The Randy Situation and my melanoma, streaking and a dine and dash

 

This dream started nowhere and wound up nowhere. While still dreaming, I tried to recount it to David and Sharon, but in both instances, I was interrupted before I could get anywhere close to finishing. 

I was living in a roommate situation with Randy Mitchell, Jeanette Antoine and some other people. None of us had our own room, and all of us had to share couches. I shared a couch with Jeanette, but it was strictly a feet to feet arrangement. I had to try to explain that to Sharon, who wasn't thrilled about the arrangement, dream or no dream.

Randy was being his usual loud, drunken self and was becoming quite the unwelcome guest. I guess he'd been doing some handyman things around the house, and he just became kind of a permanent fixture. His constant stream of crude remarks toward the ladies was starting to piss me off, so I told him in no uncertain terms that it was time for him to go.

"I think it's time for you to step on, brother," I said from my supine position on the couch.

He stared at me blankly. My statement hadn't registered in his primitive brain.

"It. Is. Time. For. You. To. Step. On. Brother," I repeated the words singly and with emphasis, so that they would sink in.

His eyes widened, and his nostrils flared. I could see his neck veins start to bulge. Typical bull behavior. This was why he had to go. He leaped over the table and towered over me as I lay there on the couch. 

I looked up, expecting a rain of blows, but to my surprise, it was Michael Cardenas who delivered the punch from behind. He drew back like he was going to wallop me, but pulled back at the last second and gave me an exploding fist bump to the chin, like something you'd do to an old friend who you were teasing or telling to "buck up, old chum." I still wanted to get Randy out of there, but Carnitas had diffused the situation for the time being. 

The Randy situation had me rattled, and it was having a deleterious effect on my health. I looked over my body, and all these new melanomas were popping up. I tore my shirt at the neck to get a look at my shoulder, and there was a huge spot that had grown larger and was beginning to ooze a dark brown fluid. I decided I had better get out of that toxic environment right then and there.

I left the house to go for a jog. At that point, I noticed that I was naked as a jaybird, carrying only a rolled up bath towel. I thought about stopping to wrap the towel around my waist, but I saw that some other joggers were also naked, so I just tried blend in. Streaking was making a comeback, I guess, since no one was making much of a fuss about it.

After a bit, I managed to fashion some rather crude clothing out of the bath towel and an old gray sweatshirt that I'd procured from some homeless person's belongings. Then I went inside the local diner and sat down to breakfast with David Chanh. I was trying to recount my dream to him, but I kept getting interrupted by the formalities of the dining experience.

"Can I get you boys anything else?" the waitress asked with a smile, after we'd cleaned our plates of the last remnants of breakfast.

"Just the check," David replied, winking at me.

He made a gesture to me that said, "We're getting out of here. Now!" and we left without paying. I had on some makeshift shoes, made from rags, that were binding up on my feet. I had to stop and cut them off with a pair of scissors, which slowed our getaway considerably and garnered a few snickers from the other diners.

Ding. Ding. My text dingy awakened me for the second time, and things wrapped up quickly after that. The closing credits for Pulp Fiction were playing to the sound of surf music.

Thumbnail Clippings: Sharon's doppleganger, Uncle Frot and shopping mall bumper pool

 

I don't have enough material for a sketch, a vignette or even an interesting doodle, but I did dream that I briefly bumped into Sharon last night, so here is my thumbnail. Actually, it wasn't her but a ringer. In fact, they were so alike that if I'd gone out shopping with one and wound up taking the other home by mistake, I doubt I'd have caught the error.

I was in a busy shopping mall, and bumping into people wasn't uncommon. People were accustomed to getting bumped into, grabbed onto or brushed up against without so much as a "pardon me, ma'am" or "excuse me."  It was literally that crowded. A frottagist's paradise.

Time stood still as I first caught sight of Sharon's double.  Her hair was long, flaxen and wavy, dirty brown streaked with sun bleached highlights, and her eyes were a laughing bright baby blue. She was wearing a faded beige flannel overshirt and blue jeans that were frayed around the edges.

