(10/6/05) all-you-can-eat buffet scuffle

(No time/place info for paper dream  journal entry.)

(10/5 -- I will try tonight to influence my dreams with thoughts of Ghost in the Shell II the anime movie.)

(No dreams were recorded in my dream journal for the night.)

***

(Daytime paper journal entry.)

Dream 1

I can't remember the beginning. I was somewhere with my friends R and Y. It was like we were doing some job outside. I had eaten a burrito that had been wrapped in aluminum foil. Once we finished we walked to the end of a parking lot and stood by something like a gas station. All I remember now is that it was a bright white building. The parking lot was empty. The sun was bright.

I sat or stood against a wall, either in the sun or the shade. R and Y were up by the front of the gas station. Possibly one of them was in or kept walking in and out of the store. One of them was talking on a cell phone. Someone had invited them to a "roller coaster park" or amusement park. I knew they would also invite me, though I didn't really want to go.

I don't really know what happened next. Something about an errand was mentioned. We walked down the parking lot toward a building that looked like a closed Kmart. It was a white building, the doors of which were boarded up with what looked like plywood painted aquamarine.

The errand had apparently become getting lunch. I thought about this with a little dread. I'd already eaten a burrito, and I didn't want to go out for a big lunch. Now I pulled two more burritos out of my back pocket. I definitely didn't want to buy lunch now, now that I had two more burritos.

I thought there was possibly a way for me to get away from these guys. But, seeing some guys opening and closing the aquamarine boards, which I now saw were steel, I knew I was just going to have to go with them.

I was now in some restaurant with them. It was like the cafe at the back end of the old Kmart on Colfax (and Wadsworth?) in Denver. But it was huge, like three or four cafe lines put together. R and Y had gone up to get food from the buffet-like lines. I stood at a table, about to sit down, but looking at my burritos and feeling guilty for even eating these. After all, hadn't one burrito been enough?

But now Y came up and told me to come check out the buffets. Apparently there were three buffet lines, each set up like they were different restaurants, with different styles of food. I walked up to the buffets with Y, telling myself not to buy any food, just to look out of interest.

The buffets were set up so that on the left and right sides were two immense, long buffets, and in the center was a small, pagoda-like buffet with something like soups on it. Y and I went to the left buffet first. It was all sub sandwiches, just a long, stretching bin full of sub sandwiches. The wall behind the buffet was wallpapered with a slightly grainy photograph of a blue sky dotted with puffy, white clouds.

I thought, Well, it's never worth it to spend this much money on a sub sandwich. But maybe I can just get a soda.

I walked away from the buffets altogether, though, back to the seats. I was about to sit down when I heard Y say, "Hey, Preemie! Come check this out!" She was now on the right side buffet, which, I could only barely see, was some kind of exotic food. I ran up through the soup buffet, which, I could only barely see, was some kind of exotic food, to get to the right side buffet.

R stood at the soup buffet. As I ran toward Y, he shoved me with his back and butt and pinned me against the guardrails for the buffet. Holding me there with his back he said, "No you don't. You aren't getting anywhere near Y."

I slipped away but he moved quickly and trapped me again. He was pissed. I tried to struggle against him, but he kept slipping out of my reach.

Trying to figure out something, anything to do to him, I stuck my hands first into a beef mushroom-type soup (kind of a french dip au jus consistency) and then into a guacamole-consistency soup, which I grabbed a hot handful of and flung into R's face.

R backed up (?) and away from me. We now stood by a trashcan by the chairs and tables. R gave me a look that scared (and scares) the shit out of me -- it was like that of a psychopath who finally decided to kill and thus saw his object as already dead, like I was just a stupid fucking absurdity for still choosing even to breathe and talk. It was a blank, petulant stare.

R was pissed that I had gotten him off of me. He was even more pissed that I had gotten a bit of his glasses and his left jawline messy with the guacamole-type soup. But he was most pissed that I had gotten some of the soup on the left side of the collar (?) of his "expensive" shirt, but that if R didn't wipe off his neck, which he wouldn't, he would let the soup get on his shirt. And he wanted that, because for so long he had wanted an excuse to kill me or embarrass me so badly that I would wish I were dead.

I half-apologized. But I mainly told R, "You just have to get off of me when I tell you to get off of me, that's all. Besides, Y's my friend, just as well as you are, and I have every right to talk to her."

He pushed me away and said, "I am going to kill you or embarrass you really bad. You don't ever tell me what to do. You are mine."

Now he was gone. I sat across from Y. She asked where R had gone. I told her he just got a little pissed and decided not to hang around for the rest of the day. She said, "Well, he should just learn to deal with the fact that not everybody in the world is going to do things whenever he wants them to."

Now I sat staring out toward the front of the restaurant, where the Kmart used to be. It was now a skyline, behind a couple skyscrapers and across a river, of what I possibly thought was New Jersey and/or lower Manhattan. It was in pinkish-orange sunset light, the buildings looking orange-purple in their shadows. I sat on the thin tile floor like I was sitting on a hilly lawn, waiting for a concert.

I was trying to think, as my friend ML sat beside me and spoke (Y now gone), how on earth I would make do back in New York if I couldn't stay at R's place. I thought that I should perhaps ask ML to let me stay with him. But right as I was about to ask him, turning up to him and lifting up my arms as if to embrace his chest like I was a fawning girl, he disappeared.

Now, instead of ML to my right, My mom's old longtime boyfriend JT was to my left. I didn't see him, but he was there. The skyline was moving now, from my right to my left, a bridge coming into view, as if we were on a boat.

JT pointed out some smallish, greenish-window-walled building kind of where Battery Park would have been. He told me, "See? That's the Jewish Aquarium Museum" (?) "right there."

I said, "Oh yeah?" first trying to figure out which building JT was talking about, then trying to figure out what made certain aquatic life Jewish.

I don't know how, but things now changed quite a bit. I was in something like an apartment that was the entire floor of a skyscraper. The floor was concrete (?) painted black and with Arabian rugs all over. There were a few nice couches as well.

The walls were either brick or black-painted concrete. There were huge holes for windows. But I don't think the windows had any panes. The window holes were from ceiling to floor and about ten or twelve feet wide, so that the "wall" was more like a wide column between the windows, more than like a wide space of wall between windows.

The space was like an artist's space, or, rather, like a space where artists could just hang out, not work. A few people were there, talking, and I was their friend. But I don't know them, nor could I really see them.

The strangest thing was that the building or the floor was revolving, turning counterclockwise. At first I thought it was just my changing perspective. But even when I held my head still I saw that building tops were "moving" from left to right before my eyes. The city looked clean, new, with buildings made out of red bricks and copper-colored, tan bricks. I was very interested in the views, but I also had a feeling that the turning of the building meant it was going to collapse.

I now heard (Y?) call for me. She told me to look out a "window" to my right. I immediately saw some neighborhood, which I thought was an incredibly beautiful yet dangerous area of Brooklyn. I was enamored with the spooky starkness (even in full, shining daylight!) of these buildings. But I don't remember them now.

I don't know what happened next. But now I was walking to a bedroom after having made an unsuccessful joke to my friend PD. There were no windows in the room. A yellowy, incandescent light shone from the center of the ceiling.

There was something like a couch-like mattress in the center of the floor. I flopped down in it and sighed to ML that PD didn't think my joke was funny. ML just grinned and was about to say something kind of rude and annoying about my sense of humor.

But apparently I predicted what ML was going to say. I butt in as he got a few words in and said something like, "Oh, yes, now it's time for you to repeat some word I characteristically say until you beat me down with a sense of being completely known and understood. You're such an ass."

But ML didn't take my comments too harshly. I don't think I meant them so harshly. He just gave me a lazy, half-dazed smile and rumpled his head under a blanket and made a joke about me.

Now a dog like my friend R's dog ran into the room from a door to my right (I had come in from the left). "She" kind of attacked my right hand, biting it softly but repeatedly.

I said, "Oh, I forgot, you like eating people's hands, don't you?"

"She" said, "Yes, I do, but I also like being petted," in a voice like a 75% feminine, 25% masculine, watery-timbered computer voice. "She" now lay back on my lap and resembled soemthing like a naked boy covered in short, silky, black dog hair. I pet it and it opened its mouth in "pleasure" that looked more like the breathless gasps of a burn victim.

Now someone somewhere said, "Oh, he's coming! Just open the door for him." They meant to use the electric door opener to open the door on the first floor but not to use the buzzer.

My sister said, "Oh, I know how to do that. I've done it before." But before she could get to the door opener the person there buzzed up to us. "My friend's dog," who was now much more, though still not quite, like the dog, sprang from my lap, barking insanely.

I now understood that the man coming up was my mom's new husband, a Japanese man. I got up from a room that wasn't quite the room I had just been in and walked down a dim hallway with a couple doorways to wide, airy, classy rooms and into a "central" room where the front door was located. The light was a rich tan-yellow.

The man had just come into the house. He was about five-foot-five, maybe 150 or 160 pounds, wearing a blue, hefty, knit sweater, slacks (or jeans?), and plastic-rimmed, black glasses. His face was kind of thick. He was wide-lipped and weary-eyed. His hair was alternately thinning greatly and full but obstinately messy. His skin was very dark, almost brown, a dull brown.

He walked toward the kitchen, where my mom was, only half-regarding me. I told him, "Hello, sir, nice to meet you. Can I ask who you are?" He just grunted and kept walking.

