Confessions of a Fuck-Up Artist!

Strange dreams and a sinister hangover haunt the day after the reading. I was with Teddy Bear to pick-up Magpie at a military airstrip that was flooded knee deep. Albino rats swam around us and were periodically picked off by the translucent piranhas lurking beneath the dark waters. I didn't want to be there actually, but Teddy Bear insisted as he needed an ex-serviceman such as myself to grant him and Magpie clearance. When Magpie arrived he was dressed in a straight-jacket straight out of a costume department. He thought it would be funny to greet us that way, but the armed guards working the arrival gate certainly didn't and seized us for questioning. I tried to explain to the guards that Teddy Bear and Magpie were both actors and therefore prone to unnecessary theatrics.

The guards (looking a cross between ice-cream truck drivers and UN peacekeeping troops) asked for proof of this and my friends produced program guides to a play they were in. Reluctantly the guards said this was my fine and asked me for my credentials. I showed them my expired military ID and after much consultation between them was told we wouldn't be arrested but had to depart the airstrip immediately.

I agreed and we departed. While we were heading for the exit though, one of my friends (you guess which one) saw a young lady he thought he recognized heading into an area clearly marked as restricted. Naturally he insisted we go talk to her. I tried telling him that something bad would happen if he went in there but my telling him so only made him more adamant to do so. My other friend said we should be fine, that he'd escort my friend and that I should wait for them there before they both vanished into the restricted area.

I stood there in the flood, with the rats and piranhas, waiting on them to return when a hand slapped me on the shoulder and suddenly there were two different guards - this time in paramilitary SWAT wear and gas masks. They asked what I was doing in front of a restricted area. I told them I was waiting on my friends and went to show them my military issued ID. Then I realized that one of my friends napped it from me when I wasn't looking to get into the restricted area.

I was told to come along with the guards and was taken to a cell built into the walls of a massive tunnel. Inside my cell I was given the tip of a broken cello to amuse myself with and looking up at the architecture of the tunnel knew intuitively that it was of my own design.

I tried to tell my cell mate this but he was unimpressed and looking at the the broken fragment of cello tip in my hands asked when I was going to finally play him a song.

I didn't fall asleep until 8am this morning and bolted up two hours later from the midst of a exceptionally vivid nightmare. Now I don't dream much, by which I mean I don't often remember the majority of them. Also unlike those rare dreams that do manage to filter through to the waking world, this one didn't disperse from my thoughts by the first sip of coffee. Instead it lingered throughout the course of the day, haunting the alone moments and flickering on the periphery of my silence.

So I've decided to exorcise these visions from my solitude and banish them here across the clean blank white page.
( Read more... )

Few things in life are as dull as another man's dreams. Still, having said that, I do want to get these down while I can vaguely remember them.

#1 - This Morning.

I was at a sprawling art party in this labyrinthine warehouse with the Magpie. I saw some familiar faces there, but every time I tried to talk to people no one could hear a word of what I was saying, no matter how funny, relevant or loud they may have been. In fact I almost thought I was a ghost, but I kept bumping into people spilling their drinks, knocking into shelves that sent fragile sculptures crashing around me in a comically absurd fashion and all the electronics kept going on the fritz when I passed them. Eventually I decided to leave the party and started wandering around the city. Ended up walking into this weird baseball field where all the bases (along with the pitching mound) resembled machine gun bunkers and a set of rusted rail tracks ran through the center of the field. There were all these children there and they all had prosthetic limbs and the umpire was a rabbi that looked like a smiling Rasputin. He invited me to play with the children and I did. I was standing all the way out in the back of the field and talking to our coach. Our coach was a young William Shatner (Star Trek young). One of the kids on the opposing team then managed to hit the ball and it was coming my way. I ran backwards for it and managed to catch it despite the sun glaring in my eyes. Only when I looked in my glove it wasn't a baseball but rather a golf ball. I looked confused and William Shatner just winked at me and told me that it was alright, I was still learning the game and that these things happen.

Then I heard this loud banging on the door. Sharp, quick and angry - the exact way dad knocked whenever I overslept for school. I found myself pried from the dream (the feeling was that unique physical sluggishness you might feel when you've been swimming underwater for a bit too long and start to run out of breath as you struggle to reach the surface) and bolted up out of sleep. I remembered of course that dad was at the hospice still but I saw mom working. I asked her if she knocked on my door and she told me she in fact didn't and that she was planning on letting me sleep in.

Dream #2 - A little over a week ago.

I'm running around what was either my old navy ship as she was sinking or a burning apartment complex. I was carrying a baby in my arms, all wadded up in a blanket. Man, I was moving like something out of a Jackie Chan movie - I was climbing ladders with a single arm, bounding down crumbling catwalks, dodging falling debris in flames, wading through waist high water filled with something terrible and hungry. The whole time the baby is crying louder and louder. But I knew I was almost free and somehow made it to a rooftop helipad. But the chopper was gone. The baby really started to shriek now and I look down at it for the first time.

