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DREAMS of 2010 1 of 2

 

FRIDAY, 1/1/10: 1:15AM: [Note typed 1/14/10] Amy Fleetman and I are walking EAST on West 22nd Street to get to 6th Avenue to go north to 23rd Street to go west to 8th Avenue (because 7th Avenue is too busy) to get cab to Brooklyn Heights. NO cabs. I see icy bluffs to our left, which people are CLIMBING, and I just want to see, so I LEAP for a handhold, GET it, and I'm ALMOST to the top and Amy, following me, SCREAMS as she slips and tumbles into the RIVER below. But she comes up OK, and a pack of KIDS go to help her, and in the confusion a mother screams "Timothy" 6-7 times when she can't tell if he's OK or not.

SATURDAY, 1/2/10: [Note typed 1/14/10] [Guessing this to be BEFORE typed 5:48AM dream, below] 1) Kid asks people to support his job as a horse exerciser. Old couple moves to a smaller, cheaper house by the shore. 2) I'm reading from a poorly printed script: role names in GOLD shine glaringly and unreadably in the light, and the text is tiny and malformed. Very confusing. 3) Before that, I'm riding in a HUGE bus over ENORMOUS hills and panoramas, with 5-second air-time (as in a gigantic roller coaster) making us SCREAM with excitement. 5:48AM: I'm in the bedroom of a cheap motel, maybe in northern New York State, and there are two little dough figures on a table that I disturb, so I figure it'll be better if I just dump them into the toilet. Try to find lights with various switches on the wall, and then have lights on that I have trouble finding the switch with which to turn them off. At one point there's a stray dog in the room that, for some reason, I decide needs a bath, but when I dump it into a tub that has about three inches of soapy water in it, the dog sort of slips through my hands and it sounds like it bumps its head hard on the bottom of the tub, but then swims back to life and I have to fish it out and try to dry it, seeing the water turn gray with the dog's dirt. Then I put it outside and it immediately runs into a little door at the base of the cabin next door. At another point I'm in a car with a woman driving who doesn't know the road but thinks she does, and she goes through an intersection that turns into wide paved areas that sort of skirt another large intersection, and she thinks she can take a short cut but suddenly finds herself driving down a ten-or-so-step concrete stairway on which the car bottoms noisily, but it bounces free at the bottom, only to find that the entrance to the road on the left is blocked by a metal wire which is too high for the car to ride over, but too low to be lifted over the car, so we're forced into an area to the side where we rapidly run out of road and find ourselves in a roadless field, lost.

SUNDAY, 1/3/10: 3:35AM: The party at Fred's was a great success, and I got home about 10:30PM and went directly to bed, getting up at 1:15AM to pee and take two aspirin (and debate taking a sleeping pill) and start Actualism and get to sleep perhaps 1:30AM. Wake at 3:30AM with this extraordinary, multi-sensory, "thoroughly lived while dreaming," dream. A small group of us are putting on a play outdoors in what is probably some small Florida resort. I had a small part in the first act and managed to get through it with lines that I'd managed to memorize, but knew that my lines in Act Two were too many: the only solution was to find a script and read my part from it. A small female assistant managed to find a few copies of the script, and somehow I knew that the other few members of the cast were up to what I was proposing. The first act had been done in a formal outdoor theater at the, say, southern end of the resort complex. Unfortunately, surrounding the end, farther to the south, was another resort with an obtrusive loudspeaker that had made our delivery of the first act difficult. I proposed moving the second act to a more casual amphitheater in the middle of the resort, try to preserve as much of the blocking as possible on a bare stage with chairs, and have someone who may be the husband of one of the actresses, who has a compelling personality and a good speaking voice, to read the stage directions. I'll read my lines from my script, and the other players will act as if nothing had changed between the first and second acts. During the preparation for Act Two, I had to have lunch, and part of the dream were bizarre thawings of frozen-in-mud portions, particularly hamburgers, of what will become my lunch. Meanwhile, this charismatic (and VERY attractive) husband has been experimenting with plastic airplanes: starting with a simple stick plane, which he throws into the air and it blossoms into two or three planes that almost appear to move in and out of hyperspace in their unfolding and "flying," it progresses into a rather large disk that, with enormous energy behind the perhaps one-pound piece, he flings into the air and it explodes into perhaps fifteen or more delicately connected, brilliantly colored (in red, orange, lemon, and a few sticks of lime color clearly patterned after the holiday lights over the Fulton Mall as the bus brought me back from Fred's party) airplane-shapes that tumble, almost as if in a kaleidoscope, through the middle air with astounding loft and life and incandescence. Tears fill my eyes as I try to communicate to him my appreciation, if not awe, of his astounding toy. I also try to boost his self-confidence, as he's never acted before, in reading the stage directions, pointing out that they usually come between speeches, so he won't be in danger of stepping on any of the actual spoken lines. Another, also young and attractive, husband asks if HE can help in any way, and I suggest he ask the audience, most of which has stayed around the southern-most stage, to move to the amphitheater in the middle, where the Second Act will start in about five minutes. Sadly, I have no idea what the play itself is about, but the dream is so vivid that I could actually write a one-act about the character developments in this dream, which must have occurred in a "real time" of something like half an hour. Also it's a shame that the "airplane" could only be portrayed in animation, looking like an unfolding (what WAS the sculptor's name?) art piece that combines the delicate white threads of a three-dimensional Russian piece with the candy-colored sticks of an enormously enlarged child's toy for making stationary sculptures, rather reminding of vividly colored Spirograph drawings of mathematically simple shapes repeating circles, squares, rectangles, and elliptical and spiral shapes of artistically pleasing proportions. Type until 4AM.

TUESDAY, 1/5/10: [Note typed 1/14/10] 1) I'm dusting Bill Petersen's window ledge. 2) I'm checking the Brooklyn Heights library for books for Marj, since she needs a NEW supply of books.

FRIDAY, 1/8/10: [Note typed 1/14/10] I'm "regularizing" video clips on remote-control-size hand units. Dennis wants to video something, and I look at the last unit I'd handled, Unit H, and say to him, "Find Unit F or Unit G and do it on that one." [Note typed 1/14/10] 3:33AM: HORRIBLE dream of AWFUL man who lures me into his house "to tell me a story," and then TEARS at me, and I TEAR BACK, with FISTS and FEET and TEETH, as HARD as I can, but he's INDESTRUCTIBLE and inexorable, NOT bleeding. I cut a WORD in a fruit-smelling floor, something like "CLUTTER," with my fingernail, to remind me. And I "wake" and stagger to my "desk" and try to turn on lights that don't work, and I find that I'm BESIDE my desk, with an overhead light of TINY FLICKERING SPOTS. 6:55AM: I'm looking at a map: we're AT Hotel A, want to go to Hotel B, so we have to pass Continental Hotel C and get to Hotel B, where we want to go. Before: My Wednesday shopping bag is "lost," but it seems to be in my shoulder bag with two thick copies of the Sunday Times. Something about a new "body plan."

SUNDAY, 1/10/10: [Note typed 1/14/10] I'm waiting for pretentious (large paintings of processions and people flying through the air) German art exhibits. I phone at 2PM, I CAN'T confess, "Maybe I'll do it there." I keep STEPPING on long-legged, slow, hairy black spiders on my blue carpet by my air-conditioning window in the living room. Dream? TV movie: STAR in bathrobe goes TOTALLY NUDE to a casino "to get money."

WEDNESDAY, 1/13/10: 7:55AM: I'm visiting a dictatorial Caribbean island [was ASTOUNDED when I read this note before seeing Sharon that afternoon, since 1) I'd forgotten I'd WRITTEN it and 2) Dr. DiMatteo told me about the Haitian earthquake at 10AM!] where Obama is visiting, and I've CHANGED my opinion of him as a wise president---partly due to an elaborate lunch for him in palatial surroundings, and views through a gate down a long, guarded, palm-lined road.

THURSDAY, 1/14/10: 8:47AM: I've returned to Ken's and my ratty hotel in mid-Manhattan at 5:55PM, early for our 6PM meeting on our last evening here, and we have yet to decide where we're going for dinner. I don't feel that there are any good alternatives, and since this is our last night here, I'd just as soon eat just anywhere and get to bed early in preparation for our flight out (I have no idea where, or why we're staying in a hotel in NYC). I go into the tiny coffee shop and find it jammed with a large party that's essentially taken over the whole place: most of the chairs are gathered around one large thrown-together table in the middle of the floor, and some high bar stools are being used as tiny tables with two or three chairs, all occupied, grouped around them. I think there might be a space between two groups on a sofa (rather like at Keith and Kevin's on Saturday at MAN), but on second thought it's just too small. Orders have swamped the tiny kitchen with one cook, and no one seems on the verge of being served, let alone ready to leave. I feel that this is a terrible anticlimax to our visit, but can't think of anything else to do.

SATURDAY, 1/16/10: 1) Three women are going shopping from a tour bus; one of them is "new" to the area. In an old loft building in Tribeca, photos on the wall show "holes in the floor" and "fallen plaster" in the old building, which has now been redone in pure white, but with no merchandise visible anywhere. 2) A man is buying a trip or a policy for two figures: $12,000.45 and $12,000.23, which he adds to the total of $24,000.68, probably stemming from my financial worries about paying my latest Visa bill and my upcoming Five Stans trip.

SUNDAY, 1/17/10: Mottled apples patterned like Earth.

TUESDAY, 1/19/10: Shampoo my hair LYING DOWN, indignant that snobby friends think that I don't know how to wash.

WEDNESDAY, 1/20/10: 1) I'm taking an advanced Actualism lesson and am filling in a sheet just ABOVE final line: Final Absolute Master. 2) Check that my tie's weave is NOT along seven decorations on the tie itself. Take 3 pees by 6:25AM.

THURSDAY, 1/21/10: Do I wait for five weeks for pills, or the start of the SIXTH week?

SUNDAY, 1/24/10: Incredible sexual foreplay in school of 24-58-year-olds!

