Then I Woke Up

Fields and fields of hopelessness

2012-02-01T20:17:00.000-05:00

First, E. and I were lost in a big city. The city was a maze of dirty buildings and empty streets, and there were haggard, poor people everywhere. E. kept saying that we had to get to the town hall and then we would "be safe" but I told him that the people around us were clearly not dangerous. They were too downtrodden and for the most part they just wanted to keep to themselves and I was insisting that we should just find a train station and get back home. Suddenly a police car pulled up and this huge cop got out, and his uniform was all neat and his buttons were shiny and he had these bright rosy cheeks and he was like "You kids need help out of this place?" and before I could say anything E. said that yes, we did, and he put us on the roof of his car like we were on a parade float and he just started driving through buildings, and if people didn't get out of his way he would just run over them and laugh and tell us how all of these people were worthless and dirty and useless. And he took us to a train station and there were clearly people in line but he offered us to run over them so we could be first in line. So I slid off the front of the car and I ran out of the front door. On my way I grabbed a big chunk of the floor with me. I was carrying it away for safety because I couldn't take any of the people, but I thought maybe if I could save a piece of the city then it would ripple out and get rid of the evilness. Everything in this city was brown and grey and dark. There wasn't a sky. It was like we were actually inside a giant building, and the ceilings lights were off and only the lights in the city (those that worked) were on.

Anyway I was running with this chunk of stone and it kept transforming in my hands. It kept changing into different stones, and then eventually I realized I was actually carrying a giant yellow tin can. Then my friend appeared and told me she wanted to go camping and she was going to the same campground that I had been to once before and I said I'd go with her, so we got onto her magic industrial carpet and flew along the highway and my stone kept dragging me towards the edge of the rug and I was afraid of falling off, and for some reason more and more people kept appearing on the carpet, and they all had tons of belongings with them. A girl right next to me had a brand new vacuum cleaner. It was a purple Dyson "sphere" one.

So we got to the campground, which was this amalgam of all the campground/forest/outdoor dreams I've had in times past. And S. said that she didn't know the exact way to get to the campground, but I said I had my phone and it said we had to follow the "loop road" to the center of the forest. So I started walking down the road, and I was alone because Sonia was busy trying to organize all the other people who had come with us. I was walking past a small abandoned-looking gas station and I thought the building looked familiar so I walked towards it and then I walked behind it and the forest ended there suddenly and it was really hot and really sunny, and there was a wide tarmac platform and a fence around it, and beyond the fence there were just fields, endlessly, until the horizon, and they were all of dying "tea". The weren't tea bushes, but for some reason they were tea "grasses" and they were just withering in the sun and in the heat, and it was really captivating and beautiful and I stood there for a long time just walking along the fence and looking at the fields and a part of me somehow knew that "these were my fields". Then I noticed that there was a man in an unseasonably warm wool coat and a hat and he was sort of prowling around, he always had his back turned to me but he seemed to be trying to get closer to me. So I started to follow him and there was an old woman, too, suddenly, and I was following the man still because I thought he was my grandfather who died last year, but then I was between the man and the woman and I realized they were assassins trying to kill me for my fields.

So I fell back and the woman and the man pulled out huge dirt-covered clubs out of the ground and said they were going to beat me to death, but I started to run away and I ran all the way back to the gas station and my friends were all there waiting for me and we pushed the giant cardboard wall down on the old man and the woman and they were crushed. And then we kept trying to walk across the road and get to the campsite. Also, the entire time there was a random blood-red shape floating in the corner of my eye. It was just a... weird geometric shape, sort of. Just floating there the whole time and not doing anything.

Then I woke up.

I haven't dreamed in a while.

2012-01-22T22:06:00.002-05:00

Awkwardly realized at like 9:30 that I actually have two quizzes tomorrow. But my mind's not working lately so I'm really just sitting here playing the same level of Angry Birds over and over and trying not to do anything dangerous.
Like really, fuck my classes. I should get an A for waking up in the morning at this point.

This isn't life. This is just one long painful and unbearable existence, and all I've been thinking about all day is how phrases like "taking one's life" are just... kind of bullshitty jokes. It already isn't life. There's nothing to take and nothing to lose

The Primaries are givin' me Nightmaries...

2012-01-11T14:31:00.002-05:00

Part the First:
I was being chased through the woods by shadowy people with very explicitly evil intentions, and Daniel Radcliffe was there suddenly and he told me that he was actually a wizard, not as Harry Potter, but as himself, and he had this magical spell to make us invisible, because the evil people were chasing him, too. I didn't believe him at first, but then he threw glittery powder over us and said that now we were invisible. Which, you know, didn't prove anything, but dream-me was like "Oh yeah makes perfect sense, how nice of you to help me in my moment of dire need to be invisible, magical Daniel Radcliffe."
Then magical Daniel Radcliffe said we should go hide on the top of this barren hill so that we could spy on the evil people, because they wouldn't be able to see us since we were invisible. So we went up to the hill, but I was suddenly pretty certain that we were not really invisible and that the magic spell had not worked. I started to crawl back down the hill, but the evil people had seen us, so we started to run, and we tried to hide under some fallen trees, but the evil people found us anyway and we were captured.
Also, everything in this forest was a shade of blue or black, even though it wasn't night time. It was more like the middle of the day, but even the sun was blue.

Part the Second:
We were at my friend M's house, and there was a massive party going on. I was trying to figure out who everyone was, but suddenly this old woman appeared and told me I had to go to the basement right now, because I was in trouble. I went down into the basement, and it was very well furnished, except Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry were all there, as well as some disagreeable-looking women who said they were their mothers.
I told them to let me go, but they said very insulting things to me and that they wouldn't let me go until they had all won the presidential election. And I told them that this was completely ridiculous, because only one of them could win (you know, hypothetically. not in real life I hope, because that's an affront to human progress), but they said they would form a triumvirate and rule together and burn all the women who get pregnant out of wedlock at the stake as witches. They said they wouldn't let me go because I was helping the gays dismantle Christian values.
So I broke through a window and escaped out onto the street and I realized I was just a few houses down from my own house, and I started walking towards my own house, I walked past the place that had burned down a few weeks ago, and it was still on fire, except instead of fire it was people, none of whom I knew. They were crammed together into weird positions together, and every so often someone would fall out of the windows and break against the pavement and disappear. So these people told me that I had broken the window in my friend's house and I now owed her 300$ for fixing it. So I said, fine, I'll go get my checkbook and write out her stupid fucking check, as long as she stops inviting the GOP to her parties, because they are the exact opposite of good human beings.

Part the Third:
I went into my own house and it was dark. Everything was shades of red and black and orange. My housemates appeared to me one by one, and each of them confessed to me that they had somehow used my stuff in my room without permission. And then my father appeared and said that we were going back to UA because there was a huge storm on the way and we would be safer in that old building. So all of a sudden the upstairs living room jerked around and we were now in the room that is my grandparents' bedroom. For some reason, my friends and some of their obnoxious friends were there with me, and I was confused and angry, because this was supposed to be a private trip. But then I remembered about the storm, and I went to the kitchen, and my grandmother was there sitting by the table like always, except for some reason the kitchen now faced the street instead of the yard.
We looked outside together and we saw that the snow was falling in huge chunks out of the sky, and it was piling up all the way to our floor (our apartment is on the fifth floor). It was like a mountain, but luckily, my father said, it would keep the river from reaching us, because the river all the way across the city was flooding and the water was rising higher and higher, but our mound of ice and snow would protect us.
I asked my grandmother if I could go brush my teeth, and she told me to go to the "other bathroom", which was located in the room where my great-grandmother had lived (and died) back when we lived in this apartment. This bathroom consisted of an ancient gas stove, two toilets, a sink, and a bathtub. Also the walls kept shifting around and changing, and the lights flickered and it was very dark. I got dizzy and had to sit down on one of the toilets, and that's when I realized that my grandmother had actually asked me to cook dinner for everyone so I started cooking, but the stove was so old and I couldn't figure out how it worked and all of the pots kept boiling over and the flames kept shooting up too high. Then I turned around and I saw that the light-bulbs in all the fixtures were rotting away and they were actually burning with fire instead of electricity and the tiles were getting scorched. Then I looked into the tub and it was full of water, but every time I glimpsed it after that there was less and less water and there were fishes at the bottom in the dirt, first they were tiny little goldfish, but then there were more and more of them, and they were small little fish that looked a little bit like manta rays, and they were eating each other.
I called my grandmother and she ran over and helped me extinguish the fire in the oven, and then she said, it was because I hadn't gone to the right setting in the bathroom, and she pushed a switch in the wall and the bathroom was new and shiny and perfect again.

And then I woke up.

Feet like loaves of bread.

2011-12-27T14:01:00.001-05:00

1. Housekeeper

I was, for some reason, a housekeeper in a mansion. My job was to keep everything tidy and to stay out of the way of the family who lived there, the head of which was a disagreeable man who was a wizard. All of the rooms looked identical and they had lots of Persian carpets and old-fashioned grandfather clocks and suchlike things. I feel like there was a young daughter, maybe in her teens, whom I never saw but whose voice I heard often in the rooms I was cleaning. I would sometimes feel like I saw her out of the corner of my eye. I would see a shape that looked like a girl, and it was a very pale shade of blue. But I never actually saw her; maybe she was a ghost.

One day the father showed up and accused me of breaking something precious in one of the rooms. He said I was fired, and that I had to leave the house. I told him I had to change into my outside clothes before I could leave, and he said "Fine, change in this room." and he made my clothes appear in a big pile on the floor, and then he walked away into a different room. I started to change into my clothes, but they kept disappearing off my body. I would put on my shirt but it would end up hanging off a chair a few seconds later when I went to pull on my pants. It was very frustrating, and then I started to feel like I was being watched, and I turned around and I saw that the old man was watching me change through a crack in the door, and he was making my clothes disappear off of me. So I got mad and pulled on a winter jacket and walked outside in just my jacket, and when I was outside I was wearing my clothes, but I was still very angry and I didn't want to go back in there, so I didn't even care that I had forgotten my wallet and my backpack in there. I told myself I would come back when he wasn't around and ask one of the other housekeepers for it.

2. Gory Elevator

I was walking down the street of the town I live in, the downtown area that's trying to be all chic and modern. Except it was a different town, that looked different, and all of the buildings were the same but they were different buildings... they had different insides. For instance, I was walking past the children's hospital but it was actually the dorm buildings of my university. So I went inside and it was the first day of the semester and we were all checking in. To celebrate, the RAs were handing out long pieces of neon-green fishnet-type fabric. They said we could tie the fabrics off at one end and make bags out of them, but most of the girls were just wearing the stuff as clothing.

I didn't have my ID, but the RA at the door recognized me and she said that I should just sign my name in on the guest list and make a note that I need a new ID to get into the building. So I tried to sign in, but the paper was a mess and someone had signed their name in every single box. Also the sign-in sheet was a survey asking if we were going to attend the "Chocolate Party" next week. The paper was all smudged up by chocolate, too, and also by just dirt.

After I signed in I cut myself off a long piece of the neon fishnet to use as a bag and I went on to the elevator. I hate elevators and I especially hate crowded elevators, so I saw that one was completely empty and I went for it as fast as I could, but as soon as I was inside it, about a dozen more people suddenly appeared and they were all pushing in and yelling at each other, and one boy said it was his birthday and he wanted to ride on the outside of the elevator, but nobody listened to him, because the doors were jammed and we couldn't move up. I was near the buttons so I kept pushing random buttons until finally the doors closed and we went up to the next floor to let some people off. It was still really loud and confusing, and I don't think anybody but me noticed that the boy who said it was his birthday, let's call him P. (he lived in my old dorm IRL), had squeezed himself into the space between the elevator and the door and was going to ride the rest of the way up on the outside of the elevator.

I turned around and my friend K was there, as well as a girl I knew in highschool, whom we can call. Every time I looked at A, her face became a little bit more deformed, it bulged out and her skin looked like it was covered in severe burns. But I still recognized her as her, and I couldn't tell if she knew what was happening to her face, so I didn't want to bring it up just in case she was sensitive about it. So the three of us all looked at each other and we all agreed that we had definitely, in fact, seen P going outside of the elevator, and we were pretty certain that he was going to die. There was a little porthole in the elevator and I tried to look out and maybe see where he was, but he was on the other side of the elevator, and all I could see was that the elevator shaft was sideways and it had been graffitied and decorated with holiday lights.

We were moving very fast, and suddenly we stopped and we realized we had been ferried across to the second dormitory tower, and also back onto the ground floor. We walked outside and we saw that there were people screaming and crying and running around. We walked up closer and we saw that there was a huge bloodied mess of a formerly-alive human being lying in the middle of the road. Actually it might have been several people. He looked like he had been crushed and ground up between the elevator and the shaft wall, and had then fallen several stories to the ground below. We knew it was P but no one else knew who it was yet, and K said she wasn't going to deal with this shit, so she just got up and walked across the grass into our tower of the dormitory. We tried to follow her but the security guards stopped us and told us there was killer still on the loose, and that we should stay over by the dorms where it was safer. We started to walk back towards the lobby and on the way we realized that the whole sidewalk was littered with cut-off limbs, arms and legs and pieces of heads, and as we walked farther and farther on I started to tell myself that the feet looked like loaves of bread, and what a weird image that was, and how I should write it down before I forget it.

We couldn't get back into the lobby, so we had to stand outside, and we were kind of just surrounded by this gory mess - P's crushed up body on one side and the chopped up people on the other. And I glanced over at where P's legs were lying. They were still attached together at the hips, but they were broken and jutted from each other at odd angles. And as I looked I saw that the legs were still trying to crawl, and the whole body was still trying to move, and so were the chopped up bodies beside us. So A and I decided that it was just too much and we went to sit in a closed-off little courtyard to hide from the wind that was blowing. And A's face was getting worse and worse and I had no idea what to do, I just kept repeating "Feet like loaves of bread. He's still trying to move." to myself over and over again.

Then I woke up.

Dreamland Wonderland

2011-12-04T14:42:00.001-05:00

I'm not sure I remember exactly how it happened, but I somehow ended up in the strange house of my strange friends. They had a lot of children, but maybe they didn't, but I kept getting the sense that they did and that my job was to babysit their children for them. We were all packed into a very large hallway, the major part of which was taken up by a huge bed. There was a man tied to the bed, like a clown, by the hands, and he kept flailing his feet and hooting at me. I was sitting in the corner with my friend, and we were holding hands, and my boyfriend was sitting at a bar table with his friend, and they were having a beer and watching us and we were all four of us trying to have a conversation, but it was really very loud.

Then for some reason somebody started telling us the plotline to a movie, or maybe it was an old myth, but in any case I suddenly turned into the main character, and my consciousness split into actor and audience, such that I was both acting out everything in the story but also watching it happen from some distant spot high above the action, completely detached from the story. So the story went like this:

A young lady about our age was unable to find a man who would marry her in real life, for whatever reason. They all found her vaguely disconcerting and disturbing, even though she was pretty-looking and generally a nice person. So one day as she was sitting down in her bedroom and crying about it, a monster appeared in her room and said "You'll get married in the dream world, where you belong." The girl was terrified, and refused and screamed, but the monster laughed at her, and insisted that this was the way that it would happen. He led her out into the center of the room and made a simple arch of dried dead vines appear, just an arch, with nothing in it, and he told her that she had to pass through it in order to be married, and even though she was terrified, she did it, despite herself, and she stepped through the arch, but just like she had expected, nothing actually happened, except the monster and the arch both disappeared. So she was relieved, and thought that it had only been a dream, but then, her room began to melt all around her.

I was watching from above her room as this happened, and what happened was that she was suddenly standing on a frozen path at the very very edge of a forest made of cut planks of lacquered wood. She was wearing a white dress and yellow-mushroom-colored shoes. And in fact, all of the shadows in this world were not black or grey, but different shades of yellow and gold. And every snowflake that fell made a sound like a tiny metal bead hitting a taught drum skin. So she stood in this din and cold and over it she heard a terrifying sound, like cackling and howling, and also the shuffling of a dozen monstrous feet, and she started to run, but the monsters were already very close to her, and she ran up to a crossroads, her path cut straight into the forest but there was another path that ran parallel to the forest boundary, and at this crossroads, from all sides, came these creatures: they had very short, broad, and flat torsos, with protruding ribs and longish necks, they had animal-like hind legs and walked on their toes, and they had disproportionately long arms, muscular but lumpy, and they walked the way primates do, on their knuckles, although if they need to they can stand and walk upright for a bit. On their long necks, they had large heads with long, very pointed snouts, so they almost looked like very exaggerated Bull Terriers, but with jaws that opened wide like a snake, and they had long pointed tongues and rows of tiny super-sharp teeth. They had no eyes nor ears, and as they came closer to her she heard that the horrible sound they were making was actually a chant; they were chanting "You will get married! You will get married! You will get married!" and laughing.

I saw them sweep over the girl and start tearing off her dress and scratching her skin, she screamed and struggled but they were too strong, but then I zoomed back into her consciousness and I looked up and saw that they had all suddenly become started by the apparition of a small child who was standing under the trunk of the nearest "tree". And the child said, I have to show the dogs their place, or they won't obey me when I am married to their master, and so I picked up the nearest one and swung him around and around and then smacked him against a tree so that his spine broke, and then all the other dog-people left me alone.

I kept moving through the forest and it became an old, decrepit house. I came to a room full of monsters, and they too tried to attack me and yelled at me about getting married. I kept on walking and got to a random secret room in which there was an old-timey pub full of human people, drinking quietly and looking scared. I tried to hide among them but then the giant snake monster-man came through the broken wall and started eating and crushing everybody to death. There was a man who had been in the pub who was dressed like a Naga, and he tried to play himself off as the real Naga's minion, but the real Naga was actually like one hundred feet long, and the fake snake-man kept slithering over him and trying to get acknowledged, but then he crawled too close to one of the Naga's poison-gas emitting pores and he fell down dead. The room filled with deadly gas and I ran off to the far side, and I saw a hole in the floor and seemed to lead into a lower corridor, white and modern, in which scared women and children were running for their lives. I started climbing through the hole, and realized that I had already been in the hallway the whole time, I had just been hiding in a pile of old firewood that someone had left. And anyway, I realized, the hole I was trying to crawl through was way too small, I couldn't even fit my head through, I would have to chop at it with an axe or something to get through to the next level.

Just as I was looking for my weapon, the parade of cards (a la "Alice in Wonderland") began, and I was terrified of them, and pressed against the wall. And just as the Ace of Hearts (ironic?) was passing by, my hand fell on the axe I had been looking for, and he saw me and immediately accused me of trying to murder him. Also the Ace of Cards became a giant head with little hearts for pupils and no irises, and he made me kneel on the ground, and he made me keep repeating falling into kneeling position until I was doing it perfectly, and the whole time I was scared to do it because I thought he was going to chop my head off with the axe, but really he was just being silly and making me do this. And so I took my axe from him and chopped through the floor and we all fell down into a pool of electric-blue water.

And I woke up.

There was a lot more to this dream that I forgot because I woke up from it and was like "WHAT THE FUCK" and half of it left me.

Nightmare Pasta

2011-12-04T14:33:00.001-05:00

I put these up on Tumblr initially, but I figured the officialcollection shouldn't go without. So here are three nightmares from the last twoweeks:

St. Felicia:

We went to aplace called St. Felicia’s Cathedral. And we were drinking and having a feast.But then everyone got quiet… and there was this sound… like a wailing or anorgan playing or a wind howling. And I looked to the front, and there was aflash of electric sparks, or something, and it made a strange ripping noise inthe air. It was a color I don’t usually see in dreams. And this woman appeared.She wasn’t solid at first, and she was crouched over, staring ahead of her. Andone of the priests said “HERE IS FELICIA! HERE SHE IS!” and then she screechedand unfurled her arms and her arms reached out across the room, like 3D buthorrifying, and I felt her pulling me in even though the person behind me wastrying to hold me down, and I was reaching for her hand, and she was makingthis strange jangling dance, and her mouth was open really wide and dark, likethat one creepy-pasta image of the woman in the corner or whatever. But she wasmoving and like… vibrating, and making this absolutely horrible noise and herhands were touching my brain.

And I wokeup ‘cause I was trying to scream but my nose is all stuffy so I made this sadmoan/snort instead. Ugh it was terrible

Dream King:

There was awoman who was trying to kill herself. She was performing a very complicatedritual in which she had to do a special dance around the decomposing body of amale deer every night until there was nothing left of the deer except itsbones. She had to pour a mixture of molasses and a little bit of her own bloodover the animal every night, and she had to sing it a song. And then she had totake the decomposed flesh and the molasses and blood and rub it over her armsand her face and keep singing and dancing until the candles died out eachmorning. For some reason I was sitting there watching her and she made a littleperformance out of it. She wore an old flowered dress and no shoes and shesometimes stood in the chest of the deer and danced in the mush of its lungsand heart. The one night, when the skeleton was finally emerging and there wasjust a puddle of liquefied flesh on the altar beneath it, Dream appeared andsaid she had to come with him, and the show was over, and I asked why, but hejust swept his cloak around the whole scene and the woman disappeared, and allI saw was his face and his twinkly eyes like stars and he said “Goodbye, now.”And then I woke up.

Lava Pit:

A friend of mine had gotten aparking ticket. And for some reason, that translated into me being sentenced tothe death penalty, which was administered via suspending me by handcuffs over apit of lava along a very slightly inclined metal beam, along which I wouldslide, ever so slowly, until I fell off and way down below to fiery andpainful, although probably very swift, death. For some reason my handcuffs gotcaught on some imperfection on the metal and I was left danging at the veryedge of the beam for hours and hours, and I had to claw my way back up along itand scramble against the rocks to keep from falling, in which process I brokeand shredded up my fingers. Eventually I was pulled back out of the pit and Iwas told that they would have to try and execute me again tomorrow, however,according to the law, if I managed to survive two more times I would bepardoned and allowed to go free.

Now, the awful and disturbing partof this dream, is that after I was released I went home for the night, and Iknew, absolutely and without a doubt knew, that I would not survive theexecution the next day. And I tried to have my last few couple of hours with myfriends and family but for some reason everyone refused to listen to me orunderstand me, and it was terrifying and frustrating and agonizing. Because Iwas just trying to explain to everyone that I knew I was going to die, withouta single bit of reserve or hope, and they just wouldn’t hear it, and all Iwanted was for someone to shut up for like three seconds and listen to me andreally really understand that I knew I was going to die and I knew there was noway I could stop it and I was resolved and resigned to it, and that I wasthinking of it in terms of committing suicide rather than being executed, butstill no body was listening, and they all had these weird distorted faces andthey talked all high-pitched and discordant.

And also the other really sick thingwas that I didn’t want to keep trying to live. I’m tired and I feel hollow andheavy, like there’s a big steel cape that’s attached to the base of my neck.And as much as there was that part of me that knew I wouldn’t make, there wasan equal part of me that didn’t want to. It was like… when we had to do thePacers, back in HS gym, and I sincerely wanted to break every bone in my ownbody rather than have to do it, again and again. I remember, at some point, inthe dream I was speaking to my father, trying to explain, and I said ‘And Ihave to do it tomorrow. And the next day. and the next.’ And I’m so fuckingtired of it.

And really the most awful thingabout that is that I woke up, and I was still thinking it. Like I woke up and Ifelt like it was still happening, and today was the day of the execution and Iwas getting up for my last two or three hours alive, and I was justindescribably furious that no one had listened, but also I was just ascompletely convinced that I had to die because that was what I wanted, secretlyand deeply and earnestly, for the longest time, and it took me like a good halfhour to really realize that I was awake and that I wasn’t going to be throwninto a pit of lava at 10:30 am. And I don’t know. Ugh. It’s doing that thing tome where I can’t feel my fingers.

2011-10-27T00:56:00.001-04:00

It's like you live your life in one cramped little room, and you think "Well it's not as roomy as other people's rooms are, but there's nothing wrong with it."

