Apparently, I can’t handle the truth.

Once upon a time in wakey-world, I cadged a place to sleep in the extraordinarily expensive kingdom of San Francisco with someone called Fredo whom I had met and befriended on LiveJournal. This was oh my! back when I met and befriended people, so 20 years ago maybe. I really liked him; he was also really pretty. In his personal history, as I recall, he had been a corpulent child and had carried a world of fat into his adulthood, shedding it only a few years before we met; it was my distinct impression that his self-image was still adjusting to the change of having recently become a strapping, athletic, naked yoga-doing, and beautiful young gay man in—well, paradise.

Told ya that to tell ya this: The guy that came to my room in my dream this morning was very much built out of Fredo: because historically there are precious few strapping, athletic, naked yoga-doing, and beautiful young gay men who have wanted me unrequitedly. But that’s what’s happening here: even while I appreciate how attractive he is, I am uninterested. I pretend to be sleeping when he comes in. I know he knows it’s pretend but I pretend anyway. We are in my library but it very much resembles a dorm room. One with bunk beds. He gets up and lies in the top bunk, flipping through an old magazine and joking, ‘I wish there was something to read here.’ Finally I engage him and offer him a more recent and/or more interesting magazine. I somehow blank on the name of a British new weekly, which is bland enough to excuse forgetting it—World News Report, I think—and list a couple others. Now that I’m actively interacting with him, however, he wants to eat. I offer him some leftover pasta, which seems really to be a fancy macaroni and cheese. He does not want this because he just had macaroni and cheese earlier in the day. I tell him I can make some other sort of pasta in some other sort of sauce. He suggests manicotti; I tell him I have neither manicotti nor anything to fill them with; but suggest I could run out and buy some groceries. He prefers restaurant manicotti, which is fine by me.

By the time we are leaving, however, he is no longer this Fredo-based NCP but Paul, who has suggested we grab a bite before—I’m not sure but let’s just assume based on historical data that we’re going to see naked men. (June 20, IRL, is the 24^th anniversary of the night we met, in a Baltimore joint whither we each had gone to see naked men.) So we head downstairs toward the main egress of the apartment building. Mabel, the doorwoman, is issuing residents out and she has a unique word for each—including admonishing one of them for some recent and questionably ethical act. She is an Edna Garrett sort of character, everybody’s moral mainstay, affectionate with everyone but never stinting to correct a grievous failing or misstep. Anyway, once a half dozen other residents filter out, Paul approaches Mabel with spritely step to return her affection. But she points out that the elevator has just come and we should run for it. Only we’re heading out the front door. For the sake of sense, then, let’s assume the front door has just arrived and we need to scoot through it before it goes away again. We scoot.

Oh wait, maybe it was an elevator. I’m so confused. We come out not on the street but in a large public hall—a ballroom or larger meeting room in a convention center or hotel—where many small tables are set up in a grid with breakfast foods on them. I think: I thought we were going out for breakfast but I stand corrected without saying anything to Paul. Anyway, I'm hungry and there’s plenty of food here.

Except the big room and the many tables inexplicable morph into six or seven tables comprising three sides of a rectangular buffet against a wall. Originally the rectangle was closed and one could peruse only the exterior in search of one’s food; more recently, however, one of the tables was removed, allowing the hungry to enter the interior and browse from there. This modification to the buffet arrangement is explicitly labeled as a GAMECHANGER. In a typical dream frustration, however, I find nothing in particular that I want to eat; and when I finally do spot something that looks appetizing, I can’t get to it because Jack Nicholson is in the way.

This goes on way too long. Paul notices I am close to losing my shit and ushers me outside where I eat some plastic.

‘What was that?’ he says.

‘Random bit of plastic wrap,’ I say.

‘You don’t know where that’s been,’ he says.

‘It’s still prolly safer than sucking a random cock,’ I say.

Dream Journal update

 

I need to know where this is.

 

Jimmy Two Times

Long ago I made a connection between Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) and Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990) and I convinced myself that the walk-on character 'Jimmy Two Times' in the latter move was an instance of Scorsese consciously (though presumably good-naturedly) poking fun at Coppola and his sister Talia Shire. Jimmy (Anthony Powers) appears only momentarily, introduced in the voiceover narration by protagonist Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), who says, ' And then there was Jimmy Two Times, who got that nickname because he said everything twice, like...'

Just a random, cute gag? Not if you consider one of the last speeches by a nearly frenzied Connie Corleone (Shire) in The Godfather, as she accuses her brother Michael of having murdered her husband in retribution for his betrayal of the family. She directs some of this rant to Michael's wife Kaye: 'You know how many men he had killed! Read the papers. Read the papers! That's your husband! That's your husband!'

We the audience may notice the repetition of two short sentences in the same meter (On the shores of Gitche Gumee / That's your husband! That's your husband!) and think it slightly jarring; but we generously write the oddity off to Connie's emotionally volatile state.

But it is jarring. And it's the fact that both in Connie's cathartic speech and in Jimmy's single line in Goodfellas, the repeated phrase has 'the papers' as the direct object. That is not, I think, a coincidence. I think Marty was doing a Curly Howard 'nyuck nyuck nyuck' at Fran.

But I can't find much evidence online that other folks think so. (I did find one Reditor who cites the same lines and attributes them to 'Connie Two Times').

Shad r[ach, Meshach, and Abedneg]oe

"... there blazes in my memory like a comet the day when [my mother] came home from Hollins market complaining with bitter indignation that the fishmongers there—including old Harris, her favorite—has begun to *sell* shad roe. Hitherto... they had always thrown it in with the fish. Worse, she reported they had now entered upon an illegal combination to lift the price of the standard shad of twenty inches... from forty cents to half a dollar. When my father came home for lunch and heard this incredible news, he predicted formally that the Republic would never survive the Nineteenth Century." 

