Intricate Sardonic Rogueries, a Dream Diary

Intricate Sardonic Rogueries, a dream diary.

Covers the period 8-1-10 through 7-16-13

Introduction

My method involved keeping a spiral-bound notebook on my bedside table in which I wrote down the dreams immediately after waking up.  I only recorded dreams that I could remember with a fair degree of clarity.  In writing down the dreams I indulged in no editorializing: the dreams are recorded as I remembered them with nothing added of a judgmental nature.  I have added footnotes to clarify who the people referenced are and to comment on the elements within the dreams.  A strange thing about these dreams is that although I could remember them well enough to write them down on awaking, I found that I forgot them totally during the course of the day.  I did not read any of the entries until after I had completely filled the notebook.

Bonnie[1] and I moved to a small island.  While shopping for books we ran into another couple whose daughter was, like ours, in show business.  Enmity sprang up.  To show our goodwill, we had a friendly contest in a feed store.  Tragedy was narrowly averted when the opposing father fell through the grating to the floor below.  They accused us of reneging on the goodwill.  Only sausages in the shape of a pentagram would suffice, but three flaming[2] over had to do the trick.

First I was an amazing nightclub performer.  I could swing from the ceiling while extemporizing fantastic nonsense.  I had two managers who were arranging big deals for me.  They went out to deal with some contracts and, as I didn’t want to be alone, they hired a semi-retarded black man to be my companion.  The two of us got into an attic and started messing about with the objects in there.  Neither of us knew what we were talking about and made up fantastic baby talk explanations and made wild pretenses at reading various captions.  There were children outside earlier, all poor, yet those living on the upper part of the (conundrum)[3] area felt superior to those below.  In attempting to climb to the attic they threw things down and killed or demolished some of the children in a doll-like way.   Earlier[4], in the first of my nightclub appearances, (which wasn’t planned, that is, I just started doing it without permission) I antagonized Frank Sinatra.  I mentioned that I didn’t eat meat to the crowd and they didn’t like that.   I felt bad later that some of my money was going to come from cigarette sales, but I decided to take it anyway.  I woke up crying from the 2cd half of the dream because it was somehow evocative of my deepest childhood attempts at explaining things.[5]

Ron Wood, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger and company are traveling through a wilderness contained within an enormous wrecked ocean liner.  On Ron’s birthday they reach their terminus, the blocked doors at the fore of the boat.  Keith makes a cryptic remark to Ron intended to indicate that the latter is now truly a member of the band.  A tour is starting in a few weeks and they must all make their way out of the boat.

A sea captain, in charge of a ship shaped like a bottle, is found guilty of dereliction of duty.  The ship is a cubical bottle of whiskey.  He drank it all and the ship foundered.  He loses everything, stripped of his pension and his property.  He is the ship, wearing it like a suit.

Took my guitar in for repairs.  There was some kind of complex problem with two of the strings.  The guy behind the counter (I had avoided talking to Mike Brownlow[6]) asked me incredulously, “You make a living at this?”  As I awoke I took more conscious control over the dream[7] and began to sing to the store employees as I played the guitar.  I sang like Johnny Cash so my normal singing voice wouldn’t put them off.

         

Woman at the deli counter took forever to make a biscotti sandwich for me.  When she finished, I took my canvas down from the wall to take it home, only to find that the top stretcher had cracked.

Ash family get-together, me attending on my lunch break.  My mother was there.  My grandfather was dead, but my grandmother was not.  Although I think she was my mother as well.  I loaded up on a corn and mixed vegetable dish and spun around on a chair for everyone’s amusement.  On my way out I swiped a large cake.  Driving back to work I nearly ran over a raccoon and was passed by two guys on bicycles delivering a gigantic pizza.

A family of Persian or Arabian royals whose men wore detachable moustaches.  Famous moustache men discuss the finest of all detachable moustaches.  The Persian family’s house was very modern.

An old girlfriend[8], with a PhD, discusses her research into losing weight the Indian way, through the magic of wearing scarves and fanciful topknots.  This was preceded by watching some obese women claw and flip their way through barbed wire on a hillside ruin in need of renovation.

I was asking trivia questions of a crowd of people about past Kiss lineups.  To the winners I gave 25¢ each.

I was traveling with a small group of people over rough terrain to some place.  There were people who were a part of my personal group and some whom we had picked up incidentally.  We reached a point where the extra people demanded to know our doctrinal stance before proceeding further.  I beat up a couple of them and let them know they would not receive my help in reaching our destination if they didn’t shut up.

Bonnie and I went to a large estate sale.  It seems to have been held in the old gym in Arnoldsville.  It was hot, so I encouraged her and the kids[9] to cut in line (which was long) and come with me to the untouched rooms in the back, piled with stuff.  I found a violin made of cloth and a case full of some other stuff.  I wanted to get out without paying, but Bonnie didn’t think we could get away with it.  Later, in the car, I asked her how much the violin had cost.  She said twenty dollars.  I was upset about that.  It turned out, however, that we had to take the money to the sellers.  We drove to a tiny apartment where we paid Cindy Whittaker, Wayne’s mother.[10]  I stepped on some broken glass in the yard and got it stuck in my shoe.

While waiting for the next truck to come in at work[11] some youths entered the scene.  One of them, an attractive girl that I now realize looked like a girl I used to work with at Kroger, sat down next to me and began flirting with me.  We kissed and I tried to keep my lips together to prevent my bad breath from seeping out.  We made arrangements to meet later.  A truck came in and I said I had to go.  I stood up, put a breath strip in my mouth and gave her another kiss.  Then I was walking home, considering how violent the rest of her gang might be.  In the distance I could hear a band practicing.  They were a doom-laden stoner band of unbelievable, volcanic volume.  I began to feel sick, craving alcohol.  Earlier, in working the truck, which had items to be sorted all over its car-carrier type body, I had been slightly intoxicated, fearing that my reek of alcohol would be noticed.  Now, on the road, I began to have trouble walking. I was forced to crawl finally.  I was a half mile from my house.  A woman in a van pulled into the field across the street to observe me.  I was passing by an abandoned house with clothes strewn all over it.  I swore to myself that I would not drink and that I would spend the week drying out.

Somehow I stole a small toy vending machine from a grocery store.  In a parking lot somewhere I fished twenty dollars out of it.  I became scared and wiped my fingerprints off it.  I left it under a shirt and went to talk to my wife.  I told her about the theft, puzzling over how I was able to get away with it, as I could not remember the theft.  As I pondered what to do, we saw a report on TV about the crime of vending machine theft.

I gathered a couple of guys from work together and told them that the bomber who had been arrested in our facility was actually being held in a concrete cell buried beneath one of the dumpers on the conveyor belts.

I’m in an old store, debating the merits of 1800 versus 1900 and 2000.  I’m driving some old woman to tears by promising to ensure that some song reaches #1 by singing another song that goes “Nu-nu-nu-number 1, nu-nu-nu-number 2, nu-nu-nu-number 3.”  There is all kinds of old wooden crap in the store.  I’m making the kid with me laugh (Peter) with my song.  We are crazy.

I became excited at the prospect of an evening alone with a bag of pot.  Driving home carefully on a road full of young people in cars.

Bonnie and I were trying to find Maureen’s house.  We wound up at Steve and Stephanie’s[12] mansion.  We had a new baby.  I watched Stephanie shower from under a door.

Played guitar for my father.  He was amazed.

         

Comedy Central paid me and another actor to portray junior executives bouncing a basketball between us.  It was my birthday and I rode home in a car with a woman from Comedy Central who teased me about being fooled so easily and offered me banana chips before I got out at my parents old house on the hill.  Earlier, I watched a dirt model of Biblical lands fill with water.

I was working as a waiter in a restaurant where people could order video tapes of arguments I had had with previous customers.  Arthur Bastidas[13] was in the dream as a customer, although he looked more like Ted Gibson[14].  He and his wife were complaining that they hadn’t gotten a tape they ordered.

I killed a rattlesnake in a garage-workshop by cutting its head off with a shovel.  Earlier its tail had been cut off accidentally so I knew there was a snake somewhere in there.  I had to be careful and moved around by climbing and hovering.  Earlier I experienced a MASH episode in which MPs had come for one of the patients to take him to complete a geography test.  To keep the patient from being taken, a squat, dragon-like tank was constructed to frighten the MPs.  It was clumsily moved about the room on the tops of chairs or sawhorses, rocking back and forth.  Finally, Hawkeye offered a solution: what if the patient completed the test there, at the 4077^th?

Driving with some people, possibly family members, maybe co-workers, certainly family members later, through a trail out in the country.  Pick up a strange girl who later disappears.  As the woods give way to more open country we pass the ruins of ancient Negro churches, tiny things.  One at the end of the line is now a store selling Negro-made folk art.  We go in.  My father and mother scrupulously avoid each other.  Passing by the many leather goods I follow my mother to the toy section.  There is a snapping turtle behind an electric fence that some old man tries to make bite a piece of wire.  Earlier there was a long sofa for sale.  Kenny Jenkins[15] was sitting on it.  I sat down on the opposite side and he acted out an obscure scene from some Black comedy for our amusement.  I tried to play along, but no one got my jokes.  Earlier in the car I was doing Abe Vigoda in his Sal Tessio role from The Godfather.

I’m at a party.  It’s my house, apparently, because I have a studio in the basement.  There are young hippies laying about everywhere, all stoned, all over the yard, all over the floors of the house, upstairs and down.  Most are nude.  I’m on acid, but all I want to do is paint.  I’ve been up all night.  I go down to the studio where there are half-completed canvases set up all around.  A horror movie is playing on the large TV.  One girl asks me if I want some wine.  I say no, but I’ll take a large glass of water.  I then ask her if she wants to accompany me back upstairs.  She says no, she’s been awake 12 hours.  I turn the movie off and leave the room flooded with blue light from the TV.  Earlier I tried to park my car in the yard, but there were naked people lying in the grass everywhere.

Bonnie and I packed up our things after a trip.  There were several things that we bought or selected on the trip.  One of them was an LP featuring nine washed-up recording artists doing a song together called “Copa Mens.”  Eight of them played four 12-stringed guitars built extra long for people to play two men to a guitar while the other guy walked around and sang.  I could see the film of the performance as they played.  The room in which our packing took place was filled with 70’s merchandise.  This room was set up during a concert so that people could buy stuff related to the acts.  There was a box full of 8-tracks, different kinds for different makes of cars.  There were lots of albums that did not really exist, like unofficial best-ofs.

I and my partner were tracking a missing child.  We followed the trail to an apartment house where Phil Houser[16] and a woman were keeping the small boy.  The boy looked liked a miniature Phil and thought he was their son.  The address was something like 1486 Snow Leopard Court.  We made our presence known in the hallway before their apartment as they returned.  As my partner was outside to check on something I kept observing.  Phil came up and tore the address we had written down off our notebook.  He told me that he would flatten my nose one day.  I said, “I believe you might.”  And then I punched him so hard that he turned into a paperback book, which I proceeded to fold up into a knot.  The woman and the boy attempted to leave and I tried to follow, but was spotted again and again while Led Zeppelin music played.  I kept trying to find a place to throw Phil so that when he turned back into a human I would be long gone.

I returned to my old high school to referee at a practice football game.  Old Coach Davis[17] was the coach of one of the teams, or both.  I was given a whistle, but Davis kept using his and I was superseded each time.  I didn’t know what I was doing anyway.  My son was on one of the teams in a shirt and tie.  Due to a screw-up on the scoreboard the regularly allotted time for the game was truncated and Peter was complaining that he didn’t get all the “breaks”[18] he was due.  The sky grew dark and I asked Tim Cummings[19] if we shouldn’t turn the lights on and he said they came on automatically.  Later there was a performance or half-time show.  My sister, dressed in a costume, acted out a scene from a movie on the field.  Davis was in the scene with her.  After the scene he asked her forgiveness for being so inept and called her a pretty little thing.

I was on the open dock at the post office.  Virginia[20] was there too.  One of the trucks was being unloaded.  It was taking a long time.  Neither Virginia nor I could tell exactly what the hold-up was, but then it appeared that one of the BMCs[21] was jammed in the truck and that a couple of mail handlers and the driver, Charles Wright, were struggling to get it out.  Finally they got the thing free and out it came.  The problem, as Charles saw, was a long package in the container that was sticking up and holding up a mass of other, heavy packages.  He climbed into the BMC to dislodge the package, which he did, causing all the heavy packages to come down on him.  His head was forced over the top of the BMC and then nearly severed by the blows.  He was dead.  As soon as I realized he was dead I turned and started for the office to call 911, saying “oh my god” to myself over and over.

It was snowing.  Night time.  A group of us, including Bonnie and me, were awaiting the arrival of important visitors.  When they arrived, they were headed up by Rhonda Kelley.  She had two tiny, doll-like infants with her.  Either Bonnie or Rhonda had written the campaign biography for a female political candidate.  I was worried about the infants, both of whom were in one carrier, because the snow was falling on them and the carrier’s foam padding was soaking wet.

Peter owned a famous “rock star” cat.  She wore a chain with beads on it, as well as two bandanas around her neck.  These got entangled with a dog.  I told Peter the only way to get the cat untangled was to disconnect the chain and that the beads would probably fall off.  I did this and the cat thought the removal was a sign of disaffection.  She said, “You don’t love me anymore?  Well, I’ll show you!”

I and some colleagues went to the hospital to pick up some supplies that it was donating to our cause.  I kept telling everyone there that I knew Clint Shedd[22], who worked there.  “He’s been here thirty years,” I said.  In one of the offices I saw one of the letters to the hospital from our organization.  For some reason, Bonnie had had it translated into Chinese.

