March 25th, 2010 / 1:25 pm
Contests
Blake Butler
Contests
Calamari Contest
Derek White has offered up 3 “chef select” prize packages from his Calamari Press Liquidation Sale for us to throw into the game. That’s three prizes of a dozen books each (you pick 2, Derek picks the other 10) from the Calamari Press archives.
To enter, comment with a brief write up of a dream you had where you went either to a country you’ve never been to, or a place that does not exist. Or write about writing in a language that does not exist, either in a dream, or in your underwear at your desk. Or you could tell about something weird that happened to you after watching a Cronenberg movie. Whichever.
Two winners will be picked for their fine job, one at random. Entries close tomorrow night.
Tags: calamari press
I used to have a lot of dreams about imaginary zoos, with crazy, scary-ass animals, sometimes composites of actual animals and other times something more terrifying I cannot fully recall while awake. Often the animals were not entirely confined to cages, were poised to pounce or grab or stampede, and also — the zoos’ geography was never stable, paths would shift while I was walking them, the map constantly changing, etc. These dreams used to be recurring, then I used them in a fiction I wrote, and it somehow… killed them. Is that possible? I miss them — they were horrifying, but also fascinating. But I also am happy the story they influenced exists, and I think would write it again (maybe write it better? I’m not sure I love the sentences) if given the chance.
This kinda feels like cheating, but here’s the opening paragraphs of the story these dreams influenced — all of these images I took from actual zoo dreams:
“All your life, you’ve dreamed of zoos. Immense zoos with complex, shifting geographies. Zoos whose maps redraw themselves while you read them, and whose paths uncoil and rewind as you walk them.
Zoos populated by extraordinary imaginary animals.
In one dream, you are standing on an overlook above an otherworldly savannah. In the distance, a herd of hoofed orange sherbet and salmon-colored creatures cluster. Their heads are two-dimensional discs, each with a single cycloptic eye, balanced atop giraffe-like necks. In another, you see hundreds of Giant Pandas ambling up broad concrete steps. When they turn to face you, they reveal visages of baboons, neon pink and protruding, their mouths agape, fanged and shrieking.”
I used to have a lot of dreams about imaginary zoos, with crazy, scary-ass animals, sometimes composites of actual animals and other times something more terrifying I cannot fully recall while awake. Often the animals were not entirely confined to cages, were poised to pounce or grab or stampede, and also — the zoos’ geography was never stable, paths would shift while I was walking them, the map constantly changing, etc. These dreams used to be recurring, then I used them in a fiction I wrote, and it somehow… killed them. Is that possible? I miss them — they were horrifying, but also fascinating. But I also am happy the story they influenced exists, and I think would write it again (maybe write it better? I’m not sure I love the sentences) if given the chance.
This kinda feels like cheating, but here’s the opening paragraphs of the story these dreams influenced — all of these images I took from actual zoo dreams:
“All your life, you’ve dreamed of zoos. Immense zoos with complex, shifting geographies. Zoos whose maps redraw themselves while you read them, and whose paths uncoil and rewind as you walk them.
Zoos populated by extraordinary imaginary animals.
In one dream, you are standing on an overlook above an otherworldly savannah. In the distance, a herd of hoofed orange sherbet and salmon-colored creatures cluster. Their heads are two-dimensional discs, each with a single cycloptic eye, balanced atop giraffe-like necks. In another, you see hundreds of Giant Pandas ambling up broad concrete steps. When they turn to face you, they reveal visages of baboons, neon pink and protruding, their mouths agape, fanged and shrieking.”
I had this dream that I was a cat turning into a silverback gorilla. It wasn’t definitely in a place that I’d never been to, but I had the generally feeling that I was in Africa, and I haven’t been to Africa before.
I had this dream that I was a cat turning into a silverback gorilla. It wasn’t definitely in a place that I’d never been to, but I had the generally feeling that I was in Africa, and I haven’t been to Africa before.
I had a dream that starts out with me walking in a large group of people. There are hundreds of people. We were all walking along what could most easily be described as “desert terrain.” The most memorable thing about the dream (for me) was the towering piles of washing machines that sort of surrounded us (and they were not white washing machines–they were definitely more of a French Vanilla color). It was like an ongoing meridian . . . of towering washing machine piles.
So,
everyone in the group was wearing black pants and black turtlenecks (not sure why). Everyone seemed visibly distraught–I remember a woman sobbing loudly nearby and talking about something that was going to kill her. The next thing I remember is hearing the sound of a gunshot, which caused everyone to panic–the group-formation was quickly ruined by the panic of the gunshot. For some reason, I decided to try climbing up one of the washing machine piles.
All I remember next is just one of the washing machine doors opening up and a long arm pulling me in by the leg. And, for some reason, I don’t resist. And I’m pulled into the washing machine and everything goes black and then the next thing I know I’m getting ready to board a train–the entire train is a bright red color.
I don’t actually recall “boarding the train” . . . I just remember skipping ahead to “actually being on the train.” So the train is moving and I am exploring the empty cars on the train. I cannot find anyone else on the train. Everything is a mess. Tables are turned over. Chairs are too. Lots of paper scattered along the floor.
Eventually, I find a room with a large chest inside. It isn’t locked and I open up the chest and there is nothing inside.
Then I wake up. I don’t remember any actual “dialogue” or any kind of language. No text or anything like that. The closest thing I remember to any kind of dialogue was the woman’s sobbing. That’s it.
I had a dream that starts out with me walking in a large group of people. There are hundreds of people. We were all walking along what could most easily be described as “desert terrain.” The most memorable thing about the dream (for me) was the towering piles of washing machines that sort of surrounded us (and they were not white washing machines–they were definitely more of a French Vanilla color). It was like an ongoing meridian . . . of towering washing machine piles.
So,
everyone in the group was wearing black pants and black turtlenecks (not sure why). Everyone seemed visibly distraught–I remember a woman sobbing loudly nearby and talking about something that was going to kill her. The next thing I remember is hearing the sound of a gunshot, which caused everyone to panic–the group-formation was quickly ruined by the panic of the gunshot. For some reason, I decided to try climbing up one of the washing machine piles.
All I remember next is just one of the washing machine doors opening up and a long arm pulling me in by the leg. And, for some reason, I don’t resist. And I’m pulled into the washing machine and everything goes black and then the next thing I know I’m getting ready to board a train–the entire train is a bright red color.
I don’t actually recall “boarding the train” . . . I just remember skipping ahead to “actually being on the train.” So the train is moving and I am exploring the empty cars on the train. I cannot find anyone else on the train. Everything is a mess. Tables are turned over. Chairs are too. Lots of paper scattered along the floor.
Eventually, I find a room with a large chest inside. It isn’t locked and I open up the chest and there is nothing inside.
Then I wake up. I don’t remember any actual “dialogue” or any kind of language. No text or anything like that. The closest thing I remember to any kind of dialogue was the woman’s sobbing. That’s it.
Whoa, where did my comment go?
Whoa, where did my comment go?
our suburb house but on a different street, like someone switched our house with this other neighbor’s house down the street, and it was my birthday and there was a party in the backyard but the guests were only one person which was boba fett. he was in the backyard shooting cannon balls out of a cannon over the fence and landing on other houses and I was out in the street getting scared at how much destruction was happening and wanting him to stop doing it.
our suburb house but on a different street, like someone switched our house with this other neighbor’s house down the street, and it was my birthday and there was a party in the backyard but the guests were only one person which was boba fett. he was in the backyard shooting cannon balls out of a cannon over the fence and landing on other houses and I was out in the street getting scared at how much destruction was happening and wanting him to stop doing it.
what gives what gives what gives!!!!
got caught in spam. i saved it.
what gives what gives what gives!!!!
got caught in spam. i saved it.
thought maybe i was imagining things
suffering from hallucinations
asking myself questions
“does blake hate me?”
lol
hehe. sorry man. i luv u.
thought maybe i was imagining things
suffering from hallucinations
asking myself questions
“does blake hate me?”
lol
hehe. sorry man. i luv u.
hey thanks. haha
hey thanks. haha
A REAL DREAM I HAD AFTER EATING A HALF-LOAF OF POTATO BREAD AND ACCIDENTALLY WATCHING DEAD RINGERS ALONE
(the double category entry wins automatically I think maybe)
People have convened by the river, crowding and pushing each other in a way that resembles an episode of MTV’s the Grind. They are looking for a portal. There has been an announcement – this is not real life! – said the speakers. And now everyone wants out. People demand to be refunded although they have no proof of payment.
“My life is payment enough,” says the child holding my hand. ‘Ick’ – I think, ‘get off me already.’
There are mud steps leading down to the bank. They aren’t real steps, someone has drawn them with a colored pencil and they are pale and frivolous as Easter eggs.
Corey Haim is there. He points to me and says “Only the girl knows the way.”
“Oh brother,” I say to everyone and then making a very big show of diving in.
A REAL DREAM I HAD AFTER EATING A HALF-LOAF OF POTATO BREAD AND ACCIDENTALLY WATCHING DEAD RINGERS ALONE
(the double category entry wins automatically I think maybe)
People have convened by the river, crowding and pushing each other in a way that resembles an episode of MTV’s the Grind. They are looking for a portal. There has been an announcement – this is not real life! – said the speakers. And now everyone wants out. People demand to be refunded although they have no proof of payment.
“My life is payment enough,” says the child holding my hand. ‘Ick’ – I think, ‘get off me already.’
There are mud steps leading down to the bank. They aren’t real steps, someone has drawn them with a colored pencil and they are pale and frivolous as Easter eggs.
Corey Haim is there. He points to me and says “Only the girl knows the way.”
“Oh brother,” I say to everyone and then making a very big show of diving in.
2.22.10
I’m driving a rental car through an impossible city comprised of narrow one-way streets, searching for a pet cat that ran away. Eventually the streets in this city get so narrow that the car gets lodged between two buildings and I have to kick out the back windshield. I find my cat in an alley, behind a glass fitness center, drinking shampoo with the late Bill Hicks–except now my cat has transformed into this dwarfish medieval doctor who explains that although ingesting shampoo causes the runs and in certain instances certain death, it gets you blind drunk on account of this chemical whose name he’s unable to pronounce. It is Black Friday. It begins to snow. I have the feeling I’m late for something. I keep waiting for Bill Hicks to say something funny or incendiary, but he doesn’t. He tilts back the shampoo bottle, and I wake up.