"Hey, baby," I said casually as I grabbed her shirtsleeves with both hands and gave her arms a familiar squeeze.

She looked at me with a saucy look that said, "I know you're a stranger, and I'm not who you think I am, but I'll play along." She didn't actually say that, but I got the vibe that she was OK with being mistaken for my wife or lover. 

I didn't get to take her home, however. It was a fast moving mall, and I barely had time to lock eyes with her and give her a quick greeting before we were each swept away in different directions by the crowd surge. 

Elsewhere in the mall, I saw Lance Matthysen posting up in a furniture store. His game was to sprawl out on a recliner with arms and legs akimbo, draping himself over the arms of the chair, like a giant spider waiting for prey to fall into his lap. But Lance wasn't waiting for dopplegangers of long lost loves. He was waiting for kids. Lance was a pedophile.

"What'cha doing, Uncle Frot?" I asked maliciously. I was onto him.

He glared at me, trying to silence me with an icy stare. It didn't work, and I pressed him further.

"Cop any good feels lately, Uncle Pedo?" I pushed the boundaries of teasing past their limits.

Jennifer Anniston looked up from her cell phone, surprised to hear such talk. Apparently, she and Lance, along with the rest of the furniture store crowd, were just about to play a game together, one in which everyone would seal their cellphones in old cassette tape cases for a day, thus preventing any phone usage. It was some kind of "Wayback Wednesday" or "Throwback Thursday" type of game, where use of pre-millennial tech was prohibited.

I got the impression that I was spoiling the party, so I stifled the urge to comment further. I left the furniture store trolls to go about their business, and I rejoined the giant crowd out in the mall, hoping to perhaps bump into Sharon again. I knew it wasn't her, exactly, but I didn't care. If she was game, so was I.

----

Once again, I awoke at 7:44 and it is a Saturday. Maybe I'll harass the cats with my new robot vacuum while I cook breakfast and make my coffee.

The dragon down the road

 

Last night I dreamed I was in Paradise. No, not the Muslim version of heaven described in the Quran, silly. The one in Butte County, CA. The little hillside town where I spent 10 years with Sharon. The one that was destroyed in the Camp Fire. That Paradise.

Anyway, I was on Bennett Rd., the street Sharon's folks used to live on, trying to get to their house on foot. This would have been a nice walk down a country road, had it not been for the dragon that lived at the end of it. I'm not one to go overboard with hyperbole, but that is the only way that I can describe this monstrous miscreant, the evil stallion that resided at the end of South Libby.

One has to travel to the end of South Libby Rd. to reach Bennett, a small dead end street that appears out of nowhere and goes nowhere. There is only one way in and one way out. Not the greatest set-up for fire evacuations, but if you were a fire breathing dragon of a horse who enjoyed stomping pedestrians into a puddle, this corner location was ideal. 

Everyone who lived there knew not to travel on foot down this section of road, and anyone ignorant of the rules got just one chance to test their survival skills against the evil beast. I was blissfully unaware as I rounded the corner and headed for Sharon's folks place. 

I'd almost reached the Vixie's when I heard the sound of snorting and scuffing from behind me. I whirled around and caught a glimpse of the massive black stallion about a hundred yards away or so. His red eyes were locked on me, and he let out an evil screech that sounded more like nails on a chalkboard than a whinny. I didn't actually see fire come out of his nostrils, but I swear the mist from his hot breath looked like it could've been steam, if not smoke.

I turned and ran as fast as I could, knowing that he would overtake me in a matter of seconds. It was simple mathematics. The horse could outrun me by a factor of ten, and at this distance, he'd be upon me before I could reach any kind of shelter. I had nowhere to run, and the gap was closing as the singularly focused monster bore down on me, galloping at full speed. 

The hoof beats were so close that they shook the ground, and just at the moment I thought I was to be trampled, I threw myself at the ground and hunkered down, waiting for death. 

