30PM, and marvel at the comfortable detail and amount of wishful thinking in this dream, hoping that it might be some sort of prefiguring of an afterlife in which my increasingly difficult body will drop off my eternally young and optimistic soul for a continuation of a life-after-death that will involve totally accepted homosexual sex as an approved way of life in surroundings that promise comfort both in the bed and bath as well as in the ordinary "activities of daily living" so difficult now!

7/28/99: 7:35AM: Less-inspired bidi-dream: bed at midnight and sleep through, with fan and air conditioner on, and (possibly caused by watching tape of Battlefield: Vietnam yesterday) I'm in the Army, as a clerk-typist of some sort, and our unit is called up to go overseas. We pile into a helicopter whose interior is rather like that of a military bus with two seats on either side of the aisle, and I'm among the last to enter, finding three guys standing in the back, and I wonder why no one took either of the two seats just behind the first pair on the right, and I end up sitting on the aisle in the second row, trying to sleep and wondering why the flight is so SMOOTH, but rationalize myself into thinking that we've transferred into a trans-Pacific jet, though I then realized that we simply weren't going anywhere, still sitting on the ground, and vaguely hoped that we weren't actually going overseas to battle ANYWAY, and fantasized that I'd be assigned to some alphabetizing (heard a guy saying that he "alphabetized" something, on the street, yesterday) for the duration of my active duty. Then I’m in some kind of barracks having to submit to a rant by a despicable second lieutenant telling us that he derides his subaltern, calling him "gay," and beating him a bit, making him do the most menial tasks without any appreciation whatsoever, and I rather wonder why he’s telling us all this. Then I have to go to the end of a long hall in the main office-barracks for some kind of meeting, and when I open the door I see that we’re all "taking a meeting," and I realize that my shorts and lack of my supposedly omnipresent white tablet and note pen aren't at all appropriate, and since only three of the twelve of us have gathered, I have enough time to get back to my bunk and provide myself with the needed equipment. Typical dream-end "mud slog" of a painful trip back to my room: down a steep set of stairs, where I add details to my "let's hope we stay in the States" alphabetization fantasy, and up another narrow set of stairs, wondering how such narrow, crumbling steps could survive in a military building, grabbing onto a papier-mâché rock to the left of the doorsill to pull myself up to the entrance, and seeing it slightly pull away from the wall, wondering what would happen if I pulled the whole lump away---but surely some other unit would be responsible for fixing it---and trying again to pull myself into the room, when I wake with a need to pee, and transcribe this until 7:50AM, ready to go back to bed until a better time. (Return to Journal 8/3/99)

8/6/99: 10:10AM: Lots of odd fragments: 1) I look out a window in the living room, and it appears to be raining inside a room in the front of the house that’s like a porch-made-into-a-room, and go out to the hall and open a long-closed door, inside which it's stuffy but not uncomfortably so, and find that it's completely dry. Look at piles of stuff that I've saved: three or four outmoded clock-radio-alarm units, old kitchen appliances, and boxes half-full of Christmas ornaments and tinsel and window decorations, and when I close the door to the outside, it's fronted with a pile of green cracked-leather cushions from some old porch glider, and I figure I can just THROW OUT a lot of this junk. 2) I'm in the backyard at 1221 Dietz and look to the property in back of L.'s to find three or four fuzzy brown puppies whimpering, and I wonder who's moved in there after the old couple moved out. Back in my own yard I'm surprised to see a sparrow in a nest at the side of my driveway, and when she gets out I can see three naked chicks staggering weakly about in the nest. Without transition a group of boys is standing on the lawn and one has crushed the side of the nest, seemingly killing the chicks. I shout at the startled and hurt kid, but when he lifts his foot I can't see chick-remains, even when I raise the crumpled side of the nest. I can feel his body maybe caressing mine as I stare into the empty nest, and launch into a phony-sounding explanation of why I thought his misstep was a disaster, but seem to get no response from the now-sullen group. 3) Other fragments have vanished from my memory, but I lay in bed between 7AM when I woke and peed and 10AM when I reluctantly got out of bed after getting to sleep about 12:30, again seeming to need the gym to jump-start my body in the mornings when I feel too tired to EVER get out of bed at ALL!

