In the Virtual Bank Line

The Pirate and I are at the opera. The venue is not the usual War Memorial Opera House, but something that looks like a community college auditorium. The walls on either side of the audience are giant windows covered with heavy drapes, and everything is done in white and gold, making the interior very light.

It is intermission, and before the audience gets up and files out, an usher asks if there are announcements. I pipe up and say that if anyone hasn't received their tickets for next season, the ushers are now handing them out. With that, ushers appear at the heads of the aisles with sheaves of tickets in their hands, although I realize that I don't have mine either. The thing in my hand that I thought was a ticket turned out to be an old receipt.

The people have filed out and are just about to come back into the auditorium. There is a single set of huge double doors at the back of the auditorium through which the people come to get into their seats, and as the first couple comes back into the room, I am standing next to the door. The man hands me my green leather notebook, and I remember that I had mislaid it somewhere. I express my gratitude, and he told me that I had left it in one of the seats and that he and his wife had to read a lot of it before they could discern to whom it belonged.

I had a message for a Chinese couple, and I waited in the stairwell until I saw them. I gave them the message, and they were incredibly grateful, so much so that we ended up talking and becoming friends. I invited them to our house after the opera, and they came over.

The Pirate and I went to bed, and when I woke up in the morning, not only was the Chinese couple still there, but they had invited all sorts of other people. They were sitting in the backyard on the adirondack chairs surrounded by their children and a few of the children's friends. They were looking out over the swimming pool that had a rock garden just beyond it. There was also a carefully laid out flower garden with little gravel paths, and a little orchard with tidy plots of vegetables among the trees. The whole effect was beautiful and restful, and the couple was telling us that they loved our place and wished they had one like it.

It turned out that while we were sleeping, a lot of people had come to the place. We heard about jam sessions among famous musicians, witticisms by famous writers and pundits, appearances by politicians without their wives. And the miracle was that I was being credited with this whole party. I saw snatches of notes on the floor that had dropped from the notebooks of at least one reporter, and when I got on the internet, I saw stories from the party in the entertainment section.

I had a screenplay that I had written and had been vainly trying to sell before, but I now had messages on my answering machine from at least three studios that were trying to buy the work. I went to a friend's house to sort out what to do next. The friend had a daughter about Peaches' age, and the two girls put on bathing suits and played in the swimming pool and ate potato chips while my friend and I talked about what to do next. The friend suggested that I not react too quickly to anything. Just sit back, let everyone make their offers, and then make a decision.

I left, leaving Peaches behind to play with her friend while the Pirate and I went on an errand. We had a second truck that we had left out on the edge of town, near a place that had a lot of truck stops and convenience stores. On the way, the Pirate asked me if I wanted to listen to a new tape that he had bought that he didn't like very much. It was some sort of "classic rock" crap, and I told him no, thanks. He gave me five dollars to put gas into the truck to get it home, and I realized that I really wanted a cigarette. I went to the convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes, but realized that I only had the five dollars and that I couldn't put any gas in the truck if I bought cigarettes, so I put the pack down and walked back outside.

The Pirate and I went to a place that was a sort of combination insurance agency/state aid agency/title company. We had to check into the insurance on one of the vehicles, and while the Pirate was busy looking into that, I looked out the window at the people outside. It took me a few minutes to notice that all of them were women, and all of them were wearing red dresses of various cuts and designs. I thought that it was odd, but the fact that I wasn't wearing a red dress didn't bother me at all.

A woman wearing a long black coat over a long-sleeved red sweater dress came walking in. She was applying for welfare, although she was obviously not poor. She was dressed expensively, was wearing very tastefully-done, expensive-looking makeup, and had manicured nails. Her shoes were obviously very expensive, and her sweater dress was cashmere. She was pregnant, and was telling the woman that she wanted to apply for welfare since she would have to quit her job once the baby was born.

The office worker made her fill out some forms, and then talked on the phone while looking at the forms. She told the woman that because her husband made a lot of money, she didn't qualify for welfare. The woman burst into tears, saying that she didn't know how they were going to live on just her husband's income, even though just his income was hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

She made a call from a payphone in the middle of the office that was one of the European style that looks like just a big, fat regular telephone. But she was short a nickel for the call, and while the telephone connected her, it began demanding the nickel loudly, the volume increasing the longer everyone in the office tried to ignore it. Finally one of the office workers got up and, with a look of obvious annoyance at the woman, plugged a nickel into the machine.

Then her caseworker told her that she had talked to her supervisor and that he had changed his mind. At first he had just said "tough luck," but now he was telling her that he could do something for her after all. The woman was beaming, and walked out of the office toward the bus stop looking very pleased with herself. I noticed her actions, but although I knew them to be unfair because this woman certainly didn't need welfare, I didn't feel at all angry about it.

We went back home and I listened to the messages on my answering machine. The messages were all from the studios that were offering me a lot of money for my screenplay. They all said that they were sending out representatives to my house today to draw up the contracts, and I figured that I would just let them come over and negotiate.

The doorbell rang, and it was the head of the company that laid me off last year. I didn't open the screen door or invite him in, but I asked him through the screen what he wanted. He said that he'd heard about the screenplay and that because I was a former employee of his, he wanted to take care of me. He offered to buy the screenplay, although he didn't mention a dollar figure. I asked him what use an electronics association had for a screenplay, knowing full well that he himself was just going to turn around and resell it to the studios.

He said that he just wanted to look out for my interests, and I told him that since they laid me off last year, I was no longer an employee, and that I could take care of myself just fine, thank you. He asked me to reconsider, telling me that he thought that I was making a mistake, but I just laughed at him and closed the door.

Then the alarm went off.

In the Virtual Bank Line

I am an 8-year-old boy. I'm being sent away to camp, and I don't want to go, because camp is scary. I don't know the rules, everyone is really clubby and I feel very excluded. I am not all that fond of home, but at least home is familiar and I have my hiding places.

I get to camp and the counsellors are all the PE teachers from my school. They're vigorous, stocky women in their twenties who are frighteningly overenthusiastic. They talk to us about all the things we're going to do at camp, but as they're talking, I completely zone out. I'm not interested, and I just want to leave and hide somewhere in the woods that are all around us.

I perk up when I hear that there will be horses at the camp. I want to see the horses, to ride them. I raise my hand and ask if I can ride the horses, and one of the counsellors knows that I haven't been paying attention. She tells me that I can ride the horses if I can tell her how many there are. I guess six, and everyone laughs at me. She tells me that there are eight white horses used to pull the camp's wagon. I'm embarrassed and run into a big central building that looks like a house.

I run through the building and see that the horses are out back. All eight of them are standing on a hill looking down at the house. They are beautiful and snow-white with black noses, and I want to find some hay and give it to them. They are up on a hill that's more like a tiny cliff, about ten feet high, and I can't see any path or stairs that leads up to where they are. I look around and there is a shed next to the house, and a barn next to that. Next to the barn is another house, and this other house's roof dropped down onto the top of this little cliff.

I go to the shed, grab two fistfuls of alfalfa and climb onto the shed's roof, and from there onto the roof of the house. I didn't realize what a steeply-pitched roof the house has, and I am clinging to the top of the roof. I am not at camp anymore, but the horses are still there. I am now in my own neighborhood, clinging to the roof of my next-door neighbor. I can't see anymore how to get to the horses, and besides, now the camp counsellors are there, standing next to the horses and I know that they will not let me feed them.

I realize that the part of the roof that I'm holding onto is breaking. It is as if the roof is put together with staples, and even my small weight is too much for it. Someone is yelling at me to get off the roof because it's breaking. I wriggle around and just as the piece I'm holding breaks off, I heave myself into a window.

