Drinkable, In A Good Way

Dream: Like A Killer Whale Zeppelin

Amalgamation of past homes and some bits of homes I've never lived in. Perhaps the über fantasy home. Summery afternoon party. Extended family & friends. Something sexual with a woman in a green and white striped dress. Begin music-video softcore sequence. Green and white stripes moving in geometric patterns. Symmetrical, psychedelic dissolves. Split-screen mirror-imaging. Her bending over. Things lifting. Pushing. Pulling. Music from the clock-radio filtered in. "Sexy Boy" became "Crazy Boy".

Sometime before or after. In the huge expansive green yard, like a park. In the distance I saw my brother with a woman, picnicking on the part of the yard that sloped up a tiny bit towards the oversized white picket fence. In the background, I could see a miniature zeppelin or possibly a bomb, painted black and white (also sort of resembling a killer whale in this way), falling nose first in slow motion towards the neighbor's property on the other side of the fence. I didn't do anything to warn my brother. Some strange logic told me that if it were a danger, then he wouldn't be sitting there. The thing will probably fall at a safe distance behind them. Well, let's see. Simultaneously, there was the sense that there was nothing I could do. There wasn't any time. He was so far away. Part of me did try to call out to him. I don't know if he heard me. Then it touched down into the yard and there was an explosion. A huge ball of flame. Things buckled. The white picket fence seemed to expand for a moment. The little knoll at that end of the yard bulged. But they were fine. My brother and his friend were startled and grabbed what they could of their things, blanket trailing behind them as they moved away from the explosion. As quickly as it occurred, it was over.

Later, I walked around the yard with a woman, looking for the area where the explosion occurred. We thought we should get a look at the site. See if there was any damage (we could be liable) and if it was marginal, maybe remove any pieces of evidence (such as the remnants of the "bomb" which I pictured as sort of a popped balloon — the metallic kind, not the stretchy rubbery ones). But the yard was different now. It was smaller. There was no white picket fence. No knoll. I tried to explain to her that there were actually two yards. We made the mistake of going straight out the back door to this one, but the route to the other yard was quite different. Even though they both let out to the same place, which was in the back of the house, and that sort of thing didn't make sense normally, it could make sense in a dream. I imagined if we went back into the house and tried to retrace that route, the house itself and the entire geography of the neighborhood could begin to change. She only glanced at me, half-listening (or pretending to), gave a subtle nod and continued looking around, still thinking she might find something. I got the sense that she thought I was nuts.

Dream: Violent Shock G

I'm a little late posting this one. I think it happened over the weekend. I came across Shock G on a vacant city street at night, the asphalt wet and reflective. His face looked different. Broader, meaner. Shock G was muttering to himself, disturbed, crazy on crack. He fired his gun twice, blindly. One bullet zinged by in my direction. I talked to him. He needed a place to hide out. He was on the run. Maybe it was some misunderstanding. Maybe not. I offered that he stay at my place for a little while until things cooled off. He followed me home. I lived in an industrial-type loft apartment. Once there, his personality continued to dominate. Other crazy cracked-out thugs started popping up one and two at a time, until the whole place was full of hard characters. Like word of a party got out.

Sparrow

Today is the anniversary of the 7.1 quake that hit the San Francisco area in 1989. I was thirteen at the time. A little less than a year later, I began taking care of and eventually adopted a cat that was living in my back yard. I named her Mello, because she never seemed afraid of me and my 13-yr-old shenanigans. Based on her approximate age, October 17th, 1989 also became Mello's unofficial birthday. I imagined that she was separated from her mom when the quake frightened them. Mello was a great cat and I wish I could've taken her with me to Seattle when I moved away, but I wasn't living in an area where she could run free (which she'd always been used to at my parents' house, catching mice, gophers, and birds). It's probably just as well, though, because I wouldn't have been able to give her the care she needed later in life.