2.22.10
I’m driving a rental car through an impossible city comprised of narrow one-way streets, searching for a pet cat that ran away. Eventually the streets in this city get so narrow that the car gets lodged between two buildings and I have to kick out the back windshield. I find my cat in an alley, behind a glass fitness center, drinking shampoo with the late Bill Hicks–except now my cat has transformed into this dwarfish medieval doctor who explains that although ingesting shampoo causes the runs and in certain instances certain death, it gets you blind drunk on account of this chemical whose name he’s unable to pronounce. It is Black Friday. It begins to snow. I have the feeling I’m late for something. I keep waiting for Bill Hicks to say something funny or incendiary, but he doesn’t. He tilts back the shampoo bottle, and I wake up.
I was not sure, whether I was too drunk or perhaps already crazy. But my manuscript I was about to send out to an unnamed magazine was bungled. The love story, rather conventional than original, but perhaps accessible for the mainstream readership of that magazine, this lovestory was gone. Instead of this, instead of my characters, of my preposterous love pretendered, there were colew and eyrdeva, who exuqued very lovely under the crogny wloves.
I tried to understand, what I’ve written in the sudden seizure, in the dark abandon. English wasn’t my native language, but even after I’ve consulted Webster I couldn’t find neither wlove nor to exuque.
Long time I sat over my pathetic table and tried to recognize my hidden barrier, but I was powerless.
Yes, and I destoyed that cursed manuscript. Perhaps I have to stop writing.
I was not sure, whether I was too drunk or perhaps already crazy. But my manuscript I was about to send out to an unnamed magazine was bungled. The love story, rather conventional than original, but perhaps accessible for the mainstream readership of that magazine, this lovestory was gone. Instead of this, instead of my characters, of my preposterous love pretendered, there were colew and eyrdeva, who exuqued very lovely under the crogny wloves.
I tried to understand, what I’ve written in the sudden seizure, in the dark abandon. English wasn’t my native language, but even after I’ve consulted Webster I couldn’t find neither wlove nor to exuque.
Long time I sat over my pathetic table and tried to recognize my hidden barrier, but I was powerless.
Yes, and I destoyed that cursed manuscript. Perhaps I have to stop writing.
Damn, I got the complete Calamari collection in the mail the other week (as per the awesome deal.)
Already a couple books deep: this truly is a wonderful prize for the winner of this contest.
Good luck chaps!
Damn, I got the complete Calamari collection in the mail the other week (as per the awesome deal.)
Already a couple books deep: this truly is a wonderful prize for the winner of this contest.
Good luck chaps!
Oh, and the barcode design at the top of this post is sooooo fresh (yeah, I said fresh.)
Oh, and the barcode design at the top of this post is sooooo fresh (yeah, I said fresh.)
THIS IS A TRUE STORY
PAPA ZZZZIPP HAD BEEN MISSING FOR DAYS. MAMA ZZZIPP DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT IT. “HE WAS EATING BREAKFAST, ZZZIPPY, EGGS AND TOAST, I TURNED MY BACK, AND HE WAS GONE.”
PAPA ZZZIPP IS NOT A NICE MAN. ZZZZIPP WAS GLAD HE DISAPPEARED. BUT MY MOTHER GETS SO LONELY WITHOUT HIM.
THE HOUSE WAS EMPTY. HE WAS NOT PLAYING HIDE AND SEEK. HIS SHOES WERE STILL BY THE FRONT DOOR. I PUT POSTERS UP AROUND TOWN BUT THEY ALL BLEW AWAY IN THE WIND. SOMEONE CALLED THE NUMBER I PUT ON THEM ANYWAY AND SPOKE TO ME IN THE VOICE OF MR. T USING AN INTERNET SOUNDBOARD. THEY MUST HAVE BEEN OVEREXCITED BECAUSE THEY CLICKED THE BOARD TOO OFTEN.
“I PITY–I P-I PITY THE FO-I PI-I PI-I PITY THE FOOL.”
THAT WAS USELESS.
“DID HE TURN INTO A PHOTON, MAMA ZZZIPP?”
“IF HE DID, I CAN’T FIND HIM.”
HE COULD BE ANYWHERE.
FROM SOME PAPERS ON HIS DESK I DISCOVERED THAT PAPA ZZZZIPP WAS STUDYING ELECTRONS. ELECTRONS ARE LIKE PLANETS TO US. HE WAS STUDYING A SECRET ELECTRON THAT NO ONE ELSE KNOWS ABOUT. THAT ELECTRON IS CALLED “X538”. IT IS LOCATED IN THE ARCTIC. EVERYONE ON THAT ELECTRON IS A SNAKE. I WENT THERE.
“ZZZZZZZZZZZO NIZZZZZZZE TO MEET YOU ZZZZZZZZZIPPPY.”
“THIS IS RIDICULOUS. DO YOU KNOW WHERE PAPA ZZZZIPPP IS?”
“PAPA ZZZZZZIPPP?? WE HAVE ZZZZEEEN HIM.”
“WHERE IS HE???”
“ZZZZO C-C-COLD HERE, ZZZZIPPY.”
ON X538 HEAT PACKS ARE CURRENCY. I SLIPPED ONE INTO THE SNAKE’S FANNY PACK.
“THANKZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. PAPA ZZZZZZIPPP IZZZZ OVER THERE.”
PAPA ZZZZIPP WAS STANDING OVER THERE.
“WHY DID YOU RUN AWAY, PAPA?”
“ZZZZZZIPPY BOY, I JUST NEEDED TO GET AWAY FOR A WHILE.”
“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL US?”
“I DON’T HAVE AN ANSWER FOR YOU, ZZZZIPP.”
I HANDED HIM A HEAT PACK.
“ZZZZIPP, I’M GOING TO TAKE THIZZ, BUT I STILL DON’T WANT TO TELL YOU.”
“WILL YOU AT LEAST COME HOME WITH ME? MAMA ZZZZIPP NEEDS YOU.”
“ZZZZIPP, THERE’S A REASON I LEFT YOUR MOTHER LIKE THAT. I WAZZZ HOPING SHE’D THINK I WAZZZ DEAD.”
“YOU SHOULD HAVE CLEANED YOUR DESK OFF.”
“YOUR MOTHER AND I DON’T HAVE A GOOD RELATIONSHIP.”
WHEN I TOLD MAMA ZZZZIPPP ABOUT THIS LATER SHE AGREED.
“IT’ZZ TRUE,” SHE SAID.
THIS IS A TRUE STORY
PAPA ZZZZIPP HAD BEEN MISSING FOR DAYS. MAMA ZZZIPP DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT IT. “HE WAS EATING BREAKFAST, ZZZIPPY, EGGS AND TOAST, I TURNED MY BACK, AND HE WAS GONE.”
PAPA ZZZIPP IS NOT A NICE MAN. ZZZZIPP WAS GLAD HE DISAPPEARED. BUT MY MOTHER GETS SO LONELY WITHOUT HIM.
THE HOUSE WAS EMPTY. HE WAS NOT PLAYING HIDE AND SEEK. HIS SHOES WERE STILL BY THE FRONT DOOR. I PUT POSTERS UP AROUND TOWN BUT THEY ALL BLEW AWAY IN THE WIND. SOMEONE CALLED THE NUMBER I PUT ON THEM ANYWAY AND SPOKE TO ME IN THE VOICE OF MR. T USING AN INTERNET SOUNDBOARD. THEY MUST HAVE BEEN OVEREXCITED BECAUSE THEY CLICKED THE BOARD TOO OFTEN.
“I PITY–I P-I PITY THE FO-I PI-I PI-I PITY THE FOOL.”
THAT WAS USELESS.
“DID HE TURN INTO A PHOTON, MAMA ZZZIPP?”
“IF HE DID, I CAN’T FIND HIM.”
HE COULD BE ANYWHERE.
FROM SOME PAPERS ON HIS DESK I DISCOVERED THAT PAPA ZZZZIPP WAS STUDYING ELECTRONS. ELECTRONS ARE LIKE PLANETS TO US. HE WAS STUDYING A SECRET ELECTRON THAT NO ONE ELSE KNOWS ABOUT. THAT ELECTRON IS CALLED “X538”. IT IS LOCATED IN THE ARCTIC. EVERYONE ON THAT ELECTRON IS A SNAKE. I WENT THERE.
“ZZZZZZZZZZZO NIZZZZZZZE TO MEET YOU ZZZZZZZZZIPPPY.”
“THIS IS RIDICULOUS. DO YOU KNOW WHERE PAPA ZZZZIPPP IS?”
“PAPA ZZZZZZIPPP?? WE HAVE ZZZZEEEN HIM.”
“WHERE IS HE???”
“ZZZZO C-C-COLD HERE, ZZZZIPPY.”
ON X538 HEAT PACKS ARE CURRENCY. I SLIPPED ONE INTO THE SNAKE’S FANNY PACK.
“THANKZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. PAPA ZZZZZZIPPP IZZZZ OVER THERE.”
PAPA ZZZZIPP WAS STANDING OVER THERE.
“WHY DID YOU RUN AWAY, PAPA?”
“ZZZZZZIPPY BOY, I JUST NEEDED TO GET AWAY FOR A WHILE.”
“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL US?”
“I DON’T HAVE AN ANSWER FOR YOU, ZZZZIPP.”
I HANDED HIM A HEAT PACK.
“ZZZZIPP, I’M GOING TO TAKE THIZZ, BUT I STILL DON’T WANT TO TELL YOU.”
“WILL YOU AT LEAST COME HOME WITH ME? MAMA ZZZZIPP NEEDS YOU.”
“ZZZZIPP, THERE’S A REASON I LEFT YOUR MOTHER LIKE THAT. I WAZZZ HOPING SHE’D THINK I WAZZZ DEAD.”
“YOU SHOULD HAVE CLEANED YOUR DESK OFF.”
“YOUR MOTHER AND I DON’T HAVE A GOOD RELATIONSHIP.”
WHEN I TOLD MAMA ZZZZIPPP ABOUT THIS LATER SHE AGREED.
