We are moving now, up high. It's like a mountain, but more the sort created indoors for rock climbing out of papier mache. But it's high, and I must work close to the faux rock on a narrow ledge. I am afraid.

I make it, though, and here I am at table in a large indistinct room. There is an arrangement. My stepfather stand-in (often my dreams are like a long-running series where parts be played by new actors, like the canine just ahead) says we'll need to split the front rooms. Which half do you want? I say, maybe I could move to the cabin. There is a village and he has many holdings within it.

We are cruising about, and I see the cabin is unavailable, but something may be. We also must split use of the typewriter. It's a typewriter, but not like I remember. There is a flaw with it and I have to show him how to bypass the problem, but then I note you can turn an internal wheel which will bring up the red sector, marked with a red plug. (This is similar to the old typewriter ribbons which include a red lower band.) I turn and turn and the red knob is up. This is how we can do it.

I can bring my pup home now. I don't know why he's been staying somewhere else, but here he is. (He's smallish and reddish and like no hound I've ever been close to.) I have to figure how his habits will work in the new environment.

But first I must go topside again. I'm ready, and the waitress is on the phone. She is the reason I must go. I wait. Then we start up, and at the first level bend, she pauses. She's on the phone still, you see. I think, maybe the reception is better here. I wait. On she talks.

I finally call it off. I reach for coins, which I had brought to some purpose, and lay them out. I guess that means she can go on when she's ready.


In a fragment from another night...

Punky Duff comes past me, and I'm talking to him. We go from one room to another in what is maybe a store, or a school. He has the same cynical dour expression as always. I'm telling him about the Scots-Irish. We're over here because James I relocated us Scots in Ireland early in his reign to displace the plagued Irish and after a time our sort grew weary of the bickering so came on over here to fill up the Appalachians and the south with rednecks. (I had just read something similar; a clue to schizophrenics in I Never Promised You A Rose Garden was that the phantasm never knows more than the dreamer.)

Punky is not even acknowledging. He never smiles. I wake up, and I think, I don't ever remember him smiling. Some have default smiles. Punky was default dour.

He committed suicide soon after high school.

I am following someone in authority. Reloj is with me. Inside a store, dimly lit, the detective lays down beside a counter, and he moves somehow...

...a woman is pushed out on the other side. I think `corpse' but she just lies there, one arm shielding her brow. The detective stands, and moves away. Towards us, and away from her.

"What now?" she asks.

"It's an arrest," he says.

"Oh, brother..." she says, more like, here we go again.

Reloj and I at the entrance of another store. He points out I have on two hats. I'm wearing two hats. I remove both, replace one, try and make it sound ordinary. Like lots of guys have on two baseball caps. Like, you try and deal a single card and two hit the table together.

Inside, there are some cute little guys, and dressed. They are toddlers in tuxes, and they are on a stage above a counter. One of them is walking by, and he greets me, and he seems so absolutely glad to see me, is so unbearably kind, I'm utterly charmed. Just a little guy who has that rare capacity to be glad in someone else's existence.

Another of them comes forward. His buddies take notice. He is studying, preparing, and he launches with all his might...a marble.

It hits a table just beyond the counter after a low slow arc. Very softly. There is no damage. It hardly rolls. A misspent attempt at vandalism.

Someone is sitting out in our back yard. A stranger.

It is eerie. The yard is small and she sits casually at our picnic table. We must investigate.

When we do, we discover our home, which is my grandma's house on Chestnut back home, with major revisions due to my lack of visual memory and dreamland's eternal compensation, is jointly occupied by a swarm of strangers.

They are affable enough, if teeming, they go about unconcerned as if they belong among us, and we begin to accept that they must. We move hither and yon, Niki J and I, and so do they, like in a bus station.

I must go to the bathroom, and the new provision for that means the fridge offers privacy if you open the door, and the lady of the other grouping is addressing me from the hall, so I do not continue.

