Diego my dreams

This is true.

I am in D.C. for a couplefew weeks for work and am staying at an AirB&B very near my office. I have one of two bedrooms on the second floor (American) in my host's house that have a shared bathroom between them, with the washroom (sink, counter, mirror, linen closet) located centrally between the two bedrooms and the toilet and separated from all three with pocket doors.
I've stayed in places with shared baths before, but they're typically "down the hall"; I've never had a room that adjoined a stranger's bedroom, by way of a bath. I'm torn as always between hippyish communal living ideals and an earned mistrust of strangers. There is no mechanism to keep the guest in the other bedroom from coming into my room. The room-to-bathroom pocket doors DO have little latches, but on the inside of the bathroom—to keep one's neighbor from barging in while... I dunno, while brushing one's teeth?
Anyway, the other bedroom was unrented the first two nights I stayed in this house; yesterday evening my host informed me that my neighbor, Diego, had checked in but had gone back out.
Ok, so I can't help myself. There is no typically masculine name that more securely ensures the hotness of its bearer then 'Diego'. Except, just possibly, Diogo. But to be honest, I still didn't give it much thought—who knows if we'll even meet each other, what with those pocket door latches.
So I went out to Clyde's to watch the first game of the "World" Series. Came home full of beer, got half-undressed and headed to the toilet.
Diego was home. Maybe he been out drinking as well, came home drunk, got fully undressed, and went to bed. Naked. With the light on. And the door to the bathroom wide open. Lying on his stomach with the end of a sheet haphazardly covering a few square inches of buttock.
Diego was indeed worthy of his name... 30ish, maybe younger, beautiful brown skin, slender but not twinky. I general, just a very lovely sight, one empire sofa or pastoral background shy of being a famous painting.
Diego woke when I walked past the door, so I gave him a noncommittal 'hello' wave, headed into the toilet room, and pulled the pocket door closed. When I reopened it, he hadn't moved much, hadn't closed the bedroom door or pulled sheets over him. I said 'Hello' and waved again, out of politeness, and to act like meeting a naked stranger isn't a little weird.
He said something like, "You are staying in this room...?" and pointed toward my room. I said "Yes" and then, again because one must be polite and normal, I walked into his room with my hand extended and said, "I'm Gordon". He rolled over enough to free his right hand and shake mine, in the process—again, with zero concern for covering up— freeing up his genitalia, which were, uh, ample. Not engorged but good and fleshy.
He said, "Good to meet you, Gordon" but did not tell me his name, so I said, "You are Diego?" and he confirmed. The business of neighborly meeting concluded, I went back to my room.
Thirty to 45 minutes later I was ready for bed, so I went into the bathroom again to brush my teeth. Diego still hadn't moved or closed his door. I guess he had fallen back asleep but again awoke as I walked past. This time he stood up, came to the door, and pointed toward the toilet with a vague "may I?" sort of utterance. "Oh, sure," I said, and he walked past into the toilet, sat down to pee, and did NOT close the door.
So here I am, brushing my teeth with a hot naked young Latino male human pissing behind me—PISSING, that is—directly in my view via the vanity mirror.
Anyway, Diego came out of the toilet just as I was finishing up at the sink, so I relinquished my position to him and said, "Well, good night". He replied "Good night" as well and I exited and went to bed.
As of this morning, he was latching my pocket door while he was in the bathroom and keeping his pocket door closed while he was in his room.
There was nothing overtly sexual about this encounter, and I thought to write off last night as non-American casualness re nudity among males. But the strict door-closing this morning makes me wonder whether he was actually drunk last night and potentially receptive to some fondling. Ah well: that is a knack I have surely lost with disuse.

x

In a hotel, rather than a hotel room, in San Francisco, I was and remain the immediate cause of extensive structural damage to a bunch of rooms. Nonetheless, while for commonsense but legally intricate reasons I am not really to blame for the damage, I am afraid guilt will find its way to my USPS-perplexing address. I have thus done my best to cover for the damage. It's still pretty obvious. In the current room, frinstance, the nightstand no longer fits into the floor. There are gaps around the jointure whither light and/or water leaks. The same damage occurs in the same bit of furniture/floor plan on all floors below and above. I did this and I am sorry but fuck you I'll lie to stay unjailed.

Simultaneously: someone in my intimate circle (who is not quite the muscle hippy dreads-up street fiddler I snapped outside The Mix, or whatever it was called in 1992, though my presence there informed or maybe assaults our narrative) is trying to get us to the right airport to depart SF in time. The geography is dreamfukt. We're in the west end of the imagined city (ignore parkland), and SFO is easternmost—I guess where AT&T field is. This rendition of SF does not involve the insanely high and broad overpass highways previously intrinsic to visiting SF.

