Nov 14, 2019

We all lived in a house in the woods, with a big pile of firewood in back that bled blood. Dadoo was sick with a strange disease that made him grow leaves, and every day he’d get out of bed, wander into the back yard in his pj’s and turn his back to the woods. Then he’d slowly start to levitate higher and higher while drifting back wards into the trees, like the slowest most pronounced Homer Fade, until one of us dragged him down and back to bed.

I got the distinct impression that there was a tall, malign invisible creature picking him up under the arms trying to steal him away. I’m an effort to find out what was sickening him, I dragged his mattress out and threw it in a nearby river. As it was swept away, a pencil thin cord of moist sinew became apparent, running from the corner of the mattress into a pocket dimension under my dad. It pulled taught and yanked what was obviously a NegaMattress, like a mattress from the Upside Down, out of the space under dad. Obviously that was what had been sickening him. OBVIOUSLY.

Side plot: there were caves under the house filled with Bigfoot that would hunt us at night.

May 09, 2019

September 11, 2018

I am at my nondescript home in some unspecific suburb on a sunny, unremarkable day. As I walk through the front room and gaze out of the picture window, I see a horde of cars headed toward my house; they are all brightly colored, covered in lights and despite being made to look like different animals or objects, they seem to be street legal. Out of them pour a few dozen people of all ages dressed in bright, bohemian, circus-themed outfits. I feel an immediate repulsion and make sure the front door is locked, but they swarm the house, entering via the back and letting the rest through the other doors. They immediately make themselves comfortable on my furniture and begin eating my food and drinking my booze, acting very much as if they’d received a written invitation.

Without being overtly rude, I try to convey that they are not welcome. Nobody takes any notice. In fact, I realize that it’s likely that these people know very well that they are trespassing. While their faces smile and laugh, their eyes are cold and sinister. Some of them are stealing things while they think I’m not looking. Others distract me while their friends go through my pockets behind my back. A few underage girls sit on the laps of men old enough to be their fathers, giggling and flirty, as yet unaware that they are prisoners. The one who looks like the ‘leader’; a toothy, swarthy fellow dressed like a matador astronaut, repeatedly tries to get me to try their ‘fancy tea’ while others also encourage, but I notice that nobody else is drinking any. I look at the phone hanging on the wall, but behind every set of eyes is the unspoken but clear threat: call the police, drive us out and we’ll go quietly enough, but later you’ll find your pets disemboweled and your house in flames, and you’ll never be able to prove a thing.

Seething with rage and impotence, I walk out on to the front lawn. As I do, another car arrives. Black and gold and shaped like a robotic beetle, it parks directly in front of my front door. Out of the passenger side emerges Crash, dressed in silver and shining blue and red, looking a bit like a circus ringleader and a bit like a seventies pimp. He is laughing and waving at the folks inside, who chorus a greeting, and walking across the lawn he sweeps me into his arms and assaults my mouth with a passionate kiss. Meanwhile the driver’s side of the beetle opens to reveal a young, smiling blonde dressed in shining purple tophat and tails, who herds me back into the house alongside Crash, despite my vicious protests. Thrown off of me, Crash looks at me with disappointed disdain. He apologizes to the group for my behavior. You know how she is, he says. He and the blonde exchange knowing glances and clasp hands briefly before he turns to me again. Can’t you just have fun? My stomach is hollow and my blood ice as I reply, “I know the person who I thought you were never really existed, but every single day I mourn the loss of the love of my life as if I watched him die.”

Crash sweeps the onlookers a look that is equal parts pity, disdain and triumph and with a shrug, wraps his arm around the blonde in the tuxedo and strolls out the front door. Slowly, the rest of the horde exits; some feigning boredom, others looking at me with a sadness that is almost compassionate, but not quite. When the last is finally gone I lock all the doors and windows and slowly, methodically begin to pick up the mess they’ve left behind.

April 5, 2013

I was dating Dennis from Jurassic Park. He had a bunch of friends over and was showing off all the things he’d bought for me, including but not limited to a group of manniquins in  my form clothed in white shirts, black jackets, and red skirts of all different design. They were pretty cool, but after spending a little time with  Dennis and his friends, I decided that they were actually not very nice people. I told them exactly what I thought of their behavior. After I’d spoken my mind, they all started to gang up on me, trying to make me feel bad for having a dissenting opinion, and I decided to leave. They gathered all of my gifts and dumped them in a dumpster outside. When I tried to leave, I decided that the gifts didn’t need to go to waste in the dumpster, so I tried to salvage them. Dennis and his posse got between me and the dumpster and started to get physical with me.  From it’s sheath behind my back I pulled out a long, cruelly sharp and thin bladed stiletto….