8/8/99: 8:13AM: I'm working at IBM, having just come back from a vacation that started sometime in mid-July and ended August 1, talking with either my boss or my boss's boss about the status of my long-term projects. It's as if I'm preparing to retire (or die) and want to make sure I haven't been keeping any important documentation which should get into some kind of central files (of whose existence I'm not even aware). I think I have to establish the final completion of four projects: 1) The billing program has been used for a number of years, but the rates keep changing and the billing requirements keep changing. I have the impression that Operations knows how to run the programs, and that one or two programmers (forget the name of the guy who actually rewrote it and maintained it after I left, who kept dropping in on me for visits over the ensuing ten years) could modify it slightly, but there’s one particular case in which the ratio of some kind of man-hours to some kind of revenue figure has to be generated, and someone quietly says that they simply took the two figures and divided them on paper. So my final impression is that it’s standing on its own. 2) The nuclear reactor package, I’m told, is STILL being used and  run for a number of clients with satisfactory results and substantial income even after all these years. I’m rather surprised to hear this, but then I’m surprised even more when I’m actually putting the packages together and finding that customers really do want to use them. Since I’m not responsible for the actual writing of any of the programs in the packages, there isn't any documentation that I have, and since it’s operating OK, I can feel that it’s  out of my hands. 3) I have the impression that I’ve never quite FINISHED another program, that I’m still involved in putting in tests every so often and not even understanding the errors that were left or the subroutines that have to be completed, but some female (is the opposite of a subordinate a superordinate?) who remind me of Sister Mary E. from St. John's Grade School demands, "Did you enter it in the Master Log Book on July 28?" and I can only reply that I was on vacation on July 28 and no one told me about it when I'd returned from my vacation, and I wasn't even aware of this Master Log Book, in which some kind of one-page summary of every job was deposited as a final overall reference. I think to myself that I should start a Master Log Book of my LIFE so that when various phases were over I could summarize them and keep a log of them. [When I woke, I thought that these DREAMS pages were a KIND of logbook of my dreams, and that my NOTEBOOK contained pages which summarized various phases or feelings in my life, and I thought back to Wit yesterday, which clearly brought up "final" feelings in Mildred, who didn't like it, and in me, who had this dream following it.] 4) Yet another program is in a status about which even I am not clear, yet talking about it with someone leads me to believe that a folder I have (rather like the folder I'm keeping still with the remains of the enormous Holt Literature series of indexes [even now I can hardly believe that it was 70 indexes for a total of something over $60,000] that I was debating sorting through and throwing out, though I left the "GR" series of indexes from 1998 and 1999 on the computer file C6 when I discarded about a hundred files yesterday) would adequately provide what was needed in case I left my job or died without notice. I woke and saw that it was about 7AM and didn't feel like getting up then, but felt that the dream was distinctive enough that I would remember it, though I DID have a somewhat more precise memory of the third and fourth programs---could one have been the Tsunami project which HAD been handed over to another programmer to maintain and produce continuing good results with? And then the thoughts of my liver function and blood functions, tested Thursday and to be revealed later this week, crowded out the dream, and these ideas should more properly be recorded in the NOTEBOOK, since I've exhausted the memory of the dream and am going on to other notes. I did finish the dream with a sense of having “done better than I'd expected" in the final documentation department, and that my superiors were more satisfied with my job-completion behaviors than I was, and that I didn't have to be so concerned about "doing more" since I'd already done more than usually adequate work in those areas.

8/15/99: 7:55AM: Really THOUGHT about writing this: "What's the USE?" was more my thought. Anyway, the luxurious decadence of the apartment is probably based on my current reading of White's The Farewell Symphony, with its many rooms with clothing strewn over beds and floors, which I attempt to clear away by asking my handsome host what he is himself gathering to put into suitcases, and he says that all the female dresses and appurtenances are to be taken away to the same place; even this beaded swatch---which might have been a child's dress, a wall hanging, or a flat beaded bag---should be put in one place so he can pack them out. I traverse a carpeted bedroom that has a recess filled with water that I think could only be a bidet or toilet, but when I start urinating into it and he comes down the hallway toward the room, I stop, thinking that the clothes in it must mean it’s some sort of laundry basin or even a kind of decorative pool in which he, I hope, won't notice the yellowish trickle of urine I'd just deposited. One of his older female relatives had confessed that he was HIV positive, and when he asks my name from an adjoining doorway, I laugh and say, "Bob," and he starts to accuse me of never using my last name, and I tell him lengthily and sarcastically that I didn't tell him my last name just then because it would invariably have caused a longer conversation about "What nationality is that?" and "How do you spell that?" and "Does it have a meaning?" or "Why haven't you changed it?" and he doesn't seem to realize the sarcasm as I KEEP ON with MY longer conversation miming HIS longer conversation, and when he finally stands above me, I can't resist caressing his hips through his clothing and (at the same time?) squeezing his nipples hoping to sexually excite him, and he stares down at me from a surprising height advantage of 4-5 inches and I thrust my face closer and closer to his until we HAVE to kiss, and I feel his mouth responding and my tongue seeking to go deeper into his virus-infected recesses and I think even in the DREAM how limiting it is to fear infection while still wanting to seduce a handsome better with my so-skilled tongue and infectious loving manner, and I even woke to feel the arthritis and the larger sore area at the base of my left spine that I should have checked with Dr. Chin with my 8/25 appointment rather than canceling it, and would I survive for more trips, and why was my throat sore, was I coming down with a delayed reaction to having become HIV positive with my relationship with Michael T. (and he stopped it when he KNEW I was infected, evil person that he is???), and how I STILL very much fear dying even though I have sex less and less frequently, and my reading of White's book shows me positively that I don't have the narrative fictional writing style that HE does for detail and metaphor and exact words and richness of characterization and depth of feeling, and I shit and piss and debate just STOPPING my dream-chronicles, but then I feel it's not raining and I'll probably try going to the Dalai Lama this morning at 10:15 to meet Charles, and I'll go back to bed after writing this out without bothering to print it (and why is the printer causing such trouble?) and I've FINISHED with the dream anyway.