It's the window of the teenage boy that lives next door. His bed is a loft bed. The foot end of the loft is a wardrobe where his clothes are hanging, and at the foot of his bed is one of those giant black-and-white TVs made out of that old white plastic that seemed to yellow instantly. The minute my feet hit the floor, one wall of the wardrobe gives way. I realize that the rod of the wardrobe is still suspended in midair, clothes still on hangers on it. I stare at it for a second, and then clothes, TV, bed, wardrobe all come crashing down.

I took off running, and I'm suddenly outside near a University. There are lots of big buildings and tons of people all over. There is a kid following me, yelling at me. It wasn't his room or his bed, and I don't know why this kid is yelling at me. It makes me angry that this kid I've never seen before should be following me in the street and shouting at me, so I turn and punch him in the face. He is surprised that I hit him, so I hit him again. And again. I punch him in the body and the face. I kick him in the groin.

The kid isn't making a sound, and although he's making like he's going to fight me, but he never seems to throw an actual punch. I continue to pound him until he falls, and then I kick him until he stops moving. Then I get scared and I run. I look back, and the kid is up again, bloody and ragged, running after me. I turn my head again and start dashing among the buildings, hoping to lose this kid. I go around the corner of one building, around another corner, and then I see inside one of the buildings a sort of glass cubicle that I can't see into from outside. I know that I will be able to see outside while no one can see in. I dash inside and stand against the window, watching for my pursuer.

For a while, I see nothing. No one seems to have noticed either my beating the kid or a bloody kid chasing me. I turn and look in another direction and I can just see two policemen kneeling next to a fallen person. I can't see the whole person, only the feet and lower legs. Curious, I go outside to see, and as I round the corner, I see that it's not the kid that I had beaten. Then I look around and see that there are hundreds of bodybags and stretchers with people who have been beaten. The stretchers are lining the sidewalks and walkways of the university, and as I leave the campus, they are lining the streets as well. Some of the people on the stretchers have been there for so long that they are covered with sores running with green pus. Although I imagine that they stink of rot, I can't smell them.

I'm walking down the street now, going back home. I'm happy to be going home. I walk down my street and to my own house. My older brother is there. He's 12 or so, and he tells me that we have to go with Dad to take the garbage out. There have been a lot of beatings, he says, and we have to stick together. We can't be too careful. My father appears with the trash bag, and we continue walking around the block. Our back yard doesn't have access to the alley, so we have to walk around the block to take out the trash. It's dusk, and my brother and I walk behind some sheds that are out in the alley. My brother is yelling the whole time that we're taking out the trash. He's made a kind of song out of it, and he's singing it at the top of his lungs.
We get to the dumpster which has a huge tree growing next to it. My brother and I climb the tree, followed by a kid who lives in the next block who heard my brother screaming and wants to play with us. We climb the tree and watch my dad go down the alley, taking the long way home. My brother and the kid go after him. I stay in the tree by myself, watching them leave. Soon, my mother comes into the alley and tells me that I have to go inside. I get down, and we walk the long way around the block home.

We're at the other end of the block from our house, and we're walking, but we don't seem to be getting any closer to our house. Then we see an ambulance in our driveway, and we run, but we're still not getting any closer. Then, one second the ambulance is in our driveway and the next, it has passed us going the other way on the road. My mother takes off running after it and I am left alone going home. I know that my father is in the ambulance, and while I don't know what happened to him, I'm not even curious.

So far, terrible things have happened to me in this dream, but I'm emotionless. I feel no curiosity, no sense of danger, no regret or disgust at what's happening.

After my mother leaves me, I decide that I"m going to go through all the houses on my way home. I go in the nearest front door. The houses are really small and close together, almost like townhouses. In the first house is a little girl in a frilly dress sitting at the dining room table coloring while her mother (Laurie Anderson) is playing the piano in another room and singing to her. I go to the side of the house, open the big picture window, and step through it. The next house has a similar picture window, and I open it from the outside and step into the house which has a large Asian family in it.

The little children smile at me, as though it is perfectly natural that I'm there. I go through three for four more houses before I realize that none of these houses even vaguely resemble mine, and I am no longer in my own street.

And then I'm awake..

In the Virtual Bank Line

I had to babysit for my cousin. In real life she's an adult, but in the dream she was about 8 and spoiled rotten. I was trying to get her to clean her house, but she wanted to get more and more toys out. I was taking them away from her and telling her that she could either clean her room or sit in the corner. She went to get out more toys, and I picked her up and plunked her down in the corner. I was MAD.

So, my cousin was howling in the corner and my sister came over. The rest of the family was hanging out down the street and were going out somewhere, so she came over to hang out with me while they were out. She wanted to play with my cousin, and encouraged the girl to get toys out, and I hit the roof. I yelled at her that our cousin was in time out for the very same infraction, and that she should be in time out too. My sister gamely went and stood in the corner, looking properly apologetic.

Just then I looked out the window and saw my family walking by wearing matching Xmas sweaters that looked hand-knit in really bright colors with crudely rendered cartoon animals on them. They were hideously ugly. The only one who was not wearing the sweater was the Pirate. He was wearing red plaid long cutoffs, black low-top Converse sneakers with white socks, a wife beater and a black denim jacket covered with studs and chains. He was riding his long skateboard and basically looked like an overgrown suburban punk. His hair had been cut with everything below the tops of his ears shaved off, and everything above the tops of his ears cut in a long sort of birds-nest style, with one long fringy layer of hair that covered everything had been badly bleached blond. It looked horrible, and I couldn't understand why he would do such a thing. He was walking next to a girl who looked to be in her late teens or early twenties, and I went outside and called to him and he stopped and turned around, and so did the girl. The rest of the family kept walking.

I asked him what he had done to his hair, and he asked me in a taunting tone of voice "Why? Don't you like it?" while shooting an "I told you so" look at the girl. I said no, I thought it looked horrible. He and the girl grinned at each other as though sharing some private joke, and he bowed his head to touch his forehead to hers affectionately. I was inexpressibly hurt and just walked away.

I went back into the house, and my sister had gotten herself and my cousin ready for bed and cleaned the house up. I was very grateful, and we went to bed. In the middle of the night I woke up because I couldn't sleep, so I opened up my laptop. My Yahoo messenger opened automatically, and the Pirate had evidently left his on and left his webcam on, because I could see an image of him and the girl asleep in my bed. I felt very sad again, and just shut the computer off.

In the morning, I had to go to work at a restaurant run by Florence Henderson. My sister had to get herself to the airport to get home. Peaches was with me, and she was going to stay with my mother for the day. For some reason, the bunch of us started out by walking down the highway. My sister and I turned to go one way that would lead us to my work, where my sister was going to call a cab, and Peaches ended up going straight on. She was stomping off purposefully, and stamped very deliberately on a small child's blue suede dress shoe that had been lost by the side of the road. I again felt very sad watching her walk away from me down the dangerous road, but she knew where she was going and what to do, and I knew that she would be okay.

I get to the restaurant, and it's a sort of B and B that's run by Florence Henderson. It's got a sort of TV theme, so the downstairs dining room has pictures of celebrities in it. I go upstairs because I'm supposed to be changing sheets on the beds. My sister comes with me, bids me goodbye and then leaves to catch her plane. I thank her for spending time with me, and we go downstairs.

Florence Henderson is there, and she's in the kitchen screaming at the staff. "WE DON'T PUT SPICES IN THIS FUCKING FOOD, GODDAMN IT! THIS IS FOOD FOR WHITE PEOPLE! I DON'T WANT TO SEE OR HEAR ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE! WHITE PEOPLE! DO YOU HEAR ME?" The staff and I are staring at each other in shock. We can't believe that she's saying this. Later she capitulates by telling us that we can put a picture of Gary Coleman in the dining room with the other TV celebrities, but THAT'S ALL.

