I am living in a new place that is part commune, part funhouse, and part D&D dungeon. I am not partnered at this point but appear to be sharing rooms platonically with Nick and two other men whose identities are mostly fictional and tend to shift a lot. The place is in an urban setting—perhaps taking up a very large city block, or perhaps it's TARDIS-like, because the multi-building complex is so vast that it takes several minutes to get from the front gate to our rooms; and even though I've traveled it several times I need Nick to draw me a map. Even the map isn't foolproof—perhaps I am just a greater fool than the map had counted on.
The D&D part comes from the fact that certain creatures live in certain rooms or at certain landmarks; some of these are indeed monstrous and pose real hazards that one needs to know how to get past; but the long-term residents know all the tricks and share them gladly with newcomers. So, for example, at either side of the dark room just inside the front gate where dwells an unpleasant and ill-tempered millipede who spits poison, residents leave numerous umbrellas lying about. Some of these creatures we know by their "monster" or D&D names, and some we actually know by their first names. Their hazardousness is unrelated to which name they go by: "Evan" might be a Komodo dragon far more dangerous than "the nightcrawler" who is literally a harmless annelid.
The city outside the front gate (and there appears to be only this one entrance to the whole complex) is rather like the French Quarter in New Orleans—it has the flavor and the color—but it's slightly more built-up and bustling. It's definitely the artist's quarter of some city, but it's not necessarily a real city. There are plenty of restaurants and coffee shops and galleries and music spaces nearby. In the space of this story I don't go to any of these restaurants etc., but I do reminisce and chat with friends about favorite ones I have been to in the past.
At one point I am in a courtyard, situated between buildings not too far back from the front gate, sitting at a braided steel patio table with Mom and a friend or two. I confess to Mom that my new digs and Bohemian lifestyle are very appealing. This appears not to mean that I'm partying/drinking a lot (as it almost certainly would in real life, at least when I was the sort of young man that moved into communes). No, I seem to be actually enjoying living amongst many humans in this quasi-communal way.
A group of eight or ten people wander past, seemingly on their way out of the complex, and Mom, who is no longer Mom but a peer, gets up and accosts the guy who's trailing the group. They are old friends and their one-on-one reunion instantly means that their entire group and ours must meet. There is a certain ritual to the introductions, but specifics are lost—perhaps something to do with order of introductions, or elders speaking on behalf of juniors younger than a certain age. As if to bolster my earlier claim to enjoying my new living situation, this group introduction has a feeling of unforced camaradérie to it, ritual notwithstanding.
Selah.
While making my (mapless and wholly unsure) way from entrance to living quarters, I stumble across (not for the first time) a large, oval-shaped common space that is part church auditorium and part secular performance space. It appears candle-lit because everything has a warm, amber glow. There may indeed be a stage (or altar, or both) over on the one end, but it's not in use right now; rather, the present musical performance is taking place in the center of the floor: a pianist accompanied by a couple other instruments—very much a cocktail lounge ensemble—singing songs in what would seem to be a great variety of idioms.
We (I don't know who's with me at this point but it's a "we") decide to stay and listen. The point at which we have entered the auditorium turns out to be a little balcony, like a single opera box; and it's mobile. We go for a ride all the way around the room, on unseen tracks on the walls, passing other little balconies with other little groups of listeners. Just as our balcony comes perigeal to the musicians, the pianist has embarked on a traditional Jewish tune whose numerous verses follow an eight-bar melody, sung solo then repeated by a chorus, ending with a nonsense-syllable codetta. Each verse starts slow and dirge-like and accelerates steadily to a frenetic pace by the end of the chorus part. The pianist, who is singing the solo verses, is letting individuals in the audience take turns at being "the chorus", repeating what she has just sung. On the third verse she turns to me. I try to sing the part but the song is in Hebrew or Yiddish and I haven't grasped the words she sand phonetically, so I make a mess of it; worse, because I've been concentrating on phonetics and because I have stumbled, I totally forget to sing the codetta at the end of the verse. The pianist gives me a look. I hear others in the audience say, variously, "He wants to sing" and "He can sing". The pianist then says, "It's ok, Gordon Geise, Gary Geise, Gordon Gary Geise." I ask how she knows my name and she replies, "Because you're from the future."
