Bombs, Kittens, Palaces

I remember so little of last night's dream that I almost didn't write it, but it keeps flitting about in my brain as though something about it is meaningful, so . . .

I was in a wildly hilly Olympia, where a mall was dug into a hillside, spiraling down like the one in Miraflores behind the pleasant, open, rainy façade of brick buildings and wide streets atop steep slopes.  I wandered all over this town, talking to various people, as though on some search.  I went into a warehouse where some kind of event was.  I encountered people from my past, again vague acquaintances from high school.  At the mall, I ran into my old friend Cori with her mother.  I was, of course, nervous and shy, but for some reason couldn't stop talking with her, and it seemed she was under the same spell.  So we talked on and on and on.  In the back of my head, I figured that this was because she was an Aquarius.  

At one point, a massive rocket fired into the sky, loud and strangely slow, but raging.  I looked up gleefully, expecting it to be a space shuttle, but found instead that it was a jet carting bombs and bombs and bombs to some distant war zone.  I called it something under my breath, and Cori and her mother were shocked, thinking I'd called it something else, some word that only military generally use for such things.  Cori had been involved in the military, I remembered.

Things happened.  Who knows.  I wound up outside of some rather large pseudo-mansion, out near the gates of a vast, rolling, green estate.  Sitting on the ground with other people, none of whom associated with the property, Ian and I were shown a bag containing two newborn kittens.  Ian pulled them out gingerly, and handed them to me so that I could touch them as well.  They were so small and sleek and squirmy, blind and kind of seal-like in my hands.  Ian was going on and on about them, about their relationship with human fetuses or something along those lines.  He was treating them like magical charms or symbols or some esoteric thing.  They were so very little.

Creepy, man

I was moving a lot.  I had to draw upon distinct parts of my personality to relate to all of the people around me that I was encountering.  I wish I could remember more about these details, but it was all overshadowed by the fact that, at one point, a man requested that I help him die.  His chosen method: self-immolation.  Rather than burning to ash, though, he burned like hard, melting plastic, growing smaller and smaller but still communicating with me somehow, even when he was a warped, melted gray disk in my hand, begging me psychically to finish it for him, that the pain was excruciating.  I'm f*cking sure it was.  By the end I felt like a torturer and a murderer.

My mother was aware of this, and tried to console me on this matter.  With her, we wandered through a quintessentially southern bayou scene to a little shack where an old blind person - not the first blind person I'd encountered in this dream - a completely androgynous wise elder figure of ambiguous ethnic descent who told us some very interesting stories that I wasn't able to hear properly.  People began to show up, drowning out their voice with their own surfing adventure tales and complaints about their home life. I eventually drove off with some of these people, prompted by something having to do with water.

My moving finally came to a close in my second dream, in which I moved to a house in a Portland that came across much more like the Seattle of my dreams often does.  I had to climb great staircases alongside eerily silent freeways to get into my neighborhood.  The top was at Lombard, but Lombard backed against a thickly forested, steep hillside and no houses were to be seen.  For being four lanes wide, it was remarkably devoid of cars as well.  I turned around and went down one flight, realizing my mistake.

The house I was moving into was absolutely gorgeous.  It felt stable and strong and new and fresh (although, I'd been told, it had been built in 1908); it had a very polished, metropolitan aesthetic mixed with a log cabin kind of feel.  The rent was a bit much, but the place was so lovely that I was prepared to stay there forever.  The owners of the house were a 30-something couple, maybe with a baby and a dog, who were calm and peaceful and creative.  A girl around my age, or maybe a little younger, also lived there, possibly with her boyfriend - also a very stable, friendly person.  My room was the only one upstairs, in a peaked-ceiling attic loft space.  