“IT’ZZ TRUE,” SHE SAID.
IN CASE I WIN BY AKZZIDENT MY E-MAIL ADDRESS IS A.O.AAA.OOO.A.O@GMAIL.COM NOT WHAT IT ALWAYS SAYS
IN CASE I WIN BY AKZZIDENT MY E-MAIL ADDRESS IS A.O.AAA.OOO.A.O@GMAIL.COM NOT WHAT IT ALWAYS SAYS
From last year:
I was at work at a swimming pool and i was some sort of absent lifeguard. I was walking to my post and saw that my friend Shane standing by a huge pool (not the one that I “worked” at but rather, perpendicular to it). He said “Hi,” laughed, and pushed me into the water. i wasn’t too upset so I climbed out laughing. Later I was in what seemed like a locker room type thing and my boss used some sort of magic powers to make a ton of fucking fresh fruits (some I had never seen before) more or less fill up the room, the fruit pouring out of a hand-dryer. I was unphased by the magick, but I was amazed by the sweet fresh fruit, which tasted incredible, including something sort of soft and juicy inside like a peach/banana hybrid, but with a berry taste. In my mind I assumed the fruits were “passion berries.”
After coming out of the locker room I was still wet from when Shane pushed me in the pool, and my boss saw me and was was angry. “Well i guess you haven’t really be working, have you,” (which it seems weird that, working at a pool, it would be a giveaway that you hadn’t been working if you were wet) and I was momentarily terrified that I was going to be fired but the terror soon subsided. My boss closed and drained the smaller pool that I was supposed to be watching, and when I turned to my right there was a pool party at the larger pool with many people that I recognized.
I put on my swim trunks and started walking to the pool, which for some reason took a long time, and once I got there I realized that I didn’t have a speedo on under my trunks and that if I started swimming my ass would be hanging out constantly, so I went back to the locker room to put a speedo on. For some reason this took an exorbitantly long time, and lots of weird shit had happened while i was changing. Eventually I said “fuck it” and jumped in the pool, just swimming for a little while. The pool was absurdly deep and gigantic.
Eventually I ended up with a group of kids heading to a “secret” part of the pool, which contained a bunch of “Greek” statues of celebrities. Some kid wanted to break the noses off, and this group of kids were really excited about the idea, so I ended up leaving. On my way out I met a young woman in the normal part of the pool. Back inside the secret area, some major shit was going down, and I guess the mayhem had caused three mythological women to show up, or it caused me to enter an alternative universe or something. And there were these drinks and (this party is hazy) . . . feminists, hated men, perhaps because it was men who had broken the noses . . . eventually I got one of the drinks, mainly because I was thirsty, but then I dropped it, and the water was really deep so I was afraid it was gone forever.
I started to swim down to get it, sort of terrified of being able to actually hold my breath long enough, but I really wanted this drink. On the way down I ran into the young woman from before, who was now the “queen of life.” I stopped to look at her, and when she smiled I realized that I was wasting my finite amount of air, but I realized I could breath internally and was totally fine, eventually making it to the bottom while sort of breathing underwater. I resurfaced with the drink and was just sort of swimming around for a while when I saw white masses of “colonies” of “bodies” underwater. I swam down to them and the colonies, I was told, were “where the dead go when they die” except the “bodies” were really small and abstracted… it was mostly viscous white and in a moment of terror one sort of came to life and started talking to me, telling me that the only truth was in them, and the three women were false… I eventually came back up and left the pool.
From last year:
I was at work at a swimming pool and i was some sort of absent lifeguard. I was walking to my post and saw that my friend Shane standing by a huge pool (not the one that I “worked” at but rather, perpendicular to it). He said “Hi,” laughed, and pushed me into the water. i wasn’t too upset so I climbed out laughing. Later I was in what seemed like a locker room type thing and my boss used some sort of magic powers to make a ton of fucking fresh fruits (some I had never seen before) more or less fill up the room, the fruit pouring out of a hand-dryer. I was unphased by the magick, but I was amazed by the sweet fresh fruit, which tasted incredible, including something sort of soft and juicy inside like a peach/banana hybrid, but with a berry taste. In my mind I assumed the fruits were “passion berries.”
After coming out of the locker room I was still wet from when Shane pushed me in the pool, and my boss saw me and was was angry. “Well i guess you haven’t really be working, have you,” (which it seems weird that, working at a pool, it would be a giveaway that you hadn’t been working if you were wet) and I was momentarily terrified that I was going to be fired but the terror soon subsided. My boss closed and drained the smaller pool that I was supposed to be watching, and when I turned to my right there was a pool party at the larger pool with many people that I recognized.
I put on my swim trunks and started walking to the pool, which for some reason took a long time, and once I got there I realized that I didn’t have a speedo on under my trunks and that if I started swimming my ass would be hanging out constantly, so I went back to the locker room to put a speedo on. For some reason this took an exorbitantly long time, and lots of weird shit had happened while i was changing. Eventually I said “fuck it” and jumped in the pool, just swimming for a little while. The pool was absurdly deep and gigantic.
Eventually I ended up with a group of kids heading to a “secret” part of the pool, which contained a bunch of “Greek” statues of celebrities. Some kid wanted to break the noses off, and this group of kids were really excited about the idea, so I ended up leaving. On my way out I met a young woman in the normal part of the pool. Back inside the secret area, some major shit was going down, and I guess the mayhem had caused three mythological women to show up, or it caused me to enter an alternative universe or something. And there were these drinks and (this party is hazy) . . . feminists, hated men, perhaps because it was men who had broken the noses . . . eventually I got one of the drinks, mainly because I was thirsty, but then I dropped it, and the water was really deep so I was afraid it was gone forever.
I started to swim down to get it, sort of terrified of being able to actually hold my breath long enough, but I really wanted this drink. On the way down I ran into the young woman from before, who was now the “queen of life.” I stopped to look at her, and when she smiled I realized that I was wasting my finite amount of air, but I realized I could breath internally and was totally fine, eventually making it to the bottom while sort of breathing underwater. I resurfaced with the drink and was just sort of swimming around for a while when I saw white masses of “colonies” of “bodies” underwater. I swam down to them and the colonies, I was told, were “where the dead go when they die” except the “bodies” were really small and abstracted… it was mostly viscous white and in a moment of terror one sort of came to life and started talking to me, telling me that the only truth was in them, and the three women were false… I eventually came back up and left the pool.
this entry wins automatically because it references MTV’s “The Grind”
this entry wins automatically because it references MTV’s “The Grind”
I dreamt that the housing project across the street from my dorm was Venice, Italy. Through one of the windows of Venice, I saw a man painting a picture. He later came into my room and I asked him if he practiced Caravaggio’s technique of keeping a dwarf in the studio at all times, to which he replied, in a thick Italian accent, “I know you are really just asking me whether I beat off or not. Well I don’t,” and then left.
I dreamt that the housing project across the street from my dorm was Venice, Italy. Through one of the windows of Venice, I saw a man painting a picture. He later came into my room and I asked him if he practiced Caravaggio’s technique of keeping a dwarf in the studio at all times, to which he replied, in a thick Italian accent, “I know you are really just asking me whether I beat off or not. Well I don’t,” and then left.
I think I may be dreaming now and I am sitting here writing this in only a towel at a Hilton hotel located in Alexandria Virginia. I am not sure if I am American or if my very dark skin and amazing strength and singing voice mean I am from somewhere that I don’t speak this bastardization of English.
I had a recurring dream for some time where I was lost in a large space station falling toward the sun. The space station was, architecturally speaking and viewed from the outside, something like what would happen if those bright plastic tubes kids crawl through in places like Discovery Zone and Chuck ‘E’ Cheese and McDonalds Play Places were combined with submarines; tubular segments, red and yellow and blue, conjoined by heavy bolts of sometimes-matching color. Most were opaque, with the occasional hub segment at the juncture of several tubes, which was a bright yellow box with large domed portholes on several sides.
At the beginning of the dream, we always had a few days before the station would fall into the sun, killing us all, and there was a little community aboard the space station, which could house the population of a very small town. None of us knew anymore how to work the machines, either because we had forgotten, or because it had never been our jobs in the first place — in any case, we clearly couldn’t read the manuals. By the end, most of the other people had disappeared, sometimes fading away from sadness, sometimes lost to disentigrating portions of the station, sometimes eaten. I always spend the entire dream trying to repair the station, searching for missing loved ones (my mother, my wife) or running from a monster, specifically, a vicious reanimated baby corpse.
Often, as is common to my dreams, I also needed to use the toilet, and was searching for an appropriate place (rarely, in a dream, can I find a toilet).
I’ve never dreamed all the way to the end of it — the terminal moment, falling into the sun. Instead I choke from sadness at not being able to save myself or anyone else, and from the horrible stress of always just missing my wife or someone like her, and I either wake up or change dreams. In many ways this is very similar to my dreams of being on the run in totalitarian America — we always know that one day they’ll catch us, I always feel they are just behind me, and yet I never quite make it to the part where we all die, though there are many gunfights on the way.
I think I may be dreaming now and I am sitting here writing this in only a towel at a Hilton hotel located in Alexandria Virginia. I am not sure if I am American or if my very dark skin and amazing strength and singing voice mean I am from somewhere that I don’t speak this bastardization of English.
I had a recurring dream for some time where I was lost in a large space station falling toward the sun. The space station was, architecturally speaking and viewed from the outside, something like what would happen if those bright plastic tubes kids crawl through in places like Discovery Zone and Chuck ‘E’ Cheese and McDonalds Play Places were combined with submarines; tubular segments, red and yellow and blue, conjoined by heavy bolts of sometimes-matching color. Most were opaque, with the occasional hub segment at the juncture of several tubes, which was a bright yellow box with large domed portholes on several sides.
At the beginning of the dream, we always had a few days before the station would fall into the sun, killing us all, and there was a little community aboard the space station, which could house the population of a very small town. None of us knew anymore how to work the machines, either because we had forgotten, or because it had never been our jobs in the first place — in any case, we clearly couldn’t read the manuals. By the end, most of the other people had disappeared, sometimes fading away from sadness, sometimes lost to disentigrating portions of the station, sometimes eaten. I always spend the entire dream trying to repair the station, searching for missing loved ones (my mother, my wife) or running from a monster, specifically, a vicious reanimated baby corpse.