Death only grazed me, though, as I'd made myself a smaller target. But he wasn't done yet. He skidded to a stop on the rough pavement and spun back around for another pass. I was still hunkered down and couldn't have gotten up to run if I'd wanted to. He leaped at me with his front hooves in the air, ready to strike down upon me with great vengeance and furious anger.

I rolled out of the way, and this left the horse with a lot forward momentum and nowhere to go but down into the ravine on the side of the road. He tumbled end over end, rolling down the steep hillside, finally coming to a stop against a large pine tree at the bottom. 

I got up and I brushed myself off, shocked to find myself still alive. I looked down the ravine and saw the horse getting to his feet. He was uninjured, but it would take him a minute to get his bearings and to navigate the steep terrain. I knew revenge was still on his mind, so I made like a tree and got the hell out there.

 

Besides my little brush with the apocalyptic nightmare horse, I'd had another little run-in that day. Earlier, I'd been at the lake, where the wind was kicking up and making some waves that resembled ocean swells. This was causing quite a problem for people who'd come to the beach for a day of fun, and now found their cars imperiled as the rising tide threatened to inundate the parking lot. Police Chief Wiggum was on the scene and was none too happy about the state of affairs. 

"Why don't you make some handmade signs to warn people about the dangerous parking situation?" I suggested.

"That's absurd. How can you even suggest such a thing? We need to keep this parking lot open," he replied indignantly. It reminded me of the scene in Jaws where the mayor is poo-pooing the sheriff's campaign to close the beaches on the Fourth of July. 

With a single offhanded comment about parking lot signs, I'd now made myself a very powerful enemy, as Police Chief Wiggum was also Mayor Wiggum. And yes, he did resemble the porcine buffoon on the Simpsons, although completely lacking the anachronistic charm of the small town animated policeman. Life in Paradise wasn't going to be easy with Wiggum as my foe, since half the town was on his side, and the other half lived in fear, trying to stay off his radar.

That's all I can remember. But now that I think of it, someone should put some signs down at the end of South Libby to warn people about the dragon that lives there.

The next generation of stock analysts

 

I dreamed I worked at a very old, decrepit dinosaur of a financial firm. Their old four story walk up building was in a high growth district and looked out of place among the newer architectural designs, despite having undergone a facelift or two over the millennia. I think the last one was done in the art deco days, since the corners all had a rounded appearance, like a 50s era toaster or refrigerator/freezer.

Inside, it was business as usual. Phone calls were being made from a boiler room. Not quite a literal boiler room, but the exposed plumbing and electrical conduit did give the place an industrial atmosphere. I think the hot water pipes actually did provide the building with heat, although the management seemingly generated plenty of that with their incendiary motivational speeches. 

"Leads are for closers," Walter Klein intoned the famous Glengarry Glen Ross speech. "So you losers won't be getting any of them. You will be making cold calls and developing fresh leads for me."

We were each handed a copy of the financial section of the newspaper and a rotary telephone. With only these two tools, we were supposed to enlarge the company portfolio by dialing up random people and picking stocks from the paper to sell to them. We were like bookie pimps, lining up sure-fire bets for the unwitting, ever gullible, greedy public. 

Fishing for greed in a sea of greed wasn't too hard, and some of our picks actually paid off. We operated under the Spaghetti-Wall/Monkey-Typewriter Theorem: throw enough spaghetti at a wall and furnish enough monkeys with typeriters, and you will eventually have a rose colored fresco or produce the Magna Carta, provided the monkeys don't get distracted picking the bits of spaghetti off the wall instead of banging away on their typewriters. (Note to self: for future versions of this metaphorical experiment, keep the monkeys away from the spaghetti.)

It was my first day on the job, and I didn't know what to do. I set about to shadow another employee, Edmund Leon, an old friend from the cult era who just recently passed away from an overdose. Let me pause for a moment to reflect on the significance of encountering a departed soul in a somewhat hellish boiler room environment in dreamland. Ok. Enough of that. I just gave myself the chills. I don't want to think about the very real possibility that we may go on to even more tedious mundane existences after mucking it up in this one.  