MONDAY, 1/25/10: 1) 4:20AM: Having gotten to bed early, about 9:20PM, after maybe four glasses of wine at MAN at Leslie/Lohman Gallery, I woke only once at 4:20 with two similar dreams of being in a small English town going through a fun-fair made by locals in a rambling, decrepit, yet imaginative manor house or even small castle with multiple levels and seemingly a history of existing over many decades, perhaps centuries, of amalgamated pleasure-rides involving climbs up rickety stairways, gripping rusty-metal walls separating rooms, vistas of old apothecaries with genuine prior-centuries' medicaments lining the walls in colorful array, offering views of the primitive past as joy-seekers climbed and descended, sometimes in metal-lined tubes where the introducer waved his or her hands up and down to preview the rises and dips in the descending chute which debouched into a larger-than-expected area, almost like an exterior garden, where vistas of motorized roller coasters rising above echoed the gyrations of the tunnel down which one has just slid on the seat of one's pants. Not that the villagers had to resort to false hunchbacks threatening visitors along the way, nor had blood-dripping-fanged children been given the part of vampire menaces in Transylvanian castles, but apron-clad fat matrons lent sturdy historical models from generations past to add to the unexpectedness of whatever happened to be around the next corner. Lurking almost unseen in the background of the dream were vague erotic undertones that suggested some of the proffered adventures might be of the sexual sort. I cheerfully wanted to linger in some of the dust-covered rooms to look at the medicine labels, or book titles, or knickknack details, to further delight in the imaginations of those who had clearly devoted weeks and months of time in collecting the constituents that cluttered these cobwebbed chambers. I had no concern for the cleanliness of my clothes as I crept on hands and knees through junk-littered passages, happy that I was wearing old jeans and worn shirts and already-scuffed shoes. Sadly, I haven't captured even a fraction of the magic and charm of these two excursions through rural ideas of what might entertain sophisticated visitors to their rundown rustic ruins. I wanted, and want, MORE. I was maybe in my forties; most people enjoying these side trips were in their twenties and thirties, and many of the participants in the "past" were children and teenagers. Charming, though slightly dangerous and threatening, dreams. Type to 4:45AM. 2) Starting to broil chicken, French fries, tomato, and LETTUCE for a snack.

WEDNESDAY, 1/27/10: Working at IBM, planning to finish testing JCAS AGAIN! Story of man's "dead" wife ALIVE. [Had NO idea what this meant when I read it to Sharon Wednesday evening.]

FRIDAY, 1/29/10: Find a glass chip on my blue carpet that I'm CONVINCED is an absolutely flawless one-carat diamond!

SUNDAY, 1/31/10: I'm watering plants through spiderwebs that the water doesn't destroy, so I have to dip the nozzle into them to break them up, and pour a BIG stream of water to drive the spiders out.

MONDAY, 2/1/10: I'm cutting iceberg lettuce into precise chunks, explaining to someone how dishes are decorated by mathematical designs.

WEDNESDAY, 2/3/10: 1) A pet CHEETAH wears a lacy white dress: be careful with your hand under the table, as it might bite it, thinking it to be an offering of food. 2) Combined poker/"magic trick" with playing cards.

THURSDAY, 2/4/10: Great hugs with Frank Mungo in busy rooms, even kissing, but we need to be ALONE.

FRIDAY, 2/5/10: 6:27AM: "Just in time for Sharon:" an ELABORATE Shakespearean-type dream of a man posing as a woman in the first act of a play, who wants to marry, though a very plain "older woman," meeting ANOTHER man posing as a woman, who in the second act will be wooed and won, though I only dreamed through the first intermission, when a stone, which the second woman kept below her sofa as a "help" to a man who would have sex with her, was ON the sofa to help the SECOND man (wait, is HE a woman?, though that would be ME in the dream?) have sex with her to convince "her" that "she" was also a woman, though why would "she" be on top? Anyway, elaborate Elizabethan dresses with large bosoms, maybe influenced by the blowsy sisters in "Coraline" last night, set among detailed Elizabethan living rooms and bedrooms, might make it a "lost Shakespeare" with the typical confusions and comedies and flowery deliveries, which might even extend to a false delivery of a child at the never-so-riotous climax of the play. Type to 6:36AM.

SUNDAY, 2/7/10: 1) Look in mirror and I have NO beard at all, as if it's stopped growing completely. 2) LONG dream of going higher and higher up "Royal Hill" in London, for more and more posh living quarters, ending in a room with a servant (clearly used to more aristocratic masters) putting tiny decorations on the rim of a strap which I'm to wear over my jacket (or maybe on the rim of my cap) to some elegant party, and I don't really know how to dress and he knows that very well.

TUESDAY, 2/9/10: While Mom is showering, I dress and catch up on journals written on back of manila postcards in a notebook, just before a late breakfast.

WEDNESDAY, 2/10/10: Spartacus and I are trying to save seats for a free concert on a beach---in rickety metal chairs, on couches, or in rows---and a bus arrives with a band which sets up their seats on the other side. I call on phone, my school answers, and I ask, "Test will start after the concert on the beach?" The answer seems to be "I guess so."

THURSDAY, 2/11/10: 1) I'm covering my entire body in the charcoal used for blackface makeup. 2) I insist that EVERYONE be allowed in a FESTIVE wedding procession: this is NOT a staid small event.

SATURDAY, 2/13/10: A man is bearing a child for the second time. This is somehow connected to a poker game with two jokers, which make great winning hands. Before that, I'm on a movie set with a hunk naked in a bathtub, and I just SIT at the edge of the tub and allow myself to STARE at his cock, regardless of what anyone might think. The loller in the tub is rather like the model Peter North.

SUNDAY, 2/14/10: 1) 6:49AM: ABSOLUTELY CLASSIC NIGHTMARE: I'm vacationing, as a young man, in Salinas, California, staying with my aunt and uncle at their 1950 house on 25 Coronado Avenue in the suburbs of the city of Salinas where I went for my junior year in high school. Rather than LIVING there, as I did from September 1949 to June 1950, I was ON VACATION from Akron, Ohio, where I was born, and it was around noon on a sunny day when I was supposed to meet my aunt at 25 Coronado to take a flight at about 2:30PM, for which I had a reservation, back to Akron. I'd spent the morning doing some last-minute sight-seeing in downtown Salinas and was now walking back to 25 Coronado with maybe a half-hour to spare, so I decided to take a small detour to a factory area I'd gone to before, where there was some kind of medical center that was offering a scan of some kind, maybe even an echocardiography of some primitive type, that could offer some kind of diagnosis (this was all so CLEAR in the first part of the dream, and so HAZY now!) that I really wanted. The ETIOLOGY of the dream seems to have two parts: my constant checking with Dr. Chin about my Holter Monitor results (held up by a non-working computer needed to analyze those taped results), and my echocardiography results of my heart scan (which should have been available on Friday, but wasn't); AND the two-hour premiere of "Survivor" on BBC2-TV last night, which started with the same sort of frantic concern about a flu which grew more and more deadly. I looked down from a hill onto the light-blue factory facade which was oriented "just so" to the main road along the oceanfront, which housed the medical center I'd maybe dropped in on a few days before but decided it wasn't important enough, at that time, to pursue, but now I felt that, if I could just get a few minutes' scan from the machine, I'd benefit my health. I went down the hill to the closest entrance to the factory and saw people coming out a door I hadn't used before, but figured if I could just get inside the building I could get to the area I remembered from before. I went through a few doors, but people kept stopping me (this is also related to my finishing Rory Stewart's "The Places in Between," about his walk across Afganistan in 2002, anxiously looking for places for him and his dog to eat and sleep, in sometimes very hostile and dangerous villages, each night of his 32 days of the walk), saying that I had to go through security, and I certainly couldn't carry in the small bag filled with slide-camera film that I somehow had with me. In desperation I asked one of the women who were denying me entrance to simply TAKE my bag and put it into some kind of closet while I was inside the building, and she sort of half-smiled and opened a supply-locker door and put the bag on one of the shelves inside. I'd have to remember to collect it on my way out. I passed through a number of halls I dimly remembered and found myself before the machine I wanted to use, but the room was crowded with people asking questions of the solitary nurse who seemed to be the only one capable of administering the test that I wanted, and it quickly became obvious that I wouldn't get through to her in time, and the time was moving past noon, and I really had to get back to 25 Coronado, so I tried to find my way back through the hallways to the entrance where I left my bag, but some of the passing details were slightly different from before (one area had a vista of columns in a hallway that NOW remind me of the shot of the metal columns along the luge-path that killed the Georgian athlete on the morning of the opening of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, BC, on Friday morning), and in my desperation to get out of the building I eventually forgot to retrieve the bag I'd stored when I entered. But I'm now on the streets, vaguely aware of the direction I have to take toward 25 Coronado, and pass a VERY old, wooden, empty bus where the driver seems to be stopping for lunch, and I have no idea of its route, and there are no signs on the front or sides to even indicate that this is a PUBLIC bus on a REGULAR route, rather than some kind of tourist tour-bus. Look around for a taxi, but there are none at all to be seen. See a truck-rental office nearby and decide that maybe I can rent a truck and driver to take me there, now that it's getting past 1PM and my flight seems more and more remote. Go into the crowded front office and ask if anyone speaks English (most seem to be Spanish, as parts of Salinas were), and someone seems to understand when I say "Coronado" and indicates it's "out in that direction," but he's not available. I try to find someone else, and another driver says that he might drive me, but he needs a map to find the location. I look around and find a map of the CENTER of the town, but Coronado is off the edge of that map, and I can't find the OTHER map (like the Brooklyn map on which I located the two offices administering the Census test on Friday) that shows the actual street. Look in a few promising places for that map, but I just can't find it. Then I lose the guy who said he might drive me, everyone else seems hostile to my asking, so I'm back out on the street, now close to 2PM, and, incredibly, it's now preternaturally DARK and RAINING, and there are fewer cars on the streets, and clearly I'll have more trouble finding an empty taxi when it's RAINING, and I stand under a bridge culvert to get out of the driving rain, trying to see the time on my wristwatch, thinking how IMPROBABLE that such a sunny day just an hour before would have suddenly turned so dark and rainy, and thinking that I'll CERTAINLY miss the plane and start thinking about how to change my reservation for a flight TOMORROW, and look frantically around for ANY kind of transportation, and it's TOTALLY dark, and I literally TWIST my body in emotional agony and think, "THIS IS REALLY JUST SO COMPLETELY AWFUL---" even though it's ABSOLUTE REALITY---that it's like a NIGHTMARE---and I wake up in the half-light of 6:35AM, almost in a SWEAT of physical agony, and find, to my dazed understanding, that it WAS a nightmare, one of the longest and most tortured in a VERY long time! Pee and record it until 7:26AM, not nearly having communicated the CONVICTION, just before the end of the nightmare, that this was all HAPPENING and I'd just have to LIVE WITH IT, and the amount of DAZEDNESS that accompanied my waking to find myself in Brooklyn, in bed, and not having any immediate pressure but to pee and record the dream while I remembered it. Sit, bemused, finished typing, feet wrapped in my blanket against the February cold outside, in contrast to the California summer warmth of the dream. Pick up the Times, thankfully early at 7:30AM, pee again, and get back to bed to think that the "waking from a nightmare" could be echoed in my fantasy-wish to "wake from the nightmare of aging, lessening sexual feelings and attractiveness, and waning abilities in general," and even more to my, yes, DREAM of "waking after death to the reality of living forever in some form or other." Reminded of my long-ago poem "Iwake" for the River, in which I woke from decreasing depths of dreams to increasing levels of reality. Sleep again and at 9:33AM wake to dream 2). I'm sitting in the first row at an extraordinary harmonica concert in which "the maestro" is supporting his harmonica on his ENORMOUS LEFT BREAST, which has all the characteristics of a FEMALE breast: nipple, aureole, huge volume. As he emotes with the feelings of his (unheard, actually, in the dream) music, he TEARS at the top of his fleshy bosom with his teeth, his face contorted with anguish, CRADLES the mass upward into his face with both hands beneath the cantaloupe-sized globe, and lets it SAG, at which time it hangs about twice as low on his corpulent body as his right breast. I think vaguely, unpleasantly, about how his constant manipulation has actually DEFORMED him. Type to 9:58AM, reminding myself to transcribe the other dreams from the past week before typing out any of these dream pages.