Often, as is common to my dreams, I also needed to use the toilet, and was searching for an appropriate place (rarely, in a dream, can I find a toilet).
I’ve never dreamed all the way to the end of it — the terminal moment, falling into the sun. Instead I choke from sadness at not being able to save myself or anyone else, and from the horrible stress of always just missing my wife or someone like her, and I either wake up or change dreams. In many ways this is very similar to my dreams of being on the run in totalitarian America — we always know that one day they’ll catch us, I always feel they are just behind me, and yet I never quite make it to the part where we all die, though there are many gunfights on the way.
I was next to a friendly blackhaired guy on a conical rock that stood some hundred thousand feet in the air, and below us a few thousand feet down, partially hazy through clouds, was another rock and then a rock below that. I felt a little like being a bastard to him until he jumped off and down to the next rock, and then I did the same and realized he was just being helpful. After a few jumps we came to a more complex rock formation that had a waterslide down to a small pool, and a staircase from the pool back up to where we were standing. Of course I went on the waterslide, and once I got down to the pool I stood in line to ride it again. After some vague, excited conversation it was my turn again, and this time when I slipped down the slide it felt like I was going for a much longer time. I noticed a secret waterslide contained in the first waterslide, and took it. This was to an indoor swimming pool with a few people in it, most noticeably a woman in a white bathing suit. I tried flirting with her by doing backstroke.
I was next to a friendly blackhaired guy on a conical rock that stood some hundred thousand feet in the air, and below us a few thousand feet down, partially hazy through clouds, was another rock and then a rock below that. I felt a little like being a bastard to him until he jumped off and down to the next rock, and then I did the same and realized he was just being helpful. After a few jumps we came to a more complex rock formation that had a waterslide down to a small pool, and a staircase from the pool back up to where we were standing. Of course I went on the waterslide, and once I got down to the pool I stood in line to ride it again. After some vague, excited conversation it was my turn again, and this time when I slipped down the slide it felt like I was going for a much longer time. I noticed a secret waterslide contained in the first waterslide, and took it. This was to an indoor swimming pool with a few people in it, most noticeably a woman in a white bathing suit. I tried flirting with her by doing backstroke.
While writing a play two years ago, I spent months reading about the American occupation of Japan.
Somewhere along the way, I had a dream in which I was in Japan, today, or rather, the day of the dream, in the back of a blacked-out van, performing surveillance on a member of the Diet. I’d planted bugs in his office reception and also on his phone line, and had spent two days listening without hearing anything at all. Somebody was supposed to bring me food and relieve me for naps, but they never came. I became convinced that the moment I fell asleep, my target would arrive, and I’d miss what I was listening for. I was also convinced that I’d heard more cars approaching than leaving, that parked nearby was a car that hadn’t moved on, and that as I was watching this Japanese congressman, somebody else was watching me. Eventually I also became convinced that the van itself was bugged by Honda, and that I should have brought an American or Korean car for the operation. I tried to maintain absolute silence, even while pissing into an empty two-liter soda bottle, so that I wouldn’t give my observers any clue about what I was up to, didn’t let them know that my guard was down. I spent weeks in that van, awake and silent.
I never wrote the play about the occupation, but the dream gave me the seed of another show which I did eventually stage.
While writing a play two years ago, I spent months reading about the American occupation of Japan.
Somewhere along the way, I had a dream in which I was in Japan, today, or rather, the day of the dream, in the back of a blacked-out van, performing surveillance on a member of the Diet. I’d planted bugs in his office reception and also on his phone line, and had spent two days listening without hearing anything at all. Somebody was supposed to bring me food and relieve me for naps, but they never came. I became convinced that the moment I fell asleep, my target would arrive, and I’d miss what I was listening for. I was also convinced that I’d heard more cars approaching than leaving, that parked nearby was a car that hadn’t moved on, and that as I was watching this Japanese congressman, somebody else was watching me. Eventually I also became convinced that the van itself was bugged by Honda, and that I should have brought an American or Korean car for the operation. I tried to maintain absolute silence, even while pissing into an empty two-liter soda bottle, so that I wouldn’t give my observers any clue about what I was up to, didn’t let them know that my guard was down. I spent weeks in that van, awake and silent.
I never wrote the play about the occupation, but the dream gave me the seed of another show which I did eventually stage.
A couple years ago (it was spring of 08), I dreamed that I visited Ethiopia. I’ve never been there or to Africa at all.
It’s not a surprising premise for a dream, as I’ve long been fascinated by Ethiopia and East Africa in my conscious mind. But what surprised me after waking up was how my subconscious mind composed or manufactured Ethiopia. I would’ve thought that I’d rely on things I actually knew and had read about the place. Not at all.
A little background on my fascination with the region: the only sport I followed growing up was distance running (track and cross country), and so my sport heroes were East African guys with names I could hardly pronounce, like the Ethiopian distance legend Gebrselassie. This interest eventually grew into an interest in the culture of the country, with its amazing cuisine (that spiced clarified butter!) and its history, both in terms of archaeological significance and more modern history (the temporary repulsion of the modern Italian forces with spears!). Of course, it’s also a place with a lot of troubling history – famine and political turmoil (Sudan scholar Alex de Waal argues that they are always connected), and the heavy-handed censures of the present government there.
In any case, my dream covered none of that, neither my personal interests nor the endemic poverty of the region. I saw no runners and no urban squalor.The entirety of the dream occurred in a very tall, old, and dark building, which did not seem to be occupied. I was riding an elevator from the ground (elevators and elevator accidents occur in my dreams with some frequency), and at some point the elevator service ended. From there I took stairs that turned into a series of catacomb-like tunnels, reddish earthen passageways that led in maze-like slopes and continued upward into the building. I don’t remember what, if anything, I ever found in this building, or how this dream ended. I don’t remember people, though I think I may have had a companion. It’s remarkable (for me) that I remember details at all, as I rarely remember my dreams. I’m envious of my friend W. who always remembers his dreams, which turn out a lot like James Tate or Russel Edson poems.
But I never saw what I expected of Ethiopia: no verdant (near;y) equatorial mountains, nothing I could identify as similar to pictures of Addis Ababa, no meals of injera and wat or incredibly fast runners passing by. If I could dream lucidly (does that really exist?), I would have left that building and, of course, flown into the sky to see what the landscape looked like, or get an aerial view of Addis. But all I saw was the inside of this weird old building with an elevator serving the bottom half and earthen passageways crisscrossing the top half.
Which is why I still don’t understand how I was absolutely sure, in my dream, that I was in Ethiopia.
A couple years ago (it was spring of 08), I dreamed that I visited Ethiopia. I’ve never been there or to Africa at all.
It’s not a surprising premise for a dream, as I’ve long been fascinated by Ethiopia and East Africa in my conscious mind. But what surprised me after waking up was how my subconscious mind composed or manufactured Ethiopia. I would’ve thought that I’d rely on things I actually knew and had read about the place. Not at all.
A little background on my fascination with the region: the only sport I followed growing up was distance running (track and cross country), and so my sport heroes were East African guys with names I could hardly pronounce, like the Ethiopian distance legend Gebrselassie. This interest eventually grew into an interest in the culture of the country, with its amazing cuisine (that spiced clarified butter!) and its history, both in terms of archaeological significance and more modern history (the temporary repulsion of the modern Italian forces with spears!). Of course, it’s also a place with a lot of troubling history – famine and political turmoil (Sudan scholar Alex de Waal argues that they are always connected), and the heavy-handed censures of the present government there.
In any case, my dream covered none of that, neither my personal interests nor the endemic poverty of the region. I saw no runners and no urban squalor.The entirety of the dream occurred in a very tall, old, and dark building, which did not seem to be occupied. I was riding an elevator from the ground (elevators and elevator accidents occur in my dreams with some frequency), and at some point the elevator service ended. From there I took stairs that turned into a series of catacomb-like tunnels, reddish earthen passageways that led in maze-like slopes and continued upward into the building. I don’t remember what, if anything, I ever found in this building, or how this dream ended. I don’t remember people, though I think I may have had a companion. It’s remarkable (for me) that I remember details at all, as I rarely remember my dreams. I’m envious of my friend W. who always remembers his dreams, which turn out a lot like James Tate or Russel Edson poems.
But I never saw what I expected of Ethiopia: no verdant (near;y) equatorial mountains, nothing I could identify as similar to pictures of Addis Ababa, no meals of injera and wat or incredibly fast runners passing by. If I could dream lucidly (does that really exist?), I would have left that building and, of course, flown into the sky to see what the landscape looked like, or get an aerial view of Addis. But all I saw was the inside of this weird old building with an elevator serving the bottom half and earthen passageways crisscrossing the top half.
Which is why I still don’t understand how I was absolutely sure, in my dream, that I was in Ethiopia.
After Videodrome, I sat at the writing desk, looking into an opaque night. The night would not have me, so instead I wrote all over it. Wrote all over its stars, denuded the presence of a trio of old brick smokestacks, scratched the name of my lover into a weeping moon and then wrote the full extent of my name into the black bed of my sleep.
And from there, dreams. Yellow sands washed over oceans and left a party of academics who were cleaning old books. I couldn’t see the titles; they were mostly leather-backed and plain, with sinews for spines. The academics were furious like a bunch of hyenas, a bunch of door placards floating upwards and then floating back down. A man in jeans and a denim jacket kept pushing me out of the circle, and dunking my head under the water, the sands, the winds of the dream. I couldn’t make sense of my lover here, for at once she appeared, moved towards the circle and removed her face. She was eating red meat. Most unlike her. But as she ate meat I couldn’t tell her apart from the hyenas. Someone named me “raft”. Looking closer at the books they were dusting I could make out the words within the covers. On yellowing paper, I saw my cuts into the night sky, my lover’s name, my graffiti between stars like new constellations, now vaguely concrete poetry – though I can’t be sure – and all those spaces between chapters, the precision of blackness.