8/16/99: 10:20AM: Two VERY detailed, colorful, and elaborate dreams, but forgot MOST of the details right after waking: 1) 7:30AM: ELABORATE dream about giving someone like Joyce A. a RING as a gift, with grand backgrounds, rich details, and portentous circumstances that I KNEW I would remember when I got up to transcribe them, and of course later forgot. 2) 8:30AM: ELABORATE dream about giving Abby B. a CAR, based of course on seeing her for the first time in a long time at the Games Group yesterday. Both these SOMEHOW connected (clearly with the idea of GAINING, as the money from Mom is prominent in my mind) with Mom's death---not knowing whether to say last night or early this morning, still things to be cleared up when I talk to Rita, who wasn't home when I called this morning, but that gets to the NOTEBOOK page which I'll write after I get to the bottom of the page on this, disappointed that I couldn't remember the sleeping-pill induced psychedelicness of the dreams that I WANTED to remember but can't---resulting in this paltry, inadequate description. (Return to Journal 8/16/99).

8/19/99: 10AM: Bed at 3AM after 5 hours of FreeCell (with lousy average), and wake at 7AM to pee, and then Lina wakes me at 9:30AM after I had this doozy: I'm responsible for security at some kind of high school or college sales office which is somehow outside the men's shower area, and naturally I'm busy looking at the athletes kidding around in their bathrobes. One group seems to be led by a Chinese, somewhat like a younger, cuter Michael M., who's messing around with a trio of Italian stallions with open robes swirling around their hairy crotches, grabbing cocks---and when one of them gets semi-erect (I catch a glimpse of about 8-9 meaty, droopy inches), they joke that he's turned on by the touch of male hands, so he must be queer. I'm not required to stop this sort of stuff, so I wander around the tables under my surveillance and glance at the parting bathrobes to see who's more aroused by their play. I get caught looking by the Chinese, who talks for a long time to me, head to head, and I look down at his body and he's looking down at mine. For a bit I think I might have on a robe, too, which I allow to fall open to (perversely) show that I'm NOT excited by what's going on, but then it seems I have on a pair of shorts, and the Chinese guy has a spray bottle of water that he jokingly squirts on me (to keep me from getting hot? to comment on the yellow stain that's probably on the front? to counter what I'm aware of for the past few days, since I haven't been to the gym in FIVE days now, as an odor arising from that area?) again and again, and I wonder how far I can go in kidding around with him to see what's HE'S got in that department. Then, without transition (though it seems to be part of the SAME dream, since I'm aware of people watching me, including the Chinese guy) I'm at an outdoor meeting of some sort, which has an open-air urinal on the ground which seems perfectly all right to use, but I'm wearing brightly polished black-leather shoes, long dark-gray flannel almost-bell-bottomed trousers, and a longish jacket with a trailing cashmere scarf, all of which I have to keep out of the urine stream, and it's not working very well: I'm conscious that my shoes are close to the urine-outlet yet not getting wet, but at some point I think the tip-end of my scarf gets caught up in the tentative trickle and is now probably wet as I consciously hold it to one side, hoping not to appear TOO ridiculous to anyone who might happen to be watching, while I try to perform with a minimum of apparent care, as if this is an ordinary urination and I have everything perfectly under control. Wake for Lina's phone call and have to urinate and smell actually pretty bad (groan!).

