(3/6/09) blow off

(Entered in paper journal at 8:38 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

My old friend ML and I had gone to a cafe together. It was very late at night. We had walked down a suburban sidewalk with houses and small shops alongside it. The sky was pitch black, but everything could be seen, as if the street was lit for a movie. There were a lot of people around, like this was a party night in a college town (or perhaps one of the crowd scenes in a Stephen King novel).

I now sat in the cafe. The cafe was large and decently lit. There were a lot of people in the cafe. The front half may have been higher than the back half by abut a step (around nine inches). There were all kinds of different seating arrangements. Along the right wall was the bar/counter. I sat at a small bar near the front door, on the left wall. To my left was somebody I had come along with.

ML had gone to meet with somebody. I was waiting for his meeting to finish. In the meantime I was writing, hunched over the bar and notebook like a child with a coloring book.

At some point ML came back. He had been longer than I'd thought he would be, and I also felt like he'd been excluding me by not including me in the meeting. ML said something to me. I blew him off, as if I had to finish a thought I was writing. ML walked away.

I finished what I was writing and looked up to my right, where ML had been. I didn't see him. I thought he'd gotten mad and left altogether. But then I saw him sitting over near the middle of the room. I knew that if I didn't make up for how I'd blown him off, he'd really make me pay for it later on. So I went to talk to him.

ML sat on a couch that was tall like a bar stool. His appearance and dress were more mainstream than usual (???). His beard was thinnish and scraggly, but softly so, as if it had been styled. He wore a "worn-out" wool cap, some kind of flannel-style overshirt, and a drab undershirt. His face might have been different -- narrower, with soft skin but sharp cheeks and thin eyes. He may have looked at me like I was nobody and he didn't even care who I was.