So most of the time (what time?) this broken hotel room is my sole worry; I stay here and I need to fix it convincingly before I leave. Still, it is after some social event and one by one individuals just show up at my hotel room door. Damage is def not hidden.

It's dusk so I turn on two-three lights—but a moment later they are off again. The exterior natural light is nearly enough to mask the on-offness of the electrics. But someone else calls it; and seeing the lit lights outened, the same friend calls for diagnosis. Maintenance (the department) is now on they way; but the solution is a duh moment at hand (cf. my recent real-life inability to operate a hair dryer). In this case or any, I'm still not caught for the damage I have wrought.

The room has eventually filled and we're all rehearsing something, maybe a staged reading. Nobody has enjoyed working with the NPC blond bombshell diva—she's terrible and she doesn't know it. Cf. Lena Lamont in Singin' in the Rain but she in affect she is much more Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger) in L.A. Confidential (so one must assume Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck are there somewhere—only OMG she has been pissing errbody off).

So we're all hushed and attendant when one of the actors, upon finishing a scene, hies him to whisper in the director's ear; and are all delighted when the director then turns to the disingenue and asks her to step out of the room with him. I notice there is now an armed guard behind them to ensure she departs peacefully. We hear "You gotta be kidding me" from her as she is made to leave. I sympathise with her enleashed dissent; I just don't like her, so she must suck, bye.

In the aftermath (I'm listening to the Law & Order dénouement while I'm *still* trying to fix the room damage up): the newspaper scuzzlebutt is that la disparue was undercover from the DA's office but was attached as a prostitute--i.e., a solicitor nabbed for solicitation.

In other news, "At night I walk through the park with a whip between the lines of the whispering Jesuits who are poisoning me against me" is still a way more interesting line than "At night I walk through the park with a whip between the lines of the whispering Jesuits who are poisoning you against me.

Searching for Kupopo

Too late to the dance came I?

I just ran across the work of the artist known as Kupopo, whose blog Beasts and Brutes hasn't been updated since September 2014 and whose contributions to Y! Gallery are at least thrice as long out of date. Beastsandbrutes AT blogspot has been removed. I've googled this and that and so far haven't been successful in finding any online activity by the artist more recently than last fall (he thanked a blog patron in November) or in finding any contact information. Minor sleuthing suggests he is from Fiji. That's about all I can find.

This is an artist I fain would patronize.

Everything is Tense these Days

There are a bunch of people at Grandmom’s house, all of whom are fretting over some logistical or scheduling problem that threatens the party we were planning on having that night.  Can we fix the problem or do we need to reschedule the party? (Rupert) Giles and others spout suggestions and we discuss them in turn, but in each case there is a sticking point. I personally am rooting for “fix now; let's party” (duh!) but the solution is quicksilver evasive. Heather Mason pitches (for the second time) rescheduling the party in the grand hotel she has recently acquired. This sounds good to most so we all reluctantly acquiesce.

Now that there’s no party tonight, I need ride home. I work on various possibilities. I recognize how damned inconvenient hauling my carcass would be for the person I really want a ride from; and frankly I don’t care to ride with one or more parties for whom it’s no trouble at all—so I refuse all rides and purpose to walk.

It’s a crazy fucking long distance to walk, so I conjure Plan B: I call Roze to pick me up. Which means I need to get to that corner by Hammonton Lake, just before the road curves to the right, to meet Roze, who is, I’m afraid, put out by my request. Unfortunately, I leave a McGuffin behind and I have to go retrieve it, which means schlepping through a labyrinth of a retail media store, something like Tower Records. I discover to my chagrin and stress that I can’t simply retrace the direct route by which I left—there’s a door that locked behind me, maybe. I end up in unknown employee-only territory briefly, and fear I’ve gotten myself lost, but a bit of backtracking fixes that. Then I get stuck at a payment register (remember when we used to say “cash register”? how quaint) between stairs helping with a customer transaction. Run run run! There has already been phone trouble, and trouble explaining the location to Roze; now I’m not going to be on “that corner” when Roze gets there. She’ll be pissed off—or worse, she will think she has mistook the location and leave again and my phone is dead and…

Later, around a restaurant table with maybe eight friends sitting around, I relate the whole episode and explain my retail labyrinth troubles to Rex: “It’s like a record store but much bigger, more the size of a department store… not a huge department store like John Wanamaker in the ’80s, but still, it takes up several floors, just with a smaller footprint.” He is distracted, would much rather be participating in another simultaneous conversation at the table, but he promises he’s listening to me.