We were having an extended summer here in L.A., until Saturday night when it started raining sporadically. It rained hard and steady last night, the water running off the roof in rivulets, onto our front stoop and down the stairs. This morning, when Jamie was leaving for work, she came back into the bedroom to tell me there was a dead bird on the stoop. A sparrow. The rain must've had a role in placing it there, but whether it died before or after the fall is hard to say. I told Jamie to go on ahead to work and I put on my shoes, grabbed a plastic bag and a spade, and went out to bury it in the garden. Before picking it up with the bag, I took a long look at it and moved it gently to make sure it wasn't sleeping. I put it only about a foot down into the wet soil among roots and worms. I knew it wouldn't be long before it rejoined with the earth. The rain continued to fall and the thunder clapped the rest of the day. I opened up all the blinds in the apartment and let the gray ambient light flood in.

Dream: Bizarre Dump Apartment

We moved to another apartment. It was one we looked at in February of this year, when we found the one we are living in now. We were wait-listed and were finally being let in. We had to share a room with another couple. Sort of an older biker (motorcycle) couple. It was a semi-dilapidated building, probably built in the 60's and not built to last. All right angles. Stucco. Seemed just like a shaky metal frame with a thin layer of plaster over it. The one-room apartment was styled like a cheap motel. Two beds. Side-by-side. This other couple seemed to be moving in at the same time. They had that same kind of confused air about them. We discovered you could get electric shocks from walking on the floor. "Don't walk on the floor! Don't walk on the floor! You'll get shocked," we were saying. A cat lived in the worn-carpet hallway which wreaked of cat urine. There was some sort of cookout or community meeting for our building. There were a lot of units in the building, maybe forty to fifty people living there, total. Everyone was very curious about us. I was talking to one young couple and the woman was taking notes in a little notepad as she was talking to me. "I'm writing a book," she said. Then talking to another young couple. I asked the guy, "So what do you guys do?" He replied (with a touch of melancholy) "Oh, we're Santa Monica city coroners." It was getting dark and a bell was tolling somewhere. He was beginning to rush off as he explained that every day after sundown he has to go report in and see who's died and what bodies need to be picked up and tended to. I became aware throughout the course of these events that we had made a mistake. We had left quite a nice apartment to go live in a bizarre dump. Whoops.

Convolutions of the Brain

Designer and architect Gregg Fleishman operates a workshop and gallery in downtown Culver City. Jamie and I had walked past it many times, and noted that the chairs in the upstairs lounge area of The Museum of Jurassic Technology, right down the street, appeared to be by the same designer. We finally walked in for the first time last night when we had an hour to kill before a movie and noticed some new items on display — hanging lanterns that resembled spherical japanese paper lanterns, but composed of many kite-shaped, identical pieces of translucent vinyl, held together with interlocking tabs. If Gregg has a single trademark, it seems it is probably an aversion to the screw, the nail, the rivet, the bolt, the hinge, and the tube of glue. It's like the joke, "How do lesbians build a house?" Answer: "No studs. It's all tongue and groove." Gregg designs like a lesbian.

In Gregg's gallery, one of the first things you'll notice are a number of different chairs scattered about. They are all strikingly handsome and modern, but often seem to conjure a sense of the organic as well (see above title). Almost all of his furniture designs are made from European Birch plywood. What seems to be an exceptionally strong yet yielding wood (or wood-product, I suppose, since it's actually wood and glue sandwiched together). Aside from what seems to be an aesthetic choice, the convoluted forms cut out of the plywood do serve a purpose. Take a seat in one of the "Nebula" designs, and you will feel the chair's back yield softly to the weight of your torso, functioning like a large ergonomic spring.

There are many other things to explore in Gregg Fleishman's studio, from the large jungle-gym structures in the middle of the room, to the Cluster Structure kits that fit on a bookshelf, and a sort of reclining bicycle that I swear I've seen Gregg zipping around town in/on. If you're ever in or around Culver City, try to drop in and see these creations. Your brain will no doubt be teased.

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