(Entered in paper journal at 7:20 AM at home in Harlem.)
Dream 1
I headed to an amusement park. I was now before a ride -- a tall, thin, metal, spidery, hourglass-shaped frame, off the spinning top of which hung long wires to swing set-like seats that almost touched the ground. The top would spin enough so that the strung seats would whirl about parallel to the ground. The seated people could then control their seats somehow to spin around and move higher or lower. I think at first the seats looked like painted, glittery, rocket-like capsules, but that they changed.
It was my turn to ride. I got on the swing set seat. The top only turned slowly. I was barely going up. I tried to turn myself around or lift my seat up some more. But I couldn't find any controls.
I heard someone somewhere say, "The last batch of folks was brave enough to have a good ride. Too bad you got stuck with this batch of folks."
Now my crew mate MG came by and saw me on the ride. He thought it looked like fun.
Now I was able to control the ride. I spun the top faster and cranked some springy string-control so that I was way high in the air, at about ten degrees from only slowly. (This ride was in something like a vacant, dusty lot. I don't know where the other rides were.)
Now Max and I and some interesting older woman were inside a shed-like area. The place was tight, with thick, wood beam frames and no walls, and a few, naked incandescent bulbs lighting the clutter of close-packed tools and boxes. We went to a red truck which had tool compartments dense along its sides.
MG was talking impressively to the woman -- something about a job he had or would have soon. The woman gave an intellectual-sounded response. I felt left out. I thought, grabbing a tub of tools I felt were necessary for the task at hand, At least I know how to work, how to put myself to work. At least I can interact with folks that way.
But now MG and the woman grabbed a huge board or case of tools out of the compartment. They tried to move forward. They'd have to move through a tight frame of wood beams. The tub of tools was blocking the way.
MG and the woman stared at me. I asked, "Wasn't I supposed to bring out these tools?"
They said, "No. We're only using these tools."
I tried to get the tools out of their way. But as I grabbed the but, MG and the woman impatiently bashed the case of tools against me. I felt and saw tools crash all around me and bright light everywhere. All this time the conversation between MG and the woman was still going on. I could hear them now talking about something about homosexuality.
My sight was now of some black and white photos, as if I were holding a coffee table book close to my face. Another voice, like a female narrator, took over for MG and the woman and gave some details about the subjects (probably artists) of these photographs, which were taken by a woman in the 1970s.
One picture I focused on was of a party at a woman's apartment, probably in New York. It was a small living room, with a couch and a woven rug and some thin shelves taking up most of the space. But there were plants everywhere. There were maybe fourteen or fifteen (small and medium) pots of plants. There were even two pots under the couch.
There were about ten people in the photograph. The only woman I noticed was the one who threw the party. She had on black leather pants and some tight-knit sweater with a v-neck. She was thin and delicate, yet somehow blunt-faced, and she had a thin yet long pile of frizz-curly hair about her head and shoulders. Everybody else was male, as far as I noticed. They were all gay, except for the girl and her boyfriend, who stood beside her.
I thought, I can't believe I've been invited to this party. I don't want to be hit on by guys all night. Not that I'm turned off by the thought of being with a guy. But all these guys look like assholes.
I now saw two guys with their arms around each other's shoulders: a normal friendship pose. But these guys were lovers. They were both Latino, though I thought at first that the smaller guy was white. The bigger guy was very dark.
At first the guys both had roundish, wide-eyed faces. But the closer I looked the more I saw that they both actually looked Native American: thin-eyed, with broad, flat sharp faces. Their dress was very 1970s Navajo-style -- very cowboy-like, with tight shirts over compactly bulging stomachs like water canteens. I was actually kind of disappointed that two guys like this would be gay.
Now I stood with another older woman. She was tall, thin, and had the same intellectual attractiveness I find in Diane Arbus. We stood in a smallish apartment that felt like it was in some city in the desert. The place was empty and the light was grey-sky light soaking in through yellow-thick curtains, into off-white walls and a dirty pine green carpet.
The woman was telling her her plans about how to flower this place. The place was something like a public center, a park or garden (though it was just an apartment).
On a ledge in front of the front window was a wide pot full of grey and white and black speckled gravel with a couple sprigs of green sprouting up into a couple white and pink flowers. But behind this pot crept a viny stalk that hugged its way around from the right to the left and stalked up independently on the ledge a couple inches to the left of and behind the wide, pinkish, plastic pot. The stalk was a tropical green that faded up into a tropical green-yellow before flowering in a cardinal-red spike tighter than a thistle-head, combed together like the wet hairs of a thick paintbrush.
I told the woman I liked this flower very much. She said, "Yes. MH," (one of my Americorps crew mates) "found this flower all the way down that way."
When the woman said this I noticed the vine, which I saw circling around and behind the right side of the pot, actually climbed farther right, low along the wall in one green and yellow strand down a hallway, to a point in a boiler room where MH had made the discovery.
The woman continued. "MH found it when she picked a quarter off the flower." (I now saw a quarter by the vine behind the right side of the pot.) "I was about to wring her neck, because she spread this invasive species just so she could pick up a quarter. But MH told me that the quarter was for a man who was diabetic and who needed every last bit of his money for his diabetes medication.
"So I said, 'Well, that's okay then. But you have to be very careful, because this vine thrives very well around these small blossoms. But I like that vine, too.'"
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