WEDNESDAY, 2/17/10: Writing tiny answers in red ink on CHEMISTRY test asking about electron-atom interactions and a MATERIALS test about having my tailor make my suit, rather than, somehow, doing it myself.

FRIDAY, 2/19/10: 8:45AM: I'm playing a game with two younger men in someone else's apartment, and one points out a roach just behind a playing piece. I grab the piece and sweep the roach onto the floor, where it feebly tries to run away, and I step on it, and come back to find another little one on the board, but that's killed quickly too.

MONDAY, 2/22/10: 8AM: I'm in a summer camp, only slightly reminiscent of Camp Santa Maria that I actually attended for a number of years. I'm there to set some kind of ascetic record, proving it by "signing out" at the end of two consecutive days, and then, toward the end, "signing in" even before two last days start, signifying (by signing) that I've somehow given myself completely to the process of staying at the camp, which is some kind of self-abnegation that helps "purify" me in some cultish way. One episode has me taking a shower, taking off all my clothes and searching for an empty hook on the wall where I can hang my undershirt and shorts without getting them wet while I go into the rudimentary shower and get totally wet, again as a "ritual" of cleaning that means I'm giving up all personality and individuality. But when I look at the moldy shower curtains, most of them have someone behind them, including a room that seems to be only about four feet high, where numerous people are sharing showers in an ultimate sign of giving themselves completely to the ritual. Then someone shouts that we all have to have our IDs with us, and a friend, who's a bit like the dead Arthur Ellenbogen, rushes to get my jeans, containing my wallet, so that I can find my plastic-coated driver's license to take with me to identify that it IS me doing all this. Another episode has me looking down into a river in which everyone must swim, almost as a baptism, and I'm thinking it looks like it might be cold, but when I jump in I find people clustered around the water-ingress point, where it's actually heated, and really very comfortable, so deep that I don't have to worry about putting my feet down into what must be an absolutely fetid river bottom, and rushing so that an effort of swimming upstream must be made to stay close to the warm effluvia. I drift a bit downstream to feel the water cool to body temperature, actually surprising myself by enjoying the whole thing. Every detail is cultish and ritualized and fraught with mystical significance. And I'm going along with it, almost as one would go along with the process of dying. Again an unusual dream, typed to 8:12AM.

TUESDAY, 2/23/10: 1) I'm trying to put Peruvian stamps on an envelope, trying to remember if it's 8P/envelope, or is 7-and-a-half OK. There are also Norwegian stamps with tissues wet on the top of them, which keep sliding off old envelopes. I'm going to amusement-park rides. And I'm not thinking of the fact that I'm mailing these envelopes in the United States! 2) I'm doing heavy editing and formatting of a New-York-magazine-type article, with blue and red typographic words that have to be used. 3) I'm looking for an old restaurant just south of the South Street Seaport, which I remember being on a cul de sac off, maybe, Broadway, but I'm not sure which block to walk down. I feel AWFUL on getting up, maybe because I'm worried (unreasonably) about the dentist tomorrow?

WEDNESDAY, 2/24/10: Take valium at 7:30AM, shit, and record note with a dream: I'm in a gay party in, maybe, Philadelphia, and the host is making two kinds of candy, but others grab them before I can. I think maybe I can wait and take some back on the train to New York City with me.

SATURDAY, 2/27/10: My sugared cereal is stolen by ruffians competing to see who can get the best deal at a hotel---there's a test to see who can cash a $25,000 check in an exclusive banking building.

SUNDAY, 2/28/10: John and I, in a luxury hotel, have phones that malfunction alternatively, first his goes out, then mine does, but when mine works, HIS goes out.

MONDAY, 3/1/10: I'm spending an INTENSIVE weekend with a very large group at a conference that seems to be a combination of the U.S. Army and Actualism. At the end, as if we were at a restaurant, attendees are debating how much of a tip to add on our credit card bills. One calculates that the 60 hours should be tipped at $50/hour, for a total tip of $3000, which to me seems excessive, because we've actually already PAID for the conference. I boast that even though they know I'm the cheapest tipper, I've been invited back for many years, so I have the nerve to leave a tip of $800, figuring that should be more than enough. Then I lose my PASSPORT, search all my pants' pockets many times, and finally find it in my uniform-jacket pocket, making the excuse that I haven't worn this Army uniform in many, many years. Maybe based on my trying to find proof that I'd been in the Army for the Census test?

TUESDAY, 3/2/10: 6:18AM: Went to bed this morning at 1AM, then woke with this incredible dream that I noted as follows: I've been handed a test booklet I can't understand. I try to answer questions, but can't figure anything out. It's in English, though some questions transform symbols, but I have NO idea what to do, or even in what FORM an answer will be. So I do nothing, saying, "I HATE tests I don't do WELL in." The, at the end, when I LOOK for an unmarked test, I can't FIND one to take "as a souvenir." THEN I'm handed a test that has MY NAME, and a code number, on it, all marked up, and they WON'T believe that I DIDN'T do it. So I'll get a SCORE I didn't produce! Like this DREAM! 6:21AM: Thoughts: I've been "IMPLANTED" with a dream I DIDN'T HAVE! A truly MAD thought---as if it had been proven, say, that I have a memory of a situation that NEVER EXISTED---making FORGETTING something that DID happen seem TRIVIAL (in importance) by COMPARISON. ALSO: I'm sure NO ONE EVER had a dream anything LIKE this before, and if Sharon says I'm wrong, I will be VERY DISAPPOINTED and very sad, because then I won't be UNIQUE. It's like I'm INVESTED in being UNIQUE in having this dream. I seem to be implying that NO ONE, in the PAST, could have had, or even INVENTED, a dream of such REVOLUTIONARY (why THAT word?) ORIGINALITY! AGAIN I insist on its uniqueness. As if my very SANITY depended on its INSANITY. I CLIP the February Scientific American article (which I really should have thrown out some days before, but it remains in the stack BY PURE LAZINESS) on "Seeing Forbidden Colors;" my DREAM was a "forbidden dream," NOT immoral, just "impossible." Thus, I AM SPECIAL! But I'm NOT special---the "Man of La Mancha" dreamed the impossible dream! But the Man of La Mancha WAS special!

WEDNESDAY, 3/3/10: Paul C.'s visiting, and has TOTALLY reorganized materials in my refrigerator---some inappropriately, some usefully, but above my STOVE he's put a rack from which to hang implements and tools (eggbeaters, hammers, spatulas) and it's like a JUNGLE of clutter that I don't like at ALL.

MONDAY, 2/15/10: [Outrageously out of order!] Drunk from Beard, perusing lengthy Picasso biography, with preview, phases of life, chapters of art, a "Mystery Companion" movie from Clouzot, back of book bibliography, and then served napkins on a place for a meal at his house---confused with Dali. Note at bottom: recall blissful drunken happiness before falling asleep.

THURSDAY, 3/4/10: 1) 7:05AM: It may be the 17th or 18th Century, and two string quartets are playing in two theaters along a stretch of Canal Street, and I'm to join one of them as a stand-by cellist. I sit on the edge of the orchestra pit and twirl my cello, puzzling players IN the orchestra. A basso continuo, in the flies above, plays against the melody and is the one permanent member. One piece just ENDS on a dying chord. Odd. Sore CHEST, take hydrocodon at 7:10AM. 2) 9:52AM: A kid flings himself away from me in what seems to be a hospital (or doctor's office) waiting room, lying inert on the floor about eight feet away from me. Overcoated doctor comes into room in order to schedule some kind of diagnostic test for me, but gets involved with another doctor in his office, seeming to have some priority greater than scheduling, or maybe even performing, some diagnostic on me. He comes out of the office, glances over to make sure I'm still there, and I decide it's going to be a long wait so I move to an easy chair and prepare to start reading my magazine. The kid gets up and moves toward another group of older teenagers, one of whom, in dark clothes, seems VERY attractive, and I keep staring at him to get a better look at his face, hidden in shadows. The overcoated doctor reappears, yet still doesn't tell me anything about my appointment. 3) Michael Blackburn approaches me in a kitchen, saying he'd just slept over at Rolf's, leading me to wonder if there might not be something going on between them, and he goes over to a drawer under a kitchen counter to my left and gets some small slips of paper that he brings over to my right as I stand, wondering, at the counter to the right side of the kitchen sink. "You'll never believe how I got out of some parking tickets," Michael begins, showing me a diagram of streets in Brooklyn Heights, and starts to explain what he said to the traffic cop by referring to his notes on the slips of paper. I'm mystified by the whole thing. An implied relationship with drugs, maybe just marijuana, seems also involved in his "getting out of it."

