Showing posts with label Dream. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dream. Show all posts

Monday, March 13, 2023

Redneck Towing Scam

Bad things always happen when I play hooky from work, but I had that "you deserve a break today" feeling, so I decided to take my chances. I packed up my Fender Twin and decided to park out on the Skyway, just wanting to listen to some tunes while I sat there in the car not going to work. Not much of a plan, and certainly not very well thought out, although I did bring along an extension cord long enough to run from the gas station on the corner to my unlikely parking spot on the busy road.

I spent an inordinate amount of time just deciding whether or not to park parallel or perpendicular to the curb. I tried both, but since there were no other cars parked anywhere in sight, I had no frame of reference. I decided to compromise and went with the angled approach, although there were no lines indicating that this was the correct choice. 

I sat there for a while listening to the radio, as played through the Fender's two twelve inch speakers. It didn't sound particularly good, since it was a talk station anyway, but that was OK. It was me, doing what I wanted, making shit work while I avoided going to the job that I hated. Feeling a little proud, I stepped out of the car for a minute to have a beer with one of my friends who lived in a nearby apartment building. 

"Come on in," the friend said, seeing my half empty beer bottle and offering me another. 

"OK," I said, "but I can't stay long. I'm parked out on the street, and my amp is in the car."

He convinced me to stay long enough to finish the beer I had with me, plus the one he gave me. We talked about various conspiracies, from aliens to Armageddon, and I was starting to get that uncomfortable feeling one gets when something is not right somewhere. You don't know what or where, exactly, just that you have to leave. So, I excused myself and walked back out to my car.

Or, I should say, I walked back out to where my car used to be, because when I got there, it was gone. I kicked myself for staying too long in my friend's house, for ditching work and bringing my amp along with me, and for leaving my car parked in such a ridiculous spot. I should have known it would get towed.

I went back into my friend's house to ask for his assistance. I'd been looking on my phone, trying to google towing companies, but I couldn't type the words into the search bar for the life of me. I asked my friend if he knew the name of the towing company that was most likely to have towed my car.

"Death Suddenly," he said.

"Excuse me?" I said. "I just had my car towed, possibly stolen. I don't have time for any of your weird conspiracy shit."

"No," he said. "The name of the tow company is Death Suddenly Towing. That's the one my landlord uses, anyway."

I still couldn't get any words typed into my phone's search bar, but I had a brilliant idea: why not just ask the landlord? He'd know for sure whether or not he'd called the tow truck and what company he used. I excused myself and went to go knock on the landlord's door.

Silva from work was also hanging around, and he decided that he needed to go with me. The landlord wasn't a nice person, and I might require his particular diplomatic skills to get anything out of him. Silva was nothing if not a people person, so I agreed.

After a few knocks, the landlord opened the door a crack, squinting out at me suspiciously. He was wearing a wife beater and lazily dangling an empty beer bottle with one finger stuck in the mouth hole. 

"What 'choo want?" he drawled. 

Damned rednecks, I thought. He knew damn well what I wanted. He'd probably concocted this elaborate parking scam, in cahoots with his tow truck buddies. There weren't any "No Parking" signs on the street, probably because he'd torn all them down. They were probably hanging up in his redneck clubhouse with all of his other bullet-ridden trophy signs, right below the deer heads and between the Nazi and Confederate flags. I kept these thoughts to myself, however, and asked him directly about the car.

"I was wondering. I have a silver Honda Accord. No, I mean gold. Wait, no it's silver." For some reason, I couldn't remember the color of my own car. "It was parked right out front, and now it's gone. I'm wondering if it might have gotten towed, by any chance?" That was pretty diplomatic, I thought. I didn't need Silva after all.

"Well, I didn't have it towed, if that's what yer askin'. That would be Rodney. He's up in Number 8. But you best not bother him. He don't take kindly to interruptions. I better go wit 'choo." 

We went to Number 8, and through the window, we could see Rodney, a fat black man in his 50s, fast asleep in his Lazy Boy. In front of him, just inside the door, was a big board with a lot of keys hanging from it. I spotted my keychain right away. 