They were my words and yet I had been aware that those words could not be read. They were as much hieroglyphs as the English language occupying in the majority. My cancer of English was making room for the stroke of a dreamt night sky, which was also the meal of the hyenas, which was also the set of books being dusted off by the academics, which also at once obscured my lover. I am a buzzing fly here, in comparison. I am the twin gynecologist tying the wrists of my lover. I am unplugging. Scouring for scars, I am James Spader in a convertible crashing into a waking hour. No mental asylum, just the drunkard father. Waking up after half-formed dreams intermingling with beer. Canada wants my constellation language.
After Videodrome, I sat at the writing desk, looking into an opaque night. The night would not have me, so instead I wrote all over it. Wrote all over its stars, denuded the presence of a trio of old brick smokestacks, scratched the name of my lover into a weeping moon and then wrote the full extent of my name into the black bed of my sleep.
And from there, dreams. Yellow sands washed over oceans and left a party of academics who were cleaning old books. I couldn’t see the titles; they were mostly leather-backed and plain, with sinews for spines. The academics were furious like a bunch of hyenas, a bunch of door placards floating upwards and then floating back down. A man in jeans and a denim jacket kept pushing me out of the circle, and dunking my head under the water, the sands, the winds of the dream. I couldn’t make sense of my lover here, for at once she appeared, moved towards the circle and removed her face. She was eating red meat. Most unlike her. But as she ate meat I couldn’t tell her apart from the hyenas. Someone named me “raft”. Looking closer at the books they were dusting I could make out the words within the covers. On yellowing paper, I saw my cuts into the night sky, my lover’s name, my graffiti between stars like new constellations, now vaguely concrete poetry – though I can’t be sure – and all those spaces between chapters, the precision of blackness.
They were my words and yet I had been aware that those words could not be read. They were as much hieroglyphs as the English language occupying in the majority. My cancer of English was making room for the stroke of a dreamt night sky, which was also the meal of the hyenas, which was also the set of books being dusted off by the academics, which also at once obscured my lover. I am a buzzing fly here, in comparison. I am the twin gynecologist tying the wrists of my lover. I am unplugging. Scouring for scars, I am James Spader in a convertible crashing into a waking hour. No mental asylum, just the drunkard father. Waking up after half-formed dreams intermingling with beer. Canada wants my constellation language.
I really wish ZZZZIPP had a blog I could read… Or a chapbook out or something. I would totally buy it.
I really wish ZZZZIPP had a blog I could read… Or a chapbook out or something. I would totally buy it.
Last night I dreamt I was on the very steep hill-like beach of a bleary unknown Eastern European country. It was set up like those vertical Chinese paintings– I saw the whole thing, up and down. Near the top stood a cluster of dumpy apartment buildings.
The sand turned into water, turned into sand, turned into water, swirling around seated couples.
My brother and I were running/swimming through the sand-water, playing catch with a massive Chicago-style softball: 16 and 1/2 inches in diameter, those things.
Not sunny. The sky clotted with seaweed. I remember being mildly worried that one or both of us would drown, but we kept running and swimming and tossing the softball, which was light and airy and dough-like.
It might have been the Fourth of July.
Last night I dreamt I was on the very steep hill-like beach of a bleary unknown Eastern European country. It was set up like those vertical Chinese paintings– I saw the whole thing, up and down. Near the top stood a cluster of dumpy apartment buildings.
The sand turned into water, turned into sand, turned into water, swirling around seated couples.
My brother and I were running/swimming through the sand-water, playing catch with a massive Chicago-style softball: 16 and 1/2 inches in diameter, those things.
Not sunny. The sky clotted with seaweed. I remember being mildly worried that one or both of us would drown, but we kept running and swimming and tossing the softball, which was light and airy and dough-like.
It might have been the Fourth of July.
thanks 4 sharing, bro.
thanks 4 sharing, bro.
oh ok, just bothered to actually read the post. this was what you were supposed to do. i was hoping you had dropped in to share your dream randomly with no prompting. anyway, still, thanks 4 sharing.
oh ok, just bothered to actually read the post. this was what you were supposed to do. i was hoping you had dropped in to share your dream randomly with no prompting. anyway, still, thanks 4 sharing.
After watching a Cronenberg movie my head exploded. Then I woke up. It was a dream. I got out of bed and fell into a void, yelling qerg]q3e5t35tq345gq4tg.
After watching a Cronenberg movie my head exploded. Then I woke up. It was a dream. I got out of bed and fell into a void, yelling qerg]q3e5t35tq345gq4tg.
tsk, tsk, stephen
tsk, tsk, stephen
it’s true.
it’s true.
heyyo ZZZZIPP, can i publish this dream in the first issue of Pop Serial? Seems sweet. If so, can I credit you as ZZZZIPP?
heyyo ZZZZIPP, can i publish this dream in the first issue of Pop Serial? Seems sweet. If so, can I credit you as ZZZZIPP?
Dude! Same thing happened to me after I watched Videodrome the first time.
Dude! Same thing happened to me after I watched Videodrome the first time.
YES, YOU CAN DEFINITELY DO THAT
YES, YOU CAN DEFINITELY DO THAT
“Something About My Blood And Yours”
1. Mine
It’s late and the freezing-rain outside rattles against the dark window to make a tinny sound. Tintinnabulation, someone called it earlier. Most of the journal staff is asleep or almost passed-out at our professor’s apartment in Chinatown. We’ve been drinking wine and bourbon; we’ve been yelling about Salinger, who died today. Our editor in chief, the professor, reaches for a double-bottle of red wine and spills it across the wooden table in the center of all of us. It glugs and burbles out the throat and across a copy of Nine Stories, pooling across old copies of the lit mag to the advanced pressing of my own novel I brought for the editor. Everyone still awake laughs, but it’s quiet and drunk laughter, and I watch the damp room spin and the cheap covers of Nine Stories and my own book wrinkle and turn purple in the center. Now the old man rises; his mad white hair shoots out from around his red face like claws or fingers. It’s all shit! he yells, and he grabs the purple Nine Stories and heaves it across the room. Red wine flings off the cover when it hits the opposite wall and leaves a splatter. A book like that should break my fucking heart! he shouts. I think he might cry. I sip my mug of bourbon and he looks around the room, settles on me. I’m younger than he was when his first novel was published and he hates that. He rears up like the statue of Balzac—I think he is ready to kill me. I stare him down and he doesn’t say anything. Then he collapses back into his chair, deflated, his coffee mug still empty. All is silent for a moment. I look around and think, This is being a writer. Then he mutters: Look at fucking Riippi there, so happy with himself, so smug with that book and that shit-eating grin. There’s some more drunk laughter from the others. The freezing-rain pummels the window. Then in one fast move the old man reaches across the table and hurls my book at me. The hard-glue spine breaks the mug against my chest; red wine and bourbon mixes on my shirt. I can’t tell if I am cut from the bug or if it is wine. Something stings. Bloodless shit! the old man howls, and laughs. Eventually I passed out.
2. Yours
In a dream I wrote:
“I don’t know the drunk priest, didn’t even know he was a priest when I got to the bar and he was already at the end stool facing a pint. But McHugh introduces him as a priest. He calls him Paddy, not Father, and says he’s the priest up at the Church of St. Thomas on 121st. Good-to-meet-you-Father, I say, and rise to walk over fast and shake his limp hand. I wipe the hot rain off my face from the summer thunderstorm outside with the other hand. An image of my mother, smiling with approval, flashes through my head. It’s a picture of her standing at the top of the church steps after Sunday Mass twenty years ago in Seattle. I am six years old and just want to go home, but she is speaking with Deacon Mike, talking about the next week’s Sunday school curriculum and about the Monsignor’s sermon. I am enjoying Deacon Mike’s First Communion classes very much, she tells him. I fidget and I fuss at the bottom of the stairs, watching her with the fat white-haired Deacon. I pick at the pant legs of my too-big suit and imagine the clouds as war planes and dragons and characters in the video games I’ll play when I get home—but I wait for her. I obey. I am a good son and I know my role. When the Monsignor walks out the church’s double doors in a bright green robe to meet the group of smiling and chatting mothers I watch him take his place at the top of the stairs next to fat Deacon Mike and I watch my mother smile and wave at me to join her. I don’t want to be there but I am immediately. I say, Good afternoon, Father, and shake the Monsignor’s hand hard, just as I should, a six year old in a suit. It’s because of this that twenty years later in New York City a bartender can introduce an old man with a pint of Guinness as a priest and I will be out of my chair as with a reflex, getting up and walking down the bar to shake the slouching divinity’s hand like a small obedient child. All that’s missing is the suit.
3. Yours, again
Now it’s today and I am wondering how my mother is getting on, where she is right now, if she’s asleep back home or awake watching the news. It’s winter again and the middle of the night. My fiancée is snoring in the other room; the coffee mug in front of the keyboard is full of last night’s wine. I should call my mom, I think, should try again to tell her about my life, to explain what poetry and art mean to me, to convince her that what I’m doing all the way across the country is worthwhile, a happier alternative to the life I would be living out there in Seattle. But sirens outside flash and pass and so does that thought as I walk away from the priest and back to my coffee and notebook. I think for a moment, then start to write something: He was 18 and he decided to be a priest, I begin—but then nothing comes and I put my pen down and sip the coffee. I listen to the rain and watch the sad priest keep on with his drinking and McHugh keep on with his channel-surfing on a muted, closed-captioned TV. The priest doesn’t look like a priest. I write: The boy who would become a priest didn’t look like a priest. I start flipping through a wrinkled Post someone left, a Sudoko game halfway empty. I write in two numbers. I stare out the window. I see an orange flame of sky caught between two high-rises some blocks away. What does it take to drive a priest out into the rain for a half dozen pints? I ask myself. No: ask it a different way. What does a priest dream about during a thunderstorm? Yes: he never wanted his life this way. No one wants their life this way. The world seems wrong to the priest; the world seems wrong to everyone. But we can’t question what is. Angel appears, Caravaggian figures, and among divine oily shadows we are presented with our purposes in life. He was 18, his mother made him a priest, I write. I spin my pen around my thumb; I feel a surge of something; I see my mother’s smile; I sense that I am smiling. And so I write: When I was 18, my mother…and wait to feel my heart breaking.”