FRIDAY, 3/5/10: I'm standing by my desk, talking on the phone to Marj, and look at the OPEN window to see SNOW blowing INTO my apartment, toward my computer, and I put down the phone in a rush to shut the window QUICKLY.

SATURDAY, 3/6/10: I'm moving photos in a ten-by-ten array around so I can get a good dark-contrast shot of Marlene Dietrich. Take Viagra at 7:30AM.

MONDAY, 3/8/10: 1) I'm lining up tables to take tests in common in a restaurant. 2) Dennis is worried about his index for a poetry book. The book is VERY lightly marked, but the index LOOKS OK and I think to start printing the first page DOWN a bit to add a printed page in length.

TUESDAY, 3/9/10: A California cannery has outrageous rules I hope to change, and they show me a room in the factory FILLED to the horizon with BILLIONS of peas.

THURSDAY, 3/11/10: 6:15AM: Details not clear: Dennis WAS TO have married some woman, but didn't. This MAY have been planned as a wedding dinner, and the bride, understandably, showed up. Yet we sit at feast and I drink good wine with relish, and toward end Dennis barely suppressed squeals of laughter on my shouting, "Do you think it sounds like I'm crying?" He whispers (I guess, something I don't hear) to my shoulder, "Perfectly," I respond, hoping to be right, and drink more wine. It IS good wine. Pee, and three shit-flecks fall from my chest to my left thigh as I sit to lay down again at 6:21.

FRIDAY, 3/12/10: Elaborate coding of river strata leads to a magazine article being taught to students of a new translation system: Variant of Zen" in a Japanese school.

SATURDAY, 3/13/10: Like a previous dream in which I admired an enormous MALE statue, this dream features a clothed, but erotic, FEMALE statue which is to be replaced, by vote, by ANOTHER, even more voluptuous, female, either an Italian-looking movie star in bright RED light, or an even MORE beautiful FRENCH actress in a bright YELLOW light with an impossibly full bosom spilling out of a buxom décolletage.

SUNDAY, 3/14/10: 3:45AM: 1a) I'm talking to who I think is a new lesbian neighbor and my friend (male) knew HIM from before, so the "lesbian" is really a male. 1b) A lay nun is confident that a local mountain will provide the base for her new nunnery, but building starts before it's determined to be really LEGAL and she stays, which may lead to violence to get her off the land. 8:45AM: 2) I'm in some kind of meeting where attractive young men are pairing off for sex, and though I'm older, I still seem to be "in the running." A young blond starts jerking off as I watch him, and as I encourage him, he moans and starts spraying jet after jet of cum onto his chest, some even reaching his chin, as he rocks his head back in ecstasy and cums ENDLESSLY as I admire him for his capacity. Wake feeling quite erotic, but I pee and don't do anything about it because I pick up the Times outside my door and start breakfast.

MONDAY, 3/15/10: 9:25AM: I'm in a different apartment in Manhattan, entertaining two male guests who might be possible sexual partners, but I'm not sure either are gay. The thinner one, rather like Arthur Dworin, says, "You may be able to get him in the sack if you use the right technique," which sort of annoys me because he assumes that I'm the less attractive of the two. He goes out into the common hallway in his too-large boxer shorts with the other fellow, clustering around the building's entrance door for some reason, when a female tenant comes in suddenly, surprising both of them on their hands and knees right at the door, looks at them both with hauteur, and goes into her own apartment. Other details forgotten now.

THURSDAY, 3/18/10: 1) 5:45AM: TV programming is being determined by how many levels of complexity the plots have, and a hierarchy of plot devices has been rearranged so that programs have been switched from one column to another, and duplicates have been linked to produce a stronger impact. The new series will be truly innovative and revolutionary. 2) 8AM: The list of programs in the earlier dream have transformed into a colorful street-map of Paris, showing a number of shops and apartments in a few central blocks, and I'm trying to look for a particular street where I seem to remember an important woman, like Madame Blavatsky, lived, so I turn the map around and around trying to locate names written in the spidery handwriting of someone who might be Colette. Then I'm in a room with a number of men who appear to be drunk, or on narcotics, so that they're acting in a listful and vaguely sensual way, but I don't want to commit myself to admitting being attracted to any of them, yet one in particular, lounging on a sofa, has his arm around someone on his left, and his right arm searches out my shoulder to lightly caress, and I permit myself to be drawn closer to him, and his hand touches my leg, and so I try, in as reciprocal a way as possible, to clasp his calf muscles gently, as if to massage him, or console him, and we draw closer together, and I try to figure out how my body will be perceived by others nearby. Just remembered an earlier fragment: a VERY attractive man has somehow appeared in what now seems to be a CLASS, or some esoteric advanced symposium, totally nude. At first I see him only in profile, and I hope he turns so I can get a better frontal view of his body, and to my delight he sits on a stool just to the right of the teacher, who is just to MY right, displaying a thick dangle that I find magnetically attractive. Others seem to appreciate his physical beauty, so I feel less and less out of place with my attention toward him.

SATURDAY, 3/20/10: 6:45AM: Woke, wondering if I'd had a dream that I might remember enough of to record, but my first thought was that I'd read an article in New Yorker magazine about someone traveling in eastern Europe, possibly up a river that flowed south from Romania, though the itinerary didn't run that far north. But I also had a hazy memory of thinking, "I have a good map of the river in the travel souvenirs from some OTHER trip," and I can see how the river---which isn't the Dneiper, on which I traveled from Odessa to Kiev with Shelley, and certainly isn't the Amazon, though some of the memories of the dream-trip seem to encompass details of stops on that river---allowed many day-trip stops in different countries each day, like Serbia and Croatia (could that be right?) on the---was it the Rhine that went from Budapest to the Black Sea? But when I got up to pee, I checked the New Yorker on my discard stack and couldn't find any article vaguely like what I guess now MUST have been a dream. Strange combination of "dream memory" and "magazine-article-reading memory."

MONDAY, 3/22/10: 8:55AM: I'm in an orgy group that I'm new to, and find someone who seems as obsessed in jerking off as I am. I become aware that my penis is slimy with diluted blood, and I've probably abraded my flesh to the point of bleeding. But then my companion's cock becomes visible, it even has open, oozing wounds and looks almost gangrenous. I ask how many times he's come already today, and he confesses to FOURTEEN. I think I believe him, and ask if he wouldn't mind if I had an orgasm, and he encourages me to continue, and I have the impression that others are looking at me as I try, futilely, agonizedly, to reach a climax.

WEDNESDAY, 3/24/10: 7:30AM: My camera's film has broken, and I reach way down in a kind of well to find the end of the film and pull it up, puzzled why it's so heavy, and when I look down, the loop has caught two of my kitchen steak knives, so I have to free the end from them to pull it up. Then there's a photo album, three sheets of two or three photos each bound at the top with a spiral binding, with me and Mom and Rita in a car-dive up to snow level on a mountain top. Rita's about 12. Then I'm looking at a computer dump and my supervisor is wondering why one location has 1/2 and 1/4 and 1/8 and....1/infinity, and I say that's just the computer's way of representing "1". Then I'm looking at a diagnostic printout and he says, "You have just two minutes to locate the wrong instruction and the stored value for the blank space," and I say, "OK, I'll do it." "I'm so glad," he responds, and I hope to find the program bug.

SATURDAY, 3/27/10: 1) 5:43AM: Huge crowds are dispersing from a central station to hear specific speakers on either side. 2) 8:33AM: Somehow, OUR "dead" spirits have been incorporated into dead INDIANS (from the subcontinent), which spirits WE incorporate, based on my elaborate notes taken from a trip there.

MONDAY, 3/29/10: 2:03AM: I get fucked ecstatically by Arno!

TUESDAY, 3/30/10: 1) 4:44AM: I'm at a convention with sessions on a Taipei-like board, where 300 and 400 are first, tiles mid-left and mid-right, and then 800 is done before 700, in a special room for a high price, and I talk with other conventioneers about technical concert. 2) 8:32AM: Some TV network will lose its most profitable advertising figure, a cartoon prince, to a rival network.

WEDNESDAY, 3/31/10: 9:02AM: Bed at 11:30PM! We're in a weekend art colony and I see a great illustrative painting and the owner says it's $500! I ask to see it, and he brings a wrecked inferior painting by the same artist, saying that the one I wanted is $12,500! The female painter's a "Weird weekend painter," and the comment is funny, so I CAN find humor. But the FINAL image is of a large snake RIPPING its own tail off: maybe it had been wounded and he thought he was "fixing" the wound. But I go to the BOTTOM of the emotion with "My alcohol, no sex, no love, sore lower lip from biting it CONSTANTLY while eating, lousy taxes, loose tooth, cough, numb feet and lower legs, sore back and waist, WAY fewer trips, ALL take-away now at age 74! Also a dream fragment about recommending earplugs to a guy who HAS them on his own, and all's TERRIBLE.

THURSDAY, 4/1/10: 6:55AM: A small group goes to fly, for two days, to a convention in Nepal or Tibet, taking only a carry-on bag, and we're envied by the REST of the group, who want to relive our experiences.

