(9/13/05) hey-YO!

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

Dream 1

A man showed me a new invention which I had suggested to him. It was a barrel with tubes or wires going through it. The tubes/wires, possibly insulated with red plastic, carried water or liquid or electricity.

I thought the invention was good, but I suggested another addition. I worried that the man would grumble at me or hate me because the suggestion might imply that the invention in its current state allowed some dripping of something bad onto the pipes, and that the whole arrangement of pipes would have to be reconfigured.

But I told the man that all he had to do was put a wooden board over the pipes, the whole circumference of the barrel, since the pipes only ran along the bottom, anyway. Apparently the addition suggested was a coat hook or coat rack.

I was now in "my" "bedroom" in an apartment. The bedroom was open, no walls except the wall with the door out of the bedroom, and no ceiling, so I could see the buildings around me and up to the sky. I was lying on me bed, reading.

I heard a voice like a man catcalling "hey-YO!" from a window behind me. He did this all the time, and I always just had to ignore him. I looked behind me, to the building the man was in. There were two narrow buildings there. They were both painted. The one on the left was beige with pink designs. The one on the right, the one the man's apartment was in, was red with cloudy forms fading in and out of an orange and yellow background, with a repetitive pattern of a moon in front of which an eagle flew in silhouette.

I thought that this apartment building had a name, XXXXX. Housing projects had names, and the names carried reputations. But apartment buildings really didn't. But this one did.

In my mind's eye I could see the street in front of the building. It was wide and busy and on a slope. The building had been abandoned for a while. Even the catcaller was gone.

I looked at the windows on the floors above me.  One window was half-covered with deep blue paper with a one-color painting advertising a Bruce Lee festival. The window a floor up had another one-color advertisement, this time on goldenrod paper, with the photo of Jack Nicholson sticking his face through the door in The Shining.

I thought, Don't look through this window. It's his (the catcaller's). He'll come back and be madder than ever. I saw the face of a bald man materialize.

I now stood outside some place, a cottage or XXXXX but outside, with a Latina woman and her teenage daughter. They were going to show me a place I could have for $550/month, which was incredibly reasonable to me.

They opened the place. I saw inside. It was incredible. It was just a room, but it was enormous. There was a huge bed, and at the head of the bed was a huge window that gave a perfect view of the ocean. I said, "No, no. This can't be true."

(8/18/08) high priced crappy rentals

(Entered in paper journal at 6:15 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I stood before a big apartment building with a woman who was a real estate agent. The building was grey concrete and dirty, almost more like the backside of an industrial building than an apartment building. The building faced a big parking lot like a shopping mall parking lot. The sky was overcast in an electric grey way, almost unreal.

The woman told me I could have a one-room apartment here for $1,500 a month. I knew the place was small and kind of trashy, but I thought it was a good deal. I asked the woman, "Why is there so much vacancy in this place?"

The woman said, "Probably cause the folks are still cleaning up the guts." I realized that the woman meant that someone (I envisioned a big, fat man) had been murdered here, and that the police were still cleaning up what had been a pretty big mess. In the meantime, nobody wanted to live here anymore.

I wondered if the man had been murdered in the room the woman was trying to rent to me. I wondered how the woman could do such a thing to me.

I had made some sort of agreement with the woman and was now somewhere else. I now thought about subway logistics for this place. I knew the nearest train was the Q, but that the Q was a far walk away, and that I would be on a stop that was farther away from work than the one I would get on at my current apartment.

I was on the phone now, discussing all this with the woman. The woman was trying to convince me how easy it was to get to the train. But as she was explaining this, I could see the neighborhood in my mind's eye, as if I were looking at it all while standing at the edge of and on the underside of a highway overpass.

I realized how bleak and trashy this whole neighborhood looked. I knew this was a bad neighborhood, full of crime. I couldn't figure out how the woman would try to rent out such an ugly place in such an awful neighborhood for such a high price.

The woman was explaining something to me like how to walk to the subway to avoid danger most effectively.