I go upstairs and start stripping the beds, which are covered with layers and layers of blankets. The girl who's working with me and I stand on either side of the beds, loosen the layers of blankets, and then throw them into a giant pile to be taken to the laundry. Before we start making the bed again, I decide to go downstairs.

I go outside the building, and now we're in downtown San Francisco. Our restaurant/hotel is right next to some sort of weight loss clinic where the clients live onsite and all wear white togas. They mill around in and around this place, and you can hear from the outside the rhythmic clapping and low chanting of some sort of group attitude-improving exercise (think Amway meeting). The funny part is that there is a group of homeless people in a doorway just outside, and they're all staring in the direction of the building and chanting insulting slogans in time to the clapping. I can't help but laugh.

A good friend of mine is coming down the street on her way to lunch. She and I start walking together and she looks at all the women milling around in white togas and starts complaining about her own weight. She is about 5' 9" with medium-length dark blonde hair that's done up in a perm of big curls that looks very midwest. She's on the chunky side, but she looks fine, and I tell her so.

"Don't patronize me," she said. "Sure, I'm not a gigantic blob, but I know that I'm overweight and that I'd both look and feel better if I lost the weight. Your telling me that I look fine is just insulting."

I felt bad because I knew it was true. I wasn't trying to be insulting, I was just trying to be supportive. But she had a good point.

"I look at these women here," she went on. "I see that at least they're doing something about their problem. Yeah, you and I both know that they're going to end up right back where they were, but for now, they're doing something. I'm not even doing that much."

And we went walking on.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The funny thing is that some really emotionally powerful things happened in this dream, but none of them caused a big emotional spike. Even seeing the Pirate sleeping with someone else just made me feel sort of sad, not angry.

In the Virtual Bank Line

At the beginning of the night, I was curled up around the Pirate. I found myself poking him in the chest because I was dreaming that I had given him a shirt (or vest or something) and it had installed some software in his operating system. I was looking for which button on his body to poke in order to bring up the "Settings" menu so I could remove the software that installed itself.

In the dream, I ended up closing my eyes tight and putting my forehead against his back. Then, when I pushed at his flesh, the menus would pop up before my tightly-closed eyes and I could remove the program.
Later, I was back at my computer, doing some other work. I was in a big, sunny apartment in a dining room whose north-facing wall was nothing but a bank of windows, letting in beautiful afternoon light and a view of the tops of other buildings. The television is on, and I'm looking up from my computer screen occasionally to see the television, although I can't tell what program is playing.

Then it's time to go to work. I'm performing with a troupe of comedians. We do Monty Python-like physical comedy - silly walks, skits dressed in drag, etc. We also do acrobatics using long poles that are used variously as pole vaulter's poles, punting poles, shepherd's crooks, etc. On this day, we were out deep in the woods, practicing our thing. A little crowd of forest-folk gathered - elves, gnomes, trolls, etc. After our practice, one of the trolls came forward and asked us to come to his house to perform for his wife who was always very sad.

We followed him to his house, a cave in the side of a mountain not far away. Inside, there was furniture made of branches without the twigs removed lashed together with rope of dried grass. Everything seemed to be covered with a wild, fringey, sandy-colored moss, and as we crawled into the dim cave that was lit by a few candles, the troll yelled "Wife!"

A little patch of the sandy-colored moss moved, and we realized it was the hair of a little tiny woman. She was human-looking, but small and fragile and sad. Her hair was wild, as thought it hadn't seen a brush in years. There were dark circles under her eyes and she was pitifully thin.
We walked in and began performing our act. After about half an hour, she was smiling weakly, and we stopped. The troll had been making lunch for us, and while the others were eating cheese and bacon and fruit, I was talking to the wife, who was dressed in a collection of rags.

"Who are you? You don't look like a troll."

"No, I'm not a troll. I'm a person just like you. Well, not just like you. I wrote about my life. Would you read it?"

I nodded my head enthusiastically, curious to see how a human girl ended up married to a troll. She took a pile of light-colored dried leaves that were tied together with dried grass and untied them. As she untied them, I could see that they were covered with writing in dark-brown, watery ink.

"I used very strong tea for ink and a pigeon's feather for a pen. I didn't have anything else."

I pulled a candle closer and read her story. It started with a woman in her early twenties in Northern California. She had family and friends, she had graduated college and was looking forward to getting married and having a family. She began having hallucinations of living in a cave in the forest, the wife of a scary troll. She was terrified of the hallucinations, which began coming with more and more frequency.

The woman finally went to a doctor. After many tests and stays in lonely white hospital rooms, the doctor told her the truth. She had brain cancer. Not one tumor, but three, growing at an amazing rate. These weren't big lumps that could be scooped out like ice cubes out of a cool drink. These were spiders, whose many legs were winding, searching, grasping at everything they touch. The doctor tells her that the hallucinations are because of these malicious spiders touching the parts of her brain that want to be somewhere else. The doctor doesn't understand that the world she inhabits in her hallucinations is not one that she likes, even a little bit. It terrifies her.

She becomes unable to drive, as the hallucinations begin coming on suddenly and without warning. Then she becomes unable to leave the house. The last memory she has of the other life is of her mother at the hospital, telling her that she will come to visit every day. She closed her eyes on the world where she had been a child for the last time, and when she opened them, she was back here again. She had never been back.
She was trying very hard to be happy here. She was trying to adjust. She tried very hard not to be too bitter. Every day, she wrote a little more, determined to keep her other life real, to keep it close to her. She looked for ways back, but she knew that it was useless.

The other players in the troupe had finished their lunch and wanted to leave. I hand the leaves back to the woman and leave, looking back to see her crying after us. I want to cry too, because I realize that what this means is that I am a character in another person's hallucination, and that thought makes me profoundly sad.

But I don't have time to be sad, because I have to pick up my two children and fly back home to San Jose with them. I hurry to the airport, and I get there half an hour before my flight. As I'm running up to the terminal, my children are also running up yelling "Mommy, mommy!"

They are followed by my father and stepmother, and by my mother. I take the girls' hands because we need to run for the plane, but my father says that he wants to take the girls for a drink in the airport lounge first. He leads them down hallway, telling them "Come on, your mommy's just being silly. Come away from that hysterical woman." I am furious because my parents do this to me all the time. I get angry and yell at the girls to come with me or we'll miss our plane, all the while glaring at my parents.

I open a door that I think will take us in the direction of the planes, but it turns out to be a conference room. I go in and see a closet door that has a sort of garbage chute in the bottom of it. There is a fire in the garbage chute, and as I come in, the flames begin licking at the closet doors.
I look around and see a complicated sort of box with a fire extinguisher in it. To get to the fire extinguisher, you had to pull three handles. One sounded the alarm. One activated a lot of safety systems that unlocked stairwell doors and pressurized rooms to keep the fire from spreading. The third handle opened the door of the box. I took the fire extinguisher and tried putting out the fire, but it was just too big. Other people came into the room, and as they took over, I grabbed the girls and left.

We made our plane and landed in San Jose. We got off and went to the parking garage, and as we walked by, a fire broke out in a trash can. I clasped the girls' hands a little tighter and started running as fast as I could with the baby holding my hand. Then we're home, and the police are questioning me. They are telling me that I set the fires. I apparently set the airport fire so that I could be the hero and put it out, except that it got out of hand.

I argued that I hadn't even stayed to put the fire out. That I saw it, alerted people as was my duty, and then left, not even telling anyone my name. That's hardly the action of someone who wanted to be a hero. They asked me to explain the fire in the trash can, and I told them that I had no explanation whatsoever. They were questioning the girls, planting ideas in their heads. "Your mommy put a lit match in the trash, right?" But the girls wouldn't say anything but the truth, no matter how leading the questioners tried to be.

The questioners were leaving as my alarm went off.