Bonnie and the kids and I were on vacation in England.   We were in a grocery store waiting in line.  Bonnie wanted to buy an organizer that fit into the space over the windshield of the car, but I ordered her to put it back.  We waited in line a long time.  While we were waiting I found a magazine whose title indicated it was about Beverage Sales and Distribution, but actually it was an art magazine.  The issue I found was devoted to an artist called Van Skelton. The drawings inside were sepia-toned, charcoal-like, and depicted men boxing and fellating each other.  Their arms and penises were of equal thickness.  As we checked out, Bonnie insisted to the cashier that I was this Van Skelton and wanted me to sign the credit card bill that way.

Rich, educated people with a polydactylic baby girl and some other kids have me as a houseguest.  Earlier, I enter a photograph of my father in the old, one-story house my family lived in across town.  I find a large wheat penny in the attic.  The people with the baby—I start to make an analogy about walking through an attic over the joists, but cannot complete it because my opening words remind the man of some sort of project he has to do involving hospital equipment.  I find a twenty-dollar bill on the floor, but I’m too honest to keep it.

ACS[23] had moved to a new building.  Their collection of musical instruments intrigued me.  I wanted to see them.  They had an actual autoharp.  That is, a harp made out of an auto.  I finally found it, along with a bunch of other stuff.  A woman found me looking at it and offered to demonstrate it for me.  We got in and she started driving the car back and forth, ramming into another car-instrument in front, to get the autoharp warmed up.  Before we could play the instrument, however, her husband showed up.  She said, “Excuse me, I have to give my husband his birthday present.”  She got out and gave him a couple of shirts.  He stretched out the sleeves along his arm, to see if they fit, but they didn’t.  He threw them back at her and said, “I told you before, wad them up in your pocket and write ‘snotty rags’ on them.”

We were looking for some place to stay for the summer.  Someone suggested Europe.  It would be expensive to get there, but, once there, the living would be cheap.  We pedaled up a steep hill to reach the farmhouse.  We gave a lift to two local girls who ate cheese and were covered with sweat.  Once at the top I commented on the great age of the place.  Then I noticed how immense one of the wooden slabs was that made up one of the walls.  The tree that it came from must have been enormous.  It was a cross-section of the tree, shaped like a star, so big was it.  As I looked at it, a crab came climbing across it.  It was a household pet.  It got to the floor and got into an altercation with another pet.  This made the house’s owner angry.  He remonstrated with it.  Then Bonnie made the comment that Peter hadn’t done too well in his latest judo lesson.  It seems he wasn’t practicing enough at home.  I told him I would practice with him.

All of the world’s most famous celebrities are gathered in one room.  I and my partner/assistant walk among them as I tell the truth about each one’s position in the hierarchy of fame.  I tell him, “It’s OK, they can’t see us or hear us.  We’re not famous yet.”  Some kind of scheme is in the works.  Before all this there was a party, an exclusive, media-covered party to which many famous celebrities were invited.  This party was being held by a famous and flamboyant drag-queen performer.  He was throwing it in anticipation of his upcoming extravaganza stage show, which I was privileged to see the rehearsals of.  One woman who was a newer celebrity, far down on the pecking order and therefore forced to park her car further away from the entrance, pulled out a glittering, collapsible pogo stick after the party to make her way back to the car.  Some of the guests merely floated, using their demonic powers.  Before all of this I was talking to the owner of an amusement park-type exhibition/performance hall where a performer called the Werewolf used to perform his daredevil/horror show act before he mysteriously disappeared.  In order to inveigle an invite to his party, for he turned out to be the drag queen/host later, I lied and said that I was familiar with all these things as I was distantly related to Billy “Crash” Craddock.

Female pop star received a package from two fans trying to find out more about her.  They left it at her apartment house anonymously.  The intent was to make it seem that Japanese had left it, but security cameras caught them.  The pop star gave the package, unopened, to me.  I took it home and cut it open, damaging two of the silk umbrellas inside.  There were about thirteen of them, all traditional, handmade umbrellas of different designs and patterns.  I showed them to Bonnie and she celebrated by buying some oriental candy.

I was the designer of a futuristic agricultural community staffed by young people and children, all divided into work units.  I was inspecting each division, getting reports and at the same time preparing to deal with a couple of mysterious intruders recently spotted.

I was on my way somewhere in our old Oldsmobile.  A redneck in a car in the fast lane leaned out of the driver’s window and fired a rifle at me, punching a couple of holes in the windshield.  I followed him to a convenience store and called the police.  He talked his way out of it by giving the cop and me each a bag of pot.  I called my cousin Jason to come help me smoke it.

I was walking around a mall in a strange city with Clay Shedd[24] and two local girls.  It was so exciting to be with a strange girl.  I didn’t want to blow it, as I was worried about my breath stinking.  Fortunately, in the food court some breath strip company had left thousands of samples.  They were citrus, but I stuffed my pockets with them anyway.  We made plans to take a road trip together.  Earlier I was in a car with two girls, the driver of which was unknown to me.  We talked about music together.  Our drive to the mall turned into a walk.

I’m watching cable TV.  I can select what I want to watch by touching the screen, where a diagonal row of cartoon characters stand.  For a long time the kids and I have been waiting to see a particular show.  In fact, I have gone to some trouble to construct a model of the principal monster in one episode.  When we finally find the episode I am disappointed.  It’s a cliffhanger.  The hero’s girlfriend is about to be crushed in her car.  I change channels.  The new show shows a woman on a sofa surrounded by monsters.  It appears that they are trying to force her to fellate one of them.  But when the camera pulls back, we see that they are actually wiping their feet on her head.  Earlier, I was at work in a suit and tie.  The suit was heavy and thick, like velvet.

I have been asked to decorate the new home of some rich couple who have seen my paintings.  They want me to come in costume to a party at their home to see the place.

I was coming down the Grove Chapel Church Road where a tiny sliver of Oconee County crossed into Oglethorpe.  A couple of oriental boys were flinging disposable razors into the grass as booby traps from the edge of the road.  I heard narration from one of the Flemings[25] that said that the Oconee section contained some of the worst gangs around.  I came across a family of mixed Mexican and Vietnamese heritage that was living under a tent-like thing with a truck backed up against it.  They used compartments in the side of the truck for holding their meals.

Going through a chemistry textbook in a school.  Lists of German words inside.

Bonnie spent time on a Navy ship as a child, receiving a necklace as a reward for her help, a necklace that still floats around on that ship today.  Earlier, it was I who had spent time on the ship, receiving a child’s book stamped with the name of the ship.

I was outside trying to frighten away the giant white wolves that were lurking in the stand of trees when their queen, someone very like Ellen DeGeneres in a white dress, came out from among them, rushing over to me, telling me to hurry and take her indoors.  She wanted me to have sex with her, so we went inside, into the crumbling bathroom.  I put her up on the sink where I could see into her stomach.  She brushed the feces down into the water.  My mother knocked on the door and I told her I would only be another minute.

It snowed.  Rusty[26] and I were walking through it, coming to my grandparents’ old house.  I commented that the people who lived there now should be snug with their fireplace and brick walls.  Just them one of the new residents, Debbie Harry, pulled up and walked across the yard.  I skied home on invisible skis.  I met my niece Grace at the back of my parents’ old house where the roof of the back porch collapsed on top of us.  Crawling out, I found a dime.  Earlier, I was eating delicious snow while gathering some.  I had to be careful what snow I gathered, because the stuff that had fallen on Frankenstein’s footsteps would summon his spirit if scooped up and used.  I heard the cartoon character Shaggy warning me of this.

As part of some kind of performance I had to assemble a makeshift band in front of a crowd and give a performance.  The drummer was a little girl whose drumkit consisted of ropes and buckets.  There wasn’t supposed to be a bass player, but Mitch Maxey[27] came up out of the crowd in a spiked dog collar to horn in on the action by playing bass.  The little girl counted out the song “one two three four, one two three four.”  My sister pulled part of the curtain down to obscure me from hers and my parents’ sight.

Sean Connery was at a water-based amusement park.  The bad guy, who owned the park, had sabotaged it so that hundreds of old people were stranded.  Connery picked out a fat boy to be his assistant.  They climbed out of the ride and started to make their way underneath it towards the bad guy’s HQ.  Connery explained that the water imagery in the song “Teen Spirit” by REM came from just such a park.

         

I had a chain of APC’s[28] tied to me.  I was pulling them out of a large retail store in the parking lot.  Earlier, I had been on the side of a road, pulling them as others like me did the same.

I went to the home of a boy[29] I knew when I was a child.  The door was open so I walked in.  I snuck around, but couldn’t find anything to steal.  I heard people moving around.  I think they heard me.  Instead of fleeing, however, I decided to show them something.  I revealed my ability to fly.  I ascended into the air and floated over the pool, attracting their attention.  The boy and his older brother came out and spoke with me.  I dropped a bottle of pills into the pool.  I told them of my plans to use my flying powers to make some money.

I was in line at a grocery store.  I purchased a bread with cheese on it.  I invited the woman ahead of me in line to eat the bread with me.  We noticed discordant music coming from a young man lying on a bench in the courtyard where we were going to eat.  I gave the man 20 dollars to turn off his music.  I gave the woman and several others business cards inviting them to meet me the following day for an important announcement.  Ultimately, the whole thing was an elaborate plot to bring together people and events exactly as they were on the day my father died.[30]

At an amusement park there is a theater where they only perform snippets of classis plays.  All of the cast are black.  Nikki[31] comes to the theater to see if the director will put on something different for her benefit.  He tries to explain that the performers cannot move on to another role or scene until they have exhausted the first.  Earlier, we came to the theater because I had suggested speaking to some of the backstage employees about job opportunities when some of my fellow attendees at the park reminded me that I had said the park was supposed to be hiring.  I was surprised that some of the cool kids were wearing the same t-shirts as I, ones that promoted this special day at the park.

I came upon a tall building, a top-secret research lab, that I was only allowed access to because I told them I was the President of the United States.  I had to get into a single occupancy elevator, just like a vertical freezer, very cramped, and ride up and down, side to side, to get to the top.

In the body of George[32] I picked up his son in his car, allowing the boy to fasten his own car seat.  I told him that we would go visit the house on the hill, which is now the Chavez’s.[33]  The boy told me they’d never let me use the bathroom there.  We drove up my mother’s old driveway and turned towards the road, but suddenly we weren’t in the car anymore, but on a bicycle.  The boy was in a toddler seat behind me.  I was riding along the top of a narrow stone wall through a swampy area.  I couldn’t make it any further along the wall and had to reverse.  I had to drop down from the wall, bike, boy, and all, to the ground below.  From the walled grounds of the royal palace in the distance I heard someone call out, “that wasn’t a proper way to descend from the wall, was it?”  I immediately transformed myself into a young maiden of the forest and ran up to a contest of sporting abilities.  Earlier, when I told the boy to buckle his car seat, I told him that I didn’t want him to get hurt because I loved him.  I wondered if such endearments sounded strange to the boy, coming out of George’s mouth.

I was sitting in a fast food place talking to some people when the woman next to me, who didn’t look much older that I, spoke to me.  She made some introductory remark about the power of photographs.  She had a stack of photos in her hand and passed some of them over to me.  I had at first thought that we had a lot in common, but it seemed that she was actually a lot older than I, because one of the pictures was of her as a little girl in 1968.  Many of the pictures were of her, but soon it developed that she had known a minor celebrity, a female film actress or singer whom many of the pictures were of.  A few showed the two of them together, but many were shots the woman had collected over the years.  I came across one that showed the actress at some event with a black cowboy singer whom I knew but couldn’t name.  As I tried to think of his name the bus, which we were now travelling on, stopped at my home town.  I had to get off.  I tried to make an effort to keep in touch with the woman, but the address she gave me was gibberish.

I was trying to get an amplifier working.  It went through a TV.  I wanted to impress some other people, people in a band who owned the system, with my guitar skills.  When this didn’t work, I put together a band.  It consisted of myself on guitar and two other people, one of them Mitch on accordion, and a drummer.  I wore a cowboy shirt and a cowboy hat.  We were rehearsing in a bar.

I had a collie that would pee on people who did bad things.  He did this to me in the house and I had to clean up the mess and gently scold him afterwards.  I started crying because he was such a good dog, but who didn’t understand exactly what he was doing.

I went into the bathroom to take a shower, but the floor was covered with broken glass and tiny plastic daggers.  I got them stuck in the bottoms of my feet, one foot more than the other, and had to stand there while my mother and Tina Mayfield[34] cleaned up the floor.  Jay Guinn[35] was even there for a minute, cleaning up.  While they cleaned, I asked my mother about my predilection for wearing dresses.  She said I got started young.  She put me in dresses as a toddler.  Once, on a trip to Korea, she had me in a dress and sent me to play in a field, only to learn that the field was mined.  Earlier, the yard was filled with the remains of my old paintings, stacked in a jumble.  I despaired of ever getting it all cleared away.  I had prepared to make a new painting by combining a small canvas with a larger, older one in the neighbor’s yard, but when I finally snuck into the other yard and got it, it was unusable.

A man was so excited to be listening to an organ version of the Star Wars soundtrack that he went to his lover’s house.  The woman was a dentist.  She began cleaning his teeth.  She spoke calmly to him as she did, but clearly she was disturbed.  When she moved away one could see why: she had removed most of his head, revealing four interlocking blades that served as teeth.  The man was a robot and didn’t know it.

It is the future and civilization has collapsed.  Most of the population is dead.  I have stolen a supply of medication to survive and now, along with my companions, have stolen a spectrometer to detect poison gas and a Geiger counter to detect radiation.  These are for use as we explore and abandoned buildings.  We enter the headquarters of a major TV broadcaster.

Driving by some property I pull out a telescope and examine the house.  I notice that one room has a wall made of glass windows.  There is a set of drums discernible so I decided to take a closer look.  The whole family goes to the house and goes inside.  It is a one room house all the walls of which are glass windows.  The owner has abandoned it.  He has gone missing.  We discover that he made hand-blown glass bongs.  There are some clippings of plant material at hand and my sister tries to smoke some.  But they are dandelion clippings.  We find a promotional video in an old car outside in which the owner, an old ex-singer, tries to convince people to buy his dandelion clippings as an additive to make their pot stronger.  He pretends to be one-armed in the video by hiding one arm under his shirt to fool authorities.  He is on the run, in hiding somewhere.  But where.  As the song on the video ends, I think I still hear it.  I got to the back of the property and look out through a fence onto a field of large-leafed plants.  In the distance we can hear the song coming from a barn.  This is where the man is now living.  We prepare to go see him.

