Over the hills and far away

 

I was having another traveling dream. Something lay off in the green land beyond the foothills. Whether it was as it a princess to be saved, a dragon to be slain or a wizard to be confronted, I don't know. It had the feel of some kind of mission or quest. 

OK, it wasn't set in times of yore. There were cars and streets and stuff. I still lived on my property, but it had the Narnia-like lushness of a world that was new. 

In the first part of the dream, I was in driving my '86 red Toyota SR5 coupe in Marysville, near where highways 20 and 70 intersect. Taking a shortcut through an alley between a gas station and a liquor store, I drove through a graveled parking lot where someone had dug some deep ruts and created giant speedbumps, making a kind of barrier intended to prevent people from cutting through.

I got myself high centered on one of the speedbumps and sank into the loose gravel. I was able to back the car up and hit it again, diagonally this time, making it over with minimal scraping of the undercarriage.

I next found myself at home, or near my home. There were relatives there and neighbors camping out in a trailer. They were about to have a picnic with hotdogs and ice cream, which they wanted me to attend. I told them I'd love to but that I had somewhere I had to be first, some kind of errand, mission or task that I had to complete. I ran into Ronaldo Carrington (my black Panamanian congo player friend and ex-roommate from the cult days) and he also begged me to stay, but I persisted. 

I walked down the front of my property through the middle of my pasture, suddenly noticing that everything seemed to have a more vibrant feel, like my sensory perception had just been turned up a few notches. There were giant pine trees lining both sides of the pasture in orderly rows, giving the pasture a long, tunnel-like appearance, like an entrance to some Midieval court. The tall, dark trees filtering the sunlight and the thick, lush pasture grass all sparkling and dewy made the air feel about 10 degrees cooler and gave the place an other-worldly, almost magical quality. I whipped out my phone and began taking pictures, backing up and changing views to get the exact perspective that accentuated the effect.

I think this next part is out of sequence, or else the story just jumps around, I don't know. But at some point, I was on a dirt driveway, still in the foothills, doing some work on a line of new cars that were parked on a hillside. RJ from Bible Study was there, also doing some work on the cars. 

He kept wanting to show me something audio related and jumped in one of the cars I was working on, while I was busy doing something with the license plates. The license plates were paper thin and made of a crinkly metallic foil, like a space blanket is made of.

"Come on!" He insisted enthusiastically, "You've got to check this out." He began to tear off the protective plastic film from the car's dash, so he could mess with the radio.

"Hey! Leave the film alone," I told him, "You know we can't start fiddling with the radio just yet. We have to finish the PDI first." I guess we must have been doing Pre-Delivery Inspections, which explained the flimsy license plates. 

I was on the left side of the vehicle, telling RJ to knock it off, when I noticed a few coins on the ground, buried in the hard dirt next to the car. I pried out a nickle and examined it. It was an older one, with an Indian head or something on it. 

"Finders keepers!" I said, excited at my find. 

I kept digging and wound up with five or so more coins. One of them first appeared to be a quarter, but upon closer examination, I found it was made of gold and had much different emblems and text . I put all of the coins in my pocket and decided that I'd done enough work. I felt I had somewhere else that I should be getting to.

I took a couple of the license plates, which had now grown much larger in size and were made of a sturdier material. The two plates were able to freestand in an A frame configuration, like a sawhorse made of tin. I jumped on and attempted to ride the two license plates, initiating motion by bouncing up and down in a pogo stick type of manner. 

This was only slightly effective, and it had an unpleasant effect on my crotch, which had to ride seated on the point of these narrow pieces of metal. Further, the license plate, being made of tin, had very little spring action, and so the hopping was just me trying to force the plates to move as a horse would. But my stubbornness paid off, and I was able to hoppity-horse my way down the hill.

I wound up at gas station near the middle of Loma Rica. There was a bathroom there, and I went in to use it. Two guys were already in there and so I had to wait to use the single dingy toilet stall. In the meantime, I struck up a conversation with one of the guys.

"So, you are a musician?" I guessed this because of his odd Mohawk-like skunk hair dye job. It was black on both sides with a white stripe down the middle.

"Yes, you got that right," he told me. "I'm the only white black guy you'll ever meet. And a damn good guitarist, if I do say so." He kept mixing up the phrase "black white guy" and "white black guy," making all kinds of combinations. 

"I'm a white guy who is black, or rather, a black guy who is white. A black and white guy. White, with black, see?" And he pointed out his t-shirt, which was black with white stripes, or black with white stripes, depending on how you looked at it. His skin, which appeared ashen, also had the strange quality of being a mixture of black and white with facial features of an indeterminate type.

I told him I hoped his music career was successful and that I'd be looking out for him in the future, but I was just saying that to be polite. Guitar players are a dime a dozen, even if they did have a gimmicky stage look, like the one he was affecting. 

I hopped back on my painful metallic horse made of license plates and headed southward. Laura Prepon accosted me before I could leave the parking lot and entreated me to stay and join the picnic still in progress back on my property. I told her I couldn't, but that maybe I'd come back this way and pick her up on my return trip. I felt that perhaps my trip would involve saving her or having some princessy type adventure with her at some point, but for now I had to leave her and pursue whatever lay beyond the foothills.

I struggled to find the correct passage through the hills, however. I kept encountering gates that my license plate horse couldn't get past. I would travel a few hundred yards in any direction and these gates or barriers kept redirecting me back to the gas station. Undeterred, I set out time and again, but never got very far in my journey. I woke up still no closer to my goal, and I never found out what my mission parameters even were. 

Hey, sounds like a life I might be familiar with. 

Well, I got a thing. Gotta go. Text dingy and then mow.