I said, "You have no business continuing if you don't tell me who I am." He now said something politely and slowly, but so quiet that it looked like he was on an almost muted television. He kept walking.

I told him, "You cannot continue until you tell me who you are." But he walked past me and almost to the "kitchen," which was now just another dark hallway.

I turned, sternly called to him, then walked up behind him, grabbed him with both arms, and attempted to pull him out of the threshold. It wasn't really working. It was like I had no power of resistance.

But now a son of this man ran up to him and said, "Dad, where have you been?" I now felt like a fool for having tried to stop the man. I had only done so because I wasn't being respected and the rules I had been asked to uphold weren't being respected.

I was now somehow in the kitchen, which was nice, light, airy, and clean. My mom was at the stove, apparently boiling a pot of mussels (?). The steam clung in the air, but it smelled and felt nice. My mom walked to the refrigerator (black and shiny like glass) and opened it as I told her, "I tried to get him to tell me who he was. But he spoke with almost no voice at all and then just kept on walking."

My mom said, "It's okay. He's very understanding. You don't need to worry about having embarrassed anybody."

I saw into a pan in which my mom was frying wide, thin, purplish cuts of sausage with other meats and a lot of green peppers and onions.

I now sensed that this man's wife (!) had arrived, as well as all the other children. The wife was Indian (i.e. from India). The children (maybe three or four of them) were Indian- and Japanese-looking. I was excited to meet them all, because I felt like they were skilled at some kind of mysticism, not consciously, perhaps, but deep down.

They ran around in different rooms. I flew through a dim hallway and into a dim living room. My position was cross-legged, sitting. Dim, cobalt blue light from the dark sky outside poured in through the big window in the living room. The only other light was from some other room, perhaps from the "entry room" or the kitchen. A couple kids and the wife were in the living room. I flew in through the right and flew out through the back, i.e.

Having seen the kids I thought I shouldn't really fly because they might first think I was showing off, and because they might second think I was flying because I guessed, based simply on their racial backgrounds, that they, too, had the ability to fly.

When I got out of the living room I landed. I was in a dark room. I walked into another dark room, the floor of which was littered with JUMP Japanese comic books, all arranged in a horseshoe shape. I think I thumbed through some of these, trying to find an issue that would be interesting to the kids, so I could have something to talk to them about. But I abandoned that idea as well, thinking that their Japanese background didn't exactly mean they'd like manga.

I walked through the hallway and back into the living room. Only the wife was there now. She looked like the mother in Monsoon Wedding, but she also seemed like some kind of businesswoman in her early thirties, American, possibly white, very attractive, with a slight intent to seduce or at least tease me. She was standing and walking in front of the couch, which was an L-shape on a bluish rug on a hardwood floor. (It seems like this apartment was a huge apartment on a high floor in a Manhattan skyscraper.)

The woman came up and asked me, almost furtively, "So... with all that... of yours, then... is that something you're going to keep for real?"

I said, "What of mine? Do you mean then...?" She said, "Yeah, the moving around stuff." (She meant the flying, of course.) She now sat down and was from now on, I think, only like the mother from Monsoon Wedding.

I sat on the floor, flopping my arms up on the couch just to the left of her lap. She told me, "Yeah, we have a friend who practices that stuff. He's even started to make a business out of it, charging people $188.10 to..., so I guess he's..."

She now started crying, not wailing or weeping. Her voice stayed normal, but tears gushed out of her eyes in three, wet, solid streams. She looked forward as she continued speaking, as if preoccupied. I had a feeling she had lost a son.

I asked her if she was alright. She said, "Oh, yes. It's too hot, that's all. Too hot, but it's too cold. I need to change the thermostat."

I got up and walked to the wall with the thermostat. There were two arch-shaped, aluminum bars resting against the wall, stacked against each other. On top of them was a cardboard ad-sign for a thermostat or CD. This confused me at first (!).

When I understood this wasn't the thermostat, I fumbled with the sign to get it out from in front of the thermostat. After I fumbled clumsily for a couple seconds, the wife cluttered up behind me and just grabbed the sign and threw it away.

I looked closely at the thermostat. It was a round one with an orange needle telling what the temperature was set at. By turning the casing, a metallic, pale copper-green plastic, you could move the needle, behind clear plastic, around, to bring the temperature up or down.

I saw that the needle was right at one hundred, which meant that it was neither too hot nor too cold. I showed this to the lady, but she grabbed the thermostat and twisted it. Satisfied she walked back to the couch.

She was incredibly depressed. I wanted to understand who she had lost in her life. I felt like it was a son, who had died in the World Trade Center collapse. But I didn't quite know how to ask her. I did say something. But as she started to respond I woke up.

(12/4/04) y on trial; ansi test; murdering my doll friend

(Entered in paper journal at 8:45 AM at the Tea Lounge on Union Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I walked into a cold, sterile room like a bright-fluorescent lit police investigation room as my friend CV, who sat in a hefty, steel chair, interviewed my friend Y, who sat on a tabletop, possibly next to some radio device.

Y was trying to justify her activities to CV. But CV kept interrupting her with insults and frustrated outbursts. I walked up to CV to defend Y. I don't know whether I had "physically" been there before.

Now the place changed into an outside storage area or a columned patio like at the Meem Library at Saint John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I hadn't been able to interact with Y in the previous scene. I hoped I would be able to now.

I yelled at CV, "Leave her alone! Let her talk, at least! Let her at least say all that she has to say!" Y, still sitting on the tabletop, though the tabletop was now a bit farther off, looked over at me. I was elated.

I said, "It's okay for us to listen to each other here if nowhere else. This is a dream. It's only a dreamworld."

As I said this a chair slid before my face, its metal backing blocking my face like prison bars. I held onto the chair back, almost as if from the side now. I looked down a bit. I thought, I wonder if I can fully wake myself into this dream and if that really is Y I'm seeing.

I looked up. Now, inside the now shed-like building, I saw Y as a tall, fat, round woman with short hair and even a goatee and mustache. She was droning on and on to me and yet automatically, as if playing a repeated inner monologue to herself about some female lovers she had and how it was good she'd finally come to understand her sexuality. She looked off into the distance, like an automaton.

Now three women, all butch-looking and tall like "Y," walked out of some nondescript shadow like they had arrived just on time, if not a second or two late, to illustrate "Y's" point.

I thought, I don't like them. Then I thought, No, no. You'd better like them, if you want to re-establish your friendship with Y.

Dream 2

I was in a classroom that didn't have any lights on and got its light from some half-shaded windows, possibly behind me. I'm pretty sure the desks and room kept shifting. I felt very small in my desk. I was surrounded by kids "my age," whatever that was.

Our teacher, someone like my high school US History teacher, walked through the desk aisles. He had just administered an aptitude tests which might put us into secret, advanced programs. He handed out papers I thought would give us our scores. But he told us to write something on them and then pass them back to him. They looked like blank tests to me. I worried, thinking he had messed up our tests and that we'd have to take them again.

He now said he was going to give out our results by calling out our names and giving us a score on a scale of one to one hundred. I cringed, thinking I'd get a ninety-six, knowing that ninety-eight was the minimum score for entry into the advanced programs.

The teacher got through a few names before stopping and letting us know that the science section of the test has been almost completely ANSI questions, which was somewhat unfair, since few of us had been experienced with ANSI. He asked if any of us knew what ANSI stood for. I said something about American Nautical or Navigational... XXXXX. I don't think the teacher heard me.

The teacher now asked if we knew what the special molecular structure of a XXXXX rope was. I "saw in my head," as if the image were projected onto some wall in the classroom, a coil of rope, wet and soiled as if it had gone through a slightly muddy river. I could see that the rope was porous and extremely flexible, though its construction made it look tight-wound and rigid.

Dream 3

I sat on a couch watching TV beside some pretty girl who sat beside my friend R. The pretty girl asked me some question. I tried to answer, but R interrupted me, bragging about how he was doing so much more in his life than I was.

I tried to tell R to stop it. R was now in a sleeping bag, laying across the couch. The girl was gone, apparently. Even as I began speaking to R, he interrupted me, whining out in a slimy way, "So you don't like what I do, huh? Well, I can do whatever I want."

R's feet, which were behind me, slowly slipped up to my back, like they themselves were the couch cushions. R rolled me right off the couch and against a coffee table. He laughed like a worm, "Heh! Heh! Pretty embarrassed now!"

I flipped around and grabbed him, yelling all kinds of things I can't remember now but which were so vivid that I felt upon waking like I could physically hear them. As I yelled I began punching and punching R, who laughed at first, then was slightly surprised, and finally ceased to be a real person. I could also sense the pretty girl on the second floor of the house, looking down from a small balcony like a ghost in shadow.

As I continued yelling the scene shifted. I now held some kind of stuffed version of a decapitated R (in overalls) against a wall. I kept punching and punching, hoping I could just murder R with punches.

But now I finally realized that the thing I was punching was just a "doll." I couldn't "remember" if I had already murdered R or if I was still just thinking about it.

(8/21/05) violent hygiene

(Entered in paper journal at 9:30 AM at Ozzie's coffee shop on Garfield Street and 5th Avenue.)

Dream 1

It was a bright, hot day. I was in a desert landscape full of mounds, each of different materials. I may have been working with "my NYC Americorps crew."

Now I sat in something like a hospital waiting room and/or restaurant. I sat in a chair, but I think next to me was a pale green vinyl booth. It seems to have been smashed up against or into another booth or circle of wood chairs like mine. My coworker DO sat in the first booth.