I had gotten doped up on paint samples the night before with a poor black man.  He was more of an addict to opiates than I and had killed someone during the spree.  I felt bad for him and brought along a plastic box containing many hundreds of the small colored pieces of paper to the jail where they were keeping him.  I gave him a few to ease his withdrawals and took some myself, for I was feeling the craving too.  A policeman saw us and came up, admonishing me for giving drugs to the suspected killer.  I tried to convince him that they really were paint samples, but he wasn’t buying it.  So I was forced to kill him.

A rich old woman had employed me in some unknown capacity.  I was to live in her house.  She told me how to get to my room downstairs.  Everything was decorated in spring green, late 1960’s style.  I found that my bed was a fold-out sofa in the middle of a disused living room.  Speakers concealed within potted plants played music from radio stations in Atlanta.  I was jealous.  I wanted to be able to pick up Atlanta radio stations from my personal radio.  One station was a spoken-word station.  One of the speakers read a poem that started off, “The wind blew in and out of Cassandra, if you know what I mean.”

I went to a tiny bookstore run by Link.[36]  All the good old stuff was in the back, a small room with wood paneling.  Link allowed me to store some of my books in there.  Some of these were a mouse-eaten series of novels written by three brothers.  As I sat on the floor and went through the books I could hear the clerk outside telling some customers a story about me and a visit I made to the store earlier.  The clerk said, “So then he dashes out of that room, pushes Kristofferson aside, and runs outside.”  He told them that I had come in rambling on about alien spaceships.

Peter and I went to the university library and started moving books around to suit our sense of organization.   When we were caught, we asked for a meeting with the library staff to argue our case.  We explained that there were sections of illustrated books in different subjects that we felt should be together.

I was visiting a sporting goods store.  Told a girl there that we should buy bunk beds so that she could have the top one and I could visit her there.  I asked my wife if she thought that was a good idea and she said no.  Earlier, told Rusty that when I worked at K-Mart, our sporting goods department was only a fraction of the size of this store’s.  Earlier, I told my wife that I saw Barack Obama put his hands into his back pockets at a press conference so that he could pull his ass cheeks apart and fart undetected thereby.

I was listening to a record on an old-fashioned stereo console in my studio when I noticed that the rain was coming in through a leak in the roof.  Water had splashed onto the record itself.

         

I was living in a futuristic wasteland, hiding to stay alive.  A woman charity worker came to visit me, bringing soup in a Styrofoam cup.  But there were spiders in the soup, fallen in on her way to me.  I told her I just couldn’t eat it.

         

A commercial for donuts came on TV.  A box of donuts we had bought began beeping along with the commercial.  There was a battery-powered device glued under the box lid.  I tore it out and had to disconnect all of the batteries to make it stop beeping.  There were sixteen batteries. 

The army barracks were moved to a new location and in the move, Rod’s[37] glasses were lost.  By the time we found them, they were horribly decayed.  They were made of iron and the glass was thick, antique bottle type.  He had been keen to look at a bookcase full of books in the new quarters, but couldn’t because of the glasses issue.  Earlier, I had a chance to inspect a gigantic Marc Bolan poster that had been cut down to a fragment.  It was on display with some other memorabilia.  Showing it were three people who produced Bolan’s last LP.

An extremely intelligent monkey, some kind of small, tailless ape, was trained in the service of a man in Korea.  Some kind of scheme was in hand.  The monkey wanted to escape and kept pointing at the harness it wore, wanting the man to remove it, but the man wouldn’t before the scheme had been put into effect.  Meanwhile, things were happening on the local TV show, similar to MASH.  The Radar character was given the opportunity to get laid once before being sent home.  He was killed once offscreen, however.  Bill Clinton visited he country, but was given the brushoff every time he tried to ask about certain political prisoners.

I was known for driving a forklift through the streets of New York at night.  This was tolerated, as I was a rich eccentric.  In fact, I owned a building where I parked the forklift.  In the building was an old movie theater where I showed old movies.  Rhonda Kelley worked there as an usherette.  I tried to kiss her, but she rebuffed me.  I talked with her about my scheme for decorating the theater with old oil lamps.  I didn’t know if they would be safe, hanging upside down from the ceiling.  And where would the smoke go?

I went to a showing of paintings and walked in with a Picasso.  I had acquired it wrongfully, if not illegally.  I told the person holding the showing that it was mine and wondered if I could add it to the show.  They agreed and this gave me entry, not only to the show, but to the intimate gathering in the back, full of famous and rich people.  I tried talking to Joni Mitchell, asking her if she’d ever been the subject of a documentary, but she walked away.  Wouldn’t talk to me.  So I sat down at the large table with the others and started spinning a line of bullshit that my name was Norman Mailer and I’d just published a novel called Harlot’s Ghost.  They believed me.  Even Joni came back to listen to me.  I told them I had three more books I was working on, plus “a little piece of a play.”  Later, at a more private get-together, possibly one in my home, I explained to an older, established writer how I was written my great masterpiece.  I told him that I had a deadline looming and knew I’d never be able to finish the book in time.  I found an old hat in the corner of my room and put it on, becoming a character, the character that would narrate the book for me.  I changed my desperation to finish the book into the desperation the narrator felt about some other topic.

My sister and I were having an affair.  Other members of the family nearly caught us in the same room.

I told a my meeting William F. Buckley story at length and in perfect detail to the instructor of a class I was taking.  This occurred on the front lawn of a gigantic red brick building completely covered with transparent plastic.

I was looking at a book on an island paradise in the South Pacific named for a goddess who bore the same name as a female nemesis spirit sent by an enemy to attack me.  The spirit was kept in a bottle presented to me.  However, instead of opening it, I wisely took it to an antiques dealer and sold it, thereby delaying the release of the spirit.  The dealer had another artifact from the island, something that played a sad song from my childhood.  I cried on hearing it.  I apologized, but the man said it was understandable.   The book was an illustrated one from National Geographic.  There were many pictures of the insectoid worry dolls the islanders made.  These dolls bordered the photographs.  The islanders didn’t know not to store their imported strawberries on the tops of flat rocks exposed to the sun, but learned through experience.

Some TV show had arranged a program in which they would help Lesia[38] and her husband move out of their home by getting rid of a bunch of stuff from their home.  But they tricked them and brought everything back.  The house looked like an overrun thrift store.  In fact, black children, with their mothers’ approval, were running wild through the place when Lesia signed the form to take receivership, her signature matched the one on the takeaway form.  Then she knew she had been had.  She took the trick placidly, however.  I was there, stealing old board games.  I met a couple of bad-teethed white trash relatives and invited them to live with me and my father out of obligation.  As my father drove us away he explained that he had divorced my mother.  Later, I remarried Vanessa Shiromani[39] while remaining married to Bonnie.

Steve F.[40] had me over to his house as a guest.  We must have been teenagers, because he lived with his mother.  We were throwing spears at something in a ditch by the road.  I started leaking green snot from my nose.  I needed somewhere to throw my dirtied paper towels and Steve told me there was a trashcan in the living room.  I went in there and there was a goat tied up.

I was playing with a newborn baby at the hospital.  The child was much closer in appearance and behavior to one a couple of months old.

I spent the evening in a storage shed playing guitar and getting drunk.  Someone cut the power, so I had to move to my grandfather’s “shop.”  I was trying to avoid my parents, who were prowling about, getting ready for a trip.  I ran past my father and sister, playing badminton in the windy winter night.  In the shop I found an old stereo console with some obscure 45’s, a couple of which were Bee Gees disco songs no one remembers.

I and my companions borrowed an ancient bedstead from one museum and took it to another, where we put it in storage while we visited.  We ran into Jack Bamford[41], who was with his wife.  My friends showed him a book they had printed up, a satire of Christianity about a cartoon rabbit that goes on a missions trip.  I felt embarrassed as Bamford looked at it.

My father and I were in a car.  Traffic was bad and we could go no further, so we pulled into a Varsity-like place to wait.  We drank hot tea.  Eventually, we could see what was causing the traffic problem.  It was something big coming down the road.  It was a circus.  It stopped directly in front of the place we were at.  It was a celebration of the local town.  They had wooden figures of Mr. Burns and Smithers getting married.  Homer Simpson performed the ceremony.  It all ended as a movie with cartoon characters flying into space from the top of the Statue of Liberty, shooting guns.  We were all watching it on TV.  One of the children fell asleep.  Later, Bonnie and I went to a department store at the mall.  I commented to her that this was the way stores were when we were young, full of color and people.

Moe Stooge hosted a black and white kids’ show on TV where he stood in a moonlit dirt road and introduced old movies.  He was approached by a man with secondary miniature arms growing out of his neck, who gave him a letter from a viewer.  The viewer requested a particular film.  Next Moe was being assisted in a comedy bit by his wife, who was wearing no pants.  She was trying to keep him from entering a haberdashery.  She had elastic bands attached to him, but she wasn’t strong enough to hold him back.  She had to enlist help from the viewer.

It was some kind of profile of a Latino playwright.  He was shown rehearsing a new play in front of an audience.  There was an indication that he was gay, but the program ended with him going on a double date with a colleague and two women.  At the restaurant his female turned to him after the meal and said, “And now, home and to bed.”  During the play rehearsal the actors were all high-stepping around the stage.  As the two couples walked across the parking lot to the restaurant there was a voiceover from one of the women.  “Just hearing the two Latino men discuss going to the movies and out to eat is a turn-on for Latino women.”  Their heads became extremely large in proportion to their bodies and I, as the watcher, simply assumed that this was digital manipulation and that it was an accepted thing among the techno savvy of today.  Later, I was awake before my wife one morning and smoking a cigarette in the house.  I was trying to get the smoke smell out and at the same time figure out how I was going to make it through the day without a drink.

         

There was a popular new subgenre of movies called cereal movies.  These were movies mainly for college students about how certain cereals, or a cereal in specific, was bad for you.  Many actors (actresses, especially) were jumping on the trend.  One film in particular dealt with a woman who had attempted suicide from her experience with one cereal.  She lay in a hospital, waiting for someone to come and donate part of his body so she could be healed.  Hundreds of kids outside were protesting what the cereal had done to her.  Earlier, I climbed into bed with two older actresses, each of us eating bowls of cereal, as they discussed getting into cereal films.  I remembered the days when King Vitaman was shaped like real little crowns and loaded with real sugar.

Stephanie and I shared a joint.  It was already used and it crumbled as I applied the hemostats.  Later I decided to stay up instead of going to sleep before work and do some reading.  I found an old Price, Stern, Sloan book.

A young man with a talent for selling himself as a prodigy for throwing baseballs through a basketball hoop talks his way onto a pro team with the help of two of the girls on the team’s staff.  The idea is that the young man will serve as an attraction for ticket buyers.  The girls are low on the team’s staff pecking order.  One of the referees, also a team staffer, connives to use the young man to improve his own standing and make more money.  Then he will get the girls fired.  He fantasizes about one of them, the one that looks like Mira Sorvino, taking a shower.  However, as he has no idea what a naked woman looks like, his conception is off.  She has a pouch for storing hair care products where her vagina should be and her legs bend backwards like an animal’s hind legs.  The scene shifts to a Japanese auto executive, formerly with a Japanese car company, now with Ford.  He is put in charge of renovating both the way Ford makes cars and the cars themselves.  Looking through the trunk of a Ford car he comes across a thick piece of plastic that serves no purpose and yet is imprinted with words to the effect that it must not be removed and that for a customer to take it upon himself to remove such parts is communism.  The Japanese executive collapses in laughter.  Earlier, when the young man is demonstrating his obscure talent to team officials, he has difficulty performing his stunt to their satisfaction until he discovers that the balls he is using are new.  To work properly, his baseball must be scuffed up.  The girls are instrumental in this demonstration.

On a walk I discovered a mysterious house behind a fence.  I had remembered to bring my camera, having forgotten it before.  Somehow my mother knew the people in the house, which sat in a field somewhere.  The walk was along a thin path cut through the field.  My mother came along on the walk to secure an invitation inside the house.  There was a dangerous dog that wore a heavy stick tied behind its neck.  But the woman of the house said she had removed the stick for us and now he wasn’t dangerous.  She said the dog used to be a vegetarian.  But that was when he was a night dog. 

I had developed telekinetic powers and was using them to rob the post office, which looked a lot like a grocery store.  The vault was hidden in the women’s restroom.  I killed Virginia Sims[42] by sealing her in an oil drum and then throwing the drum around until she was pulverized.  Certain people I was powerless to kill with my telekinesis, so I stole a gun and shot them.  It seemed that other people were developing powers too and had the same idea about stealing the money.  I saw a man in black with a black stocking cap go into the restroom where the safe was.  He looked like a grubby Matt Damon.  I threw up a psychic shield and marched into the restroom with Bonnie behind me so she wouldn’t be hurt.  The man told me that someone had already beaten him to the safe.

I was escorting two small children to school.  There were two school buildings, parallel to each other.  I told the little girl that I didn’t have time to walk with her to her building and that she’d have to go alone.  She didn’t think she could do it.  I drew a diagram in the dirt, but she didn’t understand it.  I finally went into the building and started looking for the room of my former fourth grade teacher.  I asked a couple of women, but I couldn’t remember the teacher’s name.  I had to describe her.  I wound up in a room taught by Jason Pledger[43].  He was about seven feet tall.  I immediately took charge of the situation, kidding him aggressively.  But it wasn’t necessary: he took me aside and told me that, back in the 80’s I had changed his life by recommending that he listen to the Stand By Me soundtrack.  It had led him into more serious concerns.  I said, “You mean like Los Lobos?”  And he said, “exactly.”  I later told one of the women at the school that this was the first time I’d been to the school since I was a child and that it was very emotional for me.

