I'm afraid of Americans

I have been driving for a while in upstate New York and it occurs to me with increasing urgency that my car feels "funny" driving. I have just left a retail establishment of some sort whose public spaces are semi-open to the outside: actual structures, sturdier than tents, but still exposed, sort of an indoor-outdoor hybrid space where people can come, hang out, and not feel like they've cooped themselves up. 

The place hosts public events of whatever kind: they definitely have at least one bar—but not even one usable bathroom (the one I did find was marked "Staff only" and was locked). After hunting around the whole joint for a bathroom, I finally asked, was denied, and threatened to and then actually did piss on the barroom floor, which was suddenly, unexpectedly dirt. I soaked as much of the sod as I could—it was a good, long, horsey piss—but the bartender, the same slack-jawed yokel who had denied me bathroom use in the first place, was not impressed. But he was fairly nonchalant about it, so I didn't even get the satisfaction of pissing anybody off.

Anyway, now, something is weird about the car. Specifically about the front left (driver's) quarter, the very place I just had extensive work done (no really, 36 days in the shop, IRL, pursuant to a black ice slide into a yield sign). I pull into a petrol station and turn the car off. Well, there's your problem, says Brain, as soon as I get out of the car and look: The entire front wheel on this side is beat to hell and the tire is completely flat. No, wait, that's not a tire at all; it's a badger.

Sure, the nice man at the petrol station (of course they do repairs as well; this is upstate) can fix it, but it'll take a couple days. Meanwhile, I need to figure out how to get home and then get back up here when it's ready to be picked up. This is more worrisome than it needs to be; for some reason it takes me a long while to realize I have plenty of available credit and that Americans with plenty of available credit are fucking gods in the marketplace. Until that realization, I am stressed out, boggling at the logistics of the ordeal ahead of me.

Part of this stress is that I am starting a new job—in preparation for which I am looking through an old spiral notebook, octavo sized like I used to use in high school. This notebook might actually be that old but it appears to have mostly occupational rather than educational notes. I come across an incongruous zip-lock plastic compartment with a few pens and pencil stubs. This is clearly from the early part of my life where I thought free ball-point pens were a Good Thing.

I am sitting at the breakfast counter in the house where I grew up in Folsom, N.J., setting up my new work station. As always, there is detritus in the drawers from the last employee. But the plastic organizer tray fit into the top of the drawer does not have a compartment long enough for a full-size pen or pencil. Apparently it's a secondary tray, for paper clips and erasers and staples and things...? Roze is here with me; she has her own drawer, which I note has an appropriate organizer for writing implements. While we're setting up our work stations I am running over in my mind all that I need to do in order to accommodate the inconvenience of having my car broken down in upstate New York. This involves a good deal of shopping—or so Brain assures me, though I can't imagine now what contingency supplies I could possible need in this circumstance. I think Brain just wants retail therapy.

Somebody gives me chicken dinner; but it's clearly not a winner. (Wait, strike that. Use instead: Someone gives me chicken luncheon but it hits me like a truncheon.) It actually looks like it's some other kind of fowl, probably something just made up, because I can see in its cooked skin remnants of a row of feathers that looks like a Native American headdress rather than something that occurs naturally on an actual bird. I am more and more grossed out with the offered luncheon and my stomach has begun to complain. Little stabs of pain here and there. 

Maybe there is a temporal gap at this point in which someone offered me some stomach medicine, because the next thing is that I look at the cylindrical jar of medicine I have taken and I notice it has a label stuck on it with some kind of arcane warning about its use. Perhaps this printed material is just the typical side-effect notices, but someone has also scribbled on the label a notation, in effect saying "discard ALL this stuff". 

I walk through the workplace until I find one of the staff nurses that I like (this place appears to be Division of Federal Occupation Health or some such, where nurses teem abundant) and I show her the jar and the label. She looks at the product and the label and fairly quickly declares that it's fine; that we'll be fine. Petra has also had some of the stuff and speaks up as well, with concern about her own well-being. I have to point out "no really, don't use this shit" notation scribbled on the label, at which point the nurse changes her mind and confiscates the product; but she says we will still probably be ok.

Without segue I am working next to R. Michael Hodges, which entails lying in a bed next to R. Michael Hodges. (Brain never did care for subtlety.) We are still in the workplace and we are fully clothed; but I clearly have not gone through sexual harassment training.

I am deeply in love with R. Michael Hodges, as I have unalterably been since the day I met him; and, as has been the occasional case IRL, he tolerates physical affection and attention up to a point but does not pretend to be anything other than straight. Anyway, I kiss him twice behind his right ear, and that is clearly enough for the time being. We chat about work and I tell him about my broken car, my plan to retrieve it in several days, and the shopping I need to do in the meanwhile.

