Tire Hazard. See Dog, Get Meat. Paranoid Teevee. Ducks, Pigs, Loaves,

Marco McClean

From:	Marco McClean
Subject:	Tire Hazard. See Dog, Get Meat. Paranoid Teevee. Ducks, Pigs, Loaves,
Date:	Tue, 18 Jan 2005 01:38:26 -0800

My dreams from Sunday morning, 2005-01-16:
First dream. I'm driving Juanita in my car on a freeway in
L.A. As we go under a wide overpass Juanita and I sing
together along with a John Lennon song on the radio: "All my
life I built the promises that you'll understand. Try to
understand that I still caaaaaaaare." (It ends on a high note
held till you're out of breath. I can't get up that high; I
sing a low note instead.)
A tall, thin, attractive British woman with slightly
too-wide cheekbones goes around with a clipboard inside an
office, checking wall switches. Juanita has the playing
surface of a pinball machine tilted up like the hood of a car;
she's repairing it inside. The Brit woman asks me something
about my paper. I say, "Do you remember reading about
Juanita?" She says, "Yes." I usher her to Juanita and say
grandly, "Here she is."
On the drive home from our pinball machine work I see a
tire in the road in the lane going the other way. We're on a
road along a ridge at night; there's a roadcut embankment on
the left and a brushy dropoff on the right. It's dark. I pull
over onto the shoulder. I'm about to run back with a
flashlight to the tire to throw it aside so it can't cause a
wreck. I pull the door latch...

Next dream. Down Home Foods is in a building where in real
life my car insurance office used to be. Outside are two dogs;
the big one lives here and the little white fluffy one belongs
to singer/actor Sandy Glickfeld, who's in the store. I look
away and look back and the little dog is hiding under a car.
I go to get it but it scoots out the other side, runs to
the big dog in the street gutter and they both go across
Franklin Street. A woman in a car, reminded by seeing dogs,
tells her friend going into the store, "Get some meat."
In a government office or a Kaiser hospital waiting room a
big black standard poodle jumps up and knocks me down. I'm
sitting on the floor. The dog won't take its claws off my
chest --I sink back as if dead; the dog moves away, confused.
I see that my fall resulted in my pants-pockets emptying
onto the floor thousands of tiny junk-drawer things: sewing
pins, pushpins, pens, paper clips, wirenuts, screws, old
watches, etc. Juanita and I know how to cover up this faux
pas; we'll say I'm a professional novelty-act thief and these
are my stage props. We both nod at the same time, each to
indicate that the other should speak and begin the deception.

Next dream. Inside a split-level storefront art gallery I
climb over a chain-link fence to get downstairs. An old teevee
set uses an attached SLR film camera to snap photographs as I
balance atop the fence posing in goofy positions.
I go down near the teevee. It says snarkily, "There. All
ready to distribute pictures to whoever needs them." I think
of the teevee as the Anderson Valley Advertiser newspaper, but
it's not acting right; it's as though the teevee is a paranoid
conspiracy nut. I say, "What makes you think I'm against
them?" (Against the artists above, behind the fence.)
The teevee says a string of unfamiliar names; I say, "I
don't know those." It says, "Oh, come, now-- [quiet garbled
phrase] (my name?)." I say, "Say again?" It says smugly,
"It's a common term." I say, "It may be but I can't hear it.
Do you mind if I turn up the volume." I reach for the volume
slider; the teevee lurches three inches backward and
brandishes its film camera.

My dream from a nap in the car when I got home Sunday evening:

In a college library I'm using a Windows Explorer-like
interface for reconstructing/undeleting a hard disk after a
crash. Part of the process involves using a drum machine
program and my own voice in place of a recording of a popular
song to send to old friends as a Christmas card on a disk.
In the hallway that goes to the laundry room at Mendo
Micro the area under the stairs is a cut-out window to a
bigger, similarly shaped area where a religious family singing
group sings in high-speed unison a song whose chorus
successively adds elements (like the /Hole In the Bottom of
the Sea/ song). I sing along with them when they get to this
part: "And the ducks and pigs and loaves and the fishes and
the winks and wonks and the wars and the witches and the--"
etc.

My dreams from Monday morning, 2005-01-17:
First dream. I'm flying along after a cylindrical black
smoke cloud that is itself rushing through a tube of force
toward Earth. Down in the middle atmosphere the smoke spreads
out without getting any less opaque; I fly farther and farther
away from the center to try to get around the smoke and down
to the surface.

