military drama in the meat department

Brickyard pizza with green chile & tomato, water, an emergen-C

In the meat department of a grocery store. Admiral Adama is there, as well as several officers who are all wearing white tyvek coveralls, including booties. The officers have been discovered scheming and plotting against order and are being stripped of their rank. They are embittered and furious. Part of their punishment is that they have to...go through the frozen meat section...? But in the process one of the officers discovers an operational manual that reveals that he and his cabal should have been issued certain weapons and were not. It makes Adama look tyrannical and exclusionary, that he's been ducking procedure and that the plotters were right. Now he's the one who is furious. He holds his story that he was unaware that they had been denied their weapons, but I'm not certain if people believe him or not. He orders an investigation. If the weapons weren't issued, then where are they? They aren't in proper storage.

Attention turns to a skinny teenage girl who is in charge of below-counter cold storage units in the meat department. She and her 7 year old sister start dithering, trying to cover something up. But my mother and I are there to find the truth out. We start opening up the freezer drawers. The teenage girl is fretful and insists that she did nothing wrong. The little sister starts running interference. She puts on an obscene lip-synch (or is she actually singing in a man's voice?) of a vulgar rap song. Mom and I watch in dismay, and when she is done we express to her that what she's doing is no good for a kid her age, that she doesn't understand what her little number is aboout, that she should just take time to be a kid instead of a whore. I'm afraid that we will shame her and push her further, though, rather than bring her back down to earth.

empty town

pumpkin soup, grilled cheese sammies with fake chicken, beer, 2 shots of vodka

Josh and I are on a trip to this little town. Josh is there to work, apparently, but I'm along for the ride & hope to just hang around. I'm meandering down this little main-drag street, old brick buildings, a place you'd expect a "general store" to be the main grocery. But not suprisingly, it's another little old town with an ailing Main Street. It's nearly deserted, and many shops are boarded up. But those not boarded up are closed, pretty early it seems, and there's...nobody...around. What the...?

I make my way down one side of the street, and at the end see the storefront where I know Josh is working. The windows are decorated with modern, slick vinyls, the word STUDIO in green block letters and a red 80 in a red circle beneath it. I go a little further down & cross, come back to Studio 80, go in. But Josh is at work somewhere in the back and can't be summoned, I'm politely ushered out with a Thank You and Do Come Again attitude.

I walk down this other side of the main drag now. At the far end there is a tall, modern building, looks like a hospital. When I'm near the door, two guys in business suits come out, briefcases & all. One has oxygen tubes hooked over his ears & into his nose, but no tank on the end. The tube hangs down to his waist & is just open. His friend is telling him that he really doesn't need this thing to breathe, and he shouldn't wear it, slips in some slight jab of guilt about people who REALLY need such things, seeming to be referencing something personal.

I become the man with the oxygen tube. I pick up the end, put it in my mouth, and blow into it. I feel my lungs expand. I'm somewhat amazed, probably intuitively aware that such a thing should be impossible. I get into my businessman car, I drive away.

beating up a husky kid & losing my glasses

Fresca salad with mushrooms as a piadine, little bit of cheesecake with cherries, some Candy Lady fudge, lots of water.

I've gone on a trip, to a city I've dreamed about before. (Yellowish, plastic, futuristic, almost Jetson's-like from a distance.) I am returning home, perhaps by way of some great airiship, which looks like a mall inside and even docks at the mall in Albuquerque. I am hanging out in a "museum," on the ship, which is a largish room that reminds me of an airport waiting room, but there is a grid of cot-like sleeping platforms, and people's stuff is scattered around in little piles. The walls are beige.

There is this big kid, who looks kind of native Alaskan [I know, that's a worthless description]-- probably 18 years old or so, but a husky guy, both tall and quite powerfully built. He maybe isn't quite retarded, but he's probably "slow" and has some behavioral problems. He's with his family, his mother and father. (Father played here by a PNM guy I served at the restaurant yesterday.) The kid is aggressive to me for some reason, and comes up and clubs me on the back from behind. I grudgingly let it go. But then he does something else I don't remember (hurts some kid's pet, just to be cruel?) and I flip. I charge across the room and sock him in the face, knock him down, grab him by the hair and slam his head repeatedly against the wall, knock him out.

Skip to people taking the kid away in a gurney. I'm talking to the dad. I express wonder that he isn't pressing charges. He responds that, "I assume he hit you first." To which I say (not certain if it's a fabrication or not in the dream, but I think it's bes to dress it up), "He hit me a FEW times." I feel a feeling like acid reflux in my ear canal, and I say, "I think he reputured my eardrum." The dad wonders what that feels like, I tell him it's like having lava swelling in your ear.

The airship has arrived at the mall in Albuquerque. I disembark and go to my car, start loading up, still pretty amped up. Just then Shane drives up in a blue car (Jason Foutz's car), I flag him down, ask if he will drive me home. I climb in, leave most of my stuff in my car. Shane tells me that he's been undergoing some sort of radiological treatment on his legs. I look and he's wearing this wierd, plastic, dog-boy-style underwear and his exposed legs are thin, pale, and bistered. Sickly. We driving around and he crosses one leg up so I can see him peel the whole of the skin of a big toe back to reveal meat beneath. He of course thinks it's kind of cool, but I'm really horrified.