But then one day you tear off some wallpaper and find a door and you realize the room's been a kind of abandoned closet this whole time, and no one even bothered to check.

And you are suddenly gripped with this sickening, gut-wrenching agoraphobia. This room is all you've know and you don't even know how people can stand being in rooms bigger than yours. It doesn't seem natural.

I forgot what I was going for, here.

Snippets

2011-09-23T01:19:00.000-04:00

Ever cry so hard your feet cramp up?

All the supermodels in the world were actually slightly obese, and they all just wore "control" undergarments to cover it up.

Something about weather balloons.

And I think, maybe, a little bit about talking animals.

Then I woke up.

Out of the Blue

2011-09-16T21:53:00.002-04:00

It's people like you, sir, who make me embarrassed to be an English Major. Go fuck yourself. /pettinessNow it's a dream.I was giving blood but my blood was purple, and my arm was really long and thin and spindly, and the needle kept going super deep under my skin but never hitting the vein. It just kept slithering into my arm. Then I woke up.It's so cold. Didn't anyone tell Winter that Autumn has to have a turn, first?

Sometimes Dreams are Small

2011-09-11T11:29:00.004-04:00

But still creepy.Home video, mother filming her son, who is sick, screaming and crying because he is hallucinating; footage slowly turns into what the son is seeing. Too many colors. Everyone is really tall.Then I woke up.

My house has ugly wallpaper.

2011-09-10T17:40:00.001-04:00

No, really. It's this weird beige-brown color, and it's textured. I suppose, generously speaking, the texture is supposed to represent wood, like fine park on a tree, but really I'm not sure what whoever designed it was going for. Because it's textured, it's basically impossible to hang up any posters, because any kind of tape invariably peels off, sooner or later. My roommate uses sticky-tac, but that leaves ugly spots on the posters. There's nice wallpaper in the kitchen though. It's also brown and beige, but in a nice diamond-pattern, and there are different colored pears on it, and it actually looks kind of cozy and nice. So there's that, too. Anyway. 1.) The other night, the apocalypse happened again. This time around, all of the land in the world disappeared. The world flooded, or something, but it was a weird, slow flood, like a super-high-tide, and not like a tsunami flood. Anyway, all the land was gone, but for some reason, all the bridge in the world remained afloat, and they bobbed around in the new endless WATERWORLD-type deal and eventually all ended up in the same general vicinity, and the people who had survived the flood were congregating there, and living on boats and rafts and all the smaller bridges. The big bridges were too high in the air and tended to move too much on the water. So people stayed on little boats. Anyway, my father and I were on our boat, and we were having lunch. The cafe-bridge-boat came by and gave us some wine and bread and fruit, because of course these things existed after the apocalypse. We were having lunch, anyway, somehow, and then we started hearing this faraway splashing sound. We couldn't tell what was going on at first, but then we looked around and realized that people were jumping off the bridges. Not just individual people, but whole groups at a time. They were climbing up to the highest points of the bridges and jumping off to their death, and all we heard were the splash-plops of them hitting the water. Eventually, our little boat floated closer to the base of one of the bridges, and we saw a whole dozen people climb up to the top right above us, and when they jumped, some of them hit the base of the bridge instead of the water, and we heard their bones crack and break, and then some of them didn't die right away, but floated all broken in the water and gurgled and drowned. And we continued eating lunch because there was nothing we could do for them. Then the cafe-boat-bridge man came by again and invited us to a game of floating volleyball, so we paddled over to the volleyball court and played volleyball, only the court was all wet and slippery because bodies kept splashing down around us and sending waves over it. Then I woke up.2.) The other night, I was in bed with my best friend. There was a huge thunderstorm going on, and we kept being woken up by the sounds of the rain and thunder. Then we started to feel the water dripping down on us, and I turned on the light and saw that the ceiling was soaked through and dripping right onto my pillows. Right before our eyes, the whole ceiling over my bed got soggy and crumbly and drippy, and then the ugly wallpaper began to get weird and green and moldy and peel right off the walls in huge chunks, and underneath it was just rotten wood and exposed wires. My friend and I decided that we should move to my roommate's bed and sleep there instead until morning, and so we moved across the room, and then my roommate came back and sat with us and we all watched as the water made the ceiling sag lower and lower and lower down in the middle of the room. Eventually our house-mate came home and I asked him if he could drive us to the home repair shop so we could get some supplies to take care of the leaks and he very grudgingly agreed. As we were getting in the car I remembered that I had to go home later that day, so I turned to my friend and asked if she could drop me off at home on her way to work, and she also got very flustered by this request but ultimately agreed in a "i'm going to bitch about this to my other friends later" way.We were driving through town and kept passing strange new places that do not exist in our town at all. It was, in fact, an entirely different town, but it had the same name, for some reason. Then we were on the outskirts of New York City, and it was all deserted and decrepit because of the storm. But we saw a very fluffy white cat by a fence by the highway, and two little girls, maybe 8 and 5 years old were trying to capture it and bring it in to the animal shelter because there was a reward of 3.50$ for anyone who found the kitty. Then we got to the home repair shop and it wasn't open yet, so we decided to wait around for it to open. While we were waiting, a family pulled up next to us in their minivan and asked us to help them load all of their belongings into the subway train for them because they were moving back to Poland. We all took some bags and started down into the subway. I was holding a large suitcase full of clothes, and also helping the grandmother move a huge ancient trunk down the narrow stairs. We were moving slowly and everybody else went ahead of us. The subway station was all broken down and partially flooded, and there was a homeless person who looked like one of my professors singing a song by the wall. Everything was made of blue tile, too, and lit with neon lights. It was strange. Eventually we made it down to the platform, and the overhead speaker told us that this line on the Subway had been abandoned by the City and was now being operated by a private company that ran a line directly to the airport. So as the grandmother and I were struggling up towards the train car, it began to pull away, and the entire family except her was already on board. And they left us there on the platform, and I got super terrified, because I'm afraid of trains and subways on a good day, but now I was stuck down there alone with an elderly woman who did not speak English. I went over to one of the station employees and tried to ask him what to do but he seemed completely disinterested, so then I just went over to the grandmother and tried to figure out a way to tell her what was happening, and that the family was probably going to come back on the next train. But she got all weird and possessed and her face got all weird and demonic and she began to hiss at me and crawl backwards towards the opposite side of the train tracks. I tried to stop her but she wouldn't listen, and she fell down and got hit by a train. And that was when I decided that the whole place could go fuck itself. I went back up out onto the street and my friends were all in the car and they were waiting for me. I got in and tried to explain what had happened, and they all just laughed, and I started to cry because I had been so scared, and then we drove away and all of the stores had been replaced with abandoned steakhouses.

Voodoo Vampires something something

2011-08-31T20:02:00.003-04:00

We had just moved into our new house. Everyone was on edge and acting funny because we had to unpack and get all our stuff in order and it all felt like an inordinately overwhelming amount of things to do. My brother especially was acting very strange. He kept muttering things about the windows and arranging the blinds in different ways. I was getting annoyed, so I kept telling him to stop and go unpack, and then I tried looking for our father to ask him to intervene, but he just told me to go back to work. Then I went into the kitchen and a weird little orb of blackness appeared in front of me, and I hit my forehead against it. I fell forward in time by two minutes. Everything was black and white, but we were still in the house. I think I was also in some sort of weird limbo realm between worlds, because I could see weird swirly shapes around everyone. They weren't quite auras, but more like small whispy spirit-creature-parasite type things. They were like the fish that hang onto sharks and whales. They clung and circled around everyone, but there was an especially large cloud around my brother, and I could see that one of them was worming its way into his head through his ear.

I tried to approach him but he stopped me and stood very still in the middle of the room and told me that he was going to jump out of the window and kill himself. I started to panic, because I couldn't figure out how to stop him or help him. This was the future, but it was also not the future, it was a different shade of the world, and I didn't know why I was there or how to get out.

Suddenly, the little black ball dislodge itself from me and I was back in the "real" world, and I frantically searched for my father, because I saw that my brother was moving towards the window. I started telling him what had just happened, but he suddenly turned into my friend, who was in no way interested in what was going on. He was very mean and told me to go away and stop bothering him, and I just had to stand there and watch as my brother jumped out of the window.

When he fell, the whole room shifted and I was suddenly in a weird, dark basement, or a dungeon, with a long black hallway leading off into an even deeper room. My friend was still there, and he was still kind of a jerk, but he kept telling me to stay close and not to make a sound, because people were after me and they wanted to use me as a voodoo sacrifice, and then to make into one of their own, which was some sort of voodoo/witchy/vampire/demon thing.

I was also, for some reason, in a weird child form. I wasn't a child, per se, but I was somehow smaller and weaker than everyone else. My friend sat next to me on a large wooden crate and drew things surreptitiously in chalk - warding signs to keep the spells of the bad people away from me. A woman appeared who was also claiming that she was trying to help us. She had a really hard grip on my shoulder, and I kept feeling her tugging me upwards towards the exit.

All of a sudden there was an explosion of darkness and I was outside in the street, but it was raining and really dark because there were no street lights. I heard footsteps and yelling, and it was the people who wanted to get me, they were running after me. But my friend and the lady pulled up in a really fancy futuristic car and told me to get in. My friend was being a real jerk again, and I got fed up and started yelling back at him, and arguing with the lady about who had to sit in the back seat. Eventually we all got situated in the car and he zoomed off and down a spiraling road towards a sunny waterfront, which was probably in another dimension. Right before we reached it, though, our car crashed through some sort of invisible barrier and I was flipped out of the windshield and across the canals that ran alongside the main river.

As I flew I saw heaps of bodies, freshly killed, lying all over the place. They were dressed in rags and looked like they were refugees or homeless people. Right before I hit the ground, though, I saw two of the people get up and hurriedly start hobbling away from the river, and I overheard one of them saying "...before they come back."

I landed and lay stunned for a while, and as the feeling came back into my body I turned my head and saw a group of about twenty or thirty people coming down from the town. They looked like the Snatchers and in fact their leader was the very same one from the HP movies. (Let us call him Davey, because he looks weirdly like this guy.)

Anyway, I got really scared that these people were the ones that were looking for me, so I hid in the bushes but Davey saw me and told me to go with them, and to get onto the train that was travelling along the other side. To get inside we had to swim across the river and then get under the rails and jump up into the cars through the trap doors underneath them. I jumped into the river and started swimming alongside the cars. I was at first really confused as to why no one seemed to care that there was a mob of pale, tattered criminal types swimming next to the train, but then I realized that we were probably somehow disguised so that they couldn't see it, like we were wearing Glamour or something, the way fairies did.

The river was very shallow and full of sharp stones and pieces of glass and fishing gear. I kept trying to swim and finding that the water was only a few inches deep, however, I could not stand up and just walk, because somehow the water was forcing me down. So I crawled along until I got under the rails, and I jumped up and found myself inside a small wooden box. From the outside I could hear the sound of something whining, like a saw, and I felt the box starting to move. I peeked out and saw that I was in some sort of automated sawing machine that was making wooden dressers. I crawled out and fell on top of one of the saws as I was trying to dodge the one in the ceiling, and it cut my hip, but it didn't really hurt and I somehow knew that I was okay.

I peeked out from behind the curtain and saw that I was in some sort of large parlor, and the dresser making machine ran around the room and was attended by men in uniforms who made sure it wasn't running too loudly. I was trying to be all sneaky as I walked around the room, but then I realized I still had the Glamour thing making me invisible. I walked out and into another room, and the train was no longer a train but a river boat, and I was a ghost.

I could barely walk because the room was pitching so much, plus it was full of fancy people and their fancy dogs, and the dogs kept sensing that I was there so I had to work my way around them very carefully. Eventually I made it out the service entrance and stumbled against a wall, and some other person appeared next to me and we both stood there for a while, trying to gain our balance, and then we looked at each,

and I woke up.

Neville's the real hero.

2011-08-22T12:15:00.003-04:00

Because let's everybody admit, Matthew Lewis got fine.

But moving on...
I was on a school trip to an aquarium, but it was the kind of trip where you go behind the scenes and learn about the facility, not the fish. So they took us into the dank dungeons of the aquarium to show us where they kept the dangerous predator-types when they were not on display. In order to view each tank we had to walk into a separate, cell-like room, where a thick glass gate divided the people part from the fish part. However, at the touch of a button, the gate could be raised and the room could be flooded, so that the animals had more room to move around.

One of the girls I was with was fascinated by the penguin-man-shark in one of the cells. It was a shark with a humanoid face, but coloration like Emperor Penguins. It had too many teeth and it could make facial expressions like smiling and grinning, and it liked to swim up past the glass and bang its head on it to scare everyone. Somehow, this shark managed to hypnotize the girl and convince her that she had to flood the chamber and kill everyone. She got to the button before we could stop her and the glass gate began to lower.

However, I managed to escape before the water filled the room completely, but the rest of the group were not as lucky. They were trapped inside the lower part of the room, and the man-shark kept trying to jump over the glass barrier, which got stuck halfway, but he couldn't quite get it.

Suddenly, Neville showed up, because he was one of the employees at the zoo, and gave me this long-winded explanation about how the hydraulic system worked for the glass gates and how the only way to cure the hypnotized girl was to let her drown. So he carefully fished all of the other people out of the cell with a giant net and left the girl there, and we watched her flail around for a long time in the water. Then she got still and just floated there, and started screaming because she realized what she'd done. And we were just reaching for her to save her, but the man shark jumped over the gate and tore her in half.

And then some other things happened, but mostly that was the interesting part.
Then I woke up.

[Title]

2011-08-22T00:38:00.005-04:00

I wrote seven pages. But then I scrapped everything. And the best thing I could come up with is "You are flickering and brilliant, but you are like a crystal figurine catching the light as it falls. You are going to shatter soon."

Losing touch, etc.

Last night I moved into my friends' house so that I could be closer to school. Their house is very large. There is an atrium type room in the center that they use as a living room. It rises two floors, and the rest of the second-floor rooms are located in an L-shape around it. My room was all the way at the top of the stairs. They told me it was haunted, but that the spirits were benevolent. The walls in the atrium are white and clean, but my room is old varnished wood, and the floor is that same old dark-cherry red of the kitchen floor in my grandparent's flat.

It was time to go to school and I had to go upstairs to get my shoes, but the part of the stairs leading up to my room disappeared because the insurance company did not consider me part of the family, so they wouldn't let me use the stairs in case I fell. I was late for class and I had to ask the Marine at the bottom of the stairs to look me up on the computer to convince the insurance company I existed. He went through several different companies, and only found me on the fifth try. By then I was really late for class, and I had to rush, but I also didn't know the way to campus from this new house, so I had to ask the mother of the house and her son, B, to show me the way.

B agreed but the mother was kind of annoyed, and she kept trying to distract me. At one point she succeeded and I saw B run off ahead because he didn't see that I was distracted. I yelled at the woman for leading me astray, and I told her to show me the right way, and she kept leading me through roads on which large pickup trucks and ATVs kept driving past. Also, she kept leading me in circles. Whenever we got to the part of the hedge through which B disappeared, I would run through and end up several blocks back up along the street.

I feel like several days passed like this, because every time I went through the hedge the weather and time of day changed. Often, it was raining, and my shoes were soaked through.

I think eventually I made it to class, and the teacher was the same woman who had been the mother, only she was much older. She was a giant, too. The entire classroom was built for giants, and I couldn't get into any of the desks.

When class let out I tried to go back home, but the house had changed, and I had to break into the house with the help of a wizard. Afterwards we hid in the bushes beside the house, which was perched on top of a huge, bleak cliff, and watched as hordes of wicked undead marched past below, ready to overthrow the empire. Everything was bleak and grey and black, and it was raining a hard, freezing rain.

Then I woke up.

Also, I keep getting flashes of large beetle-people. They are harmless but they are very concerned about something, and they keep scrambling up over each other.
Also something on fire.

Have you read Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things", yet?

2011-07-24T11:09:00.003-04:00

Because you should...

On a totally unrelated note, here is a poem made with phrases from the book. I wrote it for an English assignment in high school. I really like the way it came out, but also the words mean different things depended on if you have read the book or not.

"Small Things"

Sick-sweet
Sick-sweet
The see-saw sings
We in the sun
With caterpillars on our soles
(Souls soaked with sun
Seasoned with
Sick-sweet
Berries overripe)
With our sticky hands
Grasp at
Cream buns and lemondrinks
And tangerines (that smell the way
Sunshine should).
Sick-sweet
Sick-sweet
The see-saw sings
And moths like cold kisses
Whisper into our hearts
(Sick-sweet
Sick-sweet)
Too soon comes the end
Of the Holiday!

Also check out my shitty high-school writing, here.

It was quite scary, actually.

2011-06-13T13:41:00.003-04:00

I was boy-me, standing in the desert. It was blisteringly hot, literally. The sun was so hot the flat expanse of dirt and sand was glittering and moving slightly as it melted. The sky was red and inflamed, and there was an ominous black stripe all around the horizon, as though the ends of the world were falling into oblivion. In front of me was a hospital gurney, and there was a man lying on top it. He was tied down with leather straps and wrapped from head to toe in yellowish gauze, like a mummy. As I watched, bloody blotches began to appear all over his body, and he twisted and screamed and wailed in agony, because he was burning up alive under the sun, which seemed to be very very close over the Earth, maybe only as distant as the moon.
The man kept writhing and squirming and burning up alive, and I turned away from him and began to walk away into the desert. I had walked a pretty significant distance when I chanced to turn around and saw him running towards me full-tilt. He was going to kill me when he reached me. He was going to rip my skin off with his rotten, burned-up hands. I began to run too, and he chased me for a while, until I tripped and fell, and he swooped down on top of me and we began to fight.
Suddenly, however, exactly half of the world became an ocean of fire, and I knew that the man would certainly die if I managed to push him deep enough into the flames. He would both drown and burn up completely. So I gathered all of my strength and pushed him as far as I could into the water, until we came to a huge stone wall in the "water". The man couldn't fight be off any more, but he did grab my ankles, so that I could not swim away back to the shore. Luckily, I kicked myself free, and I back-stroked all the way back to land. The fire felt very soft and gentle, it was like touching cool down feathers, or running your hand through room-temperature water.
Back on shore, I discovered that I was on my home street, a few blocks away from my house. I heard voices coming from an open doorway and went in to see what was going on. It was a bar, and there was a gaggle of hipsters sitting around eating Thai food and drinking stupid cheapo beer. One of my friends walked by, and he was dressed in a pink bunny suit. I decided to go back outside and go home.

And then I woke up.

Bookends to my all-nighter

2010-12-14T12:47:00.003-05:00

The day after the Rammstein concert:
I was lost in Buckingham Palace. Inside of it was a vast wilderness. And it was decorated with snow for the Queen's annual Winter Ball. I was trying to find my way out so I could see my family. I fell into a pit of mud and the harder I tried to get out the deeper I'd slide into it, and there were these obscene, neon-color fungi growing on the walls and they were quite literally horrifying and they kept touching me and I kept being disgusted and terrified and I would scream, and one of the castle servants was standing at the edge of the pit and he was just laughing and not helping me out. I pulled myself out finally, and then I ran outside and found my family and my grandparents and invited to go and see the palace but they were afraid to go inside. The palace was actually the Student Center.

The 17-hour nap after all-night study-fest:
We were a volunteer group who would visit orphanages and play with the kids and take them on little field trips. For this trip we went down to the river that flows through the middle of the city and decided to pick fruits that hang from the trees on the banks. We picked a basket full of apples and pomegranates and then our leader decided the best way to get back home was to put each kid on a little surfboard and to tug them up along the river because that way it was closer to the orphanage. We had sent all of the children along and it was just me and the team leader and the last orphan, and she wanted to take extra fruit back up to the orphanage with her so we helped her pack a whole lot into a hat at the end of the surfboard and we began to haul her upstream. The water was turquoise opaque, as though someone had been painting with that color and had been washing their brushes in the river for a very very very very very long time. Also there were tiny specks in the water that looked either like the fat on top of a bowl of broth or like tiny specks of gold floating on the surface... We moved through this water very slowly because we were trying not to overtip the hat full of apples, but the waves started to rise and we had to paddle towards the nearest building in order to not lose them all. Some of the apples rolled off into the water, and once we stopped the leader decided to dive down and get them, so me and the little girl decided to stay on the bank. However, a small mechanical leprechaun appeared and told us to follow him, because we had landed at the secret visitor entrance of a famous toy factory, and so they were going to give us a grand tour. The team leader hadn't appeared for a good ten minutes now, so we decided he wasn't coming back and so we followed the leprechaun. They showed us how all the fantastical mechanical toys were made and how they were powered by special batteries imbued with a mysterious power that let them move on their own. Then they led us into a dark room full of huge singing pipes and sharp things in the walls, and they tried to kidnap the little girl. We fought them off and they said they needed her to extract the life-force from her body for the batteries and to turn her into a doll herself. We fought our way through the leprechauns and into the dark gift shop where the doll-children were being sold, and there we saw the toy-maker herself, and she chased us around with a plastic butcher knife and threatened to kill us. I found a real knife and slit her throat and she told us as she was dying that in order to escape we'd have to fight our way through her horde of trained rabbits in order to push the release button for all the doors.

So we fought our way through the horde of trained doll death-rabbits. And then there were zombie robots and didn't know if they were zombies or robots. And then we finally pushed the button and were free. And then I woke up.

clang clang clang

2010-11-16T10:29:00.002-05:00

I dreamed about the sound empty tin cans make when they hit each other. Like a wind-chime made of tin cans. Also everything was a cushy shade of dark red and black. Also there were people milling around in the background but they had no faces.

Not scary, but weird. Mostly it was the sound. It's weird to dream about noise. Like, as a visual-inclined person, why would I have a dream that's predominantly sound? It doesn't make much sense, imo. There's probably some sort of science to explain it though.

Achievement Unlocked

2010-11-08T22:33:00.003-05:00

Last night I wrote a bit of my NaNoWriMo novel. Now I've written some weird, gruesome shit before, but last night I was on some sort of Palahniuk/King/De Sade roll or something, 'cause I cranked out two pages of things that should never see the light of day and then I had nightmares about it all night.

It was like watching a scary movie you know is going to make you afraid of being alone in a lit room in the daytime, but in my head, all night, without stopping.

But at least I wrote something.

This non-dream post brought to you by K's need to take a break from homework before working on a Japanese translation.

宿題、宿題、宿題。。。毎日宿題あるよ。

Also, what is this, I don't even... my embarrassing Grooveshark playlist was hanging out for everyone to see. Great, now the internet knows I listen to Boney M.

There were no lasers...

2010-10-27T11:16:00.004-04:00

So it was 1941 and I was in a supermarket with my two friends and we were picking out food to serve at the awesome dinner party we were going to have, when suddenly my father showed up and told me that I had to join the air force and help patrol the skies around town and shoot down any enemy airplanes that might be in the area.
He said we were supposed to leave at 7 a.m. the next morning. And the next morning I woke up and it was 6 o'clock so I spent my hour getting ready and reading through the airplane manual 'cause I didn't really know how to fly. And suddenly it was 7:40 and I got scared that I was really late. So I can to my airplane and unrolled it out of the duffel bag it was in, and I somehow managed to get up to the air space above the town, and my father said "okay just fly in this sector and shot down anyone in a red airplane" and I said okay and basically just flew around in circles. The four red airplanes appeared, and I shot them down, and when they exploded, they made huge mushroom clouds, but for some reason, instead of falling down like you'd expect, the planes that were shot down fell sideways, and exploded when they were out of range of the town.

Then my patrol was over and I was free for the day, so I decided to fly my airplane through town. I went down along one of the river paths that were for pedestrians only, but since I wasn't in a car it was okay for me to be there. I kept almost hitting the power lines, but I got out okay in the end. I parked my airplane on a little hill near the fishing docks. It turned into a bicycle so it wouldn't take up space, and I tried figuring out what I was there to do, but I couldn't, so I got back on my bicycle/airplane and pedaled back up into the sky and just sat there and twirled around and looked at the mountains, which were very beautiful, and seemed to go on forever.