END
“Something About My Blood And Yours”
1. Mine
It’s late and the freezing-rain outside rattles against the dark window to make a tinny sound. Tintinnabulation, someone called it earlier. Most of the journal staff is asleep or almost passed-out at our professor’s apartment in Chinatown. We’ve been drinking wine and bourbon; we’ve been yelling about Salinger, who died today. Our editor in chief, the professor, reaches for a double-bottle of red wine and spills it across the wooden table in the center of all of us. It glugs and burbles out the throat and across a copy of Nine Stories, pooling across old copies of the lit mag to the advanced pressing of my own novel I brought for the editor. Everyone still awake laughs, but it’s quiet and drunk laughter, and I watch the damp room spin and the cheap covers of Nine Stories and my own book wrinkle and turn purple in the center. Now the old man rises; his mad white hair shoots out from around his red face like claws or fingers. It’s all shit! he yells, and he grabs the purple Nine Stories and heaves it across the room. Red wine flings off the cover when it hits the opposite wall and leaves a splatter. A book like that should break my fucking heart! he shouts. I think he might cry. I sip my mug of bourbon and he looks around the room, settles on me. I’m younger than he was when his first novel was published and he hates that. He rears up like the statue of Balzac—I think he is ready to kill me. I stare him down and he doesn’t say anything. Then he collapses back into his chair, deflated, his coffee mug still empty. All is silent for a moment. I look around and think, This is being a writer. Then he mutters: Look at fucking Riippi there, so happy with himself, so smug with that book and that shit-eating grin. There’s some more drunk laughter from the others. The freezing-rain pummels the window. Then in one fast move the old man reaches across the table and hurls my book at me. The hard-glue spine breaks the mug against my chest; red wine and bourbon mixes on my shirt. I can’t tell if I am cut from the bug or if it is wine. Something stings. Bloodless shit! the old man howls, and laughs. Eventually I passed out.
2. Yours
In a dream I wrote:
“I don’t know the drunk priest, didn’t even know he was a priest when I got to the bar and he was already at the end stool facing a pint. But McHugh introduces him as a priest. He calls him Paddy, not Father, and says he’s the priest up at the Church of St. Thomas on 121st. Good-to-meet-you-Father, I say, and rise to walk over fast and shake his limp hand. I wipe the hot rain off my face from the summer thunderstorm outside with the other hand. An image of my mother, smiling with approval, flashes through my head. It’s a picture of her standing at the top of the church steps after Sunday Mass twenty years ago in Seattle. I am six years old and just want to go home, but she is speaking with Deacon Mike, talking about the next week’s Sunday school curriculum and about the Monsignor’s sermon. I am enjoying Deacon Mike’s First Communion classes very much, she tells him. I fidget and I fuss at the bottom of the stairs, watching her with the fat white-haired Deacon. I pick at the pant legs of my too-big suit and imagine the clouds as war planes and dragons and characters in the video games I’ll play when I get home—but I wait for her. I obey. I am a good son and I know my role. When the Monsignor walks out the church’s double doors in a bright green robe to meet the group of smiling and chatting mothers I watch him take his place at the top of the stairs next to fat Deacon Mike and I watch my mother smile and wave at me to join her. I don’t want to be there but I am immediately. I say, Good afternoon, Father, and shake the Monsignor’s hand hard, just as I should, a six year old in a suit. It’s because of this that twenty years later in New York City a bartender can introduce an old man with a pint of Guinness as a priest and I will be out of my chair as with a reflex, getting up and walking down the bar to shake the slouching divinity’s hand like a small obedient child. All that’s missing is the suit.
3. Yours, again
Now it’s today and I am wondering how my mother is getting on, where she is right now, if she’s asleep back home or awake watching the news. It’s winter again and the middle of the night. My fiancée is snoring in the other room; the coffee mug in front of the keyboard is full of last night’s wine. I should call my mom, I think, should try again to tell her about my life, to explain what poetry and art mean to me, to convince her that what I’m doing all the way across the country is worthwhile, a happier alternative to the life I would be living out there in Seattle. But sirens outside flash and pass and so does that thought as I walk away from the priest and back to my coffee and notebook. I think for a moment, then start to write something: He was 18 and he decided to be a priest, I begin—but then nothing comes and I put my pen down and sip the coffee. I listen to the rain and watch the sad priest keep on with his drinking and McHugh keep on with his channel-surfing on a muted, closed-captioned TV. The priest doesn’t look like a priest. I write: The boy who would become a priest didn’t look like a priest. I start flipping through a wrinkled Post someone left, a Sudoko game halfway empty. I write in two numbers. I stare out the window. I see an orange flame of sky caught between two high-rises some blocks away. What does it take to drive a priest out into the rain for a half dozen pints? I ask myself. No: ask it a different way. What does a priest dream about during a thunderstorm? Yes: he never wanted his life this way. No one wants their life this way. The world seems wrong to the priest; the world seems wrong to everyone. But we can’t question what is. Angel appears, Caravaggian figures, and among divine oily shadows we are presented with our purposes in life. He was 18, his mother made him a priest, I write. I spin my pen around my thumb; I feel a surge of something; I see my mother’s smile; I sense that I am smiling. And so I write: When I was 18, my mother…and wait to feel my heart breaking.”
END
in a weird way, ZZZZIPP reminds me of Butters from south park. (if butters were a photon.)
in a weird way, ZZZZIPP reminds me of Butters from south park. (if butters were a photon.)
“Something About My Blood And Yours” (edited)
It’s late and the freezing-rain outside rattles against the dark window to make a tinny sound. Tintinnabulation, someone called it earlier. Most of the journal staff is asleep or almost passed-out at our professor’s apartment in Chinatown. We’ve been drinking wine and bourbon; we’ve been yelling about Salinger, who died today. Our editor in chief, the professor, reaches for a double-bottle of red wine and spills it across the wooden table in the center of all of us. It glugs and burbles out the throat, across a copy of Nine Stories. It pools and spreads over old copies of the lit mag and to the advanced pressing of my own novel. I brought the galley for the editor to see. Everyone still awake laughs, but it’s quiet and drunk laughter, and I watch the damp room spin and the cheap covers of Nine Stories and my own book wrinkle and turn purple. Now the old man rises; his mad white hair shoots out from around his red face like claws or fingers. It’s all shit! he yells, and he grabs the purple Nine Stories and heaves it across the room. Red wine flings off the cover when it hits the opposite wall and leaves a splatter. A book like that should break my fucking heart! he shouts. I think he might cry. I sip my mug of bourbon and he looks around the room, settles on me. He rears up like the statue of Balzac—I think he is ready to kill me. I stare at him and he doesn’t say anything. Then he collapses back into his chair, deflated, his coffee mug still empty. All is silent for a moment. I look around and think, This is being a writer. Then he mutters: Look at fucking Riippi there, so happy with himself, so smug with that book and that shit-eating grin. There’s some more drunken laughter. The freezing-rain tintinnabulates the window. Then in one fast move the old man reaches across the table and hurls my book at me. The hard-glue spine slaps the mug against my chest; red wine and bourbon mixes on my shirt. I can’t tell if I am bleeding or if it is wine. Something stings. Bloodless shit! the old man howls, and laughs. Eventually I pass out. In a dream I write:
“I don’t know the drunk priest, didn’t even know he was a priest when I got to the bar and he was already at the end stool facing a pint. But McHugh introduces him as a priest. He calls him Paddy, not Father, and says he’s the priest up at the Church of St. Thomas on 121st. Good-to-meet-you-Father, I say, and rise to walk over fast and shake his limp hand. I wipe the hot rain off my face from the summer thunderstorm outside with the other hand. An image of my mother, smiling with approval, flashes through my head. It’s a picture of her standing at the top of the church steps after Sunday Mass twenty years ago in Seattle. I am six years old and just want to go home, but she is speaking with Deacon Mike, talking about the next week’s Sunday school curriculum and about the Monsignor’s sermon. I am enjoying Deacon Mike’s First Communion classes very much, she tells him. I fidget and I fuss at the bottom of the stairs, watching her with the fat white-haired Deacon. I pick at the pant legs of my too-big suit and imagine the clouds as war planes and dragons and characters in the video games I’ll play when I get home—but I wait for her. I obey. I am a good son and I know my role. When the Monsignor walks out the church’s double doors in a bright green robe to meet the group of smiling and chatting mothers I watch him take his place at the top of the stairs next to fat Deacon Mike and I watch my mother smile and wave at me to join her. I don’t want to be there but I am immediately. I say, Good afternoon, Father, and shake the Monsignor’s hand hard, just as I should, a six year old in a suit. It’s because of this that twenty years later in New York City a bartender can introduce an old man with a pint of Guinness as a priest and I will be out of my chair as with a reflex, getting up and walking down the bar to shake the slouching divinity’s hand like a small obedient child. All that’s missing is the suit.
Now it’s today and I am wondering how my mother is getting on, where she is right now, if she’s asleep back home or awake watching the news. It’s winter again and the middle of the night. My fiancée is snoring in the other room; the coffee mug in front of the keyboard is full of last night’s wine. I should call my mom, I think, should try again to tell her about my life, to explain what poetry and art mean to me, to convince her that what I’m doing all the way across the country is worthwhile, a happier alternative to the life I would be living out there in Seattle. But sirens outside flash and pass and so does that thought as I walk away from the priest and back to my coffee and notebook. I think for a moment, then start to write something: He was 18 and he decided to be a priest, I begin—but then nothing comes and I put my pen down and sip the coffee. I listen to the rain and watch the sad priest keep on with his drinking and McHugh keep on with his channel-surfing on a muted, closed-captioned TV. The priest doesn’t look like a priest. I write: The boy who would become a priest didn’t look like a priest. I start flipping through a wrinkled Post someone left, a Sudoko game halfway empty. I write in two numbers. I stare out the window. I see an orange flame of sky caught between two high-rises some blocks away. What does it take to drive a priest out into the rain for a half dozen pints? I ask myself. No: ask it a different way. What does a priest dream about during a thunderstorm? Yes: he never wanted his life this way. No one wants their life this way. The world seems wrong to the priest; the world seems wrong to everyone. But we can’t question what is. Angel appears, Caravaggian figures, and among divine oily shadows we are presented with our purposes in life. He was 18, his mother made him a priest, I write. I spin my pen around my thumb; I feel a surge of something; I see my mother’s smile; I sense that I am smiling. And so I write: When I was 18, my mother…and wait to feel my heart breaking.”
