Last night I had another DOUBLE DREAM. It feels like dipping into a little dream pocket from which you emerge again later on, be it in the original dream or back into reality itself (maybe??). I experience these about once a month. They usually occur when I am in a especially deep REM cycle because of all the flower supplements I have to take to sedate myself every night. Come to think of it, I’m not sure if I can uhh “activate” a double dream any other way.

In this particular dream, I went into a two-story deli in New York City, like the one I slept in one New Year’s Eve a long time ago now. I walked up the stairs to the second floor and there was a large family table with a plushy red wraparound booth. There were no other tables open, so the people at the family table invited me to sit down. All of them were strangers and were talking and eating. I felt exhausted, so I lay down and fell asleep on the booth, which is to say I went further down into my dream, and dreamed within my dream.

When I awoke inside the second dream, I was lying on a booth in the observation car of a train headed for Austin, where I used to live. I have taken this train before in real life. I knew that I was on an infinite loop around the city, which doesn’t actually exist. I knew also that I was on my second lap. Eventually we pulled into a station and I got off. By then it was nighttime and it was warm outside. I was alone in a fancy shopping center that was moodily lit and there were fountains and little pools everywhere, which were lit from below.

For some reason I was holding Dante, and it stressed me out that I was in public with my cat, even if there were no people around. I walked up a flight of marble stairs to get to one of the square-shaped pools, and Dante jumped out of my arms and into the water, which he would of course never do in real life. He paddled around and I put my hand in the water and realized it was a hot tub. I climbed inside and picked Dante up and slung him over my shoulder and panicked a little because I didn’t know where to go with him. We wandered through the abandoned shopping center, alone in all directions with the lights still on and the fountains still flowing, and thought that if I could just catch the next train, I could get us back to Hyde Park in Austin where my old house was. And then I felt a great sadness remembering that that house wasn’t mine anymore, that I could never enter it again, and that my life in that city had ended and that I was now trapped inside of it with my cat with nowhere to go. With no other option I kept walking as Dante clung to my wet shirt.

And then I woke up.

I went out into the kitchen and fed Dante. I’ll be honest: I told him about my dream, I reckon just to get it straight in my head. I was still coasting on dream fumes and not altogether there, which is something that happens to me when I eat those flower capsules. And I wondered at it, and realized I have not been to Austin since just before Laura Rokas moved from Canada into my house in West Oakland, which was seven years ago. That’s insane. I spent a fair amount of my life there and I rarely ever think about that time. Now I feel compelled to see it again, though I know it is ruined, or at least a completely different city than the one I had known.

In a week and a half it will have been eight years since I left Texas to move to California. I had a real good time there a long time ago. I loved my neighborhood and my street and my strange little house. But I think it would almost make me sick to see it again. Sometimes I’ll decide to never watch a film I like again, so that I can keep it frozen in time and remember it exactly the way it was, and maybe that is what I should do with Austin . . . though I suppose there is no getting around it if that is where my mind takes me in a dream.

by the way: from here on out, june 10th is a holiday for us green-eyed people, of which i know a fair amount?? maybe it’s animal magnetism or something . . . we just find each other

anyway, it was a good day for us. i’m looking forward to celebrating again next year~ 💚

do not email someone from 10+ years ago . . . it is heartbreakingly sad and immediately makes you feel extremely old lol

I have three Movie Dads, all of them are dead, being Harry Dean Stanton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Bill Paxton. Every time I watch one of their movies, I’ll think, “Aw man.” I miss them. They made it look so easy. And even when they play “bad” / mean guys, there is still something sweet about them . . . and all three had the power to take a mediocre movie and elevate it simply because they were in it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Bill Paxton died way too soon. And Harry Dean Stanton gave us many more years than we deserved~

Rest in peace :,(

I am a theater of processes, he told himself. I am a prey to the imperfect vision, to the race consciousness and its terrible purpose.

Yet, he could not escape the fear that he had somehow overrun himself, lost his position in time, so that past and future and present mingled without distinction. It was a kind of visual fatigue and it came, he knew, from the constant necessity of holding the prescient future as a kind of memory that was in itself a thing intrinsically of the past.

dune

today is the day rachael died

Tonight I spoke to my dad on the phone, and he regaled me with an anecdote about how once, many years ago, a tow truck driver had angrily pointed his finger in my dad’s face. This gesture was a tremendous slight to him, as I imagine it is for most people in Western civilization. And then he said something that sent a chill down my spine. He said that he had told the driver: “You’d best get that finger out of my face right this second or else I’m going to break it.”

It shook me because my dad had inadvertently paraphrased a line from a literary hero of my own creation, being the seven-foot-tall super-soldier called Gritt Calhoon. I have written about Gritt many times. He stars in three tremendously stupid and insane books I have written. Like my dad, Gritt will not suffer a finger in his face. In my forthcoming novella (lol), GRITT CALHOON AND THE BLOODBATH BENEATH MOUNT TERROR, a finger-pointing confrontation takes place, albeit a more benign one.

To wit:

The old man smiled. He poured a beer from the tap and held it aloft. With his other hand he pointed his index finger at Gritt. “For you, my friend,” he said. “Drink up, and be glad.”

Little did the old man know, pointing a finger at Gritt Calhoon was often a fatal mistake.

“Ya best git that fanger out my face,” Gritt barked, tensing his thighs to the rhythm of the bongo drums he heard inside his head—an old death march number from his time as a POW on the moon of Ananke. The dark melody which only he could hear had been droning on ceaselessly inside his skull for decades. “Unless yer itchin to have one less fanger, that is.” Gritt spaced out just then. He remembered a chili dog he’d eaten fifteen years before.

The old man did not waver. He stood there smiling, still holding the beer. Foam crept over the side of the glass and down onto his brittle fingers.

Wut’s this old shit stain up tew? thought Gritt. This wily ol dog ’n his fuckin kinship with all mankind. Hell, I ain’t gunna fuckin pretend I ain’t at least a li’l bit curious ‘bout what makes a man’s heart smile. . . .

“All right, all right,” said Gritt finally, squinting at the man with bloodshot eyes. “I’ll drink yer stinkin beer and eat yer lousy meat, if’n it’ll gitcha ta put that there fanger away. ’N jus eff-why-eye, last man who pointed a fanger at me done got his nuts shipped back to Kansas in a dirty diaper.” Gritted grunted and offered no further explanation.

Yeeeaaaaahhhhh!!! I guess I really am my father’s son after all.

I guess one of the “”themes”” of this book is father / son relationships. I know that sounds insane, given the bewildering passage you have just read, but it’s true. It was a beautiful accident that this theme emerged. I mean, Gritt is haunted by many thousands of nightmares that play out in his head, and chiefly among them is the death of his beloved son, Andronicus “Andy” Trebuchet Calhoon. He’s got a complex. You’ll see!

(Would you read 130 more pages of stuff like this?? I guess we’ll all find out soon.)

Anyway . . . love you, Dad~

hmm . . . yeah lol

man when i get my next apartment this is gonna be me

scottish writer cara ellison, who once lived on my couch in oakland, totally gets it lol