(3/23/05) you're worthless for having trusted that man

(Entered in paper journal at 5:50 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I was in a large room like two or three living rooms put together. The light was low, warm, and classy. I was mainly in the company of young women. We all spoke about certain vases we owned. Many of these vases had a specifically Mexican feel or look. But some of them just looked modern. I don't remember if I owned one or if I was just interested in them (i.e. having seem them at houses or in museums).

All the girls spoke about how some artist-looking man had either sold or given them these vases only implying that they had come from a special place in Mexico and Mexican history or that they had come from the hands of a mystical artist with some kind of well-known connection, mystical or aesthetic, to the past of Mexico or the Southwest.

Some of the women knew art history and theory passably, but they couldn't figure out what time period or region these strange and intriguing vases came from. I myself was just trying to remember some of these vases and whether I'd liked the ones I'd seen.

Across from me were two chairs or two couches. In the left one sat a woman with a silver "vase" like a thick, almost trophy-like, chalice like something one might see by Nambe.

She showed it to the woman in the right chair/couch. The woman said, "This? Oh, you've been fooled. I think you've all been fooled. This is nothing. It has no history behind it. It has no merit. It's worthless. And you're worthless for having trusted that man."

The left woman cried in shame. She stopped crying so strongly after a few seconds and looked up to the right woman. She gave her a look which I interpreted as asking, Am I worth anything? and then took off her shirt and embraced the right woman, kissing her. The two women walked over to a group of women at the left wall. All those women began stripping and making out.

The woman who had been on the left couch turned around and looked at me or in my direction, beckoning. I wasn't sure she was looking at me, so I stayed sat in my space on the couch. I didn't want to go over, anyway, because I didn't want the mean girls to tell me I was ugly or worthless. All the girls seemed to be huddled in two or three orgiastic heaps now.

Now some guys, maybe six at most, appeared, but as if they had always been there. They were all pale white, thin, tall, with long, long hair and long, whole thin beards, in boxer shorts that looked too big on them. They all trudged like sleepwalkers over to a couch by me and had an orgy. Some of them disappeared or dissolved as soon as they lay down, like they had fallen into a pit of pure shadow.

One guy looked up at me, beckoning. I looked away. I wasn't interested in being with such ugly, scraggly guys. I now thought, despairing, Isn't there anybody else on this planet who feels the way I feel about sex?

The back wall of the room was now gone, revealing some tacky, bamboo-lined bar on some beach in the dead of night. Two or three girls sat on the stools, their backs to me. They were continuing some conversation about art. I didn't want to be part of the conversation. But I wanted to belong somehow.

The girls looked slovenly over their shoulders at me. I looked away. They didn't want me around. I looked back to the living room. The whole room was full of groups of girls having sex.

But on a couch were two or three girls just sitting there, talking. I was about to sit down with them to talk. But then I realized the only reason they were talking was to entice me, to try to get me to make a sexual move on them. i knew I couldn't do it. So I just sat there. And now the girls started feeling rejected.

(10/8/05) showing my brother my work; the strange thing about elvis presley's asshole; haewan

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

Dream 1

I was with my little brother. It was night. we were in a clearing in a wooded area with a few trailer homes or cabins and some picnic tables. I had a thick book which I had written by hand.

My brother asked me to show him some of the stuff in the book. I didn't want to show him any of what I had written, but I thought of a drawing I could show him. I told him about it as I saw it in my head. A woman had been pursued by some creepy people. Now they had lured her to their place, where they would kill her. But the were even going to kill her in a manipulative, unsuspecting way.

I flipped through the pages but couldn't find the picture. My brother walked away to take care of some business. Finally I found the page. There were actually four panels of drawings, like it was a black and white comic book page.

I hadn't realized how fine and professional my drawing style had been for these panels. They looked like Aubrey Beardsley, even  though my own subject matter was trite and over-sexualized, pretty much falling in line with the contemporary comic book style.

The woman had been lured by other women, to whom she was attracted, to an orgy in the dining hall of a mansion. She was aroused when she watched the orgy's participants killing each other.

I myself felt hands pressing into my spine. I though, Oh -- that's how they killed me! They actually bit my spine out!

The last panel, the one I wanted to show my brother, was of the orgiasts pulling the girl down into the orgy. Now she didn't want to go.

I got all of this in an instant -- almost as soon as I found the page I had unintentionally -- automatically -- flipped past it, to the end of the book.

The last pages were all beautifully designed crosses, mostly ornamented, with pagan symbols, and all drawn in pen, much finer than how I usually draw. One cross was grey with black stripes going up it. Another was white, with wrappings around its lower extension like the snakes around the medical symbol. They were all set against beautifully cross-hatched black backgrounds.

I was so excited by all the drawings I saw that I ran after my brother to show him. I met him coming out of a cabin. He said, "If you don't want to show me the stuff you make, just say so. I'd like to see it, but itn's not a big deal."

I said, "No, no. I do want to show you."

We walked past a cabin with the lights on. It looked like a workshop inside. There were two black girls inside, flirting with each other. They looked over at us, somehow implying in their expression that we were perverts for looking at them while they were flirting.