END
“Something About My Blood And Yours” (edited)
It’s late and the freezing-rain outside rattles against the dark window to make a tinny sound. Tintinnabulation, someone called it earlier. Most of the journal staff is asleep or almost passed-out at our professor’s apartment in Chinatown. We’ve been drinking wine and bourbon; we’ve been yelling about Salinger, who died today. Our editor in chief, the professor, reaches for a double-bottle of red wine and spills it across the wooden table in the center of all of us. It glugs and burbles out the throat, across a copy of Nine Stories. It pools and spreads over old copies of the lit mag and to the advanced pressing of my own novel. I brought the galley for the editor to see. Everyone still awake laughs, but it’s quiet and drunk laughter, and I watch the damp room spin and the cheap covers of Nine Stories and my own book wrinkle and turn purple. Now the old man rises; his mad white hair shoots out from around his red face like claws or fingers. It’s all shit! he yells, and he grabs the purple Nine Stories and heaves it across the room. Red wine flings off the cover when it hits the opposite wall and leaves a splatter. A book like that should break my fucking heart! he shouts. I think he might cry. I sip my mug of bourbon and he looks around the room, settles on me. He rears up like the statue of Balzac—I think he is ready to kill me. I stare at him and he doesn’t say anything. Then he collapses back into his chair, deflated, his coffee mug still empty. All is silent for a moment. I look around and think, This is being a writer. Then he mutters: Look at fucking Riippi there, so happy with himself, so smug with that book and that shit-eating grin. There’s some more drunken laughter. The freezing-rain tintinnabulates the window. Then in one fast move the old man reaches across the table and hurls my book at me. The hard-glue spine slaps the mug against my chest; red wine and bourbon mixes on my shirt. I can’t tell if I am bleeding or if it is wine. Something stings. Bloodless shit! the old man howls, and laughs. Eventually I pass out. In a dream I write:
“I don’t know the drunk priest, didn’t even know he was a priest when I got to the bar and he was already at the end stool facing a pint. But McHugh introduces him as a priest. He calls him Paddy, not Father, and says he’s the priest up at the Church of St. Thomas on 121st. Good-to-meet-you-Father, I say, and rise to walk over fast and shake his limp hand. I wipe the hot rain off my face from the summer thunderstorm outside with the other hand. An image of my mother, smiling with approval, flashes through my head. It’s a picture of her standing at the top of the church steps after Sunday Mass twenty years ago in Seattle. I am six years old and just want to go home, but she is speaking with Deacon Mike, talking about the next week’s Sunday school curriculum and about the Monsignor’s sermon. I am enjoying Deacon Mike’s First Communion classes very much, she tells him. I fidget and I fuss at the bottom of the stairs, watching her with the fat white-haired Deacon. I pick at the pant legs of my too-big suit and imagine the clouds as war planes and dragons and characters in the video games I’ll play when I get home—but I wait for her. I obey. I am a good son and I know my role. When the Monsignor walks out the church’s double doors in a bright green robe to meet the group of smiling and chatting mothers I watch him take his place at the top of the stairs next to fat Deacon Mike and I watch my mother smile and wave at me to join her. I don’t want to be there but I am immediately. I say, Good afternoon, Father, and shake the Monsignor’s hand hard, just as I should, a six year old in a suit. It’s because of this that twenty years later in New York City a bartender can introduce an old man with a pint of Guinness as a priest and I will be out of my chair as with a reflex, getting up and walking down the bar to shake the slouching divinity’s hand like a small obedient child. All that’s missing is the suit.
Now it’s today and I am wondering how my mother is getting on, where she is right now, if she’s asleep back home or awake watching the news. It’s winter again and the middle of the night. My fiancée is snoring in the other room; the coffee mug in front of the keyboard is full of last night’s wine. I should call my mom, I think, should try again to tell her about my life, to explain what poetry and art mean to me, to convince her that what I’m doing all the way across the country is worthwhile, a happier alternative to the life I would be living out there in Seattle. But sirens outside flash and pass and so does that thought as I walk away from the priest and back to my coffee and notebook. I think for a moment, then start to write something: He was 18 and he decided to be a priest, I begin—but then nothing comes and I put my pen down and sip the coffee. I listen to the rain and watch the sad priest keep on with his drinking and McHugh keep on with his channel-surfing on a muted, closed-captioned TV. The priest doesn’t look like a priest. I write: The boy who would become a priest didn’t look like a priest. I start flipping through a wrinkled Post someone left, a Sudoko game halfway empty. I write in two numbers. I stare out the window. I see an orange flame of sky caught between two high-rises some blocks away. What does it take to drive a priest out into the rain for a half dozen pints? I ask myself. No: ask it a different way. What does a priest dream about during a thunderstorm? Yes: he never wanted his life this way. No one wants their life this way. The world seems wrong to the priest; the world seems wrong to everyone. But we can’t question what is. Angel appears, Caravaggian figures, and among divine oily shadows we are presented with our purposes in life. He was 18, his mother made him a priest, I write. I spin my pen around my thumb; I feel a surge of something; I see my mother’s smile; I sense that I am smiling. And so I write: When I was 18, my mother…and wait to feel my heart breaking.”
END
I used to have a recurring dream when I lived in my parents’ house, which was a duplex. There was a door between the houses (which didn’t exist in real life, though the architecture was such that it could have), and the door was hinged so that it could swing both ways. If you opened it outwards (pulling towards you), it just let you through to the other side of the house. If you opened it inwards (pushing away from you), it opened into a long, unwindowed room, about the size to fit a really long rich-person dining table, though there wasn’t one inside. I remember being really scared to go in, but tossing a tennis ball in from our side, then running outside the house and around to the neighbors’ side, and hearing the ball bump against the door.
I used to have a recurring dream when I lived in my parents’ house, which was a duplex. There was a door between the houses (which didn’t exist in real life, though the architecture was such that it could have), and the door was hinged so that it could swing both ways. If you opened it outwards (pulling towards you), it just let you through to the other side of the house. If you opened it inwards (pushing away from you), it opened into a long, unwindowed room, about the size to fit a really long rich-person dining table, though there wasn’t one inside. I remember being really scared to go in, but tossing a tennis ball in from our side, then running outside the house and around to the neighbors’ side, and hearing the ball bump against the door.
I Dreamed I Was a Dream
coming after me like Sigmund Freud with a cane made of lice.
There, in the forest of artichokes.
There, in the stream of artichokes.
I know that you have been asking me what Sigmund Freud said in the dream but it is top secret.
The only way to get it out of him is to feed him an artichoke OR
to or give him a Golden Retriever puppy for his birthday so which one are you going to choose?
That’s what Rex did. He bought him a puppy and then he told me everything about the dream and it was all in this language made of:
1. Clam shells crushed and eaten with a boiled quail egg.
2. White rocks that you find at the edge of an ocean and extremely heavy land mass.
3. Rice thrown at a wedding taking place in a volcano.
So I sit down with Freud in a Yurt because he lives in a Yurt on the edge of the Cruasharami Desert and he pours me a small glass of whiskey and I pet his puppy because if I do that he will tell me about the dream in the artichoke forest where he is chasing me with his cane made of lice.
Sigmund Freud then opens his torso (sort of like the way you would open a small cabinet) and there is a film being played in there. What I’m telling you is that there is a movie theater inside
Sigmund Frued’s torso and you are in the audience:
Rex trying to cross a stream of artichokes.
Rex asking for my hand in marriage.
Rex laughing ha ha ha at his own wedding and the volcano collapsing the guests.
Freud chasing after Rex saying, “I wanted a Saint Bernard, you shitthead.”
It’s all in the film.
Then he closes his torso and says, “Do you want another whiskey” and I say, “Of course, I do” and I look out at the vast landscape. Oh vast landscape!
I Dreamed I Was a Dream
coming after me like Sigmund Freud with a cane made of lice.
There, in the forest of artichokes.
There, in the stream of artichokes.
I know that you have been asking me what Sigmund Freud said in the dream but it is top secret.
The only way to get it out of him is to feed him an artichoke OR
to or give him a Golden Retriever puppy for his birthday so which one are you going to choose?
That’s what Rex did. He bought him a puppy and then he told me everything about the dream and it was all in this language made of:
1. Clam shells crushed and eaten with a boiled quail egg.
2. White rocks that you find at the edge of an ocean and extremely heavy land mass.
3. Rice thrown at a wedding taking place in a volcano.
So I sit down with Freud in a Yurt because he lives in a Yurt on the edge of the Cruasharami Desert and he pours me a small glass of whiskey and I pet his puppy because if I do that he will tell me about the dream in the artichoke forest where he is chasing me with his cane made of lice.
Sigmund Freud then opens his torso (sort of like the way you would open a small cabinet) and there is a film being played in there. What I’m telling you is that there is a movie theater inside
Sigmund Frued’s torso and you are in the audience:
Rex trying to cross a stream of artichokes.
Rex asking for my hand in marriage.
Rex laughing ha ha ha at his own wedding and the volcano collapsing the guests.
Freud chasing after Rex saying, “I wanted a Saint Bernard, you shitthead.”
It’s all in the film.
Then he closes his torso and says, “Do you want another whiskey” and I say, “Of course, I do” and I look out at the vast landscape. Oh vast landscape!
I fell asleep when I was sleeping and I woke up in someone else’s dream
His thoughts were just like mine
He lived in the terrible house with the laughing windows
He was still inside his mother
His mother wore a thin nightgown and stood at the top of the stairs
I saw her there in the white light
The motherland
She spoke the soft pink language
Her face was torn and her feet were not there
Before he was born
His mother ran her hands over her pregnant belly
The Motherland
She saw a dead body and it was her body
The only dead body she had ever seen was her own
She has bleach in her belly
It is her worst kind of comfort
I am very tired
I will never sleep again
I will never wake up
I fell asleep when I was sleeping and I woke up in someone else’s dream
His thoughts were just like mine
He lived in the terrible house with the laughing windows
He was still inside his mother
His mother wore a thin nightgown and stood at the top of the stairs
I saw her there in the white light
The motherland
She spoke the soft pink language
Her face was torn and her feet were not there
Before he was born
His mother ran her hands over her pregnant belly
The Motherland
She saw a dead body and it was her body
The only dead body she had ever seen was her own
She has bleach in her belly
It is her worst kind of comfort
I am very tired
I will never sleep again
I will never wake up
This dream must have taken place before WWII because I was in this covered wagon full of grizzled, exhausted looking workmen. Probably fishermen.