The baby was actually my father's decapitated-yet-still-alive head. I tried to hush him with a finger to the lips but when I did he started choking and began drooling out his teeth in blood speckled spittle.

Woke up quickly from that one in the middle of the night and didn't go back to sleep until dawn.

Dream # 3 - A few days ago.

I wasn't in this one, it was more like I was watching a movie.

All the superheroes on the planet were dead. A dying mad scientist type, the last of the super villains, had somehow found the rocket a baby Superman was launched from a dying Krypton with and had turned it into a weapon that would destroy the sun. The scientist took especial delight in the irony that the vehicle that given the earth her greatest champion would also doom it. As such he had given the world a few days or weeks to say goodbye for purposes of general gloating. But then in the dream I start to follow the adventures of this international special ops team that was searching the globe for artifacts from the dead superheroes to fight back with. One of them was in Egypt looking for the lost helmet of Doctor Fate and I watched as he hid from an angry mob in a market place by dressing as a beggar. Another agent was at the Grave of Amazons and though she wasn't able to locate the golden lasso of Wonder Woman she was however able to find her bullet proof bracelets. Cut to, if you will, another agent who after great peril found the power ring of Green Lantern but without the actual lantern to charge it with it was useless. All looks hopeless for planet Earth, but the dream ends with this one agent who announces on the intercom that everything was going to be alright - she had discovered the Cave of the legendary Bat Man and within it was a plan to stop the mad scientist.

It actually ended there... on a cliff hanger. A shame really, because I really, really wanted to see another 'episode' of this one. Ah well...

Anyway, I'll leave the interpretations to the armchair psychologists. The second one being extremely obvious even to someone as poorly versed in these matters as I am. The third one however gnaws at me, my only guess is too many comic books before bed maybe.

I know, I know... the only thing more tedious than having someone tell you about their dreams is having someone blog about them instead. While the dreamer is more than certain s/he is narrating a surrealist tour-de-force filled with Jungian insights across a restless landscape rich in liquid symbols melting into hazy insights... the listener on the other hand seems to be hearing an overly-detailed account of what is most likely nothing more than a psychic bowel movement.

Like shit, it would seem, no one really believes their dreams stink!

Nevertheless (alwaysthemore?) I feel compelled to try and keep a written narrative of that unique life that exists only between the waking light and the unmeasurable shadow of its absence. It is perhaps the fact that while I sleep I find myself telling a story I have never heard before... a story in which I am both the protagonist and the author, both the theater director and the audience, a hunter hunting himself, running around in circles trying to catch his own tale... an amnesiac Narcissus trapped in an labyrinth whose walls are lined with funhouse mirrors. In my writing these down perhaps I hope to find my Aridane Red Thread that, if not providing an escape, will at least offer me the faintest hint of understanding myself better.

( To sleep perchance to... )

I don't know what it was but yesterday I just couldn't wake up. There was no real reason for it though as I had slept a solid eleven hours the night before. Yet I spent the entire afternoon in this state of near exhaustion resembling the worst 72 hour straight insomnia funk from back in my 'speed' days (all I was missing was the brittle sheen of paranoia that would scab over my consciousness during these times and the 34 inch waist that would mock my body in the years to come). My thoughts kept getting tangled up in cobwebs from which fat, hissing spiders of bad moods would swarm all over me - I felt them crawling around in my ear canal at one point, laying their filthy phosphorescent eggs in there until all I could hear was the sound of my own relentless bitching. Try as I might I just couldn't shake the little fuckers off me. I went to walk it off when the sun went down but ended up doing this staggering ghoul shuffle through Little Five Points - "Man you're all fucked up" the gutter punks and crack heads mumbled in my passing rattling their styrofoam change cups at me with the nervous faith of a priest waving a cross at the approach of the undead. At one point I even attempted to write my way through the psychic fog but found the lifting and laying of words too tedious an effort to bother with. Even the twin patron saints of orgasms and chocolate (of which I have made my life a humble shrine to) were unable to bestow upon me any relief. Somewhere in the early hours of the morning I was finally able to pry open the fist that gripped the stone of my awareness and watched as it vanished deep beneath the black waters of sleep.

I was walking along the beach arm in arm with my girlfriend Vee and what was apparently her doppleganger. They both looked exactly alike from one another (both wearing the same see through white dress and pair of well worn cowboy boots). They not only had the same voice but used the same patterns of conversation. At first it was a funny little game between the three of us - with me rambling off questions that I thought only the real 'Vee' could possibly answer, but the longer we walked the more serious the game became. They were both starting to get pissed with me because I was apparently missing some vital clue that would have easily told me which was which. At one point they demanded I choose... right there and then... which one I wanted. It surprises me on reflection... but I chose both of them and this seemed to be the right answer as they both squealed in delight and peppered me with little kisses. I'd like to say that my dream then turned into a rugged, Penthouse forum-esque menagerie trois between me and the dopplegangers but instead we just kept walking along the beach after that watching the waves roll out of the mist to crash soundlessly against the shore.