****
The fire incident reminded me after I woke up of the time that I was really sick with fever, and everything that I had touched - the clothes I wore, the sheets and pillowcases I slept on, ended up with little burn holes in it that we've never been able to explain. The Pirate says I'm that powerful, but I don't know what to

In the Virtual Bank Line

The Pirate and I are in a car driving to some small-ish town near a larger town - perhaps Richmond. I am tired and uncomfortable and want to get out of the car and walk around, but the Pirate keeps saying "Just a little further." We're going to some walking trail that the Pirate wants to show me. Finally the car stopped. I thought that we had found the trail, so I got out of the car. On the ground, there was a two-foot-wide stripe on the ground with black arrows pointing in one direction. The Pirate says "No, that's not it," but I'm already off walking. I come to some lettering on the ground that tells me that this wide yellow stripe was a fault line.

I walk along the fault line, and came to a place where there was a two-inch crack in the yellow stripe. I kept following along, and the line curved around the block down a little street bordered on one side by a hill. Clothes were strewn about the street, as though someone had lost a basket of laundry. I kept following the now-cracked fault line, and it wound back around the block to where I had first noticed the crack, as though if there were an earthquake, this block would sink into the ground.

I went back around the curve, and this time there were a lot more clothes lying in the street. Now it looked as though someone was throwing clothes off the hill. It occurs to me that I don't know where the Pirate is, so I go up the hill looking for him.

I don't find him, but I find a woman who has apparently been my pen-pal from the East Coast. She is here for a visit, and I am thrilled to see her. She wants to drive into the city for a little sight-seeing. My friend wanted to take a ferry into the city. This ferry was the sort that one drives one's car into, so we drove to the pier, but we saw the latest ferry pulling away. We parked in a parking lot and got out of the car to walk to the end of the pier. There were a lot of other people at the end of the pier, and the more people who walked to the end of the pier, the further the pier stretched out over the water.

The crowd that amassed finally made the pier stretch all the way across the bay, to within 10 yards of the other shore. We waded through the water to the nearest patch of land, which was a gravel beach completely surrounded by a huge building that we would have to go through in order to get out. The crowd acts as though we have just come through some dangerous, scary experience. Most of the people join hands and begin singing a song that everyone knows but me. I open my mouth wide, letting a very faint "la laaaa la" out so that people will think that I'm singing too.

After the singing, my friend and I go into the building and then find ourselves in the Sunset district of the city at a squalid apartment building. We go into an apartment and see that no one lives there, although we are expecting to see a man there. There are a couple of sodas into the refrigerator, but no real food. There is no toilet paper in the bathroom. There are hangers in the closet, but only one pair of pants and two shirts hung on them. No bed, no dresser, no nothing else. It looks like maybe someone uses this place in emergencies, but does not stay there.

My friend says that our target is not there, so we have to go to some desert town where he has fled. We have to get some information from him that is very important. Bad people are also trying to get this information, and it's important that we get it first. We drive to the desert, to a big, sprawling house. There's no one home, but someone has left in a hurry. There is a still-steaming cup of coffee, the dresser drawers are open and their contents spilled all over the place.

We go outside and in the back yard, there is a school bus whose seats have been mostly removed and has been converted into a tour bus. In the back of the tour bus, there is another closet with empty hangers and a pair of pants and a couple of shirts. We know that we're very close. We go through the bus, looking everywhere. We find the man we're looking for. He is dead in one of the seats.

We jump off the bus and go back through the house. There is a baby in a carrier in a bedroom. The bad people don't know that the baby's carrier is the key to the information they want. We look at the carrier, but can't see anything that looks like the information we need. It must be encoded somehow, but we don't know how.

We take the baby and go back to the city, back to the very large building. We were still trying to figure out where the information in the baby carrier was. But now we know that the bad people are onto us. They haven't actually seen the baby, but they know that we have a baby and that baby has the information. I sent my friend away - told her to run with the baby and get away. She ran from the building, and I watched her go, running up the street. I ran out another door and realized that I was on the top floor of the building. A man comes out of one of the rooms and says that he can help me. I don't trust him, so I decide to tell him that I'm alone. My friend will get away alone and I will distract this person by letting him "help" me.

He takes my hand and leads me to a stairwell, telling me that this is the way to escape. He lets me go first, and as I start down the stairs he jumps me, grabbing me around the neck. As we fall I manage to turn around so that we fall onto the man's body. He grunts heavily, so I know that he is hurt. We are lying on the landing, me on top of him, and I'm trying to get up, but he puts his hands around my neck from behind. I grab two of his fingers and pulled as hard as I could, breaking them. The man took his hands away, screaming in pain. I jumped to my feet and began kicking his head as hard as I could until he passed out.

I ran out the nearest door, finding myself on a balcony facing a street. On identical balconies off to my left were two women who were obviously pursuing me. They looked at me and ran back into the building. I realized that I was only on the second floor and jumped from my balcony into the street where I started running. I got a little way down the street when my friend came out from the bushes, hissing at me.

I went over to the bushes and saw that she didn't have the baby anymore. "I put it in daycare!" she said, proudly. I immediately realized that this was genius. None of the bad guys had seen the baby, so if they were to actually figure out which daycare the baby was in, all they would see was a whole mess of babies, and wouldn't know which one was the right one.
Not only that, but my friend had figured out the code. We would have to wait until the heat was off in order to get at it. But it was okay. We could wait years to get the information. The information was encoded in the baby's DNA.

And then I woke up.

At the beginning of the dream, I felt nothing but curiosity. Even when the Pirate disappeared, I only felt curious about where he'd gone. Then, during the very dangerous chase parts, I was excited as one is when watching a movie. At no time in the dream did I ever feel that I was in danger. I knew that I had the ability to outsmart, outfight, outrun these people. By the end, I felt triumphant, really proud of myself.

In the Virtual Bank Line

The Pirate and the girls and I are at a big family retreat. We're sleeping on a fold-out couch in a room with at least three other people sleeping in cots and sleeping bags around the floor. There are more people sleeping in other rooms. Someone yells my name (not "Mommy," so I know it's not one of my children), and I yell back "Fuck off!" because I'm not ready to wake up yet. The Pirate digs me in the ribs and chides me for being rude to my family.

Then the Pirate goes off somewhere and I go to my father's house. There are two small apartments attached to Pop's house that he rents out, and as I'm sitting there in the kitchen, a guy that I went out with a couple of times and then dumped because he was a total loser walked in from one of the apartments. "You rented to him?" I said. "Yeah," my stepmother says. "You know him?" But when he comes back out, it's Mike M. and I say "Oh, yeah. He's a good guy."

Mike M. starts telling me that he's submitted a couple of short stories to a contest being held at a local bar, and he's really nervous. I go to the bar to meet the Pirate for lunch, and as I get there, they're announcing the results of the contest, and Mike M. has won! I notice that several of us are clapping and cheering more than politely, and it turns out that, while quite a few of the Nanos have turned out, the winner himself didn't make it.

Just as the Pirate was showing up for lunch, the alarm went off.

In the Virtual Bank Line

The first thing I can see is my own face in the mirror, although my vision is partially obscured. It is obscured because my eyeballs don't seem to line up with the holes in my eyelids for them, as though I'm looking out from behind a mask.

"I can't see," I say without difficulty. A man's hand grabs my face at the cheeks and pushes while twisting slightly to one side. There is a click just in front of my ears, and when the hand moves, I can see that my face looks perfectly normal now. I don't have any hair, but the face is a normal face. I am wearing a nondescript white, collarless, long-sleeved shirt and black pants.

The man, the Maker, who adjusted my face comes up behind me again with a curved piece of hard plastic that's vaguely pinky-peach colored. He puts one hand on my forehead and with the other hand he snaps the plastic over the back of my head.

