Every minute I stay in this room

In the dream we are living on a kind of commune in a hotel in a place like Vermont. We are working there temporarily. S.P. comes to stay and she keeps setting up the buffet at the wrong time and I think she is stealing and on drugs. I don't trust her for some reason. At one buffet, there is Italian food and a lot of terrible, crumbly bread. S.P. keeps smiling all the time like she is guilty and wants to be forgiven. At one point, some people arrive to work on the sidewalk. They are dressed in old-fashioned newsie outfits from the 1930s. Stumpy calls me over to meet one: a sickly, sad, boyish character with an awful fleshy hook for a nose. Stumpy says he reminds him of the kid from the J. Peterman catalogue and I agree. In the dream I know who he means. One night, everyone is putting away all the stuff from the day and we look up at the sky and the stars are all arranged in this crazy, bright pattern: an arcane language full of ideograms, like heiroglyphics. Someone asks how we're going to interpret it and I say, "No, this isn't psychological. This is something major and religious." We realize that the end of the world is coming. It is daylight again and there is smoke on the horizon. A frantic, frightened energy in the air. I decide to drive to my mom's in this little red car she used to have. A Suzuki Swift hatchback like a shoe. When I get to her house, she is gone. But I go through her stuff and gather Chapstick, gold, and uncut diamonds. Then I try to drive back to the commune, but the highways are completely jammed. Somehow, though, I am an amazing driver and I can just weave in and out and over and through it all. It feels like I am on a rollercoaster, but also watching the whole thing from a news helicopter: OJ in the white Bronco. There is a dark storm chasing me and I am trying to outrun it. 

Back in August, Dave from Red Sofa DVDs informed me that Stumpy and I had rented 767 DVDs since they opened back in the winter of 2007. Coincidentally, they opened their shop around the same time that we moved to South Africa: Red Sofa's lifespan is contemporaneous with my life here and I feel very loyal and connected and to it. So connected, in fact, that the staff from the video store often appear in my dreams. For instance, a couple of weeks ago, I dreamed that Dave himself grew up on a Russian commune in Maine. (Don't ask me where this New England commune thing is coming from lately.) And, a couple of nights back, I dreamed that Stumpy and I were going to Burning Man, only instead of in Nevada, it was being held outside a small fishing village in the Pacific Northwest. The festivities hadn't started yet; everyone was still in setup mode, staying at all these small, rundown motels. Ours had a red striped awning and was owned by Rob from the video store. Stumpy and I had to register and the organizers gave us a lame goodie bag with single serving shampoo samples and sun block and a couple of coupons for athletic equipment. It went on from there, but you get the picture: Red Sofa has become a part of my psyche.

Now, I suppose one might think that 767 is rather a large number of movies to have watched in four years. In fact, if one were so inclined, one could perform a series of simple calculations to discover just how many total days of viewing that represents. (About sixty-four, if one were so inclined.) However, if you look at it another way, you will discover that 767 is really only equal to one movie every other day. Which doesn't even come close to insanity, especially when you consider that many people contentedly watch hours and hours of badly lit, appallingly scripted TV every day. Or, more likely, they watch reality TV, which warps the mind and pollutes the soul. (And don't get me started on the commercials: as preposterous as they are patronizing, TV is just riddled with them.) But the problem is that when you rent movies as frequently as I do, every movie you watch is not exactly going to be "The Wrestler" or "Borat". In fact, every movie won't even be "Tigerland" or "Best in Show". A lot of the movies you see are going to end up being "Scream 4". (Or "Scre4m", as it's written on the box.) Why did I rent this? What was I thinking? Granted, my stance on the entire "Scream" franchise was positively inclined from the get-go thanks to the conditions under which I viewed the first in the series, at the Northway Mall Cine-10, at the curiouser and curiouser age of sixteen. It still ranks as one of my top five movie experiences of all time. Let's just say that certain films hold up exceedingly well when viewed through the crystal-clear, absurdist lens that becomes one's adolescent mind after ten hours of side-splitting, hair-raising mid-winter hallucination: ah, the snow-bedecked woods; behold the Hale-Bopp comet! But that was then...

What I don't understand is why I am willing to devote so much time to watching bad movies. Why do I feel the need to see everything that comes along? I don't sit around looking for abysmal books to read or cheap music to listen to. I try to avoid unpalatable food and generally steer clear of dim, humorless people. I'd say that overall, I'm rather finicky about what goes into my head, to the extent that I can really control anything at all. But, I just can't resist movies. Even crappy ones. Even "Butterfly on a Wheel", which was thoroughly lame.

The sun sinks, the children sleep. I turn on, tune in, drop out. Well, in a manner of speaking: Hale-Bopp is long gone. 

No labor-saving machine

In yoga yesterday, I had to suppress a massive surge of ego when the teacher told me that my trikonasana was "very beautiful". I am, perhaps, excessively proud of that - I think it may have made my whole week. But yoga teachers are an odd sort. After class, she told me that I should take calcium citrate for my osteo-arthritic wrist. (This was her diagnosis, after I mentioned that changes in weather tend to make it hurt.) When I told her that I drink tons of milk and eat a great deal of cheese on a daily basis, she wrinkled her nose and shook her head like I'd offered to grill her up a turd.

"Cow's milk is not very good for this," she said. Her voice was marvelous. She may be French, or Israeli. Possibly Lebanese, even. Who knows? I'm terrible with accents.