My backpack, all dirty and dusty, lay by my chair, slumped into the other "booth." A Spanish family sat in that "booth." A really pretty girl sat in the chair where my backpack was slumping over. The girl was grossed out and scooted over a bit.

DO said something ilke, "That's not good hygiene, Preemie. Did you think a girl would want to sit by your backpack with all that salt-grime on it?"

I now remembered the mound I had been working on was of huge salt crystals. I thought, Well, maybe the girl should be turned on by the fact that I worked hard in a strange place like that. But I moved the backpack away and felt ashamed of my sloppiness.

I don't know what happened next. Then, for some reason, I and someone, maybe DO, were following someone, maybe a doctor (?), through the hallways of this place. Whereas the "waiting room/restaurant" had been cheerily enough lit with natural light, the hallways were dim.

We opened one door. A doctor stood somewhere, possibly unseen, like against the wall and to the left of a doorway. Also to the left of the doorway was a tall, shrubby plant with vines (?) growing out of it. A patient stood just in front of the doorway. Some of the flower-dotted vines crept over him. We had the door open only about halfway, the opening to the left, i.e.

The unseen doctor went on and on about not knowing exactly what species of plant this was.

The patient brushed the vines off and told the doctor, "I don't care what species the plant is. I didn't come here for that." I shut the door, feeling like by standing there I, too, was holding up the man from his purpose.

We walked to another room, which may not have had a door. The room was dimmer than the hallway. It was sort of long and wide. In the middle was something like a conveyor belt or really long examination table. All along it were small shrubs or trees with wide, fragrant, purple-red, heart-shaped leafs. A couple "doctors," male and female, were walking around the room, discussing things I couldn't understand.

My friend (now PD?) and I walked close to the plants. The smell overpowered me. Without thinking, I grabbed the leafs and shoved them in my mouth. The leafs were thick, as thick as five leafs stacked, and they tasted like sweet apples. I thought to myself, This is a redbud tree. Do all redbud trees have leafs like this? Am I supposed to be eating these leafs at all?

Suddenly I felt like an idiot in front of the scientists. With my mouth and hands full I ran out of the room in search either of a room with a plant that was definitely a redbud or else a place outside where I definitely knew a redbud had been planted. But I couldn't remember any place where I had seen a redbud.

I stood in a room, in front of a tree. But something distracting was happening, or maybe I didn't want to be "caught in the act" (i.e. I didn't want people to catch me acting weird with these leafs), and I couldn't focus effectively on examining the tree and seeing if it was a redbud and eating the leafs.

Now it was either late night or early morning. It may have been cool and drizzly. I was outside, in a residential neighborhood and between two tall, steep hills. My friend/coworker KA drove up and picked me up. As we drove the headlights made the drizzle look silvery.

KA said we had been planning to pick up my friend/coworker KB, but that KB had been late. I was spitefully glad we weren't picking up KB. I said something like, "It's unusual that she'd do something like this, but I don't think it's out of character."

KA looked at me suspiciously, as if wondering why I'd want to undermine things with KB. I myself wondered that. Now KA was blaming me for some mistake that had gotten us off track.

Now it was daytime. We were on some mountain/plain roadside, or perhaps just some grassy area with no road. The grass was fiery yellow, green, and orange, as if the grass were changing color, going dormant for the fall. Some other cars were parked here, kind of widely spaced. We two were here to work.

We walked up to KA's car, toward a tall, black man with dreads. The man stared at me. When I got up to him, he pulled something out of his pocket like it was a switchblade and then shoved it toward me and shouted out a "boom!" at me. I flinched. Then I looked down and saw the object was just a straw. The man laughed, self-satisfied that he had scared me.

Everything seems reversed now. Instead of walking

I walked like this.

But now I turned around to face the man again. I was a little afraid. But when I got up to him I mock-congratulated him for scaring me. Then I laughed and laughed in his face. I wasn't afraid now. I wanted to beat the shit out of this guy.

The man walked away slowly, trying to act like he wasn't threatened. But I didn't want him to walk away. I called him back, telling him he was the real coward if he wouldn't fight me, and that only cowards scare people for no reason, anyway.

Now he was running down some hill of grass and pine trees. I ran after him.

It was night. Somebody sat on the slope. I thought it was the man. I ran up, yelling that now he was going to face me once and for all. I grabbed the person's shoulder. The person turned around. She was an older woman. She looked at me pathetically. I felt bad and tried to explain myself.

But now I was walking into a tightly spaced cafe. The place was all dark, heavy, rough wood. There was plenty of natural light, but the darkness of the wood still gave the place a classy kind of dimness. The place was like a corner or "L," with a round column on the inner corner,

and two tables very close to the column and each other.

I sat at a table with a "woman" I didn't pay much attention to, and my coworker SC, who was reading the paper. In the other table was some 19th century-style man with a round face, a bowler hat, and a puny mustache.

SC spoke with the "woman" about the article he'd just read. he said something like, "I could belive that they're all related. It doesn't seem strange to me."

Now the "woman" spoke in a gaudy, deep voice. I realized the "woman" was a transsexual. I was disappointed. I looked at the "woman." She looked terribly mannish. I wanted to ignore her completely, but the way the man at the other table scrutinized me made me feel bad. I spoke directly to SC.

I looked at the article. Apparently the article claimed that six children had been conceived by an alien and born of an earthling woman. There were six photos, and the children all had a Nosferatu-like look, though some children had a bit bigger eyes or more robust bone structure.

(9/2/05) joyless euphoria

(Entered in paper journal at 7:15 AM at Starbucks on 86th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was in a bedroom, half of which was more like an empty, sheet metal-walled warehouse. The bedroom part was bedroom-sized, and the warehouse part was warehouse-sized. There were five or six couches close together, heaped and draped with disheveled blankets. At first I sat on the floor, legs folded lazily under me.

My friend R, somewhere, possibly walking behind the couches, said how when he had gone out last night with some of our mutual friends from college, that BMC had (to R's delight) played out some personal joke to the point where everybody was yelling at him to shut up.

I thought this was funny at first. But then I realized that I hadn't been told anything about our friends planing to hang out. In fact, R had asked me earlier in the day if I had any plans for later on. I had told him no. He asked me if I could, then, stay home (to watch his dog?) and I said yes. So he had tricked me to stay at home instead of going out with our friends.

R was now sitting on a couch, covered in some blankets. I told him, "You know you did that to me! You asshole!" R just sneered and chuckled and didn't look at me, as if he didn't have to.

I told him, "Don't ever do that again or you'll regret it."

R said, "I'll never regret anything."

I got right in R's face (although now he was something like a sort of pretty woman dressed as a Monty Python parody of an old woman) and I pointed at "him" and yelled, "I'll punch you in your face! I'll bust your goddamn eyes! I'll do it right now! You deserve it right now!"

"He" still didn't even look at me. "He" said, ""You'll regret that, if you do that."

I screamed and pulled "him" off the couch. It was like I was mostly grabbing blankets. Then I threw some naked person onto the ground. It was like a face-down version of me. But it "was" "R's mom."

I yelled, as if screaming in R's ear, that I was going to fuck his mom now that I had kicked his ass. I had flipped the person over. It was now something like a headless version of a boy or a girl. But in some sense it was a beautiful woman about my age. I straddled the "woman" (who I think was now facing down again).

The room was all living room now. It was small and bright, with one couch and one TV.

I hesitated over penetrating the "woman," going into her vagina as she lay stomach down with her legs closed. The tip of my penis hurt. I felt like I had warm goo all over me from my inner thighs up to my bellybutton. Then I had an orgasm. I pulled myself out I sat at the "woman's" feet. There were two stomach-down bodies now. I was in between them.

Now some black and white photo of a red-haired, crew-cut, redneck-looking bully appeared before me. A voice asked me something about my violent behavior. It compared me to (Eminem?) and said the name strangely.

I was still feeling the joyless euphoria of orgasm, which also contained some undertones of a savage blood lust. It was like I was a murderous animal listening to the seemingly meaningless speech of a human.

The voice repeated the name again and again. As it did I became more and more aware of myself. Something in the photo changed as well, as if an invisible camera swipe were slowly being lowered over it. I thought the photo would take on color. But it stayed black and white.

The more the name repeated, the more aware of myself I became, the more I was ashamed of what I had done. But I also felt more and more of a surge toward orgasm again -- once again, no pleasure, just that insect-like euphoria.

Now I was fully aware, almost as if I had woken from a dream, and I ejaculated, almost terrified that now I'd never be able to change who I was.

(12/29/05) murder by self-defense

(Entered in paper journal at my friend R's house in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was on a field with some young guys who had attacked me with something like clear baseballs. I was close up in the guys' faces. The guys lay on the ground. I had attacked them in return. They now seemed knocked out or dead. But now the guys shouted at me somehow, like they had only been pretending to be out or like they were shouting from outside their bodies. Either way, they were trying to ridicule and frighten me.

Now I looked at a magazine article about a young woman who had, at maybe only nineteen or twenty years of age, gotten the death penalty. A few of the photos in the articles were like videos. Some showed the woman going to the electric chair. One may have showed her dead. A chilling one at the end showed her walking away from one interview -- it was strange to see a picture of her dying or dead right beside one of her before death.