In the same location, a wee bit later, some of us are playing out dramatic scenes in that weird limbo between pre-written drama and real life. I and a random NPC have just finished up one such interchange and I immediately start a new one, in the same character, with not quite Chris Riggs as my interlocutor. My intent here is to drive at a confession of sorts, and he is getting increasingly defensive. The whole while, we are both fussing with small and various objects that are strung on a utility line around the room, at the top of the walls near the ceiling. Several of these objects in a row (but by no means all the hanging objects in the room) are tiny pairs of scissors. The drama builds until NQCR is livid (again, it is not clear how much of this scene is acting) and he brandishes tiny scissors at me and hollers, “Don’t you tell me how to solve my problems!” or some such. I haul out a hereto unrevealed factoid, which shuts him down. He hangs the scissors back up, and SCENE.

We both return to the dinner table and I replay the whole exchange in my mind. Inarguably, his was the more sympathetic part; but I am confident my character was right and will be seen as having the better position in the end—by, among others, NQCR’s girlfriend, who is sitting next to him at the table, critically processing the scene with him. Still, I am, with a staunch (misguided) sense of ethics, still portraying my character without any gratuitous cues for sympathy. Let the rightness be demonstrated by itself, I reason, rather than have any or all of these dullards side with me for lousy, sentimental reasons.

Finally—don’t ask me how we got here—I am at a market of some sort, cash for animals and embryos. I’m here to buy something exotic and ridiculous and wildly unethical. Wait, I need some water..

Crabby is as crabby does.

I am in the busy, populated long house, on the top floor. Perhaps it is the attic because the only way to get up here is to climb a small series of concrete abutments on the balcony, using some wrought iron railings as handholds. I have been exploring but now that I’m done and ready to head back down, I find the way down is much tricksier than the way up. It’s terrifically awkward; the handholds are in the wrong places for facing this direction; and I can’t figure out a good way to turn around and climb down in the same direction I clumb up. I can just foresee (or forefeel) my body weight shifting precipitously and inertia taking me over the balcony railing. *sigh* Another fear-of-falling dream! Anyway, Roze shows up and I lament my predicament to her. "How does one get down from here?" I ask. She offers, "You could always knife down—sticking knife points in the concrete, like Mike does." Of course Mike does. I figure it out without knives and join her below. 

I’ve been thinking that I want to move all the friends I sing with into the long house with me. This iteration of the long house is in a new town, however—Phoenix, maybe? Someplace out west. The legality of vocal auditions as a condition for housing is unclear, but the idea of having the whole group (it is a significantly larger chorus than Bamburía) living in the same house is immensely appealing. And as always the long house is immense—plenty of room for everybody. I recall previous (dream) visits, including this last time when I actually got lost wandering the halls of the second and third floors, and the atrium in the interior of both. I am also concerned that Paul will not want to move here because huge house = huge cleaning.  

As we’re walking down the stairwell, Roze says we have to go take hot showers. Still thinking about moving singers in, I ask Roze how the third floor is (there are still some old residents still living here); she replies, “Crabby. Crabby crabby crabby!” Apparently this means there is a major lice infestation; thus the hot showers.  

Roze leaves me temporarily in the bookshop on the ground floor to wait for a thing to happen. I find a newspaper and read a news story (not just an obituary) about a Ginger Raney having died overnight; her son, hurriedly traveling from afar to see her before she died, was waylaid with car trouble and was helped by a benevolent stranger, but still did not reach his mother before her death. I am wondering whether this happened to Mike Raney. (I cannot at this point remember his mom’s name; when I awake I remember it is Doris.) I start crying in the shop about the story.  

Also, I am naked and I can't remember why. It's mostly ok; certainly nothing that would concern the bookshop employees and anyone who knows me; but the customers walking in from the street seem startled.  

There is an imperious and whiny patron at the register: “I wish to see the [blah blah] books! I don’t want to wait any longer!” He is actually standing behind the register counter, separated from the clerk by, and berating her through the shelves of, a tall bookcase. He is a white, middle-aged, mustachioed, privileged asshole who keeps whinging despite the fact that the clerk is busy helping other customer.  

A William Byrd pavanne is playing on the soundtrack.

I've forgotten my mantra.