"There," he says, stepping back. "You're done."

I don't feel anything. Not happy or relieved or anything. I just am. There are other men in the house, all wearing turbans on their heads. The turbans mean nothing. They are a disguise. The men have guns and mill around, occasionally looking out the windows. Nothing can be seen outside but dark, but the men all seem very nervous.

The house suddenly goes dark and the Maker says "Get down!" I crouch down with my back to a wall next to the back door. I hold the doorknob still, in case someone wants to enter. The door has a window in it with a sheer curtain. Since the light is now coming from the outside in, we can see the silhouette of a person at the back door. The person tries the knob, but since I'm holding it still, the door doesn't open. The shadow disappears and the Maker gestures to one of the men near the front door. The door opened slowly and a man stepped inside, holding a gun in front of himself. The man near the door shot the intruder, who fell into the room. Another of the men put a flashlight in the dead man's face.

No one said anything, but this is a man who belongs to a group with whom my group is at war. If he knew where we were, others knew and we had to leave right then. The problem is that we have about six men (the Maker and me and four locals) and one rickety old jeep with almost no gas in it. To escape, we need to make it to the airstrip, but even that doesn't solve our problems. The Maker is a foreigner and therefore has a passport. I am a product and can be shipped, but the other four men don't have passports or papers. They will be killed for helping us, but they come anyway.

The jeep is lurching down the road, which is deeply pitted where landmines have gone off. The Maker is worrying out loud about what we're going to do about the other four guys, and whether we're going to have enough gas to get us to the airstrip. If we don't have enough gas, we will be found and the men will be killed. I don't know what will happen to me.

One of the men tells us to pull over. The Maker pulls over and the man gets out. He pulls two half-liter plastic bottles from his long coat pockets. The bottles are full of gas and it is enough to get us to the airstrip.
"If they catch me, they will kill me," the man said, pulling a gun from his pocket. "And we have no way of getting out of this place. I can't take this uncertainty anymore." And the man shot himself in the head.

The Maker hung his head for a minute, but herded the rest of us back into the car. We can't stop. Our enemies are still behind us.
As we drive down the road, I am sitting in the back of the jeep, staring at the body of the man lying in the road, and it begins to rain.

I Am A Wiener!

Okay, I have three pieces of news:

1. I got iTunes and an iPod (which hasn't arrived yet), so I've been incredibly busy ripping every cd I have in anticipation of the iPods arrival. No longer will I have to lug my hard plastic 40-cd case around with me. Granted, the hard plastic case was cool and made me very happy, but this thing is (okay, will be) the size of a pack of cigarettes (and didn't even cost that much more!) and will hold every cd I own. This is cool.

2. I finished my Nanowrimo novel! At 8:50 this evening, I finished the last paragraph for a total of 50,049 words. Not nearly the length of last year's endeavor, but I'm really pleased. My husband is also thrilled to no end because this means that he gets to see me again. He was missing me, poor baby. I have already promised the baby that extra snuggles would ensue, and there was champagne and sparkling cider being uncorked as I was tapping out the last hundred-ish words. Huge thanks to all my fellow Nanos for being there for me. I need you guys, even if I never show up at your dos.I'm with you in spirit.

3. My younger sister is in town this weekend for the American Public Health Association Conference. She's a clinical psychologist in Chicago, but here, she's still my baby sister. We had some yummy birthday time with her last night and she took the girls out to Santa Cruz while the Pirate and I went to the opera (we went to see Don Carlos, got there late, I wrote 1500 words while in the opera, and we left before the last guy died). She and the Pirate are playing Scrabble right now. My sister rocks, kicks ass, and is the best, bar none.

I love everything right this minute. Everything.

In the Virtual Bank Line

Saturday night's dream:

I was at work and my boss called me into his office. And now, he had a real office with an actual door. And not just one door. He had a back door, which he opened to reveal a sort of back yard, full of piglets.
"Hey, you know what?" he said in that bright, enthusiastic tone that he always has when he's trying to sell me on doing some project. "Could you train these pigs? Like to sit, and fetch and stuff?"

"Jon, I don't know how to train pigs. I mean, are they like dogs? Can you clicker train them with treats and stuff?"

"Exactly! See, you know how to do this! Great. So, go ahead and go to a pet store and get everything you need. Can you have them all sitting by the end of the week?"

I told my boss about this dream and he laughed a lot. I told him that I feel pretty confident in telling him that training pigs is well outside my skill set, and I like it that way.

On Sunday night, I had this cool dream.

The seven who went on the Nano retreat were working on a tandem story. Each one of us had a sort of journal that we could look at and see the progress being made by others. We all knew that, when we got to critical points in the narrative, we would all be magically whisked away to some place where we would all meet and resolve the story problem. I was sitting in a class at a large univerity with Mike when I happened to look at my copy of the book and notice that we were coming to a critical point. I leaned over and said to him "If you're working on anything critical, you'd better wrap it up. We're about to leave." Seconds later the seven of us were running through a field in a big park, laughing together and generally being pleased to see each other.

Yeah. The retreat was sort of like that.

And I have no idea where last night's dream came from.

I was standing on a rocky hill. There is a large group of men doing battle drills because they are just about to fight some enemy. They're all really nervous because they know they are going to lose. Everyone who faces this enemy does. Little is known about this enemy, and at the time the dream takes place (let me place the time for you - everyone is wearing wool tunics under leather and metal armor, and sandals) there is no reason to expect that the opposing army has some superior technology. The best they can do is have some amazing new strategy that allows them to cut down their opponents like wheat, so this army feels that their time is best spent drilling.

I hear a noise and look behind me, but there is nothing to see. I look back, and suddenly the battle has already started. The enemy had materialized out of nowhere - but they are not ordinary men. They have the same uniforms (white tunics with black metal and leather armor) but they also have giant wings coming from their backs. Huge, glossy black wings that they beat in the faces of the opposing soldiers, terrifying them. There are winged men with swords and winged men with a sort of thing that looks like an eagle with its beak raised and its wings outstretched. They are goring people with the sharp beak tip, stabbing them with the razor-sharp wings, or bludgeoning them with the whole thing, which looks to be made of silver or steel and looks very heavy and lethal.

The non-winged fighters are frightened, confused and losing. They have no idea where these men could have come from or how they just appeared out of nowhere right in their midst. I look behind me where I heard the original noise and I see the answer. They are phased. Another column of the warriors is materializing, already in formation, all ready to relieve the winged men who show no signs of fatigue, but who allow the new group to take over anyway. Wave upon wave of the winged men is materializing and I see something odd. There are two kinds of men in each column. There are men with two swords crossed over their heads as they march, and there are men with the giant eagles held over their heads as they march. But now I see a third kind.

This man has the head of a dog (he looks very Anubis-like) and holds no weapons, but both hands are raised in clenched fists. As the column of winged warriors passes me, Anubis looks at me and winks, giving me the sign for "I love you" and keeps marching by. None of the warriors notice me, and I know that after the other army has been completely decimated, they will just leave.

And that dream had a bitchin' soundtrack too!

What A Weekend

Back from the SoBaNaNo retreat, and I have some amazing gratitude to unpack:

THANKS to everyone who showed. Together, we were all a force of nature. My hands-down favorite part of the weekend was the Saturday night reading. You are all geniuses and I feel honored to be in your company.

SUPER THANKS to Cliff for his unfailing positivity, support, good humor and curiosity. I feel like I don't see nearly enough of you, and time in your company is always a treat.

SUPER DELUXE THANKS to Rob for his forebearance. Your restraint was both remarkable and appreciated. We know that you are capable of the kind of puns that leave the hearers unable to blink both eyes in unison and hemorrhaging from most orifices, and I feel fortunate to have gotten out in one piece.