Ian was staying the first few nights with me while I made myself comfortable. Just before going to bed, having sat around a warm fire and chatted with my new roommates for hours, they warned me as an afterthought that the house had a ghost, but that they rarely had to deal with it.  When Ian and I went up into my lovely room, a chill immediately became apparent.  As soon as we lay down under the soft sheets and I turned off the light, Ian said, "Oh, I see why they never have to deal with the ghost; it only lives in this room."  I could feel it descending upon us, falling over us like a quilt, a malicious, morose energy  reminiscent of a wailing banshee.  I tried to move to turn the light on or somehow escape, but I couldn't.  Initially horrified by the sleep-paralysis, and a little weirded out that it was happening so tangibly in the middle of my dream, I fought against it, only to give up thinking, "what's the worst that could happen?"  Which of course led me to fight it again.

When I finally broke the paralysis, I was awake in my real bedroom, staring at the window, for a full minute or so unable to comprehend where I was.  I had not expected to break back into my waking life at all.  I guess I was having a more classic version of sleep paralysis?  The kind where people claim demons lay on their chests and aliens abduct them and such?  Usually, my sleep paralysis is entirely conscious and banal; I know exactly where I am and what is around me - often I even know the time of day or night, and what the weather is like outside - I just can't move.  Nothing creepy but a fear of the unknown nature of comas in that case.  But ghosts descending on me - that is art, man.

Stubborn Time-Travel

I haven't been working on my story in ages, so when I fell asleep last night I requested a dream that would inspire me in that arena.  This is what I got:

Barbara and I, along with two of the same four guys from a dream I'd had months ago in which I crashed a car into a hole on the way to a cozy snowy cabin, took a train to "Eugene" or some such.  All of the guys in that dream were black and very tall.  We didn't get off in time, but were ushered off south of town and had to walk in ourselves in the dark.  We went to a late-night restaurant where some boys I went to high school with were - not ones I'd been friends with, and I'm not even sure if they recognized me at first.  Once they did, they (jokingly?) held me to some old stereotypes.  As I tried to prove them wrong, I unthinkingly grabbed a bite of their food and shoved it into my mouth, only to discover that it was bacon.  It took ages for me to get all of it and then it's residual flavor out of my mouth.  I felt like I'd polluted myself almost beyond recovery.

I left the restaurant with only one of the guys we'd come with on the train; Barbara and the other guy vanished around this time.  We found ourselves on a bluff overlooking a huge, beautiful stone bridge, on which another black guy was laying, writing and reciting poetry.  An earthquake was scheduled to happen around 3 in the morning, so one of the guys and I raced down to move this brother from the bridge.  It was a nerve-wracking experience to be on it, even though it wasn't so high above the water that we would die.  The poet was very hard to move.  He was almost like a sleep-walker, and very much in his creative groove, unwilling to break it. The water rushing below the bridge was inky and dark blue in the night; the scene was reminiscent of Arequipa.

Day time came, sunny early summer, and I was driving home on country roads with ripening fruit trees and twisting happy rivers.  I spent the remainder of a dream with a guy who was almost faceless - his presence was steady, but I can't for the life of me tell what he looked like or who he was supposed to be.  It was in his company that, driving into town through some loosely interpreted version of the historic neighborhood, I blinked us into the 1980's.  We were both totally aghast.  It was as though the world before my eyes had melted down into nothing but its colors, balls of color, and then reformed into an identical scene in another time.  We drove through the streets feeling out of place; our car was from the 90's, and we hoped no one would notice. Needless to say, my home town was not what it is in reality - it wasn't even anything from my dream-map - but it was much more beautiful and curious and inspired.  We pulled over at a store that isn't really there west of where the north co-op should be, on a densely green, tree-lined street.  We went inside to find a myriad of people fully immersed in the 80's, a clothing section that was fully stocked for the 80's, and food options that were woefully straight out of the 80's as well.

Outside of the store, we collided with a group of people (at least one of which I know in reality) from the present, and that broke the spell.  I tried to tell them what I had done, and they were fascinated.  The girl I do know told me candidly, "I have always known you have special powers; I don't, I am just the sort of hippie-dippy person who believes in them."  Her daughter was with us, and I had some personal interaction with the little girl that I wish I could remember better.  I attempted to do it again, but only succeeded at bringing us back to the 90's.  Still, that was quite the show.  We managed to stay in that decade for quite a while, wandering around town, until I got it in my head that we HAD to go back to the 80's so that I could go to my childhood home, so I could explore it again, so I would show the strange guy I was with all of the exact locations that I experienced paranormal phenomena in, so I could feel as an adult what the vibe there actually was.
  