When I came back home for the day, my mother was very upset that I had joined the air force, because she thought I was going to get shot and die, because there were four more years left in the war and even though I had had such a good first day, it was probably not going to all be like that. So I said "Fine, i'll join the zombie evasion force" and went off into the forest to hunt the droves of zombies that roamed the area. It wasn't very exciting.

Then the war was over and I was a veteran so I had benefits like free use of the yoga classes in the gym, so one of my vague acquaintances appeared and asked me to go to yoga with him, and I agreed. So we went into the gym of the college campus in the town, but before we went to class we decided to get coffee to relax, for what ever reason. And my friend kept disappearing and I was very confused.

Finally, we got directions to the gym class and we went down into the warren of tunnels that was the main building on campus, and we got very lost.

These are the same tunnels I always see, they're white and they turn into themselves and there are large windows in them that look into the rooms and there are always freaky experimental things going on in those rooms and I'm scared to walk into any of them and ask for help.

Then I woke up.

ANTARCTICA ANTARCTICA

2010-10-19T10:52:00.002-04:00

It's what I'm naming my new band, gaiz.

No, we just took a family trip there. It's actually pretty warm. The ice and cold and stuff is just a cover to keep away all the annoying touristy types. We got in as volunteer student teachers. I went swimming in the ocean. The waves were huge and kept trying to drag me out to sea, but I would always get away just in time.

And then I woke up.

The colors! The COLORS.

2010-10-14T19:04:00.002-04:00

I was wearing shiny black clothes walking down a neon yellow hallway with neon green doors. The cracks in the floor were neon red, there was confetti in the air and it was so brightly white it glowed. My hair was a weird mahogany color. The entire hallway undulated and twisted away into infinity. I didn't have a destination, I was just walking.

I haven't really ever gotten a steam burn before, but just now I was opening my microwave cover to get my dinner out and the steam from it burned three of my fingers, and it stings like a bitch, and they're all swollen. I guess I'll go put some ice on it.

"Please listen to me..."

2010-09-21T10:38:00.004-04:00

We were leaving the high school by bus, but there were too many people on the one bus so they had us all exit and wait outside in the snow, and they called people up by "alphabetical" order, which started with "anyone with a Y at the end of their first name". My brother went up for that. Then they called for "anyone with an H anywhere in their name", and I went up for that. And there were no real seats on the bus, they were just old milk crates nailed to boards. Also the bus was freakishly larger than all the others, and it had to maneuver around a small spa in the parking lot to get to the road, and almost ran over a girl sunbathing there. Also it was snowing hard and everything was freezing.

Then I was a boy at a boarding school somewhere in what is probably Pennsylvania. There was a large, shallow, clear lake. On the other bank of the lake was a part of the lake from a previous dream, I suppose this was just a continuation of it. I went swimming in the lake all the time, because it was fun and nobody bothered me. I could look down into the water and see giant sharp rocks, but I never touched them, or if I did they didn't hurt me. The water was clear and greenish, and it wasn't scary to swim out far and be alone in the water, because it was an observed fact that nothing scary lived in the lake. On the far end of the lake was a peat bog and a sharp valley, and it looked really pretty when the sun set.

There was a man-eating witch in the forest behind the school who would eat anyone who trespassed in her territory at night. I went on a hike there with my class during the day but got left behind somehow, and I ran around in circles trying to avoid the witch. She was right behind me the whole time. She was made of rotting bones and burned skin and tattered old dresses, and her eyes were red and tiny and her teeth were perfect human teeth, all her own, and she could move as fast as lightning. Somehow, in my terror of being eaten by her I acquired a bit of magic power, and so I tried using it to escape. I scrambled over rocks and let them fall after me, but she could fly so it didn't work. Then I tried to turn into a shadow and hide in the darkness between rocks until the morning came, but she pounced on me and she held me down, and her breath on my neck was hot and sticky and it smelled like sweet rotting things. And she said "I've got you!" and started gnawing on my skull. I could feel her perfect teeth scraping against it, and she was about to bite through and break my skull like a candy or, like I thought, "like an apple", her wristwatch alarm went off, and she let me go, because it was "time for school". I ran away down the hill as fast as I could. There was suddenly a clear path for me. I didn't even run anymore. I flew. I lay down on the path and flew down it and dove into the lake at the bottom, and even though it was only a few feet deep I didn't get hurt or crash into the rocks there, and I swam and tried to relax. I swam back to the dock and my friends were there waiting for me, and I knew they'd think I was telling them a lie or relating a dream, and my voice was very quiet and small and I couldn't make it louder, and they kept talking over me and I kept pleading with them to "Please listen to me..." but they didn't.

And then it was time for school.

Two for One Sale at the Crazy Store

2010-09-01T09:05:00.005-04:00

One:
I was in a chasm. It was immensely deep and very nearly pitch dark. The only light came from the glinting of two thin strips of metal which ran at a slight angle down into the darkness. I don't know why they were glinting, possibly they were imbued with evil. I was watching myself climbing along these strips of metal, inching my way down. For whatever reason, I could not go up, out of the pit. Sometimes the strips would be separated, or only one strip would be available at a time, so I'd have to inch along on just my toes or my fingers. Also I was dressed in weird olive overalls and a striped shirt, so I looked kind of like some lovable rascally type from turn-of-the-20th-century stories. At some point, two other people appeared. One was a girl in a white dress. The other was a boy in a dark military uniform. We inched along this wall together for a while, and then we came to a huge pipe sticking out of the wall and leading out into the darkness. The other side of the chasm couldn't be seen ever, but it was certainly there, somewhere in the darkness. This pipe was very cold and very rusted, and it was covered in condensation and slime. The boy in the uniform decided to climb up along it, because we saw that the strip of metal along the wall was a great deal farther away than we had seen before and so if we were to jump for it from the pipe, we might miss and fall into the very palpably deep darkness below us.
So the boy in the uniform continued to climb along, and got a fairly good way up but then we saw lights flickering on not too far away on the other side of the darkness, and suddenly he was swung out into the air on a rope that had been thrown around his ankle, and he swung into one of the lights there and we saw that there were cave monsters living in holes in the wall, and they squeezed his whole body through a little hole the size of a coffee mug and we heard him screaming and he was torn apart. The girl in white and I stayed on our side of the pipe, because somehow, instinctively, we knew we were safer there. However, we also realized that we had to get across the pipe because going farther down was not an option. So the girl decided she would go first and distract the monsters while I made a dash, so to speak, across to the other side, then I would pull her up, because she was an acrobat and she could fight the swing of the rope and get it to swing in my direction instead of the monster's caves.
Well it didn't really work, because the second we were halfway up the pipe, they had two ropes around us, and both me and her were swinging by our ankles from the pipe. Also it had somehow gotten brighter inside the space, possibly because the little holes where the cave monsters lived had been getting brighter and brighter. They took the girl in white first, and she disappeared into the wall through one of the little holes. I continued to swing there, and I saw the monster come out of its hole to try and grab me, and I kicked out and just barely managed to kick him in the jaw. The monsters looked like 80s monsters, like animatronics, or something. Yeah so I kept swinging around and kicking out and trying to hit the monster, and each time I was just far away enough so that when I swung out my kicks didn't have much force; but it kept the monsters away anyway so I guess it was okay.
Then the rope broke, as I was swinging away, so I was flung off back towards the wall with the pipe. I tried to get a grip on the metal strip on the wall but I couldn't, so I fell down, but I only fell down a few feet, because it turned out that right below was a large platform, of some kind, and as soon as I touched it the lights went on and I saw that the floor was only another twenty or thirty feet down, which is still a pretty big fall, but at least the pit wasn't bottomless, eh?
Then I saw the girl in white down on the ground, fighting off all the monsters. She had on the uniform the boy was wearing, and she was fighting with a sword she had found, except the sword looked more like a really really large needle, and not a sword. She ran up to my platform and hid around the corner where the monsters couldn't get here because it was too bright, and we saw that the ground was covered in coarse salt and old squeezed lemon sections. As we were pondering this, a group of six or eight men in uniform ran out of the lit space in the wall and started to fight the monsters. The girl and I wondered about this, and also about where the lemons came from, and then we saw that the hilts of all the swords the men were using, which were also like giant needles, were made of sections of lemon, and that whenever a monster killed a soldier, he would take the lemon and squeeze it in the man's eyes and then rub them with salt, and then drag him back into his lair.
And then I woke up.

Two:
I was walking out of a weird and oddly dank version of Scott Hall, and suddenly the girl walking in front of me fell down hard on the pavement. I asked her if she was okay and she said she was fine, but then she asked me if I had any aspirin on me, and I didn't. Then she told me we had had the same girl in our Spanish class one time and she started asking me repeatedly about this girl, even though I answered repeatedly that I didn't really talk to said girl or know anything about her other than her name. As we wandered slowly down the street, I realized the area was slowly turning into a quaint Mexican town. The girl and I started talking about other things, and then we stopped to buy some grapes. I got a really small bunch and she got a really big bunch, and we ate my bunch first, and then she just kept handing me the grapes from her bunch, and each time she did the grapes got bigger. Eventually we came to a a road that was under construction. To our left was a slightly less under-construction path, but it was also littered with the bones of dinosaurs or whales or some other large and imposing animal. We stood there trying to figure out which way was best for us to go, and I asked her which way I should go if I wanted to get back to my house, and she said I had to go back the way I came, except I couldn't do that, because I can't really ever do that in dreamland. She handed me another grape and it was the size of a large pear, or a smallish eggplant. We took off our shoes. The pile of bones behind her hatched a bone creature that was about to attack us, except a third girl showed up and we all set off single file down an overgrown path. We passed a snake in the grass, really really close to our feet, and I was concerned that it might bite us, but it didn't. Then we crossed a bridge, and this bridge was very long and narrow and wooden, and the farther along we got the more boards were missing from the floor and the more clothes were hanging from the sides and the cross beams so that it was hard to see what was a head. The two other girls knew the area and so they kept walking, but I had to go slowly to get over the right boards, and also I had to keep eating that pear/grape and it was hard to see what was going on, and the girls were down on the ground on the other side already, but I was stuck, because there was a group of older women in gym clothes trying to make their way up the ladder to the bridge and I had to let them through, but they weren't moving, they were just standing there complimenting each other's clothes, and I ate the last bit of my pear and woke up.

The end.

Ruin with a View

2010-07-22T12:55:00.004-04:00

I was in the supermarket, trying to find all of the things I had written on my shopping list, when a tall man in a long dark coat came up to me and told me that I had to come with him, because I was in great danger. He told me it was because of my power, and I was very surprised because I did not know that anyone knew about my secret power, because even I did not know about it. I began trying to tell him that I didn't know what he was talking about and that he should leave me alone, but he told me my tricks would not work on him, and grabbed me by the hand and dragged me through a little pinhole in time and space, to a dilapidated villa in a small town overlooking the Mediterranean coast. We stood in the empty pool of the villa, and there were moist, rotting leaves all around us, being kicked up by a ridiculous wind that seemed to come from the actual walls of the pool, and not from anywhere else.

The man told me I had to help him rescue a girl who was stuck in a grey dimension, in a large glass building in a city that was constantly dark, because all of the lights in it burned backwards, so they shed darkness instead of light. He said she had a similar power to mine, and that when she was rescued, we could go on with the rest of our mission.

I decided to agree, because I didn't really have a choice. I also realized that my secret power was to persuade anyone of anything, and make them believe anything I wanted, because I could project the thing I wanted them to think into their head, and make them believe they were thinking it themselves.

So the man grabbed my hand again and we were extruded through this pinhole in space-time to the dark city. The girl was trapped in an office room. She got stuck because in this city, everyone's mind was closed up and they did not think any thoughts, because they were all dead, so she could not convince anyone to open the door for her, because herself she could not manipulate physical objects, because she was part dream, and so not technically part of the physical world. Her power was also a kind of telepathy, but she could also turn time inside out, like inverting the fingers in a glove, and thus create wormholes in time which allowed her to travel to different eras.

She and I went on a trip into the past of the villa where we were, to the time when the pool was filled and there was sunshine and the master of the house still lived there, before he went insane. We swam in the pool and the water was turquoise clear and cool and the sunshine made everything pleasantly golden and blue.

Then we had to return to the time we came from, where the man in the coat was waiting for us to tell us what exactly our mission was. He yelled at us through time to take the master of the house with us, because he was the girl's father, secretly, and also because he was being slowly murdered in the insane asylum to which he had been committed by his enemies.

So we took the master back with us, in his wheelchair. He was blind and he was too lost in his mind for us to talk to him, but the girl and I used our powers to talk to him. I projected thoughts of the sunny pool into his mind, and reminded him what it was like to swim in the water and to be happy there and the girl reminded him that she was his daughter, and that she wanted to know what he wanted her to do them.

The master just said that he wanted to keep swimming in the pool, forever and ever, and so the girl made a kind of infinite loop of the past and she placed him in it, so that he could swim forever and ever in the sunny pool.

Then the world disappeared and we ended up back in the supermarket where I was first wandering, and we were all roommates and we were looking for things to make a candy pie with.

Also we were all vampires, and we really liked the color red, so we picked out only red ingredients, and everyone looked at us funny.

Then I woke up.

Probably something in the water...

2010-07-13T12:52:00.002-04:00

We were visiting friends for the weekend, but somehow we ended up parking in the wrong lot and we got trapped inside an experimental military complex, designed to test and quantify just how well a human being can handle complete absurdity. Or something. The entire base was in the care of a man known as General, and he lived by himself in a room on the first floor, which had no blinds on the windows and into which anyone could see at any time. Although if they did they probably would not see General, because he was almost always somewhere else, supervising the hordes of poor college students who had been hired as both lab assistants and as guinea pigs. The students were given no money and no food, and they survived by periodically venturing into some of the safer experimental "absurdity floors" and foraging for food. Like runny eggs! and chocolate chip cookies!

Anyway, General was giving us a tour of the entire institution, because we were friends of friends of friends and he was on break. At one point, he turns to me and says "You, young man, would make a fine addition to our laboratory." Everyone around me thought this was a great idea, and so General just left me on Floor 1, to fend for myself; because what he meant was I'd make a great addition to the guinea pigs. Also, I looked into the mirror and saw that I was now Schay, and I had on a ridiculous black leather trench-coat, and my weapon was a scythe made from aluminum and some sort of blue, radioactive metal for the blade.

The way the system worked in this experiment was that each specimen was somehow, surreptitiously implanted with a homing beacon and a recording device which allowed the underpaid and underfed lab kids to keep track of each person individually and to make a note of their unique experience and physiological reaction to the "worlds" they were in. This data was later compiled into a master file.

Anyway, the specimens would all start out on the first floor, with the same uniform and the same weapon. The only way to go would be through the elevator/teleporter, which was the entrance into the first level of weird. This room was fairly tame, since it was merely a massive space in which directions reversed at random, and so getting out depended on being able to adapt in midair. Remarkably, a lot of the people in this room figured this out and got out fairly quickly, though there were some who wandered around, maddened by it, with no hope of ever getting out. Incidentally, the way out was the same way as in, except it took you to a different spot in the corridor where you started, and also took you to some elevators.

The elevators all led to the different floors of the facility, and to all the different rooms, but certain people would only see different floor numbers, depending on their behaviour inside of the worlds. Each world also had a teleport device, marked by a large diamond, which was a soft of "safe gateway" out of each world. If something truly dangerous or deadly was encountered, you could run into this tiny room and wait there, either for the danger to pass or for the teleporter to randomly activate and take you back to the corridor outside.

One of the rooms I kept getting stuck in, because the teleporter was rigged to place anyone who entered it back into the environment they just came from, was a virtual world inhabited by large, skeletal, blood-red monsters, somewhat resembling a mix of a greyhound dog and a large lizard. There were also humanoid creatures, who looked like beautiful women, just strolling around under the trees - which were all identical - but who would turn into huge beige fox/snake creatures if you got within a certain distance of them. Both the red and the beige creatures were set to attack and destroy any person entering the world and the goal of the world, for the humans, was to destroy all of the creatures. This was impossible, because every time a human died and went back to the teleporter/spawn point, all of the creatures that he or she had killed or maimed returned to perfect health.

Also, they were immune to the giant scythes we were all given as our standard weapons, so we had literally kick the creatures in the face until they died, which was hard for a number of reasons, most prominent among being the fact that they were a) the size of elephants and b) made of a gummy, sort material which would turn to liquid when we touched it and imprison the attacker, allowing the creature to gnaw them off and leave them to die.

Eventually I escaped this room, but not before dying about a dozen or so times. Every time I died, it was because a pack of four or five red monsters would trample me to death immediately as I reappeared in the world. I got lucky at one point and managed to outrun them, but then I got too close to one of the beige monsters and it chased me and I ran into the diamond room, but then I ran out again and into the elevator door, which was really slow to close, so the thing almost got me, but I ultimately managed to get away safely. I lost my scythe, however.

When I made it back into the "safety" corridor, the two options for me in the elevators were to go to floor 14 or to floor 23. Somehow, I felt that my ultimately goal was to get to the very top of the building, to the highest floor, at which point I would be let free. Since there were only 30 floors, I figured 23 was the better option. The elevator for that floor, however, was completely wet, as though it came from someplace underwater. Furthermore, the entrance to it was a small window three feet off the ground. I had to climb into it, and when I did I found that inside, the window was even higher up, so I would have to climb even more to get back out, and this would be made even harder by the fact that the walls were really slimy because of the water. Also, I had no weapon, so I had no idea at all what I was up against, other than the fact that there might be water. So I pushed the button for the 23rd floor and I practiced holding my breath, just in case I'd end up in water. However, around floor 19, the elevator began to move sideways, down a series of tracks. I could see through the walls, since they turned to mesh, and I could see lab workers strolling down the corridor. I couldn't tell if they saw me in the elevator, but they definitely saw the elevator itself, since they kept pointing and saying things like "there goes another one". My elevator got stuck on the 19th floor, which was a loop world where General (or his clone?) trained new "recruits" for the rigors of the absurd worlds they were going to encounter. Which was weird, because they had to have gotten through 19 of them in order to get there, but I guess that was the point, or something.

Anyway, my box kept going around in circles, so I tried prying open the door so I could get out and walk. Somehow, I ended up on a horse. This horse went around and around in a circle, no matter how hard I tried to get it to go out through the door, every time we passed it. General didn't seem to notice me, but he kept saying things that seemed like they were being said for me to hear. Also he kept talking to the ceiling, and when I looked up I realized that the rafters were all made of living people. They were crammed into hollow metal beams, and they all had a cigarette to smoke and mp3 players to listen to music, but they could not come down from the rafters, unless they fell, at which point General would come over and beat them and make them climb back up.

One of the people who fell from the ceiling was a friend of mine, except he had been brainwashed so he didn't really respond to me or recognize me, he just sat there and laughed and smoked his cigarette until General came to put him back in his place in the rafters. It was at this point that I realized I was again in the hallway; apparently not paying attention was the way to get out, because otherwise the horse wouldn't go anywhere, because it was an absurd horse that could read my mind.

The hallway, much to my dismay, was not a safe hallway like all of the others had been; it was part of the absurd world. People kept trying to climb onto the horse with me and to get me to take them somewhere. Women would turn into witches when I refused them and I had to repeatedly kick people in the face until they lost consciousness and fell off. For a while I thought I was safe, but then I felt my horse slowing down, because it was deflating. A small boy, a child, dressed completely in black took advantage of this and began to cling to my back so that I would take him with me into the next floor. There was also a shadow-man behind him. I could not see his face, but he was wearing a jumpsuit made of shadows, and a fedora made of darkness, and he didn't speak but he was with the boy. I kept trying to fight them off, but for some reason every time I swung my arm down to hit the boy my hand would feel like it was moving through thick gel, and I would barely touch him. Also the boy had evil, black eyes.

Eventually my horse deflated completely and we had to walk. We made it to the end of the hallway and there was a group of people huddled around an overturned dresser, trying to feed their children plastic food. I took the boy I had with me out onto the balcony and I tried to beat him again. I had to crush his face so that he would not follow me. I managed to hit him once or twice, but then he stopped me with his weird magic gelatinous air trick and told me he was a double-agent, and that he needed my help to get out. Also he was a devil, perhaps THE devil, and also he was a magical shape-shifter, who took the form of a child because it was least suspicious and threatening. One of the men outside in the hallway came out onto the balcony and asked me what I was doing, and I couldn't figure anything out, so I told him I was breastfeeding my baby, because the agent/devil/shapeshifter/child had turned into an infant to complete the illusion.

Also I had turned back into a female, and I was wearing a black silk blouse instead of trench-coat.

The man said "fine, you can keep doing it, but only if you feed the mechanical baby, too", and I agreed because I had no choice, since they were guarding the door downstairs, which would lead me - paradoxically - to the final floors of the building. So I put down the agent/devil/shape-shifter and I picked up the mechanical baby, which was an actual living human baby, except some of its bones had been surgically replaced with crude machinery, so it was very lumpy and kept twitching. I fed it magnetic food, like from a children's toy set for baby dolls, and as I kept feeding it I noticed the other people were moving farther and farther away from me. I realized I was now holding a giant poisonous demon-baby with very sharp fangs and no bones. It was essentially a small, fat snake with way too many fangs. Luckily, I had suspected this would happen so I grabbed it by the back of the neck so that it would be unable to bite me. I inched my way towards the stairway door, and I tried to call over the agent/devil/child thing from before but he was too far away and the snake demon was getting loose, so I threw it as far as I could and I jumped into the stairwell. I tried to give the other kid a chance but the snake thing beat him to it and so I had to close the door and go downstairs quickly.

There were no stairs, but there were railings, so I slid down using the sleeves of my shirt like gloves. I encountered on the way down a woman riding a metal box, talking to her son, who had been cut in half, from his head down. The woman saw me and yelled at me to be careful, and her soon went "gloop gloop gloop" and bits of his organs fell out.

I don't remember how but I ended up outside, running alongside the perimeter of the building with another boy who had somehow managed to escape. We were the only two who had done so. Joke was on us, though, because the final stage was the actual outside of the facility. The parking lot all around us was empty and there was a grey digital haze making things difficult to see, but we could clearly make out the shape of two animals charging at us from opposite directions. One was a baby lion with eyes made of darkness, and one was a giraffe, whose spots were radioactive. We were hiding in the corner by the lab assistants' rooms and we kept pounding on the window. Finally, I yelled that I had brought food, and so they let us back into the building, just in time, because the lion and the giraffe collided and exploded just behind us.

We then sat around for a bit and ate runny eggs and cookies and then General came by and told us he had been looking all over for me and that the car was waiting for me to go back home, so I went outside and realized I was outside of my friend's house, and I got into the car but realized that I had left all my bags and my music player inside of the house, but we were already driving away and I never wanted to go back there again. However, I looked down and saw my bag at my feet and my MP3 player was inside it, but the battery died as soon as I picked it up because it had been on the entire time.

And we drove off down the road, but I think some of the red monsters and that demon/agent child thing kept following us, because the forest around us kept shifting around, but we managed to stay on the highway and then I woke up.

Spider House

2010-06-09T12:38:00.003-04:00

A deadly poisonous spider that my family was holding for a friend got loose in our living room and I had to chase it around the house and catch it again. It tried catching it with different cups and plastic boxes, but it always wiggled free, and jumped away. I also kept stepping on tacks and stuff and thinking that it had bitten it. Eventually I caught it in the little wooden box where I keep my sewing supplies, and then I set it outside. I weighed the lid down with a chair and went to find some tape upstairs, but as I was asking my mom for where the tape was, my brother jumped out at me from behind a corner and I screamed and woke up.

Rock and Roll House

2010-05-19T16:58:00.003-04:00

Well, first we were on a trip with some friends. We were sharing two hotel rooms among about ten/fifteen people, and it was a little awkward, because we weren't supposed to have friends coming over but everyone did it, so we spent a good deal of time sneaking around each other in the stairwells and elevators, trying not to be the one to get caught breaking the rules.