Selah.
I have just reentered the complex and I head directly upstairs to the second floor. (This is the first time in our story that a second floor or staircases have been introduced.) The entire front face of the complex on the second floor is a boardwalk-type setup, made to look like a colonial fort, with the front wall made of stout logs lashed together with occasional cutouts for windows. There are picnic tables set up in the open space by the front wall, and concession stands are build into the side walls. A good friend of mine owns and/or manages this whole public space, and I have come to have a look at it for the first time. He greets me happily and shows the place off, pointing out features and cool decorative details. When he has clearly completed his spiel, I congratulate him, put my arm around his torso, draw him close, and kiss him quickly and, I hope, inoffensively on the mouth. I am delighted that he doesn't seem to mind; we are obviously good and affectionate friends, but this is the first time I've kissed him like that. But he responds by putting both his arms around me and kissing me back—once, lightly and sweetly; then he narrates himself: "He kissed him once, lightly and sweetly" and kisses me again to go with the narration.
Holy shit, I think, and immediately move it into high gear: "He kissed him again, more passionately, and began to caress his body", I say, and do. He responds with, "His hand found his friend's nipple and began to play, lightly at first." Soon enough, I narrate: "He thrust his hand into his shorts and began stroking himself slowly," and indeed, my friend—who is now Anthony Branca—thrusts his hand into his frayed, unbuttoned Daisy Dukes and starts stroking his cock while I'm still kissing the hell out of his face. This bit could certainly get to the squirting stage in a big way, but for whatever reason, we have a scene change.
Sorry, Jeff.
I'm in an amusement park that is—as always in dreams—partly Clementon Lake Park but wildly elaborated upon. I suppose I've gone on some rides and had a great time at the park, but just now I have to head over to the campground where I'm staying. En route, I pass a sandlot where a horror movie I've seen before is "playing", in which two main characters are (a) playing 2-man baseball and (b) discussing the advent of the Black Something, which brings much evil. After stopping at my tent, I realize I've left something in the car, so I head back to the parking lot—which turns out to be a miasma of tightly crammed parking lots in a busy retail corner of a crowded seashore town. And I'm driving a rental and I don't remember the make, model, or color; I have only the key fob with a license plate and the possibility of making the car go BOOP or at least flash its lights. I have no success.
Because I couldn't find any photos of the Wacky Shack
I walk back toward the amusement park—this should be the simple third leg of a triangle: park to campground, campground to parking, parking to park; but instead of the park I find the ocean. I do see amusement piers with rides and whatnot; but just half an hour ago the Clementonish amusement park was decidedly not set on a boardwalk or by the ocean. I look for tall landmarks of my park but don't see any. I ask some strangers, rather daftly, whither has gone the amusement park that used to in Clementon, N.J.
Nobody knows except, perhaps, the ocean, and she isn't saying.
20160201
I've complained about this before, but I just can't shut myself up. A "news/public media" page on Farcebook (whose name I shall not divulge) posted a meme with the quote "You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret: All the best people are" on Lewis Carroll's birthday and attributed it to Carroll. Of course it's from that virulent fuckblister Tim Burton's cinematic crime against humanity coincidentally but unrelatedly called Alice in Wonderland.
This meme, at last report, has been shared one hundred five thousand fifty-nine times.
Even worse, a Google search for the same meme did not readily find it; but it found dozens of other memes that attribute the same quote to Carroll, or simply to "Alice in Wonderland".
This makes me very angry. (Chorus: What doesn't?) A friend advises I should pick my battles better, as this meme "will not change one person's life one iota."
