(10/16/05) they would find themselves alone very often

(Entered in paper journal at 9:05 AM at the Tea Lounge on Union Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I may have been hanging out with a female friend who was dying of AIDS, or I may have been watching a tape of her, like she, still my friend, was famous. Now I was reading a magazine article about her. She had short-cut hair. She said if there was anything she would pass on to people who'd just found out they had AIDS, it would be that they would find themselves alone very often.

Below a two-page spread, strip-thin photo of just the woman's eyes, was a red-lettered caption saying, "Are you a good listener?"

I now stood, holding the magazine, on a street in New York City, near where the woman had lived. I could feel her presence. I wanted to visit her to show her she wasn't alone.

I got distracted. I had also lived here a while back. The block looked different now, a lot nicer. I tried to figure out which building I had lived in. They all looked, somehow, like where I had lived.

I stopped in front of one building and then looked behind me to the next building, which, from where I stood, looked like it had taped up windows, like it had been condemned. I walked up to that building. The tape was just bordering the door windows. The door looked new and nice. The door window was new, with a stained glass flower pattern. I saw the building number: 143-62.

I was certain this was my old building. I thought if I could get inside I wouldn't even recognize the place.

I thought to the old place. The apartment was dingy, grey, with a square central area and four small square rooms on its left and right sides.

I think it was at the back of the building, so none of its windows faced the street.

I walked away, figuring the place I had known was gone forever.

(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.