We made our way to the neighborhood, but I was completely unable to push us back into the 80's again; we were kind of trapped behind a physical and metaphysical force-field about three houses up the street.  It was an earthy old house with a wide wooden deck in back.  From there we could see that there was a narrow cement bike path running behind the houses, and I could see that the back yard of my childhood home was unfenced and open to it.  I wanted so badly to just go back there, but the guy was very reluctant, and I found that his "no" was somewhat paralyzing. (This neighborhood was similar to the one with the huge street party in near Lake Washington in the dream where I ended up becoming immortal and taking off in a yacht to the San Juans, but couldn't convince anyone for my life to come along with me).

My life kind of fell back into a normal rhythm after that.  I had to return to work, with plants and the berry field, messing about with sandals and seedlings, my co-workers and being on time. Around this point, Ian and I traveled back down to that stone bridge from the beginning of the dream, and, also at night, he killed my favorite cat.  He had his reasons for doing it - ceremony, ritual, who knows?  I couldn't watch him do it.  I fled the woodsy place by the river and, sobbing as I wandered through the streets, came to terms with the fact that my cat's buoyant, fun energy would live on the in universe - it would be reincarnated in some way and we would not actually lose it.  Still, I was heart-broken and shaken.

Not A Dream

My dream last night was total fluff, absolutely unworthy of detailing.  It was vivid, long and colorful, but little more than a purge of pop culture influences that have crept into my precious brain over the years.  I might as well have skipped sleeping and read a pubescent vampire novel instead.  Due to health issues, with a weighty second impetus of environmental concerns, a few days ago I (re)converted to a vegan diet and put myself on a thoughtful little detox regime of sorts.  Hence, I'm detoxing crappy media input.  But as they say: cada vez, mas claridad.  Stay tuned for real dreams in the near future.

Magic House

We moved to Olympia, my family.  We bought an huge, derelict but gorgeous, ornate Victorian house north of Priest Point Park, right by the water.  It had been raining incessantly, and the sound had overflowed into our yard.  It wasn't yet lapping at our sprawling porch, but the rain was not going to stop soon; the sky was knotted with black clouds that seemed to be tearing at one another.  From the kitchen, where the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the glistening water, it appeared that we were on a boat.  When I vocalized that observation, the whole house began to shift and sway as though it were true.  My parents began considering tearing down the old house and building a new one further down on the property, but because the further from the water you got, unlike almost everywhere on earth, the lower you went, this posed the threat of the water cascading over the highest point and completely swallowing the new house.  The gnarling and twisting forests clinging to the steep hills, cut through with zig-zagging roads and occasionally interrupted by cleared lots for gardens or small pastures, were dark and beautiful.

I took a lover.  He was an artist who lived in town.  Our relationship was inspiring and blissful, save for the private knowledge that I carried of his death.  I knew the moment he would die, to the hour.  He was bound for New York City to do a show, but the night before he left he wasn't feeling well.  I tried to make the very most of what I knew would be our last moments together.  I asked him to make love, but he insisted that he felt sick and needed to rest.  I held him through the night, trying to keep awake to experience every second, but eventually drifted off.  When I awoke, he was gone, and so were the things he was meant to take to New York.

I called his best friend to see if he knew where he was, and was lead around on a verbal goose hunt.  Unable to ask blatantly if my lover had died without sounding insane, I was informed plainly that my lover was simply in New York, as planned.  But I wasn't given a number to reach him at there, and while my love's mother and sister were near by (for suspicious reasons), I wasn't allowed to speak to them, and half of the questions I asked were greeted with confounding, bizarre sarcasm, climaxing at a point where, after having been locked in this strange telephone dance for at least an hour, he asked me, "who is this anyway?"  Several mutual friends of ours approached me around this time, curious about the strange conversation I had been sucked into, and they responded to his claims that he didn't know me with a collective: "Well, tell him we don't know who he is either."

