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 | | From: | Marco McClean | | Subject: | Slabbed Cache. "Leave the Ghosts Alone." For Information Purposes Only. | | Date: | Mon, 17 Jan 2005 04:53:47 -0800 |
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 | My dreams from Friday morning, 2005-01-14:
First dream. I'm in Caspar (CA) looking east. Brightly
colored biplanes race south, low over the hills. Over the
valley up Caspar Creek the last two airplanes in the race turn
and act like kite birds, staying in place against a wind from
the north. Their wings brush and one plane crashes with the
pilot still inside. I start crying.
In the street in front of the eternally-never-finished
meat market building I and someone else tell my high-school
friend Mike about the supplies and technology that aliens have
cached in a secret concrete cellar beneath the bathroom at the
back of the green house.
Later, after the house has been knocked down, a man who's
a combination of Mendocino News Service's Grail Dawson and old
Pauly of /The Sopranos/ grasps from a single glance at me that
the concrete slab his work crew has just completed is covering
the alien cache and that I want to be able to get to it down
there. He will help, and he can keep a secret. He yells to his
men to bust up the concrete, never mind why, and set a new
slab over /that/ way, where in real life Michael's house is.
(Another Michael.)
Next dream. In the Community School as it was in the early
1980s a superstitious construction worker sees footprints in
fresh concrete and tells the other workers to leave the ghosts
alone.
In a meeting of all the staff in a barn partitioned into
classrooms I wait impatiently to get Chuck Bush alone and warn
him about the school district's plans and the sneaky bank
problem that will develop in 1984. Jody Evens is the last to
speak in the meeting. Everyone leaves but Chuck. I'm breaking
the time travel rules to tell him anything at all, but I've
decided to do it and I'm doing it. /And this is only the
beginning of the things I'm planning to do./
Next dream. I go back in time from 2030-or-2040-something
to the pink house in Caspar in the early 1990s. In my view out
the back door housecats move across the cow field in the same
motion as the biplanes flew in the race in the first dream.
I've come from a time when Juanita is dead. Here I talk to
the Juanita of 1990 or so. She knows who I am even though I'm
old. I convey by a little dance that we have to stay at least
four feet apart; there must be no physical contact, no
transfer of disease germs from the future. This meeting is
really sad but it's also hopeful; I talk to Juanita the way I
talked to Chuck in the second dream-- warn her of things and
people to watch out for. Deborah from the theater company is
here; she moves her mouth along with what I'm saying,
memorizing everything. I do Deborah the favor of telling her
she keeps picking me who beat her up, but she already knows
that-- that pattern is established; she wants to know more
useful things.
Next dream. I'm at the Community School in the present,
the way it would be today if Chuck had known what to do in the
early 1980s to keep the regular school district from taking
over and crushing it to get the attendance money. This
might-have-been Community School is a kind of communal living
situation. There are lots of kids and grownups, but it's not
perfect; it's gone sour. Families have settled in and there
are the usual family-related problems and tyrannies; for
example, I discover one family's business of making
corrugated-plastic-and-lucite art frames is based on their
oldest boy's idea and development work, and the boy has been
kept completely out of the loop. At a station wagon parked at
the end of Ford Street (which in the dream looks out over vast
marshes) I tell the boy the truth.
He breaks down crying. He says over and over, "This was
/my/ idea." What bugs him the most is that the others stayed
on welfare somehow /and/ made a continuing pittance from his
idea. They are cheaters and they're not even prospering.
The boy talks about a girl named Karen. I don't know who
Karen is. I say, "Karen... Karen-and-Sharon Karen?" He says,
"/Karen./" Ah, I know who he means, now: Karen [Ruggles,
Smiggles, Something] from my high school. What about her,
again?
I have an over-under two-barrel shotgun with a strange
gunsight. It has a small pile of metal blocks at the front and
at the rear of the upper barrel; at least four holes go
through both sets of blocks in straight lines that cross. You
don't have to calculate for distance or windage; you just
sight through the best hole for the conditions. I cock the
hammers and play with the gun without firing it. I follow a
bird across the sky with it, and then follow what I think is a
bird but that turns out to be a weightless wad of paper.
I say to the boy, "Don't worry. You'll make some money and
/then/ you'll go camping." (He's never been camping and always
wanted to go, but I think he should be allowed to direct the
exploitation of his idea first.)
My dreams from Saturday, 2005-01-15:
First dream. Harry Rothman and I are in a metal warehouse
with big louvered air-vent/windows. I've set up about two
hundred folding chairs in concentric quarter-circles facing a
movie screen on the metal wall. Harry says, "That's a good
idea-- show the game. Yeah..." He means to use a teevee
projector to show a sports game. I say, "There'll be too much
light." (The air vents don't close all the way, and teevee
projectors are dim, especially for a screen that big.) Harry
says suavely, "We won't tell them that."
He's going to charge admission to show a teevee sports
game. I'm afraid enough of the patrons will know this isn't
legal to make trouble come later, but Harry says don't worry,
he'll take it from here. And, you know, /Go away, kid, ya
bother me./
Next dream. A graceful medium-size gray-blue parrot stands
on my left fist; I scratch its neck the way it likes; it moves
its head around like a cat being scratched behind the ears.
In a giant, labyrinthine house that the dream says is my
mother's house I explore the heating system, which is several
boilers and pipe grids and woodstoves, and all of it's going
full blast and windows are open to the cold outside; it seems
wasteful.
Poet Gordon Black and some other nineteenth-century
professorial men are in a kind of garage space outside the
front door of the next house to the left. A greasy,
curly-haired Barnum character shoots a pistol into the air
(into the roof); he makes a comical hand-to-throat distress
gesture, vomits upward a fat black octopus-thing the size of a
frog and swallows it right back in. His servant chuckles that
he does this all the time.
Back inside the first house I find the manual for the
heating system and read literally boilerplate after
boilerplate-- the manual is cast in thick iron plaques. A
woman walks right in the front door without knocking; she
thinks this is a visitor-serving facility and that she's
merely entering the lobby. She wants tourist information. I
say, "This is a private residence." Oh. She starts back for
the door. I say, "But can I get you something? Coffee?" Why,
yes, thank you.
I go through the house looking for something like a
kitchen. In various rooms deep inside the house, groups of
mostly older people sit around eating and having presumably
educational discussions. In one room they're all sprawled on
the floor on pillows, like ancient Romans but in modern
tourist clothes; as I pick my way around them and jump over
them I joke about the woman at the front door, but in my story
I change her into an airheaded teenager who said in a bored
voice in response to my offer of coffee, "I'll have a large
latte."
-end-
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| | From: | Marco McClean | | Subject: | Re: Slabbed Cache. "Leave the Ghosts Alone." For Information Purposes | | Date: | Mon, 17 Jan 2005 14:00:47 -0800 |
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| Ordinarily when I discover a typo I've made I just chuckle and
let it go, but I want to correct this one because it changes the
meaning too much.
In telling the story of the dream that has me traveling back
in time to Caspar in the early 1990s to talk to Juanita and
Deborah, I meant to write, "I do Deborah the favor of telling her
she keeps picking /men/ who beat her up," not "keeps picking /me /
who beat her up." Also, while I'm here, it should be more sadly
comical that the dream character wants /useful/ information and
not information that will merely keep her from being abused for
the rest of her life.
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