SATURDAY, 4/3/10: 5:50AM: I'm studying effects of killing Greek prisoners of war, singly, and in twos and threes, compared with past studies.

MONDAY, 4/5/10: 6:20AM: VERY odd combination of events: partly taking place on a high point of land, upholstered as a black-sheeted mattress (maybe reflective of the platforms in "Fuerza Bruta" Saturday night), overlooking cliffs facing ocean waves far below. It's a birthday party for someone, but I'm given an envelope (like the one from Rita I have to check on downstairs to see if it's been temporarily lost on delivery to me) from an unknown friend, in an envelope possibly from some indeterminate European country, with strange documents and souvenirs inside that I can't connect with any one person or event in my life. Other guests are packing up their OWN presents, ready to leave, and I have no idea where we are or where I need to get to. An odd performance piece brought various types of music, on wall speakers, portable radios, and arcane audio transmitters, into the space, sometimes overlapping. I knew nobody there, symbolizing my thoughts before the dream about my friends dying, leaving me with very few close friends, mostly to talk with on the telephone, rather than doing anything social with. Definitely a lonely feeling pervaded, but I took it with the "apathy" component of acedia that I had to actually get out of bed to find on my note when I thought and thought and couldn't think of the word paired with "melancholy" in its Dorland's definition. Just had to check that the "path" root of apathy comes from "feeling or emotion," though the added word "impassiveness" rings a congruent-feeling bell also. HAD to type, rather than write, this note to try to capture some of the DETAIL of the rich tapestry of the dream content and feeling---albeit through a glass, darkly.

TUESDAY, 4/6/10: 6:17AM: Write scrawled note on memory of a dream from about 2:22AM: Subjects of a study (of dreams? of psychological states?) are supposed to DO something (keep a written log? discuss their dreams/states?). I'm either studying the results, or surprised at the results, or pleased at levels of response to requirements? And I'm somewhat pleased, or am I just barely rising above apathy?

WEDNESDAY, 4/7/10: 6:18AM: I'm traveling in France, visiting a small village and walking along a river in a park under pure blue skies, wondering why I don't have my camera with me, but considering that the view is really nothing very special. Riding in a car with two people in front and me rather reclining in back, looking out a special window enlarged at the back so that the passenger can have a good view of what he's passing, and the engineer of a passing train looks at me as we speed past his train, and he must think I'm someone important as the only passenger in such a luxurious car. Stop in a small town with a theater festival that's trying to be different by calling plays and movies by unusual names: my friend hasn't written a play, but a "trocodont," with characters who try to be unusual. Then we're driving into the evening and the driver confesses he's lost, and we stop in a village to ask directions and I go into an empty motel room to look for a men's room, which is way back in a cavernous space, and a mother and daughter come in, speaking accented English, and I go back out to the car, figuring we're going to be rather late back to Paris. All impressions fragmentary and elusive.

THURSDAY, 4/8/10: 7:04AM: Probably based on my reading the comic book "Nancy" yesterday, I'm looking at a book that I'd indexed which has double-page spreads of cartoon-like illustrations which have been BADLY bound: the spreads are separated by pages of TEXT, which makes the illustrations almost useless. Somehow this affects the quality of the index that I did for the book also, and I'm talking about it with the editor in what looks like a classroom, where we're about to break for lunch.

FRIDAY, 4/9/10: 7:12AM: I'm writing an article for some publication; it's about a presentation I organized for a third-grade boys' class in a school around the corner which had once been an all-girls' school. I don't even know the name of the school, until someone in the neighborhood suggests it might be Piney and Paul. I want to make the article longer, though even now it's about as long as the shortest article I ever published, and I can't really think of anything more to say, as I now can't even remember the subject of the presentation.

SUNDAY, 4/11/10: 6:21AM: "As-is" eyes---can't coordinate when sensation to the bottom of a seal's body is anesthetized.

MONDAY, 4/12/10: 7:04AM: Fragment of having to urinate in a dark apartment with someone else sleeping nearby, so I have to VERY carefully close the door to the bathroom in the darkness so that the latch doesn't click and wake up the other person.

TUESDAY, 4/13/10: 2:27AM: Someone's wonderfully spry old grandmother and -father race around making visitors comfortable.

WEDNESDAY, 4/14/10: 6:15AM: I'm pursuing a sexy friend of Spartacus's, hoping to get him aroused and have sex with him, despite Spartacus's unexciting presence.

SATURDAY, 4/17/10: 8:02AM: I'm on the last few days of a vacation at some kind of country resort which is the scene of a conference, or retreat, for young men who may be primarily gay, and I seem to be sharing a cabin with John just across the road from the main dormitory. I'm returning to the cabin, maybe to get ready for lunch, when the PHYSICALITY of the location hits me with psychedelic intensity: the SANDY ROAD on which I'm walking in my bare feet strikes me as a kind of concentration of TEXTURE and SOUND as my feet break through a dried crust, like butterscotch-yellow toast, with a crisp crunch that changes with each step that forms a different outline of broken dryness against an inner, moister, darker softness. I think to myself that this experience is totally unique and enveloping and to-be-remembered, and I'll have to rush to my room to take notes on the variations of color, the tactile feel on the bottoms of my feet, and the almost-smell of the dryness of the surface contrasted with the wetness of the interior; the SHALLOW STREAM through which I wade at the side of the road I'm crossing harbors a graded size-range of fish that flee from my crossing: smaller on the left, tinged with bright orange on the left side, increasing in size, decreasing in number as my eye moves to the right, through a phalanx of larger and larger fish either swimming through a rainbow of colored themselves as a rainbow, from orange to pale pink to an intermediate gray to a light greenish blue to a distinct, unbroken blue on the far right, where the fish have increased in size from a dozen of a few inches on the left to only a few of about a foot on the right. The water is slightly opaque from the rippling of the current and the speed of their flight from my approach, but their presence is startling and unmistakable, and again I feel that I must note the vividness of their colors and shapes. I enter our cabin to hear what at first I think to be a phone ringing, but the buzz is constant, and I look at an array of three or four alarm clocks on a desk, and one is slightly vibrating, so it must be the one ringing at noon, and I wonder why John, who doesn't seem to be here, would have set the alarm for that time. I press on the white bar at the top, and the sound stops only very gradually, rather than all at once. I look into two or three bedrooms around the central entrance hall, but they're all empty. Previously, I'm been on a sort of veranda full of young men at tables: groups of three or four in earnest conversation, singles looking longingly at singles at the next table who are in turn looking farther along the line of tables at other singles at sequential tables. I envy those who have someone to talk with and sympathize with those who are looking for someone with whom to have a conversation. Many of the men are shirtless, but though they're bulky, they don't, any of them, seem to have pleasingly attractive musculature. Their lower legs are bare under shorts, but they're slender rather than bulky with appealing definition. The shorts are baggy, and some are wet as if they may have been in water recently. Maybe the conference is about writing, since everyone seems to have a notebook in front of them, though few appear to be actually writing. I know I have to write for my own purposes, whatever the purpose of our gathering. This may be connected with my recent planning for a week in Martha's Vineyard, thoughts of leisurely walks on the beach, time alone for writing, little contact with the people there aside from the Isensteins, hopefully perfect weather.

SUNDAY, 4/18/10: 1) 3:45AM: I'm the last to leave the VERY security-conscious Chinese Embassy in NYC, and make my way toward the door AFTER the 6PM deadline with a copy of a magazine like Scientific American in my hand. 2) 7:30AM: I've moved into a large apartment, walls newly enameled, but the SINKS need to be scrubbed for encrusted dirt. Odd half-floor zigzag layout. Also PILES of kids' cartoon books on table, and "restricted" "500" book has to be entered in the library catalog.

MONDAY, 4/19/10: 5:35AM: I'm playing an annoying game of Scrabble with a braggart who scores over 530 and I'm trying to use "pettit," and someone annoys him by observing that he has no vowels among his three last tiles, and I'm about to go out. I use odd tricks to count (unknown) items by "looking along a comb" (to count the teeth) and "sighting down avenues" (to align the items that I'm trying to count).

THURSDAY, 4/22/10: 1) 8:10AM: I'm visiting a very elegant English estate, and the guides announce that "We're going to the Poindexters," and we're on busses to another castle. I'm also indexing a book on "my life." 2) 10AM: I'm in a LONG line waiting to get into an orgy.

FRIDAY, 4/23/10: 7:42AM: Dream of "created funerals" as a art exhibit.

SATURDAY, 4/24/10: 6:40AM: Dream of a "code" that releases me from a submarine that will sink as I escape from it.

SUNDAY, 4/25/10: 7AM: I'm sitting in a tub of warm water and just can't hold in my shit; feel it rolling out of me in oily globules that gather in the back of the tub, but then roll forward under the force of gravity, so that I can scoop up handsful of turds and drip them into the toilet, again and again, swishing my hand back and forth in the toilet to try to clean it off. Thank goodness there's no smell in the dream.

MONDAY, 4/26/10: 1) 5:23AM: Dream of pasting photos from a continuous strip down the right-margin white space of a book, and hearing from my approving boss that "There are more pictures in this version." That makes me feel good. I'm adding poems in white space left at the bottom of a page, too. 2) 7:35AM: Dream of a Chinese pair A) asking for futon-bag, B) watching boy/woman divers, and C) stripping shoes so I'll think to STEAL new ones from them or I'll scream the place down. I feel, during and after the dream, "not like me."

TUESDAY, 4/27/10: 1) 2:06AM: Huge stage forces are being directed to sing in praise at Christmas as Christ is being born. 2) 5:10AM: Praxitelean body stands next to me, listening to reports from a group in a circle, his head against mine, his hand on my shoulder, and I'm in heaven.