September 18, 2012

I am in an unknown back yard. The sun is shining and all my closest friends (in particular, my RPG gang) are in attendance. Suddenly the ground beneath our feet starts to shake. We can tell it’s not a localized quake, but a result of something  happening to the planet itself, I believe because the sun is moving strangely in the sky, and flickering. A colossal, cosmic bolt of energy emanates from the sun and hits the earth. I yell, “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE.” and receive exasperated looks from the group. I feel that I am justified in this response,  even if it means I have stated the obvious. It felt necessary.

September 13, 2012

I am in the woods, at what looks like the Firefly Bring-a-Cup site. I am part of a group of people, including my mother, who have been tasked with assembling a group of structures that look like IKEA furniture. The structure is comprised mainly of particle board and long strips of metal, and everything seems to have a serrated or very sharp edge. My mother is hurt; something has fallen on her foot or she steps on something. She screams in a way that I’ve never heard her scream in waking life. It’s the terrified sound of an animal caught in a cruel snare. My blood is ice, but I rush to her and try to take charge, remembering my first aid training.

The forest changes into the interior of a sleekly furnished McMansion. It’s night, and the white walls, grey carpet and black electronics and furniture all have a bluish tint. I am apparently housesitting with Crash. The owners of the house are unknown to me, but in my minds eye I see a well-groomed family, all brunettes, with a teenage daughter and possibly young son.

The house gives me the creeps. In my peripheral vision I keep seeing figures run around corners and up and down the stairs. I try to tell Crash but he thinks I’m being ridiculous. He doesn’t believe me. The toys in the house are also sinister. There is a toy shaped like a bullet, about the size of a rabbit, that darts out at me when I look underneath a piece of furniture. After it’s darted out and scared me, it backs up into it’s original position. We try to listen to music or watch movies on the expensive entertainment center, but the result is an eldritch cacophony of sounds and vibrations that we can’t turn off, no matter how many buttons we push or knobs we turn.

I run outside to escape the din and the sight of the shadowy figures running around the house. In the air outside the misty backyard porch is a gargantuan sailing ship. I mean huge, suspended from I know not what, but with visible cables holding it aloft, probably ten stories above the back yard. From a cable suspended from the bow of this ship, a smaller sailing vessel is hanging, with a rope ladder suspended from it’s own stern.

I am chasing either a small dog or a toddler. Maybe a being that morphs from one shape to the other. I feel responsible for it. I grab it and climb the rope ladder, meaning to spend some time in the cabin of the small sailing vessel suspended three or so stories above the back yard. When I finally make it to the deck of this boat, however, the vessel is swinging so wildly that it makes me dizzy and fearful for the dog-baby wriggling in my arms. I descend the ladder again.

As I reenter the house, a weak and rainy dawn seems to be breaking. The dark-haired girl I saw earlier in my minds eye enters the house, and I take this to mean the family has returned home. I am relieved.

April 30, 2012

I am part of a grass roots rebellion, which consists of LARPers costumed as wizards, rogues, and full plated knights, with the occasional lamé jumpsuit and giant hipster sunglasses. We were fighting a force of shell-armored Purple Koopa warriors in a forest that kept morphing into a mall. I kept trying to use my ‘hide in shadow’ ability and botching. At last we reached a room that housed an artifact that could transport us to another dimension. It looked like a small, black, round lite brite that someone had made a red swirl pattern on. It cost a dime to operate. In this room were racks and racks of lamé jumpsuits. I dug into my pocket for a dime and fed the machine.

April 20, 2012

I am back at college. It seems like an art school, but there’s a lot of technology around as well. I am in a lab full of strange devices that are sitting on shelves or worktables. One in particular catches my eye; on a track that weaves around the ceiling is a suspended cow’s head, stripped of skin but not muscle and full of animatronic mechanisms that make it move in a lifelike, and almost comic, manner. It zooms around the room, making faces and conversing with the students. Everyone here is much younger than me, but nobody seems to notice or care, which makes me happy. Outside, the grounds are covered by tall trees and the floor of the forest is covered with wood shavings. There is an open air wood shop here, where students are busy making elaborate and impractical weapons. One weapon I see wielded by a Potterish boy with glasses is a seven foot sickle-shaped blade with a four foot handle, with other elaborate blades sprouting from it’s inner curve. He seems very proud of it. I have had this dream before.