8/22/99: At the Akron-West Hilton, transcribed 8/26/99: Dream of my casing a lineup of lottery-ticket sellers so that I can exchange three coupons for a WINNING number conveyed to me on a plastic card. The air of the dream is partly sexual cruising and partly gambling-mania concentration of how best to WIN!

9/10/99: 9:45AM: Varied, inchoate, sexual dreams: 1) I'm fondling a huge cock which has a very loose foreskin, the cockhead accessible only through a bean-sized opening in the thin, tight tip of the foreskin. 2) I encounter a very handsome black-haired young man with a beautiful chest, wearing black sweatpants, who seems to like me, but when I reach for his cock, it's quite soft, and I murmur, "I bet you've come about six times already?" He gives a weary smile and, without saying anything, acknowledges that it's close to the truth.

9/12/99: 8:30AM: Height of Frustration Dream: I'm working for IBM (I assume, since I'm in a suit and in a work situation), and I'm asked by someone (who'd asked me this before) if I'd volunteer to be an aide to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Remembering what this was like the first time, and despite my certain knowledge of the impossible difficulties of this position, I again say, "Yes." I’m given a double handful of pats of butter which will be needed for a dinner later, which I put into my suit-jacket pocket. Then I have a moment's respite at a desk, into the drawer of which I put a stack of papers (very like those I gathered at the Day of Art festivities with Sherryl yesterday on 14th Street) and the butter and another bulky requirement for the upcoming dinner. Then the small inner cadre has to leave with him and I have to follow, and find myself walking off roads in the countryside heading toward a set of buildings on the horizon that I have no idea the distance of. In complete frustration I look around on my craggy path and see two women about to enter their houses on either side of my position, and ask them if they have cell phones they can use to call me a taxi. They have, but when they ask whom I wanted them to phone, and I say, "The Chief of Protocol of the United Nations, for arrangements for the Secretary-General," they look at me as if I had asked for God Herself. I then find myself in the anteroom of an auditorium in a largish hotel, where a group rather like Jehovah's Witnesses are meeting, and I figure (after asking someone for help who then enters another meeting and seems prepared to stay to the end of it) there MUST be a taxi-stand in front of the hotel, but when I get to the street there is a very modernistic white car with a lit lamp on the back of the single-passenger cabin, which from the very look of it, could not possibly have been a taxi. I look up and down the street and it becomes countryside irrationally quickly, leaving me again without resources, and it occurs to me that if I leave the butter and the other bulky requirements behind in the desk drawer, the car can return me to that building before I can direct them to the (unknown to me) hotel where the guy is having his dinner. To one person I explain that I'd once been a personal aide to the Pope, so I DID have some experience in this kind of position (the only similarity to my life would have to be my personal assistance position to the est trainer whose name I've since forgotten, the whole substance of which now to me seems like some kind of fever-dream). [Woke with a vague sense of fever, paranoid about the mosquito bites (of which I don't seem to have any at ALL, but of which Charles claims he has about twenty from our visit to the Bronx Botanical Garden) which can cause St. Louis encephalitis, which MAY be fatal to infants or the elderly, which has already caused three or four known deaths and maybe slightly fewer than a dozen other cases in the New York area, mainly slightly to the north, where of course the Bronx Garden is. Truly CRUSHING sense of frustration in the dream seemingly now echoed in life itself as I finish typing at 8:45AM.]

9/22/99: 8:40AM: Influenced I guess by Ken's talk Monday of sharing accommodations on his Sundance trip to France, I'm in some Spanish country in a bed in a house shared with a number of guys, trying to jerk off, but I stop when I think I hear someone come in. But there's no one inside, and I go out a back door to see a ship sailing past (from Siegfried and Roy last night?) loaded with peon-workers being brought into port, and they look listlessly at this rich tourist occupying a whole house when they have to share a deck on which to sleep. I walk to the OTHER tour-house, past a lecture area where lots of people are waiting for a talk to start, and through a skimpy fence to find that one of the walls of a bedroom has been removed. I look in a window and someone like my tour guide Chris in Russia/China is quietly reading a book in his bedroom. I enter through a side door which is open from the outside, and he looks up in mild surprise and says "Hi." I look past him into a bedroom with a triangular wall and part of the ceiling removed, and I see there are three guys trying to sleep in two beds in there, and I say with amazement, "You're SLEEPING in here?" and they nod as if it isn't THAT much of an inconvenience. A cute young blond notices me for the first time with some appreciation and says "Hello" with cruisy intent, which pleases me---I'll have to follow up on it later. There's the beginning of a discussion about whether I've had a meal, but it seems that my house is more adequate than this one, and I move into a kitchen where some kind of preparation is going on, but I wake with a pressure to piss a second time since the enormous dessert at Calle Ocho (Spanish, too) last night with Mildred and Charles and the attractive group of waiters around the handsome guy at the next table who seems to have influenced this dream, too.