Later and without seeming relation to anything previous: I am at a house on a large, flat property, with a long dirt driveway coming up from a road that seems a mile away. This could be a prairie—it looks vaguely like a Western—but it could also be the tidal plain of South Jersey in a particular dry summer season. I am halfway up a ladder in front of the house (why? dunno) when someone comes up the driveway and give me the mail. It is a fistful of letters, almost all of them hand-addressed, some of them in sweetly decorated envelopes—sunsets and kittens and things. 

I flip through them and quickly find one that has been misdelivered: the street name and the town are the same, but this is addressed to Whatever Terrace West, not plain old Whatever Street. Then I find one that should have been delivered to Arizona; and another bound for the U.S. state of Occiput. I toss these misdelivered envelopes into a pile on the ground. Most of the rest of the stack are similarly, wildly misdelivered: several should have gone to India, Austria, and New Zealand.

I am still on the ladder when one of the residents comes out of her house (or her part of the house; it appears to be subdivided extensively) complaining that her mail didn't come. Someone has delivered mail to her door but it did not include what she was expecting. She asks me about the stack of mail I have been sorting and I explain it's almost all misdelivered and none of it was for her; I invite her to look at the stack to be sure.

I come down off the ladder and go into the house. Residual from my sorting of the mail, I now have three gummed form pads to dispose of, in landscape format with the gum on the left side, like an old-fashioned book of checks. I believe I need to return them whence they came, but they seem not to have come in an envelope or with any information attached. Meanwhile a woman and a man are talking quietly in the front room by the window. She becomes I as we both tell the man: "I totally understand your concerns about how bad things are in America."

Late nite shenanigans

It's getting pretty late. Paul and I have been hanging out in the Park Ranger—Brain's "pun" on the Deer Park, I guess—and I'm getting antsy. For what feels like the last 4 hours and 18 minutes Paul has been at an adjacent table gabbling with a twink he's clearly smitten with, and I'm moping at the table he abandoned. Luckily, this is a dream, so I have only to think about the practice of upscale eateries distributing free happy hour munchies, so as to encourage folks to stay and drink more, et voilà, here's some now. Even though it's long past happy hour. 

The onion rings are recently out of the oil, perfectly done, cooled just enough. But the first one I chomp down on makes it clear the onions themselves are not to be trifled with. The skin on the ring is unbreakable, so after a struggle, I end up with all the onion in my mouth and all the breading on the table.

I fucking hate that. Not just the ipso facto food fight but because I am convinced everyone in the joint was watching me lose to an onion. And I'm certain my face is absolutely covered in frying oil and crumbs.

Fuck this, I'm out of here. I perfunctorily napkin myself, stand, and walk the few steps over to the table where Paul and the twink are talking. I tell Paul I'm heading out. He barely acknowledges me, but as I'm turning to go, the twink says, "Seeya, loser." I wheel around and fix him with a look I hope is withering. He shrugs and says, "Why not?" He's playing it like "We're all friends now, why not joke around?" but he really means, "You're a loser, so why not say so?" I respond with, "I can think of one or two reasons." I give Paul exactly 1.5 seconds of the same ocular death ray, then turn again and stalk out of the joint. It is a good flounce.

The environs are American Capitalist Festivity: part Disney park, part Mardi gras, everybody drinking and hollering and drinking. I decide not to go back to the hotel right away; I want to be up on a balcony watching the celebration. I head around the side of the building, up an exterior flight of stairs, and I come to a closed gate, behind which is the second storey balcony, completely empty. I am momentarily confused, trying to remember whether I have heard or read something about the balconies being closed. I try the gate (it is unlocked) just as a voice from behind me says, "Oh, are we going upstairs?"

It is a stranger, but she is apparently being played by Betsy Arledge. She wants to accompany me in my dangerous mission to scout out the balconies. We head up another flight to the third storey balcony, and it quickly becomes apparent why the balconies are closed: they are basically made of hammock material, securely suspended—this isn't a frightening experience, just surprising—but extremely... stretchy. We walk close to the outer railing and the balcony sags down so far we are only a yard or so above the heads of folks walking on the sidewalk. (Where the second storey balcony went in this moment is not clear.) 

"This is fun," says Stranger Betsy, and indeed it is. But of course we are discovered traipsing around off limits and shooed off the balcony by Park Ranger staff.

Here Comes the Thud

Thanks to the hubby I've been watching a bodacious amount of The Good Wife lately. I missed most or all of Season 1 but got drawn in early in Season 2. I really enjoyed the second and third seasons, despite the tendency of the show to hang far too much emotional and dramatic weight on the ridiculous, universal sin of infidelity. "Fer chrissake shut up and litigate," I found myself saying.

But then... last night... Season 4 Episode 8, "Here Comes the Judge". Or maybe "Here Comes the Judd".

By far the worst episode I've seen so far. In terms of plotting and dialog, it's hard to fathom a more likely explanation than that the writers all decided to try bath salts on the same day.

