(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.
Showing posts with label friend BC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label friend BC. Show all posts
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Sunday, November 11, 2012
(11/3/09) old friends and new; retrieving the troublemaker
(Entered in paper journal at 8:30 AM at Sit & Wonder cafe in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I was out on some walkway, like a promenade, but not a boardwalk (?), before a beach. The walkway was bordered by a large apartment complex, like a housing project building. I stood on something like a wheelchair ramp by the building with my co-worker and friend AR. We stood in the glare of pale, breezy sunlight. There might have been small pine trees nearby.
AR and I were talking about something like getting haircuts. AR might have just finished my hair, and now it was my turn to cut his hair. I had electric clippers in my hand. The clippers turned on and began vibrating to a worrisome degree. I looked at a dial on the body of the clippers. The clippers had a black, plastic body and silver, almost plastic-looking shears. The dial was silvery plastic, and it looked like the dial of an egg timer or an old clothes dryer.
I made some jokey kind of gestures, mocking panic about the clippers going out of control. Somebody's hair seemed to be falling to the ground in wet, black squares about an inch long. I may have seen a paper plate somewhere, for collecting the hair. AR and I were now both laughing at what was apparently a pretty good joke.
Now either my old friend BC came up, or else my old friend R came up and later on turned into BC. BC looked older, more grizzled, with a full beard. He wore a faded, green shirt and a faded, blue undershirt. He was walking away, as if he lived in the apartments and was heading out for the day.
I was surprised to see BC. I called for him. He stopped and turned so he side-faced me with his left side. He turned his face all the way toward me. I couldn't quite remember BC's name, and I kept trying to call him by his last name, never quite saying it because I never quite had it right in my head.
BC spoke with a kind of scruffy-western character to his voice. He said he was going to meet R somewhere. I worried that R might come here. Here I was, I thought, having a good time with a friend, and now R would come and wreck this relationship. But, I though, maybe that's not true. After all, AR was a guy. R wouldn't be jealous of me because of a friendship I was having with a guy, would he?
Dream #2
I was out on something like a dirt road near a vast field like a sports field. It was black night, and the road was lit by a string of dimmish, orange streetlamps. I stood with a group of men. A couple of the men were my age. The other was older, kind of like our leader or teacher.
There had been some kind of conflict between us and some other man who was about my age. The man had been proven wrong in one of his actions. He was thought, now, at least by me, to be a kind of wild, mean-spirited person.
But now that everything had been settled, the older man wanted us to get the young man back into our group. The man had run off down the road, to my right. I went in search of the man. I ran to a portion of road lined on either side by hills about thirty feet tall. The hills were covered with shortish, widely spaced pine trees.
The orange lights seemed to light this area a bit more fully than they had lit the section of road by the playing field. There were a lot of people wandering about on the road and a little way up the hills -- small groups of people spaced somewhat widely apart, yet all together, as if having a picnic.
I saw the young man. He might have looked like my old friend R. He was talking in a kind of mean voice, but he sounded more hurt than angry. He sounded like he might want to be back with the group, but he didn't know whether he could trust them.
Dream #1
I was out on some walkway, like a promenade, but not a boardwalk (?), before a beach. The walkway was bordered by a large apartment complex, like a housing project building. I stood on something like a wheelchair ramp by the building with my co-worker and friend AR. We stood in the glare of pale, breezy sunlight. There might have been small pine trees nearby.
AR and I were talking about something like getting haircuts. AR might have just finished my hair, and now it was my turn to cut his hair. I had electric clippers in my hand. The clippers turned on and began vibrating to a worrisome degree. I looked at a dial on the body of the clippers. The clippers had a black, plastic body and silver, almost plastic-looking shears. The dial was silvery plastic, and it looked like the dial of an egg timer or an old clothes dryer.
I made some jokey kind of gestures, mocking panic about the clippers going out of control. Somebody's hair seemed to be falling to the ground in wet, black squares about an inch long. I may have seen a paper plate somewhere, for collecting the hair. AR and I were now both laughing at what was apparently a pretty good joke.
Now either my old friend BC came up, or else my old friend R came up and later on turned into BC. BC looked older, more grizzled, with a full beard. He wore a faded, green shirt and a faded, blue undershirt. He was walking away, as if he lived in the apartments and was heading out for the day.
I was surprised to see BC. I called for him. He stopped and turned so he side-faced me with his left side. He turned his face all the way toward me. I couldn't quite remember BC's name, and I kept trying to call him by his last name, never quite saying it because I never quite had it right in my head.
BC spoke with a kind of scruffy-western character to his voice. He said he was going to meet R somewhere. I worried that R might come here. Here I was, I thought, having a good time with a friend, and now R would come and wreck this relationship. But, I though, maybe that's not true. After all, AR was a guy. R wouldn't be jealous of me because of a friendship I was having with a guy, would he?
Dream #2
I was out on something like a dirt road near a vast field like a sports field. It was black night, and the road was lit by a string of dimmish, orange streetlamps. I stood with a group of men. A couple of the men were my age. The other was older, kind of like our leader or teacher.
There had been some kind of conflict between us and some other man who was about my age. The man had been proven wrong in one of his actions. He was thought, now, at least by me, to be a kind of wild, mean-spirited person.
But now that everything had been settled, the older man wanted us to get the young man back into our group. The man had run off down the road, to my right. I went in search of the man. I ran to a portion of road lined on either side by hills about thirty feet tall. The hills were covered with shortish, widely spaced pine trees.
The orange lights seemed to light this area a bit more fully than they had lit the section of road by the playing field. There were a lot of people wandering about on the road and a little way up the hills -- small groups of people spaced somewhat widely apart, yet all together, as if having a picnic.
I saw the young man. He might have looked like my old friend R. He was talking in a kind of mean voice, but he sounded more hurt than angry. He sounded like he might want to be back with the group, but he didn't know whether he could trust them.
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