Geez, I thought, had I been that careless to just leave my keys in the car? I quietly opened the screen door and reached in and grabbed my keys off the rack. This was going better than I had thought. I had the keys, now I just needed to find the car.

The landlord told me that all the cars that got impounded for improper parking were stored in a loft in the back of the property. He led me to a decrepit old wooden building with broken windows and no visible ground floor entrance. We were going to have to climb up some rickety redneck fire escape made up of two extension ladders placed one on top of the other. 

The landlord, who was apparently part squirrel, made it up no problem. I stared up at the unlikely configuration from the ground with unease, but I was determined to get my car back, so I nervously began to climb the first of the two ladders. When I'd gotten near the top, the second ladder fell away, and the ladder I was on suddenly became a lot less stable. It was barely catching the corner of the building, and it began to sway in breeze.

Before I had a chance to contemplate my long fall to the ground, and without getting any closure on my car situation, I woke up. I was none too pleased with myself, so rather than go back to sleep, I punished myself by staying up to dutifully chronicle the event.

Monday, February 27, 2023

Pill bottle blues


 

Uncle Steve should never leave me alone with his stuff. The last time he did that, I wound up rearranging his room, aided by some hookers he'd paid to look after me. This time, I wound up eating all his frozen food and swallowing a whole bottle of Allegra, which I spent the rest of the dream trying to dislodge from my throat. I'd swallowed the whole 300 pill prescription, bottle and all, and I could hear the pills rattling around in the container, lodged somewhere in my chest cavity.

"Where's my burrito?" Steve asked as he walked in the door, his new girlfriend at his side.

"I ate it," I croaked. "Right before I swallowed a whole bottle of Allegra. I need to google 'effects of swallowing 300 Allegra' and also 'is a plastic prescription container digestible?'"

He just looked at me with that look he reserved for idiots, the look of disdain, annoyance and general disgust with existence, aka, his basic resting face. 

Later, I was in my mansion in the foothills near a college town. I lived in a verdant, upscale neighborhood, well treed and private, but still, those college kids got around, so security was a concern. On this particular day, I caught a kid riding his bike around on my property who had no good cause for being there. The only reason I knew he'd been there was the presence of some reflective stickers that he'd dropped on the ground outside my front door.

"Are these your stickers?" I said to him before he could get far.

"Umm...no?" he said, clearly searching for an answer that wouldn't incriminate him.

"Well, fine," I said. "In that case, I'm keeping them. My bike needs some reflective stickers. And by the way, you're trespassing."

I began to discuss, with this kid who could have been a potential thief, the need for smart doorbells that sent emails, and he agreed that they would be a good idea. I mean, what if you just didn't hear the doorbell or were in the other room? I could really see the marketing potential. I think I'll google it when I'm done transcribing this dream. (Spoiler alert: anything I can possibly dream of has already been invented and is available on Amazon.)

Anyway, in the midst of all this pill bottle swallowing and million dollar patent pondering, I had employed Bob Hansell to paint my living room. It was white, and I wanted to paint it--white. How imaginative, I know, but you've got to go with a proven winner.

"What's all this crap on my bike tire, Bob?" I said as I wheeled my bike across the carpet and saw a giant patch of white appearing on its surface with each rotation.

Bob was no longer there, so I had to piece together the possible scenario in his absence. What I figured was, Bob had cleaned his paint rollers on the white carpet, thinking that it would blend in since it was the same shade. I felt the carpet, and it was indeed wet with paint, and now my bike tire had become a paint roller, tracking paint into the rest of the house, making a broken line reminiscent of those down the middle of a highway.

At least that would allow for passing, I thought to myself. No one was ever around to hear my jokes, so the idea of people passing each other in the house became less funny the more I thought about it. I decided to go for a walk in the rain, along the soggy hillside near the college. I took an air mattress with me for some reason, maybe for a security blanket, I don't know. This was my air mattress, and it was all I needed.