First we have a judge who is advertised as "playing it by the book"—this is coming from Kalinda, an investigator whose time in court is limited, so this judge must have a seriously loud reputation for being straitlaced—but who nonetheless engages in a drunken tirade in a public bar, hollering before witnesses that Will Gardner is going to lose the case he, Judge Straitlace, is currently adjudicating. Also that Mr. Gardner is a liar and a thief who doesn't deserve to practice law ever again. Ok, we learn later that Judge Straitlace just got divorced and fell off the wagon, so now it's a free-for-all.

We have Mr. Gardner and co-counsel planning and calling for an independent judicial review of that judge's obvious bias—without once considering that it might aid their case to call the main witness to the judge's tirade, a woman, incidentally, with whom Mr. Gardner was once involved. (Are there any women in the legal profession in Chicago with whom Mr. Gardner was not once involved?) We have Mr. Gardner finally—after a courtroom reversal makes everybody go "duh!"—approaching that witness... and having sex with her before mentioning he and Justice both need her help.

We have the universally idiotic walking contrivance of "tow-truck magnate Nick Savarese" a.k.a. "Mr, Kalinda" a.k.a. "Hey let's remake Clockwork Orange!", obsessing on Cary Agos, absolutely dead certain Mr. Agos is sleeping with his wife.

And we have insipid side-plots involving each of the Florrick teens:

(1) Zach successfully lies about his identity to take a volunteer IT job at his dad's campaign headquarters—and nobody recognizes him as the candidate's son. The newly hired IT boss pleads with Eli Gold because she really, really needs this one specific high-school kid IT volunteer to, I dunno, hack the Pentagon or some shit—but he won't stay. Of course, once Mr. Gold finds out it is Zach, now Zach really, really wants to stay, but he's afraid to even ask his mom about helping out at Dad's HQ. Because for some reason both parents treat the campaign trail with the same child-protective horror as an opium den, alligator pit, or witness box at an organized crime trial.

(2) For no reason and with no convincing in-show rationale, Grace obsesses on a boy at school whose girlfriend, also called Grace, just killed herself. "It's sad but I'm good," she tells her mom on the phone—a typical utterance, as if this wildly privileged, coddled, and engaged private school teen has never learned any polysyllabic adjectives. Even if we concede the moronic premise that this human child of normal(ish) intelligence is worrying, "Hey, my name is Grace too! That could have been me!", the sequitur is ridiculous: in the space of a few days she stalks the boy, accosts him, befriends him, BFFs him, SWFs him, invites him to her house, asks him about the sex he used to have with Dead Grace in the bushes and whether that's what he intends with her (Live Grace). And possibly takes up smoking cigarettes.

And through all this insulting rubbish there is not a bit of acting required of the luminous Ms. Julianna Margulies to relieve the painful stupidity of the episode.

The Way of the World (not Congreve) at Folger

Let's get this out of the way up front: At no point in its first act does The Way of the World—"A new comedy adapted from the play by William Congreve" playing at Folger Theatre through February 11—threaten to turn into a good play. Its satire is broad and obvious—if it even is satire; the word "whinging" seems more apt. Its characters (seven filthy rich persons summering in the Hamptons) seem types—or perhaps price tags—rather than persons. Its observations on class seem tired and rote, as if the playwright, Theresa Rebeck, admitted defeat at the outset on that particular windmill duel. Its appeals to social media for zeitgeist hipness have pretty much the same effect on the comedy as Botox has on the face. Its attempts at pathos—largely in the eighth character, an unnamed "Waitress" who serially addresses the audience as a sort of tour guide to income inequality—might as well have the character reciting the words "I really want your empathy, please." A little later, there's a deus ex machina involving that same waitress, a casual hook-up with Henry, and stolen baubles that is just insultingly, inexcusably sophomoric.

(Oh, and its costuming is ostentatiously weird. Not the play's fault.)

At more than one moment in act one the flagstone cast member, Kristine Nielsen as "Aunt Renée", appears to be "doing" Charlotte Rae as Edna Garrett in The Facts of Life. This is certainly not to cast shade at Ms. Rae (who still treads the Earth with us, BTW) or the much-beloved television program she helmed, which managed to transcend pablum on numerous occasions. But to be blunt, there is nothing in Aunt Renée's attempts to avoid certain abhorred words for her increasing age and weight that hasn't run rampant through popular entertainments since at least 1979 when The Facts of Life first aired—and more likely 1879. Sure, there are some genuine laughs peppered throughout; it's just that, at opening night Tuesday, it felt oddly like all the laughs had been laughed before.

The play concerns Mae, an incongruously principled heiress who wants to donate her $600 million trust toward the salvation of Haiti; her bonne vivante but pathologically insecure aunt; and Henry, the amoral young Lothario who has recently boinked them both. Throughout most of the play, as they used to say, "She'll none of him" for both values of "she"; and the central conflict is clearly about getting Mae to have at least some of him. This entails Henry deputizing the handsome and dashing (and gay) Lyle to "distract" Aunt Renée, leaving Mae ripe for recapture.

