dream!
LADYTRAP, INC.
the flip side of reality
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adventures in california
on a road trip with jinx, sal gomez, enav, and maybe amber. we are going to drive down the coast for several days but for some silly logistical reasons we all take separate cars except for Enav since Jinx will be continuing on to New Mexico from Long Beach, Sal is only going halfway, etc. Sal drives a white VW squareback. I'm disappointed he won't be joining us all the way.
We end up cruising around a dark neighborhood at night in a cool green hippie sort of costal northern California town. This residential area is deep in a canyon and the houses are piled everywhere.... far more space allotted to home that to road, and the dirt road gets narrower and narrower. We press forward, trying to find our campsite or a place to stay for the night and we end up maneuvering the Nova into a tiny courtyard around bicycles and potted plants until our little train of cars is dead-ended and stuck. Oi! It is late at night and we have now awoken at least one of the college-age people that live collectively in this house. She comes down to greet us and invited us in for coffee and extends her sympathies and explains how annoyed everyone gets when tourists roll into the neighborhood and get their cars stuck in the courtyard like some sort of rat trap. But she also knows what it is like since we've all done that in one neighborhood or another at some point in our lives. We talk about how easy it is to hate tourists and how lame that is since everyone (including the most friendly, fun people) ends up being a tourist somewhere.
So, sure enough, one of her less-friendly roommates wakes up and starts yelling at us to get our damn cars out of there. Enav pilots a generic white car (looks like a rental) first and Mike Crowe expertly backs the Nova through this insane obstacle course. We didn't think we could do it but eventually we are out safely and parked on the shoulder of the narrow street. I can't remember if we stay they night, but she does offer.
Further down the coast we take a tour of some really dilapidated buildings across the street from the house Pat grey up in. There are scuffmarks everywhere inside these concrete shells and we know instinctively that this was an impromtu indoor urban skatepark for Pat and his brother Andy.
We are taking the tour with a middle-aged real-estate-looking friend of Pat's parents and we walk into an overgrown backyard adjacent to which a pig is hiding in a dark hole under the house. He sticks his curious nose out and Ms. Real Estate starts running across the yard in her uncomfortable shoes since she is afraid of pigs. But to her dismay (and our amusement), these harmless animals will always chase and investigate the object that moves away from them, so he races across the yard to get his nose and tongue fall over her calves and the sensitive patch right behind the knees. (You know, we really need a name for that area behind your knees.)
The next part of our trip will take us to Australia but we have already used the first two weeks of three putting around the California coast and we can't decide if we should hurry up and get there or cut that out altogether and save that bit for later. Of course Amber lobbies for the former and gets on the phone with her dad to figure out the details.
Although we aren't in Australia yet we end up renting a funny foreign car called the Presto. It looks like an Echo, or a Focus. We then pick up Erica from the bus station and we have a wonderful reunion. We will only get to see each other for one day before I leave for the southern hemisphere and thus the rest of this dream is edited for your children's safey.
alien gophers from the bottom of the ocean
Mitch and Erica pick me up from work to take me camping. I don't have all my gear and have to work a bit more (Even though it's almost midnight) so I give them a detailed list of things for them to gather from my house. They leave and come back to Cubic for the third time that day...
At the camping trip I go along an expedition to the bottom of the ocean floor. I don't think I physically go down there, but I am observing this dream from the third person, as if watching a movie. Something strange and alien has landed down there... either it is from space or it is a strange natural earth-borne thing. A very brave and curious diver goes in to investigate.
She has an umbilical connection to the surface, and is reporting her findings as she goes. The area of interest is inside a room; I think it's part of a shipwreck. There is a serious blob in the center of the room, and upon closer inspection she sees that it is a pile of cable-like matter. Like the rope piled up at the bottom of a rock-climb.
[As an aside, I hold a grid (like a screen) over the mass of cables and it is an abstract that I know Erica would love. It's beautiful.]
And sure enough, a single line rises from this pile and leads all the way to the surface. This blob has its own umbilical connection to the upper world, and we can see a sort of pumping action, as if it was sending fluid up to the surface. This gets us all nervous and you can hear the diver's breathing and heartbeat accelerate through her microphone. This cable certainly seems organic and alive, summoning thoughts of tentacles and serpents.
The fear increases when, for the first time, we think that this thing may be malicious and what it is sending to the surface might not be all fun and games. But she notices another tube running from the bottom of the pile into the next room, where there seems to be more activity. She starts to pull herself into that room, fascinated as much as she is scared, but the team above reports that they are going to haul her quickly to the surface. She protests a bit but then there we go, whisked away backward out of the shipwreck. My last sight as I follow her up is the most disturbing. Wide blobs move up the tube (like a mouse moving through a snake but much faster) and I know that they are alien animals working there way upstairs. The flood increases and I see that the aliens look like furry marmots, a bit smaller than beavers. There are thousands of them, and they are traveling on the outside of the tube as well as the inside, being hurled to the surface at alarming speeding in little baskets and platforms attached to the tube. These are clearly not terrestrial mammals, as they seem to have no problem with the pressure and lack of air.