Disturbed, but not too much, I wound up in some weird roller rink.  And that is all I remember.

The Cosmonaut

The beginning was an indulgent exploration of nature, along river beds and Puget Sound beaches, through the eyes of chubby little boys eating ice cream in parks and pregnant women reading "The Giving Tree" to their unborn children.  I was scarcely a factor in all of this; the modern human connection with nature was the main protagonist - our reaching out towards it for solace, or to protect it, or our appreciation of the mutated forms of it that we've had our hand in creating (even in a city park, there are still murmurations of native birds, after all, and on a cooling summer evening, no matter where you are, the sky still changes hues and the refreshing wind still kisses your arms).

When I did manifest clearly within the dream, I was drifting through outer space.  I butted up, by chance, against a space station that I remembered off-handedly was one that was suffering a strange leak.  As it was slowly losing some kind of gas due to an entirely unprecedented event, earth had fired up to it a contraption that had attached itself to the side of it and was filled with hundreds of tiny vials of this precious commodity.  They had put out word that they were accepting volunteers of all kinds to assist in getting these vials into the space station, as it was not equipped to open certain doors and such. I figured that since I was there, I might as well help out.  I pulled from the white box a handful of vials, and passed them through a very tiny window, where a gloved hand collected them on the other side.

It was then that I realized I wasn't wearing a space suit, that I couldn't possibly breathe, and that I was dying.  I began pounding and clawing at the doors and windows in that horrible under-water way (very similar to the no-gravity way), screaming voicelessly.  Just as I felt I had been abandoned, the door opened just a crack and I was violently yanked in.  A 60 year-old woman, clad in a gray dress, ushered me rapidly through the corridors of the station while explaining, almost lecturing, about how the doors could not be opened, and she had risked everyone's lives to save mine.  She brought me to a dark room where I was given oxygen to inhale, and both of us calmed down.

A number of people lived at the station, but I only concerned myself with two of them: this woman, and her son, a tall, charming fellow who wasn't really my type but still one I could appreciate.  The woman wanted me to marry him, for he was lonely out in space.  I told her apologetically that I couldn't bear the thought; I needed to live on earth.  I needed the wet soil and the breathable air, the rich colors and textures and tastes of life.  I couldn't stand the idea of living in space, in a sterile environment, unable to really touch my surroundings.

So I was returned to earth.

After a few months, I received an invitation in the mail to visit them again.  I accepted.  I found myself on a small planet, much like the moon as I envision it, but somehow the size didn't affect my weight too much; I felt lighter, but I wasn't floating.  The sky was black and flooded with bright stars, including a nearby sun, which lit up the land but cut through the darkness without overpowering it, possibly because there was no water on the planet to reflect it.  The atmosphere here, I knew, was quite low, but the air was perfect.  The first person I encountered here was a little man, not even a real human, just some human-like alien travelling through space looking for planets to make life on.  He was thrilled with his discovery, and sorely disappointed when I pointed out that he'd been beaten to the punch.  In the distance, we could see a camp had already been set up.  In a fit, he climbed back into his little spaceship and took off.

My old astronaut friends, plus every boy I have ever liked or tried to date, or had ever debatably liked me, was sitting around a camp fire, pulling beers from an open cooler, roasting hot dogs over the flames, chatting it up.  When I arrived they all teased me gently about my decision to not marry this man who had discovered another livable planet.  He had brought with him mushroom spores, soil for growing plants, seeds and seedlings, and so, so much water.  He was going to inoculate this barren landscape with life.  It was the ultimate adventure, starting entirely fresh and seeing what might spring up from the strange game of playing pseudo-God.  It was the experiment of a lifetime, beyond the imagination to even wish for.  And yet I had chosen earth.

I didn't regret my decision in the slightest.

