One part of last night’s all night dreaming involved the dismantling of the bay bridge, specifically the span between treasure island and the city, which ‘they’ just sort of unhooked from the island and let hang down into the water. ‘They’ did this over the space of a weekend, and part of the deal was that people were ‘allowed’ to swim across the bay for this one weekend only. I looked down from the bridge (the span between oakland and treasure island was still hooked up) and saw Kevin Killian and Ron Palmer swimming and playing together like dolphins. Kevin was such a fast swimmer! I had to get in the water! I swam and swam but as I approached the city I could begin to feel parts of the bridge underfoot, metal and grating, and the other swimmers started to feel it too, and then there was a kind of water riot, we were all approaching/swimming to the shore too quickly and arriving at once and the bridge underwater freaking us out simultaneously. We were scrambling and pushing to get out, the people behind us were like a wave, we had to crawl out of the water quickly, our time was over, ‘they’ were going to let loose some crickets to swim in the bay next. Crickets were the next round of swimmers. These crickets were going to collect, during their swim, information in their bodies about what is wrong with the water.

I have the suitcase that doubles as a small machine for washing clothes, also the latest handheld device but already it has become dented and scratched. The device draws unwanted attention whenever I try to use it (unable to locate mute button.) The main dealer of this device and his family want to befriend me. I’m embarrassed, why do I have something so valuable which I don’t even know how to use? After leaving the airport, I walk on sidewalks between houses looking for the street where he is supposed to pick me up. This is also known as walking down an alley. When I reach the alley’s end, a long decision-making process, how to move past the debris between houses without encountering a spider. I can’t reach the street without dislodging something dirty or dangerous. I go around and around in very small circles. The street is only a few feet away but I can’t reach it. I look up finally and see the sign–not even the right street! Will we ever find each other. My suitcase keeps washing the clothes I’ve already washed. All my clothes are always wet, or half-wet.

I receive intermittent video text messages on the subject of validation, desire and separation. These take the form of short skits.

*

Conference participants are installed like Hollywood Squares in the wall. I can’t see or hear from my position at the base of the wall, looking up. If I had a seat in the stands I could.

*

We walk through a yard of smokestacks until we reach the cave where all the art materials are stored. We’re prying art materials up from the ground and he panics, “we’ve been in here too long.” The art materials are radioactive.

He likes me.

*

I’m in a pink tiled bathroom with a low ceiling and someone calls out an earthquake is coming, and oh also by the way, the last two women who were in this specific bathroom during an earthquake had to be removed with some kind of machinery, I’d better hurry up in there –

*

I enter and re-enter the classroom crawling on my stomach.


*

Everything is reported in the report of an unreportable dream. (a la, “when your arms are too weary”, I mean, this blog post sung to the tune of “Impossible Dream” from the Man of La Mancha.)


*

“Everyone should try to make a chart of his weariness: at what moment, under what circumstances, am I ‘a tire that deflates,’ with on top of it the feeling that, if this is the case, I will deflate indefinitely?” (Barthes, The Neutral)

I am at a poetry event held in a combination city park and Juliana and Bill and Charles’ living room. The feeling sensation of the social space is that of an isolated figure in a cafe in a novel by Jean Rhys. A moment of confusion during the third act (music): the self-service bar behind the stage has become connected to the sound system. The bar consists of two garden hoses hanging over a table, operated with spray nozzles. (generic party movie, alternately, science fiction) One tube dispenses beer, the other vodka and water. The singer is screaming with a lot of care and effort into the microphone, and we can see and also hear the overall gist (radio) of this performance, but at a greatly diminished rate. Two poets are arguing loudly at the bar. We listen. The problem is that the bar-tubes have run empty. I offer my glass of water in a really imperious, judgemental way.

Afterwards, in a collective movement down the hill, everyone goes for a run around the lake but Suzanne and I are trying instead to get an appointment to have our hair cut at the same time. She is on the phone with the hair person and I am trying to take a photo of the halo around a streetlamp. I depress the button and there’s a click but it doesn’t actually take pictures, I keep seeing the viewscreen. Meanwhile, we are reviled and shamed by the hair person for trying to do something so crass as make a simultaneous appointment, and we return to my apartment. It is very bare; mostly there is a twin bed with a thin blanket, the color of GRUEL. (The Little Princess) There is a pile of discarded party clothes in one corner of the room, and my two cats are using this as a nest. They are having a kind of fit, meowing and pouncing and clawing at the green and yellow.. uh .. taffeta. The fabric is very dirty.

We go to play with the cats. My oldest cat has the face of a very old dog, he looks like a sick lhasa apso with big dark eyes rimmed by goo. I think my cat needs to go to the groomers. Then I realize a lot of his hair has fallen and is even still falling out. He has the kind of long fine skinny hair-fringe that a very bald man has when only a few strands of hair remain. And then I see how red his skin is, and greasy, and covered in scabs, and that my cat is very sick. He rolls onto his back and with every movement another fold of skin unfolds, each more hairless and uncomfortable than the next. I am rubbing his tummy and apologizing and crying and he is crying too, with the eyes and tears of a human man but a dog’s mouth, and I am trying to smooth his skin and am vigorously rubbing where it hurts and I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. More hair falls out. This scene passes and I am standing in front of the sink holding my hands in front of myself, preparing to wash them. I am trying to keep them away from the rest of my body. They are covered in dirt and hair and dried blood and flakes of skin. My cat (dog, man, part) is whimpering on the floor. Suzanne is standing somewhere behind me but I am too ashamed for anyone to see this and I wake up.

Each spot (lesion) has a hard, knobby miniature object shaped like a barbell inside, which I can trace/feel through the skin, and which causes the skin to be distended. I have an infinite amount of these hard pockets-flaps on my torso and legs and shoulders and back, and when I take a bath they float away from my body slightly, and become translucent (jellyfish). In the bath, when each pocket lifts up and away from the skin, it’s like being covered in grasses, in the water I’m a field, i.e. the kind that would be on a bluff, overlooking the sea. But when I am not in the bath, they are hard, and I can’t tell if they are inserted (plastic) or not. These bulbous growths. I struggle against the thought that only surgery can remove the alien barbells from my skin, and yet I know it’s true. During this time I am in an isolated house with a man who still wants to have sex with me.