He takes me home. People are around, I don't want to talk. I go into my room, which is small, wooden plank floors, has a very shack-ish feel to it. I'm milling around, and I realize that if I want to go out for drinks tonight I have to get my stuff, and for fuck's sake, I left my glasses in my car, I'm wearing my sunglasses. Can I get a ride back, please? But then, where exactly did I leave my car? Wait, where did I put my stuff? Shit, are my glasses & flight lost?

Dream degenerates into a basic anxiety loop from here, though I do eventually remember where my car was and I'm pretty sure my stuff will be in it.

fighting nazis, fighting bugs

This dream is from last thursday night, don't remember what I ate. Scrawled on paper.

I'm fighting in an anti-Nazi militia, taking back our town from them. Moving up and through a tower that adjoins a suburban house. The tower is three or for levels tall, sort of a skeleton of a building, poured concrete walls on left and right, open front and back. Stairways join the various levels. We have a small mortar with us that we use to drop a blast on each level before going through and cleaning out. The people starring as nazis in the dream are faces I saw on myspace as I cruised around before bed.

We jump a train and ride it out of town, hop back off as we pass a high-walled garden. The walls are ivy-covered and the garden is overgrown and in ruins. There is a bonfire burning. There is a restaurant there (do I work there, maybe?). There is a phonebook laying on the ground with a lightbulb drilled down into the center of the pages. Aunt Betty (Wilson) is around, she's making some charitable donation that I don't agree with. I pick up the phonebook and peer into the lightbulb. It is FULL of skittering roaches, all with egg sacks, all scrambling around a mile a minute. I gotta destroy this thing. Moving gingerly through the building (now a house?) with the phonebook, it occurs to me that the whole phonebook is probably full of these roaches. It's some wierd self-contained nest, and they've been eating their dead to continue and multiply. I flip out and I drop it. A mass of dead roaches spill out, and live ones scatter everywhere. They have really long legs-- like daddy longlegs. I think they're on me, I get the creepy crawlies in a major way.

[At this moment, Pee Wee touches her nose to mine to wake me up & I go bat outta hell style.]

why i love museum work

mac & cheese, broccoli, biscuits, some chama fudge

The first part of this dream was some puerile and academic group masturbation thing, which I unfortunately don't remember.

The second part, I am in a warehouse type area, maybe a big museum collections storage area. Maria Sanchez (kind of-- larger, longer hair, wierd clothes) is interviewing me, asking me to tell her the top 5 things I love about museum work. It seems like a gimme, maybe she's been sent just as a formality, but it could be important, too. I'm startled and I start off about something about helping Kate make pies; but then I realize I should back up and talk about actual work that I do. To my dismay, Maria seems nonplussed that I would go the pies route and then backtrack. This makes me uncomfortable. I try to structure a discussion around my interest in art handling as a task & skill, on to list making, and so on. I feel like I'm moving in circles, though.

penalty kick

dinner at howard & ann's, a mid-evening bowl of frosted flakes

On a soccer team, a very mixed bag of guys. Some my age, several much younger and smaller. The field we're scrimmaging at is very dry & dusty, a white clay mess with little grass to speak of. At one point, my team is taking multiple shots, the defenders scrabbling to keep us out. The ball goes out the back and we get a corner kick, except we take it from the point where the box intersects the back boundary. I chip it beautifully into the center, and someone says something about my ability to drop it just right. Our score is imminent, but one of the opposing players punches the ball away with his fist. It's one of two of the really small guys that have stripped (naked? not sure. not the point.) and caked themselves with clay like tribal warriors. I protest his obvious and egregious foul, and whoever is ref agrees to give me a penalty kick. All the guys crowd around the box, but then leave and go into a house, the field comes right up to it. I can look through a sliding glass door and see them all sitting on wooden bleachers. I'm still trying to get my free kick up and going, but I can't figure out where to put the ball. The field has changed from hard, dusty clay to a tiled surface, kind of like an old dropped ceiling. I know where I feel like the ball should be placed, but people seem to be pressuring me to set it much, much further back. I dither.

I ask the coach (who seems to switch between the PE coach from midschool & Lane McIntyre) where he wants me to set up, he asks how someone like ME could get a penalty kick so far BACK. I explain the situation with the hands call on the other team. He asks which player used hands, I point to the two guys sitting inside, but I don't know which one it was. He says okay. I still think the ball is terribly far back (in reality, it would be between the circle and the box, twice as far as it should be). But i'm still confident. The keeper loses focus, moves to one side, I punch it right down the middle. Score.

I go inside, there are several young women in prom dresses, sitting in folding chairs, laughing about "he's not the father." I do a quick stand up, say that those are the words that always make me feel happy. I'm not certain if they realize that that makes no good sense, or not.

carnival justice & vomiting shit [extremely unpleasant. don't read this]

corn flakes, fried okra from a bag, water.

[Carnivale is starting to seep into my dreams, as I knew it would.]

At a family gathering up at my parents' house. Jonesy & Gabriel from Carnivale are there, too, my partners in crime. We're trying to disengage ourselves from the scene, though with tact. We have things that need takin' care of. And ain't none of it good. I find ourselves in an open mountain meadow, a tiny brook flowing past us. I gag and begin to vomit, but it's huge, thick gouts of shit that come up, filling my mouth. I almost have to dig out palm-fulls to clear my mouth of it, and I can't get any air in to try to expell what is crammed in there. I can only push out a bit at a time, and then force that bit away with my hand.

[there was another part to this dream, something violent but pleasing, but I can't recall.]