Migraine Madness

Firstly, I was in the middle East, dancing back and forth across the green line, developing a taste for Palestinian pastries and eggs.  I wanted so badly to bring them back in to Israel so that I could consume them in my own kitchen, but an embargo was being "tied down tighter every day," I was told by a soldier clutching a machine gun to his chest.  I gave the eggs away, and contemplated eating all of the pastries right then and there before passing through the checkpoint, but instead placed them in a small canal of sorts and watched them float away.  Children gathered on either side and tried to pluck them out of the water.  The place was very colorful, very cramped.

In a second dream, Basho had a bar/restaurant, either to his name or simply for celebrating something like a birthday.  I was among the first of many people to show up.  He was so confident and happy.  He'd learned some strange tricks and was excited to demonstrate them.  I cannot remember much of this one, but I believe I was shirking a responsibility and had to get back to it quickly.

Somewhere in this mess, my old roommate Nate had moved in with Ian and I.  He had brought with him (irony of ironies) some really nice wall-art.  I was happy to have him, and very happy about the new decorations.  I took a walk at one point to meet my sister at the Timberhill shopping center, a place I haven't spent any time since I was much younger.  There was a class going on, perhaps a pottery class, in one of the "stores."  There were art displays not unlike Bumbershoot's.  I participated for a while, but mostly sat at a small table outside, waiting along the walkway for my sister, smoking a cigarette very slowly.  I met with her briefly, and I believe I met with Basho briefly, and then I believe I was at home again briefly, but who knows.  This dream ended with me flipping through some paintings that either Nate or Basho had, and coming upon one of a woman in a vibrant blue dress so intensely beautiful and richly colorful and intoxicating in design that I actually woke up from the strength of the emotion, just as someone wakes up in terror.  I woke up from the overwhelming, all-consuming beauty.

And I still had a migraine.  It was a couple hours before I managed to fall back to sleep.

Finally, I found myself to be visibly pregnant and with a group of other people out near the arboretum. Some kind of event was happening there, but I was anxious to get home, or at least closer to home, as it sunk it that riding my bike that far might be even more cumbersome at 6 or 7 months pregnant.  I only stopped briefly along the side of the highway, but my rest was interrupted by a couple of old college teachers who's classes I surely flunked, who wanted to engage me in an awkward dialogue.  I climbed back on my bike and didn't stop until I reached the town's "business park" or "banking castle" or lord knows what, located right at the tip of the peninsula between 9th and the highway where the old buildings caught on fire a few years ago.  It was a gorgeous tower-of-Babel type structure, a multi-tiered work-place for wealthy suits combined with a terraced public park reminiscent of of Incan ruins.  At one of the main entrances to the park, I encountered three other pregnant woman, only one of whom I know in real life.  I spoke with them for a while, about what I can't recall, and had vacillating feelings of belonging (I am finally getting to play this mother game, too) and alienation (I am not actually, pregnant, am I?  That can't be possible).  I finally wandered away from them, having not entirely rejected the idea of being pregnant, and began taking photographs. 

Double Fantasy

John Lennon's Attic

John Lennon had lived in a house in the coast range, according to the mushiness of the subconscious. The entire place was eerily lit and very still, and filled up like a balloon with a vague, indescribable but overpowering feeling that I'm sure came from an earlier part of the dream I have completely forgotten. I was staying in the house.  I had every intention to go to the beach, but it was night, and night showed no signs of relenting.  Some kind of grounds keeper/maid existed on the premises, but I rarely saw them. I spent much of my time shuffling through boxes of the dead musician's personal things.  I found letters and journals and clothing and photographs and all types of artifacts relaying daily life in the 20th century. I was most taken by the books and journals and letters and writings.  Yoko Ono fleetingly showed up to point out a box I'd been ignoring.  At another point some ghosts appeared to explain some things to me that I cannot remember, out on the lawn among the bending, moss strewn maples. In the box that Yoko had shown me were some books that John Lennon had bound for his own keeping; one was a very emotional autobiography.  It paid little mind to specific dates and even events, keeping instead to the emotional undercurrent and tone of various times.  Thoughts, memories and responses to different stimuli drove the entire plot.  It was a profoundly refreshing book to read, very human, and blissfully devoid of dry details of dates and acquaintances.  If it had been a coloring book, it showed only the color - the lines you were supposed to color between were entirely lacking.