I disagree. It will change the life of every single person who reads it who cannot summon knowledge of the original Alice stories to dispute its validity. Indeed, the same applies to seeing the Burton movie—and Burton's not alone here; the 1999 made-for-TV version, despite a quite breathtaking cast, veers even farther south of Carroll than Burton dared, adding a tiresome frame story and a moral lesson—and rigorous self-confidence building—for Alice. A certain Joel "Yagotta" Eatmon at imdb has said this as well as I might have, so I will quote:
(Of course, Dorothy Gale was similarly betrayed in that seminal family/fantasy film, 1939's The Wizard of Oz: L. Frank Baum offered no such pablum about finding the satisfaction of Home; indeed, Baum pointedly made Kansas seem like... well, Kansas; and he was quite content to side with his heroine in a middling distaste for the prairie, the farm, Henry and Em, and her situation in general.)
Sorry for the sidetrips. My point is this: the Alice stories are about an unflappable young girl—Ogden Nash's Isabel is a cheap knockoff...
—who on her two journeys meets precious few people who are even civil to her and no one, not a single person or creature, who feeds her horseshit feel-good advice like the cited quote. Indeed, the closest Carroll comes to the sentiment is the Cheshire cat telling Alice, "You must be mad; otherwise you wouldn't have come here"—which invites contemplation of one's own sanity and borders on horror story logic.
But the misquote from Burton does more than betray Carroll; it gets to precisely the same modern FUBAR psychology I lamented last month re the Star Wars franchise: Trust your feelings, Luke! OMG fuck that. Don't trust your feelings. Poke your feelings. Rigorously examine and cross-examine and contemplate and consider your feelings. Interrogate your feelings with bright lights and good-cop-bad-cop. Feelings are the least reliable things your brain makes, for fuck's sake. And, sorry Alice, but maybe it's really not fun and cool to be mentally unstable. Maybe "the best people" aren't schizophrenics, and maybe you shouldn't hold schizophrenics up as role models.
I don't mean to belittle mental health issues or those who suffer from them. I mean to point out that the popular coöption of words like "bonkers", "crazy", and "insane" to mean "individualistic", "quirky", or "colorful" does belittle them. And while I can't hope to combat that tidal wave of usage, I cannot bring myself to be sanguine about ATTRIBUTING THAT MOTHERFUCKING SHITE TO LEWIS FUCKING CARROLL.
No matter what happens to her, Carroll's Alice never once doubts her own sanity; never questions the strange happenings around her to the point where she suspects the defect is hers. When the Cheshire Cat insists she must be mad, she silently and logically refutes it. Even when her own brain produces wholly new material in place of what she thinks she knows—as in "How doth the little crocodile" and "You are old, Father William"—she finds it a curious phenomenon but still never loses lucidity. But that pigfucker Tim Burton wants you to know that, if you find yourself in some kind of Wonderland, it's because you're entirely bonkers—but that's cool!
Both bits of advice may well owe some debt of devilry to the self-positive messaging that was ubiquitous in late 1960s/early '70s children's television programming—"free to be you and me"; "the most important person in the whole wide world is you!"; "I'm ok; you're ok"; etc.—a general instruction for budding psyches that any and every thought and feeling and action was ok because they, the thinkers/feelers/actors were capital-S Special. It was supposed to build healthy personalities. Didn't anyone consider they'd be making sociopaths and congenital shitheads feel better about themselves, too?
So that, in a really big (Denmark-size) nutshell, is why this particular bit of misinformation makes me froth at the mouth.
Oh, and the really good news? IMDB lists Alice through the Looking-glass (which Burton produced but did not direct) as "completed" and scheduled for release this year.
This is the home baseball stadium but there's nothing Nationals-istic about it and it's clearly not the real Nationals Park. Among other things, there isn't a 360-degree concourse all around the playing field; at least part of stands are just like public school bleachers, only bigger: nothing but grass and dirt underneath.
I'm not sure whom I'm here with to start, but we're talking baseball: about the trades and rosters of our team and teams across MLB. As usual, I'm a little behind with the who's who and feeling like a dilettante. This event may or may not be Opening Day—indeed, right now it may not even be a game, because players and managers and suchlike are standing around on the field in clumps, definitely a pre- or post-game kind of atmosphere. It's probably being televised and thus timed and choreographed for broadcast.