"Okay, well I actually have some calcium supplements at home," I said. I've got them on a shelf in the kitchen. Every once in a while I get it into my head that I'm going to start taking vitamins. I go out and drop a load of cash on some and bring them home and put them on a shelf in my kitchen so that it looks like I'm a very healthy, responsible person. After a few years, they expire and I throw them away. Or, I move to a new house and they wind up on a shelf in the bathroom. Bathroom vitamins stay around longer, often decades past their expiration date. They sit around and trade stories with the old lipgloss. Sometimes I hear them all whispering about how they knew me when I was young and had such promise, and how it's a crying shame to see what's become of me.

"Where did you get them?" the yoga teacher wanted to know, about the calcium. I couldn't remember where I'd gotten them, not the store or the city or even the country. In fact, I had no idea how long I'd had them, either. For all I knew, they could've been vintage vitamins passed down to me by my grandmother back when she was alive and we used to go skiing together in the '80s and '90s. Once in a while, especially after a really disorganized move (of which I've made several), ancient vitamins from the bathroom find their way back to the kitchen.

"Um, er... Clicks, maybe. Not really sure," I said. "I'm not a big vitamin person." (Clicks is about the closest thing to a CVS in South Africa.) Another sour face.

"No... that's not... you should..." she began. She seemed to be wrestling with the futility of explaining something that she knew I would probably never understand. I knew how she felt: It's the same way I feel when someone tells me they like Lady Gaga or James Taylor or that remaking "Point Break" is a good idea. You just realize you are living on a completely different planet from someone else.

"Look, you need calcium citrate for this," she finally said. "This is good for prevention." I nodded earnestly and repeated "calcium citrate" so that she would know I was taking her advice on board. Now, I appreciate her concern, and I'm sure I will acquire the recommended vitamin at some point. My main problem, though, is that my whole life I've been told you can get the calcium you need from drinking milk. Cow's milk. And I thought it came from cheese, too! How confusing! Who knew that these "foods" were really just poisons to be sneered at? What other dread lies have I been fed?

I've also heard a couple of yoga and pilates instructors bemoan the modern lifestyle that forces people to slouch forward all day. They all cite the keyboard and the steering wheel as the main culprits in our current posture crisis. Now, I agree that working on a computer and driving can both take a toll on the body. However, when exactly in history did people mostly perform their work behind them? Never! Think about making bread - kneading it, rolling it. Think about sewing your own clothes or even washing them by hand. Consider the butter churn, the reins, the hammer and anvil. Consider milking a damned cow!

That'll really mess you up.

All your dreams are on their way

In the dream we were staying at A.L.’s house – me, Stumpy, Chui, M.B., HJ, N.B. – and other people. A lot of the rooms were painted navy blue and there was an extra living room hidden beneath the kitchen. We all seemed to be living there together for a while. Then, it changed into this big industrial space with a huge drop off on one side and an extremely long, difficult ladder with really close-together rungs. Everything was different – there was a kind of makeshift shelter within the space that was made of bones and sticks and pieces of flags and kites and tattered sails. Chui sat in it watching "Poltergeist" on an old TV. There was an unknown Japanese chick (maybe 20 years old) with really messed up teeth staying in the space. Her father was there, as was T.S. She showed us her dental x-rays and we were all giddy about them – about how much money we were going to make (or something). Somehow, her teeth indicated that we would be able to build something magnificent. Then, the subject changed and we needed to make a decision about what to do. Someone jumped off the edge, which seemed to be the only way out. I realized that I was filled with grief because one of my children was gone – must’ve been Sasha, though I didn’t think of her. Chui was afraid of the movie and there were a bunch of dolls piled up in the corner of the structure she was sitting in. I kept telling her not to bother me. I decided I was going to jump with the three other people who were there – it was the only way out. But then, I realized that I couldn’t and that I shouldn’t let Chui watch "Poltergeist".

So that was the beginning part of a long dream on Saturday night.

The following is a dream from last night:

In the dream, we bought an old house with a vineyard and a wine shop attached. It was just before dawn and it was cold outside. I had to wait outside for Stumpy to come with the sellers to hand over the keys. There was frost on all the vines and it covered the house too. The electric fence didn’t work; I touched it to find out. When we finally got inside, the little wine shop was attached to the kitchen. There were a lot of doors and gates that didn’t open, that we didn’t have keys for. The man who was selling the place told us that we had to keep an empty wine crate available to customers, next to the till. We would sell more wine this way. There was a teenage girl that lived on the property who was going to work for us and help us fix it all up. Somehow, in the midst of all this, I found out I’d been shortlisted for a very important literary award. Everyone was congratulating me, but I couldn’t remember writing the novel. The house was very old and interesting and we made a fire in the huge fireplace and looked at all the old stuff that the sellers had left behind. We talked about how strange it was to buy a house with a whole lot of other people’s stuff in it, and I had a quick thought that it would not be easy to sell if we had to sell it. There was a fleeting worry about being stuck. At one point, I went to look for Chui and I found her sitting on a big stone window sill next to a wide open window with a little drop below. I wasn’t terrified, but I cautioned her about windows and falling.

(Note: When I woke up Chui this morning, she told me her dream had been about "silver leaves".)

In the supermarket today, the nectarines were paradise. "Bridge Over Troubled Water" played on the speakers - the real version, not the Muzak - and everybody that went by had to pick up a nectarine and smell it: the simple and binding olfactory imperative. Put down your pale oranges, your waxy cherries, your avacado like a brick. Come over here to the nectarines. Come over here and sniff. And listen - there's Garfunkel, singing you back to your childhood heart.

On the radio in the car, they were talking about ghosts and old cinemas. There was an energy in the air like something extreme was about to happen.

But nothing did.

(Or maybe something did, but somewhere else.)

We drove home in the rain.