My brother said, "Why is their hair all huge like that? That's a stupid style."

We were now back at the table. I tried to show my brother the drawings I liked, but, flipping backwards from the very end of the book, I couldn't find them: not the crosses, not the comic book page. I was trying to remember where I had seen the drawings. But I couldn't.

Dream 2

I was watching some special about Elvis Presley. Elvis wore a black leather jacket and tight, black jeans. He turned around and pulled down his pants to show people the strange thing about his asshole. The jeans stuffed against his buttocks as he pulled his pants down. Finally he got to his asshole, which was some strange, fleshy trunk, like a piece of intestine had been pulled out his ass. It was milky, filmy, slimy, and translucent.

Elvis now changed somehow, like he was some average guy in prison as well as Elvis. He said, "I always tell people, don't take the grate off the toilet, because my asshole is so weird that if the grate is off the toilet I can't get the correct angle."

I saw the "grate," a patch of chain link fence. I knew that Elvis had to shit so that his shit could come out parallel to the ground and then go into the toilet. I didn't know how the fence would make the angle of a toilet perpendicular to its usual angle.

Elvis now stood with his back to a fence and began shitting through the fence.

Dream 3

I was on an Ancient Egyptian temple with a group of soldiers. This was Ancient Egypt, but it was all indoors. Sunlight came in through clerestory windows.

We were combating an enemy that far outnumbered us. But this temple held a secret that would give us invincibility. The temple had three levels, each constructed at different periods in Ancient Egypt's history.

One level's door had to be entered in order to start an avalanche on another level, blocking that level's door and releasing the key to the secret on the remaining level. The first choice, if incorrect, would lead to death.

We had to find the secret before the enemy approached. They could come straight to us and kill us. But they could approach as we opened the secret and hurry into the door and take the invincibility for themselves.

I had a paper (it looked like from Renaissance Italy) that was written in a symbolic riddle-language. Its writing corresponded with "writing" on a fan-shaped store over the second door. The door was actually drawn on the paper.

Comparing the "writing" patterns and the riddle-language, I figured out the correct door to enter. I called the men to enter the top level door first. It was right above us, somehow easily accessible, but for some reason we were running.

Now we were running toward the temple, as if we hadn't just been there. We ran over huge, randomly stacked, limestone cubes. As we ran, the indoor "Ancient Egypt" landscape became ore and more what I called a museum, though it was actually more like a department store's clothing section full of almost barren racks and clothing display tables and spaced with cubic limestone structures and ancient relics.

As I ran I called to the men, "Go! Go! We're almost there!" But soon I was passed up by the men, and a huge man, wearing Egyptian costume but looking more like a Viking, took my place and role of shouting to the men.

I was quickly losing my breath. I wore modern clothes. I had a shoulder-strap briefcase-bag which bounced against my stomach and was full of small, limestone cubes. The men kept passing me. We, but especially they, went at a furious pace.

I broke down. My lungs were burning. Yet I kept calling, in a progressively meeker tone, "Go! Go!" as if I were still the leader.

They were now all so far ahead of me that I wondered why they'd let me come with them and why they'd tolerated my pretending like I was the boss. I could barely even climb the limestone blocks.

The soldiers had vanished now. I got to the "temple," which was just a mock-up of the temple we'd been at before. It stood on an island of green carpet and faced a stand of almost barren clothes racks and tables. There was a tile walkway and then another island of deep jade carpet.

A group of thirty or so high school kids walked past. A boy stopped with his girl at a little square formed by the back end of the "temple" and a few other tall walls or divides. The place was still a "museum."

The boy, black, with a light complexion, showed his black girlfriend the only thing in this square: a board on the back wall. It was maybe ten feet up and was maybe ten feet tall and fifteen feet wide. it was black plastic and faced with a shiny sheet of clear plastic. it was like a sign filled with light-up numbers to let you know when your turn has come up, like at the DMV. But the board had a statement on it. The statement was obscured. almost none of the words were lit, and the shiny, wavy plastic front obscured the letters.

The boy said, "Everything else in this place is bullshit. This is the only thing that matters."

I was so weak by the time I had arrived here that I was heaving, barely breathing. I knelt down beside the kids. I remembered the boy now. He had once punched me in the face. It hadn't been while I was drunk. It had been while I was sober. I couldn't remember the exact event. But I knew now that it had happened. Throughout the rest of the dream I struggled to remember this event.

Now my main focus was on reading the sign. But I couldn't get it.

The boy was annoyed by my presence. He was being a loud asshole to get me to leave.

All I could decipher from the sign was toward the end of the long statement. It went: "The country of XXXXX is the only place where a black man can say the word 'Haewan,' his own word for God..."

Now the boy was so furious about my presence that he swung his arms violently around my head. Finally, unintentionally, he hit me just forward of my left temple, just about the bony corner above my left eye.

I had been trying to place the statement with Malcolm X when the boy hit me. I was more annoyed than angry, but I wanted the kids to leave. I stood and pushed the kid away and snapped, "Leave me alone!"