April 12, 2012

My friends and I are on a road trip headed for some kind of wild event. We stop at a large plaza, asphalt lined with parking spaces stretching to the horizon. A building in front of us is open to the street, a long glass display case shows cigars, cigarettes, and the like. My friends all purchase some kind of tobacco product, and finally the small, shriveled woman (I recognize her from my days working at the Sprout Farm in Gloucester, she lives in the section 8 housing development down the street from my house) turns to me. I’m looking for a clove/tobacco mix, since such things have been banned in MA and I haven’t had them for a long time. She hands me a pack of Djarum Black (the old kind) and a pack of Bali Hai (the old kind). I am excited, satisfied, but a bit guilty to be buying tobacco products when I should be trying to quit.  Fuck it, I think. The sun is shining and we’re on an adventure. Let’s roll.

July 14, 2011

The shore is a scree of unpolished gems, curling around a sea of glistening, smooth stones gently rolling with waves. At the end of the pale, translucent isthmus in the distance is a stories tall stalagmite with a lighthouse beam emanating from the top. Four or five people are clustered around me, looking dejected as I’ve caught them doing something they shouldn’t. One of them is an older man with a beard in a wheelchair. He is eating a ham sandwich. I look over my shoulder and into a corner of a practice room, where a Cardassian soldier sits behind a drum kit, keeping time with a rock and roll beat.

June 21, 2011

Somewhere in a temperate forest, on the edge of a calm sea, stands a stone tower that dwarfs even the tallest nearby pines. In it lives a King. His realm is humble and uneventful. While there, I collected glassy, colorful sea shells, slept on a narrow bed stuffed with hay, and swooned with vertigo on the balcony of the high tower. The King gifted me with practical clothing spun from wool, dyed in teal and magenta. My time there was long, but not long enough.

May 23, 2011

I am outside of a bar in a busy Boston square, walking down what looked like risers of stairs next to a parking garage. Chained on one of the platforms is the most amazing chopper – various shades of purple, amazingly extended fork. The Chopper’s wheels are bowed out, the spokes creating a puffed up profile that makes it’s wheels look like fans – I have the impression that this chopper is flight-ready. Naturally, I must have it.

I have clippers, or some sort of instrument of torture.  I leaned in to begin stealing the bike, my impression of the situation changes. I am leaning over the slumped body of a young dark skinned girl, clipping dreadlocks off of the top of her head with my clippers. She is either asleep or dead, I haven’t taken the time to check.

I have only gotten a few dreadlocks cut free when a liquid-shiny stretch Rolls Royce limosine –  so long that I can not see the end of it  – pulls up alongside the bar and garage. I feel sudden fear. This is a hugely powerful person and I’ve been doing something sketchy on his (I assume this is a masculine entity) turf. I am in trouble. I realize that there is nowhere I can run. This person lives and breathes the city, and has influence on all it’s streets and alleyways.

I unfold a leathery black cape, which stretches into sinister looking wings, and I fly.

High up what looks like a barren cliff, but feels like a building, there is a ragged cave mouth. I enter it on the wing and find a warm glow and some friends to keep company with. Outside the horizon shows the mottled indigo and pink of either dawn or dusk, I’m not sure which. If I gaze down at the cityscape/desert scape far below, I can see the Rolls stalking the streets, it’s length curving around city corners like a biomechanoid serpent. I am being hunted, but for the moment I will sleep in the relative safety of my aerie.

May 15, 2011

I’m renting a room. this room happens to be a whitewashed box of wooden walls, about one meter cubed, without doors or windows. (How do I get in and out? Who knows!) It is attached to the very tip of a mile high skyscraper with some kind of industrial bungees. When I try to plug something into a socket, the wiring in the wall explodes like a bomb fuse, a la Tom Hanks’s kitchen in The Money Pit. The wind picks up at night and blows my tiny cube almost completely off it’s perch. Only a couple of bungees keep me from plunging into the abyss.

May 17, 2011

I’m on a road trip with Dadoo Climbout in a convertible car. The terrain is dry white desert. At one point we come upon some kind of route marker. It’s a sort of bleached white obelisk, the bottom fourth of it resembles coral, the middle some kind of huge petrefied plant spikes, and it’s crowned with a human skull. I like it, so I break off a portion of the plant spikes and take that and the skull.

As I look up from the passenger seat of the car, the blue sky suddenly ripples like a pond, and behind the ripples are heavy storm clouds. I close the car top as the torrent of rain begins.