Eventually the time to leave came, so we packed everything up and left and while we were in the car we decided to have a picnic along the river, so we stopped on the side of the road, and sat along the cement embankment. The river below us was very shallow, but also very fast. The water was black.

Our friends had their cat and their pet mouse with them. Naturally the cat began hunting the mouse. Both fell into the water. They had to be rescued. The cat scratched my face.

We sat around on the riverbank some more and decided that we were going to stay in the hotel another night or so, so me, Mary, and this girl named Shannon, decided to go on a tour of all the haunted places around the area.

First we went to a place called the Happy Lock Bridge, which was nicknamed Happy Luck Bridge, and was of course neither. We got there and learned that a small girl had once been hanged from the bridge by her kidnapper, but that before she died of asphyxiation, lightning had struck the bridge and traveled down the wire she was hanging from and electrocuted her, so she both burned and suffocated to death, simultaneously. We stood on the bridge and tried to see her ghost, but it wasn't happening, and then we all suddenly blacked out. When we woke up we were back by our car, except Shannon was possessed by the little girl ,and she took us back to the spot the way it REALLY was, which was not the way we had seen it when we were there.

The spot where Shannon became possessed was covered by an electrified grate, so that technically no one would be able to stand there, and yet we had been in the ghost's illusion, and so Shannon had become the ghost's victim. The little girl wouldn't leave, so we decided to just keep going with our adventure, because she wasn't really doing anything except staring ahead creepily and turning really really pale.

We went to a place called Rock and Roll House. Which was a kind of kitchen cabin in the woods, and it used to serve a summer camp which had long ago been abandoned. The attraction of the Rock and Roll house was the ghost of Joe, the cook. Joe was more like a well-preserve zombie than an actual ghost. As we were walking into the building, the boys who had suddenly appeared with us started telling us that if we started to feel weightless we should hold hands or grab onto something solid, because weightlessness was a symptom that the ghosts were near us. As we were walking towards the final door into the actual kitchen, Shannon started to lag and drift away, and I grabbed her hand, and it was icy cold and I could feel her emotions and she didn't want to go into the kitchen, so I told Mary but Mary said we had to go 'cause we were almost through the door, so we went ahead and suddenly Joe the Chef appeared in front of us.

He was really jolly and he wore a light turquoise shirt and yellow pants and he was covered in drops of blood. But it was a like party! 'Cause it was the Rock and Roll House! There was already a small posse of kids around so we fit right in. It was a ghost tour, led by the ghost. The boys we were with told us that we had to watch out for Jack, the other ghost, because he would kill us, and also that we had to stay with the group, lest we find Jack, the other ghost, who would kill us if we didn't stay with the group.

Naturally we decided to explore. We went into the first room we saw and we ended up in the furnace room. The small girl tending the furnaces said she had run out of coal so she had to go get some. She said Jack the Other Ghost was coming and so we should hide, so she turned off all the lights in the room except one, and locked us in. We heard Jack The Other Ghost and his posse of undead teenagers walk past and thought it was safe, so we opened the door, which banged loudly and flew off its hinges and so Jack the Other Ghost noticed us. Luckily, Joe the Chef was still around, so technically we were still under his protection, however, Jack said that he had dibs now too, so we all had to travel together.

The undead kids under Jack were all people who had chosen to stay with him, mostly, though some of them were prisoners who were looking to be released during his nightly amnesty parties. The leader of the undead kids was a girl from my high school, who had had a child senior year. She was still pregnant when she came to see JAck, so she was still pregnant, still, because everyone was undead and time stood still. She didn't wantto leave and she was really happy and she kept shouting how great it was to be undead.

We kept walking through the kitchen hallways. The ghosts led us through a room where surgeons were dissecting live bodies. Because this was the world of ghosts, the people being dissected could feel everything, even after they had been reduced to just bones. They kept screaming. There had been music playing the whole time, but when we walked through this room the music stopped and no one spoke, so we could all hear all the screaming.

Then Jack the Other Ghost led us all into an empty room with school-desks. He sat us all down and started giving us a lecture about how he kills the people he finds wandering around the Rock and Roll House. He then turned to Mary and asked her what she thought of it and she said that she felt she wasn't ever awesome enough for cool things to happen to her, and I wanted to say it wasn't true, but we weren't allowed to speak out of turn, and Jack told her that he would let her go because she had answered honestly. And then he turned to another girl and asked her the same question and the girl said she thought she wasn't smart enough to get out of difficult situations, so Jack let her go, too.

Then he was going to ask me next, but then Shannon appeared again and said we had to leave. She was a ghost from the outside, so she had jurisdiction over me and Mary, so Jack had to let us go even though he hadn't given all of us amnesty yet.

So we left the Rock and Roll House.

And went back to the hotel room, where we continued sneaking around trying to avoid getting caught with extra people in our hotel room.

Until Real-Life Mary texted me and I woke up.

Parking Garage

2010-05-16T02:26:00.004-04:00

We were in a bad part of a bad town, and we were sneaking around a parking garage, crawling through all the small cement spaces and trying to sneak towards the back, where we knew we could escape into the fields, because a band of murderers were after us. We made it into an enclosed area at the back of the building garage, and found a number of people already living there. We asked how they got into and out of the building and they showed us the windows and the doors. The doors were pink and narrow. We opened a door and saw some of the murderers running for us, and so we started to panic and tried to get out. We attempted to sneak out the way we had come but some of the other kids were already there, and they were panicking and shooting each other. So we crawled out of the space through the windows and we ran out towards the fields, but the murderers found us and started shooting at us, too, and so we all hid behind a small hill. They were holding us hostage, but then this girl, let us call her Lilly, walked right up to the guy and hit him in the neck and disarmed him, and we were all free. And I was talking to the boy next to me, and I said "Not that I have heroic fantasies or anything, but that bitch can go fuck herself." He thought I was really funny, and we were laughing together.

And then I woke up.

Cocker Spaniel

2010-05-06T16:54:00.004-04:00

A woman was giving me a tour of her garden, and her little dog was following us around. He was very smart but also very excitable. Also he was very very small. He could barely go up some steps. He'd hang from them with his front paws and then scramble with his bottom legs to get onto the steps.

We decided to go up to an upper terrace and the steps were much too steep for the dog. So I went back down and tried to pick him up and he wriggled out of my hands and jumped on my face and then ran around in circles. I was confused, because I thought he wanted to go up the steps, and I asked the woman, and she was like "Yeah, he does that. I've tried training him more, but he seems to just want to do his own thing."

And then we discussed how some training manuals mention buying gilded dogwood or forget-me-not blossoms in order to entice their dogs to behave, or just lure them up stairs.

The end.

Troubled Heart

2010-04-26T17:18:00.002-04:00

The muscle that pumps my blood has been in a weird bit of pain lately.
I hope it'll go away after finals.

I was swimming in a channel. The water was turquoise but not clear, and there was a boat approaching me. It was low in the water; so low that water covered nearly the entire deck, and where the prow parted the water, large chunks of white ice were spontaneously generated, as though the boat was plowing through invisible ice or something. I also noticed that there were men clinging to the outside of the prow. They didn't seem to be enjoying it, but they weren't yelling for help and no one was paying any attention to them, so perhaps they were performing some sort of necessary function. The boat passed me. I stopped paying attention for a while, but then I realized I was on another boat, quickly catching up to an even bigger ship which was chugging along down this channel. Which was very narrow by the way, and crowded on either bank with houses and boats and even cars. I decided that I had to get rid of my boat so I started pressing the prow down into the water, and it sank away under me. It felt like dipping a large bucket into a flowing stream, and the way it grows heavier and heavier and pulls down. I let go of the boat and latched onto the railing of this passing ship, which may or may not have been sailing upside-down, or at least sideways. This ship towed me farther up stream, where I immediately acquired a more efficient form of transport - namely the green snow sled that I used to play with in the wintertime when I was little. This sled floated a few feet above the water, which was at this point in the channel frozen over with a thick layer of ice. Boats that went by broke the ice with relative ease, but it also closed up immediately after them. There also seemed to be a secondary layer of "phantom" water above the first layer of ice, so that ultimately there was a kind of water sandwich. The phantom water was only a few inches thick, but it was really sticky, almost like syrup, so touching it would immediately drag me down onto the ice and then immediately under it, where I'd freeze and/or drown.

I floated along the channel for a while, until I came to a dock on which expensive cars were packed closely together. The last car at the end had fallen through the wooden dock and onto the ice, and I watched it sink into the water. The ice above it did not reform, instead the gap got filled with the phantom water, so that I could see clearly down under the water. It was no longer turquoise, but a very pleasant kind of honey color. I felt kind of bad for the car.

I turned my sled into a smithy that stood partially on the ice. There was a single man working on something near one of the anvils. I wasn't sure if he noticed me, but seemed familiar. I floated on past him, and then up onto the banks where I got lost in the backyards on houses.

I heard voices behind me and realized the smith worker had called an alarm. People were shouting that I was a demon, and that I should not be allowed farther onto the land or into the houses because it would bring bad luck. Maybe they thought I had broken the dock with the cars. I found my way back to the water easily enough though, and got onto my sled again.

Nothing of interest happened after that.

Bookstore

2010-03-29T11:33:00.002-04:00

I was in a bookstore which consisted mostly of sloping walkways suspended in a labyrinth of books. I kept walking against the flow of people. Everyone was either a college frat boy or their hanger-on friend, and they would see me and shout and I bit a several of them as I walked along because they were trying to stop me. I don't remember what book I was looking for.

Apparently it's a sign of good luck?

2010-02-21T12:50:00.002-05:00

A tiger mauled me in the underground zoo. It tore off the top of my skull and ripped open my neck and my hip. I bleed all over the floor and then people walked me over to the hospital and gave me a turkey sandwich to make me feel better. They put a slice of cheese on to help my wounds heal.

2010-02-13T16:21:00.000-05:00

Jumped in the river, bbl.

ATREYU!

2010-01-23T10:48:00.002-05:00

Probably in light of "The Neverending Story", I dreamed I was Schay, in a village populated by characters from the novel. Atreyu was the mayor.

I had proven myself "the chosen one" according to one of the town's prophecies, because I had walked through a cloud of gas made from ground up glass, and lived.

Gloopgloopgloop

2009-12-07T11:09:00.002-05:00

I dreamed I got shot in the throat.

The internet tells me this represents a form of self-punishment, which I am unconsciously imposing on myself. I am may have done something I am ashamed or not proud of.

Huh. I like how any dream ever can pretty much be interpreted to mean "You're a sad, twisted human being."

There was a tipping point...

2009-10-31T12:47:00.003-04:00

...about half a pace ago. And now the whole shebang is wobbling over into a wholly new and terrible kind of light. I'll see how it goes from here. Generally I'm alright at balancing, but there's a really strong wind picking up.

Sometimes she'll just pick up a ruler or a comb - something flat, with a bit of leverage - and come down hard with the narrow side of it, over the back of her hands.

They were in a white room in the center of which, taking up nearly the entirety of the floor, stood a large bed dressed in blindingly white blankets. The ceiling, when one was not looking directly at it, was a guttural forest green and brown, branches and vines twisting this way and that and starting to come down the far wall. They took the likeness of a woman's face, a dryad or a nymph, maybe, and she placed a game of tiles onto the wall. The game involved matching stylized images of cocoa beans and acorns. The dryad never spoke but it was inferred that if the game was not completely completely and quickly, she would destroy the white room and everyone in it.

"I feel like there should be a band named Butterflies Butterflies, don't you?"
"Why?"
"I don't know. It seems like that's how names happen nowadays, just a string of words that sounds oddly compelling to some small percentage of individuals."
"Mmm..."

WORDS!

Mmmm destruction

2009-10-21T10:48:00.004-04:00

We were sitting around in the courtyard of a walled gas station / college dormitory / villain hideout. It was raining and intermittently snowing, but we sat on the benches out in the open, because we kept thinking (me and my friends) that any moment we would all go inside and get dry. This didn't happen, but we kept thinking it anyway. We had been tracking a known weapons dealer through the city for a month now, and we were literally sitting on top of his hideout, so we were waiting for the right time to strike. This is because a field trip of goth preschoolers was about to appear in the covered alley way. We had to sit around and watch them, because the teachers were all actually the dealer's cronies.

While we waited, friend... let's call him... Stephen... went to examine the dealer's car out front. He concluded that the controls for all of his highest tech weapons were somewhere near the car, perhaps in a basement directly below it, because he could see the display popping up on the windshield to control all the missiles. He figured this was because the signal was so strong and the windshield such a perfect conduit for it.

The preschoolers arrived. Their bus had a trailer attached which was hauling a huge blue plus dinosaur for one of the children.

Stephen took this as the opportunity to act, seeing as the children were going insane, and it had started to snow again. He pried open the car, which was, by the way, a very attractive, shiny red. Upon breaking in he found that the controls were actually inside the car, and the display was on the windshield because the driver had been stupid and forgot to turn it off. Stephen tooled around with the controls and figured out which was the launch control. He then decided to test the missile launcher to see if it really was the real one, and ended up launching one of the medium-range missiles under the car. He thought he was aiming it straight up, but it went over the hills and forest and hit the center of the quaint little town on the other side of the valley. There was a large bright-orange mushroom cloud and a shock-wave that seemed to take forever to get back to us. I covered my ears. It rippled through us with a noise like a violin being heard through falling water.

My friends Cecil, Gretchen, and myself... we went to hide in the gas station across the street, because essentially our part was over. So we go in and it's run by a glum little man who eyes us kind of angrily but essentially doesn't stop us from doing anything. So we go and hide in the shower, because demons have been awakened by the explosion and they are racing through the country side. One of my other friend's mother is in the shower stall next to us, so we sit really quietly until she goes away. We then emerge to find the proprietor of the gas station, and his entire family, shoving sweets into our backpacks, which we had left out on the register. They are trying to lure the candy killers to kill us. The legend goes that anyone with candy in their bag once the clock hits midnight is going to be killed by the ghosts for leading a wicked and dishonest life. Me and Gretchen rush to start unpacking the bags, taking out everything inside them lest a spare wrapper become our doom. Gretchen has more bags than I, so we don't make it and the clock strikes midnight. I tell her to go hide in a pantry, since the house is slowly turning into a quiet urban apartment. The ghosts arrive. They are pale, but still very solid, and their leader looks vaguely familiar, like a celebrity or a commercial actor. He has a knife and I have mine, but mind is very small because it is only a silly girly one. However, I manage to lead him behind the counter, where I find a large, foot-long knife from the knife-drawer. He hadn't expected this, so I manage to trip him and then I stab him. Once in the neck and three times in the heart, to make sure he is dead. His cronies - there are seven - decide that the time for fighting is gone, so we sit down to have a breakfast together, since the sun has come up. I eat candy and ask all of them for water. Eventually I get a cup of water and cranberry juice and spend a long time trying to mix them together just right. I tell them about the proprietor's family and how they steal and lie to kill people.

The ghosts laugh and say it is because they are keeping the proprietor's daughter hostage. With her as leverage they can get the man to do whatever they want, and what they want to do is terrorize people and kill them. No one has really fought back and killed the leader before, so now they don't really know what to do for the rest of the day.

I say , "I can kill her. I'm not one of you. If I kill her this will all be over." The little girl is sitting next to me. She is wearing a dress that is so white it looks like weird chalky paste. She looks like a statue, but she is alive, and I imagine her blood will be the same color as that nice car out front.

Then my alarm went off.

Mmm... school

2009-10-06T01:24:00.001-04:00

School corrupts sleeping patterns and make dreams a luxury.

Keep It Up

2009-09-13T19:57:00.002-04:00

Nothing of interest has happened lately.

Although, there are so many words. Everywhere. It's overwhelming. Words words words everywhere. It feels like tears.

The Most Important Thing Is

2009-08-29T10:55:00.002-04:00

We were at a party and my friend was lost and drunk and she was in danger of drowning in the stream that was flowing through the air. Like a ribbon. Of mercury.

I was trying to find her, but the men at the party kept distracting me. They were wearing masks that were caricatures of their actual faces, and they all were much bigger than me, and they stood around and yelled things.

I had a wound on my finger, a cut with a large pustule in the middle; like a bot-fly larva or a really really nasty pimple.

I had to stop and clean this wound out because it was making me more and more disoriented; so I leaned over the sink and started squeezing it. It hurt a lot, and all this pus was coming out. Then I felt something rupture inside of the wound, and the hole on my finger got bigger and even more pus came out. It looked like whipped cream, and it wouldn't stop coming out. It washed down the drain in huge gross gobs.

It was kind of cathartic. But also a little gross.

This One's a Doozy

2009-07-28T12:36:00.002-04:00

FIRST!
We were invited to some sort of concert. We came late, just in time to see the very end of the show. Our distant acquaintances were performing. Everything was in a cartoony Simpsons-esque mode. When the show ended the lead drummer (there were three?) decided the show wasn't over and started performning his own last-minute show of awesome. It was pretty impressive, but only in its geekery, and so everyone began to leave. Just then the sea descended from the sky and a thousand neon pink jellyfish took the stage. They were led by a very very yellow-skinned ring leader. He was not cartoony, but his skin was literally the color of a banana. I guess he had that disease ... whatever it is... with the liver or something?

In any case, he was trying to peddle us KamiTami, which in their world is the name for Jellyfish, and also means "Greek Japanese Tiger" (it doesn't, in real life) - the riddle they posed for us was to figure out why they called Jellyfish "KamiTami".

They also wanted us to accept the Lord Jelly into our lives and open our hearts to the magic of the KamiTami. They put on a show. All the children around us were mesmerized.

Oh, I forgot to mention - we were in a Hogwarts-esque establishment. Except it was full of "Retarded American Children". (It's what I called my classmates in HS. I'm a bad bad lady.)

Anyway, then all the water was draining violently away to the underground bunker where the circus/church stayed when they weren't peddling their art/faith to the RAC of Not-Hogwarts. Obviously everyone went down there to explore and to worship. We followed because... because Hermione was there and she said we had to on account of something was FISHY. (HAHAHAHAHA do you see that, my brain made a joke. a bad one. 'cause jellyfish are... not fish.) Yeah so we went down to the KamiTami dungeon. Everything was well and good. The RAC was trying to purchase food from a vending machine the size of a five-story building. The food inside was scaled accordingly.

We were about to leave when I turned around and saw a garage door partially open. Behind it was the ocean. Just... hanging out. We were on the sea floor. I turned around and started yelling "Guys, guys, why aren't we DEAD yet?" and pointing at the door, because the water should have rushed into the space about ten minutes ago, drowning us all completely.

We went to investigate and the RAC swarmed around us. The ring leader came back out and asked if anyone had figured out the riddle. I tried to say I did, because I had recently bought a candle named KamiTami which explained the reason for such a name. But I couldn't.

The end. Bloopbloop.

BUT NOT! HAHA! SECOND!
We were in a class in a ditch somewhere. I was surfing the internets seaching for tickets to Ukraine for a trip, because I was feeling nostalgic. At the same time, we were already there, sitting in the little alley street behind my old apartment building. Suddenly there was gunfire and overhead bombardment. Apparently the military academy down the street was running tests, with live ammunition. I waxed nostalgic about this for a while.

My best friend and I then were in Ukraine, but on a sort of moving platform where we couldn't actually interact. We watched a girl ice skate down a thawed creek to get to school. She went into a very unstable-looking mine shaft.

Then we were driving down the street and children on toy bikes appeared in the road, they were trying to cross to get to the forest path to school. I yelled "Children in the road! Children in the road!" because my friend wasn't paying attention.

We passed a sign that said we were in Odessa. I said "Hey, the elder is from Odessa!"
I realized I didn't have any of my clothes packed. I went back in time, packed them, went forward in time.

Somehow we had made it to India, and we were trying to get a taxi to get to a random friend's house. My friend went to ask the man running the way station. But the only way to find out where these people lived was to ask "Do you know where there are men selling beer?" "Beer?" asked the man. "Or drinking wine!" "No no! No drinking! No wine!"

And that magically summoned the taxi, which was driven by a man wearing a turban decorated with tiny neon pink jellyfish.

THE END.

Something happened

2009-07-17T20:55:00.003-04:00

At one point I was carrying a duckittenling.
I thought it was kitten, but every time I actually thought about it being a kitten, it would turn into a duckling and bite me on the finger. Eventually I figured out that I was a sort of hybrid. It had the body of kitten, but with duckling-shaped appendages. It had fur, but it was also soft enough to be down. It had the head of a kitten, but the mouth of a duck.

I carried it to someone's house, along the path by the library.

I ended up in a very cramped apartment. Everything was white. I looked out the window and saw a sunny, quaint, unfamiliar street. The man behind me said that no one was allowed onto that street.

Then I went and took a shower. That room was white, too. Even the water felt white. Or, no, I guess it was just so clean and clear. It was filled with its own brightness as well as the brightness of the room. Even my skin felt whiter, like... pasty... inhuman.

Anyway, the duckittenling bit me very hard and I still had the mark on my finger.

Then I woke up.

This was pretty epic.

2009-07-16T11:17:00.002-04:00

It's been a while because the other dreams have been somewhat lacking in whole details, they've just been one weird scene and nothing else. I was going to compile them but it seemed silly.

Okay. So. It started out on Earth. Aliens were attacking but at the moment we did not particularly care, we just had to drive my friend to the forest so she could give birth. We succeeded in our mission without any real difficulty and she had a healthy baby... something. Then as we are driving out of the forest I realize that I am pregnant, too, and I go into sudden labor. My babies are stillborn, and they are conjoined at the head. They're wound around each other, almost like they're hugging.

It was at this point that I decided to join the crusade against the aliens.

Our car became a spaceship and we flew around the galaxy, shooting and getting shot at by lasers. Our car was not specifically equipped to be a battleship, so naturally we had these semi-home made weapons. They looked like they were made by Apple, haha. Also there was a laser weapons which my father had designed himself. These things were very powerful, but only in ratio to the size of our spaceship, which is the size of a medium-sized car. The aliens had a massive ship with thousands of firing weapons, so clearly we were outgunned. Not that we were alone of course, but still, our army was pretty mostly makeshift. I was in the front passenger seat, working the laser canon.

At some point my father disappeared and my mother became the pilot. we ended up coming to an ally outpost on some other planet. The line to get in was very long and we kinda just hovered around, taking the occasional shot at enemy patrols. It was at this point that I realized our lasers had all be scrambled. Literally, all of their major components had been strewn about the back seat by some unknown force. We were halfway through the airlock and I figured I could go outside and fix it, but my mother wouldn't let me. Eventually, we got to the planet and found a spot for our ship and I saw that the biggest weapon we had, in erms of effectiveness against enemy ships was a backpack attached by a loop to the side view mirror. Inside it sat the doll I had played with as a child. Her torso had been torn out and replaced by controls and her eyes were now lasers. I put her back in the backpack and decided to go out and explore this alien planet.

It was pretty. There were green trees and nice air and water. Everyone was pretty friendly and there were a lot of card games going on everywhere. However, none of the streets in the little town we came to were paved. Mostly because the indigenous population was an alien species which moved around by secreting pure water, and it needed the mud on the road to be able to move efficiently. Seeing as paving would obviously impede their progress. Anyway one of these friendly life forms decided to show me around. And it took me to the human settlement. It was built on the edge of a dead-looking forest and a swamp. The buildings were in a weird style. I'd call it a fusion of construction site and traditional Japanese. Beneath the houses, directly, was a large spring. The water that flowed out of it was muddy, the color of a very watery coffee with milk. Some of my new friends and I decided to go hunting. We took a raft across the spring and set up. Our first kill was a baby boar. Our second kill was a bear disguised as a baby boar. A wolf appeared and started to chase us, because it so happened the the bear was actually a baby wolf (disguised as a bear disguised as a baby boar). The wolf chased over the rocks and over the water and into the house. Eventually some other more experienced hunters caught it, though they did not kill it.