Much like the park I was in last week, I'm over on this side of the field and I need to be diametrically on the other side. But this stadium is more definitively than usual divided between home and visiting halves, with more draconian rules about walking on the wrong side; so to get from here to there I'm limited to going widdershins through or under the stands. But perhaps because this is an exhibition event of whatever kind, the stands are blocked off; and after wandering around on the ground for a while I realize anything that would be a reasonable under-stands path (or "paths to understanding!" scream Messrs. Freud and Jung, unison) is also blocked off (with a plain old rope in some cases), so my last resort is to exit the stadium and walk around outside.
I'm not sure the stadium has re-entry, but as I approach the gate in the fence, a jovial employee says, "Coming back in? I have to stamp you." In order to do so, she needs to see my ID. My driver's license is issued in California and there is another piece of evidence present (can't remember what) linking me to Florida. Perhaps I am from Florida but currently reside in California—this is all counterfeit, of course; I'm from New Jersey. While this is happening, I do not know why I'm a counterfeit Califloridian, and it doesn't seem important that I know.
In any case, the counterfeit is good because the park employee tells me she can see both states "on" or "in" me, even before she stamps some sort of Florida stamp onto my right hand and California onto my left, with big ol' banker stamps that she rocks back and forth between us to apply the ink evenly. The ink is not visible.
Throughout this stamping process we have wandered over toward ground-level concessions, where Jimmy Richards joins me for coffee. The format of the coffee is nominally similar to espresso in that an expensive doohickey is employed to force the coffee into the cup—or more accurately, to *stamp* (once again) the coffee onto the bottom of a very shallow vessel, which is actually more of a saucer but from which the thick, strong coffee is drunk. When you drink the "cup" dry you are left with that stamp on the bottom, in a dark mauve splotch that is different every time. Jimmy explains the process as the concessionnaire is making the coffees for us; this is not a brand-new thing on the market, but Jimmy just read or saw something documentary about it and is eager to share details, the last of which is about the tenacity of the coffee in the cup once stamped. Apparently it just never comes off.
We each get two of these, and when the fourth saucer is placed on the counter I take a sip and immediately say, 'Wait, was that one yours?' 'No,' Jimmy says, 'I have both of mine over here' at the next window, not currently in use. I grab both my coffee saucers, which are now large oyster shells.
Jimmy and I wander over toward the field again (I never do exit the stadium) so we can chat. It occurs to me we never talk about baseball, despite the fact we frequently go to the park together. Just as I'm wondering whether he's even a fan, he asks me whether I know anything about microbaseball. This is apparently a recognized sport with rules similar to regular baseball but with only three players on each team. I recall having seen even more minimalistic attempts as a child: one-player teams where the at-bat player throws a baseball or softball up into the air a few feet and attempts to smack it on its way down. I consider that the batter may actually have been my dad at one point, but he gave up quickly because I was quite obviously hopeless at fielding.
Jimmy is now Dan Ebeling and while he's explaining about microbaseball we wander over to a demonstration thereof. Apparently there are only three stops around the bases in microbaseball: first, second, and home. That is, once you get to second base, you need to score on your next legal run—you do need to touch third base, but there's no safe stopping there. I voice as much to Dan, who's standing on my right; but as I finish with "You have to tag third but then you have to come home," the fellow standing on my left clears his throat in an attention-getting way; I look at him and he's making a "you're an idiot" face, rolled eyes and all. He gestures with his eyes and head that I should look again: and I see on the demonstration field that home plate—bizarrely and in posible reference to _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_—is actually labeled "5th base". I try to make sense of this seeming absurdity: it *would* be fourth base, except you can't call it that because it's the third place you need to run to; but you can't call it third base because there's already a third base even though you can't stop there. So fifth.
Nope, that's still really dumb. Maybe it's called fifth because it's the only base that's five-sided.
Oh, yeah, the guy on my left making me feel like an asshole for using the wrong terminology? He's Donald Trump.