The problem with this central conflict is that who gives a fuck. It is unclear whether Rebeck intends to endow Henry with any more redeeming quality than the capacity to have a crush on somebody. If she does, it doesn't quite work: he's pretty unambiguously a shitheel. If she does not, I have to wonder why we're watching a play about his woes. Honestly, does a redemption story even count if the redeeming quality is "not being the biggest shitheel on stage"?

Anyway. Meanwhile, a gaggle of technically adult humans—Charles, Reg, Katrina, and the aforementioned Lyle—spend their idle hours (that is, their only hours) in gossip and backbiting, little of which is particularly clever. 

Of these, Charles in particular borders on stereotype: he is forthrightly a fashion queen—which is fine. There lies within all things a grain of truth. Who doesn't know a fashion queen or two? But he is also "gay man hopelessly in love with his straight friend". We know he is the latter because people in his circle will keep telling him this is the case—not, alas, because we are ever presented with textual or emotional evidence of his tortured, unrequited mooning. "I got drunk and let you suck me off once," Henry chides him, at which point any self-respecting gay man ought to have replied, "...That you remember" or "Oh, that was you?" or "You and 418 other straightbois" or "Yeah, and you're the one who insists on talking about it. What, are you waiting for a Yelp review?"

This tired predicament might broach iconoclasm if the character of Charles went anywhere, learned anything, or even—call me crazy—took a militantly "Yes I fucking am in love with Henry. My emotional train wreck is performance art. Fucking deal with it" position. Nope. Poor widdle sad faggot Charles just stands there as friend after friend explains how pathetic he is. Well, so he is. So, in fact, are all these people.

Even worse, given a and b above, is c = Rebeck allowing her Henry to upbraid Charles for his invisible torch without mocking or even noting the fact that he, Henry, spends most of the play energetically pursuing someone who similarly deigned just once to fuck him and now wants him not just gone but gone gone.

Now I warrant you: in this sort of piece the modern playwright is up against the shadows not only of Congreve but of Wilde and Moliere and Albee and Guare, and them's some fierce fucking shadows to measure up to. Nonetheless, I sat there disappointed that scene after scene failed to measure up to the wit or emotional depth of Sex and the City.

Imagine my surprise when, most of the way through the second act, the play—and the character of Renée—abruptly grew up. In the space of a single scene, a confrontation between Renée and Henry that starts and ends quietly but contains all the screams of the damned, Ms. Rebeck goes all in—and wins the pot. It is breathtaking to watch. No offense to Luigi Sottile, who plays Henry, but apart from the author it is Ms. Nielsen who really pulls off this coup: with this scene—and then again in the play's final scene—she complicates her character, and the play's character, tenfold. One minute she is a near-cartoon who, in attempting to seduce a gay man, misuses the phrase amuse bouche; the next she is a woman of immense dignity, anger, passion, self-doubt, joy, regret, and survival instinct. The shift in tone is palpable. It is almost but not quite violent enough to capsize the play—it certainly casts some shame on the hour and a half of blithely caustic bitchery that preceded it. But that really salvages the whole from mediocrity. The play ends in uncomfortable ambiguity, its lackluster comedy dragged back from Hades by a glint of deadly serious drama.

Goodbye, Columbus

I am at work before leaving for Columbus, Ohio, for an extended weekend or even longer a "vacation"—as if such things existed anymore. My office is completely unlike my waking office but resembles the bowels of a House of Representatives office building I once tempted at. The last thing I need to do before going is to contact V—. (I swear his name changes 418 times throughout the following, but on waking I can't remember anything about the main one except it began with 'v'. So this dream guest stars Tom Pynchon.) For some reason the preferred method of contacting V— is fax. So I fax him a thing.

Like the office, Dream Columbus has little to do with real Columbus. In this case there is an old town that functions much like Colonial Williamsburg as a "living history" attraction; indeed, I peruse a map that shows a main entry gate with access via tram from parking lots. The attraction area is a vast semi-open plaza, maybe a city block wide and three blocks long, with small permanent or semi-permanent structures dotted throughout, like concessions, "in this historic building" buildings, and so forth. The city has its regular residents as well, and they are very much in evidence—the commerce here is surprisingly universal, not "tourist shopping" versus "resident shopping".

I am sure I enjoyed myself in Columbus but that's not the point of this story. The fun begins when I make to leave. I say goodbye to the acquaintances I have made and depart the general store to head out to the airport. On the way to the "metro", I mentally say goodbye to all the sights I have grown to love. It occurs to me: I really want to move to Columbus! The architecture Brain provides is aggressively quirky: here's a bright blue 5-story building with stylized (non-functional) flying buttresses; right next door is a slightly shorter library with a terra cotta rotunda. The cityscapes and vistas are just gorgeous. It's like the majority of public and commercial buildings were designed to be eye candy! I realize just how familiar all these wildly decorative buildings have become: I used to admire them every day but now I realize they are just background. I make myself stop and appreciate them anew.

