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 | | From: | Marco McClean | | Subject: | Big Bertha Slide Rule. Be Prepared. A Nice Day With My Grandfather. | | Date: | Fri, 21 Jan 2005 05:07:42 -0800 |
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 | My dreams from Thursday morning, 2005-01-20:
First dream. I'm somehow /under the rug/ at the radio
station where Les Tarr is doing his roadhouse blues show. He
knows I'm here, and in a kind of wink he follows an idea I
gave him earlier (in the back-story of the dream) and says
something cryptic about me so later on my show I can say the
same kind of thing about him, like the telephone call for
pizza from one /Firesign Theater/ record album to another.
When I come out from under the rug a big goofy dog lollops
in out of the rain, tracking pineapple-juice mud everywhere.
Mendocino (CA) catastrophically floods. Mister Bill (in
the early 1980s one of the dinner cooks at Brannon's) uses
wide oval-shaped cooking-pot lids to move through the water
and mud. Others fleeing the disaster say Mister Bill is
because mud has covered his feet. A second wave of water and
mud washes through and mud covers my feet too. I steer using
my own pot lids and get near enough to a watertower to catch a
beam and swing inside onto the second floor, which is now the
first floor. Safe.
The mud and water subside. Flood profiteers have a yard
sale, selling other people's things and keeping the money. I
find my old purple jacket that I used to wear skiing when I
was a kid. "This is mine." I just take it. Here's a
twenty-foot-long /Big Bertha/ slide rule; I consider saying
it's mine and taking it, but how would I carry it? I collect
clothes I recognize as mine; I'm looking specifically for the
trenchcoat I lost in 1997-- here's the felt liner. The
refugees left now mostly move downhill to where they'll be
picked up by a bus. I don't want to go south with a bunch of
others; I want to go north to Caspar by myself. I hang around
what's left of the the yard sale, dragging a long crosscut saw
behind me by the handle; I'm careless and knock over and smash
a vase. Someone says, "Dangerous tools."
Rich Bay Area tourists pour into the lane. A tourist makes
a joke about being from Ukiah. Like, /as if/.
Here's Juanita! I run to her-- "Juanita! You're alive!"
But she's depressed nearly to the point of being in a walking
coma; she'll be a burden to me. I had been looking out of
Mendocino to the east at three unfamiliar hillsides, planning
to be sad for a bit then have /three new loves/... But I'm not
disappointed that didn't happen; this is okay. I'll take care
of Juanita. Maybe she'll get better.
Next dream. I'm watching and also participating in a
rainy-school-day /health/hygiene film to review it for a
newspaper like the one Michael Keaton and Glenn Close work for
in the movie /The Paper/. In the film,
Leave-It-To-Beaver-style high-school kids use long poles to
drag each other skimming over water near shore in like the
Ganges river, and they do this as a civic-duty prophylactic
measure against disaster. One boy goes off-shift and the next
boy won't take the pole; he says, "No. I don't want to." He
lies that his parents called and they're taking him out of the
program.
I go up the shore to a concrete-block country club
building to wash my hands in clean water (the river is
filthy). "Where's the bathroom?" A kid behind a souvenir
counter points behind me and says, "Ya see it?" /Thank you./
I go into a bathroom/shower-room. Behind me a big naked German
boy is spraying everyone with hot water from a garden hose; he
sprays me and runs behind the long shower-stall wall. I reach
over the wall, grab his hair and his neck and smash and smash
his head back and forth in the corner between the metal wall
and the concrete one, ruining his face and pushing in the back
of his skull. Dead? I release him and he flops down onto the
tiles. Dead. I'm not upset or triumphant or anything; the
murder was just part of going in to wash my hands. The film
teaches us that playing pranks and running around with a
hot-water hose can result in being murdered /by someone who
lies to get out of his civic duty/.
Now it's a driver-training film. A delivery-truck driver
speeds up --slowly-- trying to beat the signal. Now, look, we
know that's not right and nothing good can come of it. We
don't need to see the result. So we don't need to stage it and
film it.
Farther into this model-railroad-like city a Japanese man
superfluously directing traffic around an L-corner. I wave
cheerily ("Hi, Mister Soto!") and ride my bicycle past him and
up the street to a two-tone green/light-green house with
potted ficus trees guarding the recessed front door. I ring
the doorbell with a suddenly weak, shaky hand. A man like
actor Max von Sydow opens the door. I say, "Uh-- do I bring
you bread?" He says, "Yes and that doesn't speak well of your
longevity." (He means that if I already have Alzheimer's as a
teenager I probably should never mate and have children.)
What am I doing here? I look in my wallet for clues about
my life and find an acetominophen gel capsule, faded receipts
and business cards I can't read. Theater director Meg
Patterson comes home; she's the man's daughter; here she's a
popular high-school girl. It's 1950-something.
I form a plan: I'll go back to the Jap (the Japanese
traffic guy), wait for him to stop a truck with bread in it,
steal the truck and come back here-- then Meg will want to go
out with me. Whatta ya think, kids? /Is that a wise plan?/
Next dream. I've just got a job working for a company
training snakes and rats. An old man --head of the
department-- traps a snake under a bit of wood for a trick.
Alone, like the Sorceror's Apprentice, I repeat this trick
with what turns out to be a less compliant snake and it bites
my finger. I convulsively tear the snake loose rather than
coaxing it loose. It's disgusted, like /What kinda trainer are
you?/ and it hurries up under the lip of the plywood building
siding. I kick the siding and get down close to see-- three
tiny snake heads fall out, bounce and climb back up inside.
They're multiplying all out of control. Oh, no!
I pretend nothing's wrong, leave work, go out onto
Franklin Street in Fort Bragg (CA). I see poet Cindy Frank
eating at a table in a food court where the Purity Market
parking lot is in real life. (In the dream, Franklin Street is
a shopping mall.) Cindy smiles at me but only with her mouth;
she doesn't want me to come over there.
In a mom-and-pop fast-food place my (dead) grandfather and
I order and wait for the food to come. A college couple, a boy
and a girl, get their food the same time we do and we all sit
at two tables-- the boy and girl and I at one table and my
grandfather at the next. The girl and I share a bag of French
fries with ketchup. The boy drinks twice from my lemonade cup.
I say, "Mister, you keep drinkin' my lemonade." He's
surprised; he hadn't noticed. He accidentally knocks the cup
over. The girl jumps up to get a napkin. "Here!" she says, "Do
you want another?" Another napkin or another lemonade? "No,
thank you."
Why are my grandfather and I sitting apart?
Later my grandfather says, "That was really nice." He
enjoyed going for a walk with me, spending the day with me. It
didn't bother him that I sat at the wrong table; kids make
mistakes like that.
-end-
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