To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.
- Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), French poet, critic.

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I am late back to work. I am always late back to work in my dreams, and I am in some earlier environment; my dreams follow me like a waterskier's empty towline behind the Evinrude of my consciousness. I dream about the office, and when I was in the office I dreamed of the Factory, and of the Army (the Army follows me everywhere, it seems). When I was in the Army and the Factory, I dreamed of high school.

I work in a large mall. There is a room, or shop, within one wing of it. And out of a room across the hall from where I am late, a smiling darkeyed lady approaches and we begin rituals which would be considered inappropriate in most malls, or offices either.

She is sitting with me on a bench just outside my workplace, which I note is entirely different from when I had left it for lunch, and another pretty one smiles and speaks to me in her progression down the corridor. My seatmate leans close to me, whispers, "I would be careful of those Hispanic girls."

I am present but not a part of a huge industrial indoor parkway. I am there visiting my pal Jim, who isn't really a pal neither. I will leave, but there is something about the leaving which requires stealth. I don't want to just walk away, maybe fearing I will not be able to prove I am not enrolled in the class. So I maneuver along a continuing obstacle course.

It resembles a railway yard, if anything; I am progressing along what would be a string of railroad cars, if it were a railroad, but it isn't, so it's just a long ravine structure. I am moseying, and down below are workers moving indecipherable tools to indeterminate purpose. I proceed.

This recalls two events in my past.

I had some sort of emotional or social stroke my junior year in high school - my first junior year of high school. Basically, as near as I am to know, what I had been no longer applied to me. I quit much of what I had identified me to that point. I was no longer a boxer or a football player by pure-dee and painful empirical evidence and thus in our southern community not much of a player of any sort. I dropped out in place. Nothing had any meaning anymore. I took classes and had no idea what they meant. I did nothing, no homework, no work of any sort. The failure was of will and not of competence, of which such limited store as I had been blessed with remained.

In the afternoons came Plane Geometry, and I would take off. I just walked away from school after noon. Went home to work on my first auto, a 1937 Chevy coupe wreck. Tried to create a metaphor of my existence by attempting to jimmy the frozen bolts on the drive shaft to try and work an incompatible transmission in place. The Chevy never ran again.

Nearly a decade later. I'm in the Reception Center, Ft Polk, LA. It is 1969. I was here in 1965. I can't stay here. I pick a time when the day begins and light is not yet up yet the guards on the gate of the center are gone. I walk the trail towards the center of the post, and the main gate outside. A jeep pulls off to the right. I continue walking towards it. I have my duffelbag with my civilian gear on my back. The MP stands down, and crosses the road, right in my path. I continue walking, unconcerned. (At that point, it meant little to me whether I went out one gate or through another into the stockade.)

"You all right?" asked the MP on his way to check a motor pool gate. It was simply a form of address.

In ten minutes, I was over the fence and outside the premises of Ft Polk.


3:15 PM 11/30/2003

Andrew Wyeth say: I dream a lot. I do more painting when 'm not painting. it's in the subconscious.

--
The Night of the Day


A little girl comes trundling out onto a football field and romps the length of it. She has thick skirts and much red coloring in it so that she in her kid romp bustles like a butterfly.

This isn't the local ball field. It's the NFL! And behind her comes Tyrell Owens!

He sets out to follow her. A lone little girl running up the field, apparently going to her family seats at the other end zone. Owens is the spoiled grandstanding star wideout of the Niners, of course, only here he is playing with a little girl. He flaps open his jacket (he's in civilian dress-up) and his vest is red and he is galloping like a kid and flashing colors like he's mimicking her. She is looking around at him, turning her head to the left while she runs, smiling beatifically. When she looks at him, Owens flaps his jacket closed so the colors don't show.

It's an amazing show, and the crowd is utterly charmed by it.

I wake up, and then I'm in a cafeteria. I am taking liberties. I believe I have friends and juice in the place, so I go behind the counter. I meet resistance and believe that's only clumsiness on the part of my buddy, but I'm suspecting, he's denying my privilege.

I have to reach to wash my hands in the sink of the kitchen. I do it like it's just a casual move, like hanging my coat on the rack, but the owner seeks to prevent it without alienating me. I'm presuming here, it's obvious.



The Day Before

Me and Scoob spent the whole day around the cabin. The cold, the cold is coming. The nasturtiums down by the pond are frozen, and, Niki J say, they didn’t do that all last year. In the early dawn the windows are glazed.

Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream—a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows—is essentially poetry.
- Michel Leiris (1901–1990), French anthropologist, author.
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In a low-ceiling industrial office space, dark and shadowy, there are pictures on a long desk. I look at some of them. They are in black and white, and quite vivid. I recognize myself! Although I don’t know where or when they were taken, I am not overly concerned. I figure the pleasant scenes are yet to happen. Here’s me, smiling vaguely, in a group setting, a bending file of us in a park which dips down in a bowl where the activity is. But the terrain is only suggested, like the names of great canyons you cannot see the walls of from any perspective.

Here are photos in color. A large russet hound. He has splashes of white around his muzzle, but I know what this one means. It was taken long before we found Scoob, but this is obviously a prediction of him. The white is all that is different from our boy today, which means to me it’s meant as a staged disguise like in old hiss-the-villain melodrama; we know who the characters are even under the phony beard. This time it's the Good Guy who is camouflaged, but one slight key is off to appease scoffers, or else everyone would believe in magic. But here is a picture of Ubbi, taken a long time before he came to us.

The project we are working on takes shape. It is long and low and wooden, like the NBA. Only the form takes on the substance of a Double-A Fueler rail job. I wonder if we are to continue this exercise, as a wooden dragster would never compete with the sleek haulers we will eventually have to compete with if we continue. Still we go on…

…and I am trapped under bodies. I see there are two of them, and it’s like the old fashioned kiddie taunt dog piles of yore. I see I should be able to remove myself from under these. One is a girl-woman, and the other is Jerry Snodgrass.

This suggests an early event in my own actual waking history. There was a bully a couple of years older than me named Billy Wells, and he is telling me on the bus home from swimming lessons at the Park he will “get me.” He has some sort of manufactured grudge, easy for him since he’s older and lots bigger.

I make to step over the seats while everyone else files out the aisle. I say, hey, Billy, look at this! I’m trying to josh him into a better mood, but he says, I’ll get you anyway.

He faces off with me on the grounds of the high school. (I am in some years too young for high school, but this is where the bus leaves us off.) Billy Wells decides I’m not sufficient reward for his bull rep, where is the value to beating up a little kid. He says, somebody take him; I’m going after Joe (my older brother). Jerry Snodgrass says, I’ll take him, figuring it's safe suckup to the big guy. He does, grabbing me from behind. Snodgrass is not as big as wells, but the same age, and bigger than me. I swing Snodgrass over my back by leaning forward, and he hangs on. I try crying a few sobs, and somebody says, aw, let him up, and he does.

Wells today is partically paralyzed, sits and smiles and smokes. Snodgrass became a notorious drunk, like his daddy, and is much despised by his ex-wife, who is a therapist and very generous to most of the rest of humanity.

I am rummaging again.

The scene is a barracks. We are due to watch a ballgame in the rec room. It is the most exciting prospect of the week. Only…I should locate my winter garb, for the wind the wind is beginning outside, and there is an edge to it. Yes, I should find warmer duds. But… it was months ago when I stashed my gear, and I cannot remember precisely where. I vaguely recall a wall locker, on that wall. There are rows of bunks with storage underneath, and lockers along the walls. I cannot find anything I recognize. I am going through lockers, stumbling here and there. Under one bunk I find a couple of clear-plastic flat footlockers, designed with multiple compartments like egg cartons. Oh, yes, I remember these. They’re mine, all right…only, they’re empty. At least I have a hit. A troop harrumphs quietly, and I apologize. It’s his bunk I’m looking under. Sorry, sorry, but where is my winter wardrobe? The game the game will begin…

The Night of the Day

I am heading to work again… a nondescript office setting, vaguely familiar from the real world gone by…there is a graduation ceremony of sorts…actually more like someone released from prison…he is in Sunday best and his hair is slicked and he carries himself like a sports star on parade…he has supporters around him…I watch, and wonder…does anyone but me know what a farce this all is?…almost as a stage act, the principal steps towards me seated beyond where the footlights would be…moving around the desk of the boss, who waits in attendance behind…the entourage of the prinicipal is abetting about…one says, “The piece…”…the little round boss, always nervous and obsequious, is most supportive…oh, yes, he says, and he opens his center drawer…reaches towards the back…brings out…a service revolver, a .357 probably, and hands it to the principal…

I am in frenetic and private opposition…I am saying to (it’s Jo Ann (just someone I knew in high school), playing the part of the front-office secretary) how it’s all wrong, this can’t be done…she is intent on doing work on paper and it doesn’t pertain to me nor my objections. I object, however, most emphatically, although not in the presence of the principal or his cohort, at least not intentionally, but a voice behind says, ‘Leave it!’ and I turn and a very tall one comes around to consult with Jo Ann, says to me, “I’m done,” meaning that’s all he has to say, or needs to say. I move out.