Like an idiot, I miss my stop on the rail line; unfortunately, that means I end up crossing the river. (Here Cbus bears a slight resemblance to Dream San Francisco, with its vast network of high-speed freeways looping around the Bay approach, 200 feet in the air.) Now I'm going to be late for the flight home and probably miss it. Dammit.

I get off at the next rail station and immediately attempt to get from the eastbound to the westbound platform. It is impossible to do so. On the westbound side to get from ground level to the platform one must climb a series of concrete abutments protruding from one wall; but the abutments get wider and closer to the opposite wall the higher up one gets, and at a certain point my ribcage is too wide to go further. I go back down and start asking people how in the hell one is meant to get to the westbound platform—obviously I am missing something. I can also see not one but two lines of humans, scores or hundreds of them, queued up as if waiting for the platform to be accessible.

Absolutely no one can explain how one boards a westbound train at this station. One guy emphatically insists the only way up is the climb that proved too narrow.

While I am contemplating my problem, a woman in one of the queues starts to sing. Some folky traditional tune, possibly an outback campfire song because she sounds either Aussie or Kiwi. We exchange pleasantries and talk about folk music. Somehow she turns into a Brit by the end of the scene, and I realize very belatedly her companion is actually an American. Are they even traveling together? Possibly they have just made each other's acquaintance. I ask him how long they have "been over here" then realize the question likely doesn't make sense.

My phone squeaks at me asking whether I want to check in for my flight.

I'm still at the rail station and looking for assistance or information. There are some young savage-as-fuck punks hanging around; some have skateboards, but the one who engages me does not. He is in his early 20s, blond, large frame, wearing a skirt and looking a little gladiatorial. He looks like William Seed.

And he is an asshole whose entire purpose in engaging me it to point out that he has no intention of helping me or providing any information. I try an extra gambit or two to get him to help because (a) I need help and (b) his physical presence is commanding and pleasant; but finally I am frustrated by his pointed dick-being and I call him a cunt. Repeatedly. As I depart the station, which now appears to be St. Pancras in London, I'm still hollering at him that he's a cunt. But he appears not to have even noticed; he was too busy mocking me himself to hear me calling him a cunt. So I go back to the station so I can call him a cunt some more.

This time he hears me and it is clear he means to punish me for it. I think he means to pound me, but instead he pulls a weird doodad out of malletspace, puts it to his lips, and begins singing darts at me. The first one hits just inside my right eye and sticks there, near the bridge of my nose. It is needle-thin and merely stings a bit. The possibility of poison doesn't even occur to me. Dude sings several more darts my way but I manage to duck most of them. I flee.

I find another west-bound conveyance and I board it, thinking it is a train. It is not. It is a bus. I am not sure I have cash for the fare, but driver does not ask for fare anyway. The bus travels scary-fast through wild mountainous countryside (Cbus is nowhere in sight throughout), into and out of tiny tunnels that look like they couldn't possibly fit the bus; and it finally drops me in a sci-fi landscape in which various huge machines moving around through fields and hills. Some of them look vaguely like this:


The entire time I've been in Cbus I cannot find any contact information for V— and it is stressing me out. I believe I am supposed to deliver a revised version of the thing I faxed him before I left but I can't find the fax number or any other datum. I check everything I can think of on my phone: recent incoming and outgoing calls, texts, social media, even my photos.

A guy who is almost but not quite Mark McKinney is looking at my photos and videos over my shoulder. I have some recently shot videos of a street performance in the "living history" area, with performers dancing in elaborate costumes and headdresses (also puppets). NotMark says, "Those are great shots. Who's the terrific animator?" I scour his face for several seconds to see if he's kidding, but he's perfectly deadpan. I tell him, "Actually, these are all live action" and he immediately "No duhs" me. I hate humans.

Somewhat later and without any context, I am exploring a garage or workshop alone. I am under some obligation to do what I am doing, which is climb (again through narrow spaces) up onto a platform in the center of the room where lies some crucial machinery. It looks like a carnival ride and a mad scientist's laboratory had a love child. At the last stage of my climb, I knock a large glass jar to the floor; it breaks and I decide to leave it. I realize this is at least the second time I have caused property damage in my travels through Cbus. (Cannot remember exactly what the first time was, but.)

I exit through a heretofore untried door and into an alley. I know that the broken jar matters to somebody—but nobody will know it was me. The back alley is unfamiliar to me; it is the space between a dozen or more domiciles, many of the residents of which are hanging out in their backyards. I aim to look like I belong there, and like I know where I'm going. I do not. I head the wrong way. Will I have to make a conspicuous about-face? Or is there a narrow alley to the street? Never mind, because en route I encounter a woman I know and she sets me up on some sort of repair work. She has a sort of spider or snarl made out of old TV antennae, and she tells me it is completely in the wrong shape and can I fix it for her? I mess around with the contraption on the hood of her car for a while. I never really get anywhere with it.