Edmund didn't want me shadowing him, for fear that I'd actually pick up some of his trade secrets. There wasn't much chance of that, since he used the pretty much straightforward blindfolded, one-finger method for picking stocks. Likewise, there was nothing special about his random phone number dialing technique. He kept no notes or logs of the many failed numbers he dialed. He simply put his finger in the dial and spun it until it started ringing. He could have been dialing the same number over and over, or calling some deli in China for all I knew. 

His success rate would indicate that he was doing something right, though, so I continued to follow him around. He went out to his car to eat his lunch, driving a full block before parking in a designated lunch parking lot.

"If you're going to follow me on my lunch break, you've gotta at least buy me something," he said between mouthfuls of baloney sandwich.

"I'll do that next time," I promised. I never seemed to think out my strategies in advance.

Lunch ended soon enough, and it was back to the desk, the newspaper and the telephone. I started circling some interesting looking stocks. They were interesting because of the acronyms they formed and because of the way they stood out on the page, not because I knew anything about the companies they represented. About that, I was as clueless as a newborn baby. I think that was why they chose newbies for this job: we had completely fresh, untrained eyes that weren't tainted by such things as knowledge or perception.

The company would go on despite my success or lack of it. I would be there for a spell, but the old edifice would remain a presence on the busy city street, despite being five makeovers out of date architecturally. Presumably, Walter Klein would remain on as well, as the perpetually old, yet never aging, curmudgeonly operations manager, reciting the Glengarry Creed to infinite future generations of frightened new employees.

Toilet Paper Mountain

 

While I was out walking in the mountains, I came upon a section of hillside that was comprised entirely of rolls of toilet paper. It had been an abandoned factory, an underground paper mill that had collapsed, leaving a feathery, pillowy wall of disintegrating toilet tissue as a memorial. Naturally, it was a sought out tourist destination for thrillseekers with a macabre taste for haunted venues.

People would reenact the collapse of the factory, entering the mineshaft-like maze through any number of manhole-sized passageways or bomb shelter door type openings at the top of the mountain, which had a well-maintained city park on its plateaued pinnacle.

I witnessed a bunch of people emerging from the mound, wrapped in shreds of the decaying toilet paper, laughing as if they'd just reached the end of a particularly exciting amusement park ride.

"Break on through!" and "Let's go again!" they shouted, wiping bits of tissue from their lips.

I saw Manuel Silva eagerly looking for one of the openings. He was with a group of people, but they weren't acknowledging him at all. One of them was McCoy, from Star Trek, and the other was that actor who plays Mini Me. They both walked faster and feigned deafness as Silva tried to engage them.

"Hey, wait, guys," he pleaded, to no avail. 

"They're gone, man," I told him.

"That's ok," he told me. "Looky what I found!"

His excitement was undiminished, as he'd found an opening to the factory. It was a standard manhole cover. He pried it open and found a small stream running beneath it. It was mostly filled in, and a person would have to crawl over some wet rocks for quite a ways in order to get anywhere. 

I was underimpressed and suggested we look for a different entryway. Soon, we found a more suitable entrance, an old metal plate door, typical of cold war era bomb shelters. He swung it open, and down we went into the cavernous labryinth. 

"Didn't a lot of people die in here?" I asked as we followed the shaft deeper into the heart of the mountain.

"More people still will," he said ominously.

The walls were a moist, mossy earth, and there was a chill in the stale air. We walked on until we reached a large open room near the site of the original cave in. It had been re-excavated at some point, and a car dealership now resided there. This open area was supposed to be the showroom, but it had a bit too much dirt still on the floors to be very showy.

"How do they get the cars in and out of here?" I wondered out loud.