DOUBLE BONUS THANKS to Mike for his amazing mastery of both fire and popcorn. And I don't even like popcorn. That's how good it was.

ASTRAL MEGA-BITCHIN' THANKS to Lynn for a tarot reading that didn't tell me anything new, but helped me to focus. Your willingness to do a reading even after I had another reading was greatly appreciated. And thank you for sharing such personal things with us. It was wonderful and moving.

SUPER MEGA DELUXE UBER-THANKS to Stephanie for yummy cookies, a fabulous tarot reading, being the designated extrovert and dishwasher and being my biggest cheerleader. Even introverts need luuuv, and I'm no exception. Thanks for being a bud.

And finally,
ULTRA SUPER MEGA GIGANTIC BONUS DELUXE THANKS WITH CHEESE to Ian for organizing the whole thing. The venue was wonderful, the company was inspiring, and it's always nice to have one guy in the group who's guaranteed to be shocked.

I'm already looking forward to next year.

Retreat! Retreat!

Went to go see Matrix Revolutions on Wednesday. Disappointed in that the potential of the original remains unrealized.

There were several previews, one of which was very alarming
There were several previews, one of which was very alarming. The Alamo. I see our country becoming increasingly jingoistic, isolationist and xenophobic, and it frightens me. The lines between "us" and "them" are being continually drawn in narrower and narrower circles, and while ideologically I'm quite happy to be outside that circle, it appears to be an increasingly dangerous proposition. I can hardly wait to leave.

Off to a three-day retreat to see just how many words I can write when I've nothing else to do. If I'm very good, I'll make a sizeable dent in the book this weekend.

In the Virtual Bank Line

My husband and I are going on a trip with a bunch of people. We've just bought a house and as people are arriving, getting ready to take this trip with us, I'm paging through catalogs looking at trees, ground cover, etc. There are duffel bags and luggage stacked in the driveway, and people are gathered in the living room.

There is a very angry-looking young man who is pacing back and forth with his hands shoved into his armpits. His face is sweating profusely and his hair is disheveled. He keeps stalking over to the kitchen counter, pouring himself shots of whiskey, tossing them down, and stalking off.
Sitting on the couch are a man and woman in their early 30s. They're smiling, chatting, having a good time. They are obviously old acquaintances.

A truck drives up and a smiling woman lets two children, a boy and girl of about 10 and 12 respectively, out with their luggage. They throw their arms around me and tell me how glad they are to see me. They keep referring to me as "Lily." The woman who drove the truck says with a very warm smile "Isn't that cute? They think you're Lily. She was their sister." The past tense doesn't even strike me as ominous.

My sister arrives and she's showing me emails from a band who is also coming on the trip. They've just cut an album, and the emails are from a few weeks earlier asking for feedback on the lyrics/music they had mailed out to a small list of people. And hmmm...my name also appears in that list of people who received the email.

The angry man is drinking again, and stomping around. I briefly have a vision of him arguing with his landlord the day before. The landlord is upset about the state of his house and the fact that the man has dug up many parts of the yard, and the man proceeds to pour a glass of red wine on the carpet while staring at the landlord. The sputtering landlord leaves. Then it's night, and the angry man is dragging the limp body of the landlord to yet another hole dug in the yard. Hmmmmm....I am not upset by this revelation. I feel like you would expect to feel if you found out that an acquaintance is from your home town and his parents know your parents. Hmmmm...how interesting.

The happy couple are chiding the angry man. They tell him to lighten up, for crying out loud. He's ruining their good time. I have a vision of them at a party some nights ago. They have played a joke on another woman at the party, exhorting her to try an "invention" of the man's. The woman whispers "it's just a stupid hat - go ahead, make him happy." But it electrocutes her. Blood is pouring from her eyes, nose and mouth as the couple giggle to each other. The woman's hair is singed and steam is coming from her mouth. They drag the body carefully (since the head is now cooked) into the host's bedroom closet and rejoin the party, looking as though nothing happened. Hmmmmm...how interesting.

The children are crowding to sit in my lap. I find it touching that they are still calling me "Lily." They have brutally killed both their sister Lily AND their mother. Hmmm....how interesting.

I am driving to a large building, something like TRW. Outside a main entrance to the building are lockers. I open one of the lockers and place a space suit into it along with a note and my address. I'm inviting someone else on the journey with us, and this spacesuit is both the invitation and the garb they will wear on the spaceship that's leaving soon. Hmmm....interesting. I guess I recruited all these people. I wonder where we're going, and what we'll do when we get there.

And then I woke up. Darn. It was just getting good!

Memories of Random Meat

Several years ago I took my daughter and my nephew for a walk in a park in Chicago. The park had a pond in the middle, and we decided to walk around the pond.

We passed what looked like the remains of a picnic. Someone had dumped most of a bucket of fried chicken on the ground, and it was covered with ants and flies.

We walked on, and passed the remains of a barbecue. Someone had dropped a large piece of raw steak, and it was covered with ants and flies.
We walked on, and passed the remains of a fishing trip. Someone had left two fish without heads, tails or guts, and they were covered with ants and flies.

We fled for home, where we had cheese sandwiches.

A couple of days later we went for a drive and while we were sitting at a stoplight near downtown, we watched a man unload eight or ten pig carcasses (two at a time, one over each shoulder) into a laundromat. They were not covered with ants or flies.

I moved to Berkeley, and caught BART into the city one day to go to the Buddhist community center in SF. I had to take a bus from the station, and after I was done, I was waiting for the bus home when I looked down and saw an entire fresh package of balogna, exploded in the gutter at my feet. It was so fresh that the ants and flies hadn't heard about it yet.

A few months later, I was in Chicago again, and had to take a cab from my hotel to downtown. As I got into the cab, I noticed a neat row of three eggs in the backseat. The one in the middle was cracked, showing a portion of the white and revealing that these eggs had been boiled. Or perhaps they had just spent WAY too long in the back of a cab.

I'm beginning to fear that I'm due for another sighting.

Toilet Humor

I'm not talking about us laughing at them. I'm talking about them laughing at us. Or am I the only one who's noticed? Every place that I've worked has had toilet issues. I'm deeply suspicious.

The first place I worked out of college was in one of those industrial strip malls that invariably congregate near freeways. For the entire three years I worked there they were constantly doing some sort of ductwork. That meant that there were workmen crawling around in the ceiling, and it happened more than once that you would be in the stall attending to business only to have plaster drop on your head, followed by a voice from above saying "Oh, excuse me."

Another company I've worked at had an entirely different phenomenon for the men's room as for the ladies' room. In the ladies' room, about once a month, the water in the toilets was boiling hot. I'm talking about coming into the room and immediately feeling the change in both termperature and humidity. The minute you sat down, you could feel the tingle of your pores opening up. I'm sure it was very therapeutic. In a really disquieting way.

In the men's room, usually at the same time as the ladies' butt sauna was going on, there would be the men's cattle-call. Every time someone flushed a toilet in the men's room, the sound of a 100-foot cow mooing at the top of its cow lungs could be heard all over the building. If I saw one of my male cow-orkers heading in the direction of the restroom, I would know to brace myself for the coming roar. On the other hand, several times a day I would be jolted out of my concentration by a sound alarming enough to precipitate a trip to the butt sauna.

In the place I work at now, they squirt some sort of lemony liquid in the toilets when they clean at night and then just leave it there. By morning, the toilet is fresh-smelling, lemony yellow, will foam when flushed, and is full of flies who have dived to their death, attracted by the lemon smell. So, you come in after your first few cups of tea and you have a choice. You can either waste a bunch of water flushing these guys away, or you can endure that skeevy feeling knowing that you are, in fact, pissing on someone's grave.

A person just shouldn't have to deal with this kind of thing at work.

I Finished!