Another series of photos, all squares one-third inch to a side, maybe twelve squares across the top of a page, showed the woman's progression into insanity. In all the photos, the woman wore blue jeans and a magenta, v-neck shirt. She often wore sunglasses.

In an early photo in this series, the woman stood by the bed of a pickup truck. The woman's hair was short and feathered. The woman had a kind of homely, lower class look. She always looked intimidating, but I think I was in love with her. I might have known her personally. As the photos progressed, the woman got skinnier, less intimidating, but more haunting. In one, where she smoked a cigarette, she looked to be about fifty years old.

Now I read or "got" the story. The woman, at the time of the last photo, was attacked by a group of young men and women, each of whom had a deadly weapon. The woman had been holding the receiver of an old, rotary-style, wide-base phone.

The woman used the receiver to relieve every person of their weapon. Then she killed every person with the receiver.

The law ruled that the killings were done maliciously and not out of self-defense. So the woman was sentenced to death.

(2/18/06) fighting a skinhead with a big house

(Entered in paper journal at 8:49 AM at Muddy Waters coffee shop on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in something like a roadside gift shop. The shop was full of people rushing back and forth. I don't know what I was doing there. Eventually I felt so bullied by everybody that I backed to the left side, near a garbage can and possibly a sales counter. But everybody kept brushing up against me even then, so I walked across the small floor to a painted wooden bench.

A boy (black or Hispanic?) sat by me. I was against the armrest to my left. I had something like a newspaper or a big book in my hands. At first I thought the kid was going to taunt me like everybody else. But he turned out just to be interested in me. I wanted to embrace the boy and read to him from my "book." But I was afraid that if I did this his parents, or any adults nearby, would try to accuse me of having bad intentions.

I was about to embrace him, anyway. But a big, shaved-headed, white man, the boy's father or guardian, sat down between us. The man wore a tan trench coat. He managed to sit so that he smashed my feet, which were now up on the bench. I may have been wearing yellow or pink canvas shoes. The man had pale blue eyes.

The man sat with his back to me so that he faced his child. He would then look over his left shoulder and smirk at me. I knew he just wanted to give me a "half-look" to give me a queasy sense of uncertainty and annoy me.

I just tried to ignore the man. I went back to reading my "book." The man, now seeing that he couldn't annoy me by splitting up me and the boy, smashing my feet, sitting with his back to me, and constantly giving me a queasy "half-look," now kept swinging his arms backwards so he would hit my "book" (which now seems to have been the comics section from a Sunday paper).

I may have taken the comics section and rolled it up and used it to hit the man, or I may have just hit the man with my hands. I swatted him on both his ears.

The man was big. And he looked like a skinhead. I was afraid of him. But I wanted to fight. But the man didn't even look at me.

I yelled at the man, "You know what you're doing! You're responsible for your actions! I'm not trying to bother you! Don't bother me!"

I lost focus, though somehow my tirade continued. The scene slowly changed to a slightly barren wilderness before a white-grey cliff. The man had a small structure that looked like a children's mock-up of an alpine-style, two-story house. I, too, had changed into an old, white man with a balding forehead and crown and long, scraggly, salt-and-pepper hair and beard. I probably wore a too-tight white t-shirt and jeans. I had complained at the man.

Now I was walking back to my home, which was something like a short, thick-trunked, gnarled cherry tree with a full canopy of tiny, synaptic branches the leaf buds of which were like rose thorns (actual thorns, not spiky leaf buds like the buds of beech leafs). I didn't live in the tree -- i.e. I didn't live in a hole in the trunk, in the canopy, etc. Instead, I just stood by the trunk, and that was how I lived at the tree. And I never actually "saw" "myself" (the old man). I just "saw" the tree and "felt" "myself/the old man" walk to the tree. I even "felt" something like a silhouette against the tree.

My statement angered the big white man. He was coming to fight me. I knew I'd have to fight. But I didn't know how I could. The man had a "big house." All I had was this tree. I already felt defeated and pathetic.

(5/2/06) you got something to say?; the big joke

(Entered in paper journal at 5:51 PM at Starbucks on 57th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I stood by "my door" in "my bedroom." I looked through the peephole. A roommate, a black man with long dreads and a mean look,  walked toward my door. At first he seemed unaware of me. Then he looked straight at me. I thought, Fine. If he knows I'm looking at him, let him know. I'm tired of ihm thinking he's got everybody scared.

The man walked straight toward me as if there were no door. Then there wa no door. He had been changing into a woman as he approached me, even though "she" was still a "man." "She" looked at me with an ugly face. "She" was somewhat dark, round, with thin, eyes, a white tank top, and a palish blue, denim skirt.

"She" asked me, "Why are you staring at me? You got something to say?"

I told "her," "Yes. You always make all this noise when everybody else is going to bed. It's rude and mean and you need to stop."

We now stood before a doorway outside like at a suburban house with a front yard. She told me, "I've been proud of you for making it this long through all the noise. It's a type of lesson for you. are you complaining about your lessons?"

I didn't feel defensive or threatened. But I did try to justify myself.

Somehow both the woman and I got sidetracked and had a conversation about something outside.

Dream 2

I was on my bed. I heard my landlord in the hallway outside. The landlord was getting ready to leave.

I sat up, jumped off the foot of my bed, and opened my door. My room and the hallway both had an opulent wood and gold glow in the morning sunlight. The hallway was enormous, with plush, green carpet and thick wood walls. The ceilings were high. A stairway went down to another visible level and then back up, like this.

My landlord was on the lower level, but I could see him. A few people, all black, hung around the hall, telling the landlord there were no problems and he could go home.

I yelled at the landlord, "P! P! I have a complaint! Everything's not okay!"

Everybody looked at me, angry. I ran down the steps. It occurred to me this guy's name was PR XXXXX. I couldn't remember his last name. It struck me I might not be able to contact him if I didn't have his last name.

I yelled at him, "The man in this room" (I pointed to a room on the lower level) "makes noise all night long. I'm tired of nobody doing anything about it."

I knew that I was putting myself in danger for what I was doing. But I had to do it.

The landlord said, "He's just a poor Hispanic." (Or Mexican?) "You can't just get mad at him after one incident."

I took the landlord's statement to heart. But I couldn't figure out why I did so. First of all, the man was big and black. He wasn't a poor Hispanic. He wasn't a poor anything. And he had done mean things to me ever since I'd gotten here.

It was night. I was in bed. Suddenly my door was bashed in. Two short Mexican men burst in. I jumped to the foot of my bed, which was now tall.

The second Mexican man pulled a shaving razor

on me, yelling, "You got my friend in trouble! He's just a Mexican" (?) "who can barely speak English!"

The men weren't trying to get sympathy. This was all just another part of their big joke. But when the second man shoved his razor at me I grabbed the man's wrist and then the razor. I pulled the razor out of the man's hand. But when I tried to slash the man I was somehow ineffectual.

(6/3/06) the female gauze

(Entered in paper journal at 10:42 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

There were two men and a woman. They were at the woman's house. One man was my boss BS. The other man was a black man, possibly Michael Jordan. The two men had bullied the woman. But somehow the woman had gained power over the men.

The men were now very small, wrapped in gauze bandages. They fit in the woman's hands. She stood at the top of stairs and threw the gauze so the end of each strip stayed in her hands and the gauze unwrapped from the men as they tumbled down the steps. The men may have stopped, not completely unwrapped, before a Christmas tree in the living room.

(9/18/06) recruiting floyd bowie; can't reach my grandmother; the vanishing stealth bomber

(Entered in paper journal at 7:35 PM at home in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was on a subway train at night. I might ahve gone some stops too far. I was with my Americorps coworkers VT and SM. The train went underground through enormous, fluorescent-lit tunnels and then up above ground through an area like a mountain town. During that time it was like there was lightning and snow.

It was Christmas Eve. I was trying to find someone from our crew who wouldn't mind working. If I could find one person, everyone else would fall into place. VT suggested "Floyd Bowie." The next train stop got off near Floyd's house. But VT warned me that perhaps the parents wouldn't want Floyd to work.

I apparently got off the train to go to Floyd's But I didn't really physically get off the train. I just kind of floated down around through the small, snow-covered city that was nestled between some mountains in purple night light.

I stood at the base of the bridge on which the train ran -- a beautiful, long, stone bridge (thought also not unlike the bridge dividing Park Avenue in East Harlem). Down a slope under one of the arches and on the other side of the bridge was a tree bathed in orange streetlamp light.

A black man stood against the tree as if embracing it, urinating. I thought, Don't let these guys see you. This neighborhood's tough at night. They'll all gang up on you.

It was like I was floating around again. I ended up on the corner of a small hill where "Floyd Bowie's" family's house was. The house was a tall, cubic structure, with white walls on the left, right (and back?), and a glass front wall (and glass ceiling?). A second story like a balcony stood high over the first story living room, which was ample and spacious but with plenty of furniture.  The entire house glowed a uranium green, as if lit from the inside.

I was captivated by the beauty of the house. But I didn't want to get too close. I was afraid the parents would think I was exploiting Floyd and pressuring him to work on this day. I thought I would just call and let Floyd's family know I was in the neighborhood. I could see if I could stop by (even though it was probably 2 or 3 AM).

As I was calling I was walking by the bridge again. Under the arches and down the hills, in orange streetlight, were tough kids. Finally they saw me and slinked along after me. I wasn't getting Floyd's phone number right, and I wasn't leaving the right message. I had to call again and again to try and get things right.