A hazy recollection of going back “home” (though not really home—presumably a hotel) and hunting through my disastrously floorstrewn suitcase for warmer clothes. En route, I puzzle over whether the blazer or the light fall jacket goes the outside: the obvious choice is jacket outside, but the jacket is shorter and tighter than the blazer and will look silly. At some point I explain to an acquaintance that I’m not always this disorganized—my clothes are home are stowed in very orderly fashion, I swear!—but the explanation itself is a distraction from a topic about which I’m even more embarrassed than the unkempt drifts of underwear and T-shirts.

Later: my flight home lands and my family greet me. Dad looks young and hot. As I hug him hello, he asks immediately about tomorrow’s plans; I reply that we’ll discuss... “logistics” (it takes me as moment to find the word) presently. In the process of hugging Mom and Bob there is a discussion going on and I end up hugging Bob twice by mistake— but I make the second time look like “It was a helluva trip so I need another hug.”

We fly out again tomorrow, four of us, maybe for a concert in Europe, to the aforementioned logistics are about getting home, unpacking/repacking and getting back to the airport in the morning. It is possible that in the course of our story one of the four travelers morphs into Bob; or perhaps I am merely considering him as the best option for car travel between Philadelphia and home tonight.

Meanwhile, there’s a party. We haven’t left the airport but we are at somebody’s spacious and well-appointed home. The bartender may be been a flight attendant: he was definitely on the flight but also appears to be friends with nearly everyone at the party. He sets up and announces shrimp cocktail on the rectangular island bar. This is actually a single dish with 6 shrimp, but it’s just an overture: the gist is, when six people claim those shrimp, he will make them drinks and set out more foods. While I do not see Jeff Goldblum on the phone, this party is definitely shaded like the Hollywood party in Annie Hall.

Heading outside to the patio, there is some issue with the floor of the entryway—like a weak sport in the floor disguised by carpet with woeful inefficiency. Henry and Jay Niepoetter are here. (Is Henry one of the performers? Not clear.) Out by the pool, several folks, including Dad and me, appear to be out of cigarettes. A young and very popular friend who is almost certainly not Jude Law is handing some smokes out; Dad rejects one that has wet spots and NJL selects a dry one to give him. I am next on the dole, and I find myself unable to similarly reject a wet cigarette. Once I have lit it with difficulty and torn the filter off and wrangled the remainder into smokable shape, I mumble, “Dammit”. Dad says “What?” I explain about and show off the shambles of a cigarette. NJL offers—or Dad offers to get from NJL?—a dry one, but I decline. Because democracy! Cue Rudy Vallee: Dry cigarettes are un-American!

While this cigarette distribution and smoking is in process dad and NJL are talking about heritage and ethnicity. Dad claims “Native American heritage, which my mother (?!) makes”, to which NJL says, “Oh, I didn't realize she was dead.” Dad corrects himself: “Sorry, ‘made’.” I try to work out the semantics of the tenses re the hereditary passage of identity, but I give up.

Back to logistics: While I had postponed the discussion upon landing, the next several hours are quietly vexing me. We’re flying in the morning but there’s at least some boat travel implied. The four of us are sort of naturally, socially divided into two pairs, and the other two are known to be planning to bring aboard a massive and varied stash of recreational drugs. I contemplate whether I can safely bring along any cannabis.

Then, as usual, there is a cat whining at me.

Short stories from this morning

I am not exactly sure who this guy is, but he is a musician, a pianist, and he must have developed or contracted one of those Oliver Sachs-type neurological disorders because he has forgotten how to play boogie woogie. (Full disclosure: He doesn't actually use the term 'boogie woogie'; in truth, he has forgotten that most basic of proto-rock 'n' roll chord progressions, I-vi-ii-V, as in 'Heart and Soul'. I forget what he calls this progression, though.) Anyway, we are sitting in a restaurant and he is telling me the story of the night said chords fled his faculties, and how he struggled to recover, in the middle of playing a set with his band. His solution was ridiculously complicated: something about dropping red markers on the floor tiles to indicate to his band-mates which notes to stay away from in any given measure, so they didn't clash with what he was playing. In the midst of his explanation, at least one minor second relation occurs to me as verboten, and I agree with his method at least that far. (In retrospect, though, the whole thing is nonsense.)