Yesterday, I finished the short story I've been working on for the past few weeks. I'm very pleased with how it's turned out, although I know that when I give it over to someone for editing, I'll become deeply self-conscious about my choices. The Pirate read it and told me that he thought it was every bit as good as "A Poor Aunt Story." High praise.

Monster

I wish that I had a tiny little monster that went with me everywhere I went.
And that monster would be my friend and fetch me a cup of tea and maybe a biscuit and bite people on the ankles when they pissed me off.
And he would have shiny scales of all different colors and needle-sharp teeth and a forked tongue, and he would tickle my neck with it as he rode on my shoulder. And buggy eyes and blood-red claws.
I wish that I had a monster. Everyone needs a monster.

Oh, The Things You'll See!

This morning, I was suited up and ready to go, but I needed gas first. I stopped at the light right before the gas station as a Buddhist monk wearing a leather baseball jacket over his saffron robes crossed the light. I've seen a few in this neighborhood before. I don't know where they live.
As I pulled the bike up to the pump, a little old lady clutching a big vinyl purse walked across the blacktop. As I turned from the ATM kiosk, she was walking back because the doors of the mini-mart weren't open yet. She proceeded to station herself in front of the tattoo place next door, pacing back and forth in front of the door and clutching her big vinyl purse. I looked up, and the monk was pacing back and forth in front of the dry cleaner's place. They were both walking back and forth and stopping occasionally to look up and down the street.
As I left, they were both walking down the same little side street in the same direction. Toward my street.

Stepping Into the Void

I've been kinda down lately. For six weeks, I've been watching what I eat and running most days. On the days I don't go running, I ride my bike or do other things. And yet, the pounds refuse to budge. I feel that all of the effort is being wasted, and it's depressing.
Similarly, every night, I sit down at my computer and I write. I write articles, essays, short stories, etc. I am currently being published in an online magazine, but it's not paying anything. I'm waiting for the day when I receive an actual check for something I've done. In the meantime, I feel that I'm just putting all this energy into the void.

In the Virtual Bank Line

In my dream last night, the Pirate and I were going with JeebusGeek to a wedding. JeebusGeek's boss was getting married in a very large, ritzy resort right down the street from my parents' house. Everyone showed up four or five hours before the wedding was to start in order to have cocktails and socialize.
Alcohol was being served, but I had to go down into a small room several floors below where the festivities were taking place. There was a woman at a desk near the door who asked for my name and address. She asked what kind of car I was driving, and if I had a cocktail, how I planned to get home. I told her that I was staying less than a block away, and that I hadn't taken a car, I had walked and planned to get home the same way. I was given a martini, but I had to drink it there in the room where I was then lectured on the evils of drink.
After the ceremony, everyone just lay down on the ground and fell asleep. We woke up the next morning when a grandfatherly-looking man came along in a little trolley and handed out food to all of the children who had attended the wedding. I decided to take a drive with my sister-in-law to go visit my best friend The Third.
Magenta and I were in a car going to see The Third, but we were in a horrible inner-city neighborhood - the kind where everyplace is strewn with garbage and all the doorways have big iron grates across them. We parked several blocks from where The Third lives, and Magenta said "Oh, let's go into this building right here. I have a friend that lives here and he can go with us." So we pushed open the broken security door and found ourselves in a long, dimly-lit hallway with no doors. The walls were not perfectly straight, but broken up by ornamental columns protruding from the wall, and little niches with nothing in them. The whole place was done in a very Moroccan plaster-and-tile sort of way and while nothing was in disrepair, the whole thing was absolutely filthy. We walked down the hallway a little ways and Magenta pushed at one of the niches which turned out to be a hidden door. We went down a dark, narrow hallway into a small plaster-and-tile room with no furniture in it. Two young, bearded men stood as though they were expecting us and led us into another room with a little battered furniture in it.
There were a few other people in the room, including a friend of mine from work, Djibouti. Everyone was going to come out to dinner with us, and it's been decided that we're going to a Moroccan restaurant down the street. "But first," Djibouti says, and he whips out a few filled syringes. Everyone crowds around him and he starts injecting them all. I am feeling vaguely put off and don't want to participate. Djibouti lifts his shirt and then brandishes a knife. He inserts the knife at least a half an inch, parallel to the surface of his skin. He pulls the wound open and then sprinkles cocaine into it. "Are you sure you don't want any?" he says, laughing. I am now officially horrified.
I look up and now the room is full of children ranging in ages from a tiny infant who's in a backpack slung over a chair to a seven- or eight-year-old. They are all staring at the grownups with wary eyes. I ask them their names, but none of them speaks. I ask them where their parents are, and they point to the people who are going to the Moroccan restaurant, who are all filing out the door, unconcerned. "Have you eaten?" I ask the children, who all shake their heads.
I tell them that I'm going to stay and make them something to eat, and they all crowd around me, suddenly excited and chattering. I start opening doors, looking for a kitchen, but all I find is a family living in one of the rooms who looks as damaged and wary as the children. I invite them to join me, and they were coming out of the room as I woke up.
I have to stop watching scary science fiction and reading up on poisons before I go to bed. It's just not a good combination.

Help, I'm Deaf

Went camping this weekend.
It dumped rain, so the entire thing ended up being the Hemingway camping experience where we all stood around the lake with our grim faces and ropey forearms wearing thick sweaters and acting like it didn't bother us that we were wet and cold and being eaten alive by mosquitoes because we were alive and it was more than we could say for the mosquitoes as we swatted them from our ropey forearms with our sinewy hands and looked out over the picnic tables piled high with soggy food and dripping dishes where we had just eaten dutifully but without relish because we had forgotten the relish and the mustard besides. The women kept their strong silent backs to the men while the men stood around the fire ring feeling hopeless because not only could they not get the fire to light but they had forgotten to bring any wood which didn't matter anyway because the wood would have mouldered away with the passage of the time that it took the women with their strong silent backs to finish the dishes and make the coffee which they poured into cups and let go cold before bringing it out to the men who stood in a circle reveling in their shame. And back in the tent we lay in the darkness listening to the rain and the acorns and the squirrel turds hitting the top of the tent and wondered how long it would be before the water began creeping into our sleeping bags and wondered whether the children really did not notice that they were wet and cold or whether they were just trying to put a brave face on it so as not to remind us of our failures and thereby to make us feel them much more acutely even though they were not really our failures so much as the failures of a God who never seems to take into account our vacation plans.
Man, I love camping.

What Exactly DO You Do With a Drunken Sailor?

On Sunday night, the Pirate dreamed that my father had given him a credit card and told him to buy us a house with it. The Pirate was so overwhelmed that he cried. And at the same time, somebody gave me an ancient 78 of "Tubby the Tuba."
Last night, without having heard about the Pirate's dream, I dreamed that I was visiting my parents in the house that I grew up in (which our family hasn't owned for more than 20 years). And the girl who lived across the street from me when I was a kid was still there and she was coming over to spend the night. I don't know how I knew that she was coming, because nobody had talked to her. I didn't even know what she would look like as an adult. My parents went to bed before it even started to go dark out, and I was wandering around the house waiting for this woman to show up. I kept looking out the kitchen window to the house across the street, but I didn't see her. I thought "I'll just call information" so I picked up the phone and dialed 4-1-1, and without my having to say anything at all, a voice said "Chapman, Fletcher. Floorgen obble wardin neeble hik bippus. Phone numbers for Tubby the Tuba are not formatted like regular phone numbers, so please write it down." And then the line went dead and I had no idea what to do. I didn't have the faintest idea how to dial "floorgen" on a regular telephone.
In the cold light of day, I think that I could have just walked across the street and knocked on the door, but it just didn't occur to me at the time.