I had no desire to keep it or take it, though, even though it made me feel so good.  I just wanted to go to the beach.

There were some girls waiting for me at a small market out there in the hills.  It was with them that I was supposed to finally go to the stupid beach, but it seemed I was caught in some vortex regarding the house.  They went on without me as day finally began, but I was back in the grass outside of this strange house, stuck with the ghosts.


Peru On Other  Senses

I was only in this dream for the beginning, staying in a haunted hotel room or house or apartment.  The ghosts here were terrifying, very playful in a malicious way.  They stole my ID card and my bank card, taking them through walls and hiding them in strange places.  Sometimes I was able to pick them up and attempt to put them away in my wallet, but other times when I touched them they would be so scaldingly hot or cold that I would burn my fingers.  A couple other guys were there as well, but were too afraid to spend much time.  I alone had to try to sleep there.  I didn't sleep at all.  A long, anxiety-ridden night gave way to a bright, happy morning, and a handsome young gardener tapping on my window to see if I wanted to play games in the sun with him.

The rest of the dream came much like a movie would; I was simply an observer.  It was set in Peru in the 1940's or 50's, but the entire political and geographical landscape was distorted and largely invented. Peru had been spiraling into chaos, which had put them at terrible odds with Argentina, who bordered them the way that Bolivia usually does.

A very beautiful woman was living at this time.  She was unable to see, hear or speak, but had a great sense of people's emotions and the world around her.  She had no way to directly speak with others - not by voice, sign or writing - but had found all kinds of ingenious other ways to communicate clearly.  At one point she had had a love affair that produced a son, and she was, to the best of her ability, a good mother.  From a similar relationship she was about to have another child, but the legal cloud spreading over the nation began to cast a shadow over her happy home.  Many men accused her of immorality for having sex out of wedlock, but a woman who defended her claimed, "she lives in a different reality than us, and therefore has an independent moral compass uniquely her own.  She is not unwed; she is married to the whole word.  All of her actions are pure."

When her second son was born, she was bestowed with some semblance of eyesight that enabled her to take a job as a waitress.  She was still completely mute, but as always very kind.  As usual, it was women who were sympathetic towards her; she had some female friends with whom she would collect into wicker baskets the mushrooms that grew in the alley behind her work, when the rain ended and the clouds parted to reveal spectacular Andean views.  Men, on the other hand, were continually passing laws that could have dire consequences for her life.  They legalized slavery and cornered her outside of the restaurant one day to claim her as their property, but on account of being unable to hear a word they said, she remained unmoved, and politely pushed past them to return home to her family.  

She was like a magical fairy creature who defied all attempts to hold her down with the infinite powers of innocence.

Once, Twice, Three Times a Nightmare

Ian and I had expensive tickets for a month-long trip to Europe.  We had to drive all the way to Seattle to begin our voyage.  It was night when we arrived at the airport, and we had made it through all the stages of the pre-boarding obstacle course aside from getting to our terminal when I suddenly realized with a gripping terror that I'd forgotten my passport at home, five hours away.  Our flight was due to leave in less than one.

There were supposedly ways around this, but they were convoluted and awkward to say the least. Getting a replacement passport in so short a time meant filling out paperwork and talking on the phone for ages, and then in the end being handed a glass filled with water with papers curled inside that couldn't be read unless they were wet.  All of them were hand-written and exceedingly unprofessional looking, and I cast them aside knowing that no one would take them seriously.  I tried having my father drive up with my passport, but in the back of my head knew that he was, of course, also five hours away.  I tried telling Ian to go without me and I would catch up, or stay home, or wasn't there some way we could talk to the airport about changing our ticket to a later date, and oh, I was so sorry, so sorry.

