(9/6/05) late for class at the club

(Entered in paper journal at 6:25 AM at my friend R's house in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in a place like a gym that had been converted into a "dance club." the long sides were sectioned with white curtains and the center had white, tall, long tables going down it.

I had come with some friends, maybe from my NYC Americorps program. They walked away, possibly to go get into a fight. I stood in one of the divisions made by the white sheets.

I heard trouble. I wanted to check it out, but I had some misgivings about my friends seeing me and knowing I had come to a dance like this (even though they had just brought me).

Now some Asian girl walked into my section. My friends walked past, but they stopped at some table and yelled at two black men had just been kissing. My friends yelled at them, "Why are you gay?" or "Why didn't you tell us you were gay?" Then they walked off.

There were a lot of people at the dance now. The light was a fleshy red-orange, dim.

I wanted to have sex with the Asian woman, though she looked slightly pudgy and incredibly nerdy. But now she was a Russian boy, maybe twenty-five years old.

We stood in some moonlit cul-de-sac by the dance room. The boy said he was going out to party with everybody. I told him I wasn't coming. I had had a drink or tow and I could feel the weird thoughts coming on.

The cul-de-sac now had the red-orange color of the dance room, the walls like sheets billowing and, where a window was, a curtain or blanket of incredibly soft translucence and texture and thickness.

I told the Russian guy, "Go on. I want to contemplate the colors as they change."

Now I was in a long room like a small lunch room with very low ceilings, bright but soft fluorescent light, lunch tables on the left side.

I was at a lunch table at first. I was drunk, or at least I was tired from staying up all night. I had a 12-inch or 18-inch glass pane that had words on it. The pane was a sign I'd created for a class.

The words were maybe paint, but they looked like chalk. Some of them were flaking and disintegrating into powder. The lettering was a spaced, slender, Art Deco-style, trim lettering. The biggest words were "SUSAN SONTAG" at the top. Then two phrases, two lines each, interposed each other in a confusing way below them. Just above "SUSAN SONTAG" were two words, in smaller lettering than anything else on the sign.

Nobody, I felt, had wanted to talk to me all night, though a couple people would walk over to me after I had left the tables to sit on the floor on the right side.

At some point I realized I was late for class. I ran outside. I was on some campus lawn. There were trees everywhere. The leafs were falling, tan. It was a sunny morning. I ran past a parking meter with a digital clock. The clock read "8:44." I was already late.