It was a Jim Carrey movie.  He played a man separated from his girlfriend by the girlfriend’s uncle for nefarious purposes.   Martin Freeman played the taxi driver.  Carrey finally catches up with the woman after a day spent running down the highway after her.  The police thought he was trying to kill her.  He catches up with her at her uncle’s house where the plot is revealed.  The uncle’s two sons threaten Carrey, but he jams a knife up into the underside of one’s mouth.

Jason[44] and I were visiting the apartment of some woman we knew.  We were dressed in English university students’ clothing with long overcoats.  The husband of the woman came home.  Jason went out the back door.  We mustn’t be seen.  I stayed, moving around the apartment as he did, trying to avoid him. He saw me at one point, telling his wife, “I saw somebody.”  She tried to assure him he was wrong.  I couldn’t take it anymore and followed Jason out.  The stairs outside went down steeply, were shared by many apartments.  I went down two flights before looking back.  A young teenaged boy, dressed like we were, looked out at me.  I snarled to warn him off.  I looked back again and he was still there, laughing at me and my snarling.

I was a superhero cajoled into putting on my costume, but worried it wouldn’t fit anymore.  I started crying.  The costume had been especially made for me.  It laced behind the legs.

I needed to get in contact with a lawyer in New York City.  Somehow I got his office on the phone through a video link, spoke to the person at the office, but the link was broken, and I found myself standing in New York.  The break in the link happened when the camera switched from filming the person in the office to some disfigured immigrant construction workers.  They had lesions on their faces from some toxic material encountered in their work.  A crowd was looking at them, keeping them back from mingling with them.  A woman in the crowd was telling me about the toxins released by the buildings.  She pointed up at a building in the process of being either built or taken apart.  I watched as a piece of insulation fell from two hundred feet in the air to the ground.  There was a disturbance to my right.  I turned to look and two black miscreants, both giants, but one a real giant, over ten feet tall, wearing jackets and snow hats, emerged from the second floor of a building, crashing through the wall.  The larger one was carrying a bottle of beer as big as a gallon of milk.  They were followed by a policeman also black, also very tall, who had them in custody.  Suddenly all three of them had blue fuzzy stuffed animals like cookie monsters attached to the top of their hats.  I got in touch with the lawyer and took him back to Athens, walking the streets at night, showing him where a series of crimes had taken place.  He was of Arabic extraction.

I followed a man skiing half frozen down a mountain.  His dogs, also on skis, followed him.  It was a dangerous situation.  The village where he was headed was down below.  The dogs were free to escape as best they could on their own.  We made it to a house in the village.  The skier, a tall old man, needed coffee.  He looked like Coach Davis[45], but there was something reminiscent of Lemmy about him.  He kept trying to turn on the eyes of the gas stove when something flammable was on top of them.  I was trying to help him make the coffee, but his interference was problematic.  It was like on the one hand he didn’t know what he was doing and on the other it was some kind of deeply embedded villainy.  I finally confronted him.  He was taller than I, but old, feeble.  His craggy face loomed over me.  I told him that he might have been tough when he was young, but that if he didn’t behave I would kick his ass up and down the old trailer.  Eventually I and someone else inspected the workings of the stove.  The gas could not be turned off.  It poured into the room.

My parents and I were watching a movie together when my mother pulled out a “dope gun,” a device that looked like a white, partially transparent BB gun made to deliver pot smoke into the system like a bong.  She smoked some and then my father smoked some and I got a little high from the secondhand smoke so I decided to have some directly too.  After I did I told my father that I had had a dream only recently in which I was smoking pot from a dope gun with my grandparents (his parents) and Vanessa.

Bonnie and I were on a trip to Europe.  We had rented a van.  There was a bike race in town and as we drove down a road there were cyclists ahead of us.  I warned Bonnie to watch out for them as they would be more aggressive than cyclists back home.  As we drove down a hill that led into a tight tunnel, traffic started to back up and everyone started blowing their horns.  I advised Bonnie to do the same.  All the cars stopped.  There had been an incident.  Someone’s reckless driving caused us all to stop.  Everyone got out of their cars and stood in line.  A policeman singled out the bad driver and made an example of him.  He had to greet everyone.  We were in a French-speaking country, but we managed to get by in English.  When I greeted the man, after Bonnie, I said only “danke” to him.  He asked if I was German and I pointed at my wife and said, no, American.  We then all filed into a restaurant/tourist organization.  As we all walked in, I saw a man with his head down on a table in the dining area.  When it was our turn to pay for our couple of days in the care of these people, Bonnie paid in cash, much to the delight of the woman behind the desk.  She gave us a receipt which then allowed us to eat in the large room.  It was a serve-yourself kind of arrangement.  All I noticed that there was to eat was cheese, crackers, and cans of beer.  I noticed the same man asleep still at his table.  Bonnie chose a seat, but I had to go get another chair to sit next to her.  For some reason an older man had joined our group.  He said loudly that he wanted to watch NASCAR on TV.  He pointed at me and said that I was an unusual one, that I would be content to make my own fun.  Earlier, I went into a liquor store with some kind of credit and selected drinks for Bonnie.  Among the drinks I chose a gallon of something that was very low in alcohol content.  I was tempted to drink it, but decided not to.

I was sitting in the transportation office[46] supposedly writing something of my own in a notebook, but really copying something Joyce[47] was working on called “Mail Nullification,” when Rod came in and turned the radio on.  I asked aloud, who can name this singer?  The fat guy, whom I had never seen before, across the room said, “Blossom Dearie.”  I said, very good.  His wife, sitting next to me, said, “you’d love Lesia.”[48]  I said, who?  She told me it was a woman who tested them in swimming.  The next song came on and the fat man said, “Who’s this?” or rather, he looked at me as if to say, do you know who this is.  I thought it might be Dionne Warwick, but I wasn’t sure.

There was a drive-thru beer distributorship, a giant warehouse that you drove your van around inside of and loaded up on whatever beer you needed.  I drove around the first time alone, but the second I took Peter with me.  There was a section blocked off to most people.  It had a mechanical horse that you rode through on.   As we walked out I could taste the beer in my mouth.

I was stuck downtown with two guys.  We needed a ride home.  Rodney[49], sporting a beard like Billy Barnett[50], was getting off work.  We asked him if he could give us a ride.   He said he was heading back to the janitorial unit and that the place would be swarming with inspectors.  I thought about taking my own dragster-influenced ride home and it became a cartoon attacked by a lizard thing.  Earlier, I and a couple of guys had went to an all-night place.  I warned them not to eat or drink anything given to them by anyone there.  Drugs were dispensed in balls of rubber eraser material.  It was an art gallery.  One of the artists had forced open an elevator while depressed and under the influence of drugs and jumped out, killing himself.  Some people at one of the booths had tried to trick me by getting me to walk up to the counter and ask for a certain number.  I walked up to the counter, but when I saw that they were selling condoms and weird sex toys I refused to say anything.  Earlier a woman was trying to show me and some people how to use a condom.  I and a couple of guys were walking past a Taco Stand[51] type place.  One of the two guys said, “show him the thing.”  The other opened the back door and we all stuck our heads in.  A smell of refried beans and tortillas overwhelmed us.  We continued walking and one of them said something like, “mmm, smells like God’s dick!”

You could go as a paid guest on specially designed fishing boats.  They looked like something made by Fisher-Price.  They were triangular, hatchet-shaped, bobbing point-down in the water.  I went with one old captain.  There was only room in the boat for three or four of the large tune-like fish that he caught.  On the way back we were cut off from the place we were to return to by the morning journey of vast schools of cod out to the deep waters.  The captain cursed.  The fish he caught were arranged vertically in the boat.  I later developed a new method of fishing in this way so that one could fire the fish into orbit from the boat.  It was a secret method and I wouldn’t tell anybody how it was done, although I did share in the profits with select minority members of the fishermen.

There was a guy about my age who had a building in which he performed his own version of a children’s TV show like Mr. Rogers’.   I was invited to attend.  There were several children there.  The guy had a woman assistant.  They were taking a break during which the children were allowed to run around.  I was amazed at the building and discussed my amazement and other matters with the guy.  Finally, he called out that break time was over.  I began to help out, rounding the children up and when they started the show up again I was a part of it, asking the children a trivia question and doing some drawing.  When I completed my drawing I started showing it to a woman beside me and the whole scene became a wedding ceremony in which we were seated in a large crowd of attendees.  My wife was on the other side of me.  The woman and I were discussing my drawing and drawing in general when suddenly I noticed that the wedding ceremony had begun.  The preacher or whoever was talking.  We were being rude and we stopped talking.  But some people in the crowd had noticed us talking and didn’t like it.  My wife took exception to their disapproval and began making comments out loud.  Eventually she so disturbed the proceedings that the wedding broke up and the crowd dispersed, everyone moving throughout the church to change back into their regular clothes.  I went from room to room looking for a certain person to apologize to.

I was in some kind of thrift store.  I found a large box of CDs that someone had obviously not intended to donate.  It was all kinds of good albums, most of them deluxe reprints from one particular company, with bonus materials.  I paid for them and then went out.  I stopped at a bubble gum vending machine; this one gave out dimes for bent pennies.  After I had been fooling with it for a couple of seconds, I realized that two university professors were making off with my CDs.  I confronted them and got them back, pulling the hair of one of them.

I visit a summer camp, where I am invited to stay as an unpaid counselor, even though I am much older than the other counselors.  Some of the children are very young and some are teens.  After playtime, where the children color pictures, I have a talk with the other counselors and tell them about a vampire movie I saw.  I explain that, like most modern vampire movies, it has a lot of “homodroco.”

My father was driving a team of mules up a hill.  They got out of control and ran into a barn.  We all ran in, looking for him, but he had been killed, dragged under a wall.   His body was a mess. Rather than try to dig him out, we decided it would be easier to just leave him there and build a kind of cairn over the area.  I said, we’re going to need some dirt, some blocks of granite, and a tombstone of some kind.  Earlier, when he had first started up the hill, the right hand line of mules had went the wrong direction and the whole team had to go around in a circle.

I visited some old people in an apartment in a strange city.  One of their friends lived in another apartment nearby and asked me to check on him.  I did so, but had to break in, as no one answered the door.  I rummaged through his things, finding briefcases with little or no contents.  I told the old people that I had left the apartment with certain things in certain places and later returned to it, finding the things misplaced.

I was in a small grocery store with Mitch and some other people.   A girl whom Edwina Miller[52] had informed about Mitch’s problems began to mock him audibly.  The store manager came over and told us we’d have to leave.  I was standing in an aisle full of large bags of dog food as we argued that we could sue the store for harassment.  Some of the bag boys, grown men that we knew from the past, came up and supported us.  Eventually we left.  Mitch was the last to leave.  We waited on him outside.  He kicked over a gumball machine on the way out.  On the lawn outside his two dogs bothered me.  They were partially psychic and to keep them from playing too roughly with me I had to reassure them that they were good boys.  Mitch was in a foul mood.  Finally I could take no more and decided that I would fake having received a summons and fly away.  I rose into the air and tapped my watch to the others as a sign.  I hoped my keys and wallet wouldn’t fall out of my pockets.  Someone spotted me flying over the city and said “Superman!”  I flew by sitting in a chair.  I came down in a bricked up square and found a couple of my oldest paintings.  I tried to fit the broken frame of one into the other.  Later, I attempted to ape Captain Beefheart by singing a song about “Pee-Nanky and Wather”[53] while painting an inept painting that looked like a cross between Dubuffet and Wolfgang Petrick.

I sat down at a table that had a phone on it.  I picked it up and dialed the secretary at the other end.  She answered.  “Who’s this?” I said.  “This is your secretary.”  The woman replied.  “This is Andy Partridge.” I said.  “I’ve taken over from the other guy.  I need you to go to reference and look something up for me.”  “I don’t do that.”  “Who does?”  “You do it yourself.”  So I and the woman who was with me, who later turned out to be Vanessa S., and I suppose, went into the deeper recesses of the building and found that nobody was around.  “The project isn’t getting done.”  I said.  So we took it on ourselves to complete it.  There were some Santa Clauses made out of paper that someone had started.  We set about completing the film, which was a commercial about doing things on your own and being allowed to think and question things on the job.  Santa Claus boomed, “Ho ho ho.”  Some women who worked there came in and wondered who had been fooling around with the equipment and the bolts of fabric.

I wound up at some kind of amusement park.  There was a zoo and an arcade.  I started playing a pinball-like game.  I played and played until my original investment ran out.  When I got finished I turned around to gather all the tickets that I had won to exchange them for prizes.  I found that Lemmy from Motorhead had been tallying them up for me with an adding machine, making them into bundles with rubber bands and writing notes regarding my play on them.  I started to add the grand total up, with Bonnie and Peter standing beside me criticizing my math.  Lemmy returned to his gambling, loaning the man across from him his lighter.  I estimated my total at 40 dollars worth of merchandise, now already exchanged for little cap guns and toy bows and arrows.  I went to exchange all this for one large prize and started walking through the arcade.  We heard an announcement over the PA regarding someone named Mitch who had “broken up a happy home.”  Bonnie assumed it meant the Mitch we know, but I saw the picture of the man flashed on the screens and it was an alcoholic criminal, a man who looked like a killer.  She and Tonya Byrd[54] went up to him and invited him to sit with us at a counter.  I told her beforehand not to stick her nose into this, but she wouldn’t listen.  I then told her to enjoy sitting with her murderer and left by myself.

I was waiting on Bonnie on a dirt road beside a wall.  She drove past me in one direction and I waited on her to return.  When she came back she again drove past me.  I started dashing packages of crackers against the wall.  I picked them up to present to her, all crushed.  I followed the car up a hill.  I pulled a cubical stone out of the ground, covered in green moss on one side.  When I got to the top of the hill I threw the stone at her car, making a dent in the back of it.  She jumped out and yelled at two young men.  “Who threw that?  You two come here and take responsibility for what you’ve done.”  I said, I threw it.