I didn't get an answer. At that moment there was a rumble, and the walls started to shake. Parts of the ceiling were giving way, crumbling in a torrent of damp dirt clods. There was a growing excitement in the crowd.

"This is it! Break on through!" the enthusiastic tourists shouted.

With dirt raining down around them, they began frantically digging at one wall. After a seeming eternity, someone reached the layers of old toilet paper rolls which comprised the outside wall of the mountainside. Using a breaststroke-like technique, they swam their way through the fuzzy substrate, emerging, breathless, into the sunlight. 

"Hallelujah! We're born again!" the enthusiasts exclaimed. "Go again?"

I didn't opt to go again. I was magically transported, well, not so magically-- just a quick cut scene, and I was back at my house. I arrived just in time to witness a huge water drainage problem that threatened to flood my garage.

I'd dug trenches around the house and cleaned the rain gutters in preparation for the runoff from a recent rainstorm. The storm had left a permanent stream flowing right in front of my house, and there was a waterfall depositing water on my roof that was swelling my rain gutters to capacity. 

There wasn't anything more I could do, so I just stood there, mesmerized by the flowing water.

"Someone really ought to have planned this out better, when choosing this as a home site," I mused to myself.

Then I woke  up. I was 7:44 AM. Saturday, my favorite.

Street camping pick-up artist

 

I met a young Latina while I was doing a little street camping in LA. It helps to pick a nice corner and to have freshly laundered linens for making your blanket fort. I had no trouble convincing this dark haired beauty to join me for some quality sidewalk cuddling time under a starless black sky, tinged orange by sodium lamps and the mist from the sprinklers at the Carl's Jr. 

"Shouldn't we be getting out of here?" she suggested, as the mist from the sprinklers began to soak our makeshift linen domicile.

I had to concur. The sprinklers hadn't put a damper on things, though, as I'd managed to free her from a good portion of her clothing while we were camped out there in my street sheik's tent. We'd been making out, and I'd surreptitiously wrangled off her panties, gently finessing them on their trek from the top of the thighs, around the knees and down the calves to her ankles--such a long journey--liberating them, finally, without removing her black high heels. Those were staying on, I decided.

"You're right," I agreed. Our activities had exceeded the limitations of our not so private paradise.

I wrapped her up in one of the nicer blankets and escorted her back to the house that I was sharing with Hannelore Orrick and Carol Carter. We sneaked past the two matrons of the house, and I tucked her into one of the rooms to wait for me. Hannelore was in the shower, and Carol was washing some dishes. I was pretty sure I'd gotten my guest in unobserved, so I skipped the small talk and headed straight for the room.

"I'll just be going to bed now. I'm tired, so that's what I'll be doing," I stumbled on my words, making it obvious that I was up to something as I closed the door behind me. I could never get anything past those ladies.

I knew that my time was limited before my soiree would be ended by an unceremonious knock on the door and some harsh words from our chaperones. I was about to strip and resume our activities, but I realized that I had a bit of sticky residue on my fingers, some dried up soda that had attracted a layer of street grime, giving them the charred black appearance of a frostbitten hobo. This would not do.

Back out into the kitchen I went, hoping to avoid Carol. I just needed a squirt of two of dish soap, and I'd be back in the arms of my sidewalk sweetheart, who awaited me, naked except for a blanket and high heels. But as per dream protocols, of course, that was not destined to happen, and I got hung up in the kitchen washing dishes with Carol and making small talk until I eventually woke up.

----

The pain in my arm is less this morning, and the B cup seroma under my left armpit has only refilled to an A cup after Monday's aspiration. Maybe I've finally hit the plateau that my surgeon tried to convince me existed while I was in the height of my anxious misery last week. Next on my cancer to-do list is a PET scan and a consult with another oncologist regarding immunotherapy. My biopsy results revealed one lymph node with rare cancer cells present. 

I'm strangely not very emotionally invested in this whole process. I just want to get back to the relatively pain free existence that I'd previously taken for granted before submitting to this painful biopsy.