9/29/99: 12:40PM: Only slight memory of being either in a vacation spot or at Mildred's "country home" and looking out the window to see the shore of a large body of water that reminds me, in the dream, of ANOTHER body of water outside someone ELSE'S home I'd seen recently. There's a flurry of tiny droplets in the air and I first think, "It's raining slightly," and then the water settles and I see that it's merely the spray from large waves breaking, which doesn't agree with the lake-like look of the shore, but this IS a dream.

10/7/99: 7:43AM: Two INCREDIBLY detailed fever/travel-dreams: lost in a Moroccan port and on a London bus. 1) In a seaport country rather like Morocco, where some elite might speak French, but most dark-skinned inhabitants speak an unintelligible "other" language, I've lost my way to my hotel. But first I'd lost my way around INSIDE my hotel: I'd located my room number, 66, gloomily glowing in the dark on a door near an interior bar, and in trying to unlock ONE door (and not succeeding at first, as at Pope's yesterday) find that I should be trying the OTHER door, since this is AT the bar and blocked by a chest of some heavy kind in front of it, and unlock the other door to find a vestibule which I barely get into when some drunks fall onto the outer door, which I manage to close and get inside the inner door, necessary for my silence and safety. My room seems to be windowless, and I go into the hall to find my way about INSIDE the hotel: going up a flight of stairs to come out at the corner of an atrium balcony. I can look down to see three or four balconies below me and get SOME idea how the floors are arranged around shops, stairs, and doorways onto the halls along the balconies, but have no real idea how to EXIT the complex. Then I find myself outside, trying to guide a small bunch of friends to my hotel, but the walk is tiring them and the group has reduced to four or five, including a little girl who is having trouble keeping up. "I DO remember a fingerlike jetty sticking out into the port as a guidepost," I say, looking over a map on the wall and seeming to find where to go, and when I ask someone for the directions to the port, we merely walk a few steps when she gestures ahead and says, "Here we are." There are boats and docks and towers, but none of them look familiar, as if we are in the port CENTER and I want to be at some EDGE of the port (rather like Ken's description of our hotel in Marseilles just two days from now). I walk along a quayside toward a hill which looks promising, but again find I'm lost with no clear idea where to go. 2) It's my first day in what I THINK at first is Paris (as on my upcoming trip) but then seems to be in London, since I think in a panic that I don't have enough local cash for a taxi, but then look into my wallet to see a twenty- and a ten-pound note of British money next to a twenty-pound Scottish note, and I figure, "Twenty pounds is about $40, so THAT should be enough to get me home," since I have NO idea how far I am from where I want to go (of which I have no clear idea in the dream: not someone's apartment, not a specific hotel, nor even if I HAVE a hotel yet, since this is clearly my first evening in town). Then somehow I'm on a bus, which I figure must lead to the CENTER of town, from which I can catch some kind of subway, but the bus seems to go to quasi-centers and then into suburban areas at random. Pass a neon-bustling movie-house showing a movie for which I'd seen a gothic-lettered, red-symboled poster before: something like "You wanted to know about many things," and look at the pricelist of 2, 4, and 6 units, figuring the middle price would be about right if I find a movie that I want to see, since it is (looking at my watch, with the minute hand familiarly missing, to see it is ten of 6) too late to go "home" and then figure out how to spend my first evening profitably. But I feel I can't ask directions, don't know where I’m going so I won't know what I MIGHT be passing, and feel vaguely uncomfortable about "just letting the bus take me where it would," since I might be "wasting an evening," but I feel uncertain about EVERYTHING when I wake groggily at 7:35AM, having fitfully slept till 10:10 from my 9:25PM bedtime, though it took me a LONG time to get to sleep and a LONG time to get back to sleep after peeing at 3:30AM. But I’m feeling SOMEWHAT rested. (Return to Journal 10/7/99).

10/8/99: 7:15AM: Totally outrageous frustration-dream of having to do something in totally impossible situations, but part of it was BEFORE I took a Rohypnol at 9:50PM and AFTER I jerked off about midnight, so all details are just GONE!! (Return to Journal 10/8/99).