When I awoke I was deeply relieved to find it was a dream.  "A reminder to never forget my passport." So my horror upon falling back asleep to the same harrowing scene was great.  Upon waking again: "Ah, just a dream! I'll ALWAYS remember my passport now!" Falling asleep again: SAME SH*T. Waking for the third time: "Jesus, I get it already!!"

Springtime in Ashland

I was visiting my friend Rob in Ashland.  The Ashland I see in my sleep has been penned onto my subconscious map; as such, it's never much like the Ashland of reality and always much like the Ashland of previous dreams.  I know I could venture out and go to other places that are on my map, and yet I rarely bother from there.  It's such a lovely little place, why would I leave?  It was spring time, and Rob had a lot of things to do, so I wandered the streets.  I found myself at the bottom of a hill, where the narrow road curved sharply near a string of businesses where I had, in a dream from long ago, been asked to join a drug smuggling ring while I suffered from a debilitating cold.  Right there, flowering trees were in full bloom, and pink blossoms exploded like popcorn from twiggy, otherwise bare branches.  I buried my face in their soft petals.  I loved them.  

A barely-known acquaintance invited me into a bar for a drink, and I accepted.  As we drank and talked, a young girl, no more than 22 at most, approached us to ask for advice on using a pregnancy test.  I was willing to help, but I didn't understand the thing she handed me one bit.  It was like a calculator, flashing all sorts of random words and numbers across its screen, none of which remotely resembling what I expected (pregnant or not pregnant).  The bar tender came over to help, also to no avail, although he seemed quite confident that it was working just fine.  I never learned whether or not the girl's womb was occupied or vacant; I don't believe it would have ever been clarified.  I was becoming aware of the fact that I was dreaming, and my thoughts had been influencing the situation so much that I felt it was becoming dishonest and convoluted.  She would be alternately excited or distressed about the idea of being pregnant based upon what I expected of her, and I knew I was somehow disturbing the test results.  I could feel the power of my brain reaching out and mucking things up.

It was night when I went outside, and I proceeded to have my second drunk-driving dream of the past two weeks.  Despite that I'd had less than one beer, I careened through the night recklessly in an attempt to get back home.  I didn't even make it out of town.  It was all I could do to get the car to pull off behind a grocery store.  I left it there, knowing I would crash or hurt someone should I keep trying.  I walked back to Rob's to stay another night.

Fake Cool

It was the 1950's, and I was bad.  I wore tight jeans folded up at the ankles, shaped my hair into awful configurations, and turned the collar up on my jacket.  Despite being male, most of the people I hung out with were female.  Of the few guys I knew, though, I did have one friendship that I particularly cherished. We lived in an abandoned building, in a wrecking-ball hole several floors up and only accessible via a tall, twisting, magnificent tree.  We would huddle there together like birds in a nest, watching the rain fall on the leaves from the comfort of our derelict home.  I didn't have to act tough around this guy; I could be myself, I could talk about beauty and nature.

A restaurant owner had lost his child.  The androgynous kid was probably only about 12 years-old when they died.  Knowing that the child he had loved was gone, the father gifted the body to my posse of teased-hair, chain-smoking, mini-skirt and leather-clad whiskey-drinkers.  It didn't seem like an entirely out of the ordinary thing to do, but I was repulsed no less as the girls excitedly unwrapped the thin sheet to reveal the sunken, bluish corpse.  Still wearing my mask of impenetrable cool, I slowly edged backwards away from them as they planned to dissect it and make art of it, "like da Vinci did."  Taking a swig from my flask and a drag off of my cigarette, I leaned towards the ear of my best friend and whispered, "Jesus Christ, girls are hard core."

And Mostly Forgotten:

I returned to Israel to work in the same peace village, but this time had much more fun.  Much more. So much more.  I was prepared ahead of time to enjoy myself massively.  I knew what to expect.  My love would meet me there.  I had a friend with me.  Together, she and I hitch-hiked and traveled about confidently and with scheming, adventurous minds.  I awoke wishing I had brought such an attitude with me in reality.