THURSDAY, 4/29/10: 8:28AM: I believe I slept THROUGH from 12:21AM! Now to try to capture a multi-episode "travel" extravaganza: I'm visiting somewhere like India, where every landscape is filled with people who seem to be waiting for a parade to pass. First we're on a hillside, where I think that mobs of people silhouetted against the sky at the top of the hill, moving upward from right to left, might be part of the parade, but they're just trying to get into a position to see the parade: people we pass now seem to be looking DOWN, and we look down to see fragments of a road (like we saw fragments of the Colorado River in some of the Grand Canyon slides on Tuesday) where the parade is expected to pass. Then we enter some kind of building where a doubled-back line is waiting in a kind of hallway-verandah, and I realize we've entered into the line itself, but when we try to move out of the way, we find ourselves at the end of the verandah, looking up a hill toward a crossroads which seems crucial to the entire parade, because some segments are coming up the road to the right, but rather than turning left and coming down the road along the verandah, they continue straight, heading toward a kind of rest area out of sight way off to our left; other segments, including very fine horsepeople on magnificent stallions with silkily flowing manes, turn to their left, heading directly toward us, and I wish I had my camera out, at last wanting to have a photographic record of this extraordinary parade; still other segments, huge masses of students or soldiers or workers, turn to their right toward an enormous government-looking building down the road in that direction; yet again OTHER segments seem to ORIGINATE in that building, coming straight down from it to pass us closely. Some horses carry two or three riders, including a young man who I take to be some kind of prince who lolls back in his enormous saddle as if this were the most boring exercise in the world. Suddenly I wonder where my bag, with my camera, is, but I'm quickly lulled into thinking that everything's where it should be. Then, without transition, WE seem to be part of the parade, walking slightly downward on a road that forks to lead to two enormous palaces which at first seem to be in different phases of ruination, but then, on closer study, the one on the left seems to have been partly restored, with polished surfaces on some of the statuary and facades that are quite strikingly original in design, and for a moment I think that the buildings are IDENTICAL, until I notice that some of the statues, of Monkey Kings or human dignitaries, are facing in slightly different directions, some looking straight out, some turned only a few degrees to the left or right. The people I'm with change through the dream, starting with a native child who may be my guide, changing to a traveling companion or companions, changing into others who may have attached themselves to me as I move from vantage point to vantage point along the route of this variegated panorama of individuals and groups moving in different directions along this intricate parade passage. The whole dream seems to take hours to elapse.

FRIDAY, 4/30/10: 8:58AM: 1) 4:23AM: I tell another dentist about my loose tooth, seeing if I can have a Saturday appointment for him to look at it, and then remember that it should be DiMatteo who fixes it. 2) I throw ten "wishing cards" into a pool for "house or home," and another ten for "health," and then keep all of them in a box with labels, hoping that the effectiveness will wear off in a day. 3) 6:40AM: I'm leaving a kind of summer camp, and one of the objects in my cabin is an enormous plastic bag filled with sand, also containing a gigantic rock; the whole thing weighs maybe 40 pounds (a little more than the 33-pound bag of paper I took downstairs two days ago). I'm quite sure I left it under a table in my room, but when I look it isn't there, so I assume I moved it temporarily to one of John's rooms in the next cabin, and I go over to search both cabins thoroughly, but can't find it (rather like my searching all four pockets ENDLESSLY last night, among all the papers and booklets, looking for my subway card) in either of his rooms, so I figure it MUST still be in my room, and go back to see it and decide to leave it for the next person to throw out. When I relate this story on a packed charabanc leaving the camp, three or four people in the row behind me start laughing behind their cupped hands over their mouths, and one of the girls says something about "meeting at midnight for some other trick to be played." 8:20AM: 4) A vague party with many men isn't intended to be a gay party, but under a blanket a rather attractive younger man is lying with his genitals exposed on top of mine, and I make a point of stroking them so that they're erect, but he leaves and moves on to someone else without making any comment at all. 5) I'm sitting outside, seemingly at this same camp, and a gentle rain starts, so I just pull up my rainhat and look down at my shoes in a deepening puddle, figuring that everything can dry out OK overnight, maybe like my trip upcoming?

SATURDAY, 5/1/10: 7:38AM: 1) My camera won't work. 2) I'm mowing a huge (closely clipped) lawn, and move into areas where the mower is completely underwater. 3) I'm at a convention with my camera, not recognizing former acquaintances, taking off heavy frame on the bottom of the camera, then adding an awkward tripod.

SUNDAY, 5/2/10: 1) 4:30AM: I get a roommate, like the guy below me at 167 Hicks, who takes the window-corner for his bed and pushes it against the closed single-drape window, which will allow lots of morning light into the apartment. And he turns on the TV loud, which is at the foot of my bed, rather far from his bed to my left, and when I get up to complain, he's put a SCREEN across the room between him and the TV, and he's shut it off. Then, from behind the screen, I hear him complaining about "the guy on the wall," and I fear he might be a psycho! 2) 7:45AM: Spartacus is giving an odd, prerecorded-sounding, tour to two of us where seem to be going to have sex in a large bathroom, and I'm concerned that there's no partitions to close us off from the larger area that contains maybe a half-dozen toilets.

TUESDAY, 5/4/10: 6:41AM: A psychotic worker is trying to kill co-workers, including me; we have to talk him out of it, befriend him, distract him, in dark.

SUNDAY, 5/09/10: 9AM: Incredible, endless dream from 6:32AM of being magically transported through foreign streets, not in a vehicle, but seemingly TELEPORTED along highways and byways, through marketplaces and shopping malls, swerving near groups of people and intermingling with automobiles, rickshaws, busses, and taxis as people barely notice my passing by, or gently move out of the way so as not to hinder my progress. I look at buildings, highway intersections, groups of children playing outside schools, tour groups clustered about their leaders, political rallies, demonstrations, businessmen with their briefcases, families on outings, business meetings in outdoor cafes, drunks clustered outside bars, dogs and cats and police and thieves and beggars and wealthy moguls entering and leaving their limousines. Neighborhoods vary from elegant suburbs to crowded city centers to slums to shopping malls---a whirlwind tour through every possible outdoor environment, and I sit imperturbably observing, hardly needing to turn my head as my invisible conveyance orients me to take in the most interesting sights of the thousands that I pass each half-hour of my tour that seems to take hours with any sign of slow-down or fatigue on my part. Part idealized touring, part travelogue, part fantasy of seeing everything without being inconvenienced by any physical constraint of crowd penetration, access privilege, or official permission to enter and pass through. At the end, somehow, I've encountered a rain-wet Joe Easter that I am somehow obliged to dry off through a continuation of this traversal of international city streets, and variations come and go too quickly to even be noted. Almost a fever-dream, or an inebriated paranormal junket without regard to physical limitations, possibly facilitated by too many valiums in the past twenty-four hours---maybe as many as three? Difficult to capture, but memorable in retrospect, I finish this at 9:11AM, ready for breakfast with the Sunday Times and then proofreading Ireland to get to Marj at 11AM.

MONDAY, 5/10/10: 7:04AM: Details fuzzy now, but it involved an exclusive meeting, maybe for dinner, in a fancy place where I was slightly out of kilter with the general elegance of the occasion: maybe someone made a suggestion that I could be acting in a different way, or eating in a more refined way, or that I should have dressed slightly more normally. But, sadly, the details are gone.

FIVE STANS DREAMS

THURSDAY, 5/13/10: 1) 1:19AM: I'm in a kind of television-writing contest where I'm supposed to string together quotes from the ends of reviews into a continuous story with multiple punchlines. Details unclear. 2) 3:43AM: I'm at an incredible party with VERY strange people, including a woman who seems interested in me sexually, but she's so strange, and brings along such weird people, that I sort of brush her off by saying, "Later." Many odd interactions with people who are almost insects, or alien creatures, and yet it's all so thoroughly dreamlike that I never actually feel threatened. One important episode is totally forgotten.

FRIDAY, 5/14/10: 1) 1:06AM: THINK I'd woken before, but was too lazy to get up to type dream, but the memory said it was at 1:15AM, so it couldn't be. Anyway, my dream involved a young Spanish guy trying to date someone, and he had to make out five clues, but he misinterpreted one of the answers and missed a crucial MIDDLE name, and when THAT was filled in, everyone was very happy because he had essentially won the contest. 2) 4:10AM: I'm preparing to go out to an orgy, so I put on old shoes even though I'm dressed rather elegantly, maybe even with a suit jacket. Before I leave, I check in on the three children I'm taking care of, and find that a 6-year-old Rita has opened a can of oily tuna and is eating out of it with a fork, and two younger kids appear to be enjoying whatever slop they're eating, and I'm tempted to ask who organized the menu, but see that they look at me with contentment, even knowing they're going to be left alone, so I prepare to leave feeling satisfied that they're well-enough tended for.

SATURDAY, 5/15/10: 1) 12:40AM: I'm trying a strange way to analyze John and then Sherryl by dialing a telephone number in a particular way to make them react in a specific manner to change the way they would ordinarily act. It takes about three different calls to John to make him realize what he should be doing instead of what he usually ACTUALLY does, but it finally works. And it works so well that Sherryl, when I try the FIRST "misdirected" phone number with her, answers in the perfectly cured manner both of us have been hoping for, and our success is so immediately obvious that we both experience an exultant feeling of happiness at our success, and I wake feeling triumphant. 2) 4:09AM: a) fragment of ending a story in a surprising way. b) writing an entire short story---no, HAVING WRITTEN a two-page short story, I finish it with a third page which gives such an extraordinary twist that I'm sure if I sent it to "The New Yorker," it'd be published in an instant and would be the beginning of my notoriety as a writer: plot involving two lovers having a knock-down, drag-out fight, all melodrama, and ending with a tranquil ending which is the ending of their relationship, but also operating at ANOTHER level as a wonderful metaphor for life, or death, or something equally powerful, but of course the whole thing is gone now. As I type, the light goes off in the bathroom, and a moment later I hear, through my earplugs, Richard's mumbled apology, as the light is turned back on. What WAS the story? A woman invalid in a wheelchair with Alzheimer's (which doesn't sound quite right to start with)? A loving argument that ends in dissolution was the absolute core, but what the "doubleness" consisted of I have no idea. The richness of my dream life contrasts with the poverty of my recollecting and recording it.

