When any of us observed one of those big city TV rigs in our town, we always thought first of Glenda.

I'm going to the library. There's something I want. The library is over a store in a small town built like a set for B westerns. It's the Leatherwood's place; a strange family with some kids I knew from back home in waketime. They own it and there's a key like one of those huge old-fashioned door keys.
I find the key up there on the second floor in a conspicuous place, like lying on the floor before the door. The library is reached by an inner stairway like one traveled up by the tawdry dance hall girls and the drunken cowboys in old westerns. I fit the key and open the door.
In there, I say, it's so loud up here. You can hear all the voices down on the street; the window is open to them. It's so loud, I say.
All attention in the room, maybe a lounging Leatherwood or two and some other young folk, is on Glenda's latest adventure, in the form of a typewritten half-page. She is publicly complaining of her husband Larry's fishing. Her campaign is taking many roads, utilizing many media sorts.
Here is a video of Glenda in her old cheerleader costume, surrounded by the current high school cheerleader troupe. They are dancing and jumping, Glenda perhaps a bit less agile than her mates, and the yell goes something like

Rickety-rackety rose!
Rickety-rackety rise!
Either you stay home with me,
Or more than a fishie dies!

Cut to a segment of Glenda singing during a high school assembly about her lamentable lonely state while her lover is out with the fishes.

All alone am I
Ever since you said goodbye
Throwed me over for a plagued fish fry...

Larry is a very stoic guy. He just says, oh, that's Glenda. The truth is, he doesn't fish very much. Mostly, he sits downtown and drinks coffee when he's not at the Plant. He doesn't hang around the house, because Glenda is usually out filming, and he doesn't argue. He shrugs, and sips.
I gather up the Glenda typescript, because nobody seems to be taking care of it. Later on the street, I encounter Glenda. When I present her with the package, I apologize to her. The envelope includes a couple of vinyl disks now, and they've been broken against a VHS tape. One smaller record is intact, but two others are broken. I'm very sorry, and so is she. Glenda is very glum. I say, of course it can be reproduced.
I know it isn't an original campaign. Some time ago, and far away, another wife set out on just such a media frenzy against her husband. There was much publicity, and this must have impressed Glenda at the time. I don't know if the first event was more justified than Glenda's complaint.


[A waking note: Glenda and Larry are two individuals from my old high school days. They've probably never even spoken to one another. Glenda is a farm girl, and a little abashed about that, and Larry was the sort of guy who would allow you to believe anything to his credit, regardless of the truth of the matter.]

I have proved Einstein's Relativity in my dreams. Albert told us that one who traveled near the speed of light away from the earth would be exponentially younger than a twin on earth once he returned. I have noticed that long sequences in dreams, as in the one following, occur in very limited dreamtime. I can gauge the latter because I am often awakened just prior to the alarm and drift back to sleep for a very few minutes. In that time, much occurs. Therefore:

1. Dreams travel at near the speed of light, and
2. Albert was right.

---

On a campus, moseying this way and that, dark in keeping as always with my lack of visual perception, or perceptive vision, I have an assignment, though I'm not in school. I know I must, but I don't understand how. It's like high school; I was somehow disengaged when something important was explained.

I understand the outline of it. We are to diagram a root of a local tree, which resembles an apricot but without flour or fruit. It remains low to the ground, sinuous as if struggling to rise, and somehow one large root follows the trunk up out of the ground.

The assignment is to gash the root just above the ground, then lay the tool we used aside, and draw the innards of the root. I see Niki J's artwork, and it's very nice. She used a motor-driven utensil I don't recognize, and it's laying before the tree, which has a large gash exposed in the root/trunk near the ground.

I will use an ax. I will set to work shortly. First however as in all my dreams there is a certain amount of walking one way with decisive intent and then coming back in the reverse direction with an equal amount of assurance. I'll start on my work pretty quick now.

From close up, I'm watching the crew dismantle a postmodern drag engine. They talk to one another like on any work crew. Two of them lift a blower off, which is unlike any blower ever seen outside a scifi flick. They place it over on a bench.

Now I must take the engine somewhere. (All my dreams are moving, as my days be sitting.) We start off, but we have, of course, two cats to take with us. One bounds off up the wrong path and I must catch her. She has the shape of a squirrel and a bobbed tail and grey-white-black coat, and the funny part is, I can catch her.

The other is off to the other side, and there is danger, because an auto is coming now. I rush to that side of the road, and just barely catch this one before he leaps into the path of the oncoming vehicle, whose driver gives one of those patented disgust headshake frowns.

I enter a dark bookshop. The engine is to drive something important there, maybe the card catalog, for all I know. I leave, and find a lady signing in at the desk lobby. Her family motor is just set in the floor behind her, like an inboard Evinrude. Everything drives something else, and I don't question it. The lady notices a list on the counter, mentions it. Hey, there's a list.

Yes, I say. It's my lifting routine from fifty years ago. Haven't used it since, but I like to keep it handy. She continues her entries onto the form.

I am somehow not troubled by a visit from Clyde Hembry, who was in waketime the nadir of the sump of our old hometown society. I mean, seedy thugs try and avoid Clyde, and all that kept him out of prison for major crimes was a lack of imagination. But he is there briefly on some nefarious mission and it's innocent as far as I'm concerned so I give him the location of a certain green of the Golf Club.

This is as wide as the social span runs in our town: from the Golf Club, the smalltown unexclusive enclave yet nest of the most posh families we can afford, and Clyde, but I seem to believe Clyde has a justifiable need of the data so I give him "A-21" and I step outside. I will show him where. I expect him to follow, and he does, but too slow is he at leaving my quarters to suit me.

Here he comes. It's sunshine outside, and I stride forth. I look at the numbers on the greens. I see H and then guide over that way for B section. The greens, I see, relate to large metropolitan newspapers. This makes perfect sense to me. I recognize now that A-21 must mean the San Jose Mercury News.

Over this way, Clyde. Watch the traps.

I am rushing through a moving train. I have to tell Reloj something I've just read.

It was in Schopenhauer. See, the way I understand it, is, you cannot substitute one string of longing and desire for another. I see it as a golf ball. You cut into the cover and you unwind one length of thread and stretch it out on the table. Then you take another and you substitute it.
Schopenhauer says you can't do that. Any impulse or drive is so deeply rooted there is no way to synthesize another for it. I go to tell Reloj that, rushing through the cars, out one door onto the platform and into the next.

We are going to a therapy clinic somewhere up ahead which will cure Reloj of his smoking habit. One of the strategies is the trading off of the need to smoke with other oral fixations. But I found a copy of something from Schopenhauer which says we're bound to fail in our mission.

Sublimation? Is that the term?

Eyes are cast above me. I notice the glaze, all along the rows, in every car, and then I know the cause. There are TV sets up high to my left.
Nobody wants to talk Schopenhauer here.

Everyone is blankly staring, as in a trance. There is noise coming from the TV sets.

Anybody? They only stare at the sets up on railings, two to a car. They do not hear me. They do not even see me.

Does this mean perhaps Schopenhauer was wrong? It's good, if so, because maybe then Reloj can quit smoking after all.

I wonder when I'm awake if Schopenhauer ever wrote anything like that.