When I got to the college, I found the embankment leading up to the campus had the perfect angle and moisture content for doing some grass sliding. Although there was a small gravel component, the grass was slippery enough to compensate. I took a few test slides and found that I could direct the air mattress up and down the face of the hillside like I was surfing a giant wave. Most satisfying, I thought, and I contemplated bringing it up to the college board as a Phys-Ed activity.

Unfortunately, the gravel punctured my air mattress, and by the time I was done sliding, it was completely deflated. I rolled it up and headed for home, feeling a bit deflated myself. I still had the prescription bottle somewhere inside my digestive track, and I'd probably need X-rays and a surgical procedure to extract it. The dream had become a loop at this point, and I came back to my house to find the trespasser, the reflective stickers and the painted carpet scene already in progress.

----

Addendum: Two days ago, my neighbor Stan needed a ride to pick up his car from a mechanic, so I drove him. Today, he emails me and tells me that he is as sick as a dog and has tested positive for Covid. It was only a five mile drive, but the windows were rolled up, and neither one of us were wearing masks. Needless to say, I'm feeling every ache and twinge as a possible sign of infection, and I'm anxiously awaiting day 5, so I can take a home test. Perhaps there is a connection between this and my dream about having a pill bottle stuck in my throat, I don't know.

Friday, February 24, 2023

Irreducibility

 

I started my first day of class at the university at dawn. Wanting to insure that I got a good seat, I made it a point to get there early, before the big rush of students. So early, in fact, that the tables and chairs were not yet arranged, and most of the faculty was still unsure of their own curriculum. I was there to take a class from Forrest Hartman, a journalism teacher at Chico State with whom I played briefly in a band last summer, but who was being assigned in this dream to teach a comic book writing class. I was looking forward to gaining an understanding of the basic concepts of the medium.

I rolled into the great hall in my wheelchair and took in the atmosphere. It was a little overwhelming at first, as one could almost hear the wisdom of the ages echoing off of the cathedral-like walls, the ornate crevices of the gothic decor, sinister repositories of secrets, physically collecting every word spoken, history meticulously recorded in the dingy, tobacco colored patina of antiquity. In the oppressive early morning silence, where every footstep seemed a trespass, every cough or sniffle a violation, I was glad my conveyance was relatively quiet, its electric motor whirring demurely as it brought me to my class.

Within minutes, people began to trickle in, and the spell was broken. Soon the everyday clatter and prattle about this and that, where and when, who and how, and God knows what filled the hall in a cacophonous rush. Since I'd arrived early, I was on the leading edge of this wave of humanity, and I had my choice of seats at the table where Forrest's class was to be taught. Using my wheelchair as a bulldozer, I gently nudged the table away from to wall to give myself sufficient access and took the spot nearest to the where the instructor would soon be standing. 

A girl came in and sat beside me. She had straight blonde hair and a studious air of sensibility. Her utilitarian outfit, a white blouse with a simple pattern reminiscent of baby clothes or hospital attire, faded jeans and low top canvass sneakers, included a well-stocked backpack, which she laid on the table and began to unpack in an orderly manner. She'd make a good neighbor, I thought, as I re-positioned my seat one final time and waited for the teacher to arrive.

Forrest ambled in with the last of the students, a bit flustered, since he'd only received his teaching assignment that day. His only qualification for teaching this class was that he was a huge fan of Batman, a fact that he made known in his impromptu introduction. I raised my hand and asked him a question.

"Will we be going over the elements of artistic style that involve reducing the subject to its most basic recognizable essence?" I thought my question was well-informed and showed an apt appreciation of the medium.

"What you are talking about is irreduciblity," he said, and without thanking me for the segue, he put up a picture on an overhead projector.

The picture was of a rocky outcropping on the coast of Ireland, the kind upon which one sometimes finds a lighthouse or stone structure. Ocean waves were engulfing the outcropping with power and persistence in an unceasing assault, and yet the rock remained unmoved, unchanged for millennia. 