Later, after boogie schmoogie guy has gone away, I am running the broader arc of his story through my mind, as if it were (and maybe it is) the plot of a movie. I am still in the restaurant—or club, the sort of place and maybe the place where the pianist suffered his sudden harmonic lacuna—sitting alone at a round 4-top table and stirring what is partly a cup of coffee and partly a bowl of soup. The chunks in the soup correspond to elements of the story I'm rehearsing in my mind. At the end of the story, the pianist breaks up with his girlfriend and it's a very 'get out yr hankies' cinematic sequence. Turns out, I am meeting the (now ex-) girlfriend for dinner, and what do you know, la voici. From the cheerfulness of her demeanor I surmise she has not yet heard that Boogie Boy has broken up with her. I am suddenly verklempt, and it seems imperative that I tell her that I love her. Maybe she gives me a look, because I immediately qualify that utterance—honestly, we really haven't known each other long enough to reasonably profess even platonic love, but I am in the moment. She ought to be assured somebody loves her. I guess I spring the bad news on her then, but the scene cuts early for some reason.

In a different, mutated thread, we are acquainted with the behind-the-counter workings of a family bakery. We are in a medieval village in the demesne of an oppressive and possibly psychotic king, and the latest news is that the king has decreed that all bakers must create loaves of bread that depict bears. Our protagonist family has been struggling to figure out how to do this, so far with no success. The regime is represented by obnoxious guardsmen on the street, always the same crusty pair, who loudly bellow the king's orders, seemingly non-stop. The story includes a lot of soap opera detail about the baker family and their interrelationships, but most of these are lost; the important thing is, the morning has come for all bakers to display their bear loaves and, hélas! our family has nothing to show for it. Rather, they have a loaf of bread with some vague lumps and mounds in a topography that is in no way suggestive of a bear or bears.

This story has been told before, I realize—it is familiar, almost a fable or household tale—but we are now seeing it from a new perspective. In this telling, the various bakers' bear-shaped loaves are loaded up on carts for presentation and paraded through the high street of the village. (There are, BTW, far, far too many such loaves to be representative of the bakerage of a small village—we're talking Macy's Parade in New York City with all the bakers in all five boroughs turning out to show they shit off.) Anyway, the products are amazing: loaf after loaf is spectacularly bear-presentative, some individual bears, menacingly mid-roar or in repose, others whole scenes with multiple bears hunting, bathing, frolicking. The crust are mostly glistening and rich golden brown, looking like egg-bathed brioche, gorgeously highlighting the detail of each offering. We see them all in motion on their carts, along with the king's men, who are inspecting the loaves for acceptability. We know that we will soon see the awful, inadequate loaf baked by our heroes and the suspense builds slowly as each magnificent bear loaf passes by. When the offending loaf shows up, however, the king's guard almost miss it: a moving obstacle—someone driving an ox, maybe—obscures it as it passes by. But they catch sight of it anyway: one guardsman says to another, in effect, "The fuck was that?" And we know our family is in for some heavy punitive shit, maybe dungeoning. But we switch stories again.

I am female. My sister (or "sister": think Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern) has sent me home from 'New Rochelle' to drop some stuff off. Typical for my dreams, my arms are ridiculously, elaborately laden and of course I have to fetch keys from my pocket. Once I get to the front porch, juggling all the packages I'm carrying, I realize that I have two keys for the apartment on me: my own set and a single, spare key that is destined for a house-guest. I think I'm supposed to find and deliver the spare, but for the time being I need to put stuff down in the apartment. It is a townhouse on a city street, but each such townhouse in this row have modest front porches, round and ballustered; some, like ours, have been subdivided, and two doors lead to separate apartments. My sister and I live upstairs, but I notice the downstairs door is ajar; so I put my parcels down on the porch (honestly? I let them tumble. Don't tell my sister.) and poke my head in to see who's about.

There are several family members and friends sitting in the front room: my cousins Michael and Jimmy are sitting on the couch just inside the door; my mom (I may be back to being male and myself at this point) and a couple other NPCs are sitting or standing throughout the room. Michael immediately asks me, 'How are things at New Paltz? Not New Paltz, I mean New Rochelle.' (Actually, I have no idea what followed the 'New' in either case... pretty sure it wasn't 'Paltz' and 'Rochelle'.) From here on out, everything anybody says is slightly off from what it should be, and somebody else corrects them: it becomes a game. I think somebody offers 'gin rummy tea' instead of gin seng. Jimmy isn't really Jimmy—he is (let us say) Greg Evigan, but he's still supposed to be my cousin in context—and he complains that somebody recently called him Gregory Peccary instead of Greg Evigan. Mom does most of the error-correcting. After a good chunk of this playful small talk, I take my packages and head upstairs.

There's a lot more where that came from, but this is all I remember.