28.1.14

a sip of coffee.


one time i had a dream that my cousin harold made the greatest cup of coffee in the world.

he let me have a sip, but he didn't share it with anyone else. he called it "hippy coffee." because it was made with twigs and pine needles.

he didn't make it with my mustard.


25.1.14

glaukopis


one time i had a dream that athena was formulating an escape plan, but she was hiding out in owl form just in case she had to get involved quickly.

24.1.14

astronomy equipment


one time i had a dream that ms. rathangan, looking through her observational astronomy equipment, saw cinnabar backfisch fall from the trestle that night.

20.1.14

the champagne man


one time i had a dream that the champagne man invited me to all of his parties.

bubbles, my pet fish, said the champagne man used to be a famous guitar player but he couldn't remember if it was in the 60s or the 70s.

the parties went late into the night. they were always loud, never had food, and there was no place to sit. there were huge clouds of tobacco smoke that hung in the air with the loud music. it seemed like it was the same group of 100 people each time and they talked about the same stories, from four or five decades ago, over and over again. this seemed to excite them tremendously. they were the heroes of their own tales. 

if you tried to introduce something currently occurring, whether it was music, letters, or just the weather, they'd be slightly uncomfortable and, in the case of the more vocal ones, possibly annoyed. they'd say things like "man, the weather today is never gonna be as great as it used to be. we had the best climate back then. now, your climate isn't even that reliable. we had rain when got too humid, and sun when it shined."

one time, i mentioned a recent periodical that i was enjoying and one of the guys, jerome, said "man, you don't even know about magazines. we used to have the real journals. they don't even publish the issues we had in those days. we had super glossies back then. no more, though. you guys don't have the guts to publish what we were circulating." the five or so people, mixed men and women, all nodded in agreement. they wore looks that mingled self-satisfaction and disgust. just when it seemed that the conversation would die, because none of them had actually read anything written back then, a voice piped up.

"don't worry though, man." said a party man, whose name i didn't catch, "the whole world is going to be reborn in fire."

"yeah, it is." said jerome, the magazine man. they high fived each other, and everybody mumbled affirmations or raised their glass. then they started to discuss the time there was a big fire in downtown pierre, south dakota. the champagne man came over and heard the conversation. he said that he must have missed the fire because he was on tour in britian back then. they asked him to tell him a story about the trip, but he said that he wanted to learn something about the fire, instead. so they told him, and bubbles and me, about it.

they always wore the style same clothes and too much make up -even the guys. it was boring to me, but i approached it like a sociologist.

it turned out he was only using me for my mustard because it made the spots go away on him and his aging groupies when they applied it to their skin.

i stopped going to his parties when i found out.

actually, i overheard him talking about bubbles on the telephone. he was in the hallway and i was in a nearby bed room. the champagne man made some nasty remarks about bubbles, but said that he was willing to put up with the fish, if it meant getting my mustard.

he called bubbles an air-head. 

bubbles said it wasn't even real champagne at the parties, just cheap sparkling wine.

13.1.14

ghost cop


one time i had a dream that my pet-fish bubbles was speeding on sawkill road. he was pulled over by ghost cop.

when bubbles pulled over, the ghost cop disappeared. 

bubbles said he'll never speed on sawkill road again; it's too scary.

9.1.14

6.1.14

hire a poet


one time i had a dream that one pooch was so bored that he hired his own private jazz poet to entertain him. his name was bigley.

bigley, that dog, would sit and listen to the accoustics and the crazy lines that the poet would spin out of his mouth. tales about unbelievable travels and memoirs of all his long gone friends who had gone bust or gone down because of drink, or lack of sleep, or over erudition. he'd tell bigley about his former job in a factory and all the characters that lived there in a mixture of blue collar misery and small scale triumphalism. and he'd tell bigley about all the jobs he was going to get like store detective for a chain of department stores where he'd wear a tan raincoat and pretend to shop -but actually he'd be looking around to see who was gonna lift a pack of smokes or steal a chair, or maybe throw a white feather pillow under their big winter coat that they wore to keep out the arctic air, and walk out of the joint and lay down in a rickety little bed with crumbly stained sheets in a paint peeling apartment, where you could hear the water in the pipes when someone flushed the toilet down the hall, or maybe a high class furniture maker who would fashion elegant pieces out of wood that people would sit down on and feel so comfortable it would make them feel regal like they were running the world, or maybe he'd be a numbers runner working out of a candy shop as a cover for all the free floating cash, or maybe a fisherman in iceland where he would fall into the drink and catch pneumonia.

he'd tell bigley of all the girls he wanted to meet, or that he had met and how it always led to break up, confusion, and bad feelings all around, and how this one girl had him go half insane. and he never knew if she was in love or she was just kissing him just to pass the days and the hours while they kept looking for the next adventure to happen. and it did and she picked up and moved to nebraska, and his musical ambitions started to flop, and he flipped, and he spent a month or so upstate, until he figured things out enough from reading nietzsche and aristotle and st augustine and drinking cheap cider because he was in apple country up there.

and bigley he would bark and howl and the jazz man would howl and bark right along with him like it was part of the music and he had arranged it that way in his head in pre-advance like he was a little mozart living down by the hudson.