"That is the principal of irreducibility," he said, tapping the projector with his pen for emphasis. "The rock has been battered, but it cannot be broken down any further.

"It's a stalemate," he went on. "Will the ocean win? Theoretically, it's possible. But no, the rock isn't going anywhere. Even as it is seemingly being eroded, new mineral deposits are forming, reinforcing its structure and keeping it in perfect stasis. Irreducibility."

I was kind of seeing how this related to my question about getting to the essence of things artistically, but I still wanted to know about the actual techniques a cartoonist might employ to get the subject to this final irreducible state, so I asked him as much.

"For that," he said, "you will have to take copious notes," and he pointed to some tables piled high with notebooks from previous classes. 

I wheeled over to the table and began thumbing through some of the notebooks. I was looking for a blank one, since I'd forgotten to bring even a single scrap of paper to write on. All of the books were already filled out with notes and scribbles from last semester's lectures. I thought perhaps I'd get some free cheat notes, but they mostly contained equations, timetables, lunar cycles and things unrelated to this class. 

I was going to ask the girl next to me to borrow a pen and paper, but she was engrossed in the lecture, taking notes of her own, and I didn't want to bother her, so I did the only logical and sensible thing I could think of. I woke up.


Saturday, February 4, 2023

Composing with Sergio What's-his-name

"Da da da da da--" Sergio stopped in mid verse as he hammered an imaginary piano ruthlessly. "No! That's not it!"

Sitting at my uncle's dining room table with a notebook in front of him was one of the great composers of our time, Sergio What's-his-name, a guy from my days with the cult who just happened to be heir to Elton John's musical legacy. I was witnessing his creative process at work, and frankly, I was underwhelmed. It was like watching a two year old playing with alphabet blocks.

"She na na na na NA," he stopped again, this time smiling as if he'd discovered a new element to add to the periodic table. "That's it! Right there! It goes up right there!" he said smugly.

I'd been sitting idly in the alcove, pondering my own artistic dilemma: how to sing a song in public when you are only vaguely familiar with the verses? Does one bring a music stand and read from it like a teleprompter?  I could bring one with me to my next open mic night in case they didn't have one handy, I mused to myself absentmindedly.

"She finds herself much OL-der now," Sergio continued with his composition.

I perked up a bit, because I could actually hear the beginnings of a song forming out of random notes and words. It sounded suspiciously like the melody from Junior's Farm by Paul McCartney, but it had a little more of a George Harrison feel to it. 

"She knew it wasn't easy, but -- HO-ly cow!" The gleeful Sergio was clowning on himself now, punctuating the "HO" in holy like a sleazy used car salesman or a religious huckster doing improv.

He kept banging away on air piano, and I drifted off to another place, suddenly finding myself sitting on the carpet in the living room of my friend Andy from group. All the curtains were drawn, and Andy was sitting on the couch in his bathrobe rolling a joint. His wife Jody came in from the other room and sat down next to me on the floor as Andy lit the joint.

"I suppose I'm going to find out what the good stuff is like," I said as he passed the jay to me. It was still moist with saliva, and it didn't want to stay lit, despite my vigorous attempts to resuscitate it.

"I mean...I grow my own," I said, wanting not to appear unhip as I struggled to get even the smallest toke out of the smoldering doobie, "but it's not like what you kids today smoke. It's good...just not great." At least mine would stay lit, I thought to myself.

I mustn't have been paying attention, or perhaps the weed was working on me very subtly, because I let my arm sag down a bit, allowing the heat from the cherry's embers to singe the back of Jody's hospital gown. I instinctively licked my finger and dampened the brown stained spot, and she turned around for a second and then went back to watching TV. That was going to leave a mark, I thought, rather displeased with myself.

Andy, meanwhile, was busy rolling himself another giant joint, as big around as a toilet paper tube. Waving it about like a shaman, it looked as if he could sage the entire house with it. I woke up before any such ritual took place, exiting yet another fragment of a poorly constructed, barely recollected dream, perhaps better forgotten.