At this point I went back to my room only to find that I had to take care of a baby. It was like one of those tiny electronic pets that people get for their offspring, only it was an actual baby. It was just the size of a small apricot. I had to feed it and take care of it and clean it. I wasn't sure whose it is, but the nice woman who appeared behind me said it was my own baby. Everyone who came to the planet got one. It was to raise an army against the aliens. Where they came from was unclear.

We started talking about inhalers for some reason.

Then I woke up.

This Weekend Involved Large Stone Buildings

2009-06-08T23:03:00.003-04:00

First, I was in what for very mysterious reasons was called Arlington, Texas. This name bears as much meaning to the actual place as the island called France does to the actual country of France in Douglas Adams' book (was that too obscure a reference? I don't believe so. Whatever.) Point is, it was Arlington, Texas because my brain said so and that's that.

So in Arlington, I was wandering around. It was a flat marshy place on the coast of the nameless ocean, and the tide was low. All the beach grass swayed in the wind and the sunshine was very very hot and there was that sand, dirt path smell in the air that can only occur on sandy, dirt paths in the middle of a very hot summer. There were little cottages with thatched roofs. There were fishermen. I was and wasn't talking to them and they were and weren't yelling things to me, because we were actually a very great distance apart even though they were only in one of the canals and I was only on the bank of this canal.

I wandered away up along the path, through the grass. My shoes started to disappear slowly off my feet, like they were evaporating. There were many paths crossing in the grass. Women with young children strolled along. This was the Arlington Museum of Monuments and this was where they kept the monuments that had been made throughout time. I followed the path that led up into the forest. It was a dark, cool, deciduous forest. Very dark. Very green. Very, very dark. Very, very green. You weren't on the beach anymore, standing just inside of the entrance to it, you were In The Forest, and there was nothing behind you but a strange open space. It was open to the sky, there were less trees, more grass, but it was still very dark, and very green. The ground was cool and soft and moist. It smelled like water. But not like dirt. Not like forest. Just water. Water running over rocks in a forest. Fresh, cold water.

Behind the curve in the path was a monument.

This monument: The Sins Monument in Moscow.
I have never seen it, personally. I read about it once, here. Very long ago.

This monument, in the very moist, green, dark forest was made of lead, but the lead statues were covered in a thin gun-metal finish. I took a picture of it with the camera of my phone, for my friend, for whom I always take pictures of the places I go.

I can't remember if I walked on or if I turned around, but I was in a Coliseum. Not THE Coliseum, but a very bizarre replica of it. It had the same design, but it curved the other way. So the facade was the interior, essentially. More and more tourists were appearing. My shoes were disappearing. Somehow I ended up on the second floor, on the stair landing. A friend from college was on the path below me. My hat flew away on the wind and I called to her to return it to me and she laughed and greeted me and said she'd be right there. Everyone spoke Spanish.

Then I was on the opposite end of the Coliseum. It was emptier and darker and more decrepit here. There was a pop song playing in the background, but not one that I knew. I went to look out of the window and I saw a whirlpool. I thought "Wow, I real whirlpool! Wow, ships are really getting sucked in!"

Tankers kept sailing by this whirlpool, which was surrounding by a ring of very very large rock islands. They went around and around and around and were swallowed up like little paper boats.

I took pictures with my phone, because how often do you see a real whirlpool?

The whirlpool existed because the water around the Coliseum and Arlington had to be drained somewhere before anything could be built there, because secretly, we were all just in the middle of the ocean somewhere, not even attached to a continent. No one knew how they got there, or why, or when they would leave.

-------------------------

Second.

I was taken hostage. Or kidnapped. Or bought. Or tricked. Or coerced. Into being part of a strange party, a la the 120 Days of Sodom. A la Salo, based on the 120 Days of Sodom.

The mansion was modern day, though. It was in a squarish, blocky sort of style, and made, or made to look like it was made of, very porous, very scratchy red brick. There were vicious-looking palm plants everywhere. There were chain-link fences everywhere. There was a large open sandy lot.

We stood in a group and a man was brought forward. He was declared a poor servant, a traitor, a piece of scum and a thief. He was locked in a large rectangular enclosure. Another man, through a special gate in the side of the enclosure, let in a large panther. It was a grey panther, though, with black spots. The closer it got to the man, the more pronounced its spots were.

It ate the man alive. And he screamed and screamed and writhed even long after he was supposed to have died. He might have continued screaming inside the panther.

Other things happened after that, but I don't recall, really. It's like the rest of the dream happened, but in the dream I was too busy remembering the whites of the man's eyes as his face disappeared down the panther's throat. He had a mewling kind of scream, though, like he was too weak to even be properly afraid.

Then I woke up and it was 4:10 in the morning.

Tweet Tweet

2009-06-02T09:39:00.003-04:00

Well, I couldn't sleep. There was a bird outside, singing all night long. It's one of the birds from our kitchen clock, but I can't remember which. It has complicated kind of song, in relation to the other birds on the clock. Anyway, it kept me up all night.

But I still managed to hallucinate a dream.

As always, the first part is... lost.

We were on a beach. A man (he looked like Sayid from "Lost", but I think that's only 'cause so far he's my favorite character) was under the pier explaining his life-long study of the Ghost Shark, which lives off the coast of whatever land we were in. He explained that the only way to commune with the Shark was via a ritual performed off the side of a ship, where one is strapped upside down to a board and dunked over the side of the ship, into the water, where the Shark will swim up to you as the oxygen suddenly leaves your system and hold you in a temporary state of suspended existence during which you may speak with it and even swim with it, free of your mortal bonds but not yet a part of the dead world. Anyway, a nice middle-aged Australian couple (can you tell I've been watching "Lost" a lot?) appears and has decided to perform this ceremony.

We are suddenly on a ship. A huge tanker. It's kind of decrepit and not really sea-worthy-looking, but we're on it. It's just our guide, the couple, me, and random other dream entities whose purpose is to play flighty extras or whatever it is my miscellaneous dream entities do besides try to kill me.

The couple is strapped to the boards. They go under water. Then the guide announced that everyone must take part in this ceremony. The ship turns into a tiny sand bar. Parts of the sand are on fire. Also, we're about 13987234028934 miles from any other sort of land so it's physically impossible for a sandbar to be there, but hey, we're talking to a Ghost Shark, so why the coffee not, right?

So the sand is on fire. The couple is now strapped under water, except they're off in the shallows off the sand bar. Our guide (he didn't really have a name) stokes the fire in the sand and then we're back on the ship. The ship tilts and we're flying over the edge. We're back on the sandbar and we're sitting on strange little mats, which are hard to hold on to and which seem as though they're floating. Because they are.

The deal is that as long as we can keep floating on the mats the couple under water is still going to make it back to the living world. The Ghost Shark is playing with all of us. The way to keep on the mat is to open our mind to it and accept it as a natural and real object in our universe.

I'm the only one left floating. I move over the water and I see a little pendant floating in front of me. It's a wooden square with a simple three-pronged peace-sign-esque design in the middle, and through it is wound a little string. The string tightens and gets slack over and over again like a heart.

Then that fucking bird woke me up again.

I never remember the beginning...

2009-05-29T00:40:00.002-04:00

But towards the middle, Michael appeared and he was torturing me. I was Schay, except Schay was me. So I was me, via Schay, and Michael was torturing the me-self and not Schay. He tied me up with caution tape and elastic bands, and he covered me in a blanket. I was on the floor in a room with a pool that turned into a forest. In the next room he stood and prepared his tools. That room was very tall and had a lot of corners, and everything was a burnt-orange color. I could see the rooms through the blanket, and I could hear him saying things to me. He said he hated me and that torturing me was his personal life calling. The blanket was made out of plastic. He put two bottles of gas under it. Orange poisonous gas. I held my breath and my lungs got smaller and smaller inside my ribcage. I could feel them feeling off from the inside of my ribs. He went into the next room, he was having a party there, to celebrate hurting me. I held my breath and I tried to roll away. I rolled into the forest space beside the orange door. And I grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him down. The other side of the room was a deep deep blue, and it seemed to go on forever. It was like the sky at twilight, when it looks absurdly flat and absurdly deep at the same time. There were little stars and swirls, too. It was like looking at a galaxy.

I choked Michael. I dug into his neck with my nails and instead of blood there was orange ooze coming out of him. I scratched open his neck and his chest and I tore out his trachea, and all of his insides were burnt-orange and vivid blood red. And he lay on the mossy tiles by the green pool and he stared up into the nothingness that people see after they die, and he kept on smiling, like he'd won. Or like he was planning something, anyway. What's a little death to a figment of my imagination?

That fucker.

All of a sudden, I really want to listen to things by the Alan Parsons Project.

Condensed for Easier Consumption

2009-05-27T23:11:00.002-04:00

There were kittens. I was in jail for twenty years. My friends drove me back from jail and they were speeding. There were cats. The cats talked. The cats changed color and grew constantly, they were taller than I was.

I've been listening to the same song over and over all evening. It's too short. So I listen to it over and over again.

Tomorrow is today, self, stop stalling.
Hm.

I wonder why I always dream that there are two of me, or that I am not really me, but someone else.

But not that much. They are just dreams.

I think the sciency types call it projection?

2009-05-24T20:42:00.002-04:00

Of all the things to cry about, it had to be the elephants.

Haha, oh you...

2009-05-23T21:29:00.003-04:00

First we were in a sporting goods store, or maybe just a gas station convenience store, and I was the only girl there. The other people were all men-folk I have known over the years. There was also a small crowd of Schays, sitting on the floor. They watched everything I did and laughed. It was a very uncharacteristic, strange sort of laugh. It's the kind of laugh crazy people laugh because "they know something you don't" about the Grey Crinkled Paper or something ("Divided Minds" reference? No? Okay, nevermind.) I guess in a way this would be perfectly characteristic. Except it wasn't. They Schays' laugh was very un-Schay-like. Oh, and all the Schays wore black wetsuits, for some reason.

Anyway... I was wandering around among the aisles, catching glimpses of old acquaintances. I think I was spying on them, because they were doing illegal things, and I had been charged with finding evidence. Then I went outside and I was in a forest. A guy I barely really know (let's call him L?) was in the forest and he was leading me through the woods to a spring.

As I was walking, I traveled through space and time and I was suddenly in Rochester with Eugene the Elder, except his room was a tent. Like a circus tent, except they canvas was actually a creepy sort of construction of very thin plastic sheets, molded together. The space between them was filled with blood. There were people outside the tent, and they kept sounding like they were about to come inside, but they never did; nevertheless, the two of us just sat there, huddling from them. Except it was all funny and lighthearted.

Then I ended up back in the forest. At the top of the spring there was also a pool, like that pool that I dreamed about before, except it was smaller. Or maybe I was really tall and it looked smaller from that high up. It was square and turquoise. The trees were those giant redwoods, except they were really skinny. Really tall and really skinny. The rest of the vegetation was very common forest growth - the kind you find in forests around here. Except among all the plants there were tall candles of pale yellow wax, and they burned and made the sky orange and red.

The water from the spring created a sort of natural water slide. Sliding down the water slide led to another pool of water, which was the color of turquoise and mud. It had leaves and other debris floating in it. Part of the water flowed into a small pipe, but most of it flowed into a giant sever pipe. We'd follow the flow of the water, which led ultimately to a dungeon-like chamber of concrete and metal pipes, and we would the ladders back up to the surface.

This was all very strange because the forest floor was essentially flat. The only rise was the source of the spring itself, which was only about five feet. Also, none of these other water features could actually be seen around the spring itself. There was only the place where the water bubbled up and the small stream down one side of it that disappeared again into the ground.

We were stuck in a time loop. We repeated the event of going down the slide dozens of times. Eventually two other people came. Distant friends of L. The boy stood at the top of the spring. The girl split into two. One of her stood at the top with the boy, the other swam with us. I was wearing a robe and almost got sucked into the small pipe at the bottom of the second pool, but I managed to swim into the dungeon again. L and the other girl were ahead of me and they were calling and yelling for me to hurry up because the water in the dungeon was going to be drained, and then there was going to be a flood. So I had to hurry up and get out, and I did. I was kind of angry that they had left me behind, because they had seemed amused at the idea of be drowning.

Then the girl went back to being one person. L turned to me he loved me, and I said I had a Eugene the Elder and anyway "You're not my type". And he said "Yeah, I knew that. It was worth a try." Then the forest turned into another tent, except it was made of bones and lace. Except the lace was made of fat. Little strands of fat and thin fans of bone. And L sat at a table in front. He stared at the giant candles and he got younger and younger. And I was like "Haha... aaaaaawkward..."

Then I traveled again. I was in the middle of the warp back to Rochester and the phone rang, so I woke up.

Words words words

2009-05-21T21:04:00.001-04:00

Thrill rides... hmmm...

I dreamed about pink little piggies sniffing around in a pool of mud that was purple and green and brown.

Free fall and stuff.

Wouldn't that be nice?

To have a short dream after such a damn long one, haha.

Pink little piggies in a psychedelic sty.

Reminds me of books I read as a child...

2009-05-19T13:21:00.002-04:00

Alright so first part of this adventure is kind of blurry, but essentially we were running around and trying to catch animals in order to prove something about ourselves. This is because a new girl had moved into town and she could channel the spirits of gypsy fortune tellers and these spirits told us that if we made a statement about ourselves we would have to prove it. So I think we all said that we could master nature or something stupidly pretentious like that. So we had to run around and prove that we could actually do this, and specifically what we did was go around this huge night-swathed city and try to capture as many rats, snakes, and pigeons as we could and make them our undisputed pets. Also, we were a three-person team, and I was two people simultaneously. Our team was the girl, whose name was probably something with an L, like Elizabeth or Leslie, and then a small random boy, probably someone's little brother, and then me - I was ME-me, and I was also a boy-me named Jesse or some other equally vapid book-character name. So at the end of our little hunting trip, the three (four?) of us went to a random bus stop where our fairy mother was waiting to yell at us for being such foolish, foolish mortal children. She told us to let all the animals go. So I set my own pet hamster free, which I'd had from the very beginning of the adventure. Then my two friends suddenly disappeared and I was alone on the pavement with the fairy mother. And she said that I had to prove positive things about myself, instead of arrogant and negative things. And Jesse started crying and said how the city made him feel so small. He was wearing an electric blue polo shirt, nondescript pants, and white, white, white sneakers. No matter how much mud or nasty city grime we had slogged through, his shoes were always white. Anyway, he was like "I'm not small! I'm not small! Help me prove that I am not small!" And the fairy mother said something to the tune of "You feel small because you're looking only at yourself. Look at other people and see how large your influence really is." And it didn't really make sense, but it was supposed to be inspiring or something. At which point we realized that Eliza-Leslie had been taken back to her home by her crazy uncle who lived in the bog, because they were going to marry her to the dark spirits and make her their eternal slave - you know, because she could channel the gypsy fortune tellers and whatnot. So we all ran to the house. At this point, the two MEs had separated into distinct individuals. Jesse was his own person, and Me-me was my own person, too, and I was wearing my purple skirt and a sweatshirt and no shoes. Anyway, we stood outside the door to E-L's house and listened in. And we heard her begging them to leave her alone and then we heard chains and laughter and crying. And then we had to hide under the front steps because the entire family - there were like twelve other kids plus all the parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts - was parading down the street towards the bog where they were going to perform the ceremony. Luckily, just as she was passing the stairs, EL saw Jesse and switched one shoe with him, which allowed us to follow the path the parade was taking all the way to the bog. At one point we lost them, and I lost Jesse, and I was just myself, in my skirt all soggy from the rain, scrambling across a giant map after a signal. The worst part was that if the parade stopped, the signal would disappear. I tracked to a place called Old Mill Pond, but I couldn't actually go there myself so I snuck into a random house along the bog road. The people I initially saw in the house weren't exactly hostile to my mission to save EL, but they did nothing at all to help, either. Somehow I turned into part-Jesse again, in the white shoes. I found a phone and I went from room to room trying to call 911 and get help for EL, but each room of the house was occupied by sick people. There were twitching bodies wrapped in vibrant sheets and they all groaned and screamed and I was afraid to disturb them. Eventually I got connected to the dispatcher and I said that the emergency was that my little sister had been kidnapped, or so I suspected, along the way to Old Mill Pond, and the dispatcher was just not listening, for some reason, she was just sitting there on the other end of the line and telling me about the bog spirits and her voice kept getting quieter and quieter and I ended up walking into the room of a sick woman who had a parasitic twin growing out of her leg. They both had white curly hair and they had blue eyes, and they slept in a large white bed with very pale blue covers and a single window through which light perpetually shown, even though the bog, like the city, was in perpetual night-time. So I was all frantic and desperate trying to get the dispatcher to listen to me, and I woke up the twins by accident, and I had to promise to play them the guitar in their closet in exchange for the room and whatever. And as I was making my last few statements to the silent phone, I started to hallucinate. I floated through the window and through many many more windows, each with different color of stained glass. And in front of each window was a face, like the face of the twins or like the faces of some of the other sick people. At the end of the tunnel there was a figure whose loser body was a face, the mouth was were the genitals would be, the eyes were where the breasts would be. It had no head, just stubby arms and legs. I saw EL through the stained glass windows, and she was being tortured. Then I hung up the phone and I turned around but I saw her walking into the front door, and she was like "Thank you for rescuing me!" And she walked into the room and told me to play the song I'd promised to play. So I picked the guitar out of the closet. It was electric blue and it was shaped like a hockey stick, kind of. All the strings were ridiculously out of tune, so I started trying to tune them, and as I did I called out into the front hallway for permission to play to these two women, 'cause I had the feeling that if I did something terrible would happen, like all the sick people would come out of their rooms and use their magic to destroy us or destroy the family that housed them. Then the father of the house came in and said it was okay and it was about time, and I continued trying to tune the guitar.

Then I woke up.

The Paper Clock

2009-04-30T07:37:00.003-04:00

I was in a boarding school with two of my friends. We were all huge history and magic geeks and were always running around campus looking for small historical details about the school and the town surrounding it. At one point we discovered what we felt was the "holy grail" of historical tidbits, which was a switch in the wall of the school that would literally just take us back to a moment in time and show it to us exactly as it happened. We had a vague idea that this was in the form of some metalwork along the fence, namely a vine with a single leaf on it,which served the purpose of being part of the primitive security system around the school. We ran down to the far end of the campus, where we rarely had gone before, in order to escape by a secret back gate and properly explore the outside of the school wall, because the switch could only be found by looking at it from a certain angle, at which point it would form a very specific image, revealing itself as the correct switch. As we made our way towards the gate we passed two groups of girls playing. The first was of girls in their mid-teens, say like fourteen-fifteen. They were all wearing heavy satin prom dresses in the same simple cut, and most of the dresses were white, pink, or baby blue. They were extremely happy and were essentially standing around and squealing about how nice and exciting prom was. The second group of girls were playing "growing up". They had members of all ages, aligned essentially in order of ascending age. They'd start out with the youngest girls, dressed in blue satin dresses, and ceremoniously remove the pink lipstick each was wearing, replacing it with a very bright, silver blue. They would apply it in a thick layer and pronounce "Now you are a woman", at which point they'd move on to an older girl down the line. Towards the end of the line, there were girls with dolls, and at each "station" something new would be done to the doll, as the though they were witnessing the child growing up. "Now she cuts her hair", and they cut her hair off. "Now she sees the world for what it is", and they took out her eyes. "Now she is bound by her femininity", and they took out her teeth. And so on. We go to the gate and as we were trying to open it, some older boys ran up to me and started harassing me and asking what the hell I was thinking not playing with the other girls, and I snapped and told them "Listen, fuckwads, I'm going to do what I want and there's no way some punkass eight-grader is going to tell me where my place is. So shut the hell up and go back to your toy trucks." And they ran away 'cause I was scary. It turns out I wasn't actually a student at the school but more like a ghost who was always there who was just assumed to be still alive. Hurrhurr. Anyway, we managed to get out of the gate and climb down into the street and then we started running off down the street. It was a very narrow way and we were going very fast, and I was concerned about getting snagged on the protruding leaf-spikes from the wall. These were on our left, very densely packed, while on our right was a long long long row of water fountains. As we ran I asked my friend why the hell there were so many water fountains. We ran even farther and eventually, somehow, ended up in Kharkov, Ukraine. Presumably, we ran all the way to the airport, bought tickets, and flew there, but from our point of view we simply ran down the street until it became Petrovskaja. Then we came to my old apartment, except it was made of canvas, metal pipes, and rope. My friend climbed in ahead of me and got incredibly excited over what he called "The First Paper Clock", which he said the tenants of this building made during "the war". I got mad, because this was my house, but didn't say anything. Instead I climbed farther inside, and the first thing I found was a nest which, in my dream, had apparently been made by my grandfather, who had at that point gone insane. There were scribbling on the wall, but I don't remember what they read. I remember they made me very sad, so I climbed higher up, until I came to a room where my parents lived. My father was extremely emaciated, and didn't even look like himself, and moreover I kept calling him by someone else's name, but he didn't seem to care or realize it, or even realize who I was. And then I saw my mother, who for some reason kept shaking uncontrollably - they informed me it was because she had had a stroke (wow, i so hope not). She asked me when I was going to visit, as though I was speaking to her on the phone instead of standing right next to her, and I said next weekend, as soon as I could get tickets.

The whole dream was very sad and confusing, and I woke up in a bad mood. >.>

Hisashiburine...