I go back to the hotel. I have missed my flight, which was actually last night, so I am definitely staying an extra day at least. I realize it's almost a day since Paul expected me home and I haven't called him. I need to do that first! Also I have not alerted the front desk I'm staying an extra day—but they haven't kicked me out. I expect this incoming call on the hotel phone is the front desk hollering at me, but it is only a cold marketing call.

If it's not apparent, my failure to make my flight and, worse, to contact V— about work stuff hangs like a sword of Damocles throughout everything described above. It was a stressful night. Holidays, I guess.

Moving Picture Shows

It's the morning I am to start my fill-in job as the acting principal of some public school or other; so of course I wake up at 4:30 a.m.—which is too early—and then not again until 8:15, which is too late. Even worse: when I get there I am asked by the administrative staff to sign off on three copies of two forms—as is always the case in movies, she flips through pages and points to lines to be signed, and I trust she knows what she is doing. Alack! Flash-forward to later in the day, and here's  my boss (presumably the Superintendent of Schools or some shit, but he's really a combination of my Chisanbop boss, Dizzy Warnacek, and Clarence Fendley (the wondrous Anton Lesser) from The Hour, Series 1) calling me out for signing all those forms that had been prepared wrong. He is profoundly and vocally disappointed that I didn't even bother to check the information on them before affixing my

Then there is the added stress that this same preliminary day of my school gig is also the day of the Best-Picture Nominee Marathon at the AMC Theater. I have a ticket and I'll be damned if I'm going to let it go to waste. I walk into the darkened theater, heading up to the nosebleed seats, running over in my mind how I can possibly make this work—juggling movie watching and my principalnik duties. My phone is already lighting up.

It is a phenomenally dumb idea. Hhow did I think it would work?

Anyway, a movie comes on, one I've been looking forward to. It's a Coen Bros flick in which two men kidnap an old(ish) woman and hang her upside down "until she talks"; though what she's supposed to talk about I can't remember. Where she hid the gold, say, or who actually Killed the Great Chefs of Europe. The movie is rife with American roots music, as was O Brother Where Art Thou and, to a less exuberant extent, True Grit. The woman is the hero, of course: she is smarter, more honest, and more moral than her captors—but she is also a world-class dick and her verbal vitriol is breathtaking.

Much later, Paul & I are attending a play, which turns out to be Hello, Dolly! But since I have never actually seen Hello, Dolly! I don't even realize this until some old guy's recitative late in the show leading into the title song. The show runs longer than we expected and we have another obligation after. Paul needs to go, and for some reason he needs to talk about going, but he talks way too loud while the show is still onstage, which is egregious behavior and so I try to shush him and we end up arguing way, way the fuck too audibly. And he leaves alone in a huff.

I wait for the show to end and I try to leave—but I have to wait for the concessions counter to reconfigure or transform into egress stairs. I had just glimpsed an elderly woman with limited mobility being helped down one set of special "assistive" stairs, but then the whole thing gets set back to its concession-counter configuration and I have to wait until the next drawbridge. Meanwhile the cast are now milling about and hobnobbing with the audience; I worry that I will be pegged as "that asshole talking loudly during the show".

When I finally get out of the theater I go back to the cinema for another movie: this one is a grim drama about a middle-aged couple in trouble: Frances MacDormand and some guy she's been with forever. All through the movie we see little bits of evidence that the relationship is moribund; each sour retort and miscommunication stings a little bit more and lingers longer, like a birthday paddling. Late in the picture Frances's character sings (yes, it's a grim drama with music; surely you've heard of Sondheim) a solid, affecting aria on the couple's symptoms of malaise, including a pun on the French word 'tous' in which the order of vowels—tous, tuos; perhaps quibbling on 'duos'?—somehow, jibing with the aforegone plot, indicates guilt shared among both parties. Toward the end of the song she manifests anger and selfishness as literal monsters, drawing them on a store front window with greasepaint crayon while singing about their Godjiran destructiveness.

Later that afternoon, I am hanging around the shop (not the school, BTW) and in the back of my mind is the fact that I have to go home to fetch the library book that must be returned today. Fortunately John Furbush (who in real life I haven't seen in 30 years) arrives to deliver my new convertible. It is a tiny thing, probably lighter than a lot of motorcycles, the "interior" just big enough to fit a single person in, like a go-cart; only it is crazy-fast and just gorgeously maneuverable. I immediately take it out for a spin on the downtown city streets; and I am having such a great time driving around, weaving effortlessly among larger, stodgier traffic, that I forget the hour and my library obligation. When I remember, it is too late; the library will have already closed.