SUNDAY, 5/16/10: 1) 1:11AM: I'm teaching a class of young students (school on the trip yesterday?) how to grow plants, nurture them, vitalize them, even how to out-compete other plants for light or moisture, to see which type wins with what kind of strategy. See this as a metaphor for actual student success, and success of a teacher in teaching, and any good result is a real winning triumph. 2) 4:26AM: I have sets of videotapes with different segments that seem to be "pro" and "con" a TV series or a new movie, and I'm busily playing each videotape in order to make ONE tape of the "pro" segments and a SECOND tape of the "con" segments, and am happy about my progress in my self-appointed task. Other details overshadowed by my chat with Richard before getting up to record the dream.

MONDAY, 5/17/10: 1:50AM: I'm going through a list of things I have to do on TV, and am just about to start on the last page, which sounds like another dream I recently had. Then I'm scrubbing a frying pan that some guest of mine (very like Richard Thomas) had used in my apartment and I thought was clean, but I have to scrub the outside to remove some cooking char from the outside edge, and particularly a crust on the very rim: the remnant of something like a scrambled egg.

TUESDAY, 5/18/10: 1) 12:02AM: I'm looking at a series of artworks that involve elements of wood, glass, steel, and other objects that form patterns identified by titles like "Line A leads to Glass B that surrounds Area C that ends with Stick D." Some pieces are quite enigmatic in how they connect, sometimes below the surface of the artwork itself. 2) 5:25AM: Vaguely sexual content which I forget the details of. 3) 9:26AM: I'm in New York, but somehow still involved in this trip. Rather like the possibility of my joining Richard when Michel sends a car for lunch at 12:45PM, Ken Levin is asked if he wants to join me for a two-hour special performance of some famous director's production of "Hamlet" at the New York Gay Center. He's not sure, and will let me know later. I should have brought a copy of my play that I wanted to leave with Barbara (I want to say Boxer, but I know that's not her surname [Kahn is]), the playwright, but I don't have it with me, yet I'll be home between now, about noon, and 2PM, when the play starts, so I can leave it with her. I prowl a few levels in the basement trying to find her, but can't. Then George Pierson, who stands in for Michel, appears, and is surprised to see me out of bed, since I'd phoned to say that I wouldn't be going on today's tour. I say, "Well, let me try to convince you that it's not as strange as it seems," thinking to convey the analogy that I HAD been interested in the possibility of an opera tonight, in Tashkent, if in fact there was one, but which Michel said there wasn't. Interesting that I hadn't thought before that Michel has the same chinless sincerity as George Pierson.

WEDNESDAY, 5/19/10: 1) 2AM: VERY sensual dream in which I was getting into jerking off, but woke to find myself sharing a room with Richard and needing to wait. 2) 5:20AM: I'm training someone to be a Master of Ceremonies for an award program (maybe based on the English-speaking crowd in front of the Opera House when we went to dinner last night), and I encourage him to speak loudly and with grand gestures. He manages to start improving, and I say he'll be just fine!

THURSDAY, 5/20/10: 5:15AM: I'm preparing for a marathon series of London play productions, the first of which starts at 11PM, and we seem to be ready for it. I quickly calculate that it should be over by 2AM, certainly, which will give us enough time to get to the second production that's scheduled to start at 2:30AM. I'm impressed that we're invited to both of these since, because of their unusual starting times, they must be some kind of festival presentation for which it must be very difficult to get tickets. Our seats for the first production are at the very sides of the first few rows, which will make the viewing of the play somewhat skewed, but the second set of seats is farther back, and someone quotes a famous playwright, like Noel Coward, who said that NO one should be seated any closer than the tenth row to view a play. I rather question that, saying that I liked a previous play from the third or fourth row where I could see the slightest change in the actors' expressions, but I knew that I often had rather strange opinions.

FRIDAY, 5/21/10: 1) 2:10AM: In a sort of quiz program, clues and progress are indicated by code numbers like 24CZ and 15QT, and these should be put into an order of importance before the questions can be answered. I feel confident that I can solve the problems. 2) 6:14AM: A group of us are on a tour, and three guys in the back keep making out, but no one seems to pay any attention to them. At the end, one guy is being very leisurely sucked off, and I find it VERY erotic and wake, wishing not to be on the trip, and thinking a lot about NOT being on it.

SATURDAY, 5/22/10: 4:28AM: A bunch of kids, three of whom may be triplets, line up in a row to surprise a blind older relative, maybe an uncle, by calling to him from a row so that he's not exactly sure who is who, until one calls him from the side and runs toward him, so the uncle can call out the person's proper name and greet him individually. I think it's a rather strange trick to play, but it's done with a lot of affection.

MONDAY, 5/24/10: 1:30AM: Pee and can't remember a dream to type. 6:05AM: Recall a dream from before: I'm sitting in a kind of meeting room with a group having a session involving the telling of travel tales, or reporting on scientific studies, or some similar "club" type activity. The room is set up in a particular way: the people are sitting on sofas, maybe ten people sharing three sofas, rather like our current trip group. That was the first dream. The second dream involved the same room, but with much of the furniture removed, and some special exhibits set up in large display cases. One particular glass enclosure contained an amorphous substance, like a big cotton-stuffed animal, whose form was partly hidden by the enclosure itself, so that it was difficult to determine whether it was an enormous panda bear, as was displayed outside some of the buildings during the tour yesterday here in Bukhara, or some new micro-organism expanded to enormous size so that its structure could be studied in detail. Then the glass enclosure seemed to disappear, so that people could reach inside and interact with it, and the creature evolved into what looked like two enormous fur gloves that comprised two symmetric lobes of some mysterious entity. But when someone poked one of the "gloves" a bit too hard, a human head suddenly appeared from the left side of the enclosure, and it became apparent that this person was ANIMATING this creature with these huge gloves on his hands, and that we had inadvertently revealed the mechanism of this display. Having solved the mystery of the creature in the enclosure, the participants in the meeting turned to other topics of less interest and I woke.

TUESDAY, 5/25/10: 1) 1:10AM: Noted prior dream from 11:52PM: I had to enter the numbers 33333333 77777777777 555 twice in order to get two stamps that I needed. Tried very hard to concentrate, but found it difficult to enter exactly the correct number of a digit before starting on the next digit. NOW wonder when I'm going to come to the end of file 8! 2) 4:53AM: Two dream cycles, of which this is the first: I'd actually thought of making it a new file 6, to be developed into a TV series, but then the second dream cycle minimized the importance of the first, which concerned a group of young, probably gay, men starting an enterprise like a publishing company, starting with the first episode of two characters coming into large sums of money and trying to figure what to do with them (rather like the owner of Sacha and Sons making HIS hotel bigger and bigger as "we got so much money we had to figure what to do with it"). In the second episode the foundations of the company were laid; in the third the purposes of the company were delineated; in the fourth there was a decidedly gay element as members realized they had to face an either primarily heterosexual or homosexual orientation; in the fifth the expansion into the rest of the house (they'd started with a dilapidated stand-alone building, purchasing only the parlor floor, but then it seemed reasonable to get the ground floor for a series of offices, leaving the parlor floor for a sort of centralized newsroom, and then the third floor and attic could be used for living quarters or more offices as the direction of the growth of the company indicated. In the recollection of the richness of the development of the first cycle, the differentiation of character was very important: background, origins of relationships, family history, prior experiences, but then the second cycle seemed to involve, I guess, four of the central characters in a totally different context. 3) 5:01AM: The final tableau rather synthesized the theme of the relationships: I, as the central character, was left standing with a triangle of three characters at my feet: a seemingly unattainably handsome young man who, it seems, had been seduced by someone very like Carl Spring, with his supreme confidence in his technique of opening up the most closeted of characters. The third of the recumbent triangle remains hazy, maybe taking the position of an outside narrator, or observer, someone like Charles who wouldn't be so active sexually but would be the sounding board for all the others' concerns and problems. We'd gotten into the "final tableau" after a complicated evening of meeting and trying to sort out incipient relationships, but then it resolved the next morning as we seemed to be walking through a suburb toward the building that was the subject of the first cycle, as if these four were characters drawn from that first dream, with their stations in the house predetermined from the first dream and not open to debate, though of course the new, handsome, character was an addition to the cast. I was jealous of Carl for having seduced the beauty, as had been my habit, and yet Carl was still, in a sense, centrally interested still only in me, yet needing his digressions and diversions. In the dream the characters and situations had a glowing possibility which has since evaporated on waking, with my struggle to set down the framework of both dream cycles. Now I sit on the john, at 5:08AM.

WEDNESDAY, 5/26/10: 1) 2:19AM: I'm talking to a confederate in my plan to go through time to influence the future me to do something important, and she reveals that this is a critical time, because the MOVING day in which I'm operating BEHIND the "to-be-influenced" me is about to BECOME the SAME day, separated by HOURS, rather than DAYS, and the "mechanism" of my more-rapid travel has to change because of that fact. I remark that the movies I've seen on this subject always GLOSS OVER, or even IGNORE, the most important moment of actual CONTACT of both times, and I'm very much looking forward (HA!) to see how this moment ACTUALLY operates. Wake before it happens, as it is said that everyone wakes before he DIES in a dream. 2) 6:45AM: Something about attaining a new kind of Nirvana in three steps: concentrating a zero in the mind, doing something specific up one side of the body, and doing something else down the other side of the body. No need for explaining why this was so wonderful: when it worked, you knew it, and knew that there was nothing else like it: the learning of it was forever worthwhile. A leader seemed to be vaguely associated with it, but the details are unclear.

