(2/5/05) "the country"

(Entered in paper journal at 8:30 AM at Starbucks on 98th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was driving across "the country." I saw a map of "the country." It looked like an early-1900s map for the first subway, except stretched all over America. What would have been subway ilnes were rivers.

I had some worry I can't remember anymore about crossing these white lines in the peach map (which were crisscrossed with red like arteries and dotted with sharp colors like a picture up too close) because they either slowed me or stopped me from getting to the actual roads I needed to get to.

I feel the presence of my mother.

Then I was driving a car down a country road, wide, green hillsides all around, with a man in the backseat, medium  height, fattening, bald, white-haired, maybe sixty years old. He kept telling me where to go, just to irritate me. It was like I had picked him up as a hitchhiker but now he was telling me all the places to go, getting me sidetracked from my own trip.

We were now close to where he needed to be. The man gave me one more irritating direction. I flipped him off in some weird way, with my shirt half over my hand so my hand somehow resembled the leafbud of an ash tree. But it's also like I was momentarily in the passenger seat, flipping the old man off with my left hand, instead of in the driver's seat.

We were now in some basement like the tacky yet cleanly carpeted, walled, and painted basement of a new church or twenty-year-old office building. There were only a couple fluorescent lights on down a hallway from this long room with a couple counters.

I stood at one counter. The man stood at the other. We were saying goodbye. He asked me for some info. For some reason I felt I should just write him my phone number. I scribbled some notes on a tiny piece of paper and wrote my cell number in the midst of all these notes. I regretted this for a second and then told myself there was no reason to regret it. He was an okay guy after all.