 

France with Ken Dreams

[These dreams are also included in TRAVEL file.]

10/13/99: TWO dreams: 1) Vaguely admonitory of "Don't eat much, don't eat MEAT.” 2) LAVISH Shelley apartment has MULTIPLE men's and ladies’ rooms behind wicker doors, a kitchen filled with freezers and lockers of prepared foods and desserts, multiple guests coming and going, multimedia "entertainment" board, and slips to evaluate entertainers, and I nuzzle a guy who seems not to like it, then smiles and returns kisses and we smooch mightily and he turns a glistening marble-muscled back and I leap on and get under his legs and enjoy his body hugely and wake about 7AM VERY hard.

10/16/99: Two dreams: 1) Sex with Rolf. 2) Fantasy. 1) was VERY erotic till others came onto the scene, and 2) involved a hotel in which many movie producers, directors, and stars all moved through parties and galas in elaborate costumes and combinations of sexual partners.

10/18/99: Two dreams: 1) I’m watching some sort of female award ceremony, with five levels of awards. 2) I'm watching a presentation (from above) of a submarine sinking, sinking, near its limits of depth, coasting to rest near ANOTHER sunken sub, in the sand thirty feet above its 300-foot limit, in amazingly bright and clear water.

10/25/99: I was eating something and one of my front teeth BROKE. Took it out with dread, and then continued to eat and broke a SECOND tooth. Felt AWFUL.

End of France with Ken dreams

[The following three notes typed 11/10/99] 10/28/99: 3AM: IBM bosses shake hands with me as I stay late to paper-clip six pages of sets of data for project. Arnold snippily says I can't come over, even though I apologize.

11/1/99: 6:10AM: IBM dream of turning over HUGE accounting program on MODERN interactive computing system. They'll need a whole maintenance GROUP established.

11/3/99: 6:35AM: I finally find my play-part, which is named ALICE.

11/12/99: 9:30AM: I'm walking streets in Akron, needing to get to Cleveland by 1PM to meet a group of people for something, not clear whether I should have eaten lunch or we're meeting for lunch. It's about 12:10PM and I don't even know how long it takes to get by bus from Akron to Cleveland (I vaguely recall that the bus station is about 10 minutes' walk from where I am, nearing the center of downtown) or how often they run. I realize that trying to take a taxi will be prohibitively expensive, though it might be necessary as a last resort, since I don't have any way of contacting them to say that I'll be significantly late. At about 12:20 I'm asking for help at the bus station ticket office and the clerk says, "There's a bus in the departure zone now," but I can't think fast enough to ask, "How long is it going to stay there before it leaves?" and "What time will it arrive in Cleveland?" Wake before the sense of frustration becomes too great and almost dismiss this as trivial, but finish anyway at 9:40AM.

11/20/99: 9:15AM: 1) 5AM: I'm organizing symbols in a grid representing any number of things: a) finding species in an area of wildlife, b) notating music, c) composing an artistic work, d) depicting programming steps, e) embodying a kind of Glass Bead Game. 2) 7AM: I'm clearing out an apartment in preparation for a trip, and closets and drawers have been emptied so that about all that's left is the furniture, which will remain with the apartment. Then it's only an hour before the plane is scheduled to leave and I haven't packed yet, but I have two suitcases not-too-crowded with stuff that I'm taking with me divided into sub-suitcases of clothing, trip information, and toiletries, so that when I pass by a check-in clerk who asks for my passport and visa information, I can quickly sift through the suitcases and come up with my current passport with its stapled full-sheet visa-information-copy-with-my-photo. Also on the bed where I'm sorting out stuff is a pack of slightly damp yellow-tablet sheets with written information about members of a group that might be MY group on this trip, and as it's now down to about ten minutes before scheduled departure, I'm demanding to know if the plane is leaving on time and what I'll do if my plane, with the rest of my group, departs. At the last minute two older women show up, fabulously rich, who are willing to pay for their own charter to catch up with the group, and it turns out to be MY group, so I figure I could travel with them if need be. Debate, in the dream, if I'm going to feel awfully lucky if something happens to the flight that I've probably missed, or, contrary-wise, if something will happen to the flight that I'm going to be ON. Wake about 8:45 and lie until 9AM, when I HAVE to get up.