Back at the shop, a coworker clues me in—too late this time, I guess, but next time I'll know better—that the library actually has a mobile pick-up service. He uses it all the time, he tells me, while I peruse the collection of books he himself has out on loan from the library. He is a polymath the likes of which I've never known. He is the Professor on Gilligan's Island, except he knows more: he would never, even for an episode, get relegated to "and the rest".

My perusal of his current collection expands and diffuses until I am wandering around the shop, looking curiously at everything. The place is dimly lit and filled with wonderful treasures of, well, near antiquity. Mostly the stuff seems to be authentic versions of crap that would eventually inspire gimcrack steampunk gimcrack. My survey of these wondrous wares gets stuck looking at a Shakespeare play in progress in the middle of the shop, which is now done up to look like the interior of a rustic cabin (think Rubeus Hagrid's place). 

The play is called This Day and Age (no relation to the Cecil B DeMille epic of 1933). The protagonist, a rural gentleman, is attempting to extract information regarding his wife—presumably an indiscretion thereof—from his manservant. The latter is a clown character whose attention wanders pathologically: he does not appear to be cravenly evading the question of his master's wife's fidelity; rather he seems earnestly incapable of keeping on topic when something else occurs to him. This makes for a very funny scene, toward the end of which the protagonist manages, with dire warnings, to keep his servant on topic for several Socratic questions running, and just as the latter is about to spill the real dirt on the lady of the house, with the master on the edge of his seat, the servant suddenly apologizes profusely for not considering how hungry his master must be and would he like some mutton? The master collapses into exasperation; and our stories collapse into an actual Sunday morning.

Home Movie Marathon

The first movie, which seems so long ago now, was an adventure story. It was about two men escaping from a deep underground cave: one is the antagonist, whose treachery and cruelty are matched only by his breathtaking physical presence;

the other man is at least sometimes me, even though I am also the audience. In the climactic reel, the two men are climbing up through a narrow passageway toward the surface. Despite my knowing the story, having seen this movie before, this time through the reel it is snowing heavily in the cave, obscuring all view of what is going on. Stupid projectionist!

What must happen in the story, eventually, is that the cruel man betrays his companion and leaves him to die. It is never made clear why he does this; perhaps he is just a psychopath. I know that the cruel man, leading the ascent to the surface, pisses on the other man from above, which, in certain company and certain context, is considered an impolite thing to do—though not usually fatal. The climactic betrayal may actually entail the antagonist suffocating his companion with his penis, but my memory may be faulty. In either case, though, Brain came up with it, so. Murder by blow job.

The next movie is a 1970s drama about disaffected rich folk: hints of Tennessee Williams here. In this one I am the sullen, alcoholic daughter of a bitterly dissatisfied, alcoholic mother. I want to say she is played by Karen Black but that is probably wishful thinking. 

In any case, Mother and I have a major cinematic fight—no recollection what it's about, but that hardly matters; the point is pathological unhappiness eating itself. Our fight ends with me unloading a devastatingly harsh zinger and storming out. Or rather, trying to storm out: it seems our mansion in this movie is a ridiculously dream-pomo split-level affair. There are broad-rising, white-carpeted "stairs" between any given pair of rooms. I stumble on these risers as I make my exit, which ruins an otherwise perfectly good flounce.

Shortly thereafter, Mother decides to commit suicide. I decide to let her. She has OD'ed on something—doubtless an elixir from amidst her vast array of designer mood scripts—or has otherwise laid herself out [I want to say on a day bed but she's really kinda sprawled on an awning of some kind—indoor-outdoor are mixed up here]. 

I discover her, still alive but not long for this world. I have just begun to slip away discreetly, never to hear from her again when I hear a maintenance man nearby, one of the familiar grounds crew; and sure enough he spies Mother and yells for me to stop and come back. I worry here that he had observed me observing Mother in her distressed state—that he knows I fully intended to passively assist her suicide. But I don't worry about it that much; he is, after all, the help and so can be dealt with.

Segue is very vague and we may be in a completely different movie, but in the next scene I am cleaning up improbable objects. It is evening and the store [a sort of old-fashioned, log-framed general store] is about to close; I worry that I am taking too long and the old woman in charge will be angry. She is ill-tempered in general, but tonight she does not give me grief as I go about my indecipherable cleanup business. I am carrying cylindrical canisters of some sort, perhaps once containing oxygen; now they are empty and must be recycled. I should know but cannot remember where the recycling is. I head out a back door to a kind of loading dock or maintenance area, and indeed there are bins here for refuse and recycling. 

There are also a few exterior doors, at one of which two other humans, probably store employees, are carrying a heavy load outside. They need to run out and come right back in once they've deposited their whatever-it-is; but they cannot figure out how to unlock the door or prop it open, so I offer to stand there momentarily and let them back in. 