2009-04-28T08:40:00.003-04:00

I was at my friend's house, but everyone was doing their own thing and I was just wandering around alone. At some point I ran into a group of people - presumably my friend's parents, as well as my own. They were being very loud and boisterous and "young-people"-esque, and they said they were going out for a little bit. After that I wandered around some more, until I realized very suddenly that I absolutely had to find a bathroom to wash my the grime from my hands, which had accumulated there because I walked around the entire, very huge house and touched all the walls, which were covered in dust and dirt and all kinds of nasty things. So I'm in the bathroom with the door closed. Having washed my hands I'm removing the rest of my clothes because I decided I just really want to take a shower or a bath or something. And I'm standing there with just a t-shirt on when my friend and two of her accomplices barge inside giggling about how the parents have found an old middle school teacher of ours and have invited him over for some whiskey and tea. In order to fit into the bathroom with me they had to take both the doors off the bathroom, so now I'm hiding behind them, since I'm not really dressed at all. Somehow, one by one everyone but the teacher and one of the girls disappears. The teacher looks sort of like a thinner Andrew Zimmern from the travel channel, except he's got really bulging eyes like he's really shocked by absolutely everything he sees. The girl is named Friday and she is not a real person, but a character in stories I have written before. In this instance she's dressed mostly in black and has a bit of a Marla Singer vibe around her, except not quite so... Marla Singer. She acted happier I guess. Anyway, I start freaking about the lack of doors, since I don't like standing around half-naked in front of an old teacher (whom I didn't particularly like in the first place, back in like, sixth grade). I yell at my friend about the door and how fucking stupid it is that they just left them somewhere and forgot. And somehow I get into an argument with the teacher, too. Because he keeps staring at me and I ask what the fuck his problem is, and he replies that I am a dirty person. Like, "soul-dirty", not just "I'm covered in grime and I was in the process of washing it off when forty people walked in on me and wouldn't let me actually finish". And I turn back to Friday and yell some more and she asks why I'm so mad and I say, again, "Because I'm standing around half-naked with the door open and Mr. Something just called me dirty", and she's like "Fine". At which point I decide, "Fuck it, it can't get any worse". At which point there was a standard lesbian make-out scene, which we performed mostly to offend the teacher sitting within five feet of us as much as possible. Somehow, as we were making out, the chair turned into a rocking chair and the bathroom/basement/house turned into the outdoor patio of a building overlooking a grassy square that looked vaguely like Voorhees Mall, if you look at it from the entrance of either Van Dyck or Milledoller. Friday and I were a little confused, but essentially pleased with ourselves, because we could see the teacher out on the other side of the square, walking away. At this point Friday got up and walked away too and I was left watching this man walk across the square. He walked at normal speed but he seemed to be barely moving. He was rather far away, as well, but he looked smaller than he should have at that distance. He seemed, essentially, to have shrunk. At that point, I saw a naked black orphan child running up to him from the far side of the square. He turned around and spit at it, and I was about to go and intervene but the child produced a banana and threw it at the teacher, and the banana exploded. The child then began to run away. Friday reappeared and chased him down, but before she grab the child, it produced a blowtorch and spit kerosene on it, which produced a cloud of fire that immolated the child and singed Friday. I watched this and then realized that the children were really after me, for some reason, and they were not going to stop. Luckily, in this kind of environment, I'm a very skilled and fast runner, so I easily outran the orphan arsonist army. I ran into the center of a random town. I tried to hide in several stores but they didn't want me there. The more I ran the more I realized I was in Kharkov, Ukraine, and it was February and the streets were covered in brownish ice and sleet. Eventually I ran into what I thought was a bank, but was really a huge empty house inhabited by another gang that, for some reason, also didn't particularly like me. However, they were also being targeted by the orphans, so we decided to collaborate. So we all wandered up to the top floor of the house, which overlooked the street. The didn't have real floors and rooms, it had sections of light wood floor held up by metal beams painted a very sanatorium-esque shade of blue-green. And all the walls were made of glass. It was very bright inside the house, except towards the back where they kept their secrets, that part was inexplicably dark and shadowy. Anyway, on the top floor we realize someone has infiltrated our midst. This person is a boy about our own age, maybe older, who has been enslaved by the orphans to do their bidding, on account of he is "the fastest" and because he is skilled in martial arts. Which he demonstrates by play-punching me in the ribs repeatedly. "But," he says, "I don't really like the orphans, so I'll let you go and just pretend to follow you, so go." As I'm leaving the gang headquarters I suddenly find another college friend among them, and together we set off down the street. We're still being pursued by the orphans. Also, every so often I turn around and see their enslaved killer following us, be he does it very slowly and very obviously, until eventually I lose him in the crowd. Eventually we get to a set of double-decker buses, at which we apply for jobs as tour guides or ticket salespeople in exchange for a ride back to New Brunswick. The driver says "Sure, don't worry about it, I'll just drive you." We're standing in a queue so that my friend is immediately by the driver, behind him is a random party girl, and I stand behind her. Behind me is someone else, whose face I never see, it might have been the killer, but he was just running away and tagging along with us at this point. So anyway, my friend makes it onto the bus, but the girl in front of me stops in front of the driver and the man starts removing his pants to, I assume, show of his junk to her. And my friend is leaning over the glass barrier beside me and informs me that the carpet matches the drapes, but that I shouldn't look 'cause it's not very interesting. The driver is blond and I'm not very interested. Eventually we get onto the bus and start moving. As we drive through the streets my friend is telling me some sort of story, but I can't pay attention so I just follow his face and smile and nod when I think it's appropriate. At one point I look at his face and it is horribly deformed. There are wart-like growths and sacks of pale, hardened skin all over him, covering his right eye and growing out of his forehead and his nose and cheeks and lips. Then I blink and he's back to normal and I interrupt and ask if that happens to his face often, and he asks what, and I tell him about his face, and he says "Oh no, you got me confused with her," and he points to the girl sitting next to him, who has two horns the color of blisters growing out of her forehead. Then the crowd on the bus thins out and I find a place to sit. A family of Italian chefs is on the bus with us, preparing all their food. Their young son is sitting next to me. I'd say he was about ten or twelve. Mostly the boy talks to his father, who is throwing oranges against the side of the bus in order to soften them for some sort of soup. I think it was gumbo. He hand the boy a bowl and he hands me one too, filled with corn flour, beans, pepper, and olives, and says to squeeze as much of the orange juice as I can into the mixture. So I do, and I'm left with a husk of just the orange skin, and a bowl of nasty nasty soup. Then I realize I have to do my Japanese homework because it is in fact Tuesday morning and I have a Japanese exam later today [this is true, how funny]. The boy next to be takes my folder and starts sifting through it and I tell him that's Japanese and he tells me I'll "graduate in god". Then we get off the bus and I look at the NextBus clock to see how much time I have. The time is 21:22, except now that means it's only 10 am so I still have a lot of time to study and finish my work.

Then I woke up.
Probably to study and finish my work.

The Future Was...

2009-03-18T14:19:00.002-04:00

I was wondering what people in previous centuries thought about the future. What did they think "the future" would be like?

Ode to the Internet

2009-03-08T19:08:00.003-04:00

Soft-pink flowers bloom.
Their fruit is ripe for picking.
Pedobear approves.

I don't know, I chuckled at it.

Because making meaningful poetry is for better days.

Milk and Cornflakes? Are you mad?

2009-02-24T10:13:00.003-05:00

We were in a cave. It was a nasty, creepy kind of gave with strange things dripping from the ceiling and weird moldy powder all over the place. There was strange cave-moss growing in places and there were holes in the floor where you could see that the "floor" was really only a few inches thick and that below was a pool of dirty cave-water. First we found three snakes, one large one and two small ones. We didn't really know what to do with these, so we put them into the nooks in the wall, behind slabs of stone, even though we could tell perfectly well that the snakes could crawl out through the cracks between the slabs and the floor. Then my father brought me two tiny hamsters. We didn't know where to put these either, so we just kind of ended up letting them go all over the floor, and they went into the holes in the floor and started to drink the water. One of them got stuck there and we were trying to get her out [it was a she-hamster], but then it crawled out on its own. Except it was much bigger. So we realized it wasn't our hamster, it was some other hamster that had been hiding down there. So then we managed to get the other hamster out. And now we had three hamsters, one big one and two small ones, and we didn't know what to do with them. I thought I saw a plastic box in one corner of the cave and I was trying to suggest that we put them in there, but for some reason I was saying it wrong and people couldn't understand me. Instead the two small hamsters were put into the nooks with the snakes, even though we knew the snakes would eat the hamsters. Then a cat showed up, and it just kind of sat to the side and watched all this. And all the animals were still alive and in their nooks.

Then I woke up.

"Ode to a Powerboat"

2009-02-18T13:11:00.003-05:00

"You rumble, drifting, on the sleepy sea,
And I madly wander along the shore,
Dreaming of drowning."

I came up with it at four in the morning last night.

Not that I didn't sleep eventually.

I dreamed about zombies [first time ever!] and, following their defeat, of being knocked into a coma by a tidal wave, then waking up to a box full of decorative bluebird chicks, who were nevertheless perfectly alive and chirping.

I wrote it all out by hand and it was much more exciting, but I'm being lazy.

Nothing to see here, move along.

2009-02-15T23:56:00.004-05:00

I had a dream that my friends were telling me about how I got completely obliterated on whiskey and cried as I sang along to "Free Bird" with some random girl.

It was kind of mundane.

Survey also says a lot of other people have been having dreams about just the dorm and people in it. How strange.

I kind of miss dreaming about the apocalypse.
Maybe I should stop being so boring.
You'd think I'd have horrible gory dreams, but I don't. What's up with that.

Last night was complicated.

2009-02-10T12:26:00.003-05:00

For a while now there's been a recurring element to a lot of my dreams. It always takes the form of a small-ish, hand-made square pool. The water inside it is usually very dirty and black and stagnant, though sometimes it does clear up and become nasty turquoise pool water, but only when I reach the other side. This pool always always appears at some point in my path. I always have to cross and I'm always filled with disgust at having to touch the water; also, I'm afraid of it because I know it's very deep but I don't know the exact depth.

1. I don't remember what was happening exactly, but there was something about bread and people running around. Celebrities were involved. In my dream, I woke up from that dream and went to tell my friend, who was bemused by the story. The tarn was involved in this one. The water was completely black, even if someone scooped it up in their hands. It was like ink, but the consistency of water.

2. I am in my high school gym class with most of the people I know. As we are walking out towards the track, it starts to drizzle, so the teacher says we have to just run down the road, and do two laps around the building instead of going to the track. Everyone starts running, and the road turns into a very hilly highway. The hills are such that, with proper acceleration, we can coast down the declining slopes without our feet ever touching the ground, and possibly even make it all the way up the other hills. I feel kind of self conscious doing this, but I see a girl in front of me coasting along, her knees bent to keep from hitting the rocks, and I decide "What the hell, I'll go for it."

And at that point the highway I'm on becomes an unpaved country road, somewhere, I think, in Eastern Europe. It's daytime, but the trees around me are very tall and the foliage very thick, so the road is darkened. I see two people coming up along the road in my direction and I know they're distant friends, but we never meet, because as I'm walking down the hill towards them, a path appears to the right and I am forced to take it, instead. It leads to the pool, which here is also very dark, but the water is just dirty. There are nasty brown gooey bits in it. Somehow, I drop my hat into the water. And it started to sink, very very slowly, and it was just out reach. Luckily I had my miniature plastic sled with me, and I used it to fish the hat out. Then I decided that I really did have to get across the pool, so I swam across it on my sled; and when I got to the other side the water had changed and now it was like a chlorinated pool, only more opaque. I ran down the path on the other side and ended up in my friend's house. For some reason, she now had a huge family - a lot of brothers and sisters. Also, her mother was now Asian, and her father very, very Italian-American. And I was in their house wandering around with a handle of vodka and a bottle of lemonade, trying to hide it from the mother, except not really. She gave me a small collectible bottle as a gift. It was strange and half-rectangular or something. And then all of my friend's siblings started bringing their friends in to hang out and it was ridiculously crowded, and I started to panic about getting back to class. But then all we did was stand around in the kitchen and made pizza rolls, and I drank all my vodka and woke up.

It was strange.

That pool bothers me. It's been in a lot of dreams lately. I don't remember the dreams exactly, I just remember the pool and how creepy and unpleasant it is.

BAH.

Santiago? Darling

2009-02-08T12:13:00.003-05:00

We were in a boarding school for gifted youngsters [all x-men references are relevant?]. I don't remember what kind of powers we had. Maybe we were just regular gifted youngsters, like with math and writing and whatnot. Anyway. We one night we decided to sneak out. And we did. And we ran around the city. And then we were coming back and it was very cold. We ran into a bank because we needed to warm up for a moment, and it was just after closing time, so we had to just as quickly run out - my two friends had done this before and they led the way yelling, "Oh no! The other door!" because there's one door that can be seen from the front desk, and one that cannot. We didn't want to be seen by the bank secretary, so we ran to the other door, but it was locked, so we had to use the other door, anyway. In any case, we ran out of this bank and all of a sudden, there are robbers. A girl and three boys. We all try to run, along with the leaving bank employees, but they threaten to shoot us, so we do as they tell us. The girl first threatens the secretary next to me, then she come to me and sticks the knife against my nose and tells me she'd really hate to cut my face open for disobeying her. So we all like face down in the grass, in positions weirdly reminiscent of Pilates. The girl continues to threaten everyone while her henchmen rob the bank. Just then, one our our teachers shows up - Mr. Darling. He defeats them easily.
We return to the school and for some reason Mr. Darling wants to talk to me, so we stand aside in the hallway. And I realize, being new to the school, that I don't actually know he's Mr. Darling; I only vaguely remember his name. But I try very hard to address him properly and I do, and he's not mad at me. And I ask, "Is there anything else we should do, Mr. Darling?" and he says to call the headmaster and tells him he needs more "bing" for his pants, and also that be is going on a picnic with two entities named Bill and Rudy, who are actually just sentient colors [a la Hitchhikers?]

And then I woke up.
It's bothering me that I can't remember Mr. Darling's first name. It was something like... Santoro? Santiago? Or maybe it was like, Secretariat, because I remember "k" sounds in there.

Anyway. The day is saved!

Fucking Trains

2009-02-07T13:25:00.003-05:00

Two of my friends and I took the train to some strange place. Some sort of steam-punk place. On our way, we decided to go into the Russian food store, and I saw that the store had my mother's favorite kind of ice cream, so I called her and asked if she wanted any, and she said yes. So I walk up to the counter and ask the woman for some random food plus the ice cream bar [it was a Dannon Mandarin Bar? Do those exist? That's what they called it, anyway]. And the woman takes the bar out, opens it, and is like "This one?" and shows me the ice cream inside. And I say "Yes, that one." But she doesn't listen and goes for another bar and opens it, and it's different, and asks "What about this one?" and I say, "No, I want the other one." So she's like, "Alright", and she goes behind the counter and brings back a whole roasted chicken and starts ringing everything up. And I'm like "I didn't ask for CHICKEN, I just want that one damn ice cream bar." And she's like "I'm sorry! There's just so much sugar in it!" And I'm like "It's for my mother." And she's like "Oh. K." And she goes to the freezer, and I look at the freezer and there's water cascading down the glass, on the inside of it, as though all the ice inside is melting. And while this woman forages for the ice cream, I realize the train is leaving soon, so I turn to my two friends and tell them to go and they're like "What about you?" And I'm like "It doesn't matter! Go! IT DOESN'T MATTER!" So they run off. And the woman comes back with the bar, and it's tiny, and I know it's the wrong one again, but I'm late for the train, and at this point I don't care anymore, so I just pay and run out, and as I'm running down the train is starting to move. So as I'm running, I throw all the things I bought to the side, and then I realize how stupid that is, since they're the whole reason this happened, so I run back for them. And they get smaller and smaller as I pick them up, like now everything fits into my hand, they're little toy food-stuffs. And I'm running after the train, and I almost have my hand on the rail.

AND THEN I FUCKING WOKE UP.
I was so angry! I was almost hyperventilating, haha; it was terrible. I hate dreams about trains.

A Few Words From Our Sponsors

2009-02-05T22:41:00.004-05:00

When I talk, sometimes, I feel like I'm not really there. Like something else is doing the talking. Or, well, someone I guess, maybe. In any case, it's not me. I'm just watching it as it happens, and I'm very close to it all - like pressing your face up against the glass of an aquarium... but I'm never really there with the fish. There's a film or something, separating us.

On a scale of one to ten, my urge to puke right now is about a seven.

I can't tell if it's because of the nasty half-expired sandwich I had for dinner or because of the vibrant ugliness swimming by around, outside. Inside? Wherever. Am I outside looking in? Or inside looking out?

Who the fuck cares. The point is, I don't really feel connected sometimes, when I go about my daily life, and it kind of bothers me.

I was wearing a grey dress.

2009-01-28T23:23:00.003-05:00

For some reason we were fugitives. I was, and wasn't, the daughter of a rural family who, by some trauma would bark and squeal instead of talking, even though in my mind, my thoughts went in coherent sentences. I would prowl around the outside of the house, close to the wall, and think things about the world. At some point, sitting on the bench outside, I saw a couple approaching the house. It turns out that they are my older sister and her fiancee, come to tell the family that they are expecting a child. I am invited upstairs to watch as they fuss over the pregnancy and the wedding dress. Suddenly, a problem comes up that requires the attention of the fiancee. Something about the dress in the city. He and some other family members embark on a quest to the city, where they can take care of the problem. Because they have no cars, they must hitchhike. At one point they are sitting along the highway, working out a deal with two passing motorists who have volunteered to drive them. Just then a police car passes the group, turns around down the road. Every one piles into the cars, but he first one won't start, so one of the men has to get out and push the car into the lane and then help it accelerate to take off, because it is actually an airplane. So the second car, a white plane behind us is gaining speed, the police car is behind them. I am the one pushing the car. I push as hard as I can, and I run as fast as I can. The thing goes faster and faster, and the faster it goes the more it looks like an airplane. We reach a hill, going very fast already, and the plane can go on without my help. Both take off but I am left tumbling down the hill, past a toll booth and into the parking lot of the EMS unit. I am completely paralyzed and I lie sobbing in the parking lot hoping someone will help me but all the workers just walk past and barely look at me. At some point my soul separates from my body; I walk into the hospital and realize I'm in the morgue, which is also where they torture people. I am mistaken for the apprentice tormentor and told to go take care of a new patient. I have a long pink chopstick which is meant to string the patient up in the ceiling. I try to do this but I fail, so my overseer says she'll do it for me, just this once. The patient is very cooperative, even though she knows we are going to torture her. In the meantime, I go back to check on my real body. It's still lying there and no one has helped it.

Inundation

2009-01-18T11:11:00.008-05:00

For some reason, in the beginning, I was back at home, and I was back in middle school. Even so, I walked outside and people were cheering "Class of '09!", "Class of '10!" as they headed off for their HS graduation. Someone cheered "Class of '08!" and I waved my hand at her; she was one of my English teachers. There were more teachers at the bus stop. It was sort of like the HS alumni tea, but outside, and all the students were waiting for a bus. Someone said, "I had to spend all my shells for these tickets."

Maybe the bus was a time machine? Or maybe, in my dream, I started to hallucinate.

I was in my family's old apartment by the library, except it was a mansion, and the clone of one of my teachers lived there with her kidnapped children. I was in the basement, trying to talk to one of the babies, when she came home, so I had to sneak around, lest she notice me. For some reason, I was wearing a skirt. I thought "She thinks I'm the house-maid just wandering around." The woman picked up the phone and called the police, she told them one of her children was causing trouble and had run away. This meant the police would have to come and search the house and surrounding area, and I would be found and arrested. So I snuck out of the house. There was a police man outside, but he was taking a statement from someone so he didn't notice. I ran away. For some reason, the farther I got the smaller I became. I ran to the creek, and by the time I got there I was maybe five or six years old. For some reason, I was wearing a bright blue chiffon dress and a white scarf, and no shoes. I was almost by the houses nearest the creek when I saw that the creek was flooded so far as to be very close to surrounding these buildings. My own former apartment building is among these, but the house I ran away from in the dream was farther uphill, behind me. The water was moving very swiftly, and in the opposite direction. It was also very clear. The ground all around the creek was just pebbles and sand, so it was in great danger of washing away. I knew this and hesitated going into the water, because even though the water was shallow, it was very fast, and the ground was unstable. I tried to find a better place to wade around. For some reason, I couldn't let go of the white scarf I had, so I couldn't swim very well. I doubled back and came to another building completely surrounded by the water. It's foundation was crumbling because it was being eroded so fast. It was then that Jackie Chan appeared, and I remembered how, in the attic of the house I had escaped from, I had watched him training Erast Fandorin on how to properly wield a Morning Star. A large chunk of the ground fell away just then, and a huge hole, like a cenote, appeared right in front of me. Jackie Chan fell in, but I wasn't close enough to get sucked in. I decided I had to swim across.

All of a sudden, I was back on the bus. All my favorite teachers had just wished me goodbye. They had been completely ecstatic about something, hugging and wishing everyone well. On the bus, I found a row of three seats still free and I sat down and waited for my friends. They all sat next to me, and then I realized we were all just little dolls in chiffon dresses. The seats on the bus were grey.

.................
I like looking up the things I dream about to see if they have any bearing on reality. For the fun of it, from Dream Moods:

Childhood - To dream of your childhood, indicates your wish to return to a life where you had little responsibility and worries. It also represents innocence. Alternatively, it suggests that certain aspects of your childhood has not yet been integrated into your adult personality. Or on the other hand, some childhood anxiety has yet to be resolved in your adult life.

Children - To see children in your dream, signify an aspect of yourself and your childlike qualities. You may be retreating back to a childlike state where you are longing for the past and the chance to satisfy repressed desires and unfulfilled hopes. Perhaps there is something that you need to see grow and nurtured. Take some time off and cater to the inner child within. Alternatively, the dream may be highlighting you innocence, purity, simplicity, and carefree attitude.

To dream that you are watching children but they do not know you are there, is a metaphor for some hidden knowledge or some latent talent which you have failed to recognize.

To save a child, signifies your attempts to save a part of yourself from being destroyed. If you dream that you are separated from your children, then it symbolizes failure in some personal endeavor or a setback in some ideal you had.

Chiffon - To see or wear chiffon in your dream, represents your feminine and delicate side. It may also point to your vulnerabilities.

I can't believe there was actually an entry on chiffon...

Flood - To dream that you are in a flood, represents your need to release some sexual desires. If the flood is raging, then it represents emotional issues and tension. Your repressed emotions are overwhelming you. Consider where the flood is for clues as to where in your waking life is causing you stress and tension. Alternatively, the dream may indicate that you are the one who is overwhelming others with your demands and strong opinion.

Friend - To see friends in your dream, signifies aspects of your personality that you have rejected, but are ready to incorporate and acknowledge these rejected aspects of yourself. The relationships you have with those around you are important in learning about yourself. Additionally, this symbol foretells of happy tidings from them and the arrival of good news.

Blue - Blue represents truth, wisdom, heaven, eternity, devotion, tranquility, loyalty and openness. The presence of this color in your dream, may symbolize your spiritual guide and your optimism of the future. You have clarity of mind. Depending on the context of your dream, the color blue may also be a metaphor of "being blue" and feeling sad.

It's pretty much the same theme as every other dream I've looked up.
All in good fun, hah hah.

R. grossularia

2009-01-14T17:19:00.003-05:00

In Michael Ende's "The Neverending Story", Bastian Balthazar Bux is given the Auryn, which lets him do whatever he wants; the exchange is that for each wish he makes he forgets something about himself. So if he wishes to be handsome, he forgets he ever looked less than good.

So today I was looking up gooseberries, 'cause I miss them. I was reading the encyclopedia article on them, and then I realized I couldn't properly remember how to say the word in Russian. It was strange.

I suppose the difference is that Bastian didn't realize he had forgotten... the memory was removed so cleanly that he, in effect, didn't remember a time when he wasn't handsome and fit. The... dramatic irony of it, I guess, is that the reader is aware of the loss, because it is stated explicitly to him, of course.

I wonder, if he had written things down, would those notes disappear, too?

Anyway, it's "крыжовник".

"Brink" is a Funny Word

2009-01-04T17:41:00.007-05:00

I can't remember why or how I got here, but I don't really care, at least - not at this moment. Right now, I am drowning happily in a pool of sunshine by the large artificial lake in the middle of the park. It is the first truly warm spring day and even though the ground is still damp from the cold rain that fell three days ago, I am stretched out in the year-old grass, watching the trees come slowly alive. I think I can almost hear them thawing, waking up, stretching and sighing and yawning. It is warm, so warm, so soporifically calm. I can lie here and no one will bother me, because it is perfectly acceptable for a body to take a nap in the sunshine in the park on a spring day. It is early enough in the day that only joggers and mothers with very young children are the only other people around, lunch time has come and gone and schools haven't yet let out, so the noise isn't too bad.

I close my eyes and I think, I force myself to remember whatever I can. The feeling is not unlike forcing myself to get out of bed early on a winter morning. Black, cold thoughts stir up like the silt at the bottom of the lake, billowing up in slow motion, huge, unstoppable clouds of blackness. The warmth fades out of me, almost like their presences was physical, like they exist as much outside my mind as they do inside. I wonder, if I open my eyes, will the sunshine still be there, or will there be acrid, icy dust.

His Words, Not Mine:

2009-01-03T01:03:00.006-05:00

[Schay]

Theory 1:
I am already dead. I died a long time ago, as a small child, and my soul has wandered in limbo ever since, hallucinating, dreaming up the life I didn't get to have. Not a perfect life, far from it, but a life. And the times I fall asleep in this dream, are actually the times I wake up, to this - the eternal desert, timeless, illusory, populated by other ghosts and demons. And that damned breeze that dances by every so often, carrying the smell of something I loved once, when I was alive.

Theory 2:
I am neither alive nor dead. Most likely, a coma. The life I see myself having is the other branch of this time-line, it is what would have been if I had not been struck comatose. In my state, I straddle the line between death and life, and the desert that I inhabit is the afterlife. I am both dead and alive, part of neither world, I am walking down a middle path, and I can see the rivers to either side of me, but drink from neither.

Theory 3:
I am alive. This life is my life and it is happening to me in reality. The desert is a construct of my mind, a hallucination into which I am drawn when the vortex of absurdity around me becomes too overwhelming. I am alive, and all that I see, feel, and most of what I remember, is true. How terrifying.