I had gone back in time to the fifties.  I attended a class at a university.  The students acted wild, responding like clowns to everything the teacher said.  An older woman, drunk, showed up in her car.  I tried to help her get some treatment, using her name and connections to order expensive items through a nerdy guy who worked near there.

Richard[55] and I and some other people were loading an old truck, a big one, like a dump truck, with fallen trees and other wood.  As we were driving out of the yard of the property, the power lines were scraping the top of the truck.  Road was there to guide us.  I heard him say to someone, “they’re going to short out.”  I had to maneuver the truck to unsnag it from the lines.  “We’re going to short out,” I said.  Richard, sitting beside me, started laughing.  “Ride that elephant, boy! Show ‘em how it’s done!”  He shouted.  Suddenly I was riding on the top of a tall basket on top of an elephant’s head.  As we approached the power lines the lines passed under the basket without knocking it off the elephant’s head.

Bonnie suggested that we all go visit this old lady I knew as a child.  I expected her to be feeble beyond belief, but she actually came out of her house and met us as we got out of the car.  She was related to Clay Shedd in some way and despite her age still had some cuteness about her.  She had a gray, mold-like growth on her right cheek.  She gave each of the kids a five-dollar bill.  Bonnie had already given them five dollars each so they could purchase an alphabet letter from the woman.  It was my intention to see if we could buy the old lady’s piano.  She invited us inside.  The inside was very much like my grandparents’ house.  In the living room the walls appeared to be falling apart, but on closer inspection, it was just the wallpaper, which was a pattern showing the same illustration over and over: a cartoon of a man with a white moustache and red cheeks.

         

I found myself walking down the road at night, talking to Eddie Overstreet[56] on the disconnected receiver from a rotary phone.  I told him I couldn’t remember anything about the day previous or how I got there, but emphasized that I had not been drinking.   He told me about some beautiful experience he had with some black musicians, about the love that was expressed in their songs.   I told him I had plenty of time to walk back and still make it to work.  When I reached the crossroads, Dianne Brinkley[57] pulled up in a station wagon and told me that my doctor was worried about me.  Earlier, I led two rough customers into a field overgrown with thick, alien-looking grass.   We were looking for James Garner’s secret base.  As I had told the two men, we found it underground.  As we opened it and descended, we were intercepted by Clint Eastwood, the real owner of the secret base.

I had enrolled in some classes.  I was going through a room with some other people gathering the necessary papers and getting the schedule.  I told the teacher on duty that I wasn’t interested in astronomy, much to his surprise.  So instead I took a biology class.  I was told that I would have to get some special papers from another room, which was indicated to me.  I went over there and met with the professor and some other teachers.  They told me that one of the requirements of the class was that had to extract three teeth from a mouse’s body.  I was relieved to find out that the mouse would be dead and that I could go ahead and get this task out of the way.  We smashed the mouse with a brick wrapped in a towel and, while they went to get something to help me, I removed three odd-looking teeth.  I correctly identified the teeth as “brain teeth” or “eye teeth” and was given a hug by all three men.  The main teacher looked like one of the actors on the British show about the village of weird people.[58]

Steve and I tried to rent an elephant to ride on the way home from somewhere.  The woman in charge handed me a couple of sacks of coolant, which were like foam pillows.  The felt cold.  They were to keep the elephant cool.  It started to rain and Steve and I decided against getting the elephant because we’d have to get wet riding it.  Also, I pointed out that we’d have to return it later.  I tried to sneak off with the coolant anyway, but the woman saw me and I gave it back.  Later, walking over a hill, some other guys and I came to a TV set on a platform.  I didn’t want anyone to know that we had been watching porn, so I tried to change the channel.   But it was stuck in a loop of porn channels.  Eventually I turned it off.  The sound still came through.  That went away and Mitch’s mom came up.  The platform covered her living room floor.  You could still see it through a little door on the side of the platform.  She asked me what I thought of her pictures.  There was a picture of Mitch as a little boy.  I told her I’d pay anything to see my son that little again and I started crying.  Later, as a lesson in divergent business practices, I showed some people a little room and told some people that I could open a store in it and be satisfied never to expand any larger than that space.  The store sold little toys and gimmicks that I had invented and trinkets with celebrity portraits drawn by Reed on them.  My father was there with us walking around.  There was a mouth-held tea-brewing device like a large pipe that he put his finger in and commented that it was warm.  A woman looked at some little dolls we had on sale and said she had something similar.  She wanted to call them “muscle man,” but couldn’t copyright the name.  I told her we called them “new man” and that the name was copyrighted.

I joined a group of kids in forming a band called Harrad.  We started off with five guys, but I kicked one of them out because he was giving us a hard time about telling us the secret how he created the metal letters that made up our band name.  We began practicing.  One of the guys in the band built a large floppy ceramic statue for the cover art of the first album.  Our manager compared us to Van Halen.  We met with President Bush, Sr. about our marketing campaign in which we would pretend to be running for president.  One of the gimmicks of our band was that we were sexually experimental, having intercourse with giant fleas.

I had been gone for some time and in my absence my parents had redone my room.  It had a glass wall leading into it and large padded stereo speakers on the walls.  I started crying, saying, “I miss my old room.”  It wasn’t completely put together yet and speakers lay on top of the water bed.  I only had 15-20 minutes before I had to go to school and I wanted to use them to sleep.  I was dead tired.  Everything was changed.  My guitar had been hanging up in the carport.  They wanted me to ride to work with someone instead of driving my car.

Rodney dragged me to a mobile store owned by David Rice[59], but managed by an old Englishman, which sold used appliances and old furniture.  All of the waffle makers and sandwich presses were turned on, making the place hot.  A kid rushed in and started cooking something.  The name of the place was Professor David’s something or other.  I asked the kid what he was cooking.  He said, “what else?  Liver and onions.  That’s sleeping food!”  I had to agree with him.

At work Nikki backed into me with the forklift so hard it hurt my butt and the backs of my thighs.  In order to avoid being run over I had to jump on board with her.  She came to a stop and got off the lift, angry at me for being upset.  I marched off to tell Rod what happened.  When I did, he just laughed and said, “that’s her.”  At that moment a forklift parked too close to the edge of the dock fell off, and rolled through the parking lot, breaking down the fence.  It rolled on and on, through fence after fence.

I found myself in a curio shop.  I was looking through a book full of stories and illustrations.  The text was printed in pale lavender ink on pink paper.  The pictures were pen and ink drawings of naked women.  Someone said, “look, there’s Dianne.  Someone stole the medical marijuana she bought for her nephew.”  I looked up and saw that Dianne had come into the shop to get a replacement batch of pot.  She had a large blue plastic bag that contained the pot and some literature on its use.  I picked up a bag as well, thinking I’d buy it.  But then I realized that I didn’t have a doctor’s note.  I briefly considered forging one, but then I decided to just go into the bag and steal a couple of buds.

The fat woman returned with gifts for everybody.  There were about a dozen of them and they were all new inventions.  One was a pair of potatoes or meat cutlets that wanted to be cooked.  You led them around the room with a handheld grill which they wanted to jump into.  The other gift was a little box covered in cloth.  It had buttons on the bottom to control it.  The main button made it subtly writhe and make a sound like a cat purring.  You were supposed to hold it while you slept.  The fat woman returned while I was sitting in the drive-in line of a restaurant with Richard and his family.

I went to a party at some woman’s house.  It was pretty boring.  A woman with piercings on her tongue and around her mouth was posing for pictures with a piece of plastic on her face that made her mouth look like a vagina.  The hostess said she was going to give another party for an upcoming wedding and she was going to get me to provide the party favors.  I wondered if I was going to have to pay for them.  As we were getting ready to leave I started looking around for stuff to steal.

I had gone back in time to visit my parents’ new futuristic house.  Each room had its own TV set linked into a central system.  They were all playing the Beatles’ Help movie.  Each room was a pastel shade.  Someone asked “where does Steve Barrett[60] sleep when he comes to visit?”  I said, “out in the heat in the room in the carport.”  My mother asked me what I thought of the bear poster.  Did it fit in with the décor?  I said yes, sure.  I was enthusiastic, if a little weirded out by being in this setting.  As I turned to leave, Oprah came out in a bikini.

I had to deliver mail to a house where there was a puppy over seven feet tall.  I didn’t know it was a puppy at first.  He was very friendly and peaceable.  I was frightened at first the people inside asked me to feed him.  His food was dry dog food mixed with Dr. Pepper.  Then a sixteen year old girl showed up.  Her rosy-tipped breasts were constantly hanging out of her open shirt.  She thought the dog was beautiful. 

A documentary on Roman bath dinners hosted by a togaed Vincent Price mutated into a Kenneth Clark-style exploration of various English places of interest.  The host introduces us to a museum-reading room where there is also a theater.  I pretend to be a short-haired lesbian from a fictitious American town peeping into the theater, crying because I am so overwhelmed.  The old lady at the box office commiserates with me.  She understands.  This is a wonderful place.  I tell here there is only one other such place like it in the world, Broadway in New York.  As we descend into the reading room where a famous document in kept behind glass, I notice that there are playing cards strewn on the floor.  The jokers are printed with a screen of TV static, the word “Essex” underneath.

I found an old LP somewhere.   As I scanned the selections on the back of the sleeve I could hear them and see them being performed by the artists.  Jon Davidson was one of them.  He was performing in a nightclub.  He was much better, much more intelligent, than as presented in history.  At the end of his act he got up on a stool or barrel and did an impression of some female singer, shaking his hips.  Other artists were more ethnic, one being a Zero Mostel-Theodore Bikel type who did some Russian Jew thing and then a group of Brazilian singers.  One of these had an enormous nose made of some root vegetable.  It fell off and was preserved in an indoor pool.  I went to the site of a school were some Brazilian teens in a photo played their songs.  One of the girls was very attractive.  But she wouldn’t stop singing or performing and allow me to leave.  I had to put the LP sleeve over her head and cut it off to get away in time.

Following a camper/hotel on wheels down a recklessly plunging highway.  It goes on down in the road, but leaves behind a trail of destruction.  Emerging from the pile of cars later than night are two men.  They are using two wounded ponies to make their disguised way down the road, trying to catch up with someone.  The road turns into a dirt road through the woods that loops up into the sky over them.  One of the men says, “there’s no way on earth that does that.”  Which gives the other one a clue.  Following the path of the road as it passes overhead and comes back down, they figure out where it re-enters the ground as a tunnel.  They run down into the tunnel.  Now they are three guys in black survival gear.  It is a long series of tunnels, tall, thirty or forty feet ceilings, the walls covered with industrial lubricant. They spy three other people, the ones they are tracking, but they are up in a chamber above them, inaccessible.  They panic and run back a ways.  “They used heated air to get up there,” one of them realizes.  Another, looking like Don Johnson, replies, “What?  You’re crazy!”  They run on.

Edwina had a new baby girl about six months old.  Bonnie and I ran into her at a general store with a lunch counter.  She let Bonnie hold the baby for a while and then me.  The talk was amicable.

I took ten polaroids of the little girl’s room, doll house and furniture arranged just so, as a message to the killer.  Earlier, Lindsay Lohan died in a swimming pool of a cocaine overdose while the old man that gave her the cocaine had underwater sex with her.  Earlier, a survivalist plunged over the falls in his ice-filled jeep.  He would be comfortable in a world too hot.

         

I was on the Jon Stewart show in a car.  Stewart was in the passenger seat.  I was backing it up, but couldn’t stop.  I held the brakes down, but the car backed through several walls, injuring a member of the staff.  Later, at work, Richard and some other people showed up.  It was Richard’s car I had damaged.  I apologized, but insisted it was faulty brakes.  I tried to fix some equipment at work, but Richard and the other people kept getting in the way.  Finally it was time to go home.  As I left everyone began having a big party, dancing around.  As I walked out the workplace became my old high school, getting ready for a football game.  I walked outside.  Then I went into a fat boy’s house and cut his throat.  I piled garbage on his bed and lit it on fire.  As I was making my exit a woman came home.  It was some woman I had killed earlier, in a previously erased history.  I was forced to twist her head off.   The fat boy was someone connected with the football team.

         

I was at work.  Flatbed trucks loaded down with mail, more mail than I’d ever seen, came rolling in.  We were packing cars full of mail into the backs of other cars.  I told someone it was the worst day I’d ever had at the post office.  I decided to go on break.  I walked down into the other part of the building, which turned into my old school.  I ran into Eddie Overstreet.  He followed me.  He had a bag of salt.  He had heard that if you threw salt against the sprinklers that they came on.  I hunted for a quiet room in which to sit down.  I finally found a kindergarten class where I could sit and eat my apple.  The kids were amazed that the teacher was allowing this man to sit in their class and eat.  Wayne from work came in and said they had a message for me.  I followed him to another classroom where he started to access the message through a computer.  But all he kept pulling up were movie trailers, which he insisted I watch.  I grew frustrated and told him off, leaving the room to head back to work.

I’m watching a movie based on a book (the heavily annotated version being read by Tonya Byrd) and simultaneously the documentary on the making of the movie.  The story is about a fantastic theater in France in the late 1800’s, early 1900’s in which hundreds, if not thousands of highly trained elephants perform aerial ballet in a theater for audiences that sit in large balconies overlooking a floor covered in many feet of water.  Engravings in the book show the scenes.  Earlier, I found Tonya reading the book and offered to read it with her.  During the film I saw several elephants plunge into the water in a terrible accident.  The main guy in the theater rushes below with his men to check on things.  They jump into cars which travel underwater pushed by poles that are suspended from the ceiling overhead.

It was the future.  COntoversy surrounded the building of an immense ocean liner inside which several dozen other, regular-sized ocean liners floated.  A scientist explained that the amount of water contained inside the ship was some measurement that the amount of water that would flow over the top of Mount Rushmore in a day.  I speculated what would happen if the boats inside were cut off from the outside world.  They would go to war against each other.