Normally I don't remember much of my dreams but the vaguest snatches of scenes... stray tracks of footprints found in the dust of recollection upon awakening... but as of right now the dream seems as clear as if I was trying to remember what I had for dinner last night (a bowl of cereal if you're curious). Maybe I had some kind of 24 hour bug? Maybe it's the stress of needing $ for my trip and the fact that my novel seems to be finish-proof lately? Maybe I just needed the sleep (I usually run on five to six hours at best)?

Anyway you have better things to read right now and I have better things to write, so I will leave this post with a promise for a full 4th edition AD&D update as well as my usual barrage of uncommentable ramblings.

Until then...


"I had the weirdest dream last night, Babe..."

Robert Doisneau Be-Bopen
Cave Saint-Germane des Prйs, Paris 1951

This would be the life...
I'd be DJing some swank and smokey euro-underground club, dropping everything from the Clash to the Skatalites to Sinatra to Gillespie off my decks while the two most beautiful people in the bar get up on the floor and lay some serious fancy footwork down! All around us shady expatriots, brooding exit-sensualists, neobeatniks, tortured artists, the charismatically insane, sailors gone AWOL and the cheerfully damned watch on through the miasma of the gloom.

That and is it wrong to want to hop in a time machine so I could date their daughter once she hit 21?

I know... I know... but let an old man dream.

The thunder has a metallic echo here in the Cube Farm, the rumble rattles down through the ceiling and the effect is similar to listening to a storm through a tin can. The women have gathered in a cluster around one of the windows. From where i'm sitting their reflections are floating outside, mute ghosts looking back at them through the mirrorglass. The rain comes down in layers of sheets. No one says anything. Think of your face back when it rained at recess, that's them all over. Finally the smallest of the women, "Baby Mama" starts singing with her squeaky little girls voice: "Ain't no sunshine when she's gone". The other women laugh a little at this rendition but eventually join in, as one by one they return to their desks.( Read more... )

Devil Worm of Cabbage Town
January 14th, 2007

Today as I was buying breakfast at the hospital, I told the young woman at the register that I needed change for a Five dollar bill. She's on her cellphone discussing whatever it is she needs to be discussing without paying me no mind. She takes my five, nods, cradles the phone with her shoulder and asks me politely - "Do you want that all in singles?"

"No... all in tens please." I answer because, to be honest, i'm an incurable smart ass.

To my surprise, and I shit you not here, she actually starts counting out ten dollar bills out of the register. So I'm standing there all ready to play it cool and collect myself some "Stupid Tax", but then just as she's handing me the five ten's I find myself saying: "I'm sorry ma'am, I only gave you a five dollar bill... I was just joking."

She hisses a 'shit' under her breath, trades shoulders with the phone and replaces the tens with five singles. Beyond that she says nothing to me. 'Yep. Another fine example of the future of America' I tell myself. I make my way to work, the devil on my shoulder whispering 'schmuck' in my ear, while the angel says what it always says... nothing. Still I don't know what it is. This nagging empathy that creeps up on me. I hate it. My Dad used to have a saying that i'm fond of quoting: "I wish I was a bigger bastard or a nicer guy...".

This morning I dreamt I was back in Yonkers with a couple i'm friends with here in Atlanta. We were walking around Tibbets Park doing a little photography. She was trying to explain to me that the reason I had trouble taking pictures of people was because I had my camera on a setting that gave everybody beards. I didn't understand and asked her to set my camera off the beard setting. She said she couldn't do that because she there was a code every photographer learned to set their camera. I told her I had forgotten mine. Her boyfriend gave me a camera to use but it was this old 'Flintstones Toy Camera' that I got out of a cereal box years ago when I was just a kid. It was this plastic little box with a window to size up shots with and had a button and a dial to wind up the 'film' with, which was really just this strip with pictures of Fred, Wilma, Barney & Dino on it (too bad I was always a 'Betty Rubble-Guy'). They both told me that the camera was fine though. So I sized up a shot of one of the large ponds in the park and snapped off a shot. The picture came out as a fortune cookie message written in a language that not only couldn't I read but one that I didn't even recognize. When they looked at the fortune they both smiled sincerely and told me it was some of my best work yet.

Now i'm no Jung man anymore, nor am I Freud nor Foe to any paticular school of thought really, but when I rose out of the coffin of the dream, all I could think was "What the hell is a Beard Setting?"