Next dream. I walk through a brightly-lit school locker
corridor at night carrying my notebook clipboard. Others go
this way. A girl behind me says, "Unitarians? What's that." I
assume the word /Unitarians/ is printed on the back of my
shirt; I say, "It's a church. I don't believe in any of them
but I never met a bad one," meaning I don't believe in any
churches but I never met an impolite Unitarian.
The girl says, "Oh. Huh." I clumsily drop my pen and keep
walking for twenty feet before deciding to go back for it.
When I pick up the pen the clipboard unclips and my notepad
falls. I get everything in my hands again and go outside,
where everyone is walking in the dark out into an apparently
endless field of golf-course grass.
The girl from before is ahead of me. I hurry to catch up
with her, and-- it's not the same girl; I say, "Sorry, wrong
person." Someone laughs. I say to this new girl, "Wanta see
something amazing?" I run ahead of her, curve up into the
dark, loop back and hover over her head as she looks around
the grass, worried. She says, "Where are you?"
I put my hand down for her to lock wrists with me and I
fly us up.
Now I'm with a 1950s movie-type Scotland Yard inspector,
looking for and finding people who've been strangled to death.
Here's a man in an empty freezer, with baling wire looped
tightly around his hands and his neck. I see the man's eyelid
twitch. "He's alive! He's alive!" The inspector pulls a
little of the wire away from the man's neck and cuts it with
the heavy lock-cutters we used to break into the freezer.
Good color spreads under the skin from where the wire was.
The man slowly fills up with life, like a paper towel
absorbing a spill--
--and becomes a black long-haired German-shepherd/wolf-dog
lying stretched out on its back in the kitchen of a strange
house. My friend Mitch is here; he's interested that I had two
dreams /just tonight/, meaning in the time it took him to get
from the front door to the kitchen. I say modestly, "I was
touring the South." He says, "I got my keys," offering for me
to take his car and continue the tour.

Next dream. I watch a demonstration of flexible copper
mesh to be used by kids as a toy to make shapes; the
demonstrator presses a continuous sheet of mesh into a very
three-dimensional relief of a little house and a boat and a
/play life/.
Also in this empty storefront is a big artistic gridwork
of bamboo rods made of steel. Wonderful.
Now I'm kneeling up at a workbench making a new kind of
headphones where the earpieces are eighth-inch mini-plugs that
generate their own sound by piezo crystals twisting them along
the shaft.
Late Night Liz asks if I want anything from the store.
"No, thanks; I already have a contractor's permit." (Teaching
certificate.) Liz comes close to where I'm soldering, somehow
gets between me and it; she wants me to come with her. As we
go into a garage where they sell fruit I say, "We shouldn't
get too near each other." She says, "Why?" I say, "Because I
just wanta grab at you." She says, "My, we're just a little
bundle o' emotions today, aren't we." I say, "Yeah." (And
so?)
I think of old prefabricated car garage parts being put
together creatively to make a three-part bay-window-shaped
garage door. Chains to the handles would pull all three parts
to tilt up and back so they cross to make a horizontal
asterisk.
People here for a real estate open house are upstairs on a
stair-landing balcony in the high-ceilinged garage. They're
told to pay attention to the show. As I disassemble the
left-front gas ring on a kitchen stove down on the concrete,
my belt slips loose and my pants fall /floop/ down around my
ankles. I pull them back up, fasten the belt securely and
continue working.

Next dream. In a packed-dirt parking lot that's almost
level with the water in a delta marina area, I'm examining a
red wooden Chinese-junk-like sailboat/barge that I've won in a
raffle. It's up on blocks. I'm expected to enter it in a
long-distance race, but first I want to understand some things
about it; for instance, there are horizontal slots front and
rear that are really holes completely through the hull, and
they're only a foot or so above where the water will come to.
These slots are for ten-foot-square sheets of one-inch plywood
that have something to do with propelling the boat-- maybe
they vibrate.
It's night-time and I'm talking in a loud voice about the
boat with someone else here. A man yells from the trailer park
across the lot, "Would ya /SHADDAP!/" Right. Sorry. They're
trying to sleep there.
Water swirls up from all directions and I'm lifted away
from the lot. The water isn't violent but I can't see very
far, so I'm worried. I catch a plank of wood and use it as a
float; I'm swirled in a gentle circle for a long time.
My old roommate Tim and some others float near. I provide
the direction for us all to swim and so rescue everyone. We
climb up out of the water on a spit of land that a restaurant
uses for its mountain of food garbage. I find good food in the
garbage and distribute it. And I find a giant radish the size
of a pumpkin. Kay Rudin is here; she notes with envy and
admiration that I /always/ find a giant radish.

-end-