Theory 4:
I was never alive. I am an illusion, something a sick, twisted mind has come up with, probably to escape its own senses. If I step into fire, will I burn? Only if the creator wishes it.

We are the infinite prison

2008-12-01T01:29:00.003-05:00

And all sorts of other trite metaphors for the various philosophic vagaries we are attempting to pretend to be thoroughly intimate with.

I don't know.

Meh.

Meh-ism. Fuck-it-ism.

I forgot.

It's quite terrible when different calendars and schedules conflict.

"I wanted to be a shadow, as thin and light and barely there as the shadow of clavicle..."

I don't remember the rest. It was probably the bravest poem I've ever written, and I let myself forget it. Because I hated it, of course, because I thought people would think I was lying. It's a sticky little train of thought.

Meh.

Yume

2008-09-22T19:00:00.002-04:00

We were in an infinite house and I was three people. Were were looking for the kelpie-mermaid who haunted the upstairs bathrooms. There was no furniture in the house, and the corridors had a nasty way of undulating so as to make depth perception pretty much useless. Besides that, the walls kept sliding around. We searched in the mirrors in all the bathrooms, but never found her because it turns out that she was really one of us. We were a three-fold being consisting of a short commanding Englishman, a nervous mid-twenties man named Edgy [my imagination is punny!], and a large floating woman whose skin was the color of dirty kitchen counters.

...And then I woke up because cereal bags are way too loud... like whoa. D:

Thoughts and Stuff

2008-09-14T23:45:00.005-04:00

I keep trying to make a concise "About Me" statement, but it never works. It's hard to find a balance between writing too much and writing too little, or writing something too generic and writing something really outrageous like "I eat the livers of aborted babies". See. That's weird. If you read that one someone's site you think they're either psycho, pretentious, or stupid.

It is very hot here, right now. Compare to the coolness of the forest.

Logic Fail:

"The city of New Mast ends abruptly, and at its border is a forest that stretches unbroken for miles, far enough away so that on smoggy days I can't even see the next metropolis over. From the other side of the apartment, the view is of the New Mast sprawl, with the night rising above it like a tidal wave. From my window I watch the sun set behind the trees. Dirty, wide-eyed children mill around the empty lot behind my building. They all look identical, all slightly feral and emaciated, all still shrouded in the androgyny of childhood. There is nothing for them to do here but fight each other for supremacy as makeshift as their forest forts; at the end of the day they must all, or nearly all, return to homes where bruises are the mark of the lowly, not a badge of superiority. Those who live to see their teenage years invariably migrate over to the Park, pick up the slang and addictions of their older siblings, neighbors, friends. The circle of life and death continues.

The sun disappears behind the horizon. I lose my interest in the darkening sky and go back to the living room. Our corner apartment is roomier than the others on the floor, and is endowed with more windows. From the living room, I can see the other end of the lot, and the row of other apartments. If I crane my neck out the window, I can also see New Mast, orange and oil-slick-shining, all made up for the night.

Soon, I think, absent-mindedly pouring a cup of cold coffee, Kennedy will come for me. We have a date. Nothing fancy, just a night on the Park, but a date nonetheless. I still feel weird thinking of her as my girlfriend, even when my parents have already come to terms with it. She's like a second daughter to them, now, in some ways a better one, even. But she's rubbing off on me, I think and, smiling, add a shot of whiskey to my cup. It's true, New Mast changes people.

Some people say it's the city of the dead, but it's more like the city of the lost, the abandoned and the tired. It's the real arms-wide-open give-me-your-weary place of the world, except there are no golden dreams here. Here, the lost come to stay lost, and the weary often come to lie down forever. When we first moved here, I didn't understand why. My father was well-payed, content, partner in a small but productive legal firm. My mother taught high school English and painted in her free time. I had decent grades, decent friends, enough pocket money for a weekly night out, though in truth I usually stayed in and frittered the nights away alone."

Somedays we don't know what to do with ourselves

2008-07-14T23:55:00.002-04:00

...so we roam the internet and order cheap t-shirts on a whim.

I don't know what to do.
Not in a profound, existential-crisis sort of way - at least, not at the moment; I just don't know how to not get bored into tears.

Oh fuck. The people are back in our house. Don't they have their own families? D:

Subject to Change

2008-06-12T21:34:00.002-04:00

1. If someone says, "Is this okay?" You say?
Let It Be – The Beatles

2. How would you describe yourself?
Sober - Tool

3. What do you like in a girl/boy?
Nancy Boy – Placebo

4. How do you feel today?
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien – Edith Piaf

5. What is your life's purpose?
Walking on the Edge - Scorpions

6. What is your motto?
Decadence - Disturbed

7. What do your friends think of you?
Brain Damage – Pink Floyd

8. What do you think of your parents?
Time - Pink Floyd

9. What do you think about very often?
Dirthouse - Static-X

10. What is 2 + 2?
Believe - Disturbed

11. What do you think of your best friend?
Honking Antelope – Serj Tankian

12. What do you think of the person you like?
Umbrella - Rihanna [not literally], Silent Shout – The Knife, and Set the World on Fire – Symphony X

13. What is your life story?
I’m Going Slightly Mad - Queen

14. What do you want to be when you grow up?
Born Slippy [Nuxx] - Underworld

15. What do you think of when you see the person you like?
Nuclear – Deviations Project

16. What will you dance to at your wedding?
We Didn’t Start the Fire – Billy Joel

17. What will they play at your funeral?
Overburdened – Disturbed

18. What is your hobby/interest?
Send the Pain Below - Chevelle

19. What is your biggest fear?
Personal Jesus – Depeche Mode

20. What is your biggest secret?
Music to Watch Girls By – The Ventures

21. What do you think of your friends?
She’s a Rebel – Green Day; I Want to Hold Your Hand – The Beatles; Hash Pipe – Weezer; Shut Me Up – Mindless Self Indulgence

22. What will you post this as?
I Am – Army of Lovers? I dunno…

We are creatures who dream.

2008-06-09T23:55:00.003-04:00

We are creatures who dream.

We're creatures who dream. Were creaturew who dream. Werecrewture who dream. Werecreater who dream. Werecreator whodream. Werecriesa to dram.

...I don't know. It made sense for a moment. We are creatures who dream.

Sufferers of the disorder often report episodes of missing time

"Clark. Clark, what happened to you? I've been calling you for hours! Did you forget about our date...?"

No. No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I lost track of time. Lost track. Of time. Lost time.

Spitting into an abyss, because if you spit enough you'll fill up even an abyss. It's true. Its true. It strue. It strues. Itt srues.

Three tree tee ree ee E. Next line? One or two? Is that a z? A Z? A. Z. Z. A.

Too early in the morning for this shit. You appear to have made the mistake of forgetting time. Losing track. Missing out. It slipped by like a paper boat on a swollen stream. It snagged on branches and even then you couldn't catch it. You just lay on the bank and water dragged through your fingers, that was good enough. At the time. At that time. That time, not this time. Not then time. It slipped away. Away. A ways away. Away a ways. Sit alone and contemplate the vaguely sexual properties of rubber bands.

The dollar blends in with the trees.

Both doomed.

Boot thoomed. Boot toom. Boot tombed. Bottomed. Out. Bottom-less.

Abyss.

...We are creatures who dream.

If I'm ever scandalously wealthy and famous...

2008-06-03T19:24:00.004-04:00

...and a camera crew is sent to my home to make a record of my fabulous luxury for the squirming, peasant masses...

It will go something like this... "This here is my master living room. As you can see the walls are encrusted with diamonds and the furniture is hand-crafted from the skins of unicorn babies and stuffed with the plucked flight-feathers of angels, and that there on the genuine mammoth-tusk coffee-table is the platinum-plated embryo of the last panda on Earth. I think it adds some character to the room, don't you? Now if you follow me to the right, here - watch the carpet, that's made from baby seal fur soaked in the tears of orphans! - here is my BEER ROOM."

At which point, the camera crew will spontaneously suffer grand mal seizures and I will sue them for dribbling on my carpet.

...........Yeah. :D

That is all.

Today...

2008-05-24T15:08:00.002-04:00

Today is a vaccuum.

Moving on.

I like this song:

Yes.

Nom!

2008-05-19T16:25:00.002-04:00

I think I see the rabbit in the moon... but I find it looks more like a squirrel than a rabbit.

Still don't see the man in the moon. Although if you look at it at a certain angle it does look like a figure sitting in meditation... UNDER A MOON.

Blows the mind, don't it. D:

Things I Want for My Birthday

2008-04-22T15:20:00.005-04:00

Part One:

Something unique to decorate my future dorm room with.
Something that reflects my personality.

I wish I got cool gifts, heh.

Also, this is exactly how I planned on making money later in life.
Clearly something is amiss... and this comic knows all about it.

HOORAY!

lol hai

2008-04-17T06:31:00.000-04:00

No, gaiz, it's really just the MOLE PEOPLE.

DUH.

Fun Ways to Spend a Friday Night

2008-03-07T20:22:00.003-05:00

If you're the sort of person who doesn't go out.

Sit and listen to the static from the computer in your headphones, with the rain as background noise.

Make up dream poetry: "I feel like a rock that's been hit by a bird. Here I am - minding my own business; and here it comes flying out of nowhere."

I was falling asleep and came up with that little image, and I'm sort of proud of it. It's like when you're walking on a beach and you find a little pebble that somehow seems so much cuter than all the other identically-shaped pebbles. Maybe because it's got a little vein of color in it, or maybe because it's a particularly interesting shade of light grey.

Write pointless haiku;
Summarize your day in style,
And challenge yourself.

Too much chocolate
To mask overeating guilt,
Oh, what irony.

I am not lonely,
I am just solitary.
This quiet is fine.

But sometimes I want
To witness the outside world
On a Friday night.

I think it's the rain,
Turning my pale musings dark,
And turning me blue.

...And after a while you start to think in 17-beat fragments. It's a bit disorienting. I always wonder how Ululala rhymed all the time in her infinite palace of columns behind that final door. But I guess all she was was song and rhyme, just a voice; she could speak only in rhyme - so I guess it was not so difficult as it was for Balthasar.

I want to get a tattoo of a spider. A small one. It will be on the back of my ankle, on that little spot below the joint.

Thinly-veiled Metaphors

2008-01-27T13:16:00.000-05:00

"My Number [<]3"

Today I received
an exceptional letter
It had a dove stamp on the front
It was a gas, I felt
So light and free
So filled with ---
Well, you know.
And I love whoever
Gave this letter to me.

-+-+-+-+-

Oh, all I want to do right now is find a huge pool somewhere and sit underwater and scream. I'm not particularly angry or depressed or afraid or overjoyed, though. Or maybe I am. I guess it's more fitting to say I am all of those things. Mind noise. Mostly I feel hyperactive-like. Maybe I'm overly excited for something and not at all sure what that something is? This is the most happy overwhelming feeling of doom or something.

My Humanities journal this unit was a farce. 75% of it was my ranting about gods and root vegetables and perfect circles and dead dogs. We were supposed to be talking about freedom - so I guess I used a hands-on demonstration approach and wrote about everything and anything in my mind; I let it flow freely, as it were. The results are several page so cramped with writing they are fairly a visual representation of that hissing static squeal that people sometimes report hearing in their heads, like when they're in a quiet room or trying to fall asleep or something. That unspecific sound in the absence of specific sound.

Cut wood smells like sweet burning. Like... the smell of heat and the smell of something fibrous and sweet, not "sweet burning" like some freaky pyromaniac chant.

Books to read right now, in no particular order:
"Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die" - Michael Largo
"The Things They Carried" - Tim O'Brien
"Silk" - Caitlin R. Kiernan
"Heart of Darkness" - Joseph Conrad
"Heavy Metal and You" - Christopher Krovatin
"Trainspotting" - Irvine Welsh
"Glue" - Irvine Welsh
"Running with Scissors" - Augusten Burroughs
"Wolf's Blood" - Jane Lindskold
"When Rabbit Howls" - Truddi Chase (or rather, The Troops. Second time I'm reading it, mostly for notes this time.)
"Survival In Auschwitz" - Primo Levi
"Please Don't Kill the Freshman" - Zoe Trope

Yeah. Yeah. I ... am sort of overreaching myself here... but look, I've only got so much time before I die - and there are a lot of books!

And I just finished "Marabou Stork Nightmares" by Irvine Welsh.
I really like the way he writes. Reminds me of Palahniuk a little, too.

...who died of ennui.

2008-01-18T20:20:00.000-05:00

That's a fun little word - "ennui". Against all better judgment I want to pronounce it "en-new-i" every time. Somehow I ended up spending a good three hours on Wikipedia, reading the articles about Russian language. This morphed into reading the article on Russian humor - this was particularly interesting because I knew a lot of the jokes, or at least ones like them.

On another page I found a bit of the black humor poems. My favorite one in that category has always been about the girl and the hand grenade.

I admit my powers of translation are less than par, but this is something like how it goes:

"A little girl found a hand-grenade on the ground,
Ran to her father to ask about what she'd found.
"Just pull the ring," he said with a smile.
...Her ribbon stayed in the air quite a while."

"Devochka v pole granatu nashla,
'Chto eto', papu sprosila ona.
'Koltso pot'ani', iei papa skazal -
Dolgo nad polem bantik letal."

Oh man that just never gets old... XD

The word you are looking for is...

2008-01-12T14:49:00.000-05:00

I cleaned out and reorganized the music files on my MP3-player-that-is-not-an-iPod-and-I'm-fine-with-that.

I found my collection of the Scorpions' greatest hits. I really really liked that band around like fifth, sixth grade; then I sort of stopped listening to them - but I realized I still like them a lot. I mean I've technically grown up listening to them - along with Queen and Pink Floyd and DDT [which is Russian rock. Ish.]

Anyway now I have "Walking on the Edge" stuck in my head - and I haven't heard that song since around 2001 when I accidentally burned the only CD in our house that actually had the song on it. AND OH DOGS, DO I LOVE IT. It's weird that we don't actually own any Scorpions albums - but we have like every one of their Greatest Hits collections. I think this is because my father's philosophy is that it's better to own the Greatest Hits collections because those have all their good songs on them anyway and you won't have to go looking through half a dozen different albums to find the ones you like. I don't know, I guess that is pretty practical... but still. O.o;

So "Walking on the Edge". Also "Under the Same Sun". Which for some reason makes me think of a Old West town. I can't really figure out why. But "Wind of Change" is my favorite, ever. Luckily those are on the CD. I also really like "Living for Tomorrow" but there is only a live version - which isn't bad except for the beginning because he voice-fucks the crowd by talking in Russian and I just don't like it when bands do that. Any band. Talking in a different language. I dunno, it's a peeve of mine.

But anyway - the word we are looking for is YOUTUBE.
Days like this, I really love it. Oh sweet, sweet German hard rock. You make my world a brighter place in which to live.

From Humanities Blog

2008-01-11T11:11:00.000-05:00

Debate Two
Rudy Giuliani vs. Brooklyn Museum of Art

The Mayor of the City of New York, Rudy Giuliani has decided that a number of works in the Brooklyn Museum's currently showing temporary exhibit "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection" are "sick" and "disgusting" and, in particular, that one work, a painting entitled "The Holy Virgin Mary" by Chris Ofili, is offensive to Catholics and is an attack on religion. As a result, the City has withheld funds already appropriated to the Museum for operating expenses and maintenance and seeks to eject the Museum from the City-owned land and building in which the Museum's collections have been housed for over one hundred years. The Museum, citing its First Amendment rights, wants the city to continue funding that was already promised to the Institution.

I do not believe this work of Chris Ofili merits the degree of feather-ruffling and squawking that has been generated. His statement is certainly a valid one. Patrons of the exhibit were warned that they would see pieces of art that are potentially shocking, inflammatory, or offensive - and if they walked in fully aware that they would undoubtedly see something that would prick them the wrong way then there is no reason there should be such a mess. An "attack on religion" is as valid a move to make through art as a "glorification of religion". Art is about the expression of ideas - any, all ideas - so this little spectacle seems pretty absurd to me. The entire exhibit is designed to shock - there is, after all, a disclaimer: "There will be works of art on display in the Sensation exhibition which some people may find distasteful. Parents should exercise their judgment in bringing their children to the exhibition. One gallery will not be open to those under the age of 18".

Actually, the very fact that so much controversy has been raised about this piece and the exhibit as a whole seems to me to be a sign that the exhibit is a legitimate one. It is offensive and it has left our poor noble leaders huffing and puffing. That's a decent success, if you ask me.

This is so very biased of me, heh heh. I really don't like any of the Abrahamic religions. Equally, mind you, so don't start.

System of a Down wins for today.

2007-12-22T21:37:00.000-05:00

We saw "Sweeney Todd" today.
I have mixed feelings about the film.
It was simultaneously awesome and terrible; but on the whole I like it more than I don't like it. I am hung up on the thought that human-meat pies wouldn't really be as delicious as they were made out to be. Of course, I've never tried human, so I wouldn't really know, would I. If I admit "Dabble in cannibalism" is on my list of things to do before I die - will people hold it against me? >.>;

Other things on my "To Do" list:
-Burn myself with lye, a la 'Fight Club'
-Get a tattoo
-Get a surface piercing, back of my left wrist
-Walk barefoot on broken glass
-Don't eat for a week
-Go hunting

This is clearly a list of "Bad Things To Do".

I have a list of "Good Things" to.
Like...
-Finish college / get a degree
-Have a job
-Join a gym
-Publish a novel
-Learn to knit
-Learn to drive
-Learn to cook better

See? I'm not completely delusional. But Chuck Palahniuk is my hero.

I got presents!
2 t-shirts: "Satan's Little Helper" and "Little Miss Scary"
2 sets of hair-clips: fish skeletons, rabbits
1 Pez dispenser: Sanrio character - Chococat
1 purple gel pen and hand-drawn card
1 box of soap - lemon and ginger scented, three bars
1 pair of men's boxers - black and grey striped [to match my scarf/sweater/hat/gloves. Hell. Yeah. I'm going to re-stitch them and wear them, but secretly wish I was a guy.]
1 pair of dragon earrings, almost like the kind I'd lost, only with blue stones

I love my friends, heh heh heh.

And by the way: I love this picture.
I couldn't find it on DA, so I give it to you on Y!Gal instead. Kinky.

Anyway, Kakihara is love.
I fuckin' want piercings like that. WANT.
Put that on the list, I think.

"I got somethin' and it goes thumpin' like this..."

2007-12-01T21:27:00.001-05:00

It's weird how very random songs and videos can give me ideas.

Watched the video for Green Day's "Jesus of Suburbia". In particular, the parts of it that involve scribbling madly on the walls of the bathroom.

I had a funny little idea for a story centering on a new 'game' that the younglings of New Mast might play. The idea is to fatally injure yourself or to ingest something that will cause fatal poisoning. It will be a timed exercise, in that you only have until you die to write everything you can on the walls of a given confined space. The optimum 'deathly injury' would be some sort of profuse and unstoppable bleeding, followed by the ingestion of a poisonous substance.

If you don't die and end up in a coma, you only get half credit. If you don't die but sustain permanent damage, you get a quarter credit. If you don't die and are mostly able to function as you did before, you get an eighth credit. If you don't die, whatever you've put on the walls is erased; and you can play the game again.

I think Ryan will take a stab at it, on the suggestion of Kennedy.
Ryan's ideas might be interesting, since she's already taken such an interesting stance on existing.

I want to learn French, but I can't pronounce the words. I want to learn French just so I can sing along to Kyo, heh heh. Benoît Poher reminds of Ty. I think it's his voice. Not because he's a paper-pale multiple. Hah hah, he's ten years and one day older than I am. And he likes "Fight Club" and Korn. [At least according to Wikipedia, where I went to find out his name, lol.] If I was an obsessive fangirl I would take that as divine proof that we were meant for each other. But moving on...

For some bizarre reason, every story involving Ty involves, in some capacity, either a metro train or a metro station. That and a three-story condominium in the shadow of a huge city, also located near the ocean.

Basically, New York City, only a bigger cesspool of crime and suffering. I don't like NYC. But. I set a lot of stories in what is... ostensibly, NYC. Except... it's emptier, and... I can't explain it. The word is "sleazier" but that doesn't work... The difference is that NYC reminds me of oil slicks and the puddles of grey rot under garbage bins and the feeling of chewing on raw chicken fat [gag now, please]. So... the city where they all live is like... a NYC-sized Kharkov. Because Kharkov reminds me of... dust... the powder coating on powdered latex gloves, dried leaves, crumpled papers, and the electric gasoline tar smell of the subway. At the same time, the place is literally sleazier than either city... New Mast is the name of both the city and the suburb where Kennedy and Ryan spend their days. Friday is friends with Kennedy; though she lives in New Mast City, not New Mast the suburb.

Also, the 'desert' where the school is located is actually the entirety of the middle and western united states. There was a war, you see.

Spoken too soon.

2007-11-30T16:02:00.001-05:00

I forgot to mention I reached 50K words! Wednesday night! JOY!

Today is a good day because: [in no particular order]

1. It is Friday. [Disregard that teetering pile of History homework behind me... Three chapters? Pshaw.]

2. Lab Day today, so we did not have to do the pacer. Take that, my fascist overlords.

3. Missed end of 12th period for Senior Picture.

4. Learned my Bio grade went up like five points [I'm up to a B-. STFU.]

By the way. This is a shock to the world at large... but for the first time in the History of EVER my ENGLISH grade is LOWER than my MATH grade. Oh god. The shame. The utter shame. I... don't know what I can say for myself outside of "I can't take this year's class fuckin' seriously. ALL WE DO IS ACT SCENES OUT. If I'd wanted to take a drama class, I'd have taken Theatre."

5. Bubble Tea House is today so I get to pretend I have a social life.

6. I got accepted to Penn State!! XD

7. My mum bought more of the Campbell's Soup at Hand stuff. Chicken and Stars. It's amazing.

8. Gaia online has new items out so I can make my Schay avatar actually look like Schay. Which is glorious. GLORIOUS. It's sad that something like makes me so happy, but it does.

The only damper on today was that I didn't get to donate blood.
But I guess I'll do it next time.

Expletives, Profanities, and Some Minor Acts of Sacrilege...

2007-11-25T19:44:00.000-05:00

I really love my pants. The black, straight ones with the weird clasp locks on the pockets. Those and the other really nice pants I have. The black, straight ones with the weird non-functional loops on the pockets. Anyway, I really love them.

My shirt smells like campfire and cigarette smoke and vegetarian ravioli-lasagna with asparagus and cheese, slightly burnt. A bizarre smell, just so you know. The odorous concoction smells like a mix of fresh-cut summer grass and burning hair, over all. Or maybe that's just what it reminds me of. I don't know anymore.

Talking to myself, except this morning I was too tired to actually say anything, so all the screaming was in my head, on top of the talking. Wait. Other way around. Yeah.

"What are you, some sort of deviant?"
"Yes. Yes I fucking am."
"What are you, some sort of deviant?"
"Yes, fuckhead. Yes. Go away, fuckhead."
"What are you, some sort of deviant?"
"Yeah. Because I don't want you, breeder. But you're invited to go shove burning logs into your own various bodily orifices."
"What are you, some sort of deviant?"
"It depends on who you ask."
"What are you, some sort of deviant?"
"Not in my world. Which you are not invited into. Bitch."
"What are you, some sort of deviant?"
"Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up."

I can't think of a very fitting, artistic song for right now.
So I'm going to go with a mash-up of MSI and Marilyn Manson.

Think, like...
"Shut Me Up" and "This Is The New Shit"

Really, really, really, loud.
Not incidentally, those are the two songs I remember hearing most this weekend.

This was a nice weekend over all. I'm glad I got to see a bunch of my friends, to hang out with them. That was nice.

Now I have about a month to dwell on everything I have learned and to mope about. Why is high school not yet over? I want to be a broke college student.

I also want a pet rat. It's going to be the year of the rat, by the way. So it will fortuitous to have the creature of the year in our house.

