021791.1605 More days. Now see if I can remember. Last Friday was the pool-on-the-way-home night. I wrote about that, from however you would describe the viewpoint. Then I remember something bizarre happened the next morning, but I was busy stamping around, and wrote about Sunday morning's dream instead. So: Saturday: and here we go: one more colon: Carmen got up early and went to work, wait a minute. No. She came over to get her uniform, said something about gallon-size Baggies for no reason, then left. There was some kind of mass shouting going on downtown, so I thought, "Great, a football game." I woke up a bit later because there were a zillion cars honking their horns downtown, and I thought, "Fine, someone got married." I woke up a bit later, and this stuff was still going on. Great, someone got married at a football game. No, reality was even sillier. There were flags all over town, and tents set up on East Broadway. And on every third phonepole was a sign saying, "HONK IF YOU SUPPORT OUR TROOPS IN THE GULF." Kids were handing out flags and shouting, and everyone was honking like perfectly brainwashed good-little-Americans. Grr. In my mind, I did the Flash and zipped from sign to sign with a big crayon. Now the signs said, "HONK IF YOU CAN READ A MAP." So the town fell silent and I could get back home and get some kind of work done without this irritating reminder of just how stupid the world has become. A funny anecdote: the signs were up for a few more days, but without the kids and their big mouths and handouts, nobody honked anymore. And a great week at work (sarcasm here). Got home at 1,2,1,4:20 and 12:30 in the morning, Monday thru Friday respectively. The late late one was (of course) Valentine's Day, so phooey. So I get home at some stupid hour, too pissed to sleep, and hungry as hell. I wake Carmen up and we sit there for an hour, then she passes out, I work for an hour or two then join her, then she wakes me up at 7 or 8 or 9 for a half hour before going off to work/school/blah, and I go back to sleep (on a good day) until 10 or 11, blah. That's our exciting schedule, these days. Friday morning's dream stands out, though I do remember about one temporal hour of dreams every night now. I dreamed I was in a James Bond film, but when I woke up I couldn't remember which one. There were two reasons to have a dream like this. One: At 4:20am I said, "Goodnight, boss," and hopped in bed with a long-haired slender woman. Two: Somewhere during the night, I'd managed to get gold ink all over my arm. It got in the cut on my hand, and I remember staring at it off and on for hours, thinking Goldfinger got me. Eventually I took some solvent and washed it off, thinking the solvent was probably better for the cut anyway. Felt good too. Now it doesn't know whether to build a scab or just stay pink for the rest of my life. Yesterday day I sent Stefan a postcard on the way to Doug's house. I wish I'd saved a copy, since I did a bit of doodling on the front. With my address (CA) in one corner, and Stefan's (NC) in the other, I couldn't help but draw an abstract map of the states in between. I labeled AZ,NM,NV, and Cripple Creek (CO). Between NM and NC were some blobs labeled "boring states", "more boring states", and "don't ask." Everything north of Nevada was labeled "polar cap (mostly methane)". Other labels were "dirty water" (Gulf of Mexico) and "cheap labor" (Mexico itself). It was strange going to the Nicoll house (condo) again. I remember seeing them back in September, but then I got sick, then they both got hepatitis, then this, then that, now it was now. Tim was there, too, and it was a bit of a shock being in a room where everyone's joking about computers and particle physics instead of pussy (I really don't like my job). So just as the game was getting somewhere, I had to leave. I got the last issue of Stellanova (which had stories by me and David (Taylor) in it), and joined the nuts at the busstop, where there was quite a crowd. People were staring at their boots wishing they had more beer, the rest were staring at bricks and trees thinking how much they'd rather be watching the Simpsons. And these people stare at ME, as if I were insane, when I plop down and start reading. Imagine if they could see that the title of the book was "The Psycholpathology of Everyday Life", and the author Sigmund Freud! A fascinating book, by the way. Endless brief case studies of people losing their keys, forgetting watches, getting on trains going the wrong way, breaking things, trying to pick random names, reading the wrong lines in plays, and all the classic slips of the tongue. Twice this week, I've forgotten to wear my watch to work, and yes, it's because I don't give a damn what time I get there. Imagine if I could hide the watch somewhere where I'll never find it. Then I could be oblivious to all time and space. The sun would still go up and down, but I would be free to choose my own rhythm for doing things. But no, the thing is strapped to my wrist like a parasite, eating my life away. I can imagine a tiny voice sometimes, leaking out of the casing. It says, quite rightly, "We have assumed control." (It is, in fact, the last few seconds of "2112".) I'd like to do a