THURSDAY, 5/27/10: 1) 3:50AM: I respond to an e-mail from an organization like Village Playwrights, and Kevin Brofsky wants me for the leading part in a play that he's written. I'm considering it when he announces that the production will be put on in New Jersey! I can't quite picture myself commuting all that distance two or three times a weekend just for a play that I don't particularly want to do in the first place, but then I think it WILL be something to start off my theatrical bibliography. But, on a bus on the way home, I think of calling him and backing out of the part. However, he'd tried a number of people before he got to me, and he doesn't have much time left, and I don't want to disappoint him, but then I recall that I don't even know how MANY performances there will be: maybe it's only ONE weekend? Then I think, very vaguely, that it might conflict with Census work that I might be getting, and wake with the issue unresolved. Lots unresolved now that it's getting close to my return to NYC after 22 days away. 2) 5:37AM: I'm on a flight in a small plane to the southern part of India, coming in very low on landing, and the plane pulls up on a patch of grass just before a small cement abutment. I'm off the plane, following Ken, into a crowded terminal where people seem to be getting on just any bus to take them to another, more central, terminal. I hope there's no fare on the bus, because I have no local currency. The front of the bus is jammed with people, and I can't find Ken, so I push aside a curtain and there's a large, mostly empty, back area with a few tired people stretched out across several seats, and some guy, who might be familiar but I'm not sure, addresses me in a cryptic way; I don't know how to respond, so I just ignore him, completely at a loss as to where I am or where I'm going.

Continuation of THURSDAY, 5/27/10: 11:16PM: I'm in a sort of back yard; maybe, in my imagination, in Dennis's back yard in San Diego, and I want to get naked, so I take off my shirt and pants and shorts and throw them onto a chair, and feel myself getting hard. Dennis comes up behind me, taps me on the tops of either shoulder, and lubricates the sides of his penis which he begins to slide up and down the sides of my legs from behind, and it feels very good when I wake up and crawl out of bed to go pee and type this to 11:19PM.

FRIDAY, 5/28/10: 1) 5:16AM: Vaguely remembered dream, clearly taking place in England, where veddy posh people are speaking in very proper ways to each other, trying to do their VERY best in making the MOST elegant impression on everyone else. 2) 5:17AM: Better remembered fragment, probably with the same class of people as in the first dream: I'm hiding behind a tree that I thought wouldn't TOTALLY hide me, but I step toward the path and find that the trunk is VERY thick, so I'll be completely hidden until I hear them coming level with me, when I can't decide if I'll just SCREAM and jump out at them to give them maximum fright, or if I'll do something more SUBTLE, like appearing to have been killed, and let their terror be more subjective than objective. But I can't quite hang myself from the tree, which would be the best way, nor can I just "fall down dead" at their feet, so what WILL I do? Wake before I decide.

SATURDAY, 5/29/10: 2:02AM: I'm trying to lower a door from a second-floor landing to the ground by tying a cord around the top of the door, hooking it around a board nailed to the door itself, and then lowering it to someone waiting below. Mom is commenting about the way I'm doing it, and I'm trying to convince her that I'd done it this way before and it had worked fine, so she shouldn't worry about it this time.

SUNDAY, 5/30/10: 12:35AM: Leonard Bernstein is VERY upset because he's forgotten some little detail about how to conduct a guest performance, and, as if I'm making a kind of public-relations statement, I insist that he's very sorry he's not been appointed to a permanent conductor's job for too many months, and he's really beginning to feel that he's getting out of practice.

MONDAY, 5/31/10: 5:35AM: I'm working in an IBM-type office where there's intense competition, and I think I may have even been fired, but the main thrust concerns a group of people who can become superheroes by taking a certain pill, except that if (somehow) they ALL take the pill, the effects are nullified. Various kinds of strategies are being used, which get more and more complicated, and the penultimate result is that the "bad" people gain superpowers without getting the fabulous muscularity of the comic-book characters, but they're provoked by the "good" people until the "bad," somehow united in a Wonder Woman-type of female, are conned into ALL taking the pill, which causes this female to "sink below the frame of the picture" in the dream, and come up covered with slime, saying, "You actually suckered me that time," because she doesn't have superpowers anymore, and the "bad" guys have lost and the "good" guys have won, but I'm denied my erotic charge of seeing all these bodies in their maximum muscularity---one of the odder sexual-suppression dreams I've had.

TUESDAY, 6/1/10: 1:43AM: I'm photographing an invitation to a guest speaker at a town event in its central park: on the left is the edge of the sign for the "Gigs and Galleons" restaurant, with a colored shield where one representative of our group will be selling souvenirs; in the middle is the main door to the theater where our show will be presented, with a double-shield indicating where two representatives will be posted; on the right is another distinctive sign, with another colorful crest at the station of the fourth sales representative. Everyone agrees this photograph makes an effective invitation to the townsfolk AND a guideline for the guest speaker to locate where we'll be. The four crests are colorful, like the 60s-90s French stamps depicting the coats of arms of different provinces. The background is mostly gold lamé fabric, so the appearance in general is very rich and medieval.

WEDNESDAY, 6/2/10: 1) 3:30AM: Fragment about groups of townspeople smashing rifles against boulders to prevent warfare. 2) 7:17AM: Fragment of tourists in North Africa going from gate to gate to find a particular entrance to a walled town.

SATURDAY, 6/5/10: 1) 4:15AM: I'm being given a tour through small towns in England by a middle-aged lady I barely know, but we seem to be getting along very well. We stop at a sort of shop for breakfast, and the custom seems to be you just take what you want onto a plate and eat it and pay for it later. Then we stop at a second shop that specializes in cooked fruit in light syrup, and I knock a bowl of fruit off a low stand, slopping about half its contents onto the floor. I say something like, "Oh, drat," and start cleaning up the mess, leaving stuff in the bowl which hadn't slopped out, and putting the dirtied stuff from the floor into my serving dish so that I can throw it out later. All this in a very civilized, upper-crust sort of way which seems very English. 2) 5:56AM: Continuing with the motif of eating breakfast in England, now I've stopped with a very soft-spoken MAN at ANOTHER breakfast place where items of food are displayed on tables around the room, and his emphasis seems to be on reserving a place to SIT on a series of benches, while I can't figure out why he wouldn't want a place at a TABLE. I look over some servings of chicken, but people seem to have chopped off all the good bits from legs and breasts and left only skin and gristle and oddments of meat too small to bother to cut off. I notice deep-fried filets of fish, so I ask a waiter for one of those, and he seems to jot it down and forget about me. I select a few items, turning over a burnt-looking piece of ham which seems mostly fat, but locate some tasty bits on the underside which I cut off and eat. At one point, people at my table cluster closer and ask my opinion about Obama and someone else, and I try to not go overboard with my response. Then a waiter comes out of the kitchen in the distance, and asks, "Plaice?" and I figure it's my fish, so I say, "Over here," and he comes over with an ENORMOUS fried filet, suitable for at least three servings, and I don't know what I'm to do with it, but then he just cuts off a bit from the middle, adds a bit of what might be cherry sauce on the top, and serves me that. Then I look at my friend, aghast, and say, "I haven't converted any dollars into pounds yet; we have to find a bank." He agrees, but doesn't seem very concerned. A moment later, I say, "Wait a minute; someone before asked for $12 and I just gave them THAT---do they accept dollars here?" And there's sort of agreement that both currencies are in use, but I have to admit, when asked, that most Americans in New York certainly would NOT accept pounds from a British tourist.

SUNDAY, 6/6/10: 7AM: I'm visiting Inuit towns in the far north of Canada, where no one seems to speak English (except at the very end, when a woman who's clearly not an Inuit speaks perfect English, but I don't have the nerve to ask her where she's from), but they chatter among themselves like children when I try to communicate simple words to them. At the end, I'm trying to take a picture from a kind of balcony, and someone behind me utters a perfect "Sir" to get me to stand aside so SHE can get the same picture. I resist snapping back at her.

MONDAY, 6/7/10: 1) 1:01AM: Either I'm in a family that has just bought a large British manor house, or I'm watching some Masterpiece Theater program, but, with the advertisement of a yard-good sale, everyone is looking at the curtains high in enormous windows, and we're wondering how many need to be replaced, and what the dimensions of the curtains would need to be, and just how we want the place to look. It seems very complicated, and maybe at some level I'm hoping there's someone whose job it is to take care of such things, because certainly I don't want to have to make all these decisions for such an enormous property, which would involve staggering amounts of money: the amount of which we can command is totally unknown. 2) 6:15AM: I'm on a cruise ship of extraordinary size, and the scope the dream, in both time and area, is phenomenal. In a core sequence, I'm chatting with a crew member and a passenger at a table in the "pool" area, and I glance up at the horizon to see an outstanding potential photograph: we're passing a snow-capped mountain that's vignetted in a wreath of clouds, and the angle of the sun is such that there is a solar spotlight on the peak: this would make a truly memorable photograph, and I don't have my camera! I think to rush to my cabin, 367, to get my camera, but have absolutely no idea how to get there from here: the "pool" area is situated in a valley in a forest that is actually all on the ship itself. Earlier, I'd asked for a plan of the decks of the ship, so I could get around (first asking a catatonic passenger in a lounge who just stared blankly back at me when I confused her for an information source), and was handed a complexly folded sheet that seemed to show that my cabin was on a hallway that sort of dead-ended, deep in the ship, at one of the walls of the "pool" area, but there was no real way to get easily from the "pool" to my cabin. I had to climb out of the valley---when I tried moving laterally, I encountered a warren of kitchen areas, and at one point noticed that one of the waiters had his blind younger brother, about seven years old, clinging to his elbow, following him around as if in the position of an apprentice in training to be a waiter---and I would have to climb to the lower summits of some of the forested "walls" of the "pool" area, and make my way to some other area, and only THEN get to the deck on which my cabin was situated. By that time the mountain, sun, and photo would have long passed from view. I was left aghast at the SIZE of the ship and the complexity involved in negotiating the path between two points on it. 3) 6:46PM: I'm visiting a vaguely military installation on a large island very far away, and a group of us get into some sort of special vehicle to be taken to a special lunch in an enormous dining room which has been dug into a white substrate of the island. We talk to the architect, who insisted that the decor be kept as plain and impressive as possible, not gussied up with decorations to take away from the sheer size of the excavation. I'm sitting at a table, surprised that I know someone there, and then a group that I'd known from New York, maybe from an organization like Actualism, comes in, and I figure everyone will be surprised that I know them, but they know OTHER people there, too, so my unique knowledge isn't special anymore, and I'm disappointed. But I try not to show it.