(Entered in paper journal at 5 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was somewhere like the apartment of my old friend R. R had walked away and left a stack of photos nearby so I would see them and look at them. They had been given to him by a group of my friends from college. I had also gotten a stack of photos like this. They were from when my old friends ML and PD visited two other friends BC & SA in India.But when I looked at the photos I recognized that R had gotten a lot more photos from my friends than I had. This is why R had left his photos out -- so I'd see them and be jealous.
The last photo I looked at was of SA and possibly the others working on fixing a building. The building looked like a ruin you might see in a Renaissance painting of the nativity: stone walls crumbled, with wood beam frames in the corners. The ground was all upturned, reddish earth, full of building debris. There were taller buildings in decent shape on either side. In the distance were city buildings like oldish apartment buildings in Greenwich Village.
I thought how similar cities all over the world look. This place, India, was supposed to be so exotic. But it looked a lot like New York City in some ways.
I was in a bedroom with PD. She had gotten undressed and into a pale blue bathrobe. She spoke a little with me before she headed into the bathroom. PD's hair was all frizzy. The bathroom light was off. PD stood in the crack of the half-opened door. Then she walked all the way in and closed the door. I walked to the bed and sat down. I may have started looking at photos.
Dream #2
I was in a drugstore. I may have been a worker there. The light was dim; maybe the only light coming in was from the windows. I had arranged a bucket of photos. There were a worker behind a front counter and two workers in a narrow aisle beside me. The man at the counter was tall, thin, white, oldish. The two workers in the aisle were teenagers or thereabouts, black, short, one boy, one girl.
The man at the counter was pleased that I had arranged the photos. But I was actually looking for photos of my own. I thought the boy and girl might know where I should look, as they seemed to work directly with the photos. But when I tried to speak with them, they defiantly ignored me.
I found a shelf of envelopes of photos. I started shuffling through them. They became big, black cartridges which I was loading onto something that looked like a film projector. A white man stood over me, to my left, as I knelt and loaded the cartridges into the machine. I thought, I shouldn't have to do all this work with other people's photos. I'm just looking for my own photos.
The man standing over my shoulder now spoke about some publicly traded beverage companies, Cott Corporation in particular, and why he thought he was going long on them now rather than shorting them.
I saw a black and white image on a thick sheet of glass. It was like a 1940s family standing in front of a house. The image was very small, maybe one and a half inches square. The sheet of glass was big. Soon I realized it was part of a machine. The body of the machine was made of a thick, greenish metal. The machine was about waist-height and eight feet long. It did something like print film images.
An old woman (like a woman from the old Ozzie's cafe in Park Slope in Brooklyn) stood bent over the glass sheet. I could see a log of coppery gears beneath the glass sheet. A light shone thinly, creating the black and white image on the glass.
The woman said, "I've been using this machine for so long. Now hopefully the thing won't break." But right after she said this, the light went out. It suddenly looked like a cigarette butt.
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