A man in required to stay in a house.  At night he sees a tableau of people in animal costumes outside in the spotlit woods.  This is in an intermittent thing, with different tableaus popping up more and more frequently, eventually involving motion in different locations. In order to save his sanity, he begins to join in.

         

A transfer truck trailer with no wheels, laden with heavy sacks, was stuck in the middle of the floor where I work.  You needed a special long pole to go into the hydraulic jack beneath it to get it up so you could move it with a forklift.  Big John the driver explained you also had to hold down a pedal with your foot.  I asked him if he had one of the poles, but he didn’t.  We tried picking it up with the forklift anyway, but it fell over, almost crushing Dianne.  She had to run out of the way.  The postmaster was watching.  He got angry.  We straightened it back up, but the legs underneath were bent now.  I told him all we had to do was push it against the wall to get it out of the way, but they tried again to pick it up.  It fell over again.  Everyone began climbing into it to unload the heavy sacks inside manually, hoping that would help.

There was a funhouse-type ride that some people were going through.  During the course of going through it, one collected extremely cheap Chinese-made novelties like tiny plastic toys and trinkets and little cheaply printed booklets of jokes and stories.  These novelties formed a complete set by the end of the journey around the machinery.  An older man was going through the ride.  It was important that he be gotten through very quickly for some reason.  The prizes he collected formed a set of clothes he could wear as a suit.  There was a bow-tie and pants and a shirt, all of very thin material.  One part of the ride, a fountain of blue dust, which gave one a funny feeling as one passed by it, exploded directly in the older man’s face, turning him Gay.  It was felt that by giving him a full selection of the ride’s offerings it would make up for this accident.

I went walking and found myself cut off from my point of origin.  I was on the wrong side of the fence.  I kept walking and walking, going through this and that.  At one point I crossed through the hold of a ship, picking up a paperback crime novel with an illustration by the man who draws The Fusco Brothers[61] on the front.  I sent a letter home, one I hoped the Viennese authorities wouldn’t intercept.  Eventually I was wearing only a yellow t-shirt which barely covered my genitals.  I had shaved around them and tightened a belt around my penis.

During the Indian wars or American Civil War I gravely insulted two other officers, younger men who swore vengeance on me.  They decided to forego getting their revenge until after the conclusion of hostilities.  One of the men I was able to convince to drop the whole thing, but the other, although later a member of one of my daring raids, which I re-enacted for him to show him that he had not been slighted in the glory, and nearly persuaded to drop of the vengeance also, but for his last-minute unfortunate accident, went ahead with it, resulting in my death and his.  Earlier, a man spent his entire fortune on a gigantic house with a bowl-shaped indoor bath the size of a pool.  He felt that if they could only take a regular-sized bath in the pool they would save just enough on water bills to keep making their house payments, but through a miscalculation, they lost their house anyway.  I and a team of people from the CSI  TV show later inspected the house and found the timbers water-logged.  In the later, war-time scenario, I saw an injured horse kiss another, more injured horse to comfort it during battle.  My heroic exploits angered my enemies.  When they came to confront me, I threw them down into the water from a high place.

I was going through some things and found an unopened letter of consolation from Charles Schulz on the subject of Captain Beefheart’s death.  The envelope was full of pencils and plastic doodads and cards imprinted with quotes of consolation.   I had received it earlier but kept it unopened to enhance its value.  When I showed it and its contents to come people, including Charles the truck driver, I commented that Schulz could afford such largesse: he made $500 million a year.  I said, why not just live in a castle on an island?  This led me to see the castle that I would build on an island.  The island was created by digging a small moat around a piece of land, the moat connected to a nearby river.  The top of the castle was reached by a long flight of stairs.

George Carlin was putting on a show.  Some of the people in the audience were actually raisin-headed apes, planted to make some sort of statement to the film cameras.  After the comedy portion, Carlin and his country music band performed.  They all wore railroad hats.  Then a priest was driving me somewhere in the city.  I was eating raisins, peaches, and Special K out of jars.  I accidentally put the uneaten raisins into the jars with the peaches.

Listening to a very rare first album by Paul McCartney recorded early in the Beatles’ career.  Special record player shaped like a kids’ play tower.  One of the songs on the album was a version of “Jingle Bell Rock” with lyrics supporting the PLO.

I was going to college and had to stay in a dorm with about a dozen other people in the same room.  We all had the same class.  It was a crafts class and we were required to build something out of wood from a kit.  I hadn’t even unpacked yet and already everyone had built and painted his kit.  I built a model house, but there wasn’t enough glue on it to hold it together and I was too shy or proud to ask to use the glue.  This all happened in the dorm.  I thought about asking my father to bring me a clamp from home, but I thought, you’re in college now, you need to deal with this on your own.  Someone advised me to buy a breathing tube so that I could study with pillows clamped around my head to keep out the sound of the other residents’ rap music.

I was jumping around my grandparents’ yard with both feet in a laundry basket.  My wife pulled up in her car.  She told me our son, still a toddler, did something endearing.  The school bus was coming.  I suddenly realized I’d forgotten to make my lunch.

The amount of work at my job slackened to the point that, for lack of anything better to do, I started making out with Maureen every day.  It started innocently, holding hands.

I and some friends had planned some mischief for a party being held in a brightly lit, abandoned store, like an old Sky City or Rose’s.  My job was to play records for the people.  I went to the stereo and started going through the available LPs, but couldn’t find anything appropriate until I came across a Grace Jones album.  I didn’t recognize it and assumed it was her first.  She and her band looked like a sexually nasty, gay version of Cameo.

In order to elude his enemies, Harry Potter drove his car over a magic stone in a road that would confuse them, but not him.  This led him to the proper street, where the ghosts of his parents had prepared a meal and a bath for him.  Soap bread was available.

I came across a store in someone’s backyard in the night.  The store sold clothing that the owners made out of rags, cast-offs, and odds and ends.  No one was there, so I decided to sit on a bench and wait until morning.  There was interesting homemade literature and periodicals available.  When the people showed up, I praised them for their work and began discussing it with them.  But then a young woman, who was a policeman in disguise as I was, came up and told me I was needed back at the office.  I didn’t want to go.

         

My family went to a Six Flags-type amusement park.  My son and I rode one of the smaller roller coasters and immediately got in line to ride it again.  But there was a delay.  We waited and waited.  Finally, one of the park employees, an older woman in the costume of some wild west prostitute, came out to entertain and explain.  She first showed everyone her breasts quite openly.  Then she held some kind of rotating motion picture device of the nineteenth century up between her legs and spun it, inviting everyone to have a look.  I got angry and stormed out.  Outside it was getting dark.  I told my father we were getting a refund and leaving.  “It’s eight ‘clock,” I said, “And we’ve only ridden one ride!”  Later, I was climbing down into a gigantic metal container covered with pipes and holding a tall chamber full of water.  I put my head into the water and could see all the way to the bottom.  I started to climb out, but I got stuck.  It was just too hard.  The floor of the container was twenty or thirty feet below.  Suddenly I realized that I could fly if I willed it, so why not jump?  I said, “Toadsgoboad” aloud as I fell.  I flew like Superman, hands out in front of me.  I picked up Jay Guinn and put him on my shoulder.  I flew over a building.  I flew as high as an airplane.  Then I deliberately dropped, almost to the ground, to scare Jay.  He passed out.

I came upon a monument under a tree.  The monument was shaped somewhat like the liberty bell.  It was made of dark gray granite.  It had carvings of pictures and words on the front in black.  I could hear the voice of the man to whom it was dedicated.  An enormous, ancient, black steel safe landed in front of me.  No one could get into it, it was said.  When no one was looking, I pressed a button on the front of the safe and opened it.  Inside, my companions and I found a room.  This was just the first of many rooms.  A house was inside.  I found colored discs inside that, if placed on the monument before spinning it around, caused the entire world to change.  One could, in effect, go to a different time or milieu.  Later, I was taking a shower.  I could hear Robert Plant talking on the radio.  He was complaining about soda pop advertising.  He said the air in the carbonation wasn’t really proud of having come from Brooke, where the soda was bottled.

I have been taking some kind of class.  The teacher, a young, good-looking woman, and I have been flirting.  She suggests that the entire class have dinner together.  It is understood that the two of us will go as a couple.  At the dinner, Mitch shows up.  He knows what I’ve been up to.  The teacher does not know that I am married.  I whisper to Mitch, “Can you imagine if I can pull this off?”  He said, “No,” meaning he doesn’t think I’ll be able to.  The teacher looks like Jenny Agutter.  Later, at a hotel, the manager kicks me out.  I am forced to walk back and forth to the car in the nude.  I tell myself this is OK, because it’s just like something that happened to Tommy Chong.

I was watching the latest movie from the creators of South Park.  Its convoluted plot involved a war between men and women, exemplified in the film by a film within the film that featured a scene at a comedy club where a woman gave a performance first about the ongoing situation, and then a man.  The man’s performance was interrupted by the owner/manager of the club, who wanted to contribute to the discussion by singing a song he wrote about the situation.  He prefaced it by explaining the song and its origins.  He made some remark about something being “proprietary.”  At this one group in the audience laughed uproariously.  He adjusted his glasses and looked at them and said something about “you guys from MIT.”  Everyone applauded.  Earlier, when the woman performed, she said, acting out a conversation, “my-my father, he’s a coward!”

I stopped in at a convenience store to buy some small item.  While in the process of getting checked out I found several coins on the floor around the register.  I used a couple for my purchase.  They turned out to be valuable.  They had been dropped earlier by the cashier.  They knew I had taken them and sent a young woman in to deal with me.  She wouldn’t give me my change to complete the purchase until I had passed a test, which included hitting a ball with a racket in an enclosure behind the store.  I refused, and started climbing around the enclosure in a circle, clinging to the plastic netting.  As I climbed around, all the dozens and dozens of young women I had had sex with were on the inside, wearing bikinis.  I could smell them.  Each smell was ravishing.  They smiled at me, delighted by my kisses and nuzzlings.  I started singing a show tune called “I Love Speed,” which I finished as I completed the circuit, kissing pictures of the children I had had with these women.  Earlier, Laura[62] had seen me at the register as she was leaving the store.  She asked me if I saw a pack of cigarettes in the change drawer.  I said yes and she told me they were hers.

My family and I were eating at a restaurant in Japan.  I had to use the restroom.  A man that worked there told me I had to pay to enter the restroom.  It cost me about three dollars.  I was required to put on a tight-fitting plastic bib that pulled over my head.  Then I had to wait.  I waited in a long line in a large, comfortable waiting area full of chairs and magazines.  Finally I noticed that there were two different lines for two different restrooms.  The symbol on my bib matched the symbol for the other, more expensive and quicker-to-access restroom.  I yelled at one of the attendants in anger, pointing at my symbol.  He quickly ushered me into the restroom area proper.  Inside I found a mock alleyway used by foreigners such as myself to urinate in.  However, I went into the area used by regular Japanese.  There were row upon row of concrete pews with tall backs.  I had to squeeze into the narrow area between them.  Japanese men were all around me.  They started to laugh at me as they found it funny that I had to pee in the same manners as they: up against the back of pew in front of me.  I laughed as well.  Filing out, I saw that the area around the urination pavilion was a hilly area of yellow dirt, the backside of many residential areas.

We were on a family trip to Russia.  Travelling with us was Rebekah Nelms’ parents[63] and another couple.  I and my family were walking through a covered shopping pavilion.  Haggard, dirty people were standing about here and there, playing the violin in exchange for the filling of their empty vodka bottles.  One man was dressed in papist robes, sitting in a chair, talking aloud.  We came to the center of the mall, where the Nelms couple and the other people were sitting around a table.  The Nelms man looked like Bruno Kirby with a pompadour and was shockingly obese.

A mysterious group of people purporting to be from Mars set up a device which administers therapeutic shocks of static electricity to the spine.  Later it is revealed that they are just a bunch of performers like the Aquabats or Blue Man Group.  At a carnival-like gathering, we see some of them mingling with other performers.  I arrive at the carnival in a bus with some other people.  Later, I buy a surplus van and drive it around my property out near an old house. My mother drives up to talk to me.  My father is walking around, talking on a phone.  I start driving, getting stuck because I can’t cross a railroad track.  So I start walking along it, entering my Uncle Leon’s house.  There I spend the night, watching a performance of the Mars people on the TV.  In the morning Leon tells me he is about to leave.   He gives me a handful of potato chips, which I spill on the floor.

Some old black man and his family, friends of Ken Gray’s[64], had bought a house and property formerly owned by my cousin’s family.  The black man ran a used car lot and flea market at the site.  His former home was across the street.  Richard and I were on his front steps watching him drive up in an old truck.  I said, “Look, it’s Lamont,” as a joke.  Four of the men walked towards us, but collapsed on the lawn, sick.  People in the house started having hallucinations.  A thin, sickly girl in the house made a strange comment about how we now knew we didn’t need doors.

I was investigating an old church.  The piano sat on a creaking timber beneath the floor.  I wanted to move it around the corner, but the floor was eaten away.  Beneath you could see a metal pipe coming out of the foundations.  This was the old steam pipe that had powered the organ, now gone, many years before.  I discussed the idea of fixing the hole with an old man and an old woman.

I met up with Renee[65] somewhere in Gainesville.  You could see the city from where we were, which later turned out to be Mark and Kathy Elrod’s[66] apartment.  The city looked like a grocery store seen from above or a collection of cereal boxes.  I put my arm around Renee and made a joke about out being engaged.  I said I used to think Athens was nice, but now that I had seen more of Gainesville I thought it was nice too.  Mark nodded in agreement.  I wanted to leave, but I knocked something over on the kitchen floor and had to clean it up first.  Mark started to help.  Some of the matter fell onto a tiny, potted cactus and I said to be careful with it.

