serhat lives in a magnificent city

I had this dream while hangover napping with Josh on a Sunday afternoon. We had just had IV takeout for lunch, me a Vespa with mushrooms and water.

I'm leaving work, my friend Laura (no such person exists) is going to give me a ride home. I know that Serhat is working at the construction site across the way, and I ask if we can wait at the site entrance so I can see him and let him know I'm around. We wait and wait, but he's not coming out. Someone (Josh?) passes by and says that they won't close up shop at the site until 5:30. I'm suprised, because all of th worksites I've been around are always closed up by 5pm. Laura says we can wait, so we do.

At some point, a clown in a white & green floral print Pagliacci-type get-up rides by on a big three or four wheel bike of sorts. He passes, and I realize that that was Serhat, I turn around and he has just recognized me and stopped and we meet up. But he is no longer a clown, he is Pablo from the restaurant, wearing jeans and a blue denim shirt. He takes me across the street to the home where he's staying with a host family. We go in, I forget to introduce Laura. The family has several members that are in Hoverround type wheelchairs. They are boisterous and playing tug-o-war. We are all out in a courtyard, partly with an overhang from the apartment building. A pastiche of the back sculpture courtyard at the Fine Arts Building and the Varsity Apartments over on Columbia. There are folding tables full of old mouldering boxes of books & files, seemingly old archive or library rejects.

Serhat has gone off to shower, leaving us alone and uncomfortable with the family. I realize that we've lived in this building before, and mention it. The father of the family is the super. He wonders aloud if it was upstairs in "36A" with the red door, where he's been doing some work. I step out into the courtyard to get a vantage and see if I can make out our old apartment. The end of the courtyard, around a corner, is actually open out into a field which fronts a very steep gorge. The far side of the gorge is populated with a medieval town of sorts. I walk out into the field and look back, and realize that the apartment building is actually part of a greater aggregated architecture, a city or Tel that climbs the whole of a small mountain. It is a city on a hill, a fantasy place with a great and ancient and complex history. I can't figure out where our old place was, I try to indicate that maybe it was in that area there, where the stonework is held with white mortar. Or maybe it is further around the side of the city, I venture around an outcropping dominated by an ancient, blocky keep. The setting, sun makes the whole city radiant and magnificent.

I go back to the courtyard, Serhat has come back from the shower. Naked but for a maroon towel around him. For a moment, he is a creepy trollish, grizzled old man with long hair and a beard, but then he is Serhat/Pablo again. By this time, Laura is becoming very frustrated, I can see, and I know we should go. Serhat's English is much better, and we can actually chat some. But I decide to write my number down for him and get going. I walk over to one of the tables and try to fish out a piece of paper, but can't find anything appropriate. I hunt through the tables, somewhat out into the vista again. I finally find an 8-ply (even 12-ply?) piece of matboard with a grid of holes drilled in it. But enough room to write my name and number. I bring it back into the courtyard, and it has become a large piece of cheap plywood with lots of marks all over it. I try to write my name, but I can't spell it right-- TYylr (scratch it out), TlyEr (scratch it out). Frustrating. At this point I awoke.