11/26/99: 1) 7AM: I'm masturbating, and as I tease toward climax, my cock gets longer and longer, so that when I press it down I'm amazed by its length, and at last (at length?) it's so long that I can not only bend down my head to suck it, but I can enclose the entire head in my mouth and toss my head BACK on my neck. At first I think I can make myself cum by sucking only, but it doesn't get exciting enough quickly enough, so I start using my hands, almost lost along its great length, and get close to cumming, when I wake with a hard-on that I can't resist, and VERY quickly jerk off, feeling "removed" from the sensation of orgasm, let the jism dry, and fall back to sleep. 2) 8:30AM: I'm sharing an apartment with two women who are clearly there temporarily, but they're taking up a large amount of space: one has a visiting boyfriend who's brought a kind of video camera built into a space-helmet, and I see a reflection on the visor (which is also the lens) that I want to make sure isn't a label that can be removed, and when my fingernails can't make purchase on any edge, I find myself licking the visor, making the once-hard surface tinny and dimpled, so I hope this won't affect the clarity of the images. Another has a few friends visiting to help her pack and move to her new apartment, and I go to the door (which is broken off its hinges and lying open in the doorway, which I connect to someone breaking it down the previous evening so it's "OK") to go to the john in the hallway, but someone's inside, a woman nearby is clearly on line next, and then there's another small line from somewhere who're clearly in front of HER. I seem to recall there's ANOTHER john down here (I'm now in what I know to be a basement, though my apartment is on the second or third floor, I'm equally sure), and I go into a corner that I THOUGHT contained a john but when it doesn't I'm equally sure that I'd known THAT before. Now there's a rehearsal going on for the gay bar upstairs, and an older man, in shorts, is dancing with a younger woman who supports his arm when he goes into an unsteady arabesque beside her, leaning against a pole. Another couple is comprised of two males, both with sexy calves, who seem to be doing some kind of Midsummer-Night's Dream takeoff in their costumes. I watch them for a bit and go off to look for another john, seeing a culvert that leads to a closed door that seems to be a john, but there's the sound of some woman using the sink inside so I try another culvert, which again doesn't have a john inside, and I'm beginning to think I don't know THIS area of the basement at all, but if they can't furnish a more convenient john, maybe I'll just have to find a corner to urinate in. Up at 11AM and don't even feel like transcribing this: another facet of my current spiritual and emotional malaise which I'll get into on NOTEBOOK - 26 now that I'm almost finished with this at 11:50AM, still not having had breakfast and the people moving around upstairs with great noise so that I'll probably put on WQXR AGAIN all day, as I did most of yesterday after I watched tapes and played FreeCell to fill in the emptiness of a Thanksgiving home alone without friends. (Return to Journal 11/26/99).

12/5/99: 10:15AM: On what was I stoned? Phantasmagoria of dreams: 1) In an auditorium like the smaller theater at Madison Square Garden, an emcee is introducing the people in the audience and there's William G. Gates, and I look and there's the familiar goofy face in glasses, next to, I suppose, his wife, and he accepts being pointed out and even moves over a seat when someone wants to join the group to his left. 2) In an outdoor amphitheater where folding chairs are scattered about, I manage to get a seat right at center front, but behind some sort of chicken-wire-mesh screen, where two odd constructions are erected before the audiences' eyes: a) an aluminum-sided house folds upward, but whoever had expected to be on the top has tumbled off, like clowns, so that everyone laughs and applauds and wonders how the unfolding took place, it happened so fast, and b) someone cuts a restraining rope and an AUTOMOBILE tethered onto one side of a catapult SWOOPS aloft as something heavier than it swings down toward the ground on the other side of a tree-trunk that swings counterclockwise into the air with the counterweight of the car. Everyone gasps at the audacity of the makeshift construction, which actually WORKS. There were other considerations of performances and acts and spectacular sidelights that I now forget, having phoned Lina to tell her I won't be joining her at the Met for a 1PM lecture on clay figures in religion, and other exhibits that I want to see, and I say, "There's just too much on the table IN FRONT OF ME to take part of the day off," but I have no confidence I'll have the energy to clear ANYTHING away at all today, and fear I’ll just waste time as I've been doing for the past TWO WEEKS, doing essentially nothing in torpid anticipation of the awful 14 hours on the plane to Tokyo in a month.