The kid was a lot smaller than I'd thought he'd be. I couldn't remember him and he couldn't remember me. But something about me startled him. He took his girl and ran off.

I knelt again to read the sign. I may have been copying it in a notepad. The place was by now almost entirely an almost barren clothing section in a department store.

I thought the sign would say that only in XXXXX was a black man allowed to worship the god of his own personal heritage, and that black men should be free to worship in their own way all over the world, especially in America, where the black heritage was so hideously erased from the slaves' lives.

But instead the sign said something like, "Black men have no god. They never had one. They never had a god or a conception of Heaven. They were always about themselves, about getting theirs, and having more than anybody else had. God and Heaven were the conceptions of the white man. But each black man naturally grows up selfish and spiteful, as he should.

"The country of XXXXX is the only country where a black man can say the word 'Haewan,' his own word for God and Heaven, and where the men there will tell him he is a fool for believing in such things."

I went from thinking this was a beautiful statement by Malcolm X to wondering who on earth would write this strange statement and why on earth a black man would think it was a good statement, the only statement worth appreciating in (what used to be) a great museum.

My mom was now to my right. I was telling her all this.

I looked below the sign. There were three plaques, grey, coppery metal, each with the name of a person who had created this statement. The top plaque had a name like Alexander. The man's profession, drug-dealer, was written below the name. The plaque below that had a name and a profession like drug-dealer/pimp. I didn't read the lowest plaque.

I told my mom, "These people only want money. They want to destroy everything, even themselves. It's a sickness they infect humanity with. They want people to become stupid savages. To forget God. And something in the universe is letting them win."

(11/1/08) goose mill; seduced by great-grandmother; last year in the suburbs

(Entered in paper journal at 9:14 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was on a building top with a couple other people, one of whom may have been my senior co-worker SuD. We looked out over a closely-packed set of buildings in dimmish grey light. SuD was telling us the history of this city. The building we stood on was a big part of the history.

But now we were going to talk about another building. I thought we were going to jump from this building to the next one in our discussion. At first the jump looked small. But I thought, How could we possibly jump from one building to the next? I looked down at the other building top again. It looked far down and all the way across a street. I thought there was no way we could do it.

SuD continued speaking. He said, "This city used to be a lot dirtier. In fact, all the building tops in Chicago were piled with old garbage and debris."

SuD continued talking about Chicago. He pointed out some buildings in the distance, beyond the small cluster we had been looking at. SuD spoke about the "golden glow" the sunlight would sometimes give the red-brick buildings around us.

I longed to see those colors. In my mind's eye I saw the buildings in that light, as if I were descending, down along the golden, canyon-like building walls, to the pavement below.

I now stood with a group people before an old building in the woods. The light all around us was greyish blue, like late afternoon on a cloudly day. The building was painted greyish-blue. It looked very old, but it also looked like it had modern siding on it rather than actual wood.

Our guide (no longer SuD?) said that this building was a mill. The building was in two parts, which were joined from about three-quarters of an inch up to the top (I have no idea what that description means...). The tunnel or underside of this joining was lit with the orange light of a fire. The place looked a little like a stable. There might have been animals like horses and goats milling around aimlessly. There were also geese, which were very frightening to me.

We were walking away from the building. Our guide said, "Of course there are geese here. This is a goose mill."

I thought, I never knew there was such a thing as a goose mill. I never knew you ground geese to eat them.

Now that we were walking away, the woods were like a tunnel-ramp in a subway station. I looked down. I watched a goose beside me basically squirming along the ground on his stomach in stuff that looked like mashed potatoes and gravy. The goose was violently smashing his bill into this stuff. I thought, Is this what's meant by milling?

Dream #2

It was daytime. I was out in some rural area. I was with one friend and someone else. We may have been near a gas station. The other person and I went into the "gas station." The place became the person's house. The person now became someone like my great-grandmother. This person seduced me.

We were now back outside with my friend, who was a woman. The "gas station" building was now a lot larger. we were wandering alongside it on something like a wheelchair ramp.

The other woman kept trying to talk about how she had seduced me. But I couldn't believe it or admit it, especially in front of my friend. But the woman was becoming seductive again. I couldn't resist her. She gold older and older again. She was naked. She looked like my great-grandmother. She was leading me back into the gas station. It was like I was hypnotized. I couldn't resist.

Dream #3

It was night. I was at a house party with a lot of people. Pretty soon all the people were women. I went into the backyard, where a lot of my friends had gone. The backyard was huge. It looked like a suburban version of the grounds of the mansion in Last Year at Marienbad. The sky and air were dark, dark blue. There was a fountain somewhere, a lot of chairs, and some long, foam mattress stretching through the whole scene. All the girls were grouped together in different places. Some of them may have been kissing or embracing each other.

I walked to the end of the yard, then turned around and walked back. As I did, I saw a particular woman, a friend of mine, lying down on the foam mattress with another woman. They may have been near the fountain. My friend wore a black dress. She may have had thick arms. She started kissing the other woman.