I must go to school. I have missed the morning classes. It's high school, and I'm an undedicated stoont. I have two problems. I do not know what my class will be in the afternoon. I somehow cannot remember what class I have after lunch. It's fifth period, right? Then what is it? I can know when I have been there all morning because it's just the next one. Only, now I don't know.

Maybe it's like jumprope. You can continue if you begin standing over a limp rope, but it's harder if they are swishing it in a hard loop and you have to gauge the right moment to run in while it's up before it slaps down. Maybe it's like that. A day of school half gone is like a swishing rope.

And my second problem is, I'm afraid of what might happen if anybody learns I do not know what class I have first in the afternoon. Maybe they will put me away. I cannot run the risk. I cannot just show up on campus, not knowing where to go. I'm expected to know that, above all. But I don't know even that, not at all.

I must skip the afternoon classes as well. There's no help for it. The only remedy for being caught not knowing where you are supposed to be is not to even be there. That should fix it.

Of course, there's tomorrow, but that's not today's worry. I go downtown. I have other occupations.

Like...waking up.

I sit in front of an office worker in a hospital insurance office. Joey is with me, behind me and to one side, and he insults my worker somehow. She is not pleased.

I have something wrong, though not dreadfully. I am given documents and pills which she makes no attempt to concern herself with the problem of transporting. Joey has insulted her, I guess, in his inimitable cynical impatience.

I use envelopes for forms to scrape pills into. I move off. I sit in another seat in front of yet another desk, but do not speak to anyone. Joey says, I'm going on ahead. He does. I never see Joey in this dream; he's behind or gone.

So I'm told the next office is through the large open double doors and right next door. It isn't, of course.

I don't know how to find Joey now, which seems most important. I wander far and wide. I understand somehow there's no use in asking anyone. They will probably all say, it's right next door, and it never is.

Here is a large yard, like where they rent backhoes. I am walking from the back grounds when a worker on stand-on forklift approaches the boss, says, "The one number two in the lot was here last year, and took two shovels." It's a warning to do no business with that one.

I happen to be carrying two implements. I'm glad to see one of them is not a shovel. I only mean to deposit them at the front door, and do so. I have found them lying around. I'm just helping.

Why did I not remember when I was near home the address book. It has Joey's cell phone number. I must go back there.

But I'm now in the corridors of the hospital. What is wrong with me is serious, though I do not know what it is. Some specialist has shown me ducts of conduit through my innards, and here is shading which might better be clear. That's all.

A politician from the land where I live now is just ahead of me along the hallway, and he, too, heads into the john. (This is the part of the dream just before waking. Or, just before the time when I'd better awaken.) He sees ahead of me the room is full, and turns away, as do I, as though it's only a habit or inclination moving us to that room.


Me 'n Reloj, the NerdNosh Seat, Soda Canyon, Mesa Verde, CO, 1995


At the old house on 719 E 4th St, remodeled as are all my settings with shadow and murky light, I am home again after an absence...and all is not well.

There is a proceeding happening. Strangers (to me, but I assume familiar to one another) mill about. Nothing is actually happening, which means an administrative action of some sort.

I learn the cause is pollution. There is tin in the ground of the community of Bonham, and what's more, my mother or our family is responsible. I see old cans brought as evidence. My mother has them to show our landfill is not the cause, as these cans and labels show they have silver lining, or tungsten.

I wait to one side. Finally, I say to one guy seated (dark and sinister if smiley, or because of that) my name, and he says, "You don't want my name. It's like meeting in a wood with shotguns." Ah, okay. I wait.

There is in the bathroom fixture, and filling a tube beside it the size of a waterheater but of clear material, sludge. I understand the sewage, maybe because of all the tin in the ground, no longer runs. Like desolate folk everywhere, my Mom moves about without panic in the gathering crisis.

We all ebb from the 4th St room and now we're on an unfamiliar street, and entering a building. This is a courtroom, I'm thinking. I don't ask any questions, probably because of the earlier rebuff. I don't seem to be able to speak with Mom.

This is a tin-in-the-ground, crap-on-the-surface sort of dream.