12/8/99: 7:50AM: I'm swimming (at first I was only WATCHING a TV program of naked men swimming in an icy Tibetan river) in a thermally-warmed stream with a group of naked modern-type sadhus, and later, when I see two handsome men quietly embracing each other, I realize that this enlightened group supports the love of men for men, which makes me feel comfortable in looking at the thickly-muscled torsos of some of the bathers, though the "crusted" chest of one of the "main men" is depressing to see, even with the flawed skin’s covering a nicely formed chest below. I've been visiting this Ashram as a tourist, but as I seem to become more and more accepted as part of the Inner Circle, I'm informed that someone of the magnitude of Baba Ram Das is speaking down at the Dammapadha, and has specifically requested (through the Inner) that I join him, so I try to ask someone who might know how I get there, but a young disciple simply smiles and waves me to the door of the pavilion in which I've been looking around, and I glance out to see the scenery seem to slew around to my right, until I realize that my pavilion is actually rotating to my left, gently rolling up and down small undulations in the blond-wood floor of the entire "fairground" that I've been touring, and I have the strong inner knowledge that someone of great intuitive power is ordering the pavilion to rotate from my position 180° away from my destination to a position where I could just step off the finished-moving platform into the Dammapadha where He would be waiting for me, and would express the same awed acceptance of my level of development in Actualism as a TRUE development in the Wider Inner World of Actual Design of which this was an earthing point. No fanfare of brilliant brass would greet my acceptance into the Pantheon because it was something that had already been prepared "above my awareness" and could now be manifest. I woke with the feeling that the dream hadn't really been finished, yet I didn't even DEBATE writing it down, so I peed and came to complete this at 8:05AM, feeling better on waking than I had in a long time, gratified to see the bright sun on the side of the buildings outside, but still prepared to go back to bed to nap before getting up more like 9:30AM, since I'd gone to bed at 1:30AM after eating pumpkin pie (better than booze or drugs) for dinner after my enormous Mixed Grill with Carolyn at Fatoosh had enabled me to send my fifth and sixth restaurant reviews to TasteOfBrooklyn, which MIGHT be taking off WITH me!

12/13/99: 8:20AM: Two two-year-olds are screaming through a restaurant and getting so rambunctious that they even fall to the floor and roll through two connected rooms, shouting with laughter. Mom has just gotten laundry out of a basket and holds up hangers with dresses on them and folded sheets and towels, and hands me a light blue synthetic-material shirt that has blue pilled caterpillars all over, saying, "This is yours," which it isn't, but I figure I can pull off the pilling and wear it OK. All of this seems to be taking place in a very elegant New York restaurant, and I'm embarrassed to be part of this chaos. Many details forgotten by the time I type this at 1:35PM.

12/16/99: 9:45AM: Note from 9AM: I'm in grad school, someplace like Columbia or another wood-paneled classic, and I'm a) going down carpeted wooden stairs, watching each step, debating QUITTING since now, December, seems a LONG time away from June, and I'm just not GETTING anything out of it and will probably flunk out anyway; b) trying to get to an economics class at about 1:15 that I know started at 1, and he'd chewed out students who'd been late before, and I think of some of the technical terms from the text whose definitions I don't remember, and surely these will be on the test for which I won't be able to produce the correct answers, wondering why I would have taken this course in the FIRST place; c) having taken a spiral-wire-connected photo album from the top filing-cabinet drawer of a teacher's office, and looked through some of the first pages, which are black-and-white dog-eared photos from his childhood (mostly of naked boys with barely discernable hairless penises) segueing into what might be cock-book cutouts of more mature erections, I try to return the book but find other people in the room, and I attempt to open the top drawer to find where to return this and it just doesn't LOOK like the place it was taken from, but I return the video underneath and the album to the top of the stack and ruffle papers atop it to make it look like it had never been removed; d) searching for my ROOM, confusing coffered wooden doors, opening one to find a baize-lined INNER door which is certainly not part of MY room, and wondering if it might be the next door and what I'll do if I open it and someone’s IN there who'll be annoyed at my disturbing him. Typical frustration dreams!

12/18/99: 8:20AM: I'm visiting a Mexican town and search through an enormous house for a bathroom, but have to pee so badly that I go outside under a tree and urinate into a field filled with potatoes. As I'm finishing, a farmer discovers me and pulls out a small machine gun with which he threatens to kill me. I run back to a car, looking at my watch to see that it's 10:20PM, after my party had been over at 9:30PM, and wondering will they be waiting for me in the car which is on the other side of a major highway. My path becomes steeper and steeper until I'm clambering up a slate slope to a top overlooking a crowded street into which I have to descend, but I'm so aware of my age-impaired agility that I really can't predict if I'll either get DOWN to the street or ACROSS to the other side safely. I wake with my legs and body feeling TIRED, as if I'd DONE it.