         

I killed a pimp who was bothering people on the street, showing them his penis.  I made the girl I was with help me wipe our fingerprints off the potato chip delivery truck we were driving and then hide with me in my concealed apartment in a warehouse.  Earlier, a propeller-like group of blades had grown up inside my scrotum.  Each blade had a spine on it that pierced my skin.  I scraped these off, leaving small scabs.  Finally I showed this to doctors at some kind of gathering.  They told me that it was diabetes.

Some kind of chain on a pulley at work had been deliberately twisted up by somebody.  I noticed it and started trying to put it right.  A maintenance man was helping me.  We got hoisted in the air.  He jumped down and eventually so did I.  I didn’t have any more time to work on it, so I started to walk away.  Another maintenance man made a contemptuous comment to me in front of everyone about the inappropriateness of my fixing something.  I called Virginia over and in front of her and everyone, I called him a smartass and a dumbshit.

I and some other scientists were being rounded up by some unknown group of enemies.  We had a secret base, but we knew they were coming to get us.  I arrived at the base and everyone was in a panic.  Some others showed up later and told us the enemy was on its way.  I found a hiding place.  Rusty Goss helped me stack some boxes up in a glass case and we hid behind them.  We weren’t found, but we were shipped to Australia with the others when the base was invaded.  There the captured ones were forced to fight naked with clubs in order to learn the ways of the enemy, whom they were now being trained to join.  I mingled with the staff, suggesting to the cook in the commissary that he fry the dumplings instead of bake them.

Bonnie and I had a meal with an Indian family we met at a mall.  A couple of bugs had been accidentally cooked into the food and I was asked to pick them out before I fed the family’s children.

I had entered my body at a younger point.  When warned about satanic doings, therefore, I was not fooled.  In fact, I went down the street looking for ways to fool the believers.  I came upon a house that had belonged to my grandfather.  There were still many of his belongings hanging from the wall outside.  I chose a couple of plastic nib-type pens and a lighter and some other stuff.  I heard someone coming and immediately flew to the roof of the building.  It was my wife.  She was mad at me for getting involved in witchcraft.  I jumped down and explained that the items were also practical.  Earlier, when the preacher and his family showed up, they had been sent as help.  The preaching was just a sideline.  I was supposed to be part of the crew.  I suggested as a joke to Mark White[67], who was in charge, that we call the preacher and his wife Sam and Alice.  (Since their initials were S and A), but he didn’t get the joke and said no.

Reed and Peter and Bonnie and I were at a room at the dump. We started finding tiny toy animals in the dredged-up garbage.  We looked around for a little container to keep them in.  I found some tin badges of Popeye as a general.  I thought everything was free, but then some guy showed up and said he was going to charge us “as little as a dollar” for each item.  So I began stuffing everything in my pockets.

I and some friends had an impromptu evening of ad lib fun with a camera.  Sting was there and so was Peter Gabriel.  I sang a duet of “King of Pain” with Sting.  Some of the others got together an improvisational film in which I took part.  It started off with a monologue by somebody famous in the room.  He was dressed extremely strangely and in a room all weird-looking.  Then I and a small puppet made of rags or something became part of it.  I and another actor and his puppet rag had a conversation.  We had our puppets talk to each other so there was an improvisation within the improvisation.  In my character I was acting dumber than I really am, putting on that I was a bit confused and slow on the uptake with the improv.  All for the camera.

Bonnie and the kids were living in an apartment in the city.  A black guy in the apartment around the corner kept harassing me, mistakenly thinking that I was a successful artist, something he envied.  Eventually, I was forced to kill him by repeatedly bashing the back of his skull into the sidewalk.  I came back inside and showed my family some of his skull fragments in my hands. 

         

I was hanging out with some young people in a special room at a fast food place.  They had no idea how old I was.  Bonnie was there too, across the room.  We were pretending not to know each other.   For fun, we all started passing a bucket full of broccoli blossoms around.  Earlier, Bonnie and I were taking the kids here and there for various errands in a shopping center.  We took some man to a fitting for a commemorative jacket.  There was some sort of stylized map on the back that meant something to him.  I was suddenly reminded of a t-shirt that my father had brought back from Vietnam.  The shirt was long since gone, disintegrated through wear.  It had a photo transfer on the front.  It was a photo of him and some of his Vietnam buddies making a Vietnamese recipe for a soup made out of duck parts.  I began crying bitterly.

My family and I visited a Mormon church.  During the ceremony they played part of a film reenacting life in the days of their holy scriptures.  The cowboys and women had three eyes.  We were forced to leave because they said that during a previous ceremony involving children Peter had caused another boy to lose his faith by rolling his eyes.

         

I went to an Elton John show in a large room filled with tables and chairs.  For the audience’s amusement there were boxes full of little books.  I picked one and looked at it.  It was an assemblage of handwritten stuff and cut and paste stuff from magazines.  It looked very familiar.  I realized that it was my work.  I vaguely remembered doing the work and mailing it to Elton John years before.  I looked closely at the pages.  They were reproductions.  I started to get excited and looked around at the books the other people were looking at, but was disappointed to see that they all weren’t the same.  Only a few were the same as mine.

Bonnie and I were going to eat at a restaurant.  I dropped her off and drove next door to park the car.  The place I parked at was an old church.  The parking lot was full of colossal, ancient trees.  The trunks were massive, gnarled, evil-looking.  They were entirely dead except for filaments of green around the exposed, tooth-like roots, little buds of green.  A group of old intellectuals, men and women, were walking around looking at them.  Some had fallen over, but most were still standing.  I realized I’d left my money in the car and went back to get it.  By the time I turned around Bonnie was walking toward me.  She no longer felt like eating.

My family and I ran into some classmates of my children in a field.  I wanted to sneak up on them and take some pictures surreptitiously.  There was a building with secret passages leading into the field.  A party was going on inside.  I ran into my old teacher Mrs. Akins and introduced her to my son.  They greeted each other with a kiss on the cheek.  She told me she had had nipple surgery.  I invited her to the kids’ upcoming birthday party.  Some people were feeding a baby peanut butter.

I worked at a department store.  I was in the back getting ready to leave when I heard Mike Jones[68] make a long, strange announcement over the P.A.  I came out onto the floor in time to see two little kids in strollers jumping off the platform that ran around the walls of the store onto some mattresses below.  They had sneaked into the back room and somehow gotten up there and the store people had punished them by making them jump.  I confirmed this by asking Dianne, who was also getting ready to leave.  She and some other workers were hunched down behind a rack of clothes hiding until time to leave.  Someone handed me a big bag of cookies as I headed into the back again.  In the back area it was crowded as everyone prepared to leave.  The TV in the break room was messed up and would only play PBS.  It was raining outside.

I have been invited to sit a table with some professors at an academic banquet.  They are telling stories about academic subjects, life as university professors.  I charm them with my conversation.

I and my criminal partner had some kind of mix-up with some campers and lost our idiot assistant.  His duplicate, a good person, wound up with the family that lived in the camper we wanted to steal, so, I sopped up out man’s essence with a rag in a cup of coffee we drank out of and then performed a switch with the new good version while the family was eating breakfast, reconstituting our criminal idiot assistant.  Together we went through the breakfast buffet.  He had asked me had we committed many crimes in his absence.  He began to make a nuisance of himself in the buffet line.

I had gone back in time to the early 1970’s.  I was sitting in a crowded bus with Frank Zappa and another famous musician, someone along the lines of Kris Kristofferson.  We were being filmed having a conversation.  The other musician was trying to find out what music or bands Zappa was enthusiastic about in order to persuade him to join with him.  I made the argument that people shouldn’t be forced by labels like hard rock or soft rock into only listening to one kind of music.  Later Zappa and I went swimming with some other people in a pool 24 feet deep. At the bar I had a tiny sip of beer from a mug.  It made a taste like a strip of metal over my tongue.

Bonnie and I were traveling through a foreign city on a four-wheeled motorbike.  Bonnie was upset and crying because I was criticizing her risky and dangerous handling of the bike.  We passed by a house where a woman I worked with lived.  We went inside and found my sister and her family having a party.  I gave my two nephews hugs as I left.  They had received toy rocks or eggs that when broken open revealed prizes inside.

I was temporarily lodged in some kind of public space associated with young people and the university.  Through this I became involved in an art project/party being televised through the campus TV network.  This was partially a charity thing.  It developed into a huge party/media event/happening.  The public forum in which this happened took on the appearance like the inside of Junkman’s Daughter’s Brother[69] in a way.  Large space, very colorful.  What started out as just a few people turned into many in attendance.  I was included in the first stage, went to my cousin’s place, brought him back just as the thing went on TV.  There were only about six of us in the first place.  When I got back and was told to sit in the inner circle with the tacit understanding that I perform as an entertaining art person, I was given a booklet of art doings in which my name had been printed as Lance Speed Ash.  Later Bonnie was in the thing at least tangentially.  She pushed her finger under my eye and said, “Smell this with your eye.  Someone just gave me a dirty tampon.  What does it smell like?”  I said, “It smells like an eye infection.”

I was the singer in a rock band that had created its own religion with a sacred text called The Book of the Lion.  It had a girl bass player and a girl drummer.  The videos made the explicit connection between the band depicted in the book with the band itself.  We wanted everyone to know our gimmick, to see how we were using them and manipulating them.

         

Desi Arnaz was married to Yoko Ono.  They were the famous couple.  Their son, Desi Arnaz, jr., had once had a career as a comedian.  He told the story of his parents’ breakup.  He was very funny, making jokes about his inability to speak Japanese fluently and the difficulty of anyone to speak it.  He also made a joke call to his mother pretending to be his father.  He even giggled like his father on the phone.  He then made a bitter joke about his father emotionally starving his mother.  This was done in the form of a fake motor oil commercial.  The oil can was shaped like a coffee cup.

         

I found an old photograph of several men working in a large cavern, shooting water up into a hole.  All of the men, black and white, sported the same look: white tufts of eyebrows, white moustaches, and white spikes of hair on their heads.  I met their modern day successors, men working in a facility spraying water on a machine that made a hot fruit mixture.  When the machine got too hot it caught fire.  I watched them work and then during a break I watched them eat.  I asked them where exactly we were and one of the men said, “above the triangle.”  I said that was too far north for me.

         

I was working at a department store.  I was given a special assignment to string a line of burning candles in baskets over the entrance to one aisleway.  I went to one department looking for little baskets to use and the old ladies there asked me to help them.  They were cooking their Christmas employee dinner in the appliances on display.  They wanted me to reach into the oven and get some things out for them.  Earlier, I was in some kind of warehouse full of tacky toys and novelties for children from my childhood.  Earlier, Randy Kumpf[70] and I found a truck of some kind that we tried to get working.

There was a ride at the amusement park in which you got into an L-shaped pool and waited for a robot elephant to get into the water with you and scare you.  I got into the water and turned on the elephant myself.  It stepped in and made noise and sprayed water.  Then I deliberately soaked some right-wing interior design magazines with a reformed Kato Kaelin-type guy on the cover.  He had hired a black guy named the Colonel to home-school his two small children.  “I leave it all in your hands, Colonel,” he said.  Later, Bonnie ordered a Soloflex and had it delivered and set up all in one day.

At a grocery store you could take a free shower, but you had to do it in front of everybody.  You had to stand in the open area in front of the checkout lanes.  You stood there naked and the water went all over the floor.  The person taking the shower was an old black man, a former boxer.  He looked like a combination of Redd Foxx and Jerry the janitor from the post office.  Later, George Foreman came in and showered.  Then I took a shower, but I tried to use three washcloths to cover my genitals.

Jay was the governor of Georgia.  He ran a race and won, making him the running champion of the state as well.  He started to cry, overcome with emotion.

It was one of the last days of high school.  I was allowed to make out with Susan Hancock.[71]  She willingly participated.  It was a school function.  It was part of the traditions.  Her boyfriend at the time made out with some other girl, knowing it was a one-time thing.  The ceremony was over.  Ted Danson was one of the student/parents there.  He made a comment about the passing of the year.  I mocked his voice and everyone laughed as I drifted back in time.  It became a graduation party at Rhonda Kelley’s house.  Everyone and their parents went.  It was an elaborate hoax she put on.  It was all about the Civil War and the slave era.  As we left the house we were driven through a series of staged tableaux in which things got progressively worse.  Gunshots were fired, slaves revolted.  I eventually became part of the act, pretending to be killed and covered with dirt.  As I pulled away, someone asked me if that was what I had wanted.  I said everything was fine except the malaria.

Bonnie and I were watching a Saturday Night Live skit in which they aped the beginning of a symphony concert special.  A huge orchestra stood on a gigantic set of risers and played the beginning of some piece.  It started to rain and they were forced to quit playing.  That was the first part of the joke.  The curtains flashed open one time revealing the orchestra being washed away in a flood.  That was the second part.  We went backstage afterwards and looked at the set.  As I had suspected, it wasn’t a real orchestra, revealed by the fact that space on the risers was filled up with books.  We went closer and found that the books were just groups of books duplicated and the image pasted onto the sides of strips of other books cut up into sections.  This made me mad because I thought they might have used some of my books.  But then I told Bonnie that most of the books, and now there seemed to be quite a number of whole books, seemed fairly common and in not too good a shape.  Then we moved further into the stacks and found more books, in better condition and rarer ones.  The kids were with us.  We found collections of Madeleine books and Babar books.  I found a stack of rare Mad Magazine materials, actual issues and calendars, posters, and copies of original artwork.  I made a huge stack of stuff to steal.  A security guard, dressed as an army sergeant, came out after catching sight of me.  I hid, but Bonnie talked to him.  Earlier, we saw a SNL sketch as it was being filmed.  I experienced part of it from Eddie Murphy’s perspective.  It was one of his Mister Robinson skits.  This flowed into a commercial starring Eddie Murphy for a brand of soda pop and then for some liquor.

I had a big party for many of the people I’ve known at my grandparents’ old house.  I noticed that the whole house was tilted.  I said, it would only take a good heave to turn the house over.  And that’s what happened.  The only option left to us was to move into the double wide next door to our old house.  In order to get in and out I had to crawl through a window.  Someone had left a plate of uneaten waffles and syrup just inside and I got my pants into the syrup which made me angry.