The Most Anal-Retentive Editor on Earth

I just sent back a 19-page short story that my friend and editing partner JeebusGeek sent me. This is a story that he and I had discussed several weeks ago and I encouraged him to "write it, for cryin' out loud!" So, he handed it off to me for my once-over. Two weeks and four pages of single-spaced notes later, it's done. Nothing has been overlooked from the tiniest grammatical or punctuation error to the largest plot hole. It's all been noted, suggestions have been made. I'm tired, but I know that when all is said and done, his story will be very publishable.

Any Minute Now, I'll Be Awake

Okay, so yesterday I was at work at five-ish. Today, a slightly more sane 7-ish.
I left work yesterday with the Pirate, who came to pick me up. We went to go see League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was one vast, unrelieved landscape of puerile plot, horribly bad cinematography and characters that, despite the fact that they are all previously-realized literary characters, were barely more than innacurate stereotypes. It's disappointing that the writers had Captain Nemo, Alan Quartermain, Dorian Gray, Dr. Jekyll and the invisible man, and they couldn't scrape together a better story than they did. Ah well. Ours is not to question why. Ours is but to get revenge by writing something WAY better and then selling it for fat wodges of cash.
I have signed on to write both a gardening column and an ongoing children's story for a local guy. That'll be good. The children's story is one that I had been writing for my daughter a long time ago about an adventurous woman who loved to explore the world via food. The woman's name is Philomena Hogg-Wahfles, and at the end of every story is a recipe for little kids. The garden column is going to be pretty much how to garden with children. That should be easy. Children should be planted early in summer (pretty much the second school's out) head-down in well-aerated soil. Keep moist, not wet. Fertilize no more than once weekly (any more and they grow too quickly and you end up replacing their entire wardrobe several times during the course of the summer). Planting head-down is vital as it keeps the whining to tolerable levels. Plant them wrong-side-up and you're in for a summer of whining.
Having said that, I miss my girls. They're still at my folks' house having the time for their baby lives and I'm unable to go for more than about twenty minutes at a time without thinking about them. I have that feeling that people have about their favorite relationships, where everything you see you want to share with that other person, every thought you have you want to give to that person, and even if you have nothing new to share, you'd just like to be able to look across the room and see that person's face. The little one will be back Sunday, the older one not until the end of August. I just keep reminding myself that they're having a great time.

What the Hell?

The clock just turned around to 6. The moon falls from horizon to horizon and I've been at work for nearly an hour.
My sister was in town for the weekend going to her transsexual former roommate's wedding. The outstanding comment was that out of the 10 people in the bridal party (bride, groom, 4 attendants each), a total of 1,000 pounds could easily be shucked. My sister's escort was one of a minority of man-born men at the wedding. She said that it was a once-in-a-lifetime event. I'm sure it was.
So, my sister hung out at my house yesterday. I made corn, chile and hominy-stuffed red peppers and we watched "Waking Life," which, the more that I think about it, the more I like. Before bedtime, we were all sitting in the hammocks out in the garden and my sister was telling me about having an amazing meal at Burger King. I'm dubious. Then she asked the Pirate and I what our top 5 candies are (mine are Almond Roca, dark chocolate-covered bridge mix, Baby Ruth, peanut M&Ms and Mike&Ikes). My sister is a very strict vegetarian, but will be the first to remind you that Milk Duds are vegetarian, as is chocolate.
We all had to go to bed, but the Pirate and I stayed up late talking about the process of becoming the people that we are and talking about parts of "Waking Life" that were relevant to that. But then I didn't sleep. I never do anymore. I'm going to be one of those old people who never sleeps, and I will never die again. I'll just become paler and paler and fainter and fainter until I'm 92 and fade away entirely.

I Wanna Be Them

I just read an amazing short story by Haruki Murakami called A Poor Aunt Story. I love Japanese stories, but I can't always get a grip on why. I'm surrounded by Japanese culture all the time. The sect of Buddhism to which I subscribe is Japanese, so many of my friends are Japanese, and I never tire of hearing them. The way they talk gives a tiny hint to me of a culture that is entirely different than the one in which I was raised. One of my best friends from high school went on to move to Japan and has written a wonderfully funny book called "White Gold" where he talks about being a gaijin in search of medicine.
This particular story, though, takes as its central point the concept of the "poor aunt," which sounds like a thing that any Japanese person would be able to recognize as a type, but not necessarily anyone here. He is evoking a very specific set of traits that tease the outside edges of my understanding. There is enough in the story to make it tantalizing, and yet I feel that I am left without the facility to grasp its essence. I don't have any internal concept of "poor aunt," so I can only extrapolate from the clues given in the story.
I wish I could write that poetically. I can't think, off the top of my head, of any American writers that do. It's a layering of surreality on top of the mundane. Anyone who has a chance to should check the story out. It's brilliant.

Why is my Life so F*****g Inconvenient and Where is My Personal Jetpack?

This morning started off really, really well. Any morning where you've gotten it twice before 9:30 a.m. is okay in my book. And he made me breakfast, to boot.
So then I'm using my leftover brain cells to figure out what I'm going to do today. I had a wonderful meeting with a friend who's currently helping me edit my book, and the takeaway from that meeting is that I have to raise the stakes for at least 3/5 of my book. Okay, that sounds tough, but in fact I'm grateful to hear it. But the thing that annoys me is that the Pirate thinks of this as a step backward, as though everything up until now was a waste of time, or that I had been pursuing something that hasn't paid off.
I've tried to tell him that this is not programming. I do not have a "desired end state" in mind, and then a series of logical steps to get to in that desired end state. I've told him that once I had actually finished writing the novel, there would be several rounds of edits, many probably substantial. I think that the outside world thinks of the editing process as one of taking out all of the extra words and correcting the spelling. He doesn't get the part where I have to do a "vacuousectomy," wherein I remove the parts that suck, and hopefully stop the suckage. It's a delicate process.
But where do I get the time for this? Tomorrow is father's day. Tonight I'm supposed to cart my younger one off to her father's house an hour away, and then make the trek back, so that's two hours out. I want to speed up the process of getting this novel sold so that I can make huge flipping wodges of cash, so that I can quit working so that I can sit home and write more. It's a viscous circle and I'm stuck in it.
And to top it all off, technology is NOT making my life any easier. I spend half an hour yesterday morning formulating my grocery list on the Household Management Console, then transferring it to Safeway.com so that my groceries could be delivered to me whilst I spent my valuable time transforming my garden into a weed-free, well-fertilized productive earthly Eden. But NO.
Safeway (once again) screwed up and delivered only half of my groceries, which means that if I'm to make Bulgarian Red Pepper Stew for dinner tomorrow, or soyrizo and jalapeno jelly crepes for breakfast (the Pirate likes the spicy foods), I have to haul my sorry kiester down to the store. And in return for screwing up my order, they offer me a paltry $10 off A FUTURE ORDER. No. I'm sorry, this is not acceptable. My enemies do not get to delay their demise. They must pay now.
On the other hand, I'm doing research into the life of Mary, and one of the sites I found is just chock-full of incredibly fascinating historical information on daily life around the time of Christ, all laid out in a very non-mystical sort of way. The whole incident of the boy Jesus in the temple was laid out as "they went on vacation every year, and one year they accidentally left for home without him." And the words of Mary were quoted as being "Do you not see how worried your father and I were?" When I was thirteen, we went to Lake Tahoe on vacation and I fell asleep before we left and got left behind, and my mother blamed me for it too. I wonder if Jesus was as pissed off as I was not only to have been left behind, but then to have his mother blame him for it. Some things never change, and if they can happen to the Son of God, apparently they can happen to anybody.
Okay. Now I'm done bitching. I'm going to go and cook some sole and herbed rice and whatever veggies we still have in the kitchen. And then I'm going to spend a whole lot of time tonight re-packaging the 3/5 of my story that need help. Wish me luck!