study on why certain songs pop into my head when they do. There's always some kind of music going on up there, and it is often (FAR too often) unwanted and annoying. Things like "Cabbage" by the Smothers Brothers, or some plastic shit by Madonna. How does that stuff get in there? Even more interesting: as a study in memory, how is it that I can call to mind any given moment of any of several hundred songs and play it in my head like a CD? Say I want to hear "Swamp" (Talking Heads). Bang. There it is. Every instrument, word, and layer of sound. What's the point of getting a Walkman? Brain music is far better. I can go into a song and mess around with it, change the words, add a guitar part, whatever I want. And, of course, the music will change itself in strange ways, with no conscious control. Perhaps one of the funniest details is that when I skip over parts of some songs, the sound speeds up as if there was a real tape passing over a real tape head on fastforward. This only happens sometimes, of course. It is so much easier to believe that nothing is real than that everything is real. In practical life, some things are real and others aren't, it varies from person to person. (Segue.) So here's my Saturday morning dream. I was sitting in a house, which is a good place to sit, I suppose. It wasn't my house, except for the futon and the coffee table with the Brittannicas under it. For some reason, waves kept crashing against the side of the house, and pushing the bottom of the wall out. I was trying to build some kind of circuit, but there were three capacitors, and all I could get was white noise. Finally, I got up and dropped the encyclopedias against the wall, hoping to block off the water, but then when I sat down the waves came crashing over the books anyway. The tide was obviously coming in, as each wave was worse than the last. I gave up and went outside and looked around. The house was high up on a mountain, with no water anywhere in sight. Yet when I went inside, there were waves, and globs of seaweed rolling around on the carpet. Stefan and I drove to the beach, where I got out and kicked every wave that came near me, which actually left huge bruises in the water. I spent a while following a trail of dimes in the sand, and when I'd collected about ten bucks' worth, I looked up and saw a destroyer drifting just off the coast. We were right up against a fence labeled "Camp Pendleton". The ship dropped off a horde of packages which slowly floated up to the beach, but nobody was there to receive them. "I want one," Stefan said, and grabbed the nearest one. Suddenly we were surrounded by marines, who grabbed Stefan and started dragging him away like an illegal immigrant (little trashbag ties around his wrists and so on), but I recognized one of the Marines as Randy (we've been doing some recording in the past few months), so I explained that Stefan was a wild drummer, and they all let him go. The end. I should point out the complete lack of Jungian archetypes in this dream, like most of mine. Now, Freud would say that water is certainly a symbol of male sexual functions, but I can simplify the issue much further. On almost any occasion when I have a dream with ridiculous amounts of water in it, I wake up needing the bathroom desperately. So there. I like to drink water before I go to bed, to insure that I never oversleep. So don't mind if I interpret crashing waves, oceans, sewers, and leaking dogs in dreams as concrete and relatively humorous messages from the bladder. Other relevant points: I had been meaning to send Stefan a postcard. I was thinking how boring the house was without him lurking around outside. Oh well. Randy probably entered the dream from a similar train of thought. I tried calling James (Kochi) on Friday, to see if we were doing any recording this weekend. The phone was disconnected, which was no surprise. Trouble is, all my tapedecks and pedals are at his house, and I can't get a hold of him in any way. Now, if I'd only jotted down Randy's phone # while I had a chance, I could still get a hold of someone in the "band". Irritating. Also, this week: When I got to work on Monday, I heard that Sergio was in jail. He's one of the Mexicans at work, who never seem to work. He was the laziest and most abrasive of the batch. He apparently got drunk and involved in a hit and run ordeal where someone was hurt, and gave the arresting officer a hard time. Good, though I heard he might be back at work this Monday. When I called Dad & Gail on Valentine's (their Anniversary), Dad was away, but Gail talked and talked. She said that some kid at Melville went out to the batting cage and hung himself for no apparent reason. She said all the derelicts hanging around outside thought it was a dummy or something, so it wasn't reported for a while, then everyone had to wait for the police to get there ... Another exciting week, then. I haven't been keeping up with the war at all, but what's the point? Death and destruction are worth censoring, not supporting. The potential for large-scale holocaust is still there, but. I got on this topic because I was planning on closing with the sentence "I've got a sink full of Israel (stamps)," just to be esoteric. There it is.