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.
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