Here I am wandering the corridor of what looks like a dark mall…hordes of folks moving desultory and hopeless…lost…but I may be the only one who realizes it…they swarm in all directions but sluggish and phlegmatic…I am thinking, I am all alone in the world…I see not a face recognize me, or care if I’m there…I am not dressed…I have on a Russian babushka and a tunic which does not cover my undies…I must go back to the office and change…the office is a hangar, I see, and the sides are dropped like drapes so that the ribbing is exposed…the office is no more…I need to ask where my clothes are…I am wandering aimless with preset notions about what should be happening and trying not to think how in the world my moving in this huge labyrinth will make it be…I feel a tug on my tunic…I look around, then she comes up in front of me…I look way down and see a tiny little darkeyed beauty beseeching…I bend to the only face in the universe recognizing me, and it is imploring…”Please, sir, I want to be Wolfie!”…as I am in the act of bending down to the radiant dark little girl, I immediately understand her…Wolfie is a cartoon character who wears a large fur cap like mine…I am removing my headgear before I have even lowered my face to the level of hers…I place the babushka on her head and it carries over to her shoulders and she pushes it back to expose only a large smile…she moves away delighted and I continue my march in the cattle call, thinking, “I have to remember her…I must remember only her…”

The Day Before

NerdNosh, it has become apparent, is no more, and I’m not seeing replies to my calls to the Attic Meister for a restructuring of our archives. The Site Engineer LB left suddenly from Sasquatch, the Noshost, under undisclosed circumstances and then a server holding our goods apparently crashed and all I’m told by the Mom of Mom & Pop Store is she will restore the Attic if I send her the files…

Oh, boy. I have worked hard to convert the Nosh to a zine. I have stolen the format and was diligently plugging in segments from our stores when the lights went out. So now all depends on restoring the lost files, and there is pitifully little interest expressed and energy to continue the Nosh is limited as well, at least thus far.

I reflect also how I am totally alienated from all the citizens of my home town in the various online groups. I founded the first one, and then another when that failed, and now there are four groups, none of them including me, and at least two of them formed specifically to exclude me.

I have been harsh in my review of my old home town and its development. I have a sprinkling of notes from old hands, flotsam after the storm…



NerdNosh Logo

We are driving, me and my beta wife, and I let her out. I think, maybe I should’ve stopped to do that. Later it will come up, and I will report I was traveling 21 MPH when she exited the vehicle.

Now I see her in some distress amidst a pack of hounds. There is turmoil and she is down amongst the pups. I stop. I worry about parking. I think, I should move on out, but then, should I hit the flashers? The hazard lights. I wonder where the switch to do that is.

We are inside a building now, and there are various individuals sitting about. The quarters are confined, like the galley of a ship. Everyone must know the beta has been attacked by hounds, but no one seems in the least upset about it. I finally ask out loud, “Who’s in charge?” I understand this is some sort of a dog owners’ gathering. Someone is indicated, and I approach him. I ask, “Are you in charge?” and he says, “Yes, me and Carl.” I say, she was just attacked, and he stands up to move off, gesturing to someone.

The beta is in discussion with that someone, who may or may not be Carl. I stand in the galley, and one of them says, “Boy, I remember when Koodge was here.” Koodgie is the ancient hound who was part of the household when I moved to my current family in Felton. So Koodge is known here?

Beta comes back. She is satisfied now. The settlement, I infer from somewhere, is ridiculously small. I go in search of a bathroom.

Always in my dreams, I cannot find a bathroom. Always, I’m responding to a real physical need. The one I locate is closed. I see a toilet and I go to use it and women come in. It isn’t a closed section, more like the display at Sears. Only the passage is narrow, like the hallway through a bar to a restaurant. I am embarrassed, but not overly so.

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