In the last dream I meet Erica at the airport for a happy reunion. We go camping... My mom calls Pat and asks him to install a new "backbone" into this cabin she owns. She will provide the backbone (I think it's a whale skeleton, actually); and hopes that a living home will grow around it. Pat explains that the only way backbones end up with living flesh around them is when they grow up naturally from embryos, so he can't help her there. The plan is to stop at a cabin to pick up keys to another cabin from one of Larry's friends. I am embarrassed to tell Erica that the friend is Kenneth Lay.
And speaking of Lay, the rest of that dream is edited.
Dr. Zanares
We have company, a bunch of Japanese college students. I think I live at my mother's house, and while we are waiting to go out to an opera (and while we are waiting for my mother to give my friend a haircut) I and the giggly students stand upstairs and bounce an orange ball around the house, on both stories.
I have been in school for three years and still haven't gotten my masters. Someone recommends I go see Dr. John Zanares. I call him up and he says I should swing by his office and he'll see about getting my degree without having to do a thesis. I look for him for hours, trolling through a canyon at UCSD. I pass the building he said his office was in, but I only see a few alcoves where homeless men sleep in the shade.
I enter the main entrance of the building that includes his Department of Architecture, Food, and Technology and the arrows that supposedly lead to his office go right back out the next door only 10 feet away. But I see Nadine there and she is on her way to see him as well, and she actually knows where his office is, so I tag along.
reclaim the airwaves
Somehow the local NPR station is left unattended for a weekend and because of my former involvement with UCSD's KSDT I am allowed to take over the station for a weekend. It's not direct permission from the station, but more permission from a friend of a friend of someone who works there...
Mitch and Erica join me. They have some creative ideas (music and poetry) that will work well with radio and we spend hours doing that. We also feel obligated to report the news and weather and traffic and all that, but I fear we aren't so professional about it.
There is some pretty important-seeming news (another war had begun) and I find it odd that they would just leave the station vacant for a weekend, leaving the news in the hands of biased amateurs.
I step out of the dark station for a while to run an errand, and when I return things have gotten ugly. Some bigwig had been listening and is now interrogating Mitch and Erica in the back studio. They look uncomfortable. Before the bigwig notices me Mitch tries to motion to me to get away but I don't understand what he is doing and I get caught in the reprimand as well.
Bummer. I suppose we need our own radio station. Or website.
***
Stefan and I go climbing in Mission Gorge after work. The place is crawling with his comrades (the Alpinistas) and he introduces me around. He leads our first climb and I follow. Only when I am halfway up the climb do I suddenly realise to my horror that I am not wearing a harness. I ask Stefan about this (I was going to borrow his extra) and he replies that he left it at his mother's house and forgot to bring it. Fortunately it isn't a terribly dangerous climb and I make it up okay without protection.
chicago boy
Pavarotti (cat) asleep on couch dreaming while I watch a video and coyotes chatter outside. First the video is David Sedaris, but he's dressed like Eddie Izzard. Then there is a movie about me. It's another Christopher Guest music documentary. It becomes my dream:
I am just about to give up on the band I volunteered for and Christopher Guest gives me the kick-in-the-ass pep talk. He takes me down to the local drugstore and gets the cashier to tailor me an outfit... it's a folk band with heavy rock roots like this and that New York band but they are local Chicago boys.
I also take over a small contract engineering firm and my four-person female staff wears baseball hats while we work in the backyard of the folks who owned it before. I also rent an apartment back there.
On our way to La Posta, Pat and Erica and I meet some Spanish folk in Horton Plaza and my Spanish is not as good as it usually is in dreams.
mangrove unleashed
It's a big deal, and I pay money to see this beast. It's called a mangrove (no relation to the water-tree), and it is truly a beautiful and fearsome creature. This is the real-live animal from this very earth that was the basis of dragon legends and myths. They have one in captivity and for the first time are giving a public display. I don't agree with the company running this show (too much like a freak-show circus with poor regard for the animals) but it is too fascinating of an opportunity to pass up.
The audience of a few hundred sits in what is like a large church with no roof, and they release the giant animal from a huge box where the altar would be. The mangrove is gigantic, the size of a school bus. Bigger. Long crocodilian snout with fangs, squinty glassy black eyes, serpentine tongue. Flies. No appendages... moves through the air as a cuttlefish does through water, rapid undulations down the flaps which run the length of the body.
In retrospect, the mangrove reminds me of Zero, Jack Skellington's ghost-dog in A Nightmare Before Christmas. But the mangrove is actually terrifying instead of cute.
The beast flies over our heads and it is a frightening and awesome experience
for everyone there. Its reptilian nature is extremely difficult to train,
and the trainers have gotten the mangrove to respond to elephants (being the
only manageable animal remotely large enough to grab the creature's attention),
which are used to herd the thing around. Tentatively. And with much
error. It's amazing nobody gets killed.
Since the mangrove is now flying high above the ground, helicopters haul the elephants into the air on harnesses (since the helicopters alone don't phase it). The poor elephants are scared beyond belief but it is beyond their power to get away from this terrible task. They trumpet and shake in frustration, which confuses and startles the mangrove. Men fly a large helicopter or cargo plane into position, with some underside bay doors open, and a swarm of helicopter/elephants roughly manoever the mangrove into the belly of the aircraft, which promptly flies out of sight.
The spectacle is over. The audience is shocked into silence. Awe. Fear. Wonder. Disdain.
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