I made plans to visit Glenn Danzig at his house after calling him on the phone.  Our talk was interrupted and I was waiting for him to call me back, but decided to try to get to his house before he did so.  As I was putting on my pullover I found half a set of skull-shaped handcuffs in one of the pockets.  I thought Danzig might want to see them and put them back.  Bonnie was in the next room and I told her where I was going.  Earlier, Lesia Tristram came back to work at the post office.  I was avoiding her until the moment was just right to talk to her.  She had one a brown and white striped shirt.

I was in high school again.  Many of us students were gathered to join some kind of team.  Mrs. Akins[72] was in charge, distributing our uniforms, which were t-shirts with numbers on them.  I got number eight, which was the same number as the shirt I was already wearing.  Tonya Byrd pulled a large, crazy-looking hat out of the box with the shirts in it and put it on her head.  It looked like a big green boat or fish.  In a funny voice I said, “Ride out 9-11 on meeeee.”  Jimmy Branton[73] and his friends collapsed in laughter.

Bonnie started a pizza restaurant in the backyard using menus from some place in Indiana that went out of business years before.  I woke up to find customers.  We also had some woman living with us who had a relationship with Bonnie.  As I came outside the woman went upstairs, claiming she had hurt her elbow.  Bonnie followed her upstairs, saying that the woman was more delicate than she was.   Some old black guys, one of them in a wheelchair, who lived across the street, showed up wanting to be waited on.  I found spoons on the floor in the hallway next to the china cabinet.

An old woman who founded a restaurant in an old warehouse-type building revisits the place to have dessert and comment on the place.  The food is mostly transparent gelatins, although they do have some sort of flavor.

I was on the side of the road.  A crowd had gathered.  A little girl was lost somewhere down in the mud and grass.  Finally somebody pulled her out.  It turned out she was a brat.  She made some kind of statement and everybody laughed at her.  I walked away and a little boy came up beside me.  My father picked him up by his hair.  I felt so bad for him I started crying.

I demonstrated an ability to pick up rolls of toilet paper off the ground with my mind, bringing them up to my outstretched hands.  I could also make them float up from my hands.  A researcher came to observe the phenomenon.  I picked up a pen from the ground and suddenly had the idea that maybe I could write with the pen, moving it with my mind.  Then I tried drawing that way.  The initial attempts were crude, like children’s drawings, but I knew I could get better at it.  Then I was in a parking lot with my son.  My powers had progressed to the point that I could stop his shopping cart from moving across the lot.  Two men tried to kidnap either my son or me, but I forced them to lie down on the ground in a fetal position.

Sean Connery was one of a group of engineers/businessmen who took a field trip to a factory to take a look at some new piece of machinery.  At some point in the trip he passed out.  When he woke up it was dark and his group had left him to go back to their own place of business.  He ran to the gate, waving his pass.  The bus was just pulling away.  They came back and got him and enjoyed a drink in the bus on the way home.

I went to a big store specializing in Mexican made party supplies.  I crawled across the top of a pile of merchandise about halfway down the store, stuffing a miniature green paper chair in my back pocket.  I then climbed down and made my way towards the back of the store.  Two ugly girls came in on their lunch break.  They wanted to go to the restaurant area in the back where they could dance.  At a register I found some trinkets I liked.  One was a plastic pin of the Hulk all in gold.  I tried to buy it, but my money was all discs of dough.

Nikki and I were flying around in a tiny little airplane.  We were trying to make it back to base in time to win some contest.  The plane landed at one point high in the trees on a platform.  The only way to get it started again was to drop off the side.  But we were too scared to do that, so we rolled off the side of a cliff instead. 

We were living in our old house.  I had done some drawings in nutmeg dust inside an old science textbook.  Peter was looking at them.  Some boys came to visit and one of them erased the drawings.  Peter was upset about it.  He came to me to tell me about it.  I chased one of the boys out of one of the rooms.  On the floor I found a needle and a vial of heroin.  Not wanting some kind of scene, I hid these things in the closet.  Then I went through the book with Peter trying to find the drawings, thinking that maybe Peter had just lost the correct pages.

I was getting married.  The in-laws, whom I had never met, came to stay with us.  They were smoking electronic cigarettes in the house.  Earlier, Terry Moore[74] and some other former USPS workers stopped by the job.  Terry had red hair.

I had some kind of business in the Old West of the late 1800’s where I supplied travelers with necessities for going across the continent.  One group that I supplied I gave a list of religious nuts, where they were located, and how to avoid them.  Only after they left did I realize that they were one of the groups mentioned.  One of the men had asked me which city I loved most of all.  I said New York City.  He asked me how much money I had spent while I was there.  Lying, for I had never been there, I said, “Oh, about 1900 dollars.”  Then, I found out that Jeff Turpin[75] had made a display of my severed penis.  I had put it through a hole in a Heavy Metal clock that had pictures of Van Halen and ZZ Top and others on it.  The penis had been cut off and Jeff decided to put it on display in the hole in the clock.  He had it in a glass case.

Some of my workmates and I were waiting in a doorway for something or someone.  There was a pile of magazines next to us.  There was a picture of a band in the magazine.  I couldn’t figure out who they were, so I asked Randy.  He said it was the Kinks, but he pronounced it “Sinks.”  He tore up a copy of the magazine in his fervor to look at the picture.  I looked closer at the picture and, sure enough, there was John Entwhistle and Rory Gallagher.  Then the person or persons we were waiting for showed up.  They wanted their rolls.  One was missing.  It had somehow found its way into my body just under the skin.  I moved it around until it was near my anus so I could get it out.  I reached in my pants and got it.  Some people thought it was nasty, but I said, no, it will be OK once I microwave it.  The microwave was an older model.

I was in the basement with two guys, one of whom looked a lot like Ivan Stang.  They invited me to smoke some pot with them.  They passed a pipe across the table to me.  Bonnie joined us.  After a few seconds Bonnie told me, why don’t you brush your teeth?  I knew I had no choice.  I got up and, as I passed by one of the guys, I asked, Have you ever heard of such a thing?  He said no.  I went upstairs and made a sloppy pass over my teeth with the brush.  I then went to pick out some music to bring with me downstairs.  By the time I had turned around Bonnie was upstairs.  She was dragging the vacuum cleaner down the hall.  I said, You’re going to vacuum now?

Connie Seagraves[76] was expediting on the open dock.  She opened the door on a truck and held onto the strap when it went up.  It pulled her all the way up into the mechanism.  Her little feet were sticking out.  I shouted for her to hold on.  I went to get a BMC for her to climb down on.  Dennis[77] said, hold on, he’s getting a CMC thing.  I shouted to the driver to raise the dock plate.  When I got to the truck Brenda[78] was up in the door mechanism too.  She climbed down first, after Connie’s shoes fell off.

I was at a shoe store.  I asked for a certain kind of shoe.  The salesman went to look for it, but I found a pair on a high shelf.  I also found a pair of pliers behind the box.  The salesman came back with a book.  He placed it opened on the floor and had me step on it.  My toes lay over the edge.  I said, this is a 13?  He questioned me, saying, forty-something?  When I turned around to sit back down in my chair a man with his pants down was propping his naked rear on the arms of my chair.  He excused himself and stood up again.  I realized that I only had cash with me and asked, if they still had a coupon in the latest coupon book, but the season was wrong.  The salesman said, you have so many styles to choose from, why do you want these?  I said I used them as work shoes.

Bonnie and I were walking with Bonnie’s father in some extremely steep countryside.  He was talking about being invited to seek some kind of cultural artifact by a friend of his.  I noticed a man with long curly hair far above us entering an old barn.  As we walked on the man was standing above us.  He was part of this thing that Bonnie’s father was talking about.  He said he was going to give a speech at the meeting and use his native accent, which was kind of Scottish.  I let him talk and then said, can I ask you something?  Are you Lou Gramm?  He said yes.  As we headed down the hillside I told Bonnie’s dad there was no way I was going to the meeting if we had to walk any higher up.  Bonnie said, who’s Lou Gramm?

I was taking an elementary school class with my children.  We had to take a test.  The math was far over my head.  Finally I got up and said, not only is this ridiculously far beyond me, but this particular test has already half-way been filled in by someone else.  There were several teachers around the table.  They handed me a plastic box thing hanging from a string.  Inside it were rows of little objects like toy people.  They said, here.  What do I do with this?  You just run it through the machine.  I didn’t know what they were talking about.  Then they said, give him a napkin he can write on.  It was a flimsy paper napkin.  I said, I can’t write on this with a pencil.  I need a pen.  An old man in a suit let me borrow his fancy pen.  When I sat down and began to write with it I found it was not only writing brown, it was actually writing in chocolate with chunks of peanuts in it.  My children were on either side of me.  They were having no trouble with the test.

There was an old house in town that my parents wanted me to have.  An old man owned it.  Somehow if he married this woman on her deathbed it would soon pass into my hands.  My parents were trying to encourage him to do this.  Earlier I drove a van down a narrow street with large blocks standing down the middle to the house.

I was one of several performers at a nightclub.  All of the acts were arranged around the wall facing a large floor.  Several of the others were in cahoots to perform synchronized dance moves with each other while they performed.  These were all musical acts.  Some of it looked like TV advertising moves to me.  I thought it would be funny to throw shoes during the dancing as if that was my rehearsed bit.  They introduced each act aloud to the audience, but I wasn’t introduced as I wasn’t a featured performer, only an unknown, far down on the bill.  There were two people who weren’t musical acts.  They were two sons of Bob Hope.  They were old men and they looked a lot like him, with the same type nose as their father.  They told anecdotes about things that happened to them.  One of them involved their pot use, leading James Thurber to write a story about smoking pot that eventually led to him becoming a pot smoker.  They said that when E. B. White found out, he scolded Thurber about abusing.  He replied, abusing what, a phone number?

It was a movie that Bud Powell had written the music for.  A woman was asking me questions about the music.  I was explaining who Bud Powell and some of the other people were.  Then Herbie Hancock walked in.  Everyone was awestruck, even the other musicians.  Then the woman was showing me a car in a swimming pool.  Herbie Hancock had given her the car.  She wanted my help in getting it out.  The pool was in a warehouse.  Once the doors were opened the water ran out.  The girl’s boyfriend was there.  We knocked him out.  The car was of a kind called a Black Namba.  Earlier, I was floating up to the ceiling while explaining the music.

---

[1] My wife.

[2] I cannot make out this word.  “Flaming?”

[3] ?

[4] This will be a recurring device in my dream entries.  Often I would forget some part of the dream that occurred earlier in the dream, so I would put it in, explaining that it happened “earlier.”

[5] I didn’t realize that I had put down this “non-dream” material until I started typing these entries.  This sort of thing was soon banished from my methodology.

[6] Owner/manager of Musician’s Warehouse, a music store in Athens, GA, and guitarist.

[7] As we go further into the diary semi-waking state dream material is excluded.  Only material from the unconscious should be allowed.

[8] A side note on the page tells me that this is Rhonda Kelley, my high school girlfriend.

[9] Reed and Peter, our children.

[10] Wayne’s mother, just like it says.  Wayne was two grades ahead of me in high school.

[11] The Post Office.

[12] Bonnie’s father and stepmother.

[13] A guy I used to work with at UGA.

[14] A guy I used to know.

[15] A guy at the Post Office.

[16] My wife’s stepfather.

[17] The head football coach at my old high school when I was on the junior varsity team.

[18] Meaning “breaks from activity,” not “advantages.”

[19] The coach of the junior varsity football team when I was on it.  Later head coach when I was on the varsity team.

[20] Long-time plant manager or temporary postmaster of the Athens, GA post office.

[21] Stands for “bulk mail container.”   Big, aluminum boxes on wheels that the USPS purchased from Amtrak years ago for their own use.

[22] Brother of a friend of mine.

[23] Athens Christian School.  I went there from 4^th through 12^th grade.

[24] The friend of the brother mentioned in footnote 22.

[25] Agricultural family in the area.

[26] A guy I work with at the Post Office.

[27] Friend of mine.

[28] An APC (All Purpose Container) is a type of container on wheels used by the Post Office.

[29] Jonathan Langley.

[30] Actually not dead as of this writing.

[31] Woman I work with.

[32] Man I work with.

[33] People who bought my parents’ old house.

[34] Woman I work with.

[35] Man I work with.

[36] Man who used to run a video rental place in Athens, GA.

[37] One-time supervisor at my workplace.

[38] A friend of mine who moved away to New York.

[39] Old girlfriend of mine.

[40] Guy I work with.

[41] One of my high school teachers.

[42] A supervisor where I work.

[43] A guy at my old high school.

[44] My cousin.

[45] Football coach at my high school.

[46] Room at my place of employment.

[47] Union steward.

[48] Friend of mine who moved away.

[49] Guy I work with.

[50] Guy who used to work at the Post Office.  He looked like an evil Jesus.

[51] Mexican food place in Athens, GA.

[52] Woman I used to smoke pot with.

[53] May not be exactly the title.

[54] Woman I went to high school with.

[55] Richard Barrett, friend of mine.

[56] Guy I went to high school with.

[57] Woman I work with.

[58] The League of Gentlemen TV show?

[59] A guy I work with who was also my eighth grade home room teacher.

[60] Guy at the post office.

[61] J.C. Duffy

[62] Woman I work with.

[63] My daughter’s best friend at school.

[64] Guy I work with.

[65] Woman I work with.

[66] Man and woman I work with.

[67] Supervisor at the post office.

[68] Guy I work with.

[69] A store in Athens GA much like an old-fashioned “head shop.”

[70] Guy I work with.

[71] Girl I had a crush on.

[72] My 7^th and 11^th grade home room teacher.

[73] Friend of mine in high school.

[74] Guy I used to work with at the post office.

[75] Guy at the post office.

[76] Woman at the post office.

[77] Janitor at the post office.

[78] Woman I worked with both at UGA and the post office.