Another of the exterior doors is a garage-door-size portal: it is open now and bright light and bustling sound come through. I walk over to see what is going on out there and I see a vast warehouse-type space (indoor-outdoor are mixed up here) that has been portioned off with ropes and canvases like a flea market; only the main purpose of the individualized spaces here appears to be social, not commercial: families and friend groups are set up and, it seems, tailgating. I am not sure there is a particular occasion being celebrated—probably this is a typical Friday night.

The whole concept of partitioning spaces off like this gives the OCD and/or autism spectrum aspect of Brain a hard-on. I want to rent a huge space and make a huge blanket fort, with tunnels and secret entrances. Also, part of me wants to get in a tarped-off space and have ironic, barren, species-disdainful sex, with oblivious humans partying on all sides, just a few feet away.

I wander some more. It now appears to be several hours earlier than it was a while ago: the sun is lowering but still offers plenty of light. The west lawn adjacent to the store (First Baptist Church, Egg Harbor City, N.J./Merritt Square Mall, Cocoa, Fla./Colonial Williamsburg Governors Palace kitchen gardens) currently hosts an enormous vehicle of some sort: it is basically a carnival big-top on wheels, with mesh or otherwise transparent walls. There are groups of people partying inside, so similar to the warehouse space I just examined that I have to check whether it's not the same space; whether a trick of perspective has fooled me into thinking this space is different. But no, the geometry of my recent footsteps convinces me this is a different party after all. And I see now it is a decidedly smaller space. This party is bound in its own weird and glorious vehicle for a folkfest of some kind.

It is a new movie. I am out with Fomo and two other friends; perhaps we are wassailing. We visit a house that is at least partly 94 Wilbur Street in Newark, but none of us live here. The residents here are all women, and we are having a fun time visiting; spirits are bright and we are all joking and laughing—until a particularly vindictive resident shows up. She clearly despises us, every one, and she turns her attention on each of us sequentially, running through each's litanies of sins, all of which appear to be based in sexism, toxic masculinity, and sexual microviolence. I parry her verbal attack with what I think is a decent comeback (now lost), but obviously none of us are to be permitted any further cordiality in this house, so let's go let's go to Benares.

We head down the stairs; Dorothy and Dan are on the lower landing; they have heard the preceding vituperation and offer a modicum of sympathy. Full-voice I address the assemblage at large: "It's so great visiting a house where people I love live with people who hate me." Somebody, possibly Dodo, asks "Why do they hate you, though?" and the implication is they have every right to. The implication is that I am a rapist, and of course I worry that I might actually be.

A buzzed-cut platinum blond punk rock chick comes up the stairs giving me so much similar shit as her housemate had, moments ago. Fuck this fucking shit. I tell her she is an asshole and shove her, lightly, at the top of her chest: it is minimal violence but it is still violence; and it's wholly non-sexual yet I still fear it promotes the general sexual accusation. Since rape has nothing to do with sex anyway.

I leave the house alone, heading down several long flights of wood plank stairs. The later ones are in crazy disrepair: most of them are turned completely at right angles so I have to step gingerly on each with the balls of my feet. Brain often sets these Wacky-Shack obstacle courses for me to run, and I run them joyfully.

Onto the street. It is night now.

For some reason, Maury Levy from The Wire is driving me around to look at real estate. At one point I recognize a house on a hill on the corner and think that we and the house are all in Wharton Park. "No," Maury says, "But you already made that connection, just a little while ago, and you sang a rhapsody and hailed a storm about it." I vaguely remember. In any case, this is not my beautiful house.

Maury lets me out and I have to go get my own car. These are city streets now and I am retracing my path to the historic guardhouse/one room schoolhouse-looking structure where Renee Hayes used to work. I know I left my car, legally parked, in front of this building. As I'm approaching my car, however, I see someone is getting into it and preparing to drive it away: this is Sharon Church from Chisanbop. I wonder what the hell she is doing. But as I head around the car to confront her at the driver door, I see now she is merely driving a transparent plastic conveyance that might have contained my car at some point, but not now. At present I can see my car (which is now a little kid's big wheel-looking toy) through her transparent buslike vehicle. It is Sunday night, so I ask her whether she is starting a route now or just taking it for a school bus route in the morning.

Lastly and most alarmingly, I am in the D.C. Metrorail system with a lot of strangers. We have all gotten off trains but are being held on the platform for unclear reasons. No one is giving us any information; indeed, no Metro employees or authorities are visible, nor have they been for a disturbingly long time. We are being held in the station with locked steel grates. At length I decide to raise a ruckus: I stand at the grate and holler "HEY!" as loud as I can. After a few iterations this gets somebody's attention, because someone hollers back, "Keep it down!"

I decide I need to keep hollering "HEY!" until someone actually shows up. And if they show up and refuse to let us out I will keep hollering "HEY!" in their face until they do. This actually seems like a fine idea! Why didn't 900,000 Jews at Treblinka think of it?

Unfortunately I'm really only hollering "HEY!" at Paul.