—H.L. Mencken, 'The Baltimore of the Eighties' (1940)

So how come I don’t make him squirt? Or, So how squirt I don’t make him come?

 I recognize the movie just as the rookie cop goes to get a cup of coffee: I remember that he’s going to see something amiss over by the coffee maker, something that triggers him because he recognizes evidence of an actual trigger in the hands of a notorious madman and there will be explosive violence that drives the rest of the plot and fuck! I hate this movie, did Paul put it on again? I run down the hallway from the coffee maker scene but I am too late; I see with chagrin that I am closest to the crazy guy with the gun and am therefore the first person he captures as a hostage. There are several others, of course. There is a long, drawn-out section of the movie all about hostage endurance and the crazy’s guy’s craziness. I am not always his focus; sometimes I am barely a walk-on. But this time, it appears, we actually bond.

He’s got all his hostages completely under his thumb now—the gun is ever present—so he settles down on the floor next to where I’m sitting, leaning against a wall of windows in the institutional hallway, just off the confluence of hallways where I first was ta’en hostage. I’ve been trying to remember what happens in this version but, no, wait a minute, this is definitely new: crazy guy settles down to rest under a blanket and he puts his feet up on my lap. I’m pretty sure this is mean as a provocation—See, look what I can do and you can’t do anything about it!—but when it comes down to brass tacks there is no other movie in the universe than Brain Needs Smut, so... his feet, which started stockinged, are bare and he is kneading my (bare) thighs with them. It’s still a provocation, of course: he’s daring me to touch his feet and threatening immediate violence if I do. Also, he’s pushing me down the hallway as he kneads: we’re both sliding along the floor, slowly, against the glass window.

Gradually the original focus on the hostage-taker degrades. By the time we reach the end of the long hallway, there are other people walking around doing other things; we are only one thing among many (and whoever sees that way heals his heart, without knowing it, from various ills—Czeslaw Milosz). He has been villain-talking and it’s gotten more and more explicitly sexual. His feet and ankles and slick with sweat. I finally parry his threatening talk with ‘Oh, come on—I could make you squirt in a heartbeat.’ I still do not touch his feet but the non-touching is now the erotic part. Do I say ‘I know you want me to’ or just rehearse saying it?

This erotic impasse take a weird turn. Not exactly sure how: it must be one of us mentions a mythical-mystical authority figure—say, the Wizard of Oz or Doctor Benway—and as each of us is certain he knows the good doctor (or whoever) better than the other and that the latter’s sympathies would lie with him in this situation, we finally resolve to hie us, as it were, off to see the wizard.

I do not perceive how the change happens, but the crazy hostage-taker with the gun is now very much the embodiment of Kirikou (from Kirikou et la sorcière [1998]). This short, naked, brown baby leads me by the hand out the double-doors at the end of the hallway onto the concrete landing and to the left where a series of stadium stairs lead us up, finally, to the rooftop deck. There are more and more people milling human-herdlike around us as we go; the entire hostage plot is gone but the little boy leading me is still a formidable antagonist—which is one of two reasons, the other being that we’re both naked, I’m wondering why nobody is paying any attention to us.

Anyway: we come up on the roof and follow a bustling crowd of humans around anticlockwise until we see the uber-antagonist we were aiming for: except now it is a woman, a fabulous hipster guru in diamond-encrusted spectacles; and her temple, her throne, her funky-styled, famous-and-infamous oracular headquarters is a wee corner of this roof where she has a barber-type chair in a single booth, garish in red vinyl and pop art. It is clear—it is known—that everyone wants an appointment with this woman: everyone wants in her chair and can’t nobody get there; what is less clear is whether the chair and the booth are for cosmetology, optometry, or dentistry. But despite the impossibility of seeing this fashionista demigoddess, when we reach her she is madly happy to see us. Like she has been waiting for nobody but us. I suppose she is la sorcière in this story—she has a name but it is lost in the waking—only she and Kirikou are now in cahoots and let the fucking nations just quake about that. There’s a crescent moon above and this whole scene is gloriously rad: it’s a perfect cinematic mythmaking moment, the love child of Jim Jarmusch and Keith Jarrett.

Mind you, these are still vicious, violent antagonists; they’re just in a good mood right now, like technicolor Batman villains, whooping it up and having a grand old time. I remind myself of this as this scene morphs to a sort of drugstore counter with an adjacent optometrist office: of the peril that remains, that could be set in motion by any false word or action that spoils the effervescent good mood of our villain (still the hostage-taker only now she is a punkish teenage girl who is too cool for me and everyone else around her). A random, NPC optometrist is chucklingly sharing with us her usual advice for mothers buying their offspring their first pairs of glasses: ‘Buy extra. Buy a dozen.’ I wholeheartedly agree with the advice.

Although I am still, technically, a hostage, I have some wandering space. I happen upon a fanzine—no idea what the publication called because this particular issue consists entirely of a novel called /Snuck 2/ and that title is prominent on the cover. It’s a Buffyverse novel and its antagonist is none other than the young women I have left sitting at the counter just over there (the obvious villain analog here is Glory) whereas I am wending my way through the tall grass and wondering if I can just vanish. I flip through the novel, noticing how ‘Snuck 2’ is printed in gray text in a different font face as the first word on every verso page and the last on every recto—rather than being a headword—and reminding myself of all the evils this malefactor has wrought.

The word for today is 'inguinal'

 ... as in 'The fungi in our inguinal crease are not the same ones on our heel pad or behind our ear'