Just sayin'.

I think I'd name it... Mortimer. Or maybe not. I'd have to go check out the name book for it to make sure.

Play your favorite song.

2007-11-21T23:05:00.001-05:00

And dance to it like you would dance at your funeral, knowing you were finally liberated from your physical bonds. DANCE, DAMN YOU! Do the little "short-communist-homicidal-maniac-dance". One out of four isn't bad... Eh? Eh? I am rather short, after all.

Stroke of genius for the week was:
"Yeah we get four days off. Only to come back on Monday - 'fresh as pickles'. Except not... because... well, they are pickles, after all."

I hear it's the time of year for lists! Lists like... "Things I am Thankful For", "Things That Make the World Suck", "Reasons November is a Good Month", "Peeps to Buy Holiday Stuff For", and... least but not least, "Reasons to Live Another Year".

HAY GUYS GUESS WHAT!

I'm like forty trillion words behind for NaNoWriMo right now. I should be at 35007. I'm at like... 32,somethingorother.

Makes me sad. Makes me sad like sad Schays in snow. SAD SCHAYS IN SNOW!
Yeah, I totally ripped of MegaTokyo right there. Because MT is awesome like that.

Not to be confused with the other MT: Mission Trance. Which ceased to exist for a while but apparently exists again, now? I don't know anymore, I sort of stopped following it. But Forcekill is still one my favorite names ever. If I ever have a child, its middle name will be Forcekill.

The library made me sad today. It apparently doesn't have a copy of "Being There" by Kosinski. Every copy of "Running with Scissors" was out. [All like, twelve of them.] As were "When Rabbit Howls" and "First Person Plural". I thought about taking out "The Eden Express" again, but I decided against it, 'cause I do still have fifteen trillion other books to read. I keep forgetting to borrow my mom's copy of Chekov, too.

Eh, so I ended up taking out "Nightwatch", which I found out we don't own in Russian. And it's too much trouble to order it, because I don't foresee myself liking it to any reasonable, justifiable extent. So I'll just read it in English and have done w/ it.

Also took out a book called "The Periodic Table", by Primo Levi. I'm only about halfway through the second chapter, but it's pretty interesting so far. I was standing there trying to decide if I wanted to check out the entire collected works of Neruda, then I was thinking about maybe Sartre. Then I remembered, again, the stack of books I still have to finish. Need to work on this obsessive book-borrowing, heehee. Anyway, so I took out "Periodic Table" because it seemed interesting, and it didn't seem like a very long read. And it's good, I rather like it so far. Will have to see how it progresses. So far he has discussed the origins of his family, explained to some degree the dialect that was spoken, and started on youthful dreams of a life in Chemistry.

Yus.

Cue victory theme music...

2007-11-18T23:01:00.001-05:00

31,709 words done!

Hurray and stuff!
I was behind by three days. Now I ahead by one day. This is good. I tapped a good vein of ideas today. Um. No pun intended. On dates, some couples go out for dinner and out to a movie and cuddle in the back row. S and J, they sit on the floor of the hospital and cut each other.

But love is love, kids, no matter how queer or kinky. No off-color pun intended! Oh, dog, I'm a terrible person sometimes. I'm sorry.

Besides, it was more therapeutic than going to the doctor was. That should count for something. I am writing a great novel about the evils of organized psychiatry. Or something. It's also about waffles, but only really smart people with Ph.D.s in literature will understand that. I kid, I kid.

One of my dumbest self-indulgent fantasies is that someday, my book will be published and someday after that it will become a staple of the high school English curriculum, and students will read it in class and discuss the many themes, the profound and multi-layered symbolism. Learned men and women will write essays about how twisted I am, and someday, there will be a movie. It will be rated R for disturbing scenes of violence and for language, and it will not be very popular in the mainstream, but it will be a cult favorite and surly teenage boys and girls, bowed by the weight of their cynicism, will watch it in the darkness of their basements, going "OMG I TOTALLY RELATE TO THAT." Then they will say "OMG THERE WAS A BOOK, FIRST? I'M GUNNA READ IT!" And I, sequestered in my shabby loft apartment, writing my next masterpiece of horror, will smile to myself for no explicable reason.

Hey, I need something to brighten my days sometimes...

Wheee~

2007-11-15T23:40:00.000-05:00

25,038 words

"The Painted Bird" has some of the most disturbingly beautiful and beautifully disturbing imagery I've ever read, by the way.

Mostly to do with books I'm reading...

2007-11-13T21:36:00.001-05:00

If something is said to exist so that it is "never to be found", and that something disappears, who knows that it has disappeared, and how do they know? And has it disappeared it all? Does it even, actually, exist?

I'm starting a grand literary adventure to practice my languages. Except English, which I speak enough of to know I probably won't be losing my command of it anytime soon unless something hits me really really hard in the head at just the right spot. This [the quest, not getting hit in the head] will require clandestinely purchasing two dictionaries - Spanish and Russian, and finding books in both languages. I have enough Russian books, and I think I can get good Spanish ones at the library. I wonder how this will turn out.

This isn't a "YEAH, RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW" sort of project, because I have some other books that I am reading right now... but I'm getting there.

Also, current and planned reading includes:
"Stranger in a Strange Land" - Robert Heinlein
"Vandal" - Michael Simmons
"The Flanders Panel" - Arturo Perez-Reverte
A book of John Keats' selected poems
"Interworld" - Neil Gaiman
"Azazel" - Boris Akunin
"When Rabbit Howls" - Truddi Chase [again]
"Nightwatch" - Sergei Lukyanenko [in either Russian or English]

...and I'm thinking of re-rereading "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". Just in case my understanding of Joyce's work and themes has grown at all since Feeney launched the book at me in 10th grade. >.>; Hmmm.

It's wrong, but every time I walk into the library, which is pretty much every other day, I take out a book to read. There are clearly a lot I never finish... but I go back to the ones I like. The last batch was filled with stuff from the YA section that I got as recommendations.

I got through some of them... the rest I started, but didn't finish. I don't know why, but I experience a deep-seated feeling of derision every time I read a young adult book. There are YA books I enjoy, but for the most part they all elicit some form of minor disgust. I can't tell why this happens, though.

The plot lines shouldn't really bother me, because there are only so many "stories" in the world that can be told, and they've all been told and retold and retold. Some more than others, of course.

Maybe it's the writing... or the characters... or... the "hip" little dialogues [fuck you, spell-check] and monologues that happen. The banter that is so fluid it must have been rehearsed ahead of time. The obligatory resentment of authority and anything vaguely representing it. The clique psychology. Passages that end with "After that, I could have sworn things couldn't get any worse. But I was wrong." Sappy descriptions of the dark and beautiful love interest. Oh how the sap flows. Of course [and because?], I write like that sometimes. But at least my shit isn't published. It does give me hope, though. >.<

Oh, but most of all, the worst part is when a book has foreshadowing so blatant it might as well be a giant neon sign. The tedious predictability of some of these books bothers me... Though I guess it's an attribute of literature in general. It's just sort of a let-down when you get the end of the book when you're still in the middle.

It's sort of like holding the brand new copy of HP:HBP that you stood in line for at midnight and then have some jackass in the parking lot drive by and yell "SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE" at you.

By the way guys, Snape kills Dumbledore. SPOILARS HOMEGEE!!!eleven!!

Oh man, now I want to read it again.
I don't even like HP that much. What the hell, man?
You. I blame you. >.>

Oh. Shit. I have to go write.

Nothing worse than trying to make a pun on "write, now" and "right now" and messing it up repeatedly until they get together and make a baby and name it "Wright".

See post two down from this one. :3

Un poquito masoquista...

2007-11-12T19:14:00.000-05:00

There are times when I love Spanish, and times when I find it somehow lacking and inadequate. Somehow Spanish seems to be fit for talking about grandiose, abstract things, as well as war and pain. The structure of the sounds in Spanish words reminds me, for the most part, of the sounds of battle. But not angry sounds; Spanish isn't an angry-sounding language [as opposed to Germanic languages which, I confess, make me think of haughtiness, bluntness, and a twisting sort of anger]. Spanish makes me think of the chinking of armor and the rattle of weapons, but in a hollow space-time, like the battle is going on but no one really knows why it's being fought. Not for real, at least. Sure there are "reasons" - power, religion, money, love, revenge - but the whole scene feels like it's being acted out rather than earnestly felt. I don't think of Spanish-speaking people in those terms, of course, just the language. I think my impressions come mostly from having read works by Borges and Marquez. Mostly Marquez. So in reality, my impressions is based on a limited presentation of images, but that's not to say they were bad images.

Hmmm...

Anyway, that was my preamble, of sorts. Although I think it's more of a clarification of the title. I could say "a little masochistic" and have done with it, but somehow - English doesn't have the same ring to it. English "masochist" ... tastes funny. Does that even make sense? It tastes like chalk or like dust; but with little hard bits mixed in, that grate and stab the tongue; the meaning is not lost, but it just doesn't taste good. The Q in "masoquista" makes it a twisting word; it's like a knife being stabbed and turned inside the wound.

I love tangents. But not mathematical ones. Anyway... the real topic of this blog was... the Cranberry.

Yeah, that little tart thing that gets about fifteen hours of fame during the Holidays with it's "Cranberries in Everything!" Campaign, then quietly goes into less public projects, like Craisins and juice, during the summer.

There is a large plastic tub of cranberries in our refrigerator right now, the remnants from an industrial-size bag of the stuff that was purchased at the local bulk store. Half was converted into some delicious, vitamin-rich jam, and was promptly consumed. Anyway, this large tub of cranberries is tempting, yet repulsive.

Cranberries are sour. They are so sour they're bitter. Or maybe they're bitter AND sour. I've never quite been able to tell, and I have, as of yet, not been inspired enough to look this matter up, shame on me. But the fact remains that the little buggers are sour. They're like "twist your mouth into new and painful shapes" sour. Not as bad as lemons or limes... but they have their own special way.

I don't like sour things. The very thought of lemons makes me shiver. I feel their sour radiating through them; I can taste it just by looking a their damnable yellow skins. AND YET... I love cranberries. Raw cranberries. The really sour kind. They make me feel sick with their sourness, but I eat them because I sort of like it. As opposed to lemons, which I avoid to an almost comic degree - I walk around the lemon stand wherever I can avoid it, and I try not to look at them too long, or think about them too long. Like right now, it sort of hurts to keep thinking about lemons.

So what is it with this slightly masochistic practice of eating these cranberries?
Hmmm...

And since we are in the area of the subject:
A favorite joke motto in our family is "Sadism - lutshyi otdyh."

I like the Russian minimalism of it - three words, and the meaning is clear. In English, I don't even think I can translate it adequately... but it's something like "Sadism is the best medicine." Or "Sadism is the best respite." Or, rather stupidly, "Sadism is the best vacation." That one works when I forget other words.

My Russian is deteriorating. Woe.

Hmmm... That was neither here nor there.

Which is a nice song, by the way - "Not There, Not Here". I used to really like it when I was about seven.

"Po nebu angely let'at, v konave d'avoly polzut, i ten'i et'i govor'at: Ty nam ne vrag, ty nam ne drug, ne tam ne tut."

"Angels are in the sky, devils are in the gutter, and all these shades tell me: you're not our enemy, nor our friend - not there, not here."

I had wanted to be a translator someday, but at this rate I don't believe that's a viable option. I translate too literally.

Hmmm...

It seems, also, that my current word count is 39 words higher than MSWord had calculated. Interesting!

I'm up to: 19,590 /50,000

Only 414 left for tonight. :D

Yeah, baby.

2007-11-09T02:45:00.000-05:00

^ Irony.

13,872 / 50,000 words

I feel good.
It's fifteen to three in the morning and I'm sort of seeing Evil things out of the corners of my eyes and I can't really type anymore because I wrote out eight and a half pages before typing them... But this is so worth it.

AND there is no school tomorrow, so I get to, y'know... SLEEP.

I am so happy right now. >.<

NaNoWriMo Word Count

2007-11-02T22:23:00.000-04:00

First Update!

November 2nd:
2,060 / 50,000

A humble start, or something. :3

November 3rd:
4,668 / 50,000

November 4th:
6,762 / 50,000

November 5th:
8,881 / 50,000

Also, damn Rihanna and her outrageously catchy tunes. O.O;

November 6th:

10,099 / 50,000
Fuck. History.
I have a novel to write, kthnx. The Puritan Revolution can wait it's freakin' turn.

Word count: Woefully low because THE INTERNET AND HOMEWORK ARE MAKING DISTRACTION-BABIES IN MY HEAD.

I "strongly dislike" babies...
Fuck! But don't! 'Cause that makes BABIES!

Tek-Tek of Doom

2007-10-27T16:45:00.000-04:00

I Tek-Tek'd myself.
Mostly because there is a new item on Gaia that resembles vaguely my "LABCOAT OF DOOM!" and I decided to make an avatar that looked sort of like me, wearing it.
Also because Tek-Tek is a damned lot of fun. It is pretty much like the paper doll dress-up game little girls play with, only adopted for the electronic, egalitarian age. It's way more fun than Barbie ever was. When I played with dolls, I didn't play with the dolls, I played with their little accessories. I imagined ghosts were moving it around, and Barbie and Stacey and Ken or whatever they were, were caught up in this ghost-world. There was something about funerals that I did. I don't remember now what it was, exactly, but I remember the commode that I had the dolls in reminded me of a mausoleum or a haunted house, and so even though they were planning for a glorious picnic/visit to the stables/pool party/fancy dinner/fashion show/doctor visit ['cause people bought me shitloads of Barbie stuff!], someone would end up dying/being kidnapped by a ghost, and everything would be ruined forever.

Yeah. I also love the phrase "Everything is ruined forever!" It amuses me, greatly.

Anyway, back to Tek-Tek and the hours of stupid fun it provides.

"LABCOAT OF DOOM!"

Multiply into infinity.

2007-10-21T23:44:00.000-04:00

Not unlike a mirror in a mirror.
I am afraid of mirrors.

The beginning of a story I probably won't finish. I had it written in LJ originally, but I think I'll make a duplicate post, just because. It's late and I can't sleep, so whatever.

"
"Darkness is the natural state of the universe," says Devin, "It isn't a matter of good or bad or anything. That's just how it is. That's how it started. That's how it'll be after the end."

"What do you mean, after the end?" Devin's twin sister is wide-eyed, with her knees drawn up to her chest, her thighs flush with her torso. She is so thin, every joint in her body stands out by itself and when she moves her bones can be seen sliding under her white, white skin. As she looks up at Devin, her eyes appear huge in her skull. Her eyes are black, the color of plain coffee, and her hair is the color of ink.

"After the end, milady," the boy enjoys peppering his speech with odd phrases. Some he gets from books, some he hears said.
"After the end means when the end is over. Everything ends, even the end. After the end, it is the same as the beginning. And it will be darkness."

The girl heaves her eyes away from her brother's face and stares into the air.
"Oh," she says, and her dry, cracked, thin lips form a slow circle, "I think I get it."
She closes her great eyes, finally, and Devin looks away, too, toward the sky, blue and bright and filled with fat clouds. The wind that chases them across the sky skirts down every so often, and washes over their faces the smell of air and dirt and sunlight. The children are sitting in the shade of a wall in the middle of a field. The crumbling brick rises like the backbone of some starved beast, some decaying behemoth. Devin runs his fingers through the dirt and his sister stares with her eyes closed, with her knees poking the underside of her jaw.

"I get it," she says, with finality, this time, and reaches out to take Devin's hand.

"Good," he says, and stands up, pulling her with him.

They walk hand in hand along the wall until they come to the edge of the field. There is a bike, and old one, lying in the dirt, and a faded red wagon tied to with rope. Devin rights the bike and mounts it, and his sister huddles in the wagon, and the boy pushes down on the pedals and they creak wordlessly down the straight, unmarked road.

~~~~~

July burns and August blazes and September smolders but only in October do the trees truly catch fire and crackle as the wind whips through them. The rains come in the middle of the month, a few strong storms that bruise the sky with their fury and rip apart the clouds and slice the air. The twins watch from the kitchen window as their front lawn dissolves and the sundial sinks a few inches into the mud and the birdbath spills over.

A car pulls up in the drive way, and they perk up minutely, but do not move from their posts. Devin calls out, "They're here!" and her twin brother leans forward, his nose to the window, his breath fogging on the glass, watching the man in the car bracing himself. Devin's twin is long and thin like his sister, his eyes just as black, his skin the same cold, opaque, white. His hair, like hers, hangs to the middle of his back, and is tied loosely with a piece of grey ribbon.

"They are here," he whispers to the glass, and reaches out to take Devin's hand. The watch a man spill out of the car, slam the door, and slosh up their front walk. He does not see them in the kitchen window, but they see him shudder as he stumbles past and looks around quickly, nervously, like he feels he's being watched. He falls against the front door and hammers on it with both fists and a leg, just as the sky overhead bursts open and lightning forks across the sky. The thunder is felt all the way down in the foundation of the house.

Devin and her brother take their time walking to the door, and while Devin undoes the security chain, the boy slides open the bolt and turns the knob. They open the door together and step aside as the man lunges into the parlor, trailing oceans of rain water.

"Welcome," says Devin.
"Welcome," says her brother.

"Ugh... Hi... Gimme a sec. Do you mind?" says the man, and starts sloughing off his coat and shoes.

"No," the twins say, and close the door quietly.

"Hey, where can I put this, kids?"

"The kitchen will do," Devin whispers. She leads, her brother follows, and the man trails behind. He dumps his jacket in the sink, his shoes onto the floor, and slumps into a chair. His sweater and pants still drip and his hair is plastered to his face, but he sighs in relief.

"Man was it a bitch getting here," he groans, then slaps his mouth quickly, "Pardon my French, kids."

"That was not French," the boy says flatly, "But your speech does not offend us."

"Right," the man eyes him from head to toe, then his sister, then checks his watch, "So where's your mom?"

"Upstairs."

"She comes anon."

"A what?"

More lighting, and more thunder rattles the house, and the panes of glass in the kitchen window shudder. The twins sit side by side, their backs to the storm, watching their visitor drip onto the linoleum. The man stares back awkwardly, his lips draw tight.

"Mr. Rom," comes a voice from the doorway, "I am glad to see you made it out here safely. Tonight is a bad night for travel."

In the gloomy kitchen it is hard to see Mr. Rom jump, but he does, and the twins do see, and they smile. Their mother walks into the kitchen and accepts the man's handshake.

"I can give you some of Albert's old clothes. You don't want to catch cold, do you?"

"Oh it's fine, Ms. March..."
"Melanie."
"Right. Melanie. It's fine, really. The car's got heating and all, so we'll be fine." Rom looks back at the twins, "So are they all packed?"

"Aye, Sirrah," says the boy, and the girl nods once.

"Well, then... I am told all your paperwork's been done Ms... I mean Melanie. So... I... Would you like a moment to say goodbye or something?" Rom feels stupid saying it. The kids will only be two hours away, and they'll have visiting passes every two weeks. But it's his job to say it. "I uh... I can go into the parlor, or something."

Melanie shakes her head and steps up to her children and hugs them. Rom hears her whispering things, but either the rain distorts the words or she speaks a different language, because when she pulls away not half a minute later, he can't remember or can't understand what she said.

"We'll get our bags," the girl says quietly, and the two trail out of the room. They disappear up the stairs, into the darkness of the second floor.

"Is uh... is the electricity out or something? Why's it so dark in here?" he asks shakily.

"We keep the lights off during storms like this," Melanie says dreamily. She picks up Rom's sodden coat and hands it back to him, "Anyway, they don't like the light."

"Who, the storms?"

"The twins," the woman says, almost surprised, "This is an old house, you see, the wiring's not exactly perfect. Albert got a nasty shock fixing the light-bulbs once."

"Right," Rom nods, and schools his face quickly, to avoid rolling his eyes, "So... you've got all the info on the visiting and calls and mail and stuff, right? Can I answer any questions for you?"

"No," Melanie shakes her head, "I have all the information I need, thank you."

"We're ready, now," comes Devin's voice.
"We are," says her brother.
"Goodbye," they say together.
"Goodbye," says Melanie. She reaches out and touches with one pale hand their foreheads as they pass by. The close their eyes momentarily, smile, and keep walking.

Outside the storm is suddenly quieter, though no less mean. The rain still pelts the ground like it's seeking vengeance, and the air still roars as the lightning whips it, but the violence of it seems far away.

Rom takes a deep breath, tips a small salute to the twins' mother, and leads the children into the rain. Each carries one plain suitcase, signed with the letter D."

lolWHUT?

2007-09-28T06:06:00.000-04:00

Waking up earlier than usual is an experience; forty minutes earlier and it feels like there are eons before anything has to actually be done. Although now I am probably going to start falling asleep in the middle of some class or another.

Something creative, now:

"See Schay, sitting in the House rec-room; the television is on, perpetually on, and through the window is the pre-dawn twilit view of the sky, the field, the trees, and behind those the yellowish stain of the city, the false glow on the horizon. It is cold and silent, and still, and this is quite alright. We try not to move too much, even to breathe, even in thoughts, because the body - the muscles, the bones, the blood, seem to be in different planes, and movement causes them to rattle against each other.
The room is really occupied by the trinity - Schay in the middle, Des on the right, Charon on the left. Behind the couch and on the floor are the others, the lessers, and above, on the cieling, is a hole, a void, a vacuum in which God floats, separate from and part of everything, not a vortex but behaving like one, not really there at all, it's just a shadow on the cieling cast by the white-noise glow of the TV.
The room is crowded, and cold, and silent; not, in that manner, unlike a morgue."

"As Ty stands on the boardwalk, the tide comes in closer and closer, inches up, swallowing the sand, spitting salt-spray over his shoes, his jeans, his t-shirt. The snow on the sand, where the water laps it up, crowns the waves in dirty white, and slowly, slowly, slowly disappears."

I was thinkin'...

2007-09-14T13:53:00.000-04:00

...About how sticks of gum feel a little bit like those giant green caterpillars that sometimes attack our tomato plants. And those caterpillars... we didn't see them around until we actually got tomato plants. They're sort of cute, too: Green, about the length and width of a human adult's finger. Their little clinging legs and their little curved, folded manatee/fetus-esque face-things... Although, they are sort of creepy... mostly because they are, as has been established, the length and width of a human adult's finger. We don't normally see caterpillars that big.

It is called the Tomato Hornworm, and its skin feels sort of like a stick of gum. The one we had in our tomatoes has probably long since been eaten, because I merely lobbed it out into the grass. I wonder if Hornworms taste minty-fresh, too. I bet they don't.

LJ Excerpt: Carmen

2007-08-27T19:18:00.000-04:00

I finished reading "Carmen." It was okay. I kept thinking "This would make a great Shoujo-manga," as I read it. A little one, I suppose, it's a short story, after all.

The images were quite nice. I liked Maru's place, with all the crap nailed to the walls. That's awesome.

And the scene in the club/concert place, with the statues. And the way she looked into the crowd when the band was playing; how she talked even though no one could hear. I've done that before, it's a weird feeling. It's not the same as when no one hears you anyway, it's almost the opposite. O.o; Anywho, those two things stood out the most. Oh and the Chernobyl song.
But I'm still not sure what exactly the band sounds like. >.<

The character was a little strange. Not quite the word... but sort of; because I was reading it and I couldn't imagine the girl as any older than like, eight or nine. Ten at a stretch. Even though it says she's going on fifteen, right? Something like that? In any case, image-wise, it was a good read, I enjoyed it.

--------------------------------- And that's it. D:

Also, a poem. I'm still working on it:

From "Everyone's" point of view:
“His Condition”

We into the lowest pit,
The niche of God, the office of Death,
Descend.
Under the scars, under the skin:
We were once the same meat, the same mind;
Now a myriad:
Now a horde swept downriver,
Cold and black and blue;
On currents tilled by bony fingers,
Waves whipped by decayed wings:
And the roar of the river is the roar of the beast:
The archangel did not
Protect the child of this land.