What struck me about them was a kind of pusillanimous silence. Like industrialized animals or gray pictures of missing children. Men who seemed like they’d be smoking and spitting and drinking and cursing with whores and hustlers in a bar somewhere seemed afraid. Beside that, they were all dressed in cheaply tailored suits and not one of them was without a bouquet of flowers.
We piled out into this red brick street in what looked like a foreign village and made our way into the lobby of a hotel.
It seemed we all were there to court the same woman. A kind of romantic gangbang.
Anyway, we got word from someone that this girl was too sick to see us so all the men and I trudged back outside.
All of them kept throwing these flowers into the gutter. One by one. Over and over.
So I went over and grabbed all these flowers up out of the gutter and made my way into the hotel while the workers got back on the truck. I went in and asked to see her again–flowers cradled in my arms–and was met by a woman caretaker. I begged to see her. Told her there was no illness that could keep me from this girl. That I’d sit by her side. The old woman explained it was impossible.
The girl had cutoff her lips with a pair of scissors.
(That’s a real one, no fucking bullshit…real)
This dream must have taken place before WWII because I was in this covered wagon full of grizzled, exhausted looking workmen. Probably fishermen.
What struck me about them was a kind of pusillanimous silence. Like industrialized animals or gray pictures of missing children. Men who seemed like they’d be smoking and spitting and drinking and cursing with whores and hustlers in a bar somewhere seemed afraid. Beside that, they were all dressed in cheaply tailored suits and not one of them was without a bouquet of flowers.
We piled out into this red brick street in what looked like a foreign village and made our way into the lobby of a hotel.
It seemed we all were there to court the same woman. A kind of romantic gangbang.
Anyway, we got word from someone that this girl was too sick to see us so all the men and I trudged back outside.
All of them kept throwing these flowers into the gutter. One by one. Over and over.
So I went over and grabbed all these flowers up out of the gutter and made my way into the hotel while the workers got back on the truck. I went in and asked to see her again–flowers cradled in my arms–and was met by a woman caretaker. I begged to see her. Told her there was no illness that could keep me from this girl. That I’d sit by her side. The old woman explained it was impossible.
The girl had cutoff her lips with a pair of scissors.
(That’s a real one, no fucking bullshit…real)
speaking of cutting off lips
speaking of cutting off lips
whoa, do embedded videos like, immediately get edited out of comments?
here’s a link then
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTBEPS6n_8U
whoa, do embedded videos like, immediately get edited out of comments?
here’s a link then
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTBEPS6n_8U
I never have nightmares.
I often have unsettling dreams, dreams tinged, or saturated, with a profound strangness, or offness. I have incredibly tedious dreams, dreams where I waste the entire night sweeping a distorted recreation of the bar I work at or casually arguing about directions with a vague driver. I’ve had many dreams of explosions and meteors; sometimes an ominous plume in a dreamy twilight, sometimes a heat-seeking bastard the size of a smart car suddenly plummeting from a clear sky during an otherwise innocuous dream about a barbecue. Unpleasant dreams, or maybe more accurately, negative dreams, but always lacking in a certain urgency and undiluted horror for me to ever regard them as Nightmares.
I’ve had one Nightmare.
I no longer remember when I had it, what kind of life events swirling around in the stew of my consciousness to produce it. It began in a forest of thick, impossibly tall trees. They were broadly spaced and it was hard to tell whether the prevailing bluish gloom was due to an impenetrable canopy high above or night. I was wandering the forest alone, or not, and at some point the terrain shifted into a kind of excavation site. I was inside, without having entered, an enormous tent or makeshift pavilion with a single thick, gray, canvass tarp serving both as monolithic walls and ceiling, somewhere overhead and out if sight. There were trees inside. The earth was sectioned off, rectangularly, in varying sizes and depths. Drably uniformed workers were scattered sparsely throughout the site, walking around slowly, tugging things, carring things, measuring things. Their demeanors were an unsettling contrast between cautious, focused and silent, and raucous, weathered, and overly friendly. Everything felt muted and distant.
In the back, on a raised plateau of dirt overlooking the operation , was a long military style tent. Two armed guards in vaguely military dress stood on either side of the entry flap, a few more milling about outside and on the dirt ramp that ran up along the mound. I made my way toward the tent, accompanied maybe by a guide, perhaps merely propelled by the shimmery narrative thread of
dreams, and went in. The interior, bright and white with harsh florescence and linoleum, extended back like a hallway ending in another flap and two more armed guards. The hallway had desks, computers, printers and other various machines on either side and an assortment of administrative looking personnel, moving about, rapidly speaking into ostentatiously mechanical radios from bygone eras. The tent was active but everyone seemed to be mostly ignoring me, at the most briefly acknowledging me as if I was a well known confidant in the strange activity underway all around me. Walking through the flap at the end I found another hallway shaped room with more people, more machines and two more guards in front of another flap. Progressing deeper and deeper into the tent it was the same again and again, endlessly, however the personnel and equipment began shifting from administrative to medical. At first the changes were simply a few doctors springing up within the greater body of workers, but eventually the sides of the tent-segments were lined with severely disabled bodies, amputees and whole-body burn victims, moaning on dirty pallets. Once the first doctor appeared the changes seemed to increase exponentially. There was something bad in the tent. I was reaching the point in the pregnancy of a nightmare where my self-awareness would normally abort it, but if anything the dream was escalating feverishly, like a cart approaching a valley in an abandoned mine shaft. Looking closer the patients all had what looked liked burns in various degrees on there bodies. The doctors were gone, replaced by the same uniformed workers in the excavation site halfheartedly “attending” to those in need, mostly just carrying kettles of water and towels back and forth between patients. They too had sickly burns on there hands or necks or faces. The guards were wearing full bio hazard suits. Things were breaking down. Repulsive faces flashed as I hurtled through the tent, gibbering drooling. The rooms were devoid of any sort of supplies, perhaps a blood stained table with a broken leg or a dangling cord. Deformed madmen ambled around, occasional turning to me and hissing; the heads within the bio hazard suits were lacesd with gnarled, purplish burns.
“This is a nightmare” I thought to myself in a pleasantly surprised tone. “Everything is perfectly nightmarish”
(i hope its not too late to post this)
I never have nightmares.
I often have unsettling dreams, dreams tinged, or saturated, with a profound strangness, or offness. I have incredibly tedious dreams, dreams where I waste the entire night sweeping a distorted recreation of the bar I work at or casually arguing about directions with a vague driver. I’ve had many dreams of explosions and meteors; sometimes an ominous plume in a dreamy twilight, sometimes a heat-seeking bastard the size of a smart car suddenly plummeting from a clear sky during an otherwise innocuous dream about a barbecue. Unpleasant dreams, or maybe more accurately, negative dreams, but always lacking in a certain urgency and undiluted horror for me to ever regard them as Nightmares.
I’ve had one Nightmare.
I no longer remember when I had it, what kind of life events swirling around in the stew of my consciousness to produce it. It began in a forest of thick, impossibly tall trees. They were broadly spaced and it was hard to tell whether the prevailing bluish gloom was due to an impenetrable canopy high above or night. I was wandering the forest alone, or not, and at some point the terrain shifted into a kind of excavation site. I was inside, without having entered, an enormous tent or makeshift pavilion with a single thick, gray, canvass tarp serving both as monolithic walls and ceiling, somewhere overhead and out if sight. There were trees inside. The earth was sectioned off, rectangularly, in varying sizes and depths. Drably uniformed workers were scattered sparsely throughout the site, walking around slowly, tugging things, carring things, measuring things. Their demeanors were an unsettling contrast between cautious, focused and silent, and raucous, weathered, and overly friendly. Everything felt muted and distant.
In the back, on a raised plateau of dirt overlooking the operation , was a long military style tent. Two armed guards in vaguely military dress stood on either side of the entry flap, a few more milling about outside and on the dirt ramp that ran up along the mound. I made my way toward the tent, accompanied maybe by a guide, perhaps merely propelled by the shimmery narrative thread of
dreams, and went in. The interior, bright and white with harsh florescence and linoleum, extended back like a hallway ending in another flap and two more armed guards. The hallway had desks, computers, printers and other various machines on either side and an assortment of administrative looking personnel, moving about, rapidly speaking into ostentatiously mechanical radios from bygone eras. The tent was active but everyone seemed to be mostly ignoring me, at the most briefly acknowledging me as if I was a well known confidant in the strange activity underway all around me. Walking through the flap at the end I found another hallway shaped room with more people, more machines and two more guards in front of another flap. Progressing deeper and deeper into the tent it was the same again and again, endlessly, however the personnel and equipment began shifting from administrative to medical. At first the changes were simply a few doctors springing up within the greater body of workers, but eventually the sides of the tent-segments were lined with severely disabled bodies, amputees and whole-body burn victims, moaning on dirty pallets. Once the first doctor appeared the changes seemed to increase exponentially. There was something bad in the tent. I was reaching the point in the pregnancy of a nightmare where my self-awareness would normally abort it, but if anything the dream was escalating feverishly, like a cart approaching a valley in an abandoned mine shaft. Looking closer the patients all had what looked liked burns in various degrees on there bodies. The doctors were gone, replaced by the same uniformed workers in the excavation site halfheartedly “attending” to those in need, mostly just carrying kettles of water and towels back and forth between patients. They too had sickly burns on there hands or necks or faces. The guards were wearing full bio hazard suits. Things were breaking down. Repulsive faces flashed as I hurtled through the tent, gibbering drooling. The rooms were devoid of any sort of supplies, perhaps a blood stained table with a broken leg or a dangling cord. Deformed madmen ambled around, occasional turning to me and hissing; the heads within the bio hazard suits were lacesd with gnarled, purplish burns.
“This is a nightmare” I thought to myself in a pleasantly surprised tone. “Everything is perfectly nightmarish”
(i hope its not too late to post this)
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