I ran into a corner -- a wall jutting from the bridge. I had missed the stairs leading up to the train. I turned around.

An Asian boy stopped me. Some of his friends stood in the distance. He was tallish and fattish. He wore glasses, darkish blue hospital scrub pants with clownish designs, and a plain blue hospital shirt. The left shoulder of the shirt was held together by a safety pin.

The boy did something to bully me. I "fought" him weird, so I ended frozen with my feet kicking his left shoulder (?). I pulled the safety pin off the guy's shirt. The guy was just laughing at me. He grabbed my legs or arms and taunted me. He told me I couldn't get out of his grip, that I wasn't tough enough.

I was going to shove the safety pin into the guy's neck. I got close. The kid took a silver lighter out of his pocket. He said, "You did just what I wanted you to do."

The guy put the lighter over my head. I stood back (apparently back in control of my legs). The guy put his lighter away. I was about to go at the guy again. But he said, "Ah, ah, ah... You might want to do this." He tapped his head.

I tapped my head. I had a flame coming out of the crown of my head. I patted it out. I was furious. I knew all the kids were going to attack me now.

Dream 2

It was like I was under a table in a house with no front wall or a huge, open front door showing the wide view of a small, mountain view on a sunny, crisp day.

I was on my cell phone, trying to make a call. I had heard my (grandmother P?) was in bad shape, maybe even dead. I had somehow missed a call from her, out of carelessness and not wanting to talk to her. Now each time my call failed to connect seemed to prove more and more what an awful person I was.

I could almost hear my (grandma?) scolding me for being such an awful person, to let her die like that. It was almost like she died partly to teach me a lesson.

Dream 3

I stood with a friend (can't remember who) on open ground on a clear day. (Now it seems obvious to me we were on an asphalt strip next to an airplane hangar. But this was not obvious in the dream -- I simply felt like I was somewhere near a forest.)

I looked up. I saw a "Stealth Bomber." I pointed it out to my friend. The bomber flew over us once and then slowly a second time, fling upside down and low so we could see the two pilots waving at us.

I shouted to my friend, "Did you see that? They waved!"

We looked away. But I couldn't believe it. Why would anybody wave at me? It must have been my friend they were waving at.

I looked back up. The jet seemed to be frozen in place. I saw the pilot in back "waving." Then I realized he wasn't waving. He was signaling. He was trying to get me out of the area where the jet was trying to land!

Now I meandered all over the place like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to get out of the way, looking up at the jet the whole time. The jet lost its body, as if it had never existed. When the "jet landed it was just a cockpit on wheels. But it still looked cool. I knew it was still an important vehicle. It had landed so slowly, gently, and quietly, though, that I wondered why the back pilot had made such a big deal about me getting out of the way.

(7/25/07) control of the pole

(Entered in paper journal at 5:45 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I stood in a misty landscape, possibly moving as if on a train, in the dim evening. I heard a woman talk about how much it cost to live in this area. I saw a figure like $612,000 per year in my head. The woman spoke, probably about this figure, as if she had gotten a good deal. I thought, Why is it so expensive to live here?

I stood in a tall, wide building like an emptied warehouse with a handful of desks in it. There may have been no glass in the windows -- the building mostly open to the bright morning air. The walls gave off a bluish tint. They were like rough, unfinished concrete.

My co-worker MW sat at a teacher's desk at the "head" (more like the side) of the room, giving the Sales department a presentation on research his team had done on housing prices. The members of the Sales department sat in students' desks.

I had left my copy of MW's printed presentation over the blackboard, off to the right of the sales force. I reached up and grabbed it.

The presentation may have been over now. I walked up to a young man in the back row who may have been sleeping. (The seats were now arranged perpendicular to how they had been before, facing now to the left of the building instead of the right half of the back wall. The seats were also rows, long tables, instead of single desks.)

The young man, white or Hispanic, had a thug-like look to him. He wore a big, baggy, white jacket with blue designs on it. When he looked up at me from under the hood of his jacket it was like he was looking out from under a rock. I was afraid -- like I was afraid of telling the young man something he didn't like. But all I wanted to do was tell the young man that the presentation was over and that we were all leaving.

I was in a hallway of a smallish suburban house. I was walking into "my bedroom" (?), which was to my left. I had to grab some notebooks to get ready for a presentation. I was embarrassed by how shaken up I had let the young man's mean gaze get me. But I tried to convince myself that I wasn't shaken up at all.

When I grabbed some notebooks out of a wicker basket high up on a bookcase, two or three other notebooks started slipping down. I tried to hold them in place, but they became unmanageable and slid down to the ground. I knew that I couldn't control the notebooks because I had let myself become jittery and clumsy -- because the young man's mean gaze had shaken me up.

I got angry, indignant, and stomped out of the room. I walked along a flagstone path. The house I'd been in was now down a short but steep slope off to my right. To my left was a vista of desert mountains.

I stood huddled against a pole, or possibly a phone booth. I looked over my left shoulder, behind me. I thought, I'm so bored with my life, my job. I wish I could get out of here.

I looked out over the vista of desert mountains. One mountain I saw was, on the far right, mostly green with trees. In the center it had a vertical striation of basalt-like maroon stone and tan stone that spread out into wide stripes at the base. This section of the mountain had new cookie-cutter house on the slope and the base.

The far left section of mountain was like a mountain that had been covered in geometric, fluorescent plastic. In some patches it was green and in some patches it was orange. There were houses on the mountain here, too. The houses were also plasticky, like the mountains.

(At this point I got off the train and headed into work. I resumed the paper journal entry at 6:14 PM, after work, and after a visit to my psychiatrist A, I believe. I wrote at the Starbucks on 29th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.)

I had finished dealing with a group of bullies who were being verbally abusive. They had stopped I was now standing on a porch. Now one of the bullies came at me with physical threats. The bully was a scrappy, black boy with a black sweat-hoodie jacket, black t-shirt, black jeans, and a squarish, red baseball cap with the bill tilted rakishly to the right side of his head.

At first I thought I would avoid the boy by getting away from the porch while he calmed down. But as I left the porch the landscape became harder to traverse: it was slowly cluttered with broken pieces of scaffolding, metallic fragments like off of large pipe-seals or caps. I walked until i had to jump from stable piece to stable piece. I worked my way counter-clockwise around a huge boundary of standing blue scaffolding-wall.

At the same time I heard the boy's friends say, "If he doesn't face him," (i.e. if I didn't face the bully) "he" (the bully) "will just think he" (I) "is a chicken shit, and he'll keep attacking."

I got around the final bend of the scaffolding, knowing I'd have to face the bully. I was ready. He stood maybe twenty-five meters away, across a span of scrap wood and metal, like the debris of a house that had been hit by a storm.

The boy swung a long, red pole at me. The pole was like plastic-coated metal. The red "plastic" was ribbed, almost like the ribbing on the hose of a vacuum cleaner at a car wash. I grabbed the pole. The boy swung the pole with me at the end of it. He was trying to throw me off it so he could hit me with it.

But I was slowly gaining an understanding of how the boy was using the pole. I was about to turn the tables, to use my understanding to leverage the boy's actions against him.

The boy dropped his end of the pole, thinking I would fall with the pole, flat on the ground. But I was ready for this move. I landed on my feet, and I now had complete control of the pole. I was about to begin hitting the boy with the pole.

(1/6/08) swimsuit harassment; moonlighting friend; signs in the mall

(Entered in paper journal at 8:47 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was talking with a woman wearing a long, white shirt. The woman had bare legs. She said how she ahd bought a new swimsuit (white, I knew), which she was wearing under the shirt. I asked the woman if I could see her in her swimsuit. The woman got mad at me. We were co-workers. The woman somehow made me think she would sue me for harassing her.

I was riding in a car driven by a kind of scraggly-looking man. The man somehow convinced me that asking a girl something like if she'd let me see her swimsuit was the same as asking the girl to have sex with me. That made sense to me. I decided to apologize.

Dream #2

I walked into a small, almost empty bar. One of the volunteer supervisors I worked with over at New York Cares was behind the bar, wearing a black dress. She turned away as soon as she saw me, hoping, I believed, to hide her identity from me.

She asked what I'd like to drink. I told her I'd like a beer. She poured a tall glass of beer and put it on the counter. I thought, Does she make so little money at New York Cares that she needs to supplement her pay by tending bar?

Dream #3

I was in "a mall from my hometown." It was moderately busy. A young, black man with pale skin and wearing a grey windbreaker jacket walked toward me, about twenty feet away from me. He flashed a bunch of rude gestures at me to scare me. I got pissed off and flashed some kind of gestures at him. We had passed each other as I had done this. The man turned and made some inarticulate grumbling as if to say, Oh yeah? Well, we'll see.

Another man walked beside me. He was white, maybe a little oldish and worn-out, with a softish, roundish face and big, watery, blue eyes. He said, "You shouldn't do that kind of thing. Now that guy will just have it against you from now on. He'll find a way to get back at you."

I was walking down a brightly lit, almost empty corridor of the mall. I was trying to find some point of reference that I could remember from the last time I had been in this mall. The current appearance of the mall was so unfamiliar to me.

(5/26/08) washing a painting; no idea who i am

(Entered in paper journal at 9:06 AM at Flying Saucer cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was possibly on a dark shore with my mom, my aunt M, and another woman, possibly my cousin AH. The sky was dark, almost brownish. The ground was like mud, or like muddy pools.

My mom and the other woman stood in two different puddles full of muddy water. They were wading their arms into the water as if cleaning something off. They were also searching for something, possibly a painting.

I ended up standing in the water in my mother's place. I may have held the painting. I may have been washing it off with the muddy water. As I was doing so, my aunt was talking about how incompetent my mom was, how she hadn't been able to find the painting.

Dream #2

I stood in a very cramped room with a few people, among whom were my mother, my oldest nephew, and a few other family members. The room was probably a kitchen and was bright with light from a window. My nephew sat by a stainless steel refrigerator. His dull reflection showed on one of the sides of the fridge -- possibly not the side he sat next to, which may, however, have been bright with window-light reflection.

I said to my nephew, "You know that this you" (I pointed to my nephew's reflection) "isn't real, right?" My nephew said yes. I then asked him, "But, now, are you quite sure that this you" (I pointed to him, but toward his lap) "is real?" I could tell that other people in the room were listening to me and thinking that I was trying to teach my nephew a good lesson.

There was now a scene before me -- a McDonald's menu all in red, as if written in some kind of fancy menu card and hung up on a wall. I was working to figure out how McDonald's sales would perform given their new menu.

I now sat in an audience, looking out at a very dim stage, which may have been lit with red-orange light, and which was pretty much level with the front row of seats. There were two men, possibly Asian, who were making some deep statements about something like business or finance.

As the men started speaking, some recording started, music or voice, which was supposed to appear like it came from a device, like a phone or a HAM radio, or a person at a table on the right side of the stage. I thought the double-sound was making a statement on the reality and unreality of everything we say -- as if everything we say is and is not based in reality. The speech of the Asian man became more philosophical than businesslike.

Suddenly one of my senior co-workers, KU, who was sitting behind me and just to my right, got angry at the person sitting behind him. He said, "You'd better apologize and clean that up right now!" I could tell that the person sitting behind KU had spilled something like a chocolate shake on the floor and that it had spilled into KU's row. The person behind KU, I felt, was a young man, pale white, with shaggyish, blonde hair and possibly some scraggly facial hair and wearing jeans and a t-shirt for some heavy metal band.

KU said, "You have no idea who I am, and how much I can mess with your life if you don't apologize!"

The man behind KU now said something like, "I have just as many connections as you have!" He then made some reference to a group of very powerful people in the Private Equity industry.

I had been hoping KU could get this guy to apologize. It had becoming clearer to me that this guy had spilled his drink into KU's space on purpose. I thought KU had been right to stand up for himself. But now I felt despair at the fact that this guy fought against KU in the same way and simply wouldn't apologize.

(12/27/08) a tangle tale; the gravel pit

(Entered in paper journal at 9:23 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I stood out on an open field by myself on a greyish, warm day. I was flying on a red kite. The kite was really big and seemed to be at a towering height.

At some point I may have seen a tangle of other kites, which were red and blue. I may have tried to avoid the tangle. My kite avoided the tangle, but then a strong wind came up and dissolved the kite. All that was left was the frame, and possibly a clear, gelatinous film where the red plastic (?) had been.

The kite may have crashed, and I may have run out of the way of it. I now looked at the tangle of red and blue kites. It was a bundle of long strips of red and blue kite fabric. The strips reached up to the towering distance my kite had reached, but they touched down to the ground as well.

I saw one of the strips lose its ability to fly. It seemed to disjoin from all the other strips and to slide out of the body of the tangle under its own weight. I was afraid the if one strip fell, the whole mass of strips would fall, and that if they fell on me, they would kill me.

I ran out of the way, though not particularly panicked. It was like as soon as I started running I became less afraid, remembering how lightweight and soft kite material really is.

I may have seen the very barren structure of what would be a tall building like a warehouse or movie theater when it was fully constructed. I now stood under a tarp-tent with a white roof and plastic, white poles.

There were people in line, possibly "to watch" the kites. I got in line, but some old man butted in front of me in a really annoying way. The man was shortish, bald, fattish, with leathery, tan skin and brownish sunglasses. He had a little girl, maybe his daughter, with him.

I at first tried not to show how annoyed I was at him. But I suddenly got uncontrollably angry. I got close to him and made gross noises. Then I actually hit his right ear. This may have caused some kind of stir. The line may have broken up, the people in line may have turned to gather around me, thinking I was crazy.

Dream #2

I walked out onto a strange field with my mom. The day was grey with heavy clouds. The field was dark brown, wet earth with tall clumps of grass.

My mom was leading a group of us on some mission. My mom may have stood on or before something like a small pond that was either frozen over or had solid matter in it that could be walked on. She was taking an instrument like a shovel or jackhammer and either breaking the ice to take something out of the water or taking the solid pieces out of the water.

My mom called and waved to the others of us as if she were a military leader. The others went up to the body of water, which had a dark, grey metallic gleam to it. Somehow the whole atmosphere looked "as if" it were stormy and apocalyptic.

I didn't go with the others, however. I had a bag of bones (?) in my hand. I needed to go bury the bones. My mom yelled after me to come with everybody else. She sounded very threatening. I yelled, "Fuck you! I have to take care of my own things!"

The "bones" were now seeds. Then the seeds were encased in the squares of a chocolate bar. I walked over to a gravely pit. The pit was a burial pit. The pit had a lattice structure, a grid of wood, embedded in it.

I remembered that the bones of John Lennon had been buried here. I didn't want to disturb the bones. I was afraid they would bring John Lennon back as a bad spirit. I also knew I (or others?) had buried other seeds within this pit. The seeds themselves were like bones, and disturbing them, I feared, would also have bad consequences. Nevertheless I tossed in the (now) almonds, which were coated in the melted chocolate of a candy bar (although some were still in full squares), into the burial pit.

But when I pushed my "shovel" -- some weird, metallic instrument like a roto-rooter with a spade tip -- into the gravel, all the gravel in the pit began sinking. In some squares of the grid, the gravel receded entirely, revealing something like a living space below, almost like an ugly, messy version of Bugs Bunny's house, maybe with some skulls lying around.

I thought I would need to find more gravel to fill the pit back up. The pit may have needed to be full for the magic of the seeds to work. But my fear of the consequences of disturbing the bones and the seed-bones may have caused the pit to lose its gravel.

(3/19/09) no suicide attempt; library creepsters

(Entered in paper journal at 9:15 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I sat in a presentation room with a group of co-workers. The room was dimly lit with effusive, yellowish light. The walls were white. The room was full of folding chairs.

My superior co-worker RLC got up to give a presentation. Both of his legs were in a cast, and he had a bandage on his head. He had been sitting in a chair at the front of the room, to the right of the room, and he'd had to be helped up. As he crutched his way to the podium, he was telling everybody how it looked like he'd attempted suicide, but that he really hadn't, and that he was fine.

Dream #2

I sat in a library like the Rose Main Reading Room in the Schwarzman branch of the New York Public Library, except with thinner reading tables and something of a college library feel. I was reading books that were big and colorful, like children's picture books.

Two youngish, white boys sat down, one on either side of me. They had a hip look -- clean, but with wool caps, pea-green coats, button-up shirts tat were unbuttoned, and t-shirts. The boys spoke back and forth over me, to annoy me.

At one point, the boy to my right asked a question like, "You know what would be good...?"

I turned my head and yelled, "You know what would be good? If you sat somewhere else to talk to your friend!"

The boys seemed hurt. They stood up and walked away. I might have gotten up and walked somewhere else, too. I felt bad about having yelled at the boys, who, I now thought, were innocent enough.

(4/11/09) graveyard/shooting; lone men and mobs

(Entered in paper journal at 8:31 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

It was daytime. I was in a car with my family. The blue sky was possibly webbed over with thin clouds, dimming the overall light. My mom was probably driving the car. We were driving down a mountainside road, into a small valley between two mountains. The valley was part of a range that extended far in the distance to my left. We were arguing about where we were, as if either this landscape wasn't a certain kind of landscape or as if we were heading in the wrong direction.

 We now approached the valley. At the base of the slope opposite us were tallish headstones, all of orange-tan stone, mainly shapes like square columns with smaller spheres on top. I made some comment about this place being a cemetery, as if that proved we were or weren't in the right place.

We turned right and drove through the valley. I looked to the right (I had been in the backseat on the driver's side, but I wasn't quite there now) to see monumental, white headstones. There were gigantic heads springing out of columns like flowers; headstones of double-men, from the torso up, reaching out and looking forward; and other similar headstones, all in a style like an Art Deco imitation of Hellenistic sculpture.

The size and odd style of these headstones gave me an ominous feeling, as if where we were was a prophetic indication of something bad that would happen to us.

We now drove among headstones. We drove past (to our right) a tall headstone of greyish stone, like a pedestal displaying a large sculpture of a man, not unlike the torso-men, driving a chariot carried by two horses. The sculpture almost seemed alive to me.

Now, along both sides of our car, a group of "horses" ran up from behind us, then running ahead of us, turning a slight left, as we would, with the road, toward a tallish, arched, pale tan-orange stone gate.

The horses were pale slate colored, with a deepening grey on their sides, and with their sides dappled with black spots. Their legs were, however, long and spindly, so that their bodies stood perhaps ten feet above the ground. They were ridden or guided by a group of people who may have been wearing yellow and red silk clothing. I again thought that all of this was ominous.

There was now a view, of which I was, at first, not necessarily a part, of a man giving a speech to a large audience. The speech the man gave was like an Oscar acceptance speech. But it was also supposed to be like a political speech.

The man was about six feet tall, a little heavy, wide-faced, slightly balding on the forehead, but distinguished looking, with red hair, a short, red beard, and glasses. The man wore a nice, pale coffee colored suit with a cream colored shirt. Behind the man was a satiny, purple curtain. The man stood behind a podium.

Suddenly, someone shot the man. Now it was like I was the man. In a series of reveries (like I was in a half-waking state, rather than a dream state) I wondered to myself how bravely I'd act if I really were shot. I wondered whether I'd flinch or maybe scream in a high-pitched voice.

I thought that perhaps I'd take the shot alright, but that if I fell and the person who had shot me were to proceed to attack me physically, I might, in my death throes, thrash about and flinch like a weakling. I also thought that if I were attacked, and the person who shot me were straddling me and pummeling me physically, I might sit up and attack him with all my strength.

But I thought that even then, I'd lose my realistic consciousness, like the police officer (Bannerman?) did in the Stephen King novel Cujo, and imagine that I was fighting on, while really I had fallen back down and was rolled onto my left side, dying.

I, as the man, was lying down. My head had been shot. I was lifted onto a stretcher and into a bunh of material like a gauzy blanket. The people who carried me may have been Mexican boys or young men.

I was carried into an "operating room," which looked more like a run-down barber shop. It had purple-painted walls and unpainted, uncovered, concrete floors. I sat in a barber's chair, possibly before a mirror, though I couldn't see my face.

All this time people had been telling me not to move but to stay awake. They may also have been telling me not to speak. I had also not been allowed to be part of a certain aspect of all the action that had been taking place around me.

But now the group of people had placed on my head a wrapping of gauze as thick as a helmet. With this "helmet," which went over the crown and sides of my head and under my chin, with a strap across the middle as well, to go over my nose, the people now told me, "Okay," as if I were now "allowed" to be fully conscious of all the events around me.

I could feel blood gushing down from the crown of my head and down along my left ear. The blood felt cold, but it was like a fresh gushing, like it had just begun.

I was placed in a wheeled chair, something like a cross between a wheeled hospital bed and a dentist's chair. There were people carting me along, people carting things like IV bags along, and people walking backwards before me. We walked toward a doorway to an "operating room" (?).

The people walking before me kept telling me to stay awake. They kept asking me questions to keep me talking. I wondered why they were making such an effort to keep me awake. I thought, I'm doomed, anyway. I might as well lose consciousness now, and either die or wake up with irreversible brain damage.

Dream #2

I was with my brother in a "movie theater lobby," which was a lot more like a cafe, except with the dim lighting of a bar, and the feeling that this room was in a much larger building, like a big shopping mall or an airport. The light was dim orange-yellow, like candlelight.

I was in the ticket-taker's line. I noticed my brother was over at the "concession stand." I walked over to him, awkwardly, like I'd suddenly realized I should be with my brother, although I still actually wanted to stay in the ticket-taker's line.

I looked into a cafeteria-style glass case displaying desserts. There were a lot of things that looked like brownie squares with layers of some kind of pale brown "chocolate" cream in them. Some of the brownie squares had their top layers out of shape like they were stale, so that the old brownie layer was bending upward at the corners. Some of the brownie squares, however, looked very fresh and appetizing. I couldn't decide what I wanted.

A man who was black or Hispanic, or both, stepped between me and my brother. The man was about my height, wiry-muscular, with a tight face. He had shaggy, curly, pale brown hair, that was kind of long, but not quite down to his shoulders. He wore a tan cap and blue-reflective sunglasses. He had a mustache. He wore a beige windbreaker.

The man started making weird comments to me about how tough it was for someone like him to come here and see movies. He then made a comment like, "It's really tough when there are all these fags here, isn't it?"

I thought the man was half-thinking I'd agree with what he said, but that he also half-thought I was gay and that I'd stand up for myself and other gay people by starting a fight with him. I just backed away from the man, figuring that other people had heard him, and not wanting other people to think that I was with this guy or that I agreed with what he was saying.

I had stepped backward and out of the line for the "concession stand." But I thought, I didn't really need to eat anything, anyway. I'll just wait for my brother. I ended up standing behind a table that held one or two tallish, cylindrical, chrome coffee makers and a couple baskets of different-colored tea-packets. I even ducked behind it.

But now the man turned in my direction and shouted out, "But what's even worse than that is the spics, isn't it?"

I knew there were a lot of Hispanic people here, and that I had to stand up against the man's racial slur about Hispanics.

I stood up as tall as I could. My head peeped up about halfway over the coffee makers. I said, "Oh, yeah?!"

I thought I'd say something else. But I looked around to see that all the Hispanic people in the place were staring at me, like I was also responsible for what the man had said. Everybody, disappointed in me, may simply have dropped me from their minds.

The people now turned and ran out of the place, as if the man had run out before them and they were now chasing him. I ran along with everybody else, trying to prove myself to them.

We all ran through a series of balconies, like the indoor balconies in an office building or hotel. The balconies had red carpet and light-colored, wood railings. There were stairways going up and down. Balconies randomly turned and intersected.

The group of people stopped in their chase while heading up a small staircase. I was at the back of the group. As the group started moving forward again, a black man, tall, wide, wearing black jeans, a black, leather jacket, a backward cap, and slightly tinted, round eyeglasses, jogged down the steps.

As the man went past me (I stood still, like a straggler), he swung his arm out and grabbed my right leg, around the calf, skimming and swinging along on it like it was a handrail, to annoy me. He hustled off confidently, thinking I'd do nothing.

I turned and ran off after the man. I was going to catch up with him and fight him. But he was now ahead of me and apparently running himself. He ran along a balcony and then into a glass-walled corridor that ran alongside the balcony he'd just run through (so that he'd run in a hairpin curve). I followed him through the corridor, which was kind of stuffy and fluorescent-lit.

The man then turned down a narrow, grey-walled, fluorescent-lit hallway. I was about to follow him down this hallway, but I saw that he was heading into a doorway on the left wall. The door was automatically locking, with a number punch-code fixture over the knob. Another person, a tallish, thinnish, black man wearing a red polo shirt, let the man in.

I could tell this was the back entrance for a restaurant. The man was coming to work. I knew that I probably wouldn't be able to get past the locked door. But even if I got past the door, I thought, I'd have to deal with a whole group of men ready to fight me, instead of just the lone man.

(4/25/09) building on fire; confronting rude man; boss draws my dreams; message from interviewer

(Entered in paper journal at 8:20 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a car with a woman like DK (a director of the department I worked in at the job from which I had been laid off in waking life). I may have been laying in the seat somehow, while DK drove. We were driving through a large city full of skyscrapers. I could see up to the sky as if through the roof of the car. It was early morning. The sky looked dim blue, like just a skein of grey clouds were floating below it. The sky was visible in small sections between the buildings.

We were talking about the weather. DK mentioned the forecast, which was somewhat at variance with what I was currently seeing. But then the sky grew deeply clouded. I wondered how the sky could get so cloudy so quickly. It worried me a little.

We then passed a building maybe "seven or eight stories" tall (i.e. there seemed to be seven or eight window-rows, though the building may have been more than seven or eight stories tall. The building was on fire, or, rather, there were huge stacks of black smoke erupting from certain windows. But through the other windows I could see people walking around through undamaged, undisturbed work spaces. The people may actually have been worried, but they seemed to be taking care of their business, anyway.

The office building was maybe hexagonal or octagonal or oddly four-sided and was build on a smaller base. Its top sloped out mildly, so the whole thing was almost cup-shaped, like something Eero Saarinen (?) might have built, but also like a black building I was familiar with from my trips to Boston (???). But I could see everybody in the building as if they were in a row house or a small shop on a small town's main street.

The smoke that came out of the building was quickly making the sky as black as night. We drove past the building.

I noticed that the other buildings were also on fire, in the same sporadic, smoky way as the first building, though fire was visible in some of these other buildings. The streets somehow seemed filled with panic, with people rushing around. The air was filled with smoke, to the point where we couldn't see in front of us. The smoke was tinged orange, as if lit by streetlamps. I got panicked and wondered if the whole city were going to be destroyed.

We drove down another street, like a pristine office park. There were wide, redbrick plazas all around us, lit as if from sparkling white ground lights. The sky was black as night. People were also bustling around in this part of town, though less people were around.

DK turned left (she may actually have turned right onto one of the redbrick plaza walkways) to drop me off at an office. I said, "How can people be working right now? Who knows what's causing these fires? The whole city could be under siege. We don't know what building is going to get it next!"

But DK didn't seem like she was listening to me at all. She was still driving to drop me off.

Dream #2

I was walking down a hallway with a man and a woman. We had come from another hallway and had turned left into this one. The hallway was somewhat wide, somewhat short with dull, white walls, grey floors, and fluorescent lights.

The woman was like an older authority figure. The man was a slightly scruffy, medium-height man. He may have been Indian. He had a stuffy face and short, tightly disarranged hair. His body was a little wide. He wore jeans, a pale tan blazer, and a red and pink, button-up shirt.

The man made some comment about how incompetent I was at my job. The woman made a slight comment, not really regarding the man, to let me know I was alright. The man had turned and walked back down the hallway, as if by walking away after his comment he could make it irrefutable.

I rushed down the hallway after the man, to force him into a confrontation. I caught up to him. He turned away from me whenever I tried to face him. He was almost to the end of the hallway, about to turn down it, which would somehow mean I'd lost the argument with him. So I grabbed the man and forced him to face me.

The man gave me a sour-looking face, like a constipated person might show. I thought the man looked like an idiot. I made whatever comment I'd needed to make to justify myself. The man kind of smirked in acceptance.

The woman, the man, and I were again walking up the hallway. We were heading to a celebration or convention. We walked up to a large event room. There was a cluttering of people near the entrance to the room, like a disorganized group of people trying to get in. I stood near an older woman who seemed to have a huge sense of propriety, who lightly regarded me, like I was an idiot.

I now got into the celebration. At first it was just a large, harshly fluorescent-lit event room lined with folding tables, with people at the tables passing out literature. Large groups of people flocked at all the tables. At one of the tables I saw my old co-worker JM, a person whose intelligence I admired greatly. JM was wearing a light brown suit which fit his slim body a little too loosely, and a cream-colored, button-up shirt. JM was with an Asian woman who was his wife, but not his waking-life wife EC.

I tried to catch JM's attention. But JM walked away from the table, almost as if he were trying to avoid me. I followed JM closely, trying to tag him to get his attention, so I could say hi, but apparently also talking on and on as if JM had already acknowledged me.

We walked through a series of rooms that were organized like a museum exhibition, though they felt more like mock-ups of rooms in a cheap apartment. There were tables everywhere. The tables were cluttered with paper and with people trying to hand out literature.

At one point I may have given up on JM. I walked, possibly with someone with whom I was talking, into another exhibit room. This artwork in this exhibit room was a sculpture of two gigantic books, opened lying pages-down, one loosely piled on the other. The books were maybe six feet long, three feet wide, and one and a half feet thick, with chunks like little cheese wedges, carved out of the pages at certain points. This may have reminded me of something else, which I may have mentioned to the person I was walking with.

Dream #3

I was trying to explain the burning building (from my first dream) to my old boss BS, who was then trying to draw the building. BS was drawing on a horizontal surface, which was alternately a chalkboard and a cardboard or brown-paper surface. BS wasn't quite understanding my spatial description of the building. At one point I may have tried to draw the building for BS. But I realized I couldn't get it quite right, either.

Dream #4

I was working on a computer. Apparently I had a bunch of visual-artistic programs opened. I saw an email from BT, (a person I'd interviewed with for a job in waking life a couple months previous to this dream). I saw the email as if it were on my BlackBerry.

I tried to open the email, but my BlackBerry's screen suddenly started getting flooded with the artistic programs I had open. I had to plow through all the programs to get to the email. I'd close the files but I wouldn't exit from the program. I plowed and plowed through the screens, slowly feeling more and more like I'd never actually get back to BT's email.

(5/21/09) not checking in books; wrong man bombed

(Entered in paper journal at 7:34 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was sitting in a library, like the Mid-Manhattan Library on the fifth floor and east side. Some daylight came into the space from windows beyond the books stacks to my right, but the place was mainly lit by fluorescent light.

I stood up and walked into the stacks. I had a pile of books with me. I started to put them all back where I had gotten them, all from different locations in one aisle of shelves. There was a lot more sunlight through the shelves, with probably a triangle of sunlight at the end of the shelves next to the windows.

As I put the books back, a couple people walked through the aisle. One of them, a young, Hispanic girl with pale olive skin and red-brown hair, was putting books back on the shelf, as if she worked at the library.

I was watching the people who walked through the aisles out of the corner of my eye. I wanted to make sure they didn't see and take the books I was putting back on the shelves: I still needed those books. Nobody seemed to be paying attention.

I was almost finished putting the books back when a man (tallish, white, a little tan, with short, brownish hair, who was maybe in his fifties and was thin but with body a little sagging and wrinkled, and who wore a white polo shirt and tan khakis) walked just behind me.

The man said in a slightly effeminate voice either that I shouldn't put the books back myself or that I should be paying better attention to where I was putting the books. The girl, the man said, was really working hard to put back a lot of books. The girl couldn't take the time to fix any mistakes I'd make. I felt guilty for having put my books back so quickly, although I was pretty sure I'd put them all back correctly.

I went to check on one book. I still had a couple books to put away, and I'd sat them on an empty space of shelf. I looked at the book I'd come to check on. The book was hard covered, with a solid grey cover, and maybe 250 pages. I noticed, by checking the Dewey decimal number, that I'd put the book just out of place. I thought, Gosh, now I really will have to check all the books.

I was about to start checking when I realized I'd made a much bigger mistake. I had actually checked out all the books away. Instead of checking them back in, I had simply placed them back on the shelves. Now I would have to pull all the books back off the shelves. I'd have to remember every single book I'd taken, more by decimal number or actual position on the shelf than by title, as if I couldn't remember the title of any of the books I'd checked out.

It seemed like too much work to me. I thought for a moment that I'd just leave all the books on the shelf. But I realized that if I left everything, I'd be counted as having kept the books, even though they were in the library. And I'd be charged a lot of overdue fees. So, as difficult as it would be, I'd have to take the books back off the shelves.

I was now on the first floor of the library. It was dim. Daylight came in through the windows: sky-blue and white-grey. There were no electric lights on on the floor. The area was large, with tall ceilings, like the Mid-Manhattan library. But the library felt more like a college library in the southwestern United States, with white walls dark wood trim, and possibly a large god's eye ornament decorating one of the walls.

I sat before a female librarian. She sat on the other side of a table which she used as a desk. Behind the librarian, across a short walkway, was a row of filing cabinets or microfiche machines (or computers?).

I was looking for a book to check out (possibly The Gilded Age, which I had bought from the Housing Works Bookstore in waking life in the day before this dream.). I may have seen this book on the shelf upstairs. I may even have been holding the book in my hands. But the woman told me that there wasn't a copy of this book at the library. She'd have to request the book from another library.

I asked the woman how long it would take to get the book. The woman said she could put in a request, which would take a couple days. But Monday was a holiday. So I wouldn't get the book until Tuesday at the earliest.

This seemed like an awfully long time to wait, and I wasn't even sure I'd get it, even if I went through the hassle of ordering it. I felt terribly insecure, like the woman really didn't want to help me after all.

Dream #2

I was in a 1950s-style diner. The place was tight and crowded, like some of the old downtown diners. The diner had a small and strange feel, like it was a double-wide trailer set off a road somewhere, or a small, flimsy field office for an archaeologist, or even a child's playhouse set up to look like a diner. The ceiling seemed small. The walls were all close, maybe paneled with wood in vertical strips. By the door was a small, bedstead-like shelf, possibly with a couple phone books on the shelves.

The scene was like a movie. A group of older men sat in a booth. A younger man (possibly like Ewan McGregor from Trainspotting) stood before the counter. He was possibly heading for the door. But before the Ewan character opened the front door, the old men, like mafia men, said, "This is it. You've owed us this money long enough. We've given you chances to pay us. Now you better just watch your back. You better be careful."

The Ewan character took a little of a supplicant tone, possibly even hunching over one of the swivel stools before the counter, and said he would pay the money, if the old men would only give him a little more time. Ewan left the diner.

I saw the area outside. The day was hot and grey. There was a wide road over which I highway overpass ran. On the other side of the street that ran under the overpass was a thin, triangular median, which was probably made of asphalt. On the other side of the median was another, smaller road, on the other side of which were some small shops like mechanics or auto shops, then a wide residential road lined with run-down looking houses and apartment buildings.

The Ewan character ran across the street. I watched him until he approached the median, at which point my view may have changed. I knew the Ewan character was now really trying to figure out how to get the money he owed the mob guys. I thought it was possibly for the Ewan character to get the money. But, I thought, the guys already told him they were out for him. They aren't giving him any more time. He's in danger right now.

I saw a young, blonde woman, probably the Ewan character's girlfriend, walking with an old man. The old man wore a long-sleeved t-shirt and a thin, billed cap: both items he may have gotten from participating in a volunteer event or running in a race. The blonde woman and old man came out of a wooden, shack-like building that seemed to be set into an old, small junkyard or tire yard. I thought that the Ewan character would run up at any time soon to enlist his girlfriend for help.

At first, not seeing Ewan, I thought that I wasn't seeing right, and that the person I saw as an old man was actually Ewan. But then I noticed that the old man was small, thin, and wasted, with either injured legs or no legs at all, and that he was using forearm crutches to walk. There was no way this old man could be Ewan.

The woman and the man crossed a wide asphalt road, then turned left around a wide corner of vacant lots and houses to a wide, run-down residential road. The old man walked ahead of the woman. The woman fell far behind the man.

Another man ran, somewhat stealthily, up behind the old man, also possibly thinking, like I had thought, that the old man was the Ewan character. The other man threw a tube, like a metal tube of paint, in the man's direction. I knew this tube was really a bomb. I wanted to call to the man, to protect him. But I didn't.

The paint tube, possibly with dried paint (or caulk?) layered on its surface near the cap, flew over the old man's head and landed maybe ten or fifteen feet in front of the old man. The tube "exploded." It made a loudish, hollow, popping sound, but did nothing visual. But there were airy shock waves that knocked the man over.

I could tell, as the old man flew backward and to the ground, that more damage had been done to him. He'd probably sustained some pretty severe injuries in his